Catherine Deveney Interview - Alastair Campbell

ALASTAIR CAMPBELL was said to have an ego the size of a house by his old boss's wife, Cherie Blair. He wouldn't disagree.

It's a bit of a shame the Cherie thing ended badly. Everyone knows they had their moments but he always thought they got on okay. (In the aftermath of "moments", they dabbed each other's cuts and bruises a bit.) He didn't even mind when she called him "a charming thug". In fact, the only thing he objected to was when she claimed Campbell had told her hairdresser, "You're only a f***ing hairdresser." Even the hairdresser denies that, says Campbell. "I might say to Tony, 'You're only the f***ing Prime Minister,' but I would never say to a hairdresser, 'You're only a f***ing hairdresser.'"

There's a nice philosophical distinction here about the rules of engagement when being abusive: go up the line, not down. And it's true that if you want to know what a person's really like, you learn more by asking the people below them in the pecking order than above. Interestingly, Campbell has now written a novel, All in the Mind, and one of the characters produces a little essay on humility. Most people would not associate humility with Campbell. "Most people don't know me," he points out.

Campbell was regarded as the Machiavellian architect of New Labour; the spin doctor who died of giddiness. He was the Downing Street communications manager accused of "sexing up" the Iraq dossier which led to the suicide of government adviser David Kelly. But, he insists, "I'm not interested in power per se. I'm not a status person at all, which is why I could never really see myself ever going into the House of Lords… For the sake of it."

Which is not to say the man now informally advising Gordon Brown isn't a control freak. "Control is different," he agrees. It's immediately apparent when he opens the door to his Hampstead home, dressed in jeans and a peppermint-green shirt. "Oh my God," he groans as his opening line, putting his head against the door when he sees our photographer, assistant and lights. It's good-humoured enough, but you can see from the restrained nervous energy of him how that might tip. You certainly wouldn't mistake him for a patient man. "I hate chaos," he mutters, which I understand, so we raise our eyes in silent protest at the chaotic world of photography .

How does he feel when he's not in control? It depends. If he's in a football crowd and his team have scored minutes from the end and the place is uncontrollable and wild, he likes it. If he breaks his leg, he wants to go to the hospital and know there's someone in charge who isn't him. "But when I am doing something that I am involved in and which means something to me and is important, I want to feel in control. But in trying to get control of the government communication machinery, I was doing it so Tony could better exercise the power he had. I didn't see it as a power thing for me."

He clashed with the press despite formerly being a journalist himself and doing 24-hour shifts outside Prince Andrew's girlfriend's house. The difference, he says, is that while once he got a story wrong and couldn't sleep all night worrying about it, now "there are a lot of journalists who don't really care that much whether what they write or broadcast is true". It was once reported, for example, that Campbell was to work at Manchester United with his friend Alex Ferguson. Campbell phoned the journalist. It wasn't true. I know, the journalist said, but it was a good story, and he was desperate. "That's what I rail against," says Campbell.

The walls of Campbell's hall are lined with political cartoons. Thatcher, Mandelson, Blair… they're all there, the physical characteristics exaggerated to comic effect. In many ways, that's what happened to Campbell's personality. He became a one-dimensional figure. The psychological equivalent of a slight curve in the spine became a Quasimodo hump. We knew about his breakdown in 1986 and the alcoholism that fuelled it, about his anger and impatience and obsessive nature – and little else.

His published diaries gave insight into his methods. But perhaps his novel is even more revealing. It's the story of mental breakdown, of patients visiting a psychiatrist who is expected to fix everything but is having a breakdown of his own. The characters are surprisingly sentimental. They search for meaning and find God by examining the individuality of raisins. As you move in Campbell's house from the hall into the kitchen, the art changes from brash political cartoons to framed children's drawings. Another angle, another facet.

DEPRESSION IS CUT FROM a recognisably dark cloth but it's not a uniform. It's not one size fits all. Campbell read somewhere that the author Margaret Drabble described it as like being injected with a liquid that slowly spreads through the body. "I don't feel like that. I feel…" he says, searching for words, "that it starts with a knot somewhere inside you and you just feel it grow and that's when I know, oh shit… and it just feels like everything is a monumental effort and after you've made the effort you feel exhausted."

When he's not depressed – and he's not right now – he finds it hard to recollect the exact feel of it, the texture. Then it comes back and it's like taking an old jacket from the back of the wardrobe. The vaguely familiar smell of the cloth as it's lifted out… the weight of it as it's put on your back… and before you know it, you're right back in the skin of it.

For the famous, depression is almost a career asset. It's linked to 'creativity'. But Campbell doesn't blame ordinary people for saying they have flu when they're off work with depression. There's so much stigma still. Which challenged his condition more: the incredible stress of working with Blair, or the sudden emptiness when he left? Well, not the job. He handled that. "It's true that after I left I had a really big crash but I think that was a combination of things."

A few weeks after leaving, David Blunkett came for dinner. Was it good, he asked Campbell's daughter Grace, then nine, to have her dad at home more? Oh yes, Grace said. And what did he do all day? Well, Grace replied, see that chair you're sitting in? When she left for school in the mornings, her dad was sitting in it. And when she came home he was lying in it. "I was exhausted," says Campbell.

But he misses the big moments. "I remember when Tony went to see Gaddafi. It was in a tent and there were camels wandering about and I thought, 'Oh God, I'd love to be at that.' And the US election result – you are in Number 10, it's a long way away, but that's a really big moment. You've got to think about it, plan for it." Writing his novel is the closest he has come to the buzz of his old job. "It's not a replacement but it's the nearest I've got. There was a purpose to it. I miss the big driving purpose."

Depressives are often regarded as simply gloomy. But they are often interesting people because they think deeply, feel deeply, care deeply. Campbell is no exception. But he is also humorous. You sense real mischief in him when he describes stopping Tony Blair from ending a broadcast about Iraq with, "God Bless." Discussing the start, Blair asked, how will I begin? "And I said," says Campbell, voice a mere whisper with laughter, "How about, 'My fellow Americans…'"

But perhaps the most unexpected aspect of Campbell is that the man regarded as a bruiser is surprisingly emotional. "I was surprised when I read my diaries back. And I remember my eldest son Rory reading them and saying, 'Dad, do you have to do all this crying shit?' He wasn't impressed at all. But I am, you see."

Campbell's childhood was happy, devoid of the depression that would later dog him. "My mum says I was never any trouble. They never had to ask me to do my homework, I just did it. I was always hard-working and I think I was quite funny. I was quite big into extended family, and sport was always massive, particularly football. The only thing I can think of as a bad experience in childhood is that when I was 11, my dad, who was a vet, had this bad accident. He couldn't cope with private practice any more, so he joined the Ministry of Agriculture and we were uprooted and moved to Leicester."

Both parents were Scottish but Campbell (a bagpipe player and avowed Scot), his two older brothers and younger sister, were born in Yorkshire. His father was from the Hebrides, and Campbell admired the way he prospered in a different culture. He inherited his father's workaholic tendencies but his dad was more naturally gregarious. When Campbell took to the road with Blair in the 1997 election campaign, his father was unwell with a variety of conditions. "I said to my mother, 'I hope he doesn't die while we're on the road.'"

In fact, his father was to live for seven more years. When Campbell was writing a funeral section for his novel, he found it draining. "Writing it, I was crying buckets of tears. Every time I read the funeral speeches, I can feel it." Why the speeches? "I don't know. They're very powerful. I hate funerals. I haven't been to a funeral that I haven't cried at. I hate speaking at funerals." I wonder why he says that, then it occurs that perhaps he spoke at his father's. You might expect the oldest son rather than the third to take on that duty, but did Campbell speak? "Yeah. Yeah, I did," he says quietly. How did he get through that if he has never been to a funeral where he didn't cry? "I took some pills."

His father had been in a nursing home for a spell. "He hated it. He didn't complain but I could tell he hated it. He just wanted to be at home. He died at home. I remember two things. Before he died, Kim Howells, the foreign office minister, said to me, 'No matter how prepared you think you are, you're not. It's like losing a limb.' That's exactly how I felt. And I remember afterwards Gordon (Brown] wrote to me. He said he still saw his father every day. And I completely got that as well. If you're not religious, and I'm not, it's the only way you can make sense of this, that there's still spirit there, still something there that is speaking to you."

We know Campbell is not religious because he once famously said, "We don't do God." Why does everyone prefix that quote with the word 'famously', he asks curiously. Because it is. But, he points out, so many of his phrases – like "bog-standard comprehensive" – became infamous. "We don't do God" was just a throwaway line. He says, "It's not like, 'New Labour, New Britain'. We planned that. Or 'Education, education, education'. We planned that. 'People's princess', we talked about that."