Ex-Tony Blair aide Alastair Campbell on China, Jeremy Corbyn and Diana's death
The three-times British prime minister's former communications director talks to Niall Fraser about the British Labour Party’s swerve to the left, the Chinese leadership and the question that once kept him up all night.
The past couple of weeks can’t have been easy for Alastair Campbell, the man best known as spin doctor-in-chief to former British prime minister Tony Blair.
The struggling political party he helped turn into a potent electoral force in the late 1990s has elected a new leader determined to dismantle the Blair-Campbell New Labour project; one of the triumphs of his time in high office – the Northern Ireland peace deal – is unravelling before his eyes; and his bete noire, the Iraq war, is back at the top of the news as a flood of refugees from conflict in the Middle East pours into Europe.
It’s a touch ironic then that Campbell – who served as Downing Street press secretary and then director of communications and strategy for the Labour Party’s arguably most successful prime minister of all time (Blair is the only Labour leader to have won three consecutive general elections) between 1997 and 2003 – has been in Hong Kong to publicise his latest book, Winners: And How They Succeed.
A smorgasbord of celebrities from the worlds of sport, business and politics, its pages drip with tales of successful figures, from Richard Branson and Anna Wintour to Angela Merkel and Jose Mourinho, not to mention Queen Elizabeth. All this is topped off with Campbell’s concluding formula of what it takes to win.
The name of the 58-year-old former tabloid journalist, born of Scottish parents in the feisty northern English county of West Yorkshire, will forever be synonymous with the dark political art of spin doctoring – that is, manipulating the way information is portrayed to the public for one’s own gain. While Campbell rails against the label, it is clear he knows that notoriety is a valuable asset.