Interview with Alastair Campbell

In Dublin to promote his latest book, The Irish Diaries, Alastair John Campbell is having an extremely busy day. He appeared on TV3’s Ireland AM couch early this morning, and was interviewed on Today With Sean O’Rourke on RTÉ Radio 1 a couple of hours later.
He then dropped into the Hot Press offices for a photo-shoot with Graham Keogh (they discussed football shirts), following which he went out to UCD to address the Law Society.

Our interview is scheduled for Brooks Hotel in the city centre at 4pm. I’ve been able to track Campbell’s movements on Twitter, as have his other 250,000+ followers. An enthusiastic user of social media, the 56-year-old Scot describes himself on his @campbellclaret profile as ‘Writer, communicator, strategist, used to be Tony Blair’s spokesman, now my own’. He’s also a novelist, filmmaker, political adviser and public speaker. Very much in demand on the international circuit, he’s able to command fees in excess of £10,000 per speech.
He’s certainly not short of things to talk about. A Mirror Group journalist for many years, he worked as Tony Blair’s spokesman and strategist from 1994 to 2003, and again during the 2005 general election (in Blair’s memoir, A Journey, the former PM describes him as ‘a genius’). He has written five volumes of diaries, three novels and a personal memoir on depression. He won awards for his film, Cracking Up, about his life-changing, alcohol-induced nervous breakdown in the mid-eighties.
The father of three children, Rory, Calum and Grace, he lives in London with his partner of 33 years, Fiona Millar (who worked as an assistant to Cherie Blair for many years). His most recent novel, My Name Is…, is the story of a teenage alcoholic, told from various different perspectives. Although it was published as recently as September, today is all about The Irish Diaries.
Edited by Kathy Gilfillan from Campbell’s original four-volume diaries of the Blair era, and featuring forewords by Blair and Bertie Ahern, the book offers an intimate, insider account of the conduct of Anglo-Irish relations from 1994 to 2003. It’s both a fascinating read and an important historical document, detailing his regular, and often fraught, meetings with Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness, John Hume, Mo Mowlam, David Trimble, Ian Paisley and Bill Clinton, and featuring cameo appearances from the likes of Bono, Bob Geldof, Paul McCartney and Sinéad Cusack. A sharp, honest and incisive writer, Campbell spares nobody – least of all himself – in his often entertaining diary entries.
He arrives into Brooks ten minutes late. Wearing a conservative suit, blue shirt and red tie, he’s instantly likeable and charming. Curiously, his many detractors consider him the devil incarnate. A self-confessed alcoholic, he orders a pot of tea, and we get straight into it.
Soon after the interview has ended, he posts the following tweet: “Enjoyable interview Hot Press. First time been asked when lost virginity. Now off to Irish Diaries launch Royal Hibernian Academy.”

OLAF TYARANSEN: What’s your earliest memory?
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL: Oh my god! It’s one of those interviews? (laughs) I don’t know. I can remember my first football match, which was Celtic against Motherwell. My dad was a vet, and I can remember being in his surgery, but I’m not sure what age I was. Same with my first memory of my mum. I remember hitting a ball against a wall, and her just sort of being there. But I couldn’t honestly say which of those was first.
Did you always keep a diary?
I started when I was about 10. My dad had a really bad accident. He was injecting some piglets and the sow was meant to be tied down in the pen, but it got out and it battered him against the wall. He was really in quite a bad way. Of course, if that was today, you’d have texting, Skyping, 24-hour visiting, and you’d go and see him after school. Back then, you couldn’t visit. There were strict visiting hours and only my mum could go in. So I started to write to him every day, and that’s where the diary thing started. It was very diary-ish: ‘Got up, had breakfast, went to school, blah blah’. I’d take things out of the papers, like the football results, and write them all down. That’s where the habit started.
Was it a James Herriot type of upbringing?
Very much. He was Scottish, like James Herriot, and practised in the north of England, like James Herriot. He had a surgery in town – two, actually. One was cats and dogs. He also did farm-related animals: horses, pigs, sheep. Harvey Smith, the showjumper, he was his vet, so he got into the whole professional horse scene as well. My memories of my childhood are good. It’s funny, when I became mentally ill and had my breakdown and my depression, psychiatrists were desperate to find something in my childhood that was terrible. I’ve never found it.
Were your parents strict?
Not particularly. Maybe more strict than my generation of parents. Their background was very different to mine. My Dad came from the Hebrides. English was his second language. Can you speak Gaelic?
I learned it as a kid. When I was growing up in Yorkshire – I always felt I was from Yorkshire, but I never felt I was from England. When I go to Scotland, especially now with the independence debate going on – I’m called Alastair Campbell, I play the bagpipes, my Dad’s from the Hebrides, but a lot of the SNP types wouldn’t see me as being Scottish. Well, I feel much more Scottish than English. I think I feel British, then Scottish, then Yorkshire/Northern – my football team is in Lancashire so that’s a bit of a complicating factor – then I feel London, English, European.
What did you aspire to be when you were a kid?
I never seriously thought it would happen, but I did want to be a footballer. I wanted to play cricket for England and Yorkshire; football for Burnley and Scotland, and rugby league for Keighley and Great Britain.
You didn’t want to be a writer?
No. And I didn’t even think of being a journalist until I became one. I first started writing when I was in France, as a student, the kind of soft porn stuff…
Your Wikipedia page says that your first published article was in Penthouse, but I assumed it was fake.
My Wikipedia is really boring, you know that? (laughs) There’s loads of stuff that’s not in there. It doesn’t say that I played football with Maradona.
Did you?
And with Pele. I’m one of the few people that’s played football with Pele and Maradona and it’s not even on my Wikipedia! Soccer Aid was the first one: Old Trafford, 72,000 people and Maradona. Pele was a match for when Gordon Banks’ statue was unveiled at Stoke. I always wanted to be a footballer. But I was always really big into words too. I used to write poems as a kid. I used to write songs. I was a big letter writer to all my relatives.
What were you like at school?
Good. I liked school. I hated… after my Dad’s accident, he joined the Ministry of Agriculture and became a Ministry vet. That was fine, but it meant we moved to Leicester. I was 11, so not a great time to move, and I became a bit chippy. There was a school uniform: black blazer, black and yellow tie, and I refused to take off my Burnley scarf. I wore it every day, to every lesson. And I had a rather manky blue anorak and I used to wear that in every lesson. That was my way of saying, “I don’t really come from here.” I’ve always had a little bit of that sense of not coming from any one place.
You’re an atheist – but did you have a religious upbringing?
My mum and dad both went to church every Sunday. My mum is still alive and still goes. She loves the music, the singing. She’s a community person. We went to Sunday school, did all that. I’m not sure when it happened – some time in my teens I just thought, ‘I’m not sure about this’, and I stopped believing. I don’t know if I ever really believed. I’m not anti-religion. I can’t quite stand this [Richard] Dawkins’ ‘Faith is the root of evil’ stuff. I think that faith is quite a good thing for a lot of people. I can’t share it myself, but I have people in my family who are very religious.
You had your first drink at 13. Was it something you immediately took to?
Yeah, it was. I don’t know if it was the first drink, but the first time I got drunk was on New Year’s Eve in Scotland. It wasn’t just the drinking that I enjoyed, and the fact that I seemed to be able to drink quite a lot without getting hammered… (Points at my pint on the table) I could no more drink that now than fly to the moon.
I thought you were still drinking?
There’s something about beer and spirits that I couldn’t even think about drinking. I do drink a glass of wine every now and then. I’m not drinking at the moment, and I like it when I’m not drinking. I have the odd drink to have that sense of maybe feeling a bit more normal. I’m not going to say that I didn’t enjoy being a drinker, because I did. One of the things I remember about getting drunk on New Year’s Eve in a place called Gullane, it was the next day, reliving it and talking about it and, “You won’t believe what I did!” I quite enjoyed all of that, as well.
So you’re able to control yourself now?
This is quite dangerous. See, I made a film about alcoholism for the BBC [2012’s Britain’s Hidden Alcoholics], and I thought, ‘I can’t not tell the truth about this’. So I said that I do occasionally have a drink and I got a lot of people who go to Alcholics Anonymous saying that that’s such a bad message to put out. I said, yeah, but equally, I couldn’t deny it. People are going to ask me and I can’t say ‘no’. I think I’m an addict and, at that time, alcohol was my addiction. Now, they come and go and are different sorts of things. Work is an addiction, sometimes. I’ve done six volumes of these things now (taps copy of The Irish Diaries on table] – I’m not saying that’s an addiction…
A compulsion, perhaps?
Yeah, there’s a compulsive side to me. With work, sometimes, I can get obsessions about things and think, ‘I’ve got to do something and I’ve got to do it now’. It’s the same kind of impulse. As I said to the students today in UCD, I’m a great believer that if something bad happens, try to turn it into something good. For example, I can argue that there’s loads of dark times in my diaries, but at the same time, I’ve gone through that, I’ve survived, I’ve written 10 books in 10 years, six of them about that time. I’ve written three books about mental health, all of them somewhere rooted in my breakdown. That’s my way of saying to myself, “Well, it was the worst time in your life but you’ve turned it into something.” That’s an impulse that I have. That’s a form of addiction. I’ve got a pathological fear of being bored. I’m not good at relaxing. I can be slightly manic.
What age were you when you lost your virginity?
Oh my god (laughs). I’m not going to answer that! I was wondering if sex ever became a compulsion… I’ll tell you what, I’ll answer it-ish. I wasn’t young. It was after I had started drinking.
Given that you started drinking at 13, I would have expected that!
I was into my late teens.
And the soft porn for Penthouse?
No, that was later.
Were you big into women?
Oh yeah. There was a singer I had an absolutely dreadful crush on. Lyn Paul of The New Seekers (laughs). Now, that’s a serious confession! Lyn Paul. I used to have this little stash of pictures of her. I don’t know what age I was. When I was really young, before I was 10, there was a girl who lived near where we lived and I was absolutely smitten by her. Something mystical and magical about her. One of my most enjoyable times as a journalist came when Eve Pollard was my editor at the Sunday Mirror. A lot of guys, particularly in newspapers, find it really difficult to work with women. I’ve always actually liked working with women… I didn’t lose my virginity with her, by the way.
You went to Cambridge University and got a 2:1.
Miracle. I was drinking a hell of a lot. I only really enjoyed the final year. The reason that I enjoyed it a bit more than the first two years is because I had a year in the south of France in the middle. I think I grew up a lot there.
In an interview you said you once drank 32 pints in one day.
Yeah. Well, according to a guy who was on holidays with us recently. He said I had 12 at lunchtime, 10 in the afternoon, and 10 in the evening, and then a bottle of scotch. Now, I don’t remember that, but there were days when I was drinking that sort of volume. The novel I have written about the alcoholic girl, I’ve dedicated it to all sorts of different people including the woman who picked me up from the floor of the buffet at Peterborough railway station when I was 21 or 22. I haven’t got a clue how I got there. I was wearing a kilt, I had my bagpipes and I had a bottle of scotch in my pocket.
How did you get into journalism?
I came out of university, with not a clue what I wanted to do. I carried on busking with my bagpipes, I really enjoyed that. Good money. Bagpipe busking is good.
I’d pay you to shut up! They say the definition of a gentleman is somebody who can play the bagpipes, but chooses not to...
Oh, I know every bagpipe joke going (laughs). I’ll tell you why bagpipes are a great busking instrument. They’re loud. People do not expect you to stay for long. If you’re a guitarist or playing harmonica or singing… say there’s restaurants in the south of France with big terraces. You’ve got to do four or five songs before you can dare go round with the hat. With bagpipes, it’s 30 seconds. I used to have a mate with a motorbike and I’d sit alongside him, riding pillion wearing my kilt, and we’d drive up and down. All the other buskers would stop because we were louder than them. He’d get off, take off his crash helmet and go around. Back on the bike, onto the next town. We made a lot of money.
What kind of music were you into? Aside from The New Seekers...
I really did like the bagpipes. My dad taught me when I was young and I played to quite a serious level. In terms of music, I’d say Motown more than anything. Because I was drinking so much, I’d always be on the jukebox in Cambridge. I can even remember the numbers of some of the songs. Tavares’ ‘Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel’ was like 14B or something. I’ve always liked Elvis. My big, big music/singing passion was Jacques Brel. I love Diana Ross. I’ve got a really similar taste to my daughter, who’s 19. We listen to a lot of the same stuff. She’s really into The Beach Boys, The Beatles, Elvis, Bob Marley.
What about Oasis?
I didn’t mind Oasis.
You would have known them.
No. I had dealings with Alan McGee over that famous party with all the showbiz people and ‘Cool Britannia’, which, by the way, we never, ever said. It was a Time magazine headline and it just caught on. Alan McGee was the one who said, “Noel can come [to 10 Downing Street] but I’m not letting Liam anywhere near the place because he’ll do something really stupid.” I liked them. The first record I ever bought was – I bought two records at the same time – The Mamas & the Papas’ ‘Each Night Before You Go To Bed, My Baby, Say A Little Prayer For Me, blah blah blah…’ (It’s actually ‘Dedicated To The One I Love’ – Ed) and Frank and Nancy Sinatra, ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’’. No, no, wait! ‘Somethin’ Stupid’. ‘Boots…’ came after that.
In your college years, did you get into smoking spliffs or dropping acid?
No, never, and I think it’s a good job because I think I am an addict. Drink was my drug. That’s one of the lines in my new novel. The girl is seducing the boyfriend of her mum and he’s smoking some marijuana and he’s trying to get her to and she says, “No – drink is my drug.” While I was writing it, I remembered that I used to say that to people. I said it with a kind of pride. If you smoked marijuana or took cocaine, you were a complete tosser. This was the stupid, chippy, macho, northern thing [of mine]. Here’s something. Do you know that I’ve never, ever seen cocaine?
Really?
Never. Seriously. You hear about dinner parties and that sort of thing, but I’ve never seen cocaine in my life.
Surely cocaine use is rampant on Fleet Street?
I know, but I never came across it. People knew that I was a heavy drinker and that’s what I did. When I came back from hospital at 28, people knew I had been through quite a bad thing and started to treat me in a slightly different way. Much more, “Leave him alone, let him get on with it.”
You got arrested in Glasgow in 1986 [while covering Neil Kinnock’s visit for the Daily Mirror]. Was that your rock bottom moment?
That was rock bottom, yeah.
When you eventually returned to the Mirror, you were demoted…
I started doing the night shift. Dog watch. On the one hand, I was incredibly grateful. I left the Mirror to go to Today, and Ed Richards was my editor at the Mirror who later went on to edit my earlier diaries, The Blair Years. He died a couple of years ago. He went mad when I left, really angry, one of those, ‘Never darken my door again’ moments. But when I was in hospital, he was the first one to ring me up and he said, “I hear you’ve gone mad.” I said, “Well, I’m not in very good shape, no.” He said, “I’m not going to say I told you so, but I told you so. Tell you what to do, keep taking the money and when you get fit again, you can come back.” It was amazing. I thought I was finished. I thought Fiona would leave me, because why wouldn’t she? I thought I’d lose my job. The humiliation…
You were depressed.
I was chronically, chronically depressed. I was coming out of alcohol addiction. It was difficult. I went back and I thought it was actually quite a good thing to start at the bottom. And do you know what’s really weird? On the day of my breakdown, I’d had a big row with Fiona the night before. I’d been on the piss all day and I ended up booking into a hotel and completely demolished the mini-bar, bit by bit. There’s a similar scene in the novel. All this stuff, I use it somewhere. I had to go to Scotland because I was doing a feature on Neil Kinnock. That was at Heathrow. When I went back to work, the first job I had, I got arrested by the Special Branch.
Because you were drunk and acting suspiciously…
They thought I was behaving in a very odd way near a major public figure. I got arrested, locked up and was told that I could leave if I went to hospital. Right. Fine. My first job back, there was a terrorist incident at Heathrow and I got sent out to cover it. I got out there and I can’t even describe it. I just couldn’t function. I ended up phoning two colleagues who weren’t even in London, they were out of town, and totally levelled with them: “This is my first job back and I can’t speak to anybody, I’m panicking.” And they did it from where they were, took over and filed it in my name. And it was fine. Bit by bit, I rebuilt myself. And then I got into this thing about counting every day [off alcohol], and I was way into the thousands before I’d stop. And I used to go to bed at night and pretend I was Geoff Boycott, the batsman, and every day was a run. (Adopts TV sports commentator tone) “And there he is, he’s onto 2,416 and he’s still not out…”
How did all of that affect your relationship?
Fiona stayed with me, which was pretty amazing, and we had our first kid. He was born a year later. That totally changes your life. I got totally back into work and I became much more political. When I was in the police cell, this doctor, a very nice guy… it was the middle of the night, in Hamilton in Lancashire. I was having a full-on psychotic breakdown; I was hearing music, hearing voices, bagpipes, brass bands, people shouting at each other… all in my head at the same time. Just full-on. And I’m talking to this doctor, who is trying to assess me. The first thing he says is, “Are you alright?” A perfectly reasonable question. And I can remember thinking, looking at him, thinking, “Ah… that’s what they’re up to. They’re trying to make me right-wing.” I’ve been arrested by the Special Branch. I remember telling a psychiatrist in London about this and it was fucking hilarious because he wouldn’t believe it. I ended up storming out. He wouldn’t believe that I’d been arrested by the Special Branch. It was like a classic, paranoid fantasy which just happened to be true!
When Tony Blair asked you to be Press Secretary, you told him you had a massive ego and a bad temper. Is that still true?
I think I’ve got the capacity for both. I think my family would say that I’ve got a big ego, but I don’t think I do. I’m not selfish. I like to feel relevant. I say no to more things than I say yes to. Have I got a big ego? Probably, but I don’t have an A-league ego. In a funny sort of way, I’m very ambivalent about being recognised. Some people live for it. I like to be recognised for what I think I should be recognised for. At this launch tonight, I want people to come along and think that I’m talking about something worth hearing. For example, I said ‘no’ to going into the House of Lords. That’s the dream! To call yourself Lord Olaf… I don’t give a shit about any of that.
Were you bad-tempered when you were drinking?
I was incredibly good-humoured – but I could also be quite a morose drunk and I could be a violent drunk. I was all of those things. There was an old friend from Cambridge who I saw recently and he said that people would find me quite scary when drunk. There was a sense of, ‘You never quite know what he’s going to do’.
In The Irish Diaries, you mention a row with Peter Mandelson in which he threw a punch.
It was a total handbags thing.
At many times, it seems the entire Labour cabinet was rowing.
Yeah, at times it was silly (laughs). There were various points where I thought, ‘We’re defying gravity here’. We’d get a landslide victory in 1997, three-figure majority. Then we’d do it again in 2001. Never been done. And then we have the Iraq War and we win again and I’m thinking, ‘We’re just defying gravity here’. This is so naïve it’s ridiculous but I can remember once thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it just be amazing if this group of people were able to hang together forever?’ It would have been incredible, but I’m afraid life isn’t like that, and politics isn’t like that.
But it was volatile even from the very beginning.
Totally. When Tony asked me to work for him, he was as much interested in what I was going to say to make Gordon [Brown] feel okay as what I was saying about him. Now, history is going to have a lot of fun deciding whether or not he should have bitten the bullet then, but it was impossible. It was impossible.
Are you still in touch with Blair?
Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve read Tony’s intro. I said to these kids at the university today that I genuinely like Tony and – just like the way that I don’t like seeing the way that Bertie [Ahern] gets hammered here – [I don’t like] the constant whacking of Tony. And it’s not just about Iraq. There’s something deeper there that’s about them thinking, ‘We really put our faith in him and he really let us down’. Well, what did he do to you? We won three general elections, we changed the country for the better, we did things that no Conservative government is ever going to do… what’s your problem?
There’s a lot about Bill Clinton in the book. Do you think that the Monica Lewinsky scandal helped the Northern Ireland peace process in that he desperately had to be seen to be doing something positive?
Ha! (laughs) You think Monica should have gotten the Peace Prize and not Trimble and Hume? I know what you mean. If you remember, it was around the same time as the Kosovo War and [veteran Labour politician] Tam Dalyell called it ‘The war of Clinton’s penis’ because he was saying he’s only doing it to be seen to be doing something. I didn’t buy that and I don’t really buy it in relation to Northern Ireland. I thought Clinton’s commitment was genuine, serious and sincere. I think he felt an emotional affinity. So, I don’t think Monica can claim too much of the credit.
You seem to get narky every time journalists mention David Kelly. You say in the book that his suicide was the lowest moment of your political career.
Well, it was. Without a doubt. I never met him. What I get narky at is the people who say, “You lied to us!” I get narky because I know that I didn’t. I get narky at the people who say, “Tony Blair did it for George Bush.” I don’t get narky at people saying, “Do you feel you could have done things different so the guy didn’t feel like he had to take his life?” The honest answer is that I don’t know the answer to that question. He happened to be the person who unwittingly became the pivotal figure in what became this extraordinary dispute between the government and the BBC over a report that the BBC should never have broadcast. His only offence was to have an unauthorised contact with a journalist. Well, that happens every day of the week in every government department in the world. No big deal. But the journalist in question [Andrew Gilligan] was a complete low-life. I think it’s extraordinary that someone like him… his evidence in the Hutton Inquiry was ripped to bits. He’s still a journalist and he’s Boris Johnson’s advisor on cycling.
It was a catastrophe nonetheless.
I am a bit of a control freak and I like to think that I’m good at saying, “If I do this, that’s going to happen and that’s how we’ll get there” – but what happened in that situation, for all sorts of reasons, not just to do with Iraq, not just to do with weapons of mass destruction, not just to do with David Kelly… but at that stage, our relationship with the media had become so poisonous that, honestly, it felt like we were inside some horrible novel. You just didn’t know how it was going to end.
But end it did...
The moment when I flew back from Washington, landed, switched on my phone and had all these missed calls and messages, ‘Phone urgent’, ‘Phone urgent’, ‘Phone urgent’ and the duty clerk said, “David Kelly has gone missing. A body has been found.” I didn’t know what to think. I said that I felt like a juggernaught was coming my way. From then on, for quite a period of time, we had media outside 24 hours a day.
What about the conspiracy theory that Kelly was taken out by the security services?
I just don’t buy it (shakes head). Not on any level. I never have.
Does that kind of thing happen though?
I don’t think so.
Does James Bond exist?
I don’t think James Bond exists, but some of the people you see in films doing some of those sorts of things clearly exist.
Well, in Northern Ireland, it clearly exists.
Absolutely. Tom Bradbry did that film recently, Shadow Dancer about a relationship between an IRA person and a British Intelligence guard. Likewise, that film with Ben Affleck, Argo, and Zero Dark Thirty… clearly there are people out there who do pretty amazing things. David Aaronovitch wrote a really good book about this, Voodoo Theories. It’s about the modern desire for conspiracy theories. I think David Kelly, for whatever reason, just felt that he couldn’t cope and couldn’t go on with it. It’s sad, obviously. And it is very strange for me to have him as sort of a part of my life, never having anything to do with him.
What’s your take on Edward Snowden? Surely what he did wasn’t all that different from Woodward and Bernstein?
I think it’s very different. Woodward and Bernstein were really dilligent, careful, fact-obsessed, context-obsessed. I know Carl Bernstein reasonably well. In fact… (points out a blurb from Bernstein on the back of his book). He’s a great guy. I’m a bit conflicted about Snowden. The government person in me says that it’s an absolute disaster and a scandal and blah blah blah. But the media person says, ‘How on earth did this guy have access to all of this information when he’s not even a proper State employee?’ He was a contractor. I also do think that the Guardian and the other papers who spoke to him have tried to apply the Woodward and Bernstein context thing, but can you really trust a journalist, any journalist, to handle some of the stuff that they’re talking about? And this gets back to the point that you do need mature relationships between the government and media, so you can have genuine dialogue about whether something really is going to damage national security. I don’t think journalists always know. Glen Greenwald’s view or [Julian] Assange’s view is, just dump it out there… I really don’t buy that.
Does it gall you to see Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy?
It doesn’t gall me… I mean he’s got kids, doesn’t he? There has to be some space within government where you can have internal dialogue. The truth is, this is the other reason why we’ve got this whole press thing going on, with the Leveson Inquiry and all that: all the drive is towards openness and transparency. When Bernard Ingham was doing my job in Downing Street, if he were asked a question about MI5 or MI6, [the official answer was] ‘We never comment on intelligence matters’. That was 20 years ago. Now these guys have to go into parliamentary committees. The train is moving towards transparency. What you shouldn’t do from that is to say that every single thing that has ever been out there should be put out into the public domain. What galls me – and that’s a good word – is the extent to which the media apply this to other parts of life, but not to themselves.
What’s your take on Leveson?
I think what Leveson proposed was eminently sensible and not remotely challenging to the freedom of the press. An independent self-regulator is exactly what should happen. The Press Complaints Commission was useless. The idea that it’s going to bring in repressive measures, that editors are going to have their content decided by politicians and it’s going to be like Iran and China and Korea, is just bullshit.
Did you think your phone was bugged when you were working in politics?
I think you made an assumption, yeah. You didn’t necessarily know by who. But look, I think I said at the Leveson Inquiry, about phone hacking: if I go out for a run on Sunday and the phone rings, switchboard goes, ‘I’ve got Tony on the phone’, ‘Is it a mobile’, ‘Yeah’, ‘Oh well, then we’d better not talk, then’ – and you’d talk!
You say in Irish Diaries that Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness wouldn’t bring phones with them when they were meeting the IRA.
Correct, because they assumed that their phones were being tracked. With Angela Merkel, I think what’s happened is you have this technology now – when you look at GCHQ in Cheltenham, it’s a big place, lot of people working there. If you’ve now got this technology that can hoover stuff and [target] keywords… I do it see it from both sides. If you think about it from the security services’ point of view, they’ve got a tough job, particularly post-9/11, and you can be guaranteed that the same people who say that it’s terrible that you’re listening to all these phones and terrible that you’re tracking all these emails – if a guy from Nairobi sets off a bomb on the Tube and it emerges that he was overheard in a pub five years ago saying, “One day I’m going to blow up the Tube,” they’ll be saying: “Why didn’t our people know about this?” Getting that balance right is very, very difficult. It’s hard when you’ve got these conflicts between the state’s natural desire and need to have secrecy for certain things, and the media’s natural desire for openness, transparency and bloody great stories.
How would you like to be remembered?
Not really bothered (shrugs). If you think about people who’ve died recently. Mrs Thatcher was a huge figure, so she’ll be remembered a long time by a lot of people. It’ll be the same when Tony Blair goes, the same when Paul McCartney goes. I think the one thing that gives me a certain amount of pleasure and a little bit of pride is that even these papers that absolutely despise me, like the Mail and so forth, they come from the perspective of not liking me because I was way too effective. They’ll never say I was shit in the job. And they’ll always say, ‘Why hasn’t this government or that government or this bank or this energy company, why haven’t they got somebody like me doing what I did?’ So I think I was pretty competent. But I genuinely do care more about what my family think about me than what any newspaper does.

The Irish Diaries is published by Lilliput