Fan friction

A long review of Alastair Campbell’s Living Better: How I Learned to Survive Depression

I’m a fan. The podcast The Rest is Politics, where Campbell and Conservative Rory Stewart go head-to-head (always good-naturedly) is always absorbing and provides both insight and entertainment. When LBC need a viewpoint, Campbell is often the go-to pundit. He is fluent and lucid. Though he mistakenly called for a ‘People’s Vote’ following the 2016 referendum, his understanding of our post-Brexit world is a clear one, and the New European weekly that he founded offers essay-length opinion on vital topics. His tv appearances show a handsome, rugged type of Scot, despite his sixty years and English accent. He does not affect certainty, which gives him a young man’s voice. People like Alastair Campbell. I do too.

But I’m not satisfied with the book. Not to say unreadable. The very opposite. He’s not a tabloid journalist for nothing; he knows how to engage. Raising the issue – depression – is timely and necessary. Among many things, it taught me to separate the mental (or medical) condition – from sadness. His account of the four-day periods of misery that he has withstood since early adulthood – is harrowing: the unlocatable physical pain, the vanishment of self-belief and the withdrawal of all energy, motivation and desire. That the man has recourse to his bed, to tears, to a ‘tiny nod’ as only signal to his family – should make us pity him, or anyone else who undergoes a similar ordeal.

In literary terms though, how is this experience used? It is a well-written account of suffering. Via Campbell, we are given the whole package – of the drugs used to treat depression, the interventions of psychiatrists and the role of family and friends in recovery. As a red-top reporter he has a facility for making complex things simple. One doubts that his high-quality supervision was NHS-funded; a man who has a house abutting Hampstead Heath could surely anyway pay for it himself. But this this not a state-of-the-National Health address. Campbell’s purpose is to inform the reader of the steps he has taken to bring the condition under control.

And this is where the benefits of his treatment, to us, become real. To stand up for those with mental health issues is noble. The more so when admitting to them is seen as a sign of weakness. Campbell is a figure well-suited to taking down the ‘macho’ that has made mental health a taboo subject. Combative, hard-drinking, Burnley-supporting, marathon-running, he is the embodiment of male physical culture. And yet public confession to life on the booze – a side of his nature that has disrupted the lives of those around him. Who gains? Well, we the public obviously, because what was hidden is now flooded with light. We understand more about depression. In doing so Campbell has also brought himself into relief.

For many readers, the interest will be the ‘insider’ telling about the Blair government. They fall into two camps. First there are those who damaged his mental health (Blair himself by preying upon his vanity to recruit and then visiting overwork upon him) and then those who have guided him out of the abysm, whom he calls good friends. He devotes an uxorious chapter to his wife’s role. Such references sell the book. That there is a commercial intention does not of course make it a bad book. It is the easy reliance on narrative that prevents it from being a good one. The writer narrates the background that has contributed to his depressive condition. The Scottish background and the poetic descriptions of Hebridean childhood holidays is brought into very-loose association with a genetic transfer of the disposition. The stellar career is told too, for the apparent purpose of showing the pressures that bring about breakdown. Perhaps the story of Alastair Campbell is inseparable from a history of psychological disorder. I had the impression he was treating the reader to an autobiography studded with so much detail (Cambridge University, love, children, self-discovery). I could picture him, hammering the thing out on his laptop over a few days, just telling us a series of stories. And if we picked up the book (as the Media would have) it would remind us, should he choose to make a future come-back, of his name.

To write a ‘gratitude list’ followed by a ‘resentments list’. Then to make a ‘need/want’ separation. The ‘repurposing’ of negative thoughts. These techniques may be simple, have immediate good effect but they are not well-known. Why not? There’s a proliferation of self-help books that will contain versions of them. If the manuals are up-to-date then their psychology is generally sound. Why would we then go to Campbell rather than, say, Oliver Burkeman? Part of the answer may be that Campbell has lived through depression, as opposed to having studied the condition. But that can’t be all.

It is too simple to say the famous will naturally trump the obscure in any contest for public attention. There’s nothing Campbell needs to know about maintaining a public presence. Since the 1990s, he has never been outside the political gaze of the nation. As Tony Blair’s press secretary he had little choice in the matter. Amid the revelations of the Chilcot enquiry that followed the Iraq war, Campbell struggled to defend himself from the suggestion that the objective of the invasion was regime-change and that the ’45-minute’ capability for attack on the west by Weapons of Mass Destruction was actually unfounded, and put out to try to win public support. And yet, in the years that followed the disgrace of the Blair government, Campbell has kept his name alive. Four novels, seven volumes of diary, an account of the Good Friday peace settlement in Ireland and then two pop-psychology reviews: The Happy Depressive, Winners and how they Succeed. The name Campbell keeps popping up. And yet names from the first Blair government do not. Who hears now of Charles Clarke, John Reid, Jacqui Smith, Alan Johnson? And they were all Home Office ministers. Alastair Campbell on the other hand cottons on to issues that are marketable, and so keeps himself in the public eye.