Interview with Alastair Campbell

Two versions of Alastair Campbell’s post-Downing Street self collided in the back of a taxi one day last December, on his way to lunch with the Albanian socialist party leader. Campbell was advising Edi Rama on Albania’s forthcoming general election, which Rama duly won recently (“Got a landslide! Fought a proper new Labour campaign”), but on the way to lunch, literary inspiration struck.

“There’s a little notebook in my pocket, and don’t ask me why, but in the cab I pulled it out and wrote, ‘My name is Hannah, this is my story.’ Then I turned the page and wrote, ‘My name is Kate, I tried my best.’ By the time I’d got there I had 12 characters. How did that happen? I said to Edi, ‘I can’t believe this, but I’ve definitely got the idea for my next novel.’”

Nine months later, here Campbell is in his north London living room, a hardback copy of “My Name Is ...” fresh from the printers on the coffee table. He is not keen to talk party politics, least of all Syria (though later we do); the only version of himself he wants to be today is the novelist. It is so unlike his old remote, brooding spin-doctor self that anyone who still thinks of him as a Blairite bully would barely recognise this touchingly excited, unguarded, even oddly innocent Campbell.

His first two novels had been perfectly respectable, but read like an ex-journalist’s idea of fiction — a little clunky and concept-heavy, too busy making a point to let the characters really come alive. But he wrote the first draft of “My Name Is ...” , about a teenage girl called Hannah who becomes an alcoholic, in just a few days last Christmas: “It just poured out of me,” he marvels. One of the characters came to him in a dream, while writing some chapters moved him to tears, and scenes would come to him while he was out cycling, and he would have to get off the bike and type frantically on his BlackBerry. He didn’t know where the plot would go, and sometimes, as he was writing, “I felt like I was taken over by it.”

He has become a proper novelist, I exclaim. “No I’m not,” he protests, but then admits bashfully: “It is quite weird, being a proper novelist.” He looks delighted when I say I loved the book, crestfallen when I query the ending, and when he gets out photos on his phone of a flat he found while scouting north London for the place he thought Hannah would live, he shows them off with a tender, nearly paternal pride. Every chapter is written from the first-person perspective of different people in Hannah’s life — parents, friends, siblings, police officers — and I am not the first to remark, he tells me proudly, that his female voices are the most vividly compelling. He claims he has always been more “sensitive and empathetic” than people gave him credit for, but this is a Campbell I have never seen before. He has even come round to thinking Page 3 should be banned — though his 19-year-old daughter, Grace, a campaigning feminist, must take the credit for that.

Sensitivity wasn’t an obvious quality back in his own big drinking days. In the mid-1980s on the Daily Mirror he could drink 32 pints in a day and would routinely pop out “for a cheeky dozen” at lunchtime. It all came to a calamitous end with a nervous breakdown and diagnosis of alcoholism in 1986, and he didn’t touch another drop for 13 years.

In 1999 he drank a glass of wine in private — to test himself, he thinks. “You know they say if you’re a real alcoholic and you have one drink you’ll be back? Well, I wanted to see if that was true about me. Which was a very stupid thing to do when you’re the PM’s press secretary.”

But he discovered he could have just one, and now drinks very occasionally, only with his partner of 33 years, Fiona Millar, though he admitted as much to the world just two years ago. “Quite often Tony used to say, ‘There’s a lot of things I could cope with, but if you went back on the booze that would be a big problem for me,’” he offers quietly. “I used to be totally honest with Tony about everything. But not that.”

He still only drinks rarely because “I don’t want it normalised in my life again now”. That, he says, was part of the point of writing this novel: “Everyone has a relationship with alcohol, and the country has a relationship with alcohol, and I think the country’s relationship is in a really bad place — and that’s due to normalisation. This isn’t a political book, but it does have a political message: drink is normalised in every level of our society. I mean, I hate the idea of sounding like a middle-aged old fart, but I do honestly watch the telly and watch the ad breaks in football matches, and it’s the normalisation of gambling and alcohol.”

Every other advertisement, he points out, is for a betting website or a drink. When he is out cycling in London and gets bored he counts the number of places where alcohol is either sold or advertised, “and in a three-hour bike ride you see literally thousands and thousands. You see them every few seconds.” Until recently he had always believed drugs posed a greater threat than alcohol, but “liver disease is the only major cause of death in Britain that’s rising, and I’m now absolutely convinced that alcohol is a far bigger problem than drugs”.

He was “really disappointed” by David Cameron’s retreat on minimum pricing. “Because I think we’ve got a real problem. You know, Russia — not my favourite country in the world — they have had real success in dealing with alcoholism, and it’s been about pricing and availability.” Critics would say that is a bit rich coming from him, as it was Blair who brought in 24-hour licensing. “Well, I was never a big fan of that, and I never bought the idea that we were going to become like Spain or Italy. And I do think the alcohol lobby is very sophisticated and clever.” Is he saying it was behind Labour’s 24-hour licensing? “Look, I was never — I know it’s perceived wisdom that I was always driving policy, but I wasn’t, so I don’t know.”

Up until this point he has been unexpectedly cheerful, given the rather belligerent reputation. He takes my teasing about his midlife crisis shoes (powder blue suede with a two-tone-effect tan sole — he bought two pairs) with good humour, and while he is being photographed outside has an expansive smile and a matey greeting for passers-by. The only time he becomes palpably uncomfortable is when the conversation strays into territory that comes close to criticising Labour, either in the past or present, and he looks quite queasy about lamenting Labour’s licensing law reforms.

“I certainly don’t like being in a position where I look critical,” he agrees firmly. He “didn’t particularly enjoy this summer” because of all the criticism of Ed Miliband, and can’t bear to be the sort of old codger who would say: “Oh that would never have happened in my day.” He seems to value loyalty above all else — and that extends to Labour values, too; unlike Blair or Peter Mandelson, he still lives in the same terraced house, and although he can earn more than £10,000 (Dh57,990) just for giving a speech, he would feel “very bad in myself” if that is all he did, so he has a rule. “If I get a paid speech, I must do a party or charity thing before I can take another paid one.” He divides his time between writing, speaking, consultancy, sport and charity, and doubts he will ever take on another big full-time job. “I never ever thought I would be a freelance anything, but I find it hard to see what job it would be to make me want to give up my freedom now.”

Nevertheless, he can’t resist making a point about Labour’s present economic message. “The Conservatives have very, very successfully managed to persuade the public of a complete lie — this line, ‘the mess we’ve inherited’ — and we’ve allowed them to. What it means is that they only need a fairly slim recovery to say, ‘We’ve done our job.’ They haven’t done their job, they have not done what they said they would, they haven’t fixed the economy, and we had a decade of pretty good growth and prosperity that ended badly because of an international crisis, which Gordon actually handled [very] well. But we’ve allowed that ‘mess we’ve inherited’ to become a given because we haven’t wanted to defend the record, and that’s a strategic error.”

Is it recoverable? “It’s recoverable provided we recognise that that needs to be done. But too many people in the Labour party don’t want to do that. Britain was not a mess when Cameron took over. The LSE Growth Commission has just said Britain was no worse-prepared for the crisis than anyone else, and had an economic success story to tell. But we don’t tell it.”

The one issue Campbell really doesn’t want to discuss, though, are comments he made about Syria the day before parliament defeated both the Labour and Tory motions on military action. “To stand aside and say we can do nothing,” he told ITV’s Daybreak, “would be hugely irresponsible and incredibly dangerous.” I am pretty sure Campbell would have kept quiet had he known Miliband wasn’t going to support the government motion, because he is now stuck having to defend this position without criticising Labour.

“Look,” he struggles, “a Bosnian friend said to me the other day: ‘You’re divorcing yourself from Europe and now you’re divorcing yourself from America, what’s going on?’ You know, we’ve ended up in a position where [Bashar Al] Assad has used chemical weapons against his own people, and we, Britain, have ended up in the position of saying, ‘Well beyond trying to help with the humanitarian clear-up, there’s actually nothing we can do.’ My point is you definitely have to have at least that threat of military action. Britain has been removed even from that, and I don’t think that’s a very good position to be in.”

By now he is almost squirming. Because he doesn’t want to criticise the Labour leader? “Well, I don’t particularly want to criticise Cameron, either. I do empathise and sympathise with these politicians. I’m not sitting here saying, ‘Whack off a load of Cruise missiles now.’ But you’ve got to be really careful that we don’t in a sense become irrelevant. You can’t have a position on something as important as this where the House of Commons can never go back. Particularly when both motions said that under certain circumstances we could use military action. The government motion was largely supported by the government benches, and the opposition motion was largely supported by the opposition benches. How can Cameron then stand up and say military action is off the table for good?”

Well, possibly because public opinion is so hostile — thanks to the legacy of Iraq, including Campbell’s own role in that war. Does he feel in part responsible for what happened in the Commons? All trace of the sunny ingénue novelist has now vanished, and the old, bellicose Campbell is back, indignant and defensive, growling about Iraq. Then he seems to check himself, and softens.

“Look, public opinion is clearly an important factor in any democracy. But ultimately leaders have to take decisions. All I’m saying is it’s disingenuous for people to say that Iraq led to a trust problem because they didn’t find WMD, and therefore that stops people taking action now. If that’s what’s stopping MPs, then it shouldn’t.”

–Guardian News & Media Ltd

“My Name Is ...” is published by Hutchinson.