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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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Alastair Campbell
Age: 67
Born: 1957
Born: May 25
Diarist
Journalist
Novelist
Politician
Keighley
West Yorkshire
Alastair John Campbell
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Dyke
Dykes
Greg
Attacked
Defend
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More quotes by 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 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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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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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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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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To me, marriage is partly a religious thing and I'm not religious.
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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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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I think I'm highly loveable.
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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Tony's [Blair] convinced I'm going to find God. I do have spiritual moments, but I don't think it's God.
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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I have always been driven. I have always believed in what I believe very deeply.
Alastair Campbell
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I have a nightmare about Tony [Blair] and Gordon [Brown] killing each other. Not every month, but now and then. I also have a recurring dream about losing.
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
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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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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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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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My closest friend, who died not long ago, is buried near Marx's grave in Highgate cemetery, so I see the gaggle of admirers laying roses at the foot of his tombstone regularly. I have never been tempted to leave flowers there myself. Great theories, shame about the practice. Marx did many things. But inventing class was not one of them.
Alastair Campbell
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Jeremy, are we going to play your games?
Alastair Campbell