ALASTAIR CAMPBELL - THE RETURN OF THE JEDI

Interestingly, when I came across Lesley White’s News Review Interview with Tony Blair’s former press secretary Alistair Campbell, now novelist author and unemployed plotter, it brought the whole labour shenanigans back to me. What a collection of mugs. I’d all but forgotten about Robin Cook’s famous airport divorce. Or Ron Davies’ infamous moment of madness on Clapham Common. Or a red-faced Prescott staggering into the House of Commons after a short sharp shag with his personal secretary. Which did the former deputy prime minister’s international reputation no harm at all; Clinton knew just how he felt. But what
about his superbly inadequate grasp of his own language?And now, we learn that that psycho Campbell is back again, and never was there more ambiguity in a piece of editorial information that he will be “involved only when he feels like it, he won’t even have a title or an office”. No doubt he'll have a salary.

That caustic comic is no mug!

Of course, if you happen to be Alastair Campbell, remembered as an
arrogant, cantankerous, psychologically warped know-all, who was somehow
involved with the death of Dr David Kelly, you’ll be well wary of all this. As a
matter of fact, if you are Alastair Campbell you shouldn’t be perusing this
blog. You ought to be preparing your answers for the next instalment of
Celebrity Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. When previously the question came up
which country, in 1973, entertained a space-station called “Skylab”, France -
Russia - UK - USA? - Alastair famously opted for France. Or was that just the
whisky talking? Well, for your information, Alastair, the moon is a balloon and
apparently uninhabited.

Brown’s stance has a certain obstinacy, you have to admit, but also a
certain desperation. Caught in a net of apparently insoluble conflicts, he’s
disinterring skeletons. Alastair’s past history was an unbroken chain of
disaster, his blunders ranging from minor tactical gaffes to major strategic
errors, to say nothing of his psychotic breakdown, clinical depression and
uncontrollable outbursts. Fear and Loathing in No 10. One can sense the
unmistakable lunacy of that asylum. At the very least, there’s the demonically
heightened atmosphere of political conspiracy. Indeed, the Mandelson appointment
suggests an almost suicidal wish to atone for personal culpability. Mandy the
mascot. Destroy him and the nation will disintegrate. Mandelson the mother of
all huffs, the king of strops, torn between feelings of inferiority and
delusions of superiority, a rascal possessed of astonishing chutzpah, swept to
the top of one of the most notable piles of sewage in recent political
history...

Meanwhile, in America, Blair went on to his greatest triumph, the
Congressional Gold Medal award. WODs may be done and dusted, but no judgement on
his person or his role in history can avoid references to a rare facility for
lying and the vapidity of his ideas for the preposterous Millennium Dome. As for
his role of envoy to the Middle East, Rami Khouri, a leading Arab journalist,
wrote: it was “like appointing Nero fire chief in Rome.” A perfect incendiary,
indeed. It's self-perpetuating. There is a hot wind blowing through the souks of
Arabia.

Now all this may seem a little melodramatic. No doubt it is. But the
first thing to realize is that with the globalisation of its historical sense,
Western statesmanship has lost much of its idealism, vision and purpose. Power,
corrupts and depraves men like no alcohol or opium does. And the general
promiscuous cupidity to which the Labour Government has stooped over the past
ten years or so, has debased this nation as nothing else could. Needless to say,
political life has its own rules. And cupidity always sets the cultural tone at
the lowest possible level. But these years will remain branded, nevertheless, in
the history of the moral, political and social degeneration, rather than
decline, of this, once the noblest of island nations.

And that, folks, just about covers my view ...

Dreamy