As someone who was fond of Derek Draper (a feeling that probably wasn’t mutual, as I nicked his bird) it was strange to see photographs of his funeral. It seemed like a state occasion for some legendary leader who had died in battle defending his country, rather than for the husband of a likeable TV presenter who had been unlucky enough to catch a virulent version of a sickness which so many shook off. Sir Elton John sang; Sir Tony Blair speechified. Gordon Brown, Peter Mandelson, Ed Balls and Alastair Campbell showed up; the Blair Bunch reunited. The dignity of Draper’s widow and children sat oddly next to this ghastly bunch of carpetbaggers, reminding us that before he found redemption, Derek became famous – notorious – for revealing the hollowness at the heart of New Labour.
Populism exists because elitists like Campbell really believe that they know better than the rest of us
It’s hard not to see his life as akin to a French novel – Bel Ami with barm cakes. Derek Draper (even his name was novel-ish) was a thrusting young man from a working-class Northern family, one of the kind who sees success as an end in itself and isn’t fussy about how they get it – the kind who reads What Makes Sammy Run? as an instruction manual. At 25 he went to work for Peter Mandelson, chief cheerleader of the New Labour project; a few years later he became director of a lobbying firm called GPC Market Access, which turned out to be every bit as dodgy as it sounds. He was soon taped boasting to an undercover reporter – Greg Palast of the Observer, posing as a businessman – that GPC could flog access to government ministers and create tax breaks for their clients. Draper babbled ‘There are 17 people who count in this government and to say I am intimate with every one of them is the understatement of the century.’ Palast also wrote that Draper said, regarding his motivation: ‘I just want to stuff my bank account at £250 an hour.’ Concluding, Palast opined that: ‘Draper was nothing more than a messenger boy, a factotum, a purveyor, a self-loving, over-scented clerk.’
Wounded, disgraced, and sent packing from politics, Draper advocated for voting tactically in the 2005 election, saying of his former idol Blair: ‘I’d like him to wake up after the election and feel like a hunted man’. But he just couldn’t keep out of trouble; after Blair was gone – though leaving in the manner of a conquering hero itching to make some serious money rather than as a hunted man – he was caught conspiring with Gordon Brown’s aide Damian McBride in 2009 to set up an anonymous blog which would post nasty lies about senior Tories and their spouses, including tattle about the alleged mental instability of George Osborne’s then-wife. This last one was particularly low, especially in the light of the fact that – having been driven from the political arena for the final time – Draper would retrain and practise as a psychotherapist. For one as addicted to gossip, mischief making and secret telling as he was, this was akin to letting me manage an off licence, and if Draper had worked for long in this role, I think it’s likely that he would have achieved a hat-trick of scandals. Instead he had the bad luck to contract Covid, suffering for the after-effects for four years and dying in January. It is for this sad fate – being one of the UK’s longest-suffering Covid victims – that he will be remembered.
Which brings us back to his funeral, where those who had scorned him as a loose-lipped liability ‘paid their respects’ as the phrase has it, though having the low opinion I do of Tone’s Drones I felt that they probably just wanted to make sure that Draper was dead. The Blair Bunch have not aged well; even El Tone himself resembles a pensive perma-tanned gigolo thinking better of his louche life and wondering if it’s too late to go celibate and thus stand a chance of swerving Hell. In the past, a gathering of politicians at the funeral of a political colleague would have had some gravitas. But here’s the weird thing; the showbiz-sofa friends of Kate Garraway, such as Rob Rinder and Susanna Reid, actually seemed more dignified than the political animals present. When quiz-setters seem more substantial than lawmakers, you know that a culture is decaying.
It’s a truism that ‘Politics is show business for ugly people’. But it’s only with the advent of reality TV that the full ghastly extent of this desire has made itself clear. You can’t imagine Harold McMillan wanting to be on a reality show, not even a genteel baking one; Ed Balls has been on loads, and currently presents Good Morning Britain, thus representing the apex of modern political ambition in this country. But there is a member of the Blair Bunch who makes Ed Balls seem like a visionary, a dreamer, a revolutionary – like Winston Churchill and Aneurin Bevan combined. Alastair Campbell. Looking at the photographs of Derek’s internment, it did make me wonder what sort of funeral Alastair Campbell would have had had he died at a similar age. Would Elton John have sung? Would Tony Blair have speechified? Would the most loathsome and self-serving creature in public life have been hailed as a giant of a man who a grieving nation could not bear to be parted from?
I don’t think I’ll ever find out, as you can tell he’s going to be around forever. The cockroach – of the order Blattodea, deriving from the Latin blatta ‘an insect that shuns the light’ – can survive three months without food, a month without water and a week without its own head. Alastair Campbell has survived being Robert Maxwell’s bag-carrier and being revealed as a persistent and incorrigible fantasist. Other than these differences, there’s not much to choose between them – except that this pest seeks the spotlight rather than shunning the daylight.
Observing the career trajectory of Campbell, from pornographer to podcaster, it’s hard to believe that showbiz success rather than public service wasn’t what he craved all along – even if seeing him gauntly entreating us to let him entertain us is like seeing Beria attempting to join The Great British Bake-Off. He is everywhere and has been ever since he hung up his wet wipes after his stint as Tony Blair’s Groom of the Stool. He is on television more than the weather symbol for rain. He’s certainly ‘driven’ – though no wordsmith (it was I who coined the phrase ‘The People’s Princess’) last year he published his 18th book (poignantly, his 2015 publication Winners And How They Succeed was swiftly available from Amazon for 98 pence) heroically entitled But What Can I Do? – ‘a call to arms to people to get more engaged in politics and to fight back against the wave of populism, polarisation and post-truth.’ What a joke. Every institution in this country has been captured by critical race theory and gender woo-woo, and this clown’s bitching about populism. Is he aware that he is the disease, not the cure? Populism exists because elitists like Campbell really believe that they know better than the rest of us; this from a fool who has made more bad calls than an Amish-targeting get-rich-quick phone-scammer.
Like many mediocre people, Campbell is fuelled by pure petulance which he perceives as righteous anger; specifically, by the events of 23 June 2016. Yes, it’s our old mate The Big Sulk (Le Bouder Grand) which has been going on ever since we, the people, refused to vote on Brexit the way our betters and bed-wetters told us to. Campbell said the vote played into the hands of Isis, called Brexit ‘the worst decision Britain has made in my lifetime’ and swore to do anything it took in order to change the nation’s mind. Instead he had the nation changing channels every time we saw him showing off on some panel show.
He will apparently work for anyone; see his years ‘advising’ the governments of countries such as Albania. To his credit, Campbell turned down the chance to work for Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad – on the grounds that he was ‘a bit dull’. He is a fine example of what I coined the Cry-Bully – a hideous hybrid of victim and victor, weeper and walloper – who will not hesitate to remind us about his Mental Elf the moment criticism hits him in a soft spot. Even this aspect of his personality he has found a way of merching, being a client of something called The Mental Health Speakers Agency, alongside Alex from Love Island and Chico from The X Factor; I’m sure it’s a lovely little earner, rolling in the greens by singing the blues. Furthermore, a man who plays the bagpipes in his spare time is obviously not a friend to humanity.
But at last Campbell is tasting the success he has chased in such a scatter-gun manner all his life. Last year But What Can I Do? became a Sunday Times number one bestseller in the first week of publication, at the same time as his project with Rory Stewart, The Rest Is Politics, was the most listened-to podcast. Nauseatingly, he announced his podcast tour ‘sold out the Royal Albert Hall quicker than the Foo Fighters’ and doubtless looks in the mirror each morning and mouths the words ‘rock star’. But there’s something so profoundly, inherently sad about him that even his swagger looks like a nervous tic. He has the air of a man who will never be truly happy, who will swing between narcissism and self-loathing all his life. Rod Liddle said it well in this magazine: ‘This is the thing about Alastair. He has a kind of deep man-love for messianic bullies, no matter how immoral they might be. Not long after the Maxwell incident, Campbell transferred his crush to Tony Blair, which is how we will remember him – as a liar’s paid liar.’
What makes Alastair run? His own demons, which he will never escape from. And so the most shameless, worthless individual in public life continues on like the indestructible cockroach he is, while poor Derek Draper lies in the ground, mourned so falsely by the very men who made a sacrifice of him.
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