Street-fighting for survival

Alastair Campbell famously decreed that if a government politician featured in negative frontpage stories for more than a week, the greater good of government required him to walk the plank, regardless of the facts. Michael McDowell is now well past that line.

Despite a tumult of commentary demanding his resignation, the minister insists he has acted on the statutory rape issue with "good authority and courage" and time will vindicate his actions. He says he will not resign and you just know it is true. By John Waters

Alastair Campbell famously decreed that if a government politician featured in negative frontpage stories for more than a week, the greater good of government required him to walk the plank, regardless of the facts. Michael McDowell is now well past that line.

Despite a tumult of commentary demanding his resignation, the minister insists he has acted on the statutory rape issue with "good authority and courage" and time will vindicate his actions. He says he will not resign and you just know it is true.

Across the water, David Blunkett and Charles Clarke walked the plank as a result of events with arguably less serious implications, and certainly far less public outcry. Campbell correctly identified such pressurising of politicians as a media-orchestrated game to create the kind of plot twists that maintain audiences. While condemning this game, he was respectful of its rules – when in the end he couldn't get his own name off the front pages, he took the walk.

But McDowell is a special case. His defence of his own indefensible position this past week, as he fended off assaults from media, opposition and public, has been a remarkable spectacle in political determination. The secret of his unassailability is in part his arrogance. His demeanour conveys a sense of strength that, mysteriously, communicates itself to his assailants in such a way that their assaults somehow lack the conviction they might attain in a similar exchange with anyone else. He is a dirty fighter, as Eamon Dunphy discovered recently when McDowell quoted on air some off-mic remarks by Dunphy about the Frank Connolly affair, undermining Dunphy's position. (The interview was pre-recorded, but Dunphy left the exchange in.)

There is in McDowell a relentless streak which never allows him to forget a grudge or relax his guard against the possibility of further attack. I first encountered him in the 1980s when I profiled him for a Sunday newspaper. The tenor of the profile was that he was an admirable figure with an image problem, but the sub-editor disregarded any subtleties and headed the article along the lines of "Bootboy of the Right". I gather this did not appeal to Mr McDowell's sense of himself, and we have since kept a suspicious distance from one another.

The year before last, when debating the idea of a press council, I made a case concerning the unreliability of media as advocates of freedom of speech. One of my examples was the failure of newspapers to campaign against the in-camera rule, which prevents the public from perceiving the corruption of family courts. This point, of course, might have reflected also on the Minister for Justice. Immediately, McDowell jumped in to suggest that I had engaged in a personal attack on a colleague who was reporting the event. It was nonsense, but it completely distracted attention from the substance of my argument.

Increasingly he appears driven by undiluted hatred of certain political and ideological opponents, which sometimes causes him to suspend judgement and reason. Remarkably, these breakdowns often touch chords of approval in the depths of public opinion. To accuse a citizen in the way McDowell, as Minister for Justice, accused Frank Connolly, especially when the law officers over whom McDowell presided were unable to make a case, would have ended another political career.

But, as public disquiet began to mount, McDowell dismissed expressions of disquiet as, in effect, fellow-travellerism. This, intriguingly, had the effect of galvanising public support in his favour, as critics shrank from the implications of the smear. At no time did he seek to put on the public record a substantial case to show that he had acted correctly, but simply bullied the public conversation into silence.

The point is that this relentless appetite for streetfighting continues to work for McDowell. The New Labour trio of Blunkett, Clarke and Prescott are as remorseless a bunch of bullies as you might fear to encounter, but they could all do with lessons from Michael McDowell, whose tactics may one day provide a study for those seeking to find ways around the modern culture of media scalp-hunting.