When the shadows closed in on the end of Tony Blair’s government

The sixth volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries covers the traumas of the handover to Gordon Brown, 2005-07

Something held me back from finishing this review. I read the book when it was published in October last year, and started to write a review, but I wasn’t happy with it. Meanwhile Alastair Campbell published another book, a novel about football written with Paul Fletcher, and now volume 7 of the Diaries, covering 2007-2010, has been published. I reviewed that volume here, so now it must be time to publish this review too.

I think my problem was that I didn’t know what to make of Campbell’s openness about his struggle with depression, and I didn’t know how to relate it to the dysfunction of the final years of the Blair government – or even whether the two were in any way connected.

Still, this means I can see it, as if from a distance, with some perspective. When I read it I was most gripped by the revelations of the final and worst phase of the feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Indeed, several scenes are made for the sumptuously funded Netflix docudrama of the future.

There was the time Blair said casually to Brown he could “run someone against you” for the Labour leadership when Blair stood down. (Campbell noticed Brown and Ed Balls, who was the chancellor’s adviser, “giving each other a little look” at that point.) There was the scene when Brown, asked by Blair if he was threatening him, said: “You’ve done far worse to me.” Another vignette when Brown put the phone down on Blair; or when the chancellor refused to take the prime minister’s calls and Blair said it was embarrassing, “calling the switchboard and asking if the chancellor had been found yet”.

Some of the scenes were unintentionally comic. In 2005, when Brown was agitating to be given a date for the handover of power, Blair said, pointedly questioning Brown’s suitability for the highest office, “The thing about politics today is, it’s a very quick game.” Brown replied: “It’s a very slow game where I’m sitting.” But most of them were just painful, such as the time when Blair said to Brown, “It is becoming undignified to have this discussion in front of others – I have other things to do,” and “got up and walked out”.

Each incident, had it been reported at the time, would have required The Independent, which went tabloid in 2003, to revert temporarily to broadsheet size to accommodate headlines in large enough type.

But now, more than 10 years later, the histrionics of the Blair-Brown relationship seem almost comically trivial, and we know how it ended. Blair, rapidly losing the support of Labour MPs, was forced in September 2006 to announce he would be gone within a year, and Brown took over – without a leadership contest – in June 2007.

For the whole period covered by this volume, from the 2005 election, which Blair won with a reduced but still emphatic majority, to his departure, Campbell was more out of 10 Downing Street than in. He had resigned as communications director in 2003, but had never really let go. Thus his diaries remain the best and most candid historical record. The contrast with Brown’s memoir, grievance-laden but blandly unspecific and also published last autumn, could not be greater.

For all Campbell’s association, in the minds of his opponents on left and right, with spin, the diaries are unflinchingly honest. He recounts a lunch with Piers Morgan, who admitted “he had not really kept a diary, but had recreated it with notes and schedules and papers”. Morgan seemed to think Campbell was going to rewrite his diary for publication as he had, asking: “Well aren’t you?”

No, Campbell insists, he was not. He was asked by the Cabinet Office to leave out things about special forces and the royal family, and he left some things out about his own family – but, mostly, he left it in.

Hence the openness about his mental health problems, and about his relationship with Fiona Millar, his partner, and their children. Campbell recounts how Fiona told him she thought a cause of his episodes of depression was that he secretly agreed with her that the Iraq war was a bad idea, but he was forced to defend it because of his loyalty to the prime minister. “I said that is real transference if I may say so; I supported him and still do,” Campbell wrote.

I believe him. Campbell may have been ambivalent about Iraq, but I don’t think it aggravated his bipolar disorder. There may have been a parallel between his mental state and the sapping of Blair’s power as prime minister, but I think that was a coincidence forced by Campbell’s decision after the Iraq war to step away from a front-line role that kept him focused but made family life impossible.

All the same, the shadow cast by Iraq is the third dark theme of these diaries, after the Blair-Brown feud and Campbell’s struggle with depression.

Campbell records a surprisingly open discussion between Blair and his inner circle seven months before that argument with Fiona. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s chief of staff, wanted to know what Campbell’s diaries – about which he and Blair were increasingly nervous – would say about how supportive they each had been of the Iraq policy. Campbell told him he had written that Powell had been “basically pro with the occasional wobble”. Blair commented that Campbell and Sally Morgan, another close adviser, “were never the biggest fans of the war in Iraq”.

Campbell’s diary entry continued: “I said I had just about convinced myself because it had been my job to support it.” He reported that Pat McFadden, Blair's political secretary, commented: “Ah, the Nuremberg excuse.”

This kind of gallows humour seemed to have spread among Blair’s inner team by the end. At a farewell dinner at Chequers in June 2007, Peter Mandelson spoke to praise Blair and “said we had all benefited to greater or lesser degree”. Powell heckled: “Yes, not all of us will go to jail.”

After all the water under various bridges since, this seems a long time ago. At the time, the Blair-Brown feud was the biggest divide in British politics, far more important than divisions between New Labour and the Conservatives, or between New Labour and the Socialist Campaign Group. But it is the other themes that have endured: the terrible legacy of the Iraq war and Campbell’s brave campaign to promote openness about mental illness.

From Blair to Brown: Diaries, volume 6, 2005-07, by Alastair Campbell. Biteback Publishing £25, e-book £13.

Reviews of previous volumes of Alastair Campbell’s diaries: Vol 1, 1994-97 (interview); Vol 2, 1997-99; Vol 3, 1999-2001; Vol 4, 2001-03; Vol 5, 2003-05.