Why has there never been a male Bridget Jones? It may seem odd that this should have occurred to me half-way through the latest instalment of Alastair Campbell’s seemingly never-ending diaries, which are neither fictional nor comic, and yet it did.
It might be the habit he develops of opening each entry with a fitness assessment (“Pulse 53. Bad run, OK swim”) that reads like pure Bridget. But perhaps it’s that this time the heart of the diary isn’t political but emotional, dominated by a mid-life crisis with which one suspects many men will instantly identify.
Having quit Downing Street in 2003, chiefly because his partner Fiona Millar urged him to, Campbell, in this new volume, is torn between two very different lives; a domesticated one with the long-suffering Millar and the kids, versus the bad-boy charms of Tony Blair and an exhilarating but ultimately toxic job at the heart of government. Deep down, he knows the latter isn’t really good for him. But the former doesn’t quite feel like enough. Strip away the politics and I suspect that conflict between career and family – along with the faintly obsessive triathlon training, niggling ailments and the old struggle against depression overlaid with a new confusion about his purpose in life – will resonate rather widely. Like Ed Balls’s autobiography, this represents a new, more emotional strand of political writing. But are Campbell’s interior dramas enough to sustain such a long, hefty book?
The action opens just as he leaves Downing Street, although arguably he barely leaves at all. Blair, who seems wholly in denial about his departure, rings for advice within hours before firing off a 15-page “weekend note” to the man who no longer works for him.
And so it goes on, with Campbell hovering in perpetual and occasionally resentful limbo; neither out nor in, by turns guilty about backsliding on his promise to Millar to give it up and guilty about leaving Blair to it. Before long he is “lethargic, depressed … so not used to this kind of meandering, not-sure existence”, struggling with both his mental and physical health and having rows with his partner. She’s impatient for them both to move on, and increasingly critical of their old bosses (she formerly worked for Cherie Blair). Campbell feels he gets no credit for having quit, but still can’t let go or stop defending Blair’s corner.
Meanwhile politics follows him around everywhere he goes. Even a consultation with his GP descends into a debate about Iraq, and his days are peppered with calls from old mates in government moaning about other old mates in government, like squabbling children begging a parent to intervene – often to Campbell’s frustration, now that he’s out of the daily fray. As he says, apropos a friendlier than expected lunch with Balls, “It was interesting how a little bit of distance was making me look at people in a different light.”
Perhaps in part because of this new perspective, Blair comes across slightly less likably this time; needier, more self-interested but also more self-doubting, and increasingly preoccupied with the soul-sapping war of attrition with Gordon Brown.
Again and again, Campbell uses the phrase “going round in circles” to describe the interminable, fruitless debates about whether Blair should sack Brown, try to save their relationship, or quit himself (the surprise for many readers will be how early, and how seriously, Blair considered resigning). But if it feels like groundhog day to Campbell, it’s arguably more so for the reader. In truth the middle of the book drags, redeemed only by a fascinating and sympathetic account at the end of what was going on inside Brown’s head during the 2005 election.
The snag, however, is that suddenly all this feels like ancient history. The Labour landscape was unchanged enough under Brown, and even under Ed Miliband, for the earlier diaries to offer valuable insights. But the world Campbell describes is so alien to Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour that it barely makes sense to compare the two. The strength of the diary format, the sense that they’re an immediate first draft of history, has become a weakness; what you long for now is a more considered analysis of how on earth Britain got from there to here.
Campbell has a stab in his introduction, arguing that in retrospect the journals show New Labour wasn’t sufficiently cemented into the party and didn’t nurture new talent for the future. Perhaps, but the overriding impression the reader gets is of the impossible relationship between Blair and Brown becoming a black hole that sucked the life out of Labour, leaving too little energy for anything else. As a lobby reporter during that period, I did sometimes worry that we got hung up on “the TB-GBs” at the expense of policy. If so, I suspect we weren’t the only ones.
It’s striking, too, that while Iraq naturally casts a long shadow over this period, only once does Campbell record a conversation between himself, Blair and chief of staff Jonathan Powell about whether it was actually right to invade. (For the record it’s Campbell, who describes himself feeling somewhat “used” by the Americans and wonders if they did the “right thing in the wrong way”, whose view perhaps best stands the test of the time.)
What is clear in retrospect, however, is that the anti-immigrant backlash fuelling Brexit was growing even then. The late pollster Philip Gould is the Cassandra of this story, warning as early as March 2004 of “the most racist and unpleasant” focus groups he has ever conducted – although anger then was directed at asylum seekers, not EU migrants.
There is also a brief but fascinating passage about Blair’s promised (and ultimately abandoned) referendum on the EU constitution, and his desire to “get to a position on Europe where the question was in or out”. Campbell could hardly be expected to draw these threads together and predict Brexit in one late night diary entry in 2004, but it would be fascinating to see him try to retrace the steps. What a shame it’s too late for his publishers to skip the next two diary volumes, and ask Campbell instead for the definitive book on why New Labour ultimately failed.
• Diaries Volume 5: Outside, Inside, 2003-2005 is published by Robson. To order a copy for £20.50 (RRP £25) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
