Governing in prose

It’s a unique view from a unique perspective. Ahead of publication of the third volume of his uncut Downing Street Diaries, Alastair Campbell, the man dubbed Tony Blair’s king of spin talks to Ian Macrae about the privilege and pressures of being inside Number 10

There’s nothing new about a fascination with diaries and diarists. They give us history intravenously. Samuel Pepys’ account of the Great Fire of London has urgency and immediacy because it is contemporaneous. More recently Alan Clark gave us a blow-by-blow account of Margaret Thatcher’s fall from the highest office.

But Alastair Campbell says that his account of life at the heart of the Blair Government has something extra.

“The big difference is that I’m right at the centre. It’s very rare for a diary to be published literally from the centre and that’s its strength.”

Clark, a good friend of his was, says Campbell close to the centre but also frustrated because he was also always at a remove.

Journalists and political rivals have, over the years found many accusations to throw at Campbell. Some, lacking any subtlety use clumsy shorthand relating to his openly proclaimed mental health problems and call him plain “Bonkers”. Others, drawing overt or covert historical parallels have called him the power behind the throne.

“First,” he says, “I’ve long gone past worrying about what other people see or say about me. The reality is that, in a modern democracy, if you’re the Prime Minister of a country like Britain, then you have people who support you. The idea that, in a modern media age, you’re not going to have someone lifting part of the blame for you is ridiculous.”

The publication and success of Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker prize-winning novel, Wolf Hall which had as its central character, Thomas Cromwell – himself described as “Henry VIII’s spin doctor”, led to direct comparisons.

Campbell laughs, remembering that the author herself once described her hero as “Alastair Campbell with an axe”.

“They were very different times. It’s true that I was involved as a political advisor rather than just a media advisor, but at the same time you can’t compare the world of Thomas Cromwell with the modern world.

“There are all sorts of principles of government which maybe always apply, but the job that I was doing did relate to a completely changed media environment and that’s what I was there to help Tony Blair and his colleagues adapt to.”

So did he see himself as being involved in actually running the country?

“No. I saw it as helping him to get elected and then helping him to take forward the changes on which he’d been elected with particular regard for communication and strategy which were a very big part of that.”

But it can be difficult to keep a strategic focus when you are also required to fire fight crises, sometimes on a daily basis. Certainly in the months and years following New Labour’s landslide election victory in 1997, the honeymoon was shorter than they might have hoped and the administration was overtaken by what Harold Macmillan once wanly referred to as “Events, those unforeseen, if not always unpredictable personal and political scandals and catastrophes”.

The death of Princess Diana, controversy over political donations by Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone, sexual scandal surrounding Welsh Secretary Ron Davies’s “Moment of madness”, Home Secretary Jack Straw’s son being involved in news stories about cannabis, and Peter Mandelson’s first fall from grace over a loan from Geoffrey Robinson. All created media frenzies which required Alastair Campbell’s attention, energy and savvy.

“One of the reasons I was a bit of a control freak and trying to centralise was that you need to stay on top of the day-to-day while also needing to stay focussed on strategy. Being on top of events and the management of events is what allows you to be strategic. We did become more strategic as we went along, but, of course, as time goes on, we became less popular.

“You can see in the second volume that the power of events does consume an awful lot of energy and time.”

Defining the difference between electioneering and governing, Campbell reaches in one diary entry for the phrase coined by former New York City Governor, Mario Cuomo, “We campaign in poetry, we govern in prose”. Nowadays it’s so often quoted that it’s become almost a cliché. But at the time it had real resonance in Number 10.

“The reason everyone quotes that now is that it’s such a brilliant phrase and a brilliant description. When you’re out on the campaign trail, anyone who’s any good at it is really trying to get people to soar to the heights. And it is different in government.

“But then again, something like Northern Ireland, that was bloody hard prose that was really hard work. And yet, you get some of the poetry back into it when, for example, the Good Friday Agreement comes together.

“The other thing to keep in mind is that this is my diary not anybody else’s and my mood does weave in and out of it and I am pretty down about most things. So I’m perhaps more likely to focus on some of the stuff that’s a bit dark”.

Something else which clearly emerges from the diaries is Campbell’s almost constant irritation and irritability. He is pissed off for a lot of the time.

“I remember Tessa Jowell saying to me that I was a victim of my own success. I’d set up this command and control situation , and then, at the weekend, trying to get a bit of quiet time, everybody’s phoning wanting to know the line on this or to tell me they’re doing that.”

This brought pressure to bear, not only on Campbell himself, but on his partner, Fiona Millar and his relationships with his children. In addressing how he coped and went on coping, he kind of echoes Churchill’s old dictum, “Keep buggering on”.

“I think I probably just did. I was a bit of a workaholic, probably am still to some extent. I got better at delegating as time went on. Understanding you can delegate and still have control is important. I had a very good team, but the other thing I had was an ability, a capacity for hard work.”

To a greater or lesser degree, Alastair Campbell’s time at the heart of what came to be known as “The Blair project”, was haunted by an event in 1986 which has shaped much of the rest of his life. At a Labour party conference which he was attending as a political journalist, he had a mental breakdown. He describes its impact.

“The reason why I sometimes say that my breakdown in ‘86 was the best thing that ever happened to me is because it’s the thing which I use when I do feel a bit edgy. I always compare how I’m feeling with that.”

In the first volume of the diaries, he describes how, returning to Scotland in 1994, it seemed to him that it all got very close to happening again. Other episodes of depression occasionally have an impact on his ability to do the job, but, like many people in that position, he has developed mechanisms for dealing with them.

“I would sometimes ask my deputy Godric Smith to do something for me, so in extremis, I’d admit to myself that I couldn’t actually function in the way I was expected to.

“You find your own mechanisms, and, actually, bizarrely – and this is probably really dangerous – I would throw myself into work even more because that was the only thing that would take my mind off it.”

Finally, there is the question of Gordon Brown, once memorably described by Campbell as having “Psychological flaws”. So did Blair’s successor suffer from Campbell’s absence?

“The books record that Gordon and I had our ups and downs, but at the same time I was always straight with him that once I’d left in 2003, I wasn’t going back full time. I think that maybe he felt that therefore his operation wasn’t as strong.

“But he’s admitted himself that he underestimated how big the gap was between being Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a very good one, and taking on the job of Prime Minister.”

And are there any qualms about calling into question Brown’s own mental health?

“There was a point when I was at the end of my tether with Gordon and with Charlie Whelan and I did sometimes go over the top.

“But part of me says that there’s no reason why, if people do have worries about their mental health, they shouldn’t be completely open about it.”

• The third volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries, Power and Responsibility is published in hardback in July along with the paperback of the second volume, Power and the People, both by Random House. Randomhouse.co.uk