Living Better: How I Survived Depression
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL
(JOHN MURRAY, 320 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Tony Blair, for whom Alastair Campbell worked in Downing Street from 1994 to 2003, thought he knew “everything there was to know” about his chief strategist, co-architect of New Labour, spin doctor and family friend. But this book, in which Campbell recounts the whole story of his depression and breakdowns, and how he learned to manage his condition, has told his former boss a whole lot more. For the rest of us, it may come as something of a shock to realise just how ill and tormented Campbell was while working as the Prime Minister’s right-hand man; but there is much to admire in the way he has not just survived, but reinvented himself as a writer and campaigner.
The book opens with an admission that last winter he found himself, not for the first time, contemplating suicide. Then he plunges into the first half, entitled “Me, My Life, My Depression”. Predictably, he finds clues to his later troubles in his background and childhood, although he was neither unhappy nor unloved. The family was Scottish, but he grew up in Yorkshire where his father was a vet and a bit of a drinker. Campbell himself, by his late teens, was progressing from his state school to Cambridge, passionate about football and the bagpipes and already on the way to becoming an alcoholic. Whether the drink led to the depression or the other way round remains obscure. Of his two beloved older brothers, one became a schizophrenic and the other died of alcohol-related disease.
