I was an enormously important man ... Alastair Campbell discusses his diaries. Photograph: Jeff Overs/BBC/PA
Since their publication last week, there's been a lot of coverage of Alastair Campbell's diaries considering what they add to our understanding of The Blair Years. But as a self-confessed diary geek, I just want to know if Campbell's publication is a good read, not a true historical record. The less truth - and the more deranged rants - the better, in fact. And Campbell's turns out to be one of the best, since its author is apparently under the impression that for the last ten years he has been prime minister.
Blair, it would seem, would not have got far without the brains of the operation ready to sort out his bungles. There is very little direct speech by the former prime minister that doesn't end with a question mark. Clearly, he could do nothing without Campbell's advice. The last entry of the diary has Campbell sadly leaving with Blair telling his sage that he will still be calling every day for help, to which Campbell coyly replies he might well not have the time to answer.
Take where he recounts the ludicrously Jacobean plot in which a secret deal was made with the Lord Cranborne, then Opposition leader in the "Other Place", over Lords reform. We already know this is true. What we didn't know was how Campbell imagined himself as some sort of Richard Sharpe throughout it all, working with the old guard while remaining a tough outsider they respect but can't accept. He wonders why these old school hereditaries wish to deal specifically with him but then remembers being told something by a not too different diarist, Alan Clark: "The Tory toffs were fascinated by me because they thought I was brutal and understood power and its use." Perhaps more Macdonald Fraser's Flashman than Sharpe, actually.
In fact the whole diary reads like a drunk at the wake of his best friend, reminiscing dreamily about how he and the deceased once had this country by the balls.
Like Sharpe or Flashman or any other fantasy of the tough Englishman, he never shows weakness unless it is appropriate. He felt down about Diana (though he still manages to mention that he thought she fancied him), and writes about the David Kelly inquiry with a disappointed sadness, but in this context seems to think of himself as Tom Cruise throughout the trial, trying to get to the truth that we just couldn't handle.
There have been a lot of suggestions in the last week that Campbell's prose is rather Pooterish. It's an easy, and rather lazy, link to make about any diary, but they are right in a way, it's just that he is the son rather than the father. This is Lupin's diary: the cocky, self-assured son that would flip off his colleagues and bosses while effortlessly climbing the social and professional ladder.
Yes, in a way it is brilliant, though not in the way Campbell intended. The whole thing may be useless to any decent historian, but at times it's a better satire on the last decade than David Hare or Armando Iannucci have managed to come up with. If only it were true.
