Alastair Campbell
by Peter Oborne and Simon Walters
Aurum £8.99, pp370

Everyone who has encountered the one-man show that is Alastair Campbell has a tale to tell about his charisma, kindness or cruelty. There are two occasions I'll always remember, which demonstrated to me the strange contradictions of this unique political character.

The first was when, as a struggling journalist in the early 1990s, I wrote to him asking for advice when he was political editor of the Daily Mirror. Rather than throwing the letter in the bin, he suggested I meet him at the House of Commons. He spent an hour showing me around, then sent me to the Express to meet his wife, Fiona Millar, who was equally generous with her time. Neither Campbell nor Millar had anything to gain from this.

The second encounter came just after the 1997 election when the Observer football team was challenged to a game by David Miliband, who, as head of the Downing Street policy unit, ran a team called Demon Eyes. Campbell insisted on playing, although he was 40 and this was well before he started training for marathons. In true New Labour style, he had come to a secret pre-match agreement, which meant he would come off after quarter of an hour.

But by half-time, Downing Street were a couple of goals down, Campbell was still on the pitch and fast becoming a liability. Miliband was furious and ordered the Prime Minister's communications director off the pitch. Campbell spent the next 10 minutes fuming and shouting on the touchline until it all became too much and he ordered one of his underlings off and put himself back into the game.

This book is essentially a rewrite of Peter Oborne's biography of Campbell from 1999, but much has happened since then to justify a new edition. Oborne and co-author Simon Walters capture well the peculiarities of Campbell's psychology which create in him a fearsome loyalty to his friends or political masters and an obsessive hatred of his enemies.

Campbell's nervous breakdown clearly had a lasting effect. It is no coincidence that the worst insult he can find for someone is that they are mentally unhinged. Gordon Brown was 'psychologically flawed', while Peter Mandelson was 'curiously detached' after the Hinduja affair, when Campbell likened his behaviour to Ron Davies's 'moment of madness' on Clapham Common.

When this book first came out, many wondered whether the subject justified a biography. Events have shown that Campbell is closer to the heart of the Blairite project then anyone could possibly have imagined.