Hidden some -where in a safe, protected from fire, theft and the ravages of
an imploding economy, is a pension fund tha t we might all envy. Its
currency is words, millions of them, tapped out late at night. They give a
raw, blow-by-blow account of government and are reputedly brimming with the
unexpurgated horror of the real Blair-Brown relationship.
Alastair Campbell’s first volume of memoirs stepped softly, but his
unpublished and ever-growing sequel is a guaranteed route to a comfortable
old age. For Gordon Brown, however, the contents of the safe are a timebomb
with a clock ticking just as long as Campbell needs it to. Right now the
prime minister would be unwise to dwell on how he might feature in the
diaries; after all, he needs a favour.
Five years after leaving his post as Tony Blair’s press secretary – blamed,
beleaguered and exhausted – Campbell has agreed to go back (or “backish”, in
his words) to help the man with whom he once had a relationship almost as
fractious as the one Brown endured with that other recent recruit from his
personal hall of horrors, Peter Mandelson. Campbell agreed because of
loyalty to Labour, hatred of the Tories and probably because Tony urged him
to. (And no doubt in part because the experience will only add to the
interest in – and market value of – those diaries.)
Although Campbell still spits out the old fighting talk, you can also detect
an inner groan at being lured away from his comfortable new life. He and
Brown have never been chummy: Campbell didn’t even attend the party to
celebrate Gordon’s accession in June 2007. But missing his former influence
on affairs of state and worrying about Brown’s slide in the polls, the
former journalist has been sending the PM notes on “areas I think might be
helpful” ever since.
Why return now, with no election looming?
“The dividing lines are going down now,” says Campbell, launching straight
into a classic attack. “Cameron and the Tories have been getting away with
murder. How can you say, for example, you are going to scrap the third
runway at Heath-row and your policy replacement is a new rail link to
Birmingham and Manchester? When you have the Chinese building dozens of new
air-ports, what are the policy consequences of not having a third run-way?
It’s a joke. Why is Cameron never asked that sort of question?
“Cameron is pretending to be something he isn’t and he can’t keep it up. You
saw it in his conference speech: it was nasty, all that nonsense about
teachers not putting plasters on children’s knees and soldiers not being
respected. The only communication that works is authenticity. You are seeing
that work to Gordon Brown’s advantage right now. In the middle of an
economic crisis you just have to deal with it and people who didn’t like him
have started to say that they like the cut of his jib.”
Was it a struggle to bury the hatchet between Brown, Mandelson and himself? He
shrugs: “No hatchet to bury.”
What – you’ve all made up? “That’s what you do. Whatever is divided and
separated is dwarfed by shared belief.”
There is no escaping the past, however – especially the printed version, which
sold more than 60,000 copies in hardback. And Campbell’s first volume of
diaries, The Blair Years, depicts Mandelson flouncing and huffing and
declaring that he’s “had enough!!!!” when he is at the end of his silken
tether with beastly Brown. Once Mandy even “pushed” Campbell, who grabbed
his wrists (the way Robert Mitchum might have grabbed an uppity dame’s to
intercept a slap) in a bust-up about whether Blair should deliver a speech
tie-less or not.
Back in those first heady days of power, Mandelson and Campbell had been
close. Indeed, Campbell told me last year that he felt “bad about Peter”,
whom he had pushed towards his second cabinet resignation in 2001, after
which he was cleared of impropriety in the Hinduja affair.
Was it Campbell who brokered Mandelson’s return to the fold as a way of making
amends? He says not: the first he heard of it, he says, was when called by a
news channel on his mobile phone while walking his dog on Hampstead Heath.
Was he surprised? “Not at all, actually. Gordon needs some big hitters. It
made sense to me.”
Have they been in touch? “We have spoken a few times . . . I think Peter has
learnt a lot,” says Campbell carefully, clearly not wanting to sound
conspiratorial, or overconfident or, even worse, as if he’s starring in a
political remake of The Big Chill, where old friends gather to reminisce
around a corpse – in this case, new Labour.
Both men ran their invitations to return past Blair, still their chief
confessor and guiding hand, who blessed the reunion and is clearly still
pulling strings from behind the scenes. “It’s obviously in all of our
interests that Gordon does well and that the Tories don’t get back,” says
Campbell. “Tony and I talk all the time. Emphasis on present tense.”
You have to marvel at Campbell’s good luck. Not so long ago he was vilified as
the co-author of a disastrous war, as a faker of dossiers and as a
protagonist in the terrible betrayal leading to Dr David Kelly’s suicide.
Now here he is, ensconced in his new life as a demi-celeb from which he has
been prised because of his (unspoken) disappointment at how wrong the
government has been getting it in his absence.
“At every level – Gordon, the parliamentary party – we have got to remember we
are in a fight,” he says firmly. “It is a fight to remind people about what
we’ve done and to make sure they know what the Tories are about.” He never
had to remind Tony he was in a fight.
We meet on the day after he hosted a 21st birthday party for his eldest son
Rory at home, the sort of family event for which he once might not have had
the time or energy. He has enjoyed his postpolitical life – the luxury of
super-league book advances, the travel, being called on to advise the South
African government on communications, raising funds for Leukaemia Research,
turning down Strictly Come Dancing and, just recently, a “name-your-price”
Celebrity Big Brother. “I’d rather die,” is his comment on the latter.
What he has done, though, is to write his first novel, All in the Mind, the
story of a self-loathing London psychiatrist and his patients – for which
Campbell drew on his own well documented battles with mental illness over
the years.
It is hard to imagine him sitting quietly at his kitchen table and
contemplating raisins. But this is one exercise he used to reconnect with
the “beauty and possibility” of the world when he reached the lowest ebbs of
his own clinical depression.
In 1986 Campbell suffered a psy-chotic breakdown while covering his friend
Neil Kinnock’s trip to Scot-land; he was arrested, hospitalised and has
suffered depressive episodes ever since. It is a fragility that, on the face
of it, seems at odds with his macho politics.
I ask how dried fruit helped him to recover his equilibrium. “You look at
raisins and roll them round your finger – you can do it with any sort of
fruit or petals or a flower or anything – and you just suddenly see there is
interesting and good stuff around you,” he says.
In his search for peace of mind he has also – like the fictional characters in
his novel – noted his dreams, transcribed long lists of his “wants” against
his “needs”, snapped a rubber band against his wrist to deflect negative
thoughts and, in extremis, taken medication, although never while working
for Blair.
He has also suffered from the unhinged behaviour of others – and not just
huffy Mandelson (whom he once described as “slightly detached”) and
saturnine Brown (“I never said he was psychologically flawed. I am, that’s
for sure”).
The actress Nicola Pagett, who is bipolar, wrote “hundreds” of love letters to
Campbell, with whom she believed she was conducting a passionate affair.
More have arrived from her since he left the job, although maybe none as
memorable as the postcard adorned with the front of a pair of knickers which
reached the dignified desk of Ming Campbell, the former Liberal Democrat
leader, via the Commons internal mail system: “He sent it on to me with a
note saying, ‘I think these are meant for you’.”
Campbell has never met the actress and never sought legal advice to deter her:
“No, I was never worried by it. I felt it was benign. I just hope she’s
okay, but I have no way of knowing.”
It is tempting, in the light of his honesty about his illness (not to mention
his recent BBC2 documentary, Cracking Up), to see those years of spats and
furious rebuttals at No 10 as a product of mental frailty. His diaries are
suffused with a persistent gloom, after all. But he disagrees: “I was fed up
but not depressed. There is a difference.”
When he stormed into Channel 4 News to defend the government against the BBC’s
charges of “sexing up” the case for war in Iraq, he certainly looked like a
man on the edge: “If I’d been depressed, I wouldn’t have been able to do an
interview and I still think I was right, given the accusation against me . .
.”
Is all this self-revelation a bid for sympathy? “No, it is an attempt to talk
about something which is a big taboo, meaning that people who need help
don’t feel they can ask for it.”
Some of the afflicted characters in his novel, such as Arta, the Kosovan
asylum seeker, derive specifically from his old political life; but he
agrees that his intermittent mental anguish informs them all: from the
shrink to the sex-addict barrister who solves his problem with a rigorous
regimen of city cycling, one of Campbell’s own hobbies.
There is also an alcoholic secretary of state entrapped in a sex scandal. The
closest Campbell came to one of those was when he had to deal with Robin
Cook’s marital collapse and, later, Ron Davies’s “moment of madness” on
Clapham Common. Campbell himself was never a sex addict but he was once a
chronic boozer – and he knows full well the fatal incompatibility of alcohol
and stress. Having stopped drinking after his 1986 breakdown, he
occasionally “lapses”.
“It’s like I’m testing myself: if I have one glass, will I have another and
another? So far, I haven’t . . .”
One of the characters in his novel – Emily, a young woman disfigured in a fire
– is asked by her psychiatrist to study a box of wrinkled Sun-Maids, an act
that then launches her on the path to spiritual enlightenment. Has Campbell
had a religious epiphany like Emily’s? He is not, as we know, a “God
person”, although he knows a man who is, but after a lifetime’s atheism he
admits to being curious: “Tony has his hopes up that one day I’ll find God.
But he also says if I ever get religion, I’ll become an Islamic
fundamentalist.”
What has changed about the man who is returning to fix the Labour party? Well,
he still hates toffs, Tories and the media – in fact, can’t stop himself
complaining about the media’s unfairness, its caricatures of himself, its
apparent love of enthroning “Tory toffs it can kowtow to. Weird”.
His touchiness about journalists has its uses, serving as a handy defence. “I
know I have written a good novel,” he says of his book, which will not win
literary prizes but is readable and rings true on the introspective world of
damaged people, a world he knows only too well. “But I also know that some
newspapers won’t be able to say so.” Without his famous name and the frisson
that attends it, would he have won his fiction deal with Random House? “I
told everyone – agent, publishers – that I only wanted to publish the book
if they thought it was good in its own right, not because it was written by
me.”
Which brings us back to those diaries in the safe – when exactly, one wonders,
will they see the light of day? The rumour was that Campbell had the sequel
to the first diary ready to run as Brown’s unpopularity started spiralling
towards a possible resignation; but he says that was not the case. Nor are
there any concrete plans to publish – yet. So, as he returns to assist
Brown, he will be making strategy by day and squirrelling away more and more
gory details by night.
What if he and Brown discover a mutual affection this time around and he feels
he can’t dish the dirt? After all, Campbell has a habit of developing an
emotional closeness to his boss; and he doesn’t demur when I suggest that
his own politics are closer to Brown’s than Blair’s, who always thought his
press secretary “more Labour than me”.
“It’s not about feelings,” chortles Campbell. “It’s about business. You have
to stop seeing political relationships in terms of love and hate. Gordon
knows my diary is a very raw, authentic account of what happens day by day
and he still speaks very openly to me; Peter still talks to me. Anyway, I
don’t feel in any rush to publish them.”
One doubts somehow that Campbell will be bringing his new-found serenity and
novelist’s insight on the human psyche to his unpaid advisory role at No 10,
a role he has promised his family won’t be as stressful as his last one, its
terms being so casual that he will be involved only when he feels like it,
won’t have a title or even an office (“I bloody well hope not”). However,
he’s not about to change his spots.
He may claim that he “can’t even remember the last time I lost my temper”, but
Brown needs him for precisely the qualities that Blair was advised to rein
in: a relish for attack, an understanding of urgency, a readiness for a
punch-up – all of which are missing in a government that has plenty of
brains but not enough balls. Brown needs him, too, because charming Dave
famously wants to “rub [Brown’s] face in the shit” and someone has to look
after the swotty kid in the playground.
Meanwhile, Campbell still haunts the nightmares of political journalists and
the ones who felt pushed around and misled are now determined to settle
scores. In his new book Tony’s Ten Years, Adam Boulton of Sky News claims
Campbell once lied to him about Blair’s whereabouts (which had a bearing on
the likelihood of a reshuffle) and called Boulton later to apologise. Did he
lie?
“I have no idea. I have no recollection,” he sighs, which I take to mean that
he probably did lie, possibly no more or less than others who have filled
his role before and since, but with more impunity and belief in a higher
justification. “When journalists accuse me of lying, they usually trot out a
melange of [Lakshmi] Mittal, [Bernie] Ecclestone, Mandelson – and they prove
nothing.”
True to form, he then tries to disable Boulton’s accusation with an attack of
his own – a sharper, more personal one: “With Boulton it’s jealousy. It’s a
generational thing. People like him and Matthew Parris [The Times columnist
and former MP] stand outside looking in and they can’t bear the sight of
their own generation doing it.”
Having wounded two broadly respected journalists with one bullet, he goes back
to the wider attack. “The Tories are trying to get in by stealth,” he
claims. “It’s a case of ‘We should never have been kicked out and we deserve
to be back now because we’re Tories and we went to Eton’.”
Earlier this year Campbell – an unlikely class warrior considering he is the
Cambridge-educated son of a vet – bumped into David Cameron at a Manchester
taxi rank. They chatted politely while intrigued onlookers gawped.
“I told him he needed to get some policies. He just smiled at me. I can see
that he’s charming but that’s not enough. People compare him to Tony as a
communicator, but Tony had something to communicate.”
He pauses: “You know, Tim Bell [the Tories’ former PR guru] told me that they
would never have any policies. He said, ‘Can’t you get it into your head
that they are not about policy?’ He was right. It’s all just positioning.”
There’s no doubt that he genuinely shudders to think of the Bullingdon Boys
running the show, or that his leftie, chippy, passionate love of Labour
makes him a formidable combatant – and, at times, his own worst enemy. But
I’m not sure he is looking forward to the fray, to reconnecting with his old
media adversaries or even to reading their newspapers again – a habit he was
happy to ditch. Nor is he convinced that the inevitable adrenaline surge
will be good for him or that his bruising style – which ultimately made him
a liability to our previous prime minister – will still do the trick.
In his head I suspect he is like a Lord Kitchener recruit, unable to ignore a
call to duty: “It’s still win-nable. Gordon’s got a couple of years to go,
he’s taken a lot of hits, the polls have not been great. Now he just has to
go for it.”
Alastair Campbell will be talking about his novel All in the Mind
(Hutchinson, £17.99) at the Festival Hall, London, on Wednesday, November
26, at 7.30pm. Box office: 0871 663 2500
