Customer Reviews

The Blair Years: The Alastair Campbell Diaries

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Until Tony Blair himself publishes his account of his time in office, this has to be the next best thing. Although most of the daily entries are short, it conveys the mood. Sunday morning confabs to determine the appropriate response to a breaking story, speechwriting on airplanes, careful feeding of information to journalists, it is all here. I found myself thinking " *that's* how they did it".

There are also many amusing/bizarre anecdotes such as Campbell walking in on Mo Mowlan in the bath.

The Diana parts felt set up to me. We hear about how she wanted to meet Campbell, then they met, she asks for him later, and then of course her crash and death. His affection for her seems somewhat overblown, and it says something of his reputation that I found myself believing his portrayal in "The Queen", coldly feeding the "People's Princess" line to Blair, more than his own diaries. The cartoonish version of Campbell as the arch spin doctor is now a cultural fixture of its own, turning up not only in "The Queen" but in books like "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen". I wonder what Campbell must think about that.

Ambition and rivaly are never far from the surface. When describing Blair's lengths football header session with Kevin Keegan, Campbell is careful to note that it was easier than it seemed, since "of course a professional like Keegan can head the ball towards a target in the same way most of us can throw it, so it wasn't that difficult."

I found it amusing that Campbell goes out of his way not to to use the word "spin". I expect that he became thoroughly sick of hearing that word.

Note that this is "Extracts from" Alastair Campbell's diaries. The really secret stuff is, well, secret.

We'll see in a hundred years if Blair's leadership was meaningful, a bridge or a failure. Until then the book allows us to see a side that we have not had an opportunity to study yet - if you want to see it. If you don't, then you've already decided history, I guess, which is a brave thing.

I am really into Tony Blair and am especially fascinated with his dealings with the War on
Terror. I wrote a research paper on that very subject and checked this book out from a library as a source. I like it because the information is first-hand, straight from the confines of Number 10. I enjoy reading about Blair and made this the first "chronicle" really, to my Blair library. It's an easy read, though long, because of the journal entry-like style. It's also really gritty, not polished over like many things you might read about someone in government. It's fantastic.

Whereas the recently released diaries of President Reagan were an approachable exercise in easy readability that never excluded facts and anecdotes about the personages of the age, this diary is truly for hard-core political aficionados only. I can read almost anything, and even I had trouble getting through The Blair Years. What's wrong here? Well, the typeface was poorly chosen, the writing style was distancing at best, and even the entries themselves were printed too closely together and should have been better designed. In the end everything about this work serves to put a reader off.

For every interesting piece about, say, dinner with Princess Diana (who served Mr. Campbell tea), the Queen's bored reaction to the Millennium celebrations, or juicy details on Bill Clinton's personal opinion of then-President elect Bush, there are scores of entries that cover minutia so densely recorded that I truly think this is a book that will be of greatest value to a graduate student studying foreign affairs, or a future historian who wishes to research the Blair years. The average reader hoping to get a backstage pass to politics as undertaken at 10 Downing Street will probably do better looking elsewhere.

While Campbell is comprehensive, he is not (at least as evidenced here) gifted with those talents that make for an engrossing reading experience.

mr campbell wrote every thing about sir tony blair in the period from 1994-2003 you will feel you are working & living in 10 downing street or in the labour party -before they became in power in 1997- really good job . iam waiting for mr blair diaraes which i heard that it will be released in 2008 to have the complete view about the most powerful british prime minester since margret tatcher

This book was returned due to its poor quality. There was simply no way I could present this book as a gift due to the cut of the pages. Please improve your product standards.

You don't have to go far into this "diary" to discover it's a highly interesting and possibly questionable account of the times but an account that has been not only excised of any substance but of any objectivity too. Therefore it fails as a diary and becomes a very monochrome and monotone account of.......well what? Campbell was well know in Fleet Street as a partial leaker of government business. That is the way the system works. If you were in favour by printing favourable things about "Nu" Labour then you got his highly coloured stories. Woe betide you if you printed the truth, locked out of the circle of knowledge you were left with crumbs from the table. And so "Nu" Labour set out with Campbell to control the press, sometime sucessful, sometimes with spectacular failure (Honours for money). Whatever Campbells truth is, it is his own and he should be left to it and his own fantacies!

George Bush suffers from the worst public approval rating of any modern president. As bad as things are for Bush, Tony Blair, frequently referred to as "Bush's Poodle", was forced from office due to 85% of the British public disapproving of his leadership. With this backdrop, Blair's chief propagandist, the author Alastair Campbell, engages in revisionist history and desperately attempts to downplay the significance of the Iraq war debacle. If you have not been living in a cave for the past ten years, than nothing new will be discovered in this drivel of a book.