“... telling descriptions of Adams have been made by those who saw him working closely with McGuinness. Alastair Campbell recorded in his diaries that at an early stage of the peace process Blair asked both men whether they would be able to sign up to a settlement that didn’t explicitly commit to a united Ireland. ‘Adams was OK,’ Blair reported, ‘but ...”

“... and what she eventually gave was a mendacious little speech composed for her with the help of Alastair Campbell, in which she spoke about how she felt as a queen and as a grandmother. No one believed she really meant it, but that didn’t matter; she got through by showing she wasn’t above sharing, and that was enough. Still, she was bested ...”

“... as if on their way to a Royal Marine assault course. Next appears Robin Cook, who is led aside by Alastair Campbell and rehearsed in conspiratorial whispers about what he is to say to the reptiles waiting across the road. Cook, whom I’ve never met, gives me a quick, suspicious look. Alastair, whom I have, carefully ...”

“... unprecedented rudeness, surpassing even the gruff Bernard Ingham under Thatcher and the venomous Alastair Campbell under Blair. For all Johnson’s protestations that he wishes to see warm and friendly relations with ‘our European friends’, he only has eyes and ears for the domestic Europhobes who raised him to his position. We have moved from ...”

“... released at the Hutton Inquiry, Jonathan Powell, the prime minister’s chief of staff, wrote to Alastair Campbell and David Manning, Blair’s foreign policy adviser, of an early draft of the September dossier on Iraq’s WMD programme: ‘I think it is worth explicitly stating what TB keeps saying: this is the advice from the Joint Intelligence ...”

“... government spokesperson is a bit of a leap, though there are odder episodes in the early career of Alastair Campbell. No subject was further from my mind when I began to write the play and it was only as I sat in on Irwin’s classes, as it were, that I saw that teaching history or teaching the self-presentation involved with the examination of history ...”

“... making it possible to freeze out unfavoured reporters. Again, this recalls the worst behaviour of Alastair Campbell when he was Blair’s spokesman. It needs to be said plainly that this is not a pleasant government, or an overscrupulous one.I do not romanticise the politics of fifty years ago. Governments were often bumbling, often underinformed, slow ...”

“... of the most memorable discussions I moderated at the BBC brought together two master spin doctors: Alastair Campbell and John Nagenda, who managed the media for President Museveni in Uganda. Much of the programme dealt with the techniques used by British officials – some of them former BBC employees – such as timing the release of information to ...”

“... Hoon’s mouthpiece. She’s not happy because she thinks this is all too warry.’ Apparently Alastair Campbell, who is trying to direct media operations in the desert from Downing Street using Wren as his instrument, would rather this army in the desert was portrayed as camping, no more.27 February. Paul and I drive to the Shuwaikh district of ...”

“... Nelson’s Miss Lincolnshire, taken last year. Include very small cartes-de-visite portraits and Alastair Thain’s huge close-up colour photographs of exhausted marines. Set an amateur snapshot by Vanessa Bell, a glamour portrait by David Bailey, and a picture of a nurse in uniform from Belle View Studio in Bradford against one another. One aim the curators ...”

“... within.’ My Irish friend recommended that people get to know the enemy by reading a biography of Alastair Campbell. The meeting lasted longer than two hours. Throughout, in what people said, there was a frequent, unthinking slippage between ‘members’ and the ‘public’. In our small discussion group it was never quite clear whom we were meant to ...”

“... There is much to be said for gathering information about a person while he is still alive, as Mr Alastair Horne is now doing in the case of Mr Macmillan. But to publish in the subject’s lifetime is difficult. There are things in some people’s careers which it is impossible even to mention while they are living and many more which it is hard to treat in ...”

“... drawn from very obscure sources. Some are in Gaelic, some in Welsh, and a good many are by women. Alastair Fowler’s New Oxford Book of 17th-Century Verse widened the canon, but no other collection of poetry from this period takes so seriously or represents so fully the geographical and social diversity of 17th-century Britain. There are poems by the group ...”

“... tycoon Roland Rudd, while most of the organisational work came from Blair’s former aide Alastair Campbell and other veterans of New Labour, who unlike Rudd were chary of committing the campaign to cancelling the result of the referendum, preferring the pretence of simply asking voters what they now thought. Tensions between the two wings boiled ...”