At the beginning of 1998, Marr was sacked, according to one version of events, for having refused to reduce the newspaper's production staff to just five subeditors. According to Nick Cohen's account, the sacking was due to the intervention of Alastair Campbell, director of communications for Tony Blair. Campbell had demanded that David Montgomery, the paper's publisher, fire Marr over an article in which he had compared Blair with his predecessor John Major. This article had followed an earlier one by Blair published in "The Sun", in which Blair had written: "On the day we remember the legend that St George slayed a dragon to protect England, some will argue that there is another dragon to be slayed: Europe." Marr's response asserted that Blair had spoken in bad faith, opportunistically championing Europe to pro-EU audiences while criticising it to anti-EU ones; and that the phrase "some will argue" was Blair's disingenuous rhetorical ruse to distance himself from the xenophobic appeal that he himself was making.