Alastair John Campbell (born 25 May 1957) is a British journalist, author, strategist, broadcaster and activist, known for his political roles during Tony Blair's leadership of the Labour Party. Campbell worked as Blair's spokesman and campaign director in opposition (1994–1997), then as Downing Street Press Secretary, and as the Prime Minister's Official Spokesperson (1997–2000). He then became Downing Street director of communications and spokesman for the Labour Party (2000–2003). He returned as campaign director for the 2005 general election in Blair's third win.
Campbell is the editor at large of The New European and chief interviewer for GQ. He acts as a consultant strategist and as an ambassador for Time to Change and other mental health charities. He was an adviser to the People's Vote campaign, campaigning for a public vote on the final Brexit deal. Since his work for Blair, Campbell has continued to act as a freelance advisor to a number of governments and political parties, including the Prime Minister of Albania. In March 2022 he launched the podcast The Rest is Politics with Rory Stewart, which has been the top politics podcast in the UK in the Apple rankings since its launch. He has written eighteen books, with his most recent one being released in 2023.
Education and early life
Campbell was born on 25 May 1957 in Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire, son of Scottish veterinary surgeon Donald Campbell and his wife Elizabeth. Campbell's parents had moved to Keighley when his father became a partner in a local veterinary practice. Donald was a Gaelic-speaker from the island of Tiree; his wife was from Ayrshire. Campbell grew up with two older brothers, Donald and Graeme, and a younger sister, Elizabeth.
He attended Bradford Grammar School for a short period of time, followed by City of Leicester Boys' Grammar School and the University of Cambridge where he was an undergraduate student of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He studied modern languages, French and German, gaining an upper second (2:1) degree. Campbell is an emeritus professor in media at Cambridge University.
Journalism
After leaving university and doing casual jobs Campbell was accepted as a trainee reporter with the Mirror Group Newspapers.
His first published work was Inter-City Ditties, his winning entry to a readers' competition in Forum, the journalistic counterpart to Penthouse magazine. This led to a lengthy stint writing pieces for the magazine with such titles as "Busking with Bagpipes" and "The Riviera Gigolo", written in a style calculated to lead readers at the time to believe they were descriptions of his own sexual exploits.
As part of the Mirror Group training scheme Campbell spent a year at a local weekly paper and he quickly became the sports editor at the Tavistock Times, writing a column called 'Campbell's Corner'. While he was at the Tavistock Times he met his partner Fiona Millar, with whom he has three children; two sons (born November 1987 and July 1989) and a daughter, comedian Grace Campbell (born May 1994). His first significant contribution to news journalism was coverage of the Penlee lifeboat disaster in December 1981, while a trainee on the Plymouth-based Sunday Independent, then owned by Mirror Group Newspapers.
National newspapers
In 1982, Campbell moved to the London office of the Daily Mirror, Fleet Street's sole remaining big-circulation supporter of the Labour Party. He became a political correspondent, then in 1986 moved to Today, a full-colour tabloid newspaper which was at the time trying to turn leftward, where he worked as a news editor. His rapid rise and its accompanying stress led to alcohol abuse.
Alcoholism and depression
While accompanying Neil Kinnock's tour of Scotland in 1986, he began to display increasingly erratic behaviour, including dumping his hire car in the Rosyth Dockyard. He continued on that day, following Kinnock to Perth, Scotland and finally Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, where he had a nervous breakdown and was arrested by two Special Branch detectives. Police contacted his partner and following her calls to friends in Scotland the police let a family friend take Campbell to Ross Hall Hospital, a private BMI hospital in Glasgow, where she and her father visited him. Over the next five days as an in-patient he was given medication to calm him, and he realised that he had an alcohol problem after seeing a psychiatrist. Campbell said that from that day onwards he counted each day that he did not drink alcohol, and did not stop counting until he had reached thousands.