Book description
POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY is the third volume of Alastair Campbell's
unique daily account of life at the centre of the Blair government. It
begins amid conflict in Kosovo, and ends on September 11, 2001, a day
which immediately wrote itself into the history books, changing the
course of both the Bush presidency and the Blair premiership.
In this volume, we see that New Labour's honeymoon is well and truly
over. In addition to detailing the continuing tensions at the top,
here we find graphic accounts of a variety of domestic crises:
foot-and-mouth disease and protests over fuel prices which almost
brought Britain to a halt. Volume Three includes Peter Mandelson's
second resignation, the agonies of the Millennium Dome, and the most
unexpected slow-handclapping in memory, when the Women's Institute
turned against Tony Blair. Yet despite all the problems - not least
the most accident-prone manifesto launch in history, complete with
deputy prime minister John Prescott punching a voter - Labour won a
second successive landslide election victory. That triumph is
intimately recorded here, alongside the high points of this period,
such as devolution to Northern Ireland and the fall of Milosevic.
Alastair Campbell was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, in 1957, the son
of a vet. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in
modern languages, his first chosen career was journalism, principally
with the Mirror Group. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour
Party, he asked Campbell to be his press secretary. He worked for Blair
- first in that capacity, then as official spokesman and director of
communications and strategy - from 1994 to 2003, since when he has been
mainly engaged in writing, public speaking, working for Leukaemia
Research, where he is chairman of fundraising, and continuing to advise
Blair, Gordon Brown and other leading Labour figures. His first novel,
All In The Mind
, and an accompanying award-winning TV documentary,
Cracking Up
, led to him being voted Mind Champion of the Year. A second novel,
Maya
, was published in 2010, and
The Happy Depressive
, a candid look at happiness (and depression) is to be published as an
ebook in January 2012. His interests include running, cycling, playing
the bagpipes and following the varying fortunes of Burnley Football
Club.
