What can we learn about Afghanistan from Alastair Campbell?

Alastair Campbell can’t write. If that sounds like one of the less significant charges one might level against Tony Blair’s former spin-doctor then stick with me. Because anyone who can spill out thousands of words and still be so unoriginal and lacking in insight or self-perception must have things they are trying to hide. That is why the laborious ‘long-think’ that Campbell wrote this week for the equally laborious ‘Tortoise’ website is worth pausing over.

For those who have missed it, Campbell was this week invited by Tortoise to write a multi-thousand word piece on the recent events in Afghanistan. Since Campbell was right-hand man to Tony Blair when the then Prime Minister chose to send British forces into Afghanistan alongside America almost exactly 20 years ago this could have been an interesting piece. If it happened to be big on detail and bogged down in policy minutiae then all the better. That is what such a forum is self-professedly for.

Yet Campbell did none of this. His first paragraph is taken up with a claim that Johnson imagines that he is Churchill, only ‘with lots of hair and no comb’. It shows a special type of small-mindedness to start a piece about the human catastrophe and foreign policy disaster that is Afghanistan by making an unoriginal crack about Boris Johnson’s hair. But once caught in cliché alley, Campbell can find no way of getting out from it. His follow-on observation is that ‘in reality Boris Johnson is a combination of Captain Mainwaring, Corporal Jones and Private Pike’ from Dad’s Army.

Campbell goes on to accuse Johnson of ‘blustering’, ‘blundering’ and failing to show ‘leadership’. Later we learn that there is a risk that the Afghan exit will strengthen ‘the hard Right at home’.