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“... If you search for images of Alastair Campbell on Google, you will find, many times over, a picture taken by a Press Association photographer during the Hutton Inquiry. The photo is proliferating: it even graced a recent cover of Poetry Review. It shows Campbell standing outside, wearing a suit and tie, his right arm folded across his body, a scroll of paper in his hand ...”

“... as long as possible. Although making sense in and of the world is not irrelevant to a review of Alastair Campbell’s first novel, All in the Mind, it was my initial plan, after reading it, to extend the preliminary discussion of the niceties of sanity and madness to about 2975 words, after which I would round up to a respectable 3000 words with a ...”

“... all-out war, because at the moment we have the upper hand. The person to whom Blair said that was Alastair Campbell, whom he appointed to run his press operation shortly after becoming party leader. It is worth noticing how accurate Blair’s sense of the press-government relationship is: it makes you wonder, if he saw things so clearly, how on earth he ...”

“... a lovely man, but really’; ‘Don’t get me wrong’; ‘Take my word for it’; ‘I said to Alastair, mark my words’; ‘didn’t matter a hoot to me’; ‘He conceded nothing, and I mean nothing’; ‘The whole business was barking.’ He uses the inclusive ‘your’: ‘what your Marxist would call …’, ‘your ordinary motorist’, ‘your ...”

“... with in 2015? George and Ed are trying to hoover up the crumbs left by Rory (Stewart) and Alastair (Campbell), whose podcast, The Rest Is Politics, is a freak sensation – even selling out the Royal Albert Hall for a live recording – and a source of succulent profit. George and Ed, we know, are real good ...”

“... debased. In the immediate aftermath of the report’s publication, the Napoleonic posture of Alastair Campbell, proclaiming his integrity from some sort of throne against a grand imperial backdrop, contrasted with the BBC employees’ mobbing of their departing director general to give us the two images with which Hutton will now always be ...”

“... Some notes, though. Revealing, since his vanity was the main issue, were the settings in which Alastair Campbell chose to present himself: two Palladian interiors that would not have shamed a head of state. His simple joy at the vindication of the truth about as convincing as Jonathan Aitken’s dedication to it. Almost the only heartening note was ...”

“... to wait for the arrival of the man the bullshitters urge us to look on as the mother of them all, Alastair Campbell, to distrust what all governments say, as opposed to what they are seen to be doing. On the other hand, the turnout at the next general election could be a lot lower still, as the great many former Labour voters who are appalled by ...”

“... has ever produced’. The British used to do the journalist-politician very well. Now we have Alastair Campbell. David was for a time a Labour councillor but he was more susceptible to the charms of political commentary. He presented himself as a plain man, and on occasion stated his own point of view very plainly, but he was also more interesting ...”

“... the intelligence wordings in the worrying sense. It’s quite extraordinary that the ghastly Alastair Campbell, Blair’s PR man now turned vaudevillian, was not even asked to give evidence to Butler’s committee. The incriminated dossier of September 2002 was of course presented as the work of the Joint Intelligence Committee but – Butler ...”

“... secretary, William ‘Bronco Bill’ Sutherland, had a reputation every bit as evil as that of Alastair Campbell or Gordon Brown’s frightful pair, Charlie Whelan and Damian ‘McPoison’ McBride. Nor was it always the PM’s press spokesmen who dripped the poison. At the time of Suez, Eden’s spokesman, William Clark, was startled to get a call ...”

“... the violence that Brown wished on his enemies. The underling was working towards the Führer. Alastair Campbell, speaking on Andrew Neil’s Daily Politics, thinks the proper analogy is with football. McBride was a rogue player so set on mindless aggression that he fouled people all over the pitch. He was like a footballer who was happy to kick his ...”

“... accuses of having no sense of purpose: a grinning fool he derides for prancing around in front of Alastair Campbell in his yellow and green underpants. The truth is that Blair was all these people and more: the mystic, the fool, the sofa politician, the neocon, the preacher on a tank and the deliverologist. The reason the last matters is that it allowed ...”

“... Branson, Paul McCartney, Patsy Kensit, Ian Botham, Jordan, Mohammed al Fayed, Cherie Blair, Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair. (If there are names in that list you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, none of them matters as much as they think they do.) At a Christmas lunch at the Mirabelle for his Mirror columnists, Morgan remembers ...”

“... by us,’ New Labour told government press officers at the outset. Less well remembered perhaps is Alastair Campbell’s creation of a head of ‘story development’. The post of official fabulist was filled by Paul Hamill, who would play an inglorious role in the fabrication of the Dodgy Dossier of September 2002.We weren’t careful what we half-wished ...”