LONDON: The war over Campbell’s mouth is about something bigger than it seems. It is bigger even than the Iraq conflict and how we were set up to get into it, because that was decided as soon as George W. Bush set the juggernaut in motion that dragged Tony Blair zealously in its wake. It’s about how we’re ruled, and whether this hairy-heeled government is any longer willing to abide by one of the subtlest, sweetest compacts once found in any governing system anywhere: the protocol which says that while politicians preside over public bodies, they do not rule them.

Broadcasting is a prime, but not the only, example. The BBC lives off a textured public understanding of this that took decades to embed in the national culture.

No one else has reproduced it. In the US, Murdoch’s Fox News sent wave after wave of bombers live into Baghdad accompanied by the national anthem. Patriotism before truth was the networks’ guiding star, and even the panjandrums of the print were scared to crack it. Not enough Americans wanted to know.

An ABC poll last week showed 24 per cent of them easily convinced that Saddam had used his weapons of mass destruction against their boys. The British are still different. It’s one of the merciful dysfunctions, behind the shared parting about freedom, between Anglo and US attitudes to news.

The Brits still worry about meticulousness in the broadcast media, where the protocols of objectivity were nurtured. These Brits include audiences as well as the politicians who know that audiences care. A reputation was built on this long before Blair and Campbell, or earlier complainers like Wilson and Thatcher, emerged into the primeval forest of partisan politics. It has built a trusting global audience of more than 160 million who depend on it, a national asset that Campbell-Blair seem happy to compromise if not destroy.

Campbell knows perfectly well from his days as a reporter that the BBC’s reporting of the incident he has made the casus belli was legitimate. He now tries to strike us blind with the list of grandees — Blair, intelligence bosses, joint intelligence committee pavement artists, himself — who have to be believed while a BBC reporter is called a liar.

If single source stories had been barred from the Mirror when Campbell’s byline reigned as political correspondent, its appearances would have been few and far between. If we had taken the intelligence word of the grandest of grandees, though not his MI6 servants, over the past few months, we would have been feeding off corrupted Horlicks.

The fact is that Blair-Campbell are no more entitled to be axiomatically believed than a reputable BBC reporter. If anything, less so. They have plenty of form and a heavy motive.

As they see the polls going down, they reach for every cleansing detail to purify their motive for going to war. It’s another divide with Uncle Sam. Not only do most Americans want to skirt round uncomfortable truth, they are much less bothered with picayune details about WMD.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.