Alastair Campbell’s book is far too discreet to justify its £1m advance, argues nicholas clee |
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The revelations in Alastair Campbell’s book The Blair Years, published this morning, hardly meet the 'fantastically indiscreet' hype; nor do they seem to justify the £1m that Hutchinson (part of Random House) has paid to Tony Blair's former director of communications.
A good many of Campbell’s indiscreet words, particularly about Blair's family and about Gordon Brown, have been removed. Does this explain the lack of a newspaper serialisation of the diaries?
Campbell, who with his agent Ed Victor held on to serial rights in The Blair Years, is putting it about that he did not want his old sparring partners in the press - he mentioned the Daily Mail in this morning's Today programme interview - to get hold of his book and distort his words. So he did a deal with BBC2 which will serialise the book in three parts, starting Wednesday.
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| Campbell’s diaries are likely to be of far more interest to the media than the man in the street |
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But Campbell was previously reported to have held discussions with the Sunday Times about a serialisation.
In the end, he is thought to have been paid between £250,000 and £500,000 by the Beeb, about the same as he might have expected from a newspaper deal. The difference is that the licence fee payer is footing the bill.
Campbell's diaries are undoubtedly a key text for students of the past 10 years. Their attraction to Random House - the boss of which, Gail Rebuck, is married to Labour Party adviser Lord (Philip) Gould - is obvious. The drawback is that books such as this can be of far more concern to the media than they are to general readers, who are not necessarily interested in what Tony said to Gordon about the Private Finance Initiative.
Nevertheless, Random House managed to sell hundreds of thousands of copies of the diaries of former Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan, about whom the most one can say is that he is as charming as Alastair Campbell. That must be an encouraging precedent. 
FIRST POSTED JULY 9, 2007
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