Mingling with the crowds who thronged the Mall yesterday to savour some rare sunshine and the start of the Tour de France was at least one member of Britain's political class not wondering about the potential landmines in tomorrow's publication of The Blair Years: Extracts from the Alastair Campbell Diaries - Alastair Campbell himself.
Campbell, along with his two sons and his friend and New Labour pollster Philip Gould, was seizing a last afternoon of relative anonymity before re-entering the limelight. He withdrew somewhat in 2003, after a bruising battle with the BBC over the allegedly 'sexed-up' Iraq dossier, the suicide of weapons expert David Kelly and the Hutton Report.
Some of the most powerful entries in his 794-page tome deal with the pain and pressure that he hid, in those final days, behind a trademark facade of self-confidence and control. It is little wonder he has told friends that he feels a mix of excitement and 'apprehension' about re-opening old wounds with a book that his website proclaims as 'the most compelling and revealing account of contemporary politics you will ever read'.
Others will feel mostly apprehension. During nine years at Tony Blair's side, from opposition through the first six years of New Labour rule, Campbell became routinely referred to as 'the second most powerful man in Britain' (understating his role, some quipped). Last night, one government minister describing the atmosphere of frenzy and fear ahead of the Diaries, remarked: 'It's beginning to feel as if he still is.'
No one had greater access to the Prime Minister. No one in Blair's political inner circle has had an easier or closer relationship with him. And no one - as the Tory blogger and publisher Iain Dale remarked last week - knows more about where Labour 'bodies' are buried... 'because he buried them'.
Yet in the run-up to the publication of his book, and an accompanying three-part BBC TV special also beginning this week, something of a transformation in the image of Blair's 'King of Spin' has been under way.
Since leaving, he has spent much of his time beyond the glare of publicity. Not least, having secured a reported £1m advance for the Diaries, he has been working away in the converted basement office he shares with his journalist partner, Fiona, at a property they have bought next door to their family home in north-west London.
To the extent he has been in the public eye, it has generally been because of twin personal passions. One is Burnley Football Club, taken to such extremes that his personal email domain includes the phrase 'claret and blue', the team's colours. The other has involved his efforts, including a middle-aged transformation into a triathlete, to raise cancer research funds in memory of his close friend, journalist John Merritt, following the death of both Merritt and his young daughter from the disease.
But Campbell himself has, in the past few weeks, taken an active role in his public rebirth. A computerphobe during the Downing Street years, he has launched a blog called 'Diary of the Diary' full of observations on everyone from singer Mick Hucknall to David Cameron, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
The newly laid-back tone is best captured by his reflections on a chance meeting with Carole Caplin - the style guru who dazzled Cherie Blair, to Campbell's undisguised alarm, and, with her conman companion Peter Foster, got Number 10 entangled in a Bristol real estate deal known as 'Cheriegate'.
Caplin will probably not come off well in the Diaries but he recounts how he and Caplin had now 'had a really nice chat'. But in a spirit of reflective tolerance that would have astounded members of the political press lobby at the height of his command of the government spin machine, he concludes: 'I found myself realising that as time passes, you can have a different perspective on events and people.'
In fact, Campbell has always been a tangle of contradictory qualities. Outwardly self-confident, he can, at times, be extraordinarily fragile. The private agony of the Kelly suicide and its aftermath will have inevitably brought back disturbing memories of his breakdown two decades ago during the early, hard-drinking days at the Mirror
'If your knowledge of him comes only from the media, your impression might be of a man who is confident, takes no prisoners,' Stuart Prebble, who worked with Campbell on the BBC programmes, said. 'But when you read the book, you get an impression of a guy who is more vulnerable than you would think.'
He might now be often dismissive and hostile about the press, but when he began his working life in journalism as a Mirror trainee in Plymouth, where he met Fiona Millar, he was 'passionate' about being in journalism, according to one early colleague.
He retained, despite his later disenchantment, the tabloid pro's talent for the wonderful turn of phrase. It was Campbell, says one of his closest friends, who coined the 'People's Princess' phrase that defined Blair's response to Diana's death. And when Bill Clinton's speech wowed the October 2002 Labour Party conference in Blackpool, its celebrated opening line - 'Clinton, Bill, Arkansas CLP, New Labour' - was Campbell's.
And while Campbell could be savagely critical of politicians or media figures he didn't like, he has always been fiercely loyal and protective towards those he did - none more so than Tony Blair.
The closeness of their relationship reflects a similarity in the back-stories. Like Blair, he had a comfortably middle-class upbringing, and secured an Oxbridge education, without developing any serious interest, much less driving passion, about politics. Like Blair, too, part of what changed all that was his life partner - though Fiona was and is far more politically driven than Cherie Blair, and has exerted a more profound influence on her partner.
Millar's father, Robert, became a role model: a Fleet Street journalist, but also fiercely and outspokenly political. His brand of politics was Old Labour socialist, and it was at the Millar family home that Campbell first met leading Labour lights, including the one who, next to Blair, remains his closest party friend: Neil Kinnock.
For Campbell, the Kinnock relationship eased and encouraged his passage from lobby reporter to eventual political editor of the Mirror. More importantly it gave him a sense of political commitment on issues, such as an abhorrence of private education, that led to some of his fiercest internal rows while at Downing Street.
The Diaries are certain to provide a fascinating insight into the complexities of Campbell's character rarely seen when he had his frontline role.
One driving force, say friends, remains his fierce 'tribal' loyalty both to Blair and Labour - and its flipside, an almost visceral dislike for anything Tory. His determination not to do 'anything to detract from the wider battle to win the next election' - the words of a friend yesterday - explains the extraordinary decision to expurgate from the diaries any serious reference to the bitter feud between Brown and Blair that dominated Campbell's time at Number 10.
The effect will inevitably be to shine Campbell's occasionally excoriating criticism on other targets. Over recent weeks, the 'new' Campbell has managed to mount a leak-proof campaign. But this hasn't stopped politicians and reporters great and small from asking Campbell - and his friends - the same questions: 'Am I in the book? Do I come off badly?'
One figure who could fare badly is Peter Mandelson, who still blames Campbell for having been responsible for his second forced resignation from the cabinet, over the Hinduja passport affair, despite the fact that a later inquiry cleared him of wrongdoing. 'Peter is doubly unlucky,' said one friend of both men last night. 'Both because he's sure to be the target of some pretty pointed diary entries, and because without the Brown-Blair battle as a context, Peter's often angry and driven efforts to protect Tony will look incredibly over-the-top.'
But claims on Campbell's website that the book will offer the kind of insight that only his special access and involvement makes possible are more than mere spin. One of Blair's oldest and closest government allies, asked to describe Campbell's place, recounted a conversation he had had with the ultra-Blairite MP Alan Milburn during the last general election campaign. Milburn, at Blair's behest, had been drafted in ostensibly to run things, a role soon displaced not only by Brown but by the growing influence of the 'retired' Campbell.
'Alan was feeling down about being so marginalised,' he recalled. 'But I said to him he was silly to have agreed to get involved if he really thought he was going to have the final influence. Only three men in politics have really been close to Tony, I told him: Gordon, Peter. And Alastair.'
The Campbell Diaries
Born Alastair John Campbell, 25 May 1957, Keighley, West Yorkshire, the son of Donald, a veterinarian, and Elizabeth Campbell. He and his partner, journalist Fiona Millar, have two sons and a daughter.
Best of times Tony Blair's landslide 1997 victory, ending 18 years of Tory rule. Campbell was critical in managing the media campaign, including the symbolically important switch by Rupert Murdoch's Sun from the Tories.
Worst of times The suicide of government weapons expert David Kelly after being named as the source of a BBC report alleging Campbell and others had 'sexed up' intelligence on Saddam's WMD programme before the Iraq War. It was the Hutton inquiry, which cleared Campbell of wrongdoing, that led to the revelation that Campbell was keeping diaries: one entry had him noting that disclosing the BBC source would 'fuck Gilligan', a reference to the Today programme reporter Andrew Gilligan.
What he says 'It's been a period of phenomenal change for the better in this country... I look back and I see what a phenomenal privilege it was just to be there, and to be a small part of helping to make that change happen.'
What others say 'His detractors see him as a yob and a bully [but] ... he remoulded Labour's media operation. Campbell's exuberant personality was the most powerful force in Number 10.'
Anthony Seldon, biographer of Tony Blair
