If you search for images of Alastair Campbell on Google, you will find, many times over, a picture taken by a Press Association photographer during the Hutton Inquiry. The photo is proliferating: it even graced a recent cover of Poetry Review. It shows Campbell standing outside, wearing a suit and tie, his right arm folded across his body, a scroll of paper in his hand. His left elbow rests on the back of his right hand, and the knuckles of his left hand are pressed to his chin. Watching something out of the corner of his eye, he resembles a wolf, or a bird of prey. The picture could be a physiognomical paradigm of a conspirator, a machinator, a schemer, a Machiavel. It shows Campbell as those who don't like him like to see him.

LRB 18 March 2004 | PDF Download