The Campbell Diaries - Podcast and Blog
The PRWeek Podcast featuring Martin Le Jeune, director of Open Road, talking about Alastair Campbell’s Diaries can be found here: http://www.prweek.com/uk/home/article/670665/podcast/
Need a laugh? ‘It is a sad irony that we have more media coverage than ever before, but less understanding or real debate’.
Who uttered these statesmanlike words? Yes indeedy, it is the one and only Alastair himself, in the intro to this massive door-stop (just under 800 pages including indispensable index), making a bid for the Hypocrite of the Year Award, and on this showing liable to beat off strong competition from Vladimir ‘Democracy’ Putin, and last year’s winner ‘Big-hearted’ Bob Mugabe.
As we know that Alastair, as befits a fearless champion of the sacred sword of truth, has left out all the stuff we really want to read about how incredibly awful Gordon Brown is a person, the key question is: are these diaries worth reading at all?
Marginally, yes. Empty your mind of all deeper thoughts, transform yourself into an empty vessel waiting to be filled, and you can get a real sense of what a bloody awful job it is to be the spokesperson of the prime minister: especially when the prime minister is as sensitive about what the press says as Tony Blair – or ‘TB’ as we should now all start calling him.
After an hour or so of reading you begin to realise that what Campbell and crew were getting every day was the equivalent of taking a substantial amount of coke (or – ahem - so I’m told). Up in the morning, hit by a crisis (frequently utterly trivial, indeed now completely forgotten), frenetic activity for hours, then the deep depression in the evening. And so on, and on, and on…No wonder they stuck it for so long, because the highs must have been incredible. And the lows never lasted long enough to matter.
Next question. Will anyone read these in 100 years? Well, Samuel Pepys this ain’t. For a professional journalist (admittedly on the Mirror) these are really quite stylistically poor. The author makes up for lack of original writing by swearing a lot. Apparently he toned down the language for publication. Blimey. On a normal day, the language at No10 must sound like the Sergeant’s Mess at Basra.
Ah yes. The war. This is the most boring bit of the book, including the decision to go to war, the vote in Parliament, the WMD dossier, the Gilligan report and every other thing pertaining to the decision to invade Iraq. It makes Greg Dyke’s memoirs read like War and Peace. We have read or heard about it all before.
However, Campbell’s admission that he wept over the death of Dr David Kelly did produce a strong reaction in me. I wanted to puke.
Finally, the biggest question of all. Does it matter? Not at all.
One: this is history written by the valet. The closest equivalent is Paul Burrell’s memoirs of Diana. Yep, that bad. We catch glimpses of important policy stuff for a nanosecond before we re off again, threatening some scribbler on the Glasgow Herald who has suggested that the government is less than perfect.
Two: the lesson we learn here is that the more you spin the less point it has. Can I remind younger readers of the wise examples of Stanley Baldwin (didn’t know the name of the editor of the Daily Mail) and Clement Attlee (read the papers for the cricket scores)?
Memo to future prime minister: take out two subscriptions, one to the Economist (will make you clever) and one to The Week (useful for dinner-party conversations and for catching up with the tiny number of stories that last for a whole seven days).
That’s it. Or as Alastair would say ‘Stuff the f**king papers’.