Alastair Campbell Quotes

I will continue to help the political causes I believe in in any way I can.

In an ideal world, it would not take a film star to get the media focused on mental illness.

Like most meaningful activities, campaigns are team games.

Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.

One in four of us will have a mental illness at some point. That is a lot of people.

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.

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.

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.

The day of the daredevil reporter who refuses to see obstacles to getting the truth, and seeing it with his or her own eyes, seems to have died.

I’m certainly driven, I hate losing, I can be ruthless and short-tempered and terribly competitive.

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.

My public caricature – that of a self-confident alpha male – is only partly accurate.

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.

I used to be very routine-based and the new thing in my life is not having a clear, full-time existence.

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.

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.

The bad news for journalists today is that the media, however seriously people who are in the public eye take it, is not taken as seriously as it once was – by the public.

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?’

I think I’m highly loveable.

I want to write more books, see my first novel made into a film, fight more campaigns, work in more countries. I want to be able to recall experiences that have endured for their pleasure and range and intensity.

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.

Don’t accept that you are in crisis just because everyone says you are.