Diaries Volume One: Prelude to Power (The Alastair Campbell Diaries, 1)

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Volume 1 details the extraordinary tensions between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown as they resolved the question as to which one should stand to become Labour leader. It shows that right from the start, relations at the top were prone to enormous strain, suspicions and accusations of betrayal. Yet it also shows the political and personal bonds that tied them together, and which made them one of the most feared and respected electoral machines anywhere in the world. Alastair Campbell announces his resignation as Tony Blair’s director of communications, August 2003. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images Yet, in the Campbell version, it is more often a grim and grinding tale than an inspiring and uplifting story. This is partly because the diary is grouchily coloured by the chronically depressive nature of its author, a man who presents a pugilistic face to the world as a mask for frequent despair about his life. Even on the night of the first, sensational election triumph, when Tory seat after seat is tumbling to Labour, he is miserable. "Fiona [Millar, Campbell's partner] asked what was wrong. I said it was probably the anticlimax and the worries about the future." The worries one can understand: Labour was coming into office after an 18-year absence from power. But an "anticlimax"? Labour has just won a crushing landslide and one of that victory's architects is grey with gloom. That persists when Blair makes his "A new dawn has broken, has it not?" speech at the Royal Festival Hall. Writes Campbell: "It was weird. I felt deflated. All around us people were close to delirium but I didn't feel part of it." 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.

He is criticised in the report for failing to properly articulate to his commanders the scope and direction of Britain’s strategy in southern Iraq after the invasion. Well, now Tony Blair's consigliere, Alastair Campbell, has stepped forward, after editing down more than two million words into a still-formidable volume, to tell us that in all those years when the author was firing off abusive letters to television stations, tearing a strip off inadequate journalists and threatening elected members of the Labour party with the termination of their halting careers, he was secretly suffering agonies of self-doubt, wondering whether the price he and his family were paying was far too high, and despairing daily of how he might ever again lead what he calls a normal life. At a Celia Johnson-ish moment in their second election campaign, he and Tony Blair stop in a Dorset café by the sea. "Don't you sometimes wish," says Blair, apparently scripted by Noël Coward, "we had a normal life like the people who live over there?"He told Iraq that many countries still believed it had WMD. But the council wanted to offer Iraq a last opportunity, one that the UK and the US in the end did not wait for. John Williams Goldsmith comes out badly from the Chilcot report – maybe second only to Blair in terms of damage to his reputation. Scarlett emerges from the Chilcot report with his reputation badly damaged, mainly for failing to rein in some of the wilder conclusions by Blair in claiming that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the basis for going to war. Straw told Blair: “We will obviously need to discuss all this, but I thought it best to put it in your mind as event[s] could move fast. And what I propose is a great deal better than the alternatives. When Bush graciously accepted your offer to be with him all the way, he wanted you alive not dead!” Clare Short

The report notes that Hoon – early in 2002, before Blair went to see Bush in Texas in April – identified Iran as being a bigger problem for the UK than Iraq in terms of weapons of mass destruction proliferation. But he did not follow through on this and joined the rush to war in Iraq. Hans Blix Riveting and revelatory, The Burden of Power is as raw and intimate a portrayal of political life as you are ever likely to read. This was Campbell not being mendacious, but simply faulty. One diarist, scribbling away late at night after long and stressful days, and writing from a self-serving perspective, will not be wholly trustworthy. This is a problem with all the memoirs from actors of the New Labour years, those which have already been published, and those which have yet to come. While diligent journalists and historians try to gather as much evidence from as many different witnesses as they can, the political diarist relies on just one uncorroborated source: themselves.Straw also identified the need for a “Plan B” for the UK not to participate in military action in the event that the government failed to secure a majority in the parliamentary Labour party for military action.