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AS a Downing Street spin doctor, Alastair Campbell was renowned for telling tall stories and stretching credulity to the limit. Now he has transferred his skills to writing fiction and the result is his debut novel, All in the Mind, the story of a psychiatrist who desperately needs psychiatric help himself.
If there is any justice in the world then Campbell's book would win a literary prize - the Literary Review Bad Sex prize, that is. Clunky sex scene is piled on clunky sex scene, two-dimensional body upon two-dimensional body, and his observations border on the banal.
Ernest Hemingway observed it is much easier to write about what you know than what you don't know. Campbell has clearly taken this lesson to heart. He started out on his career as a soft porn merchant writing colourful prose for Forum magazine, under the pseudonym Riviera Gigolo. His powers of description, such as they are, have not really developed in 30 years.
There's a priceless scene where our hero loses his virginity "on an oddly shaped park bench with intricate metalwork at either end". It's a curious detail and any writer worth his salt would have arrested our attention (and prolonged the anticipation) by giving us the texture, the smell and the colour of the bench. But Campbell doesn't linger: he is too eager to get down to the business of copulation. Not for the first time, he is guilty of sexing up his prose.
Campbell isn't the first writer to cross over from the political arena into fiction writing. Former prime minister Benjamin Disraeli practically invented the English political novel. His best known works are Sybil and the more romantic Coningsby. Both are still in print today.
His parliamentary heirs have been found wanting by comparison. We have the frivolous bonkbusters of Edwina Currie and Jeffrey Archer's cut-and-paste novels. Douglas Hurd cowrote passable thrillers as a foreign secretary, while Iain Duncan Smith's unthrilling thriller, The Devil's Tune, lost him any last modicum of respect. Boris Johnson had his first "comic political novel", Seventy-Two Virgins, published in 2005 but he has still to return to the fictional fray.
The trouble is that most politicians these days see fiction as fallback option rather than a vocation. The reason why Disraeli was an exception to the rule is that he was a novelist before he became a politician, achieving a wild succès de scandale with Vivian Grey, which he published in 1826 when he was only 21. Disraeli once remarked: "When I want to read a novel, I write one."
Campbell should stick to spindoctoring rather than spinning yarns - or else sit on a few more park benches.
