I’ve been away in Italy for a fortnight and thus missed some slightly disconcerting comments on an old post I wrote round the time Blair was leaving office (thanks Matt for bringing things down to earth). I’m still fairly bemused as to how anyone might have come across a post I wrote in March 2007, but, coincidentally I’d been thinking a lot about the old PM anyway, as I’d packed Alastair Campbell’s edited diaries, The Blair Years, for holiday reading.
Part of me was expecting it to be dry and dense so I was surprised to find it incredibly compelling and full of anecdotes that demanded to be read out loud; mostly to my sister, to whom I would intone whole chapters while she put on suncream or made coffee in those serious-looking metal espresso pots seemingly found in every Italian kitchen.
For example.
TB was wearing Nicole Farhi shoes, ludicrous-looking lilac-coloured pyjama-style trousers and a blue smock. After GB left, I said he looked like Austin Powers. He said you are the second person today who’s said that.
The following day: ‘Up to see TB in the flat. Another Austin Powers moment. Yellow/green underpants and that was it. I said what a prat he looked. He said I was just jealous – how many prime ministers have got a body like this?’
I know most people hate Campbell, and with reason, but his humour and attention to such detail is very appealing, as is the affectionate, mutually deprecating relationship he clearly had with Blair; “TB was wearing flip flops, which looked absurd”. In one of their few moments of agreement, Campbell commiserates with Cherie about the sheer amount of time they both have to spend talking to Tony in his underwear.
Actually the portrait Campbell paints of “TB” is only mocking in so far as to make him seem more human. Overall Blair comes across well (no coincidence from a narrator who is uncompromising in his Labour loyalty); incredibly hard-working, getting up at 5am to rework speeches or understand policy documents, statesmanlike in his diplomacy and kind in his dealings with staff. In Campbell’s eyes, Blair’s main flaw grows over time, as he increasingly rejects advice and instead insists to all and sundry, “I know I’m right on this”. Cue Iraq. The final third of the book is excruciating to read with hindsight of the error the government walked into, misguided, hopeful, inflated by previous foreign policy success and Bush’s flattery; doomed.
Blair signs the Good Friday agreement
Despite Campbell’s signature arrogance and at times glaring sexism, it’s startling to get an eye-witness view (however biased) on so many key events in our recent political history, in particular the exhausting struggle towards the Good Friday agreement (12 days after he entered no.10 in 1997, Blair said he “reckoned he could see a way of sorting the Northern Ireland problem.” Campbell notes, “I loved the way he said it, like nobody had thought of it before”, but the next 200 pages – and history – bear witness to Blair’s seriousness). I was also engrossed by entries detailing the run-up to intervention in Kosovo; Blair’s close friendship with Bill Clinton; Clinton’s political nous and continuing interest in Blair’s fortunes even after he left the White House.
Of course the “diaries” have to be taken with a lot of salt. It’s not so much that in editing them for publication Campbell will have sieved out anything unedifying; it’s that such a consummate story-teller would never have written the unedifying stuff down in the first place. He’s far too wily for that. As John Lanchester points out in the London Review of Books, re: Campbell’s behaviour in the David Kelly tragedy, “Even if he had leaked Kelly’s identity to the press, he’d never have admitted it in his diary”.
Despite that, there’s no getting round the fact that the book is a fascinating, often dismaying window into the processes of modern politics; the mutually destructive relationship between spin doctors and a frequently shallow, unaccountable media; the extraordinary pressures on cabinet ministers as they struggle to balance careers, principles and family. And, the undeniable importance of communications in a world that votes for reality TV but not for governments.
I quite liked Matthew Parris’ summary in The Times: “If Bill Sikes’s bull terrier had written an autobiography it would read like this: a snarling, compelling, gut-wrenching splicing of loyalty with faithlessness”.
