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The royal family's existence is a constant reminder of the hollowness of John Major's rhetoric, and idiotic statements by its leading members a constant boost to the republican cause. They're fine opening hospitals. It's when they open their mouths they get into trouble.

Alastair Campbell

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Alastair Campbell
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 25
Diarist
Journalist
Novelist
Politician
Keighley
West Yorkshire
Alastair John Campbell
Open
Mouths
Rhetoric
Causes
Major
Royal
Existence
Constant
Hospitals
Family
Members
Leading
Hollowness
Republican
Statements
Idiotic
Cause
John
Reminder
Fine
Opening
Boost
Trouble
Majors
Reminders

More quotes by Alastair Campbell

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As Tony [Blair] said in his book, Gordon [Brown] was brilliant and impossible. If he'd just been one of those things, the options are obvious.
Alastair Campbell
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Paul Keating told us before we were elected that you can do deals with [Rupert] Murdoch without saying you were doing a deal. Did we do that kind of thing? Maybe. But from around about the turn of the century, I felt strongly that we had to do something about media ownership and self-regulation. Tony [Blair] disagreed.
Alastair Campbell
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I'm certainly driven, I hate losing, I can be ruthless and short-tempered and terribly competitive.
Alastair Campbell
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Like most meaningful activities, campaigns are team games.
Alastair Campbell
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One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that 'My Life,' Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.
Alastair Campbell
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Tony [Blair] slowly sucked me back in for the 2005 campaign, and from six months out, I was basically working full time trying to keep the Tony[Blair] - Gordon[Brown] thing together for the campaign. It was awful.
Alastair Campbell
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My public caricature - that of a self-confident alpha male - is only partly accurate.
Alastair Campbell
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By asking the question 'Am I happy?,' and via the answer setting out what I mean by happiness, there is a political route that can be taken, by asking another question - 'Can politics deliver happiness, and should it try?'
Alastair Campbell
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There are many reasons for the decline in royal esteem. One is that so many of the royals are thick.
Alastair Campbell
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To me, marriage is partly a religious thing and I'm not religious.
Alastair Campbell
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I remember talking to Alex Ferguson about Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown], and he said: Why doesn't Tony just get rid of him? But if you sack someone in football, they can't turn up to training the next day. In politics they're still on the pitch. Gordon would still have been a big player.
Alastair Campbell
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In an ideal world, it would not take a film star to get the media focused on mental illness.
Alastair Campbell
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I had a happy childhood.
Alastair Campbell
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What concerns me is that the Independent is going, and there are job cuts at the Guardian, but the wretched Daily Mail is still rampant, making lots of money by millions of people clicking on pictures of cellulited women. I think that's sad.
Alastair Campbell
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I have always been driven. I have always believed in what I believe very deeply.
Alastair Campbell
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I used to be very routine-based and the new thing in my life is not having a clear, full-time existence.
Alastair Campbell
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There is something in me that makes me see things through.
Alastair Campbell
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The media are obsessed with spin doctors and with portraying them as a bad thing, yet seem addicted to our medicine.
Alastair Campbell
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So here is one of my theories on happiness: we cannot know if we have lived a truly happy life until the very end. This view of life and death was reinforced by my close witnessing of the buildup to the death of Philip Gould. Philip was without doubt my closest friend in politics. When he died, I felt like I had lost a limb.
Alastair Campbell
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May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.
Alastair Campbell