Campbell's secrets

There wasn't even a copy to be glimpsed in his study at the top of his house, where the No 10 phone once connected him to every news event but where now, he promises, he barely looks at a paper. He hasn't listened to the Today programme for four years and is out of touch with current affairs. Earlier this week when a friend mentioned the release of Alan Johnston, Campbell thought she was talking about the secretary of state for health.

The Blair Years was culled from 2.5m words, written longhand most nights after days spent finessing Tony Blair's image, propelled by an instinct that seems to have been a cross between catharsis and canniness. The worse the troubles of the day - the fuel crisis of September 2000 and the foot and mouth epidemic less than a year later were the two domestic horrors - the more words he spilt over them.

Spanning 1994 to 2003, his journals begin on the sunbathed platforms of Marseilles railway station, where he finally accepted the job as Blair's press secretary. The young leader, wearing shorts and a suit jacket and looking "bizarre", told Campbell that together they would "change the face of British politics, change the world"; and just as he finished his moving speech the train doors slammed shut in his face and he was left doing what John Prescott calls his "Bambi smile", waving at a bemused Campbell through the window.

The diaries end in the darker impasse of a military and a media war, chronic fatigue, depression and a beleaguered family who had never enjoyed an uninterrupted holiday in a decade. But in opposition the possibilities of new Labour seemed limitless; everybody wanted to stake a place in the future by meeting the charismatic young pretender, not least the gilded chatelaine of Kensington Palace.

According to Campbell, Diana was even more fascinated by the tall, brooding spin doctor. After a dinner in Belgravia where the Blairs were entertained with the princess by mutual "establishment friends", Campbell arrived with Blair's driver to ferry them to Labour HQ in Walworth Road to hear local election results.

"I rang the bell and told them Mr Blair's car was there. And the next thing is she's there, at the car. I've ribbed Tony about this ever since, because she basically said she'd really like to meet Alastair Campbell.

"We're standing there in the middle of the road with cars whizzing by . . . And she said, 'Wouldn't it be hilarious if there were a photographer around now?' She was so gorgeous. She said, 'I mustn't hold you back any longer', and there was I wanting to be held back for a very long time."

A few weeks later they met again at the home in Hackney, east London, of the Blairs' close friends the lawyer Maggie Rae and her husband Alan Haworth, then secretary of the parliamentary Labour party. "It was just extraordinary to see her in this ordinary house. We had an amazing dinner. She made me a cup of tea . . .

"I think she really felt she was part of the whole new Britain. I think she thought Tony would support her causes, Aids and child poverty. We talked to her about how she was seen and how she handled the media . . . She'd talk about pictures all the time. She said to me, 'They can take a lot away from you, but they can't take away your pictures.' She said, 'You can really touch people in pictures.'

"I think she was interested in Tony and what we wanted to do. He described her as very political, not in the party sense but instinctively. At the dinner she would physically withdraw from the conversation if she thought it was getting too political. I honestly don't know what would have happened if she'd lived. And whether she would have had a role."

On the night she died, Blair and Campbell stayed connected on the phone until morning, and Campbell recalls never having heard his boss afflicted by such "long pauses and gabbling" before or since. Who came up with the "People's Princess"? "I write that we were discussing notes that he'd drafted, and we agreed it; so it was his idea."

WHEN Campbell, now 50, approached his former boss last Christmas to inform him of his plan to publish, Blair had just one early stipulation: he must to show "that they were having a laugh".

This is easy for Campbell, a raconteur, a clever mimic, who reports a trip to Japan in opposition where one high-ranking minister commented that "the whole of Japan is looking forward to your erection, Mr Blair" and Campbell chimed in from the side-lines, "Yes, we're hoping for a big one".

"There were times," he says, "when Tony and I just couldn't afford to catch each other's eye."

Other duties were more onerous. Campbell's description of telling Robin Cook, then foreign secretary, that the News of the World was about to reveal his affair is tragi-comic - although "I never told him he had to choose between Margaret [his wife] and Gaynor [his mistress]".

In the first summer holiday after the 1997 landslide, Cook was being driven to the airport when Campbell reached him.

"I could hear Margaret talking to the driver, and Robin's special adviser was in the car, so I said to him, Robin, you may want to go somewhere private for this conversation. He ended up saying to me, you just talk and I'll listen, and I kind of had a feeling he knew."

As Campbell delivered the bad news, Cook tried to disguise the nature of their conversation, declaiming, "What are those dates again?" and "I can see that could be a problem. Er, what would your advice be?" If Campbell's diaries tell us anything, it is how often the brightest stars in the last government were felled by human frailty rather than media ambushes or malicious leaks: frailty and the growing impatience of Gordon Brown, of course. Campbell says the top man almost went, too.

In the summer of 2002, the diaries reveal, Tony Blair decided to announce at the annual party conference that he would not fight a third election, telling his perturbed press secretary: "Two terms is all you get in the modern world."

The reasons for this decision are not made explicit, though Campbell mentions that his boss probably knew by then about his wife's pregnancy (which would end in miscarriage). There had also been the criticism about Blair's alleged jockeying for position at the Queen Mother's funeral, and there were mounting tensions over potential military action in Iraq.

"We had been going through a lot of crap," says Campbell bluntly.

The question Blair asked himself and his inner circle - Campbell, political adviser Sally Morgan, chief of staff Jonathan Pow-ell, and others - was: would the announcement liberate him to pursue sometimes unpopular reforms without focusing on the next election? There was to be a leadership contest and a smooth handover probably to Brown.

"I wasn't totally opposed, but I advised him that it would make him a lame duck," says Campbell.

In the build up to war, Blair's departure plan was shelved, and the business of government - foundation hospitals and tuition fees - rolled on while the once bushy-tailed people pleaser gradually but visibly transformed himself into a defiant moral crusader who no longer cared what the papers or the people thought of him.

"What you get as the book goes on is Tony caring less about what people say about him."

Campbell's diaries are clearly haunted by his own longing to escape; he wanted to stop doing the job almost as soon as he'd started it - "definitely in the first term".

On these occasions Blair would comfort him, reminding him that his travails with cynical journalists were "the inevitable downside" of changing the country, both of them sharing a view of the media as a nasty but inevitable side-effect of their miracle cure for modern Britain.

The book will also reveal that it was Campbell's nemesis, Andrew Gilligan, instigator of the allegations about a sexed-up dossier, who inadvertently kept him in his job for another three months after he had finally persuaded a reluctant Blair to agree to his departure.

On May 28, 2003, the day before Gilligan's fateful 6.07am Today programme report, Campbell and Blair had agreed that the press secretary should resign, and had put in writing a plan for breaking the news.

Instead, Campbell would end up leaving on August 29, three fraught months later, having missed his chance of a life-chang-ing escape by a one day.

CAPITALISING on his privileged access, Campbell always kept diaries. He denies he ever called them his pension, although - with future volumes planned - they beat the civil service provision. The writer Robert Harris apparently once quoted Mae West to him, saying, "Keep a diary because one day it may keep you". In conversation there is a lot that Campbell cannot recall, names and dates, sequences of events, which is odd because habitual journalisers usually have honed powers of recall. Whether the lapses are genuinely poor memory, strategic evasion or simply the habit of avoiding detailed answers is anyone's guess.

This is Campbell's problem as a historian (he has none as an entertainer): does a propagandist ever make a reliable wit-ness? Is his book a raw first draft of history by the ultimate insider, or so carefully edited as to obscure its own validity?

Its guiding principle was to say nothing that could hurt Tony Blair; and we can be sure of his complicity in its content. "As people form a judgment about Tony, which they're doing now," he says straightforwardly, "I want to be part of that in a positive, constructive way."

There are moments in our interview when I wonder if he has carried more away from his years with Blair than a valuable chronicle. In his mannerisms and idiom - the telltale "Look . . ." before every important point; the gentle shaking of the head and incredulous rolling of the eyes at some absurdity - his performance is like an impersonation of the boss. If Blair acquired some of his lieutenant's bloody-mindedness, so Campbell has absorbed the softened edges required for a charm offensive.

His diaries are a Book of Judgment of new Labour politicians, the first time they have been tried by "sources close to the prime minister", and not with measured hindsight but on the spot.

In the league of annoying resignations, Robin Cook "comes across well"; Clare Short does not. "Robin and I met and discussed exactly how to handle his resignation and I felt he did it with dignity. Clare effectively resigned on the radio and then phoned me about it. I said, 'Can you explain to me how this fits with collective responsibility - don't you think you should be speaking to Tony, not me?'" He snorts derisively at the recollection. "She said, 'Oh, I thought you'd be angry, I thought I'd better get it over with . . .'" THE old bruiser lives in a tall Victorian house full of sunshine and light; the prettiness of his kitchen - all pastel colours and flowery fabrics and pretty mugs, with a cute brown spaniel called Molly curled on the sofa where Campbell napped in the afternoons after he left the job.

All is harmonious order; surfaces gleam, an organic loaf waits on the table, very north London. To be honest, you'd think Anthea Turner lived here rather than the man under whom relations between government and fourth estate descended into a bitter vendetta culminating in the suicide of Dr David Kelly, the former weapons inspector, in July 2003.

He didn't used to excel at making you like him. The first time I encountered him, researching a piece for The Sunday Times Magazine, he called me one night at home, demanding gruffly that I "stop going around saying the opposite of the truth". The second time I met him was on a trip with Blair to Amsterdam in 1996, when he had the cheek to ask me to pop across the road from the embassy and buy a football strip for his young son.

But then only two things mattered to him in those years of service: the triumph of Labour, and his family. For Campbell politics is football: you pick your team and stick by them through changes or management and captaincy, never falter. This is why there is no mention of the rift between Brown and Blair in his published journal. I tell him that without it he can't claim to offer us anything like the truth of his Downing Street years.

Campbell couldn't care less what his readers would like or feel entitled to know; the whole truth is a politically compromising commodity, one he has spent the past 10 years taming in order to protect what he considers to have been the greater good.

Gordon, whose huffs and sulks and "rival government" next door must have caused more grief to Campbell than a few recalcitrant BBC executives, passes though without censure. The famous outbreaks of the ranting TBGBs behind closed doors are resoundingly absent.

"You get a sense from time to time that there are tensions," comments the author mildly. "I wasn't going to hand anything to David Cameron on a plate."

Campbell says that he has deliberately tried to ensure that The Blair Years is not a book about the media, but what else could it be, since he hasn't stopped protesting bitterly about journalists for 13 years.

"This will sound a bit rich coming from me," he smiles, "but I've moved beyond worrying about headlines. And I think Tony did a long time ago."

Except, of course, when they concern himself: for the man who antagonised journalists as a point of principle, being thrown on their mercy in order to promote his book must be nerve-racking, not just for the usual reasons of paranoia and personal vanity, but because Campbell is a team player who couldn't bear to score an own-goal against his Labour side.

These days he seems relaxed. While we talk his phone buzzes with calls from Terry Venables (who reckons the Brown regime is "gonna be serious", a verdict with which Campbell seems well impressed), Jamie Redknapp and Sir Alex Ferguson.

Though he claims to hate celebrity, he loves sportsmen with their discipline and determination and alpha-male ambition. But pop stars? According to the diaries, Tony Blair neither knew nor cared that Noel Gallagher would attend that glittery 1997 Downing Street reception. "It was Jonathan Powell's idea to invite him."

The golden glow of reconstructed Labour fell away with the twin towers and Blair's subsequent commitment to "reordering this word around us".

On September 11, 2001, Campbell records Blair cancelling his speech to the TUC to return to London, having heard news of the attack. "We got on a train . . . and I remember thinking, God, this is bloody ridiculous, he's the prime minister and he's shuffling about trying to find a seat."

As they sat down Blair took out a notepad and a pen. "He wrote down what to do when we got back: which meetings to call, who should be there, who we should phone . . . But he also wrote down 'WMD/rogue states'. Tony had been going on about Al-Qaeda for quite a long time, seeing more and more of the intelligence indicating that Saddam was becoming more of a problem, not less of a one."

When it came to plans for "dealing" with the Iraqi tyrant, it seems that Blair was the only member of his charmed circle without doubts; well before the first conversations with Bush, Campbell advised caution.

"I had doubts about the impact of military action on Tony's future," he says. "I said to him, 'Look, if, when all this is done, you are history before your time, is it really worth it?' And he said, 'It's always worth doing what you think is right. America has been attacked. It's important they don't think they're going to stand up to this on their own'."

Campbell says Blair had been concerned about a strain of antiAmericanism before 9/11. Indeed, chief whip Hilary Armstrong warned Blair that the PLP might not support his shoulder-to-shoulder promises (not military at that stage) and Campbell recalls Blair's disbelief. "What on earth are they thinking about? Just imagine what the reaction would be if this was Britain. If that had been an attack on parliament or Buckingham Palace."

Following the first phone call between Blair and Bush after the attack, Campbell records Blair's surprise that the US president, far from baying for revenge, was "much calmer" than anybody expected.

Bush told Blair: "The American people will give me some time, but then they'll want to know who has attacked our country and what am I going to do about it."

Blair decided that phone calls with 15 people listening in were not adequate communication; he would visit Bush face to face. "He knew from the word go that there would be some who would want to portray him as Bush's poodle," says Campbell. "He was just prepared to live with that."

Is there any evidence in the diaries that he was a restraining influence on Bush's reaction to September 11? "I don't see it like that."

In the dearth of such proof, at least the US president understood the usefulness of that claim. "After the first meeting before we flew home, Bush said to me, 'There you go - you'll be able to paint a picture of how Tony flew in and pulled the crazed unilateralist back from the brink'."

If Campbell is honest his account will give a flavour of the excitement of war, the heady morality to be claimed in saving Kosovan refugees, displacing the Taliban and "dealing" with Saddam. Was Blair, who relished every minute of his mission, seduced by his international success to the detriment of his domestic agenda?

"We were going round the world," says Campbell. "I think it was at the time of Afghanistan where I record this, and Tony was being feted as this great statesman. Coming home it was like swimming through s***."

On the day the September 2002 weapons of mass destruction dossier was published, Campbell recorded in his notebook that Andrew Gilligan's BBC big line was that there was absolutely nothing in it he didn't know. The second February 2003 dossier, including the notorious claim that the weapons could be launched in 45 minutes, he refers to as a "briefing paper given to a few Sunday journalists to keep them off our back on a plane. It has been wrongly conflated with the September dossier, which was a very serious piece of work".

What do his annals record on the appalling miscalculation of Jo Moore, the special adviser to Stephen Byers who, it later emerged, had sent an e-mail suggesting that September 11 was "a good day to bury bad news". "I was of the view that it was a bad mistake made by a fundamentally good person."

Didn't it force him to reappraise the presentational ethos he had enshrined in Whitehall, with unfavourable news released during a diversion? He shakes his head. "Bear in mind that at the time Tony was going round the world at a rate of knots after September 11. You could argue that we didn't think about it enough."

The diaries should also give the sense of a zealot on a short fuse, serially ignited by the shortcomings of trivial or wantonly misleading press and television reporters.

"It drove me mad that dictators like Saddam and Milosevic had their media statements taken at face value, while the democratic coalition forces were routinely questioned and disbelieved. The attempt to establish a sense of moral equivalence between us and them was very irritating."

The more cross and exasperated Campbell became about journalists, the more he deflected attention from the message. Blair became concerned. "He said, 'The trouble is that the press are now more interested in you than in what you are saying'." An example, he says, is his "bog-standard comprehensive" gaffe at the time of the 2001 education white paper. "Tony had said that before you know . . . It was his phrase. When he said it publicly no one had picked it up."

The negotiations of the 1998 Good Friday agreement are described in detail in the diaries, the only event their author noted hour by hour, and maybe ultimately the media management of which he is proudest, since the politicians not in talks milled around watching coverage of the process on television. "I haven't got a clue how it all came together." His diary mentions a point in the evening when the UUP's John Taylor, who had been "very, very obdurate and difficult", was suddenly in a better mood. "Something had happened to him somewhere out there which allowed David Trimble to be in a slightly different place."

Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were tough negotiators, described by Jonathan Powell as "constantly chiselling", winning a concession and then wanting a little bit more and a little bit more . . ."

Campbell came home from Hillsborough Castle to north London exhausted, "wired", sleepless, and moved onto the next fire-fighting mission while Tony went on holiday.

The curious thing for a recovering drinker and depressive is how much stress and fatigue he allowed himself to absorb; pretty soon it took its toll.

"I wanted to leave the job early on. I said to my deputy, Godric Smith, that I felt like the Alan Shearer of the government - time to go but with no obvious replacement. I was very depressed. I can remember Philip Gould saying, 'I don't think even Fiona [Millar, the journalist and mother of his three children] really understands the effect of sustained pounding.' "I was one of the people that Tony looked to constantly to be lifting people. When I was really down, he said, 'You've got to lift yourself out of this because it has a terrible effect on everybody around you.' And most of the time I could do that."

Campbell's access to world leaders was relaxed and assured. Downing Street press secretaries are rarely on chummy terms with presidents; but Blair's personal, down-home style of international relations meant that his right-hand man became part of the presidential package.

Occasionally he pinched himself to make sure he was really awake; he describes a lunch with Vladimir Putin at his Mos-cow residence where the conversation was heated.

"There were tough exchanges. It was at the time of Iraq. Putin felt that Britain was constantly taking the American side on different issues. There was a point at which he was talking to Tony in a very personal, emotional way, and I noted that it reminded me of Fiona when she was having a go at me."

He also recorded the first meeting with Boris Yeltsin, who made a "big thing about Britain being in safe hands with Tony, and I remember noticing he had a bit of a finger missing". Was he sober? "Yeah. There were other times when he might have had a few. There was a phone call when Tony had no idea what he was saying at all."

The personality for whom true reverence is reserved is Bill Clinton, whose every utterance seems to have been a communications masterclass. But, perhaps in order to avoid relentless positivity (which can be wearing), Campbell includes spats and squabbles with Clinton and the Blairs.

He fell out with Blair over the latter's decision to send his sons to the selective London Oratory school. "Tony said that for the sake of political correctness I'm not going to do what I think is the wrong thing for my kids."

Frequently the leader would seem at odds with the traditional assumptions of his party, telling Campbell: "I'm not as Labour as you are."

"And that was what gave him a real edge. He truly wasn't."

Cherie meanwhile resented Campbell's disapproval of her lifestyle adviser Carole Caplin, and being told who her friends could be by her husband's spokesman. His diary also records Clinton's anger with Blair during the latter's attempt to win US support for ground troops in Kosovo.

What had been Blair's reaction to the Monica Lewinsky scandal? "He said every leader's got to be able to let go a bit, and Bill - that was his way of letting go of it."

It is hard to imagine that the uxorious and deeply Christian Blair was not privately disapproving and disappointed, but Campbell will only have him standing by his hero. "On the day the Starr report [on the Lewinsky affair] was published, Tony and Clinton had a phone call where Clinton barely mentioned it. He was talking about Ireland, about Russia, and at the end we were saying, 'Wow, that's focused'."

Once out of office, Clinton seems to have become the Blair team's life coach, dispensing wisdom and experience to his British fans. When Campbell was seething and demoralised, Bill delivered a mild pep talk. "He said you got to remember in my job and Tony's job that there was no blue riband; that job is the blue riband."

It also seems to have taken an outsider to suggest they bathe their grumbling back benches during the Iraq war with a little compassion.

"He said remember that when you go to DC your MPs go to their constituencies. They've got talent, too, and interests and political strengths but they maybe think you're just moving a bit away from them. I was a bit down on Tony at the time - I was pissed off with everything probably - Bill said I should mix very frank advice with an understanding that we're all human in the end. He was saying don't beat up on him."

This advice was given during the BBC battle over a cosy lunch in Clinton's Ritz hotel room attended by Peter Mandelson, Campbell and Gould. After Mandelson's departure, Gould asked Clinton what advice he would give Campbell about staying in the job or leaving. "He said, 'Maybe it's time that you went to the media and said: Look, I don't know what I've done wrong but let's just stop treating each other like we're subhuman'."

Why didn't he do it? "I was angry and on the way out."

Clinton also asked him to consider whether he was "hurting" Blair more than helping him. Was he responsible for giving his boss a reputation for evasion and spin? "Possibly, in part," he concedes. "But I think the media had reached a point with us where they didn't want to know."

NOTWITHSTANDING his chirpy mood on the morning we met, Campbell is prone to bouts of melancholy, his lowest moods brought on by times of high stress, visible in the finger-jabbing appearance on Channel 4 News after the Hutton report on Dr David Kelly's death and his irritated evidence to the foreign affairs select committee.

Campbell took every slight personally, which is his strength and his weakness. Editing his journals for publication revealed to him how much he cared about what now seems trivial.

The truth is he was angry. While he was selling his message of new Britain, new optimism, the media seemed more cynical and judgmental.

Of course it was, you want to say, its job is to unpack easy slogans, find the weak link in every chain of political promises; but for all his cleverness and expertise, Campbell is temperamentally unwilling or unable to see the point.

"I was determined we were going to set the agenda, not the media, and it felt like a battle."

Wasn't his own aggression to blame for the hostility of the media? "Maybe. I can be competitive and aggressive but it was in the service of the Labour party. I was driven by the history of the media and the party, what they did to Nye Bevan and Neil Kinnock. Me and the press had a mutually abusive relationship and neither could wean themselves off. David Kelly's death was the horrible crash of two colliding forces."

Does he regret his furious pursuit of the BBC, which looked at times as if he was spinning out of control? "Maybe I did get into too many confronta-tional situations. What I regret is that my relations with the press got as poisonous as they did. Tony used to say to me, 'Just understand you can't just be fighting battles on every front the whole time'."

The diary records Sid Young, a Mirror journalist and friend of Campbell, telling him the media were saying he had lied in order to send young men to their death. "Not that that was the effect of what we did, but that it was actually the purpose."

This seems too absurd an accusation to even dignify with a response, so extravagant a claim that only someone with a heightened, and in this instance possibly disastrous, sensitivity could have taken it seriously, let alone allowed it to intensify an already extreme course of action.

Did he feel responsibility for the death of Dr David Kelly? He hesitates. "I really regret the fact that it happened. I still think about David Kelly. I wanted to write to Mrs Kelly but John Prescott, who was going to see her at the funeral, thought that with the judicial inquiry going on it was best not to. I never met David Kelly but I inadvertently became a part of his life . . . and death, and in a way he'll be with me for ever."

He also feels sad about the "fractured relationships" of the BBC saga. Gordon Brown's political secretary, Sue Nye, the wife of the BBC chairman Gavyn Davies, who resigned after Hutton's criticisms, is, he says, always friendly and professional. But "she must really blame me for a huge change in her life, and her husband losing his job . . . "I was very angry then, but I'm not any more."

When Campbell heard that Kelly had gone missing "I felt absolutely sick. I felt like a juggernaut was coming my way. When they said a body had been found, I came home just before the press started arriving and I wanted to quit there and then. I knew what was coming. Then Tony phoned me from the plane and I said 'look Tony, I just want to go'."

For all the belligerence, tough rebuttals and swearing (he won't confirm that Blair's salty language has been excised from the book, but Campbell swears enough for both of them) the diaries should reveal the soft centres at the heart of new Labour's hardened control freaks.

Led by the bagpiper Campbell, theirs is a moist-eyed emotionalism peculiar to this chapter of British government. The court favourites saw themselves as a squabbling but devoted family, huddling closer as the outside world conspired to misconstrue its efforts.

When Campbell talks about Mandelson, Gould or Prescott, it is of old friends with whom he has shared the most thrilling passage of his life; moreover, there is something comical but also sweet in Blair nagging Campbell about his health. "I remember him once saying, 'Look - you know, I worry about you. You work too hard and you don't exercise'."

Campbell suffered with colitis and asthma, and as the depressions resurfaced he also feared a return of the demons that had led to a serious breakdown in 1986. "During the voting on clause 4 at the 1995 Scottish Labour Party conference, I felt things were a bit on the edge. I told Tony about it."

Blair was more resilient but also nostalgic for the old days of common ground and shared offices. "He'd talk about what it was like when he and Gordon and Peter were first starting out together and how they were unstoppable. He was wishing it was a bit more like the old days."

Fiona Millar's job minding Cherie Blair had been suggested by Mandelson as a way of keeping the strained couple in closer proximity, but it had ended badly. She played her part in Campbell's resignation.

"Fiona didn't want me to do the job in the first place. At times she felt I was off, gallivanting round the world, being feted as a political superstar . . . To me, I was working my arse off. I had to leave the job, not just for the family, I had to go politically as well. A part of me thinks I wouldn't have made it anyway."

Friends of Cherie have stated on record that Blair had to "cut Campbell off", that he was too big for his boots, triumphalist after the Hutton exoneration, in the course of which these diaries were subpoenaed as evidence; but Campbell denies this. "Tony said when I left, 'You know you're going to regret not seeing it right through to the end', and in a way I do."

He watched the handover to Gordon Brown on television, but is currently more taken with a biography of Flaubert. He writes on sport, speaks fora fee, does something most days for his favoured charity, Leukaemia Research, of whose tria-thlon team he is captain.

After he left the job, his 13-year-old daughter Grace told David Blunkett, a dinner guest, that when she went to school her father was sitting at the table in one corner of the kitchen, and when she came home he was lying on the sofa in another. But promoting the diaries sees him reengaging with his old adversaries.

Ironically, the BBC will show three hour-long documentaries based on his book. Does he think the corporation has improved since Hutton? He sighs. "I barely watch it."

There might be further, less expurgated volumes to publish; but this one, with its aim of enhancing our memories of Blair, is dear to his old propagandist heart; and Campbell is smart enough to know that it will only be effective while he is worth a headline.

"You become the past very quickly," he says. But actually, in his shorts and his trainers instead of a navy suit, buoyed by his memory-lane phone life with his old colleagues, he seems more human than I remember him.

Campbell's are not the diaries of a "pretty straight sort of guy". They reflect a complex, touchy, funny, emotional, controlling, combative (he even sniffs aggressively) perversely fragile, innately Labour creature, one who still believes in the ends justifying the means and is blamed for much by plenty, but who also believes he has helped lay the corner-stone of a new Jerusalem.

Before he was famous

Alastair Campbell, who was born in Yorkshire in 1957, learnt the bagpipes from his Scottish father, a vet. They featured in his first attempts at journalism.

Teaching in Nice while studying languages at Cambridge, he wrote racy articles for Forum magazine. The title of the first was The Riviera Gigolo. Others suggested that "phallic" bagpipes could turn women on and warned of the detrimental effect of smoking on sexual athletes.

These led to a place on the Mirror Group training scheme and a job on the Mirror itself where Campbell drank heavily. He later claimed to have had a daily intake of "15 pints of beer, half a bottle of scotch, four bottles of wine with David Mellor at lunch . . ."

After a breakdown, Campbell gave up alcohol and became the Mirror's political editor under the controversial press baron Robert Maxwell.

When Maxwell drowned, Michael White, political editor of The Guardian, made a joke in the Commons press gallery about "Cap'n Bob, bob, bob, bobbing along".

Outraged, the loyal Campbell hit him.

The Blair Years by Alastair Campbell will be published by Hutchinson tomorrow at £25. Copies can be ordered for £22.50 including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585