[CMA] Guardian Article: 'Purnell's progress'

[Chris Hewson]

The Guardian

May 23, 2005 (Guardian Media)

HEADLINE: Purnell's progress: James Purnell had a hand in all the key
media policy decisions of the past decade. Now the man who thought up
Ofcom at 24 has landed a key role in the government. In his first
interview he tells Matt Wells how Blair, Birt and Sky+ changed his
life

If you are a young, energetic MP with ambitions to get a touch on the
tiller of power, the offer of a junior post at the ministry of fun
might not initially seem like the best starting point. But for James
Purnell, former No 10 policy aide, former John Birt strategist, and
present occupant of the "one to watch" column in Westminster
observers' notebooks, the position of minister for broadcasting at the
Department for Culture, Media and Sport is but the latest stage in a
logical career trajectory.

Few people outside Westminster would be aware that, despite being only
35, Purnell has been at the heart of the most influential media policy
decisions of the past decade. The blueprint for a converged media and
telecommunications regulator was set by Purnell in his mid-20s
incarnation as research fellow for the Institute for Public Policy
Research; the policy foundations for the BBC's leading role in the
digital age were laid when he worked for Birt as the BBC's head of
corporate planning in the mid 1990s; and the legislation that set up
Ofcom, cleared the barriers to a monolithic ITV and paved the way to
digital switchover, was a product of his work and that of Ed Richards
when they were Downing Street advisers.

Now, mirroring the path from ideas to implementation taken by Richards
when he switched from a senior position at No 10 to a senior position
at Ofcom, Purnell has completed the transition from thinker to doer.
"For me it was wanting to move from an advisory role to doing
something," he says of his decision to stand for parliament. "I wanted
to be in a situation where I was helping to set the framework, and I
believed strongly that what Gordon Brown and Tony Blair had done
transforming the Labour party was important, but it was also important
that other people came in and took that on so it became an embedded
change rather than a passing fashion."

Unlike some previous occupants of junior ministerial posts at the
DCMS, Purnell is a man on his way up - and he clearly intends to stamp
his mark on the job. In the next few weeks, he will make a keynote
speech that will outline his vision for a creative Britain. It is an
area with which he is familiar, having sat on the creative industries
taskforce set up in 1997 amidst the wave of euphoria that greeted the
first post-Thatcher Labour victory - a well-intentioned attempt to
capitalise on the creative successes in Britain that ended in Cool
Britannia derision when hordes of pop stars were paraded incongruously
in Downing Street. "What we did with Cool Britannia in 1997 was the
right policy but the wrong message," he says. "It would be good if we
could do it again, but without the parties."

Purnell has already made a statement with his job title: unlike his
predecessor, Lord McIntosh, who was minister for broadcasting,
Purnell's job description has been updated to minister for the
creative industries. "They are a massive part of the economy and I
think Britain should be confident about that - 10-15% of our economy
comes from the creative industries. It's a great success story. The
tragedy would be if in 20 or 30 years' time we talk about these areas
in the same way we do about shipbuilding or coal mining, areas where
we used to be pre-eminent but then got overtaken."

When describing his vision, Purnell talks about "modern Britain" a
lot. It is a touchstone New Labour phrase - and Purnell is a
quintessentially New Labour figure. More than that, he is a product of
that curious world of professional politicians, advisers and lobbyists
whose names, careers and even personal relationships can seem
interchangeable to the casual observer. He was best man to Tim Allan,
another former Blair aide who went on to become director of corporate
affairs at BSkyB; he worked on media policy in Downing Street when
Richards was working on the 2001 manifesto; he played football with
another adviser-turned-MP, Andy Burnham; and was at Oxford at the same
time as recently deposed education minister Stephen Twigg and
newly-promoted housing minister Yvette Cooper.

The swirl of special advisers, to which he was linked, became
synonymous with the dark side of the New Labour machine: the radical
website Red Star Research puts the case for the prosecution bluntly.
"Several advisers have been friends with senior Labour party figures
for many years, others are partners of millionaires or bosses and all
come from a self-perpetuating middle-class elite that thrives on
patronage, using it to bypass the grubby world of democracy and slip
into positions of power and influence."

Purnell bats away the criticism, saying one of the reasons that he
moved into elected politics, and away from the shadowy world of
strategy and policy advice, was to realise his ambitions to make a
difference to people's lives. "Politics is a difficult business. There
are skills that you need to do the job - but that doesn't mean I'm not
passionate about changing the world, about building a modern social
democracy."

At least Purnell can claim not to have bypassed the grubby democratic
world. Since 2001 he has been MP for Stalybridge and Hyde - his most
famous ex-constituent is Harold Shipman - a solidly safe traditional
Labour seat in Greater Manchester.

Which is why, dressed in a crisply expensive suit and a deeply
fashionable white shirt and sporting a trendy Make Poverty History
wristband, he looks as if he would feel more at home in his smart St
Martin's Lane flat than his constituency home in Broadbottom.
Naturally, he begs to differ, citing his campaigns for secondary
schools in local council estates as his proudest achievements as an
MP. Although he retains one important link with the capital: he is an
ardent, season ticket-holding Arsenal fan - which, after his team's FA
Cup final victory at the weekend, will make the next visit to his
constituency somewhat awkward.

Now, however, he is a member of the government, responsible for what
is about to become a key area of policy - digital switchover. It is an
issue in which Purnell has been immersed for more than a decade, so at
least he is aware of the pitfalls. He knows, for example, that at some
point policymakers and broadcasters are going to have to deal with the
as-yet unknown number of "digital refusniks" - the poor and the
elderly who do not want or think they cannot afford digital. But he is
also aware that BSkyB, in particular, will vigorously oppose any
attempt to subsidise the switchover. "We have to operate within the
state aid framework and we are not planning a mass, government-funded
distribution of set-top boxes or anything like that."

So, while the government cannot escape the fact that the BBC-backed
Freeview system is the best way to fill in the final few, ministers
cannot be seen to favour any one platform. "We get hundreds of letters
every month from people saying we can't get Freeview, and we are not
in favour of any particular platform, we are platform neutral, but we
want to be able to offer people a choice there," he says,
diplomatically.

Purnell is clearly a digital optimist: he thinks technology like the
BBC's digital media player and Sky+ will help viewers and listeners
sift out quality from the dross in the digital age. He is a fan of
both: using the BBC radio player to listen to Gilles Peterson and Sky+
to navigate his TV viewing. "Sky+ changed my life," he says, somewhat
overstating the point.

While Purnell is a fan of Sky technology, his relationship with the
BBC is more of an issue, as charter review negotiations reach their
final phase. He was vigorously opposed to Greg Dyke's stance on the
David Kelly affair, becoming one of Labour's Hutton obsessives. Today,
he declines to "pick over the scars" of Hutton, tactfully praising
Dyke instead for inspiring his staff and his strategic success in
backing Freeview. He is also astute enough not to be drawn on the
competency of the current management at the BBC.

On Birt, however, you get the sense that Purnell is torn. On the one
hand, he is keen to praise his former boss: "I worked with John Birt
for three years and I learned a lot from him. I think people will look
back and give him much more credit for what he did at the BBC than
they do now. It's easy to forget there were people in the Conservative
administration who were dead set on privatising the BBC and he saw
that off." But Purnell is conflicted: Birt, now a policy adviser in
Downing Street, was on the opposite side of a row with Tessa Jowell,
Purnell's boss at the DCMS, over a plan to share out the licence fee
for public service television to broadcasters other than the BBC.
Jowell won, and Purnell is careful to put clear blue water between him
and Birt: "I work for Tessa now, and I work for the government."

Fortunately, Purnell is a big supporter of the licence fee. "It's not
perfect - it's a bit like democracy - it's the best system in the
absence of any other." He is convinced it can survive into the digital
age - perhaps beyond the review that Ofcom will conduct halfway
through the next charter, around the point of digital switchover. But
he is also clear that the BBC must respond to the demands of its
audience - his first public visit as a minister was to the
corporation's digital station 1Xtra, aimed at young black listeners; a
favourite radio show is Zane Lowe's programme on Radio 1. Lowe is one
of the new breed of presenters who have turned around the fortunes of
the BBC's pop station.

But press attention so far has not focused on Purnell's musical
tastes: the Sunday Telegraph unearthed an article he wrote in 2003 as
a backbencher, condemning the proposed London Olympics bid as the
"wrong priority" for Britain. It was embarrassing -Purnell counts
tourism in his ministerial brief - but he warned Jowell of the article
on his appointment, and it would hardly be a surprise if the Labour
press machine was behind the placing of the story in an effort to get
the bad news out of the way as quickly as possible. (One of the first
things he was given along with his ministerial red box was a Back the
Bid badge, which has not left his lapel since.)

Ordinarily, it would be tempting to tip Purnell for a cabinet position
in the not too distant future - but his Blairite credentials may count
against him as the Brown age dawns. Yet you can already detect Purnell
positioning himself for a post-Blair world - notice how he mentioned
Brown first when talking about the Blair-led changes to the Labour
party. "Politically the task for us is to try and win a fourth term -
and create the kind of change that becomes very difficult for an
opposition coming (to power) to reverse." As the Conservative party
prepares to go to war with itself again, Purnell urges unity and
clarity of purpose in Labour. "I think it's perfectly possible if we
are united and clear about what we want to do, we can win 60 seats
back at the next election." Is he seriously suggesting Labour
post-Blair can return to power with a landslide? "If you look at
places where people thought the Tories might win, the Labour vote came
out quite strongly. It's where they thought the Tories weren't
anywhere that they registered a protest vote." So has Labour replaced
the Tories as the natural party of government? "Never take the
electorate for granted." But is it a big change in the political
landscape? "It's an earthquake - but politics can change quickly
again," he adds.

So it does - and it will be fascinating to see where Purnell ends up
when the Blair-Brown fight is finally over.

	
	
		
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