Has He Got History For You

Alastair Campbell is launching the fourth volume of his unexpurgated Diaries at the Mile End Group at Queen Mary, University of London, at 6.30pm on 20 June.

He will be “In Conversation With” me, before taking questions. Details of how to apply for tickets are here.

The Burden of Power completes the quartet of the complete diaries, which were originally published in condensed and Brownlerised form (that is, with the rude bits about Gordon taken out) as The Blair Years in 2007. This volume covers the most dramatic period of Campbell’s time as Tony Blair’s head of communications, 2001-03.

I am reading a review copy of it and I can say that it lives up to its billing as the most important primary source material on the second Blair term.

I can also reveal that, in the Introduction, Campbell says that he continued to keep a diary after he left Downing Street in 2003, which he might publish one day. He came back to help fight the 2005 and 2010 elections and was in No 10 on the day that Gordon Brown, and New Labour, finally departed.

While you wait for 20 June, Campbell presented Have I Got News For You last night, where he worked on a quizzical look that made Ian Hislop look a bit daft in pursuing his anti-war obsessions.

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• JohnJustice

  According to your last comment I suppose you would have been one of those who were happy to let Hitler exterminate the Jews in Germany while he was not attacking us and our allies. So much for your earlier reference to the generation who heroically saw off the fascists in Mile End!

  And the only lies about the Iraq war are the lies people like you spread about Tony Blair’s part in it.

• Odysseus

  What the hell are you talking about – we did “let” the extermination take place, if you must put it that way.You don’t seriously consider that we went to war to prevent or halt the genocide do you?

  By the same token, you don’t believe Blair et al sexed up the dossier and lied to the British people in order to take this country to war to get rid of a rather nasty dictator who massacred his own people,do you?.If you sincerely do believe that you are breathtakingly naive,and I almost feel sorry for you.

• JohnJustice

  Reply to Odysseus’ latest reply

  No we didn’t go to war to prevent or halt the genocide. But according to your logic we should have stood by while it was happening because it wasn’t affecting us.

  And no I don’t believe Blair lied to get rid of Saddam ( almost every intelligence agency in the world believed he still possessed WMD) although I would have had some sympathy for him if he did if this was the only way of overthrowing such an
  evil monster.

• Odysseus

  “almost every intelligence agency in the world believed he still possessed WMD”. Evidence?

  What sheer nonsense, David Kelly revealed that the dossier was sexed up to make a case for war and Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector, said while Bush was still in power: “It was never about disarmament. It was never about getting rid of weapons of mass destruction. It started with George Herbert Walker Bush and it was a policy continued through eight years of the Clinton presidency and then brought us to this current disastrous course of action under the current Bush administration”.

  Please don’t fabricate history simply to suit your point – god knows Blair is good at that sort of thing, one is more than enough.

• http://twitter.com/crehillfanclub Arthur Watt

  Poor Ciaran.