The prime minister is omnipresent. He nevertheless emerges as a nebulous and insubstantial figure. This is partly because Campbell, though a trained and sometimes observant reporter, has few literary skills. Even more to the point, the book is fundamentally about Campbell, not Blair. Jock Colville’s record of Churchill created a revealing and at times very moving portrait of the great wartime premier because he was happy to put himself in the shade and present a mainly uncritical portrait of a man he unambiguously cherished. In this book the diarist regards himself as a vigorous and dominant personality in his own right.

This is a fair enough reflection of the actual state of affairs while Campbell was in Downing Street, but there is one important consequence. There is a part of Campbell which seems to regard Blair with a certain amount of resentment and even perhaps an unconscious contempt. He records the prime minister’s weaknesses and moral failings, noting for instance the excruciating moment in the 2001 general election when Blair grabbed an umbrella off a female party worker, allowing her to get drenched. The deep truth about the mutual dependence between these two men, who more than anyone else created the tone of British public life over the last decade, does not fully emerge from this diary. Nothing tells us what makes Tony Blair tick.

This book is extremely informative, nonetheless, about the structure of government which New Labour attempted to impose while Campbell and Blair were in Downing Street. The obsession with the media is quite extraordinary, often amounting to hysteria. Previous British governments regarded press coverage as an unavoidable nuisance. The Blair regime, in a stunning epistemological leap, came to regard perception and reality as identical and therefore placed communications at the centre of everything it did. This methodology led directly to the creation of a system of populist rule which sidelined Parliament, downgraded ministers, marginalised the civil service, and enfranchised the British press and media. Thanks to this unusual set of circumstances, Campbell became both the moral essence and the driving force of the Blair government.

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