Who will rid us of the over-mighty Campbell?

[T_i_B]

Blair's spin-doctor needs to go ASAP, but that is not likely to happen without a fight.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/07/21/do2101.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2003/07/21/ixopinion.html&secureRefresh=true&_requestid=72537

I don't believe that anyone is "responsible" for Dr Kelly's death. The notion is distasteful and belittling of a man in extreme despair: these things are never as simple as that. But what Mr Campbell is indubitably responsible for is the Government's communications and strategy, both of which now lie in ruins. For that alone he should go, and go at once, regardless of what Lord Justice Hutton concludes in his eventual report.

If that sounds unjust, it is no harsher than the treatment Mr Campbell has meted out himself in the past, for example to Peter Mandelson, who was subsequently cleared by an official inquiry of any wrongdoing - although much good it has done him in the febrile world of assassination-by-headline in which Mr Campbell has moved so happily, and which he now excoriates.

But if Mr Campbell won't go voluntarily - and at the time of writing it doesn't look as though he will - does Mr Blair have the strength of character to fire him? Here we come back to their peculiar, increasingly unhealthy, interdependence. And we also come back to Mr Campbell's diary, which, if I were the Prime Minister, I would now feel hanging over me like a Sword of Damocles.

An aggrieved former director of communications, with a one-million-word journal for sale, the monetary value of which will be in direct proportion to how soon it can be published, is not a pretty prospect.