These diaries fill one with astonishment, not that New Labour has now come to an end but that it lasted as long as it did. Alastair Campbell gives us chapter and verse about the appalling personal feuds that rent the movement from the death of John Smith in May 1994. Campbell is a gifted tabloid journalist who can see at once what the story is: he saw from day one that Tony Blair rather than Gordon Brown was going to succeed Smith as leader. Brown could never accept being supplanted. We get in this account numerous instances, omitted from the previous version of Campbell’s diaries, of Brown sabotaging Blair’s leadership. Campbell is enraged by Brown’s refusal to behave as a team player and by Blair’s failure to get a grip on his defeated rival: “TB was just not dealing with him. He allowed him to drive this drivel and nonsense through meeting after meeting, and paralyse us. The truth is there are two rival operations, lots of suspicion and lots of trouble ahead unless we can get it sorted.” That was written in February 1996 and they never did get it sorted. A neighbour of mine who read extracts from the book said that to her they all sounded incredibly juvenile. This was a sort of kindergarten, with Blair a bit more grown-up than the others. In September 1995, Blair says, “I’m fed up with all these egos” – and so, by now, are we. In January 1997 there is a particularly fierce shouting match between Blair and Brown: “Both had purple faces when they left… I asked what had happened. He [Blair] said it was too dreadful for words, but the bottom line was GB said he would not be doing the press conference on VAT and food.” Campbell says things cannot go on like this, but on they go for 744 pages, with perhaps another 2,000 pages still to come when he publishes further volumes: Brown and Peter Mandelson “biting each other’s heads off”, and Brown “close to explosion the whole time” and “totally mistrustful of anyone except his own staff”. Sometimes the atmosphere is more reminiscent of a hysterical girls’ school: “TB was worrying, as so often at real pressure moments, about his bloody hair.” The women do not, however, emerge well from this account. Campbell writes of Clare Short: “No matter how hard I tried, which was probably not very, there was something in Clare I found totally repulsive… I felt totally nauseated watching her parade herself.” Mo Mowlam, another gifted Labour woman, is seen as a liability: “Silly woman, just can’t resist gabbing.” Campbell’s world is the brutal, angry, hard-driven, joky, football-crazed and intensely male world of tabloid journalism. He is a fluent and industrious reporter, with amazing stamina: it is quite a feat, at the end of days dealing with the press on Blair’s behalf, that he managed to get this account down. But Campbell is also relentlessly repetitive and has no feel for language, which is one reason why he is so prolific: the actual writing does not matter to him in the slightest. His style is energetic but dead. People who annoy him are “w-----s” who “get a bollocking”. At one point, he even gives himself “a mental bollocking”. Towards the end of the 1997 election campaign, Blair went to Lancashire and Campbell records: “There was a great atmosphere in Rochdale in particular, really nice young kids came out, chatting away to TB about football… I did feel strongly that these were the kind of people we were in it for, ordinary decent working-class people who play by the rules. There was a real look in people’s eyes, something good was happening.” Rochdale is the town where towards the end of the 2010 election campaign, Brown was overheard making his disastrous attack on a life-long Labour voter as a bigot. Campbell was right: it had to be Blair. But why the hell did they ever allow Brown to take over? The Alastair Campbell Diaries: Volume 1 Prelude to Power 1994-97 ed by Alastair Campbell and Bill Hagerty 744pp, Hutchinson, £25The Alastair Campbell Diaries: Volume 1, Prelude to Power: review
In The Alastair Campbell Diaries: Volume 1, the former spin doctor reveals
the Blair-Brown feud in all its full glory, finds Andrew Gimson
Sunday, 6 June 2010
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