While Bobby guards the door, Blair, John Prescott and Gordon Brown are shielded inside by Alastair Campbell and Lance Price, top right in the window. Curtains open and close as peeping toms watch in vain.

The Spin Doctor’s Diary: Inside Number 10 with New Labour
By Lance Price
Published by Hodder and Stoughton, 2006
My review for The Nation, published in August 2006

Feeble spinsters

Former media minder Lance Price’s dish on Downing Street isn’t dirty – it’s empty.

Any book with celebrities in it can be a bestseller these days – there are just so many nosey people around. But for sheer inanity, Lance Price’s memoir of three years inside 10 Downing Street takes some beating, even with serious politics as a selling point.

Price was doing all right at the BBC when he accepted the Labour Party’s invitation to hop the fence and help the baby Blair regime deal with the muckiest press in the free world. Among the pork barrels of information that Price does not reveal is what price they paid him for making them look good, but he stuck around until Tony Blair won a second term in 2001 and then buggered off to France. So much for his endlessly affirmed faith in the government.

This 2006 edition, coming half a year after the original, gives Price a chance to have his hindsight checked and try to soothe some of the people he’d managed to annoy – not so much those who looked bad in his book as the readers who’d been conned into buying it despite accurate warnings like this from the Sunday Times: “You will not find a book that is more sapping and pointless on so many different levels.”

But there’s nothing mollifying in his nine-page add-on preface, just more of the insipid second-guessing that hobbled the tell-nothing book in the first place. He even cripples it further by explaining the censorship imposed on “Diary” lest anyone be offended. The party still had to be appeased.

Then Price was off to write “Time and Fate”, a novel about life behind the scenes at No 10, his publisher again promising that Price “reveals what life is really like at the top of British politics”. How many chances does this idiot get?

Promises. You’d think “Diary” would have loads of dirt in high places being scrubbed off the front pages by squads of high-paid liars, maybe some journalists on the take, definitely fresh revelations about the scandals that time forgot and, naturally, a generous slice of spin-doctoring wisdom – just how do they do it, Mr Price?

No dope, not even methadone. What you get is a placebo – what I did on my summer vacation with the fat cats – without any actual gossip of the sort worth ruminating over.

Is it as pointless as the Sunday Times said? That’s one of Murdoch’s papers, isn’t it? And doesn’t Murdoch get slagged off right at the start when Price reveals that among the entries he had to soften to ensure publication was the one about Labour kissing Murdoch’s ocean-jumping butt?

Well, you might have read in The Nation on August 1 about Tony Blair giving a speech to Murdoch lackeys in California and thought, “Ah-hah!” And on July 12 we reported that that British police had found no cause to take action against Blair for referring to a certain constituency as “the f—king Welsh”, as reported in “Spin Doctor’s Diary”. No, wait. That was reported in the Mail on Sunday’s serialisation of “Diary” – Price had excised it from the book to (that’s right) ensure publication.

What else? On July 10 there was the piece about Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott still being in trouble over accepting favours from American billionaire Philip Anschutz, the would-be saviour of Labour’s Millennium Dome debacle. But, no, nothing in “Diary” on that, and hardly anything about the debacle either. In fact, Price was on another of his myriad overseas holidays on millennium night.

The war in Bosnia, foot-and-mouth disease, Northern Ireland, those darned Clintons, Scottish and Welsh devolution, extradition for Pinochet … these issues wash in and out in soft greys as Price (Price of the Periphery!) gets on with the real worry of the day: Section 28, Margaret Thatcher’s legislative clause banning the “promotion” of homosexuality.

Labour’s determination to lop off this nasty little hangnail first appears halfway through the book, with defecting Tory MP Shaun Woodward “going on at inordinate length” about it, and then it never goes away, as Price goes on at inordinate length about it.

It becomes his raison d’etre, his motif, threading through the fact of his own gayness, his troubles with his partner, their holidays in odd places like Eritrea and Iceland, his gay and lesbian colleagues and his attending to the needs of gay politicians being outed in the media.

Meanwhile Tony Blair is making frequent frizzy appearances, his communications director Alastair Campbell is playing Wizard of Oz, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and Home Secretary Jack Straw are moping about, and Prescott’s throwing punches – and we don’t get any closer to any of them than we do in the cheesy News of the World!

Price’s “bean-spilling” isn’t worth the beans.