So, to start right at the beginning, Alastair John Campbell was born in Victoria Hospital, Keighley, on May 25th 1957. He lived in Oakworth, in a house named 'Lydstep', at the end of Station Road. Luckily it's been knocked down otherwise I'd feel kind of obliged to go and look at it. The family then moved to nearby Keighley in West Yorkshire, where Alastair attended Utley Primary School: "I think I'm right in saying my first teachers were Miss Feather and Miss Gill." His parents, Donald and Elizabeth, were from Kilmarnock (originally the family came from Tiree), but Mr Campbell was a vet and was enticed to England by the memoirs of James Herriot (this bit may not be strictly true, but I’m trying to get a flavour of the family going on here). But the Scottish link explains Alastair’s ability to play the bagpipes, a useful attribute in any man. He has two brothers, Donald and Graham, and a sister, Elizabeth.
Here’s what he wrote to Keighley Library when it celebrated its centenary in 2004:
To all at Keighley Library -
Many congratulations on your centenary. I have many fond memories of times spent in, and books taken from, the library when I was growing up in Keighley. Above all I remember what a beautiful building the library is in, and the nice people who worked there. I wish you all the very best for the next hundred years.
When he was 11, Alastair’s family moved to 11 Welland Vale road in Leicester. He attended the City of Leicester Boys' school, a grammar school, but he never lost his allegiance to Burnley FC, the nearest decent team to Keighley (apart from Bradford and Leeds). "I was very sad to leave but my dad had a bad accident when he was treating a piglet, and he was attacked by the sow. He was in hospital for a while and when he went back to work he found it hard to do the job as he'd done before, so he got a job with the Ministry of Agriculture and we moved to Leicester."
Being desperately intelligent, as well as devastatingly attractive, in 1975 he went on to study medieval and modern languages (French and German) at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. He claims to have written essays based on criticism rather than original works, which he didn’t read; but that sounds like he was just trying to be cool. All the swots do it (I know, being a swot myself).
Alistair had always been on the left, politically, but being a vet's son at Cambridge hardened his political views. “There were people and attitudes there I did not like. There was not equality of opportunity.” So after a good drink at the Late Night Bar he'd head off "to beat up an upper class twit". Allegedly. My kind of bloke indeed.
To help pay the bills he wrote sexual ‘fantasies’ for Forum magazine, using the pseudonym Riviera Gigolo. These, he says, were total fiction, and done to win a bet. Alastair spent a year in the South of France as part of his degree, busking with his bagpipes whilst wearing a kilt. His soft porn adventures include Busking with bagpipes: 'a little known aphrodisiac - the dangling pipes of Scotland...It's all tongues and teeth, lips and gentle squeezes..As I lie on a Lisbon hotel bed next to a Portuguese person crying out for more, I thank my pipes for doing most of the chatting up.' So nothing autobiographical going on there, except in my dreams. I do so love a slut. On the subject of being a gigolo, Alastair apparently appeared in a 1980 article in The Sun (so it must be true) headlined 'WANTED, Men For Hire', in which he said, "you would talk, have dinner, make love; in return they would give you money or gifts...It's never hard work but the women do expect a high standard of performance." Sounds like all my previous relationships to me (minus the high standard of performance, on the whole).
After all that gossip and innuendo I suppose I'd better get back to how he became a trainee journalist, and miss out his little stint as a croupier. He got on to the Trinity Mirror training scheme and began an eight-week introduction in the basics of journalism at the Sunday Independent in Plymouth in 1980. Torquay photographer Stuart MacDowall recalls, "one of our jobs was an advertising feature for a beauty parlour in Truro and as part of that feature, we had to have pictures of someone having their legs waxed. Obviously as there was no female reporter on hand, Alastair had to be volunteered for the job and I took pictures of him having the treatment. He was very willing, very keen but I had no idea how far he was going to go."
He was then moved to the Tavistock Times, initially as a sports reporter, but soon being promoted to the dizzy heights of the news pages where his first big story was the loss of the Penlee (Mousehole) lifeboat with all its crew, and he wrote a good piece whilst under pressure. Former Sunday Independent Managing Editor Reg Scott remembers that despite being "genuinely and generally a good reporter", Alastair was "a very cocky, aloof individual. He thought a lot about himself and when he took part in training sessions that I held, I remember him as a very surly figure. Certainly I could not see him as the kind of person who should be giving advice to the Prime Minister but he seemed to think he would go far - and that is exactly what he did."
Whilst working there, he met Fiona Millar (grrrr), the woman who is still his partner (grrr) and the mother of his three children. Oh pass me a sick bucket somebody. Mr Scott remembers that she was a "pretty little thing, but a very good trainee".
Journalist James Dalrymple was Director of Mirror group Training and recruited both Alastair and Fiona. "He was a smashing young man who worked very well, enjoyed himself and was very bright.... I was in the training room on the day that Alastair and Fiona first met. They immediately hit it off, fell for each other straight away and were going out within days."
Robert Millar, Fiona's father, said, "She’s going out with a strange bloke, who claims he is a Scot but who doesn’t sound like one, and who has been making a living playing his bagpipes around the south of France."
It was also about this time that Alastair met John Merritt, who was to become his closest friend. Merritt and his future wife Lindsay Nicholson became inseparable companions of the Campbell-Millars.
They all eventually moved to London at about the same time, Alastair following Merritt to The Daily Mirror. Initially he reported on Miss World, animals, royals and celebrity gossip; particularly upsetting Cliff Richard and Martina Navratilova with stories about their (separate) sex-lives. He also frequented the terraces at West Ham around the same time as I was there so often. But I wasn't infltrating the InterCity Firm to produce a piece about how gang violence was arranged well in advance of soccer games. Gradually he began visiting the Commons and attending party conferences, getting to know politicians and political correspondents and getting more political stories into the paper. It was around this time (1985) that he met the Kinnocks, and Glenys and Neil were soon cose friends of the Campbell-Millars.
This could all only end one way, and in summer 1985 Alastair was appointed as a lobby reporter for the Mirror, despite the opposition of the political editor, Joe Haines, who was probably just jealous that Kinnock preferred his younger, better looking new junior.
The worlds of politics and journalism often collide in the pub, and Alastair's reputation as an accomplished drinker was spreading. He has admitted to drinking "15 pints of beer, half a bottle of Scotch and four bottles of wine with David Mellor (a Conservative cabinet minister at the time) for lunch." Lightweight.
Not that Alastair stayed at the Mirror much longer. In Autumn 1985 he accepted a job on Today, the now defunct paper launched by Eddie Shah. Shah intended to change the face of newspapers, breaking the unions in the process by using new technology and refusing to continue with out-dated working practices. The paper was also poorly-managed, under-funded, and its anti-union philosphy would appear to be at odds with Alastair's own political views.
Alastair's decision to take this job and leave the Mirror has been cited as the first evidence of his impending breakdown. By now he was becoming obsessed with Dean Reed, and American who had failed to find success in the US but was a popstar in the Soviet Union. And tales of his erratic behaviour were becoming more common. It was 1986, Alastair was 29, and as news editor for
"I hit the bottle pretty hard, got completely manic and cracked." But he doesn't look upon his problem as being primarily one of drink, " I am not 100% sure that I was an alcoholic." He wouldn't be the first to self-medicate with whisky when things weren't going well. He finally collapsed from nervous exhaustion over a 'lost weekend' in Easter 1986 and ended up in hospital.
"I was actually with Neil Kinnock and he was having a busy day of engagements and I was shadowing him for the day and the police picked me up for my own safety – and took me in and locked me up."
"I was just giving them cause for concern – I mean - to be honest a lot of it I can't remember but at the time that they picked me up, I was in the foyer of this building and I was just – I don't know why I was doing this – but I was just emptying my pockets onto the floor and tearing everything to little bits. And I was trying to make phone calls but the phone wasn't switched on but I didn't realise that and I couldn't understand why I couldn't get through to anybody."
"I was banged up for a while and eventually seen by doctors and taken to a hospital. It was terrible but at the same time, I now look back on it and it was the best thing that ever happened to me because I came out of it."
"Everyone was worried about me and what was going on. At the time, I could not remember much about anything, it was quite a bizarre period. 'It was a mixture of everything. I think it was actually the recognition fairly soon after going that I had made a mistake and then not really being able to handle it. The Mirror was a very secure political base and Today had all this baggage, Eddie Shah, the union stuff, it didn't feel right. The harder I tried to make it feel right, the worse it got."
"You obviously felt the people you had left behind you couldn't really go to. And that's where most of the people in my journalistic life were, they were at the Mirror."
"I think what my breakdown did was that it sorted out for me who my real friends were. What I had worked out was that I had this massive number of acquaintances that I would be out on a doorstep with until three o'clock in the morning waiting for Prince Andrew to come and see Koo Stark and it was all very jolly, but what I knew was that once I had cracked up and was in the funny farm you were just the latest thing that that group of people were talking about in the pub, having a bit of a laugh."
"Whereas there were a small number of people with who you felt a real bond because of their approach to it and their attitude to it. Everyone at the Mirror were incredibly nice, but it doesn't mean that they were friends."
"'The breakdown sorted my own mind out about who mattered and who didn't. There are very few people that you can actually count on when the chips are really down. Your friend is the person who walks through the door when everyone else is walking out."
John Merrit, visited him at home a few weeks after his discharge from hospital and handed him a bag of marbles saying, "don't lose them again."
"I've always had a pretty clear perspective about what matters and what doesn't. When I say always, well, I think my crackup in 1986 sorted it out for me. Work has always been important to me, family, what you believe, political beliefs."
By the way, if anyone has a copy of any of the porn stories, I'd just love to read them.....