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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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Alastair Campbell
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 25
Diarist
Journalist
Novelist
Politician
Keighley
West Yorkshire
Alastair John Campbell
Bigs
Brown
Next
Training
Ferguson
Doesn
Football
Gordon
Someone
Player
Sack
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Blair
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More quotes by Alastair Campbell

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Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.
Alastair Campbell
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Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.
Alastair Campbell
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There is something in me that makes me see things through.
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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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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My dad, Donald, was a vet and had a practice in Yorkshire. Cats and dogs were his bread and butter, but his greatest love was large animals.
Alastair Campbell
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The junk food of political journalism...all reshuffle stories are crap.
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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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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Greg Dyke is on record as saying that once the BBC was attacked, it was their job to defend themselves. But that is not their job.
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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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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The thing about politicians in Britain is that they are out there, you can lobby them, get close to them, there are loads of ways you can protest against them, and booing is a pretty weak way of doing it.
Alastair Campbell
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Sometimes Jonathan [Powell] and myself would go to Tony [Blair] and ask him if he was absolutely sure about this or that. That was our job. But ultimately it was his decision.
Alastair Campbell
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Don't accept that you are in crisis just because everyone says you are.
Alastair Campbell
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I think I'm highly loveable.
Alastair Campbell
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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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I used to be very routine-based and the new thing in my life is not having a clear, full-time existence.
Alastair Campbell