Product Description

With Alastair Campbell's career as the Prime Minster's press spokesman coming to a close amid the huge controversy of the Hutton Inquiry, the debate over Weapons of Mass Destruction and the waging of the war in Iraq, this biography has been completely revised and rewritten with a substantial section of new material to bring the story of Alastair Campbell right up to date as of the end of 2003. This book is about one of the most powerful unelected figures in British politics, whose combative approach to his job in 2003 has precipitated the most serious row in years between the government and the BBC, occasioned the extraordinary spectacle of an incandescent Campbell walking into Channel 4 News to deliver a live diatribe to Jon Snow, and who, if his many critics are to be believed, was involved, unprecedentedly, at the highest level in the presentation of the intelligence dossier on Weapons of Mass Destruction that made the government's case for war. This portrait of Tony Blair's right-hand man who has himself become the media story, is written by one of Britain's best political journalists.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #142329 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 378 pages

Customer Reviews

An anti-hero of our time
This meticulously detailed but fast-paced book explains how Alastair Campell, ostensibly the Prime Minister's Press Secretary, was allowed to create his own job to accommodate his volatile and driven personality. Secondary legislation (Orders in Council) were implemented to enable Downing Street staff to be both Special Advisers and Civil Servants (and so to give orders to the hitherto impartial executive). The immediate result was a "purge" of the Government Information Service and the crowning fiasco was Campbell's (and Jonathan Powell's) part in coordinating the Iraq intelligence dossiers.

Campbell reached the heights from inauspicious beginnings. At Cambridge, he did little else other than play football for his College and drink himself blind in the "Late Night Bar" before, when he could manage to scrape himself off the floor, sallying forth into the night "to beat up an upper class twit". After a spell drifting around on the Continent, playing the bagpipes and exercising the ferret, he won a prestigious traineeship on the Mirror, eventually becoming political editor in his early thirties.

Oborne and Walters develop the thesis that from early in his career, Campbell's vocation was to act as Grand Vizier to someone who enjoyed extensive power. Robert Maxwell provided one dry-run for this ambition, Neil Kinnock another. Apparently Campbell developed a suspicion and antipathy towards the Parliamentary lobby as a result of their vicious treatment of Kinnock in the late 80s.

The second Mandelson resignation, "Cheriegate" and the vendetta against the BBC cumulatively made his position untenable - not least for asking for the PM's backing against his own wife - and suggest that the psychological demons once led to a (manic depressive?) breakdown have not been laid to rest.

It is difficult to know how his career will develop now. None of the (friendly) Murdoch papers have offered him a column and his roadshow he has bewildered audiences with boring asseverations of loyalty to Burnley FC and foam-flecked phillipics against the Daily Mail. He may be a vindictive bully (and auctioning a signed copy of the Hutton report didn't leave the sweetest taste in the mouth) but Campbell also emerges as supremely talented as well as loyal to a fault. I for one hope that he finds something fulfilling to do with the rest of his life.

To conclude, his unofficial biographers have blended constitutional exposition, psychological dissection and the drama of decision-making in the Downing Street nerve-centre with consummate expertise and I recommend their book to anyone.

An absorbing insight into the power behind the Blair throne
Peter Oborne is a political correspondent who manages to step beyond the daily "splits" and "backing down" verbiage that passes for political journalism. His analysis of Campbell's character-change (after a drink-induced breakdown) is fascinating. And his analysis of his subject's power is useful:a combination of a "Napoleonic" centralising of power by Balir; the sidelining of Parliament and representative institutions; and the importance of the "media-class". It's a good read. I recommend it heartily.

The apotheosis of journalism brings forth monsters...
Oborne has written and co-written a number of books, some containing material similar to this book's. Simon Walters, the joint author, is or was a Daily Mail journalist (i.e. 'right wing'). My copy was first published in 2004 - clearly it's been updated from 2000, though it doesn't say so anywhere.

Let me try to get the authors to speak for themselves:

They say (page 102) '.. talented journalists ... wield immense social, economic and political power which the Media Class has gathered unto itself...'
BUT
(page 126) '.. Bernard Ingham ... understood the value of denying access. [TV and radio] Programmes that irked Margaret Thatcher suddenly found that no senior minister would go on to be interviewed. ... Campbell and Mandelson never made that sort of mistake. They controlled who appeared where ... Any programme which questioned the glowing public image of Tony Blair and his Shadow Cabinet found itself ostracised. ... Mandelson's method .. with the press was to single out a tiny number of favourites. He had a coterie of trusted souls...'

So journalists wield immense power - but, back in the real world, are at the mercy of secretaries and press officers. Oborne (editor of the Spectator) cannot admit that people like Murdoch have immense and corrupt power - able to tell lies about genocide, for example.

As regards Labour, Oborne and Walters state (page 117) 'Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould were born and bred in the Labour party - it is part of their innermost being, which is why the final ... step... felt ... like ...
parricide. This was not so with Campbell...'
BUT
after all Mandelson is, or believed to be, descended from Jews in Poland who presumably collected taxes from the peasantry. Gould worked in advertising and polls, and was a sort of prequel to spin doctoring. Born and bred in the Labour Party? Nonsense!

They generally have a curious naivete about Labour: (page 121) '.. Dromey and ... Harman ... [sent] their next son to... a grammar school in Orpington. Harman knew it was a provocative act: almost the entire Labour party was opposed to selection at the age of eleven. ...' This is disingenuous, since these authors must know that most of what 'Labour' politicians do is money-based and soaked in hypocrisy.

They seem naive about the Civil Service; at least, it's puzzling the way time-honoured routines simply seem elbowed out of the way; why didn't the mandarins object or remonstrate? I'd like to know - since after all this is highly significant for democracy - but the influential and powerful journalistic authors seem to make no useful comment. E.g.: (page 150) '.. Cabinet Secretary Sir Robin Butler ... feared the consequences of giving Campbell and Powell access to two areas of government that should be kept separate from political appointees at all costs: the intelligence services and the honours system. ... It was a prophetic warning. [But] Campbell got his way.'
AND
Page 151: '.. GIS, government information service .. seventeen out of nineteen directors of communication inherited by New Labour ... left within two years of the 1997 election.'
AND
Page 288: '.. the Prime Minister [Blair] had chaired no fewer than four meetings ... leading up to the release of Kelly's name. Permanent secretaries and Cabinet ministers had been present. Not one of these meetings had been minuted, a shocking and serious breach of Whitehall procedure. ..'

At a personal level, the authors make quite a bit of the Campbell name - the depths of treachery, which perhaps they believe is hereditary. And of his looks - he may have been a gigolo - an Amazon review speaks of 'exercising the ferret', but it seems more like a marathon. It's not clear to me how Campbell got to Cambridge, being a football©loving drunk; maybe he was a token northerner? He got what the authors call a 'prestigious' training place as a journalist. This was with the Daily Mirror! He attached himself to Maxwell, Ingham, Kinnock, before Blair. He essentially faked letters: page 230: 'Campbell used the authority of the Downing Street press machine to issue a false account of Mandelson's [dismissal] .. he then wrote the resignation letters. Emboldened by his success with Ron Davies' resignation letter and Nick Brown's gay 'confession'.. he composed both Mandelson's letter of resignation and Blair's reply. ...'

What happened under 'New Labour' - the instructions and agenda and secret directions - doesn't ever surface. This is a book by journalists for people who don't realise that the media are a managed branch of propaganda. I'll give two stars - not that it matters, as Campbell and the rest will vanish like gigolos after servicing their clients.