In the journal History Today, Archie Brown, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Oxford was critical of what he believed to be Blair's flawed sense of leadership, but had praise for the chapter on the Northern Ireland peace process: "Blair's role in the Northern Ireland settlement was perhaps his single most noteworthy achievement. It is also widely believed that the character of Malcolm Tucker from the BBC political satire comedy The Thick of It is loosely based on Campbell. In January 2014, Campbell announced that he was joining British GQ with a brief to conduct interviews with figures from "politics.

Sometimes Bower is straining so hard to damn the accused that the author tumbles into the ridiculous. Several chapters are devoted to trying to sustain the accusation that Blair presided over a “silent conspiracy” to flood Britain with immigrants. Campbell voted Labour in the 2019 general election, having been part of a failed tactical voting campaign aimed at preventing Johnson from winning a majority. But it frequently suffers from Seldon's lack of day-to-day contact with Westminster and his unfamiliarity with Labour and its leading figures. The Tiree Community Songbook was made into a CD, which won a Community award at the Traditional Music awards.If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. On his watch, the IRA, which had been the most murderous killing machine in Europe, put itself out of business.

Campbell made his first appearance on the BBC One political discussion programme Question Time on 27 May 2010. Contemporary history and biography dates quickly, and all these books will be superseded, particularly once the memoirs and diaries of the main actors, such as Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell, are published. The march was described by the media as the second biggest ever, after the protest against the Iraq war in 2003. Watch: Scottish musicians join forces with Alastair Campbell to launch charity single in aid of NHS workers". Within a week, Nielsen BookScan said that 92,000 copies of A Journey had been sold in the United Kingdom, the best opening week for an autobiography since the company began keeping figures in 1998.He wrote that it made Blair seem "likable, if manipulative; capable of dissembling while wonderfully fluent; in short, a brilliant modern politician (whatever his moans about the media). He had played the bagpipes at a concert in Glasgow earlier in the year, staged entirely by musicians with links to Tiree. In his autobiography, Blair would later reveal that Campbell had coined the name " New Labour" and described Campbell as a "genius". In Blair's own account, A Journey (in which Mandelson features hardly at all, and Gordon Brown only at the end) it is of course very different. If you are interested in why Blair made his mistakes, you won’t find any profounder explanation than the repeated assertion that he was a duplicitous and conceited fool.