Bernard Ingham: At last, Alastair Campbell tells the truth about Labour's brazen abuse of power

He has not, of course, produced a confessional book. Nor has he taken to the airwaves to admit anything other than the principled brilliance of the Blair era.

Indeed, during his appearance before the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq invasion, he expressed his sense of privilege and pride in the part he was able to play in that blood-soaked intervention.

Campbell has never done apology, as he would put it – only thumping assertion.

Yet his performance before Chilcot was a mine of information as to why Labour, under both Blair and Gordon Brown, has distressingly failed its supporters when they had reasonable hope of becoming the natural party

of government, given their golden legacy.

Let me dig out a few nuggets from the Chilcot seam.

The first is Blair's constitutional ignorance. Campbell said that he inherited a Government Information Service (GIS), which I once led, that was "not fit for purpose". Consequently, he proceeded to break down departmental barriers that got in the way of meeting the demands of the so-called media revolution.

Translated, this means that Blair killed Cabinet government based on departmental autonomy so that No 10, in the manner of Orwell's 1984, could take control.

From the formation of the GIS in 1945, No 10 press secretaries had had no authority over their opposite numbers in Government departments, who answered directly to their Cabinet Minister. Even with such a powerful PM as Margaret Thatcher, I could not impose anything on my GIS colleagues. I had to rely on persuasion.

Blair – and through him Mandelson and Campbell – regarded this as

grossly inefficient. They were right. It is. But up to then it had

been the price our democracy exacted in order to dilute and disperse power. This is one inefficiency I hope David Cameron restores.

Under Blair, Labour ideology, rendered unserviceable by Thatcher, went out of the window. With no guiding philosophy, they had to resort

to central control of the message, so Cabinet was rendered toothless.

As Campbell has revealed, any Minister who was unsound on Iraq was kept out of the loop – eg, Clare Short – and the rest manipulated.

With Cabinet neutered, it was not much of a step for a Government with a massive, compliant majority and an ineffective opposition to sideline Parliament, which is supposed to hold it to account.

All this worked remarkably and depressingly well until the abuse of power became so blatant over the case for war with Iraq that

disillusionment set in. It is true this led to Campbell's downfall and eventually Blair's demise.

But their departure has not brought a return to Cabinet government and Parliamentary accountability since Brown, if not as ignorant of constitutional proprieties as Blair, is no less contemptuous of them.

Witness the vast commandeering of a cool 500m from the taxpayer for "Government advertising" to make good Labour's current election penury.

It follows from all this unconstitutionality that Campbell was never Blair's press secretary but his Svengali. Who else then could better superintend the presentation of the case for war? Inevitably, Campbell presided over its refining, taking precedence over a singularly weak head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, editing out inconvenient

detail and producing a dodgy dossier.

Up to then, it would have been unthinkable for a No 10 press secretary to dabble in intelligence. That was for experts who had spent their lives in the arcane business.

This brings me to Labour's arrogance. Only the insufferably arrogant could defend, as Campbell does, "every single word of the (dodgy] dossier". After all, nobody has found any of Saddam's feared WMDs and in any case, as a former tabloid journalist, Campbell has no background in intelligence, the military or the Middle East.

Of course, some kinds of arrogance are more bearable than others. Unfortunately. Campbell's carries the hallmark of Labour's control system. Deliver it loud and long, defiantly and brazenly, regardless of the evidence.

"New" Labour has always believed in getting its story out first,

shouting it from the roof tops and sticking to it regardless of credibility. That is why Gordon Brown bludgeons us with repetition, the better to make his delusions stick in our minds.

We have much to thank Alastair Campbell for, even if he has helped to mangle the constitution. The more we see of him, the worse Labour

looks. He has his uses after all.