Campbell makes Bad Sex prize shortlist

Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former spin doctor, has been shortlisted for the Literary Review's Bad Sex prize for his debut novel, All in the Mind. The nomination appears merited. In his book, Campbell describes at length how his hero loses his virginity on a park bench and chronicles his subsequent visits to a brothel. Says the narrator: "The worst thing about going to a whorehouse was the moment of entry".

Campbell has some experience of sexing-up prose, a talent that began when he wrote pornography for the magzine Forum in the 1970s and 1980s under the pen-name the "Riviera Gigolo". His gifts were also allegedly deployed with the Government's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

The Bad Sex prize was founded in 1993 by Auberon Waugh, the son of Evelyn Waugh, to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it".

Campbell faces strong competition. Martin Amis's wife Isabel Fonseca is also on the shortlist for her debut novel Attachment, in which she writes:"[It] Seemed a long time they'd been standing there kissing, her hands holding his shoulders like the sides of a big ladder she was considering climbing. ... He placed her carefully like a large terracotta urn and skilfully set about his work, as concentrated as a specialist restorer focused on her intricate finish..."