Alastair Campbell:
- This article is about the British journalist, broadcaster, and author; for others see Alistair Campbell (disambiguation).
Alastair John Campbell (born 25 May 1957) served as Director of Communications and Strategy for the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1997 to 2003. He began working with Tony Blair in 1994.
[edit] Early life
Alastair Campbell is the son of veterinary surgeon Donald Campbell and his wife, Elizabeth, a Scottish couple (his father was a Gaelic-speaker from Tiree while his mother was from Ayrshire[3]) who moved to Keighley, West Yorkshire, England when the elder Campbell became a partner in a veterinary practice there. Alastair has two elder brothers, Donald and Graeme, and a younger sister, Elizabeth.
Campbell attended City of Leicester School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages (French and German, for which he received a 2:1, or Upper Second) and claimed that he wrote essays based solely on criticism and did not always read the works themselves. Campbell spent a year in the South of France as part of his degree.
Campbell also became interested in journalism. His first published work was "Inter-City Ditties", his winning entry to a readers' competition run by pornographic magazine Forum. This led to a lengthy stint working for Forum, writing articles such as "The Riviera Gigolo" and "Busking with Bagpipes" which Campbell claimed were based on autobiographical events.[4]
He was appointed as a sports reporter on the Tavistock Times and then promoted to the news pages where his first major story was the loss of the Penlee lifeboat with all its crew. It was as a trainee on the Plymouth-based West Country newspaper the Sunday Independent, then owned by Mirror Group Newspapers, that he met his partner, Fiona Millar.
[edit] National newspapers
Campbell later moved to the London office of the Daily Mirror, the largest circulation left-wing paper, where he became a political correspondent. However, his rapid rise and stressful job led to alcohol abuse.[5]
[edit] Mental illness
Campbell was admitted to hospital in 1986 when he travelled to Scotland as a journalist to cover Neil Kinnock's visit to Glasgow. He had been drinking alcohol heavily up to that day, although he had consumed little alcohol while travelling and when in Scotland. He rapidly developed a psychosis with thoughts that he was being subject to a continuous test, and misinterpreting events and interactions as being part of this test. He also began to hear voices (auditory hallucinations). When Campbell was held in a police cell following a misdemeanour, his wife in London received a telephone call with the bad news at about 2:00 am. Following her calls to friends in Scotland and because of Campbell's bizarre behavior, the police let a family friend take Campbell from the police cell to Ross Hall Hospital, a private BMI hospital in Glasgow where she and her father visited him. Over the next five days as an inpatient he was given medication to calm him, and he realised for the first time that he had an alcohol problem after seeing the psychiatrist, who was in charge of his hospital care. Campbell said that from that day he counted each one that he did not drink alcohol, and did not stop counting until he had reached thousands.[5]
After hospitalization Campbell returned to England, preferring to stay with friends near Cheltenham, rather than return to London (and his wife) where he did not feel safe. His condition continued with a phase of depression, and he was reluctant to seek further medical help; however, he eventually cooperated with treatment from his family doctor.[5]
[edit] Return to work
His first son was born in 1987; and when Campbell returned to the Daily Mirror, he had to start at a low grade again and work night shifts, but eventually he rebuilt his career and became Political Editor.[5]
He was a close advisor of Neil Kinnock, going on holiday with the Kinnocks, and worked closely with Robert Maxwell. Campbell's loyalty to Maxwell was demonstrated when he punched The Guardian journalist Michael White after White joked about "Captain Bob, Bob, Bob...bobbing" in the Atlantic Ocean shortly after Maxwell's drowning in 1991.[6] Campbell later put this down to stress at the thought of himself and others losing their job following the demise of the Daily Mirror proprietor.[7][8]
After leaving the Mirror, Campbell became Political Editor of Today, a full-colour tabloid newspaper which had launched in 1986, but was now trying to turn leftward. He was working there when John Smith died in 1994. He was a well-known face and helped to interview the three candidates for the new Labour Party leader; though it was later revealed that he had already formed links with Tony Blair.
[edit] Career in politics
From 1994 Campbell worked for the newly-elected leader of the Labour Party, Tony Blair, later moving into government when Labour won the 1997 General Election. Having recovered and become teetotal,[9] he told Blair about his illness, which Blair did not see as a problem. He was active during the controversies of the Gulf War. After his resignation of 2003 he suffered a recurrence of depression, and he has required medication from time to time since. In October 2008, he broadcast the personal story of his illness in a television documentary partly to reduce the stigma of mental illness.[5] He has also written a novel on the subject entitled All in the Mind. He is a lifelong supporter of Burnley Football Club.
[edit] Selected works
[edit] References
- ^ a b Channel 4 News (23 January 2008). "Political Awards: and the winner is...". Channel 4.
- ^ http://www.secularism.org.uk/comingoutasatheistalistaircampbe.html
- ^ Seon C. Caimbeul "Beachdan 'ceannard nan car' mu ar cànain" The Scotsman 28 July 2007, Retrieved on 30 July 2007.
- ^ Oborne, Peter and Simon Walters (2004). Alastair Campbell. Aurum. ISBN 1-84513-001-4. pp. 25-32.
- ^ a b c d e "Cracking Up". BBC Two television documentary written and presented by Alastair Campbell. Broadcast Sunday, 12 October 2008.
- ^ Michael White "White vs Campbell", The Guardian, 5 November 2001. Retrieved on 19 July 2997.
- ^ Simon Hoggart "Sooner or later, Campbell was going to lose it", The Guardian, 26 July 2003. Retrieved on 19 July 2007.
- ^ Nick Assinder "The life and times of Alastair Campbell", BBC News, 29 August 2003. Retrieved on 19 July 2007.
- ^ Alastair Campbell (2007). The Blair Years. Random House, entry for 6 April 2002. ISBN 0099514753.
- ^ "Campbell diaries to be published". BBC (16 October 2008).
- ^ "The Blair Years". The Random House Group.
- ^ "Feel the fear". The Guardian (25 October 2008). Retrieved on 2008-10-31.
[edit] Further reading
[edit] External links
| Persondata |
| NAME |
Campbell, Alastair |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES |
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| SHORT DESCRIPTION |
Director of Communications and Strategy for New Labour, journalist, author, broadcaster |
| DATE OF BIRTH |
25 May 1957 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH |
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| DATE OF DEATH |
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| PLACE OF DEATH |
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