ALISTAIR CAMPBELL DIARIES - TRULY EXCELLENT!

A few weeks ago, I wrote a short piece on Political Diaries. I had just bought Alistair Campbell’s mega-tome “The Blair Years” – some 760 odd pages of Blair’s ex Communications Director’s diaries covering the period 1994-2003.

Having read most of the many recent sets of diaries from politicians of all hues, I couldn’t help wondering what these would be like, seeing the media presented Campbell as some form of cross between Machiavelli and the Devil Incarnate. Rory Bremner’s view that Blair spent the whole of his premiership being Campbell’s poodle also left you with a very clear impression of the media’s view of the man – and the impression you were left with was not one you liked much.

THE BOOK'S COVER

IF YOU DIDN'T KNOW, FROM THIS CAREFULLY CHOSEN PICTURE, YOU CERTAINLY WOULDN'T THINK BLAIR WAS IN CHARGE

Having now finished the book, I have changed my mind. Forget what the critics say, “The Blair Years” is a devastating and thrilling read, and, I think, a very, very important piece of work.

Campbell's views of those he came into contact with are fascinating, particularly such people as Mandleson, whom he clearly likes but who equally clearly frustrates him immensely, Clare Short, whom he simply despises, Clinton, whom he admires enormously, Dubya, whom he thinks is brighter than most people give credit for, Cherie Blair, Carole Caplin, who you feel Campbell almost suspects as having some unspoken hold over Tony Blair, and even Campbell’s wife Fiona, who also works with the Blairs.

The most interesting one of course is Blair himself. The great flaw in the book is that, right at the beginning, Campbell formally notes that certain passages have been modified/left out to avoid putting New Labour/Blair/Brown in a bad light. So all the time you’re reading it, you find yourself thinking – There’s something missing here, or the flow of that bit changes as if some post event changes have been made to the words. And, by definition, the bits where you feel this most are the bits which you really want to read about - like Blair's relationship with Gordon Brown - because there is little doubt that they’re in the original.

The reality of any published diary is that a varying amount of editing has always taken place, quite often with way more than half the original written words not seeing the published light of day. Here it is different. Firstly, this has been done for a specific reason, ie to avoid political embarrassment until much later on when the Full Cream Version is released, and secondly, the excision has been done by the author, and not someone like a Literary Editor, who makes the decisions on what to leave in on much wider and more independent grounds. So, we see Blair (certainly), and Brown (probably certainly) in a somewhat artificially sandpapered light. Occasionally, we are shown a flash of Blair temper, selfishness and petulance, but only in a situation where it occurs over an unimportant issue.

Sad but probably inevitable.

The other person you see portrayed throughout the book is Campbell himself, and here I am quite a convert. Clearly a hugely important man in the way the Government operated, with the occasional “we” rather than TB appearing when perhaps it shouldn’t, as in “we” deciding to sack someone during one of the several reshuffles. It may have been sloppy writing, but I don’t think so.

CAMPBELL - WHAT A GREAT PICTURE OF HIM

But in spite of the fact that anyone writing such a book cannot but help wittingly or unwittingly showing themselves to the reader, Campbell comes across as a terrific operator, very wise, very clear thinking, very strategic, and always seeing the big picture, when more people in the Government than you would like to think seem to be fixated on the flea rather than the dog.

In contrast, you feel he’d be great fun on an evening out at the pub, and that’s not something you can say about many of the New Labour Top Team.

You may not like what he was doing politically, but you have to admire immensely the way he did it. Bill Clinton, who as a communicator, Campbell thought was in a different league from all the rest, jokingly according to the book (but one suspects a grain of reality actually) wanted Campbell to takeover as the American Press/Communications Secretary. That says something.

His non Labour bits, when he runs the Marathon, bumming a decent sponsorship out of Dubya, when he does a walkabout with Clinton into the wide-eyed inhabitants of a Lancashire sea-side Fish shop, and particularly all around the mind numbingly frustrating Northern Ireland issues are rivetting reads.

They are not quite up with Alan Clark in the literal sense, who, to my mind, from a “writing” perspective in the political arena, reigns supreme here. But Clark has more time to “smell the daisies” and he does so brilliantly. Read him when he has to shoot the heron which has just devastated his fish ponds, and if you finish that bit without a tear in your eye there’s something a bit wrong with you. Campbell’s book isn’t like that because it’s much more focused on the politics, but he does write with great feeling.

The comparison with Clark is intriguing, because bizarrely, it turns out in the book that they were great friends, with Clark talking to Campbell far more in the latter stage of his life that I bet the Tory leaders would have liked, had they known. Campbell comes across as a really good, honest bloke, with tons of gravitas but also with, believe it or not, a ton of integrity – someone who, if you were picking up teams at school, you’d make bloody sure you got him on your side.

The book itself, I am sure, will become an absolutely invaluable historical tool. One suspects that not too many of the Big Players over the last 10 years have been sufficiently driven to keep a meaningful, detailed diary like Campbell (it’s very, very comprehensive), so it may well be the only inside version in the end that historians can rely on. You also feel slowly, as the book winds on, his gradually increasing lack of motivation and occasional despair at a life which consumes him totally and you really feel for him over even the survival of his marriage. Yet, he still kept on, with the job and the writing, until the Weapons of Mass Destruction, the “Dodgy Dossier” and David Kelly seemed to tip him over the edge and make him decide to leave. It’s all there, and you live it precipitately, day by day.

YOU KNOW YOU'VE MADE IT WHEN THE CARTOONISTS GET THEIR KNIVES INTO YOU

Writing a book, be it biography or autobiography, after the event, is totally different. They’ll all do that when the time comes – even John Prescott is in the throes, so my mind at least is in hyperboggle mode there. But in the Diary, the whole thing fizzes along in a very unique way.

It’s intriguing to read the critics and the book reviewers on it all as well. There are very few of them that don’t come in for some degree of savaging – it’s really about how many limbs Campbell is trying to remove from each of them. So it’s not surprising that when the critics have their one page chance to get their retaliation in, they all seem to have a go. Some damn it with faint praise, and some seem to verge on suppressed rubbishing.

The reality is that Campbell was One of Them, before he became Blair’s Communications Director. They must all, to some extent, feel betrayed and perhaps jealous, partly because he did the job so well. They have stayed on the sidelines, whereas he has taken centre stage, and there seems a thread of synchronised envy running through all the reviews I read. In the end, I got fed up with them, and decided to come to my own conclusions.

I think it’s the best set of diaries by a country mile since Alan Clark’s – in some ways it’s better, others not. But it runs them very close. They’re exciting, vivid, important, passionate, relevant, funny, individual and in places very moving. I simply didn’t expect that.

It’s a long while since a book has given me as much pleasure as this one did.

Tags:

alistair campbell,
diaries,
blair years,politics,
book review

HALF TIME SCORE - AC 1, AC 0

Reading about the lives of other people is a passion of mine. This can take several forms - the Biography, where someone takes an outside view of a person’s life, ranging from a congenial to a nasty viewpoint, or the Autobiography where the individual writes (or is accorded the title of having written) his or her own life story.

Both of these have their plusses and minuses. The autobiography will contain information and opinion known only to the author. The potential price to be paid is objectivity. It takes a particular type of individual to avoid leaving out, or at least colouring in his/her favour, any event which does not do them justice, or about which they are not totally proud. The Autobiography is also usually written long after the event, often towards the end of the person’s life, and thus the power and possible distortion of hindsight can often loom large (knowingly or unknowingly) in the author’s mind, and hence on the page.

We all use “post event rationalisation” to so much of our lives that often the context and meaning of a particular event ends up completely different years and even decades later. We also view the myriad people with whom we come into contact in a general, summary form at the end, rather than the reality where there are times when we love them, and other times when we may feel very differently about them. The Autobiography usually smoothes these ups and downs out, and loses these important and often interesting fluctuations in the final text.

The Biography however, can include these issues with impunity, but only if they are known by the writer. Timing of these books is key – write them too early, and the stories are not finished, and write them too late, and all the people needed to corroborate and act as a “check and balance” in the search for truth or at least balance, are dead.

It is so difficult with both forms of writing to get the colour, the immediacy, the feeling “on the day” about the subject’s real thoughts and motives, attitudes and intentions. However, for the people whose lives are worthy of such treatment (and there aren’t that many), the medium where this can all become so much clearer is The Diary.

As a written form, The Diary is the most exciting, immediate and informative way of living someone else’s life. It takes a very special individual to keep up the task of Diary keeping, particularly when events playing around them are testing them mentally and physically to their limits. So we end up with all too few examples where interesting people create such a fascinating view of what’s going on. We must be grateful therefore to the few who do manage it.

I have read most of the “Premier Division” diaries, particularly the political ones of the last Century, and they have probably give me more combined pleasure that any other form of book. In the field of politics, the Diaries of Harold Nicholson, “Chips” Channon, Duff Cooper, Harold Macmillan, Richard Crossman, Tony Benn, Edwina Currie, Gyles Brandreth, Woodrow Wyatt, Paddy Ashdown, Piers Morgan (believe it or not, Yes!) have all given me great pleasure, but my personal favourite, winning “easily”, to take up a racing metaphor, out of all of these “contestants” is the late, lamented Alan Clark MP.

Three volumes of his diaries have been published, covering the period from his beginning in politics in 1972, up to his too, too early death in 1999. They are a truly amazing read. They exude the “stuff” of politics, day by day showing the twists and turns of an ambitious, clever, exciting man who wanted power, and achieved partial success, but was left frustratingly unsatisfied at the end. A man whose views and attitudes on life were not to everyone’s taste – his declared penchant for Naziism and his often declared adoration of Hitler, galloping snobbery, a hugely low boredom threshold and tolerance of what he saw as mediocrity, his ever present eye for the ladies which must have driven his wife to reach for the meat cleaver on many occasions, and so on.

ALAN CLARK, FACING HIS DESK AND THE PROSPECT OF A DAY'S FILING. A FEW SECONDS LATER, THE DESK WAS CLEAR

But, and it’s a bloody big But, you cannot fail to wish you’d met him and been part of his entourage, or a friend. He was a hugely exciting and interesting man. He wrote with great skill, being a considerable Military Historian. He knew an awful lot – his father was Kenneth Clark, the Art Historian, and creator of “Civilisation”. He lived in a fantastic Norman castle in Kent which looked just as you’d imagine Ernst Blofeld’s English hideaway would be.

He was searingly, cringingly honest, even when being so left him at the mercy of the reader’s views. He conducted, in full view of the reader (and presumably, his wife!), a long affair with the wife, and two daughters, of a judge, and this thread runs unsuppressed in the book through the 14 years of its tangled life. You read about his lifelong passion for old, very high quality Motor cars, his addiction to Backgammon, his unnervingly kinky feelings for Margaret Thatcher, his hatred of the Plymouth Constituency for which he was MP, his huge love of his children, his frequent vertiginous financial state, his often all-consuming hypochondria, and his complex and totally individual views on most things in life (almost National Front Right Wing politics vs vegetarian, Animal Welfare Vigilante).

His use of language and the structure of his writing is excellent, often leaving you with an incredulous last word or sentence which you would reread and savour again and again.

As an example, talking after the Falklands war, when his own Nationalist views came out with all guns blazing, he got into discussion with some of the Political Wets, about making sure the Argentine Prisoners were properly fed on the recaptured islands – his parting shot diarising the discussion was “There was some long and disparate conversation about what the Argentine prisoners were going to eat. I suggested that they should eat each other.”

His view on Sir Robert Armstrong, then Secretary to the Cabinet, and probably the most important Civil Service Job in the Country, when the subject came up in an MP group discussion – “….Carol Mather chimed in with support, and said he too thought Armstrong was ‘creepy’.

‘It is my personal belief,’ I said, ‘that he is a full Colonel in the KGB.’

Nobody demurred.”

If I was to choose Half a dozen people from History to populate an imaginary eclectic Dinner Party Table, he would be among the very first ones, if not the first, I would choose.

His Military books, which include a terrific denunciation of the Army Generals’ (mis-) management of the First World War (later turned into the hit musical “Oh, What a lovely War”), a comprehensive history of the Tory party, and an excellent book called 'Barbarossa' about the disastrous German attack on Russia in the Second World War, are something to be proud of. But he will live for a long time off the back of the Diaries – they are something apart, and should be greatly cherished.

Coincidentally, I started to reread them a week or so ago, just when Alistair Campbell’s Diaries were released. So, immediately the possibility of comparisons came to mind. Now I think Campbell is one of the most extraordinary men of the last political decade, and am sometimes inclined to share Rory Bremner’s view that for much of the time Campbell was the man running the country. So one can’t help look forward with huge anticipation to the idea of such a man keeping a detailed diary of the times, and publishing it.

But (another bloody big But), one’s eagerness is clouded by the thought that Campbell has had the final say on what is included, with a declared intent to avoid rocking Tony Blair’s boat. Diaries don’t work like this – they need to be ruthless, honest and extremely "unselective" on the part of the writer. The reason we want to read them is to find out exactly what he thought of Blair, not to have this skirted over. If he's not brave enough to allow this to happen, he should wait before publishing them.

ANOTHER OF 'MATT'S' HUGELY PIN SHARP CARTOONS - IS THERE A BETTER CARTOONIST IN THIS COUNTRY?

Usually, a forthright, independent editor is a must – one who can stand up to the writer and say “Bollocks, I think that bit should be in, and I’m sorry if it embarrasses you, but my Word goes here.” The depressing thought here is that they have been published way too soon, and too much excising of the bits that make most diaries actually worth reading will have taken place. We shall see.

I will refrain absolutely, at the moment, from commenting further on this because, as I write, I haven’t yet read them – I’ve read a few reviews, and the forecast from these isn’t good. But the only way to reach a conclusion is very simple – read the Book.

So, today’s trip to Waterstones saw me returning with The Tome, secured at the rather odd discount of £5.01 (Don’t ask, the girl on the till didn’t understand either), and I’ve got my literary cossie on and am just about to dive into the 757 page long pool.

I may be some time.

Tags:

alistair campbell,
alan clark,
diaries,books,
politics

WHY I LOVE THE PRINCESS ROYAL

A lovely snippet in the Telegraph today, where Alistair Campbell’s diaries get a mixed reception.

Campbell says that while Mr Blair was discreet about his meetings with the royals, his wife was less so.

He recalls that Mrs Blair “had asked the Princess Royal to call her Cherie when the Princess had addressed her as Mrs Blair. “I’d rather not, Mrs Blair”, said Anne”, Campbell wrote.

Now, that’s what diaries are there for. Excellent.

Tags:

alistair campbell,
princess royal,
princess anne,cherie blair,
diaries