Meeting somebody for lunch does not usually make me nervous. But I feel slightly on edge as I wait for Alastair Campbell. Once Tony Blair’s closest aide, Campbell, a 51-year-old former journalist, makes no secret of the fact that he despises most journalists. He is a big, burly man with red hair and a short temper.

I have arrived early, for an early lunch – and La Casalinga is empty. To pass the time, I look back over All In The Mind, Campbell’s first novel, which is about to be published. Rather to my surprise, I had liked the book and read it at a single sitting. But its themes – depression, alcoholism, suicide, and sexual addiction – do not suggest that Campbell will be a relaxing lunch companion.

I put the book aside and get chatting to Lucio, the proprietor, who tells me, “I’ve known Alastair for years. He has been coming here since the 1970s.” This sounds helpful, so I ask, “What’s he like?” Lucio pauses for reflection: “He’s OK.”

After a couple of minutes, Campbell strides in and greets me like an old friend. “Hi, how are you doing?” I am gratified, but slightly surprised. We have met before – perhaps three times over the past decade – but I must be one of literally thousands of journalists he dealt with, in his role as Blair’s press secretary. Still, although it is a classic PR tactic, it cheers me up. Perhaps the hard man of New Labour has mellowed?

We are ushered to a table at the back. Although New Labour was often accused of an addiction to glitz and glamour, Campbell’s choice of restaurant is an old-fashioned Italian – which now feels slightly out of place amid the boutiques and coffee chains of a smart north London shopping street. The menu is traditional. We both opt for the set lunch. Campbell, not noted for his interest in food, goes for soup and fried calamari, while I choose the mozzarella and tomato salad and grilled halibut. Campbell is a former alcoholic, so I do not ask for the wine menu.

Factions and fictions

There’s a strong link between politics and fiction, and plenty of Westminster insiders have gone before Campbell in channelling their fame into a book deal – and (they hope) some decent income for their post-parliament years, writes Isabel Berwick.

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), who had two terms as prime minister, was the first “big name” politician to write novels, the best-known of which are Sybil (about the tensions between rich and poor in early 19th-century England) and the rather more romantic Coningsby. Both of these are still in print.

Since then, most politicians’ efforts have fallen into the populist, rather than wildly popular category. In recent times, former Conservative MP Edwina Currie has written several novels, including A Parliamentary Affair (1994). Truth turned out to be more compelling than fiction when Currie’s diaries revealed that in the 1980s she had had a four-year affair with fellow MP John Major, who went on to become prime minister.

Tories seem to have the edge when it comes to imagination and racy real lives. Former Conservative party chairman Jeffrey Archer’s life story is probably more exciting than his own novels.

More staid rightwingers in print include Douglas Hurd, the prolific Anne Widdecombe and even London mayor Boris Johnson had his first “comic political novel” Seventy-Two Virgins published in 2005.

Alastair Campbell’s new book falls into a rather less well-worn genre: fiction by former civil servants and political apparatchiks. A successful crossover artist in this category is the crime novelist PD James, who spent her career in the civil service, and whose Whitehall experiences have often informed her writing.

In the New Labour years, former spin doctor Martin Sixsmith wrote a novel called (yes!) Spin, set in a government of the near future.

Another spin doctor, Lance Price, went further, publishing his diaries about life at Number 10 before his former boss Alastair Campbell’s efforts, and Price followed that up with a novel called Time and Fate about (yes!) a cast of characters in and around parliament.

After all this in-crowd politicking it comes as light relief to find that Campbell’s fiction debut covers the life-and-death themes that are relevant to the world beyond the gated confines of Downing Street.

Additional research by Marina Scukina

He started his career as a journalist in the early 1980s, at a time when boozing was almost obligatory. At the Mirror newspaper, where Campbell worked, a drinks trolley did the rounds at 11am – “It was for the execs’ fridges,” he recalls laughing, “but we all used to steal things off it, as it went by. It was like having a butler.” Most journalists drank heavily, but there was a certain etiquette: “Funny was good, falling over was bad.”

In 1986, aged 29 and two years after the birth of his first child, Campbell had a serious mental breakdown and was hospitalised. At the time, he was drinking up to 16 pints of beer a day, with spirits on top of that. Yet he was slightly surprised when a psychiatrist suggested drink might be part of his problem.

Once out of hospital and on the wagon, Campbell made his first attempt to write a novel. But his partner, Fiona Millar, with whom he has had three children, deleted it from their computer by accident. “It was on an Amstrad, it was our first computer – and Fiona was reading it on the screen and it just disappeared.” This might have put a certain strain on the relationship, I suggest. “Yeah, it was pretty heavy,” he agrees.

His literary ambitions thwarted, Campbell re-established himself as a well-known political journalist with pronounced Labour sympathies and close friendships with many of the party’s leading figures. When Tony Blair was elected Labour leader in 1994, he offered Campbell a job handling the media. Campbell soon became one of Blair’s closest aides – one of four or five people who defined New Labour. In 1997, when Blair became prime minister, Campbell went with him to Downing Street. The two worked together so closely that some journalists labelled Campbell “the second most powerful man in Britain”.

Yet his career in Downing Street ended in 2003 in deeply controversial fashion. The Blair government was accused by Andrew Gilligan, a BBC reporter, of “sexing up” the evidence for war with Iraq. Campbell, the government’s head of communications, hit back with all his trademark aggression. But in the midst of the controversy David Kelly, a government scientist who had spoken to Gilligan, committed suicide. The official inquiry, by Lord Hutton, into Kelly’s death was pretty sympathetic to Campbell. But he resigned from his job, shortly after giving evidence.

Chewing on his calamari, Campbell insists he left the government more or less at a time of his own choosing, and for his own reasons. But many felt that his aggressive style had become a liability, that Blair knew it and had decided his closest aide had to go.

. . .

As we discuss New Labour, Lucio comes over to ask if everything is OK, and then launches into a diatribe against the scandalous local taxes he has to pay: “Westminster Council do what they want and I have to pay for my own parking. Disgusting. I’m planning a revolution.” Campbell, who may have heard some of this before, laughs heartily.

The fact that his favourite restaurant is one he first visited in the 1970s says something about the man. Campbell is a loyalist. He is still a fanatical supporter of Burnley football club, who were an important team when he was growing up – but are now in the second division. He is a passionate, tribal supporter of the Labour party. And he was utterly loyal to Tony Blair and the causes he embraced.

While his partner Fiona was strongly opposed to the Iraq war, Campbell played a key role in arguing the case for it. In his diaries, published last year, Campbell says some anti-war Labour MPs believed that he, too, had secretly sympathised with their views. Was this the case?

“I was supportive of Tony on the war,” he says, carefully. You were supportive of Tony, but were you supportive of the war? I ask.

“Yeah, I mean that was the position.”

But if he’d taken the other position, if he’d said, “I can’t go along with this,” would you also have supported him?

“Yeah, probably ... Because on that one, I could see it both ways, and so could he. And people did have worries about whether the Americans were kind of, you know?”

He lets the thought tail off, but I think I know what he means. Kind of, you know.

I first met Campbell in Downing Street in 1997. I was doing an off-the-record interview with the new prime minister in his study. Blair’s style was reflective, low-key and friendly. But towards the end of the conversation, his press secretary had bustled into the room, outraged by something that the BBC had broadcast about Iraq. (This was six years before the outbreak of war.) I remember that Campbell had called the BBC, “the bloody Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation.” Blair had laughed but seemed embarrassed.

I remind Campbell of the incident and suggest that perhaps he was the angry alter ego to the mild-mannered Blair. “I think, a little bit of that,” he says, sounding slightly doubtful. “Tony always thought he could persuade people and he was probably right ... I felt that at times they so overstepped the mark you had to say so.” His period in Downing Street was marked by perpetual, bruising confrontations with the press. Many journalists who dealt with him at the time still deeply dislike the man, although I have noticed that most of his former colleagues are fond of him.

Campbell himself is reluctant to revisit his battles with the BBC, but he makes no bones about his feelings about one of Britain’s most popular papers – “If you say to most journalists, what is the most putrid, negative, unpleasant media organ in Britain, they’ll all say the Daily Mail. Ask them the next day, what’s the most professional product in the British media, they’ll probably say the Daily Mail. And that says something about where the culture lies.”

Campbell’s emotional temperament – and his history of alcoholism and depression – arguably made him a risky choice for a stressful job at the heart of government. Before agreeing to work for Blair, he warned his new boss that he had had “a serious psychotic breakdown” in 1986. Blair’s reply was, “I’m not worried, if you’re not worried.”

Looking back, Campbell muses, “I did have times in Number 10 when I was probably depressed, but you just keep going.” It may be that the relentless nature of the job actually helped to ward off depression. It was only after he left Downing Street that Campbell suffered his second serious bout of mental illness – and underwent the treatment that informs his novel.

For the moment, Campbell remains outside the political fray. But he takes a professional interest and, like much of Britain, is fascinated by the US election. His view is that John McCain’s campaign made a mistake by putting Sarah Palin on the ticket.

“McCain was doing his big experience thing, and he took that argument out of the game ... That was a classic example of where a clever tactic turned out to be counter-strategic, and the strategy should always take precedence over the tactics; and that’s why I think Obama has done very well ... What he’s done the whole way through is to keep on a basic message. So if he wins, I think he deserves to win, if you’re looking at it in purely campaigning terms. McCain’s been a bit all over the place.”

Campbell also sees an important dividing line emerging in British politics. He thinks that bad economic times could, paradoxically, help the Labour government of Gordon Brown. “I am a great believer that you need strategic dividing lines all the time, and Brown – a serious man for serious times – against Cameron, the novice. That is a good dividing line to have.” He adds that David Cameron’s Tories also have a good slogan: “ ‘Time for a change’ is very powerful. But Labour’s then got the job of saying, ‘Change to what?’”

There is little doubt that Labour – behind in the opinion polls – could do with Campbell’s strategic skills. Peter Mandelson, another of the architects of New Labour, has just returned to the cabinet. That has only heightened speculation that Campbell himself will soon return to frontline politics. He says: “As far as I’m concerned, nothing’s really changed. I’ve always said to Gordon that I’ll help in any way.”

It is pretty clear that Campbell retains his disdain for the Tories. He says Cameron and his allies strike him as “a gang of chaps who have sort of decided, ‘We’ve done the whole varsity thing and then we did a bit of the business thing, and you know, wouldn’t it be great to run a country.’”

The note of class antagonism is clear. In fact, Campbell’s dislike of the symbols of the class system could block an obvious route back into politics. Peter Mandelson was able to go straight into the cabinet by accepting a peerage and is now Lord Mandelson. But Campbell is emphatic that the House of Lords is not for him: “I can’t see it. I can’t see it. That’s not me.” He is not particularly interested in a business career either – “I don’t really care if oil company A is more successful than oil company B.”

For the moment, Campbell is enjoying a portfolio existence. He is already at work on his second novel. He gives lectures. He makes television programmes. He gives advice on communications to a variety of clients, including the South African government. He works for charities – in particular, leukaemia research. He watches a lot of football.

I, too, am a football fan, but, I tell him, I haven’t subscribed to any sports channels for fear that I will waste too much time watching them. Campbell not only watches Sky Sports, he has developed an interest in the fan channels run by individual football teams – even ones he doesn’t support. He warms to his theme: “I mean, for example, Celtic TV recently showed the entire 1967 European cup final. When Celtic won. The Lisbon Lions. The whole game. It was awesome.”

I am impressed by his devotion, but also slightly depressed (in the non-clinical sense). It seems odd for a man so full of energy and passion to be whiling away his time watching 40-year-old football matches on TV.

He claims to be enjoying the free time his new life offers him. But he admits that the lure of full-time politics could eventually draw him back: “I may wake up again one day, still in my early 50s, and say it’s time to start getting up at 5.30am again and working round the clock.”

We finish off our coffees and Campbell gets ready to go. He needs to get to Manchester that night. He and his eldest son have tickets for Manchester United v Celtic.

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La Casalinga
64 St. John’s Wood High St
London NW8

2 x set lunch £27.00
1 x onion soup
1 x mozzarella & tomato salad
1 x fried calamari
1 x grilled halibut
1 x mixed vegetables

2 x sparkling mineral water £5.20
2 x coffee £5.20

Service £5.60

Total £43.00

Read the FT’s review of ‘All in the Mind’. Alastair Campbell will talk about his book at the Royal Festival Hall, November 26, 7.30pm

Gideon Rachman is the FT’s senior foreign affairs columnist