The mannikins don’t walk

All in the Mind, by Alastair Campbell

It was a good idea. You start with a psychiatrist, and not any psychiatrist, but a professor of psychiatry, a man ‘widely viewed as one of the best psychiatrists in the business’, specialising in the treatment of depression; then you give him a caseload of depressives, and not any depressives, but a Balkan rape-victim, an alcoholic English Cabinet Minister, an immigrant forced into prostitution, a young woman hideously scarred by fire, a successful barrister caught out in his adulteries; and you see him as they see him, calm, omniscient, dispensing advice and hope. Then you have him crack up. It was a very good idea.

Still there must have been some nervousness on the part of the publishers, for they felt obliged to insist on the dust-jacket, ‘A Novel’. But then this is yet another materialisation for the spin doctor and political bully who, if you have forgotten, they remind you, also on the dust-jacket, is ‘the best-selling author of The Blair Years’, surely an experience likely to depress anyone.