Former Downing Street communications director Alastair Campbell has declined to grant any newspaper the rights to serialise his forthcoming diaries of his time working with Tony Blair, turning his back on an estimated £400,000.

Mr Campbell said he had forbidden a potentially lucrative serialisation due to ethical and political issues surrounding the publication of extracts from the diaries.

"It has led me not to serialise, lest people assume my prime motive is either financial or sensationalist," he wrote as part of a 2,000-word posting on his website, AlastairCampbellDiaries.co.uk, to promote the publication of The Blair Years.

"It has led me to be reasonable and responsible about content, whilst ensuring it is a book I believe many people will want to read," Mr Campbell added.

Mr Campbell has, however, signed a deal with BBC2 to air a three-part factual series based on the diaries. The three one-hour programmes will air just a couple of days after the diaries are published on July 9.

The former spin doctor, who had a heated row with the BBC over the intelligence dossier the government released as justification for the Iraq war, said that a major theme of the book was the continual and "untrue" media depiction of the government.

"It has been a constant theme of mine over the past decade that much of the modern media distorts the real process of politics," he wrote on his website.

"The depiction of politics in general, and TB [Tony Blair] in particular, is partial, and as a result untrue. It has the superficial appearance of being whole and truthful because of the huge volume of words spoken and written about it, 24 hours a day, much of it one journalist talking to another about what other journalists are saying," Mr Campbell added.

"Politics itself is more difficult and painstaking, more complex, more human than it is ever given credit for. I think that in recording a lot of that humanity, the ups and downs, the difficulties, real people dealing with real challenges under a relentless and often hostile spotlight, I can help to give a more rounded picture of what it is actually like."

The original diaries ran to more than 2m words. Mr Campbell and his book editor, Richard Stott, who was his boss and editor of the Daily Mirror in the early 90s when he was the tabloid's political editor, have cut down this to 350,000 words to ready them for publication.

Mr Campbell said that "little had survived" in the 700-page book about his day-to-day engagement with the media.

"I think people will be surprised - as indeed I have been ... Clearly, the events that led to the Hutton inquiry were an important part of the Blair premiership, and are therefore covered in detail," he added.

"I hope that when the full diaries are published, they will become a part of the historical record of a fascinating period in British and international politics."

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