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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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Alastair Campbell
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 25
Diarist
Journalist
Novelist
Politician
Keighley
West Yorkshire
Alastair John Campbell
Obvious
Impossible
Book
Gordon
Things
Blair
Tony
Options
Brown
Brilliant

More quotes by Alastair Campbell

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I feel like thanking Paul Dacre every time, because the reason they ask me is because they think I've come through the other end with a pretty good reputation. Loads of people get a bad press but have a good reputation. [David] Beckham - think what he went through. [Bill] Clinton, likewise. You just have to be true to yourself.
Alastair Campbell
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Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.
Alastair Campbell
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He [Tony Blair] was always ambivalent about the [Rupert] Murdoch papers. But he gave other papers the chance to believe it was just about 'The Independent.' And that was wrong.
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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Don't accept that you are in crisis just because everyone says you are.
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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For all that the papers would say I was a liar, I took the words I was saying at briefings as seriously as Tony Blair took what he would say at the Despatch Box. I find it very difficult not to tell the truth. I felt I was accountable for what I said.
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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I hold no candle for George Osborne whatsoever. He has no strategic skills, is a hopeless chancellor, has no idea how most people have to live and his policies are failing and hurting millions.
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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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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My aunty says I'm the double of my father. He was a workaholic, which I've definitely inherited. And like me, he could be the life and soul of the party, but also quite withdrawn.
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'm certainly driven, I hate losing, I can be ruthless and short-tempered and terribly competitive.
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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There is something in me that makes me see things through.
Alastair Campbell
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We should confine booing in sports arenas to sport. I love a good boo as much as the next football fan.
Alastair Campbell
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One day, we will look back and wonder how on earth we used to believe that depression was a lifestyle choice, only to be debated and taken seriously when an A List film star took his life, and the world filled with people saying how shocked and saddened they were.
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