Campbell holds a mirror up to shallow Britain

Stephen Pollard, who as David Blunkett’s biographer longed to see Alastair Campbell’s journal, says it tells us as much about the nation as it does about New Labour

Alastair Campbell may be no Chips Channon or Alan Clark, but his diaries are at least readable. Very readable. And that is not something one can take for granted with New Labour diarists. The last set, from David Blunkett, managed to turn one of the most melodramatic political stories of all time into a turgid cure for insomnia.

The Campbell diaries’ importance lies not in any great revelations but as the final part of a New Labour Trilogy. More than just telling us about modern politics, however, they act as a guide to modern Britain.

Two previous books have been essential reading about The Project. Philip Gould’s Unfinished Revolution was a detailed account of how a coterie of (to use their own word) ‘modernisers’ took power and launched a revolution within the Labour party, transforming it from the greatest election-losing machine in Western politics to an unstoppable winning force. Donald Macintyre’s biography of Peter Mandelson then put flesh on the bones, personalising the strategic story with the life — and, most importantly, rivalries — of the Rasputin of the Blair revolution. Alastair Campbell’s diaries conclude the trilogy. Unintentionally, however, they move the story beyond politics to the state of Britain itself.

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Ostensibly, Campbell’s book is simply edited highlights of his daily diary, an insider’s account of the Blair years. TB fretted, PM took offence, BC gladhanded — that sort of thing (in the New Labour world, you were no one if you weren’t initials). And it’s fascinating stuff for political junkies. Who wouldn’t want to know that TB described Roy Hattersley as ‘a fat, pompous bugger’? Who wouldn’t want to know that, at a small private dinner with Diana, ‘TB couldn’t work out whether to flirt with her or treat her like he would a visiting dignitary’? And who wouldn’t have guessed that, ‘he ended up doing a bit of both’?

But there’s little of this that actually matters or changes our perception of the New Labour court.