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Issue: 21 July 2010
Author: Matthew Limb

Alastair Campbell, Founders’ Lecturer at this year’s Congress, has dramatic personal experience of mental illness. Matthew Limb reports

With New Labour gone from power Alastair Campbell admits to lacking the ‘full-on mission and purpose’ he had while working in government.

But he is ‘enjoying more freedom’ instead, including it seems the chance to express himself on his website  on matters big and small.

One day it’s serious commentary on the new Tory-Lib Dem health reforms. On another, he’s reeling off the star names he kept company with at his mate Piers Morgan’s wedding, an account one irate blogger brands  ‘celeb-licking twaddle’.

But Alastair Campbell admits he is someone who has always divided opinion. ‘Even before Iraq,’ he notes.

He was a national tabloid newspaper journalist with an abrasive, colourful and hard-living reputation before becoming Tony Blair’s communications chief at 10 Downing Street.

To some critics, he will always be reviled for the era of ‘spin’ , the ‘dodgy dossier’ and the other controversial justifications for invasion of Iraq.

But he believes the issues and arguments covered by several inquiries are now ‘so gone over’ that they have led to a ‘dialogue of the deaf.’

He says the ‘many’ supporters of the war tend not to be listened to and some people ‘just don’t want to accept the truth’.

 ‘I only feel the hostility really in certain parts of the media. I don’t really feel it out with the public.  It’s fair to say a lot of people liked what I did, a lot of people didn’t. But I think when you boil it down it’s usually a political divide’.

Alastair Campbell has, he says, moved on. ‘I’ve definitely reached the point where I genuinely don’t care what they say. I find the ones who are most critical, or anti, are the ones who don’t actually know what I did or know anything about me beyond what they’ve read’.

Hospitalised

These days the self-styled communicator, author, strategist, consultant and public speaker has other things to care about.

He talks, writes, raises funds and campaigns on health issues, for the Leukaemia Research charity, and, drawing on personal experience, mental health.

In 1986 he had a now well-publicised psychotic breakdown. ‘I was arrested for my own safety and hospitalised,’ he says. He was off work for months.

His experiences were explored in a BBC documentary entitled ‘Cracking up’, broadcast two years ago, in which he tracked down the doctor who treated him.

Alastair Campbell was identified as having a drink problem and having suffered for a long time from bouts of depression, ‘which I still get.’

‘I have periods when I’m very full-on, active and very creative and I think that’s how I am most of the time, then I have these downs’.

His message is that society generally needs to be more open about mental illness to reduce associated stigma and ‘taboo’ and that employers, among others, can be supportive.

‘When Tony Blair asked me to work for him, he was well aware of my problem. He was very understanding.

‘The more open we are, the more we recognise people with mental health problems and problems in the workplace, the better off we’ll be as a whole. People won’t feel they are on their own when they’re going through difficult times mentally and will know that help is there and they can go and find it’.

Alastair Campbell wrote his first novel, All in the Mind, about mental health and last year he received the Mind Champion of the Year award in recognition of his work in raising awareness.

He is dismayed by, but also aware he is symbolic and part of, the media culture that seems to need ‘celebrity-attachment’ to raise difficult issues. ‘That’s how it is at the moment. I hope it changes, whether it will is another matter.’

A keen sportsman, he recognises the connection between physical and mental well-being.

‘Most days I will either run, cycle or swim. I’m now 53. I’ve had issues with knees, ankle, hip, shoulders, lower back. Even when I’m in the depths of real depression I always try to do exercise and sometimes I can’t.’

How much have the pressure-cooker environments of high-level journalism and politics contributed to his troubles? ‘I don’t know really. You are conscious, when you’re under pressure of being under pressure, but that’s the same for any job.’

He says his regard for MPs has gone up given the scrutiny they are under for decisions which ‘affect millions’, and hopes his new volume of diaries, Prelude to Power, might aid public understanding.

Although, according to one reviewer, Tony Blair emerges from it as almost ‘the sanest man’ in the Westminster ‘asylum’ where spats and fights between personalities, often closest colleagues, seem brutal, egotistical and, some might say, hardly conducive to mental well-being.

Alastair Campbell says: ‘If you think of any organisation you get personality clashes and arguments. Politics attracts strong personalities with strong beliefs. In such an aggressive environment, every now and then the blue and red mists descend’.

But he says there is still ‘warmth’ to be found and the Commons can be ‘quite a forgiving, friendly place.’

One anecdote captures the spiky mix. Campbell and Blair were in amicable and respectful chat with Conservative adversary Michael Heseltine during a memorial tribute to a mutual friend and colleague.

‘As we came out, Heseltine said: “Now I’m off to the World at One to attack everything you stand for.”’ fl