Alastair Campbell
Alastair Campbell
Alastair John Campbellis a British journalist, broadcaster, political aide and author, best known for his work as Director of Communications and Strategy for prime minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2003. He resigned in August 2003 during the Hutton Inquiry into the death of David Kelly...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth25 May 1957
views media office
Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.
religious
To me, marriage is partly a religious thing and I'm not religious.
self media regulation
Paul Keating told us before we were elected that you can do deals with [Rupert] Murdoch without saying you were doing a deal. Did we do that kind of thing? Maybe. But from around about the turn of the century, I felt strongly that we had to do something about media ownership and self-regulation. Tony [Blair] disagreed.
responsibility people leader
If you look at the other people around at the time - Charles Clarke, Alistair Darling, Jack Straw - they've all gone. And they're not old. What's happened is that someone who is quite old - Jeremy Corbyn - is now leader. We have to take some responsibility for that.
trying together awful
Tony [Blair] slowly sucked me back in for the 2005 campaign, and from six months out, I was basically working full time trying to keep the Tony[Blair]-Gordon[Brown] thing together for the campaign. It was awful.
football player talking
I remember talking to Alex Ferguson about Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown], and he said: "Why doesn't Tony just get rid of him?" But if you sack someone in football, they can't turn up to training the next day. In politics they're still on the pitch. Gordon would still have been a big player.
football team believe
This may sound arrogant, but I believe that if we'd done teamship better, we'd still be there. Where we fell down was the inability to hold together. We should have learnt from the great football teams. The players may not like each other. They have egos, they have their own ambitions, they have different personalities, but they are still bloody good teams.
election elections leader money next
There is going to have to be another leader in place when the next election comes and you would have to put your money on Gordon,
pressures
The pressures to get the story first, if wrong, are greater sometimes than the pressures to get the story right, if late.
coverage defined goes negativity politics shift
There has been a shift to what may be defined as a culture of negativity which goes well beyond coverage of politics.