The good, the mad and the ugly

His recollections are nonetheless revealing and instructive for being selfserving and selective. They miss out the nasty Gordon bits to preserve the new PM's blushes. But of course GB hangs like a restless phantom over the whole enterprise, deliberately subverting Mr Blair's pro-Euro policy (thank you, Gordon), getting in the way, brooding and agitating for power, thwarting the boss wherever possible — well, you know the rest.

Even the brief passage of time blunts memories. We forget, or take for granted, how astonishing it was for Labour not only to return from the doldrums but also to steal the political scene for so long. Three Conservative leaders have come and gone, meanwhile, and another is fighting gamely but not certain of success. Virtually the only people I meet these days who have an acute sense of what is demanded and what can be learned from it are the Cameron team, because they know the scale of what is ahead of them, too.

Mr Campbell is a perfect study of hubris. He commits the cardinal professional error of bad timing, stays too long and his judgment fragments. In the end he is as much a problem as a solution to his master's ills. He heeds no omen. Given the warning of the first "dodgy dossier" on WMD culled from the internet and exposed, he then sets about the real dossier, a far more accurate reflection of what was known at the time but unconscionably spins and tweaks it to assert far more certainty than the Joint Intelligence Committee ever intended.

Had it simply been posted on the internet, with no intervention from him or the No 10 team, the assessment would still have been flawed, but only in so much as Saddam ditched his WMD stocks as the war approached. It would have been largely in line with what most informed sources here and abroad thought was the state of affairs. In trying to create absolute certainty where none existed, Mr Campbell delivered his enemies a silver bullet. That is why he is still so sore on the issue and why the misjudgment was so major, even before the ghastly spiral of blame and counter-blame resulted in David Kelly's suicide.

Many will look askance at the riotous picture of government and its feuds painted here. "I hate all this PM hates GB stuff," emails a friend with a vengeance.

But you know what? We hate it just as much when the political communications business fails, too. Politicians who can't do that are treated with electoral scorn or pre-emptively ditched by their parties. That is why William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith are now answering to David Cameron, not the other way round.

One of the most senior figures in Camp Cameron bemoans that after all the efforts of the Tory leader to create an entire new image for his party, all people remember is that he rides a bike but has his car follow behind. A vast amount of effort goes into offsetting this image of flakiness. I can't say I blame them. Mr Campbell bemoans after a long day of focus-groups that all the participants want to talk about is "whether they like Tony's smile or not, on and on".

Mr Cameron has just hired a former News of the World editor to refine his message. The intention is exactly the same — to sell an able politician to the voters and overcome the hurdles of his own party's image and the press's unforgiving appetite for flaws.

Successful politicians and their inner circle are rarely studies in well-balanced individuals working quietly together in common cause. Mrs Thatcher was a sleep-deprived, relentless, hyperactive maniac who ground her staff to distraction. Bill Clinton was a sexaholic, sloppy, instinctive leader, whose lapses and ensuing coverups make the Blair/Campbell axis seem tame. The dominant modern European leaders, Chirac and Kohl, were manipulative, scheming, unbending control freaks.

Balanced people rarely thrive at the top of politics. Even those on whom we bestow the veneer of history, such as Churchill and Lloyd George, were oddities as well as giants.Those who work closely with them for any time tend to be extremely submissive or just as peculiar as their bosses in their own way.

Sometimes I look into Tony Blair's intense and anguished blue eyes and think he is not quite right, too. Neither is Gordon Brown, who has wanted to be Prime Minister since he was 15.

The "madness" of politicians and their court followers is often commented on.

Yet sensible, well-adjusted ones don't command our belief or attention either.

True, the sight of overwrought aides brawling is enough to make the pratfalls of The Thick of It seem like documentary footage. But Mr Campbell was, I still conclude, a necessary evil for New Labour. His real failing, to which he returns in a fugue of self-regard and despair, is that he never knew when to stop or how to quell his own combative excesses. Now he seeks to make some great heroic clash out of the perfectly natural disagreements between press and politicians. In reality, this is one of the most valuable things in a democracy to be prized, not spurned.

I do not think that anyone would seek to replicate his manner or powers, or that anything like the Blair years, with their extremes of comedy and tragedy will come again soon. But Mr Campbell instills one lasting lesson: politics will always be a communicator's business.

He says he left government with more respect for politics and less for journalists.

The two are much more interdependent than he cares to admit. The political process in Britain is, on the whole, robust, reactive and capable of change — even if it needs to restore more of the checks and balances he helped remove.

One of the main reasons it is kept within bounds at all it is the annoying, vigilant and varied media that he professes to loathe. Funny, that..