All in the Mind
By Alastair Campbell
Hutchinson £17.99, 304 pages
FT Bookshop price: £14.39

Striding Byronically around the House of Commons for nearly two decades, first as a journalist and then as right-hand man to Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell was never going to be short of material for future books. His edited diaries, The Blair Years, published last year, were anticipated with glee and terror; the full, unexpurgated version is promised once New Labour’s chiefs are out of electoral harm’s way.

Yet one of several surprises in Campbell’s debut novel, All in the Mind, is how little he uses the Westminster milieu, choosing instead an ensemble of characters only one of whom is a senior politician.

Indeed Campbell’s theme is not the excitement of politics but the anguish of mental illness, which he experienced first-hand in a nervous breakdown 22 years ago and in bouts of depression ever since. If readers expecting a political thriller are disappointed, those intrigued by the idea of Campbell sharing his personal demons will not be.

All in the Mind follows a collection of traumatised individuals adrift in contemporary London. Alongside the alcoholic cabinet minister facing a vertiginous fall from grace, we are introduced to a Kosovan rape victim, a trafficked prostitute, a woman with disfiguring burns and a young man with a dead-end job in a warehouse. Each of them is being treated by Martin Sturrock, a psychiatrist himself afflicted by mental illness and compulsive behaviour.

Unlike many so-called misery memoirs dealing with depression, Campbell’s narration frequently switches point of view, making the book more than a catalogue of morbid sensations. We are invited, for example, to consider how self-involved sufferers can be and how this blindness damages family life.

Sturrock himself becomes increasingly sensitive to the harm inflicted by his self-destructive urges and finally is unable to contain his “angels and demons”, as he terms them. Here the writing comes alive during descriptions of Sturrock’s circular thoughts, and of his pleasure at a patient unknowingly articulating a pain they both share.

Like Robert Harris, another newspaper man who turned to popular fiction, Campbell’s style is not exactly literary. Instead, it adapts the trusted techniques of reportage: lively dialogue, a few telling details and minimal metaphor, delivered in short sentences using accessible vocabulary. This has its limits: the supporting cast is sketchily drawn, plotlines are too easily resolved, and the concluding scene is mawkish.

But Campbell knows his business, which is telling well-paced and compelling stories; the novel succeeds because of the clarity with which his reporter’s prose evokes the torments of a depressive on a downward curve.

Sturrock’s final descent is harrowing, with all the panic and despair of someone feeling their mental world shatter on an ordinary suburban street. Indeed the misery is relentless, particularly the crippling inability of men and women to understand each other in sterile, loveless marriages and joyless sexual encounters. In the world of this novel sex is, with one exception, violent or shame-laden – perhaps ironic given that Campbell’s first pieces of writing were erotic tales.

But the journey is worth the effort. As with his recent BBC television documentary, Cracking Up, Campbell has performed a service for which he may be uniquely well-equipped. He has increased compassion for individuals trapped in a private hell that those who are spared it may never fully understand.

Lunch with the FT: Alastair Campbell

Miranda Green is a former FT political correspondent