If you look at the other people around at the time - Charles Clarke, Alistair Darling, Jack Straw - they've all gone. And they're not old. What's happened is that someone who is quite old - Jeremy Corbyn - is now leader. We have to take some responsibility for that.

Alastair Campbell

Categorized in : People Responsibility Leader

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

Alastair Campbell

media stars world

There are many reasons for the decline in royal esteem. One is that so many of the royals are thick.

Alastair Campbell

royal decline reason

The media are obsessed with spin doctors and with portraying them as a bad thing, yet seem addicted to our medicine.

Alastair Campbell

doctors medicine media

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

Alastair Campbell

crisis accepting

I do think it's strange that I get associated with Iraq more than the people who were Foreign Secretary or Defence Secretary. It's because of my closeness to Tony [Blair], which I don't regret at all. I think that was a privilege.

Alastair Campbell

iraq regret thinking

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

Alastair Campbell

mental-illness four people

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.

Alastair Campbell

writing country book

This may sound arrogant, but I believe that if we'd done teamship better, we'd still be there. Where we fell down was the inability to hold together. We should have learnt from the great football teams. The players may not like each other. They have egos, they have their own ambitions, they have different personalities, but they are still bloody good teams.

Alastair Campbell

team football believe

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

next-day player football

One day, we will look back and wonder how on earth we used to believe that depression was a lifestyle choice, only to be debated and taken seriously when an A List film star took his life, and the world filled with people saying how shocked and saddened they were.

Alastair Campbell

stars taken believe

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

Alastair Campbell

driven hate losing

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

royal causes mouths

Like most meaningful activities, campaigns are team games.

Alastair Campbell

team games meaningful

What concerns me is that the Independent is going, and there are job cuts at the Guardian, but the wretched Daily Mail is still rampant, making lots of money by millions of people clicking on pictures of cellulited women. I think that's sad.

Alastair Campbell

independent cutting jobs

For all that the papers would say I was a liar, I took the words I was saying at briefings as seriously as Tony Blair took what he would say at the Despatch Box. I find it very difficult not to tell the truth. I felt I was accountable for what I said.

Alastair Campbell

telling-the-truth paper liars

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

Alastair Campbell

political believe way

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

queens christmas mother

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

dykes records jobs

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

six together trying

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

brilliant impossible book