A Journey

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He has interviewed dozens of former ministers and 200 former civil servants, some perhaps with a score to settle towards a PM who barely hid his disdain for Whitehall. Within New Labour," a senior civil servant told Rawnsley, "they were a revolutionary cell within the party . Campbell voted Labour in the 2019 general election, having been part of a failed tactical voting campaign aimed at preventing Johnson from winning a majority. Campbell was part of Tony Blair's core team that conducted the negotiations that led to the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, and he has been honoured by several Irish universities for his role in the peace process.

Next he is defending the Rwandan leader, Paul Kagame, in the face of human rights accusations (as the British government, it must be said, has long done).Reg Keys, whose son Tom Keys was killed in Iraq in 2003, said the book was "just crocodile tears from Blair. When he fought a by-election in 1982 - losing his deposit in the safe Tory seat of Beaconsfield - he spoke in public for the first time. The minister who had been scheduled to appear was the then Chief Secretary to the Treasury David Laws, who Campbell produced a picture of during the programme. The picture Rawnsley presents is of an inexperienced government in permanent panic and almost wholly paralysed by fear: fear of not being re-elected, fear of economic crisis, fear of rebellious old Labour MPs, fear of the civil service, fear of the press, fear of repeating their party's past mistakes, fear above all that they simply weren't up to the job.

Assessments of Blair cannot draw on any significant record of pre-parliamentary achievement, any youthful history of arguing through political principles with close friends and comrades, or any early statements of philosophy and beliefs.Nor does he acknowledge that any British prime minister would have faced an acute dilemma after 9/11 when confronted with an angry US and a president determined to go to war. And at a stroke, it's clear these great, vocal proselytisers of New Labour have unwittingly written its epitaph.

In March 2022 he launched the podcast The Rest is Politics with Rory Stewart, which has been the top politics podcast in the UK in the Apple rankings since its launch.Campbell was a guest presenter of Good Morning Britain from 10 to 12 May 2021, where he presented with Susanna Reid.

The book closes with a final chapter offering a critique of Labour Party policy, and discusses its future. Within a week, Nielsen BookScan said that 92,000 copies of A Journey had been sold in the United Kingdom, the best opening week for an autobiography since the company began keeping figures in 1998. Elements of the left, rather perversely, help the Conservatives when they talk as if Labour did nothing worth respecting with its longest span in office.

The Tiree Community Songbook was made into a CD, which won a Community award at the Traditional Music awards. John Rentoul, author of the Blair biography Tony Blair Prime Minister, was equally positive, giving particular praise to the chapter on the Iraq War. But nor (unlike Gordon Brown) had he been a student politician, nor (unlike Jack Straw) a ministerial adviser, nor (unlike David Blunkett) a local councillor, nor (unlike John Prescott) a union official. Jenkins, in a book which argues that Blair is more of a Thatcherite than Margaret Thatcher, describes him as "an outsider with neither hinterland nor destination".