Palace intrigue

Plunging into the second volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries is like opening a Samuel Richardson novel.

Plunging into the second volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries is like opening a Samuel Richardson novel. The tone is breathless and excitable and the dramatic world of backstabbing, tittle-tattle and palace intrigue is instantly captivating. Historians will scour the book for valuable new information. Practitioners of media management will regard it as a classic.

Downing Street rivalries dominate from the start. The impression that ‘the TB-GB riftology’ developed after 1997 is inaccurate. War had been raging ever since Blair won the leadership in 1994 and Brown’s sabotage unit, led by Charlie Whelan and Ed Balls, swung into action as soon as they arrived at No. 11. Campbell is vague on the Granita deal, a seemingly immoveable fixture in the New Labour story, but the probability is that Brown’s henchmen dreamed it up in order to destabilise Blair. So when Blair and Brown denied that they’d agreed a timetable for sharing power they were perceived to be lying and were in all likelihood telling the truth.

Blair’s difficulty was a dearth of top talent. The party had plenty of able middle-rankers but only one figure with serious prime ministerial ambitions. So every scrap of anti-Blair sentiment gravitated automatically to Brown and made him more of a threat.

The Blair-Campbell relationship was evidently warm and strong. Away from the pressure of summit meetings they relaxed by improvising sketch routines in silly voices. Heading to Scotland they always put on ‘mock posh Jock’ accents. Blair loved to entertain his staff with impressions of world leaders, and his version of the Queen is, apparently, lethally accurate.

Some of Labour’s best-known figures failed to shine in power.