Campbell & Dacre - A Match Made In Hell

Alastair Campbell Yesterday

Oooooh! Handbags at dawn! It seems Paul Dacre has really hit one of Alastair Campbell's particularly sensitive nerves. You can really sense the barely restrained hated for Dacre in Campbell's latest blog entry. As well as referring to the man in Nazi terms; those that work for the Mail as scum and relating it to dogshit, he's now suggesting Dacre's a repressed homosexual and...

"Hell hath no fury like a fag scorned, apparently"

...according to Campbell. I'm no fan of Paul Dacre or his newspaper and I'm sure there's all sorts of reasons to have a pop at him/it (not least today's failure of the Mail to lead with the disaster unfolding in Haiti). Let's not forget that Dacre is a man who's judgement is so appalling, he once described Gordon Brown (a friend of his - birds of a feather etc) as being "touched by the mantle of greatness". So, I'm not going to defend him.

But I love Campbell's deluded image of himself, exposed by this blog entry. He can't work out why Dacre (or anyone else for that matter) dislikes him so much. It can't be Alastair's warm and friendly personality or his unquestionable honesty, so what could it possibly be?..

OF COURSE... Dacre must be in love with him. It seems a psychologist rang him up to tell him as much recently. And that claim is as water tight as the claims he made in his dodgy dossier. As you read on it seems that anyone that pretends to dislike him or accuses him of dishonesty is, in fact, in love with him and wishes they could have hot, gay sex with him.

The funniest part of the blog is where he extends his theory to Peter Oborne, who wrote a book about political lying in which Campbell featured heavily. Campbell suggests that Oborne's description of him was somewhat homoerotic and says...

When Oborne was writing his soft porn about me, he was on the Express, but tried to flog his book to Die Mail [Nazi style reference to the Daily Mail], a move the Express blocked, saying he had to serialise it in his own paper. This drove the Kommandant [same again, this time referring to Dacre]into boil-erupting

The blog is funny in itself, but this bit is especially and unintentionally funny as Campbell wrote soft porn for Forum magazine before his Fleet Street career took off.

Now, I know his blog post is written tongue in cheek and no doubt he would respond to any criticism of it with accusations of a sense of humour failure on part of the critic. And if I should persist, no doubt it wouldn't be long before I'd be accused of being as gay as a lord and only upset because I'm not allowed to bum him. But we all remember that Campbell and co were very keen to court the Daily Mail and other so-called "Tory press" papers when they were in opposition and subsequently after they won the election in '97.Indeed The Daily Mail, under Dacre, supported New Labour up to the first glimpse of its true venal nature was exposed during the Ecclestone affair when Dacre first came into conflict with Campbell who was desperate to spin Labour's way out of the scandal.

But, it seems to me that, using the same psychological analysis, Campbell is just as much in love with Dacre as Dacre is with him. In fact I'd say they are made for each other. Rather than writing about each other, they should just move in with each other, retire from public life, stop inflicting their vicious bile on us and make sweet love together until all the hated inside them is purged and they can return to normal society.