Alastair Campbell

Alastair John Campbell (born 25 May 1957) is a British journalist, author, strategist, broadcaster and activist known for his roles during Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party. Campbell worked as Blair's spokesman and campaign director (1994–1997), then as Downing Street Press Secretary, and as the Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson (1997–2000). He then became Downing Street director of communications and spokesman for the Labour Party (2000–2003). He returned as campaign director for the 2005 United Kingdom general election in Blair's third win.

Campbell is the editor at large of ''The New European'' and chief interviewer for '' GQ''. He continues to act as a consultant strategist and as an ambassador for Time to Change and other mental health charities. He was an adviser to the People's Vote campaign, demanding a public vote on the final Brexit deal. Since his work for Blair, Campbell has continued to act as a freelance advisor to a number of governments and political parties, including the Prime Minister of Albania. He published his sixteenth book in 2020. In March 2022, he launched the Rest is Politics podcast with Rory Stewart, which has been since its launch the top politics podcast in the UK in the Apple rankings, and often the leading podcast in the UK.

Early life

Campbell was born on 25 May 1957 in Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire, son of Scottish veterinary surgeon Donald Campbell and his wife Elizabeth. Campbell's parents had moved to Keighley when his father became a partner in a local veterinary practice. Donald was a Gaelic-speaker from the island of Tiree; his wife was from Ayrshire. Campbell grew up with two older brothers, Donald and Graeme, and a younger sister, Elizabeth.

He attended Bradford Grammar School for a short period of time, followed by City of Leicester Boys' Grammar School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages, French and German, for which he received an upper second (2:1). Campbell is an emeritus professor in media at Cambridge University.

In the late 1970s, Campbell spent time teaching in a secondary school in Nice as part of his academic degree course. While hitchhiking back to the city from Aix-en-Provence, he learned of the Belgian singer Jacques Brel's death and shared stories with the Belgian lorry driver who had picked him up, leading to a lifelong interest in Brel's music.

After leaving university Campbell spent some months busking, as well as training as a roulette dealer at the Golden Nugget Casino on Shaftesbury Avenue, before being accepted as a trainee reporter with the Mirror Group Newspapers.

His first published work was ''Inter-City Ditties'', his winning entry to a readers' competition in ''Forum'', the journalistic counterpart to ''Penthouse'' magazine. This led to a lengthy stint writing pieces for the magazine with such titles as "Busking with Bagpipes" and "The Riviera Gigolo", written in a style calculated to lead readers at the time to believe they were descriptions of his own sexual exploits.

As part of the Mirror Group training scheme Campbell spent a year at a local weekly paper and he quickly became the sports editor at the ''Tavistock Times'', writing a column called 'Campbell's Corner'. It was while he was at the ''Tavistock Times'' he met his partner Fiona Millar, with whom he has three children; two sons (born November 1987 and July 1989) and a daughter, comedian Grace Campbell (born May 1994). However, his first significant contribution to the news pages was coverage of the Penlee lifeboat disaster in December 1981, while a trainee on the Plymouth-based '' Sunday Independent'', then owned by Mirror Group Newspapers.

National newspapers

In 1982 Campbell moved to the London office of the ''Daily Mirror'', Fleet Street's sole remaining big-circulation supporter of the Labour Party. He became a political correspondent, then in 1986 moving to ''Today'', a full-colour tabloid newspaper which was at the time trying to turn leftward, where he worked as a news editor. His rapid rise and its accompanying stress led to alcohol abuse."Cracking Up". BBC Two television documentary written and presented by Alastair Campbell. Broadcast Sunday, 12 October 2008.

Alcoholism and depression

While accompanying Neil Kinnock's tour of Scotland in 1986, he began to display increasingly erratic behaviour, including dumping his hire car in the Rosyth Dockyard. He continued on that day, following Kinnock to Perth, Scotland and finally Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, where he had a nervous breakdown and was arrested by two Special Branch detectives. Police contacted his partner and following her calls to friends in Scotland the police let a family friend take Campbell to Ross Hall Hospital, a private BMI hospital in Glasgow where she and her father visited him. Over the next five days as an in-patient he was given medication to calm him, and he realised that he had an alcohol problem after seeing a psychiatrist. Campbell said that from that day onwards he counted each day that he did not drink alcohol, and did not stop counting until he had reached thousands.

Campbell returned to England, preferring to stay with friends near Cheltenham rather than return to London (and his partner) where he did not feel safe. His condition continued with a phase of depression, and he was reluctant to seek further medical help. He eventually cooperated with treatment from his family doctor.

Return to work

Campbell's first son was born in 1987. He returned to the ''Daily Mirror'', where he eventually became political editor.

He was a close adviser to Neil Kinnock, going on holiday with the Kinnocks, and worked closely with ''Mirror'' publisher Robert Maxwell. Shortly after Maxwell drowned in November 1991, Campbell punched ''The Guardian'' journalist Michael White after White joked about "Captain Bob, Bob, Bob...bobbing" in the Atlantic Ocean, referring to where the tycoon's body had been recovered. Campbell later put this down to stress over uncertainty as to whether he and his colleagues would lose their jobs.

After leaving the ''Mirror'' in 1993, Campbell became political editor of ''Today''. He was working there when Labour leader John Smith died in 1994. Campbell was a well-known face and helped to interview the three candidates for Labour Party leader; it later became known he had already formed links with Tony Blair.

Politics and government

Shortly after Tony Blair was elected as Leader of the Labour Party in 1994, Campbell left ''Today'' to become Blair's press secretary. Having recovered and become teetotaler, he told Blair about his alcoholism, which Blair did not see as a problem. In his autobiography, Blair would later reveal that Campbell had coined the name "New Labour" and described Campbell as a "genius". Campbell wrote the speech that led to the party's review of Clause IV and the birth of "New Labour". In addition to being press spokesman, Campbell was Blair's speechwriter and chief strategist. He oversaw new co-ordination and rebuttal systems which gave birth to a communications machine which became both feared and respected, and the model for modern communications in politics and business. He earned a reputation for ruthless news management which made him many enemies in the media. But even the Conservatives conceded they were partly defeated by their inability to find someone to match him. Campbell played an important role in the run-up to the 1997 UK general election, working with Peter Mandelson to co-ordinate Labour's successful election campaign. He also worked hard to win support from the national media for the Labour Party, particularly from newspapers that for many years had been anti-Labour. By March 1997, many of the leading newspapers—including ''The Sun'', once a staunch Thatcherite paper; had declared their support for Labour.

Campbell moved into government when Labour won the general election in May 1997 and served as the Prime Minister's chief press secretary until 2000. In government, he implemented many radical changes to both procedure and operational management. He persuaded Cabinet Secretary Sir Robin Butler that government communications had to be modernised, and the government set up the Mountfield Review. He created a Strategic Communications Unit which gave Downing Street the power to co-ordinate all government activity, using what became known as "the grid" as its main apparatus. He set up a rapid rebuttal unit similar to the one he had used in opposition. He put Downing Street briefings on record for the first time, and although he was only identified as "The Prime Minister's Official Spokesman", he became one of the most high-profile and written about figures in British politics, earning the epithet "the real deputy Prime Minister". He opened briefings to the foreign media, among a raft of modernisation and efficiency strategies he introduced. In 2001, Campbell claimed that the days of the bog standard