From the archives: The resignation of Alastair Campbell

No need to explain why we’re looking back on the resignation of Alastair Campbell for this week’s entry from The Spectator archives. The piece itself is merciless stuff from the pen of Stephen Glover.

Alastair Campbell’s redtop values have contaminated our politics, Stephen Glover, The Spectator, 6 September 2003

When I learnt of Dr Kelly’s suicide, my first thought was that he had been fatally drawn into Alastair Campbell’s world. It is what many people felt. It was a reasonable assumption that Mr Campbell or his office or someone responsible to the Prime Minister’s director of communications had deliberately put Dr Kelly’s name in the public domain – with disastrous results. We have since learnt during the Hutton inquiry that Tony Blair himself was involved in the decision to expose Dr Kelly. At a meeting in his study chaired by Mr Blair on the morning of 8 July, it was agreed to issue a press statement describing an unnamed individual who had admitted to having met the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan.