The chief press secretary invited me into his office on the ground floor of 10 Downing Street for tea and coffee and a two-hour tête-à-tête during which the conversation, taped by us both, covered much of the public and private personae of Alastair Campbell. But no matter down which avenue our discussion turned, Campbell would invariably lead it back to his belief that “the journalist as spin doctor” was far more culpable than his own office of distortion and manipulation of the news agenda.

Spin alley is a two-way street, he insists, and positively bristles with examples of what he sees as googlies being bowled at the Government. Over Europe: "You can take the same speech from a politician or the same survey from a bank or whatever and you have a fair idea that in The Sun and The Mail it will be ‘Disaster for Euro’ and in the FT or The Mirror, ‘Boost for the Euro’.” Over Peter Oborne’s Spectator allegations that certain members of the Fourth Estate are Campbell’s “agents”: “It was a very clever piece of right wing spin, that. People only have to look at the papers day by day to see that the idea that any of them are in our pockets is a joke, but it actually had quite an affect on the papers – the next day The Mirror gave us a right kicking on the Health Service.” And over the Dome: “It was described [in the press] on a daily basis as having failed. But how many things have up to 20,000 people going to them [in a day]? When I was at Burnley [Football Club] last week there were only 14,000! My point is that large parts of the media have just decided, let’s kill the Dome. In fact, the public is still going to it – okay, not every day in the numbers you might want, but I think that as the year goes on you’ll find the Dome doing pretty well despite the relentless negative publicity.” The Dome has since, of course, requested and received considerable extra funding and its chairman has been sacked.

He presents me with a photocopy of a New Nation piece about Tony Blair’s visit to South Africa, in which writer Steve Pope comments on the British press corps: “A bigger bunch of middle-class, public school, ego-tripping, arrogant, smug, patronising, cynical, nasty, self-important merchant bankers you’d be hard pressed to find this side of a Pall Mall gentleman’s club.” One can tell Alastair Campbell approves of Mr Pope, which is more than can be said about the majority of the political press.

When he was a journalist, mainly with the Mirror group, plus a couple of stints – one most unhappy – at Today, he used to lie awake at night worrying that he had got a story wrong, he tells me. “I am going to risk sounding like a middle-aged old fart, but I think standards have declined a lot. I don’t get the sense that journalists [today] lie awake wondering whether they’ve got a story right or wrong. I’ve got to be careful [about what I say] because of what I was as a journalist…”

A journalist spin doctor, I venture. “Yes. Was I writing things in my newspaper in the hope that they would then get picked up by television and radio? The answer, yes. Did I it see as part of my job to do stuff on television and radio to help give the newspaper an extra dimension to its political profile?The answer, yes. Now, I did it in part because I thought there was this gross imbalance within the written media as a whole on the Tory-Labour weighing scale. What I think has happened now, though, partly because newspapers are so competitive, partly because newspapers are cutting back on traditional marketing budgets, is that part of journalists’ jobs these days to get themselves on television [just] to get the paper noticed. Some editors seem to spend as much time on the box as they do on the back bench.”

As a political correspondent at the Daily Mirror and political editor of the paper’s Sunday sister and then the daily before filling the same role at Today, Campbell says he was “interested in how journalism could be used to debunk a Tory Government which had massive support in the media. I mean, people go on about us [the Labour Government] getting a good press, but Thatcher had most of them eating out of her hand the whole time. When people go on at me today for criticising the media and say, well, you used to be this and you used to be that, I hold up my hands – I was a biased journalist and I don’t make any bones about that. But the bias was so overwhelmingly the other way the whole time, I didn’t like it and I was in part responding to that.”

Bored

He was never tempted to become a member of parliament and, contrary to Peter Oborne’s speculation in The Spectator says he has no interest in a political career once he jumps or tumbles from the Blair bandwagon. “I don’t know what’s next [for me]. I’ve had a career in journalism. I’ve done this for more than five years and I’ll do it for a while yet – we certainly hope to win another term and I guess I’ll stay as long as Tony wants me to. But I can certainly imagine life away from here. Quite easily.

“I would probably like to do something completely different afterwards.” He is, I point out, too old to envisage playing football for his beloved Burnley. “Yes, but I could manage them,” he says with a smile. “I honestly don’t know – I haven’t even thought about it yet. I just feel there is something else in me that’s out of the world of politics and media and that I’ve still got time to do it. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s there and I know I’ll do it.”

That he agreed to this interview and his decision to co-operate with Michael Cockerell for a BBC-TV documentary (to be screened on July 15) surely indicate that he is deliberately raising his profile, I suggest. At one time a Prime Minister’s press secretary would keep his head, and name, off camera, if not below the parapet, yet Campbell’s star twinkles more brightly with each passing day.

Not so, he argues: “I just feel there is so much focus now on the issue of so-called spin and relations between the Government and the media that it is worth allowing somebody [Cockerell] to come in and take a look at what we actually do, as opposed to what the public is constantly told that we do. And it does not herald a change in our view that my briefings should be off camera, or that I should not continue to be identified as the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman. When John Sergeant, as chairman of the Lobby, told his colleagues that we were going to allow Cockerell some access to briefings, meetings and visits, some of John’s colleagues were clearly not very happy that they had not been consulted. Some journalists said that if there were to be cameras inside, then surely I would have to be identified by name.

“But I think people can see the difference between a one-off film about the Government’s relations with the media and the formulation of the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman, that I believe serves both us and the media reasonably well. I did say that there is nothing I can do to stop them [the Lobby press] naming me, but that I didn’t think it added anything to the public’s understanding of the Government. On that basis, several [papers] reported that I had ‘agreed’ to be identified. I did not.”

If in Campbell’s (almost) public life his contempt for the work of some political journalists is barely concealed, it emerges with undisguised venom during our conversation and he tends to vault back on to his hobby horse at the slightest opportunity. But in between bursts of press bashing, he talks openly and revealingly about many pleasures and problems, past and present…

He knew when he accepted the job with Blair that his life to date, so chequered you could play draughts on it, would be publicly examined. “When I was talking to Tony about it – he knew lots about my past, anyway, because he was, and is, a friend of mine – I said, ‘Look, you’ve got to understand that stuff about my past will come straight out’. I remember saying that there would be calls within days about my soft porn stuff, Forum magazine and all that. In fact, it was within hours – I got a call from the News of the World. So it didn’t surprise me. You have to make a judgement as to whether it matters or not and in my view it didn’t and doesn’t. I’ve never hidden that. I’ve never hidden that I had a nervous breakdown. I’ve never hidden the fact that I drank too much. The truth is, even if you wanted to hide these things, you can’t, so there is no point in worrying.

“All the stuff that’s in the cuttings and is trotted out doesn’t say too much. I feel about the whole breakdown business that it’s where I sorted myself out – personally, politically, professionally, everything. I had left the Mirror and joined Eddie Shah’s outfit [as news editor of Sunday Today] and it was a big mistake. I should never have done it. People advised me against it at the time. Humiliation is the wrong word, but it was very, very public in terms of newspaperland. Everyone knew something had gone wrong and I'd cracked up and was in hospital. And when I re-emerged, I was very shaky. I knew people were thinking, '‘Oh yeah, there’s the guy who thought it was all coming his way and, bang, he was history’. I just felt that from that time I had sorted myself out and knew far more clearly what I was really about, which was, actually, very political. I remember once, before all this, someone saying to me, ‘Look, you’ve really got to decide whether you are in politics or journalism’, and me thinking, ‘I’m not sure about that – I think I can have it both ways’. And I did. Once I got back to the Mirror I made no bones about seeing my job as being a political journalist, as opposed to a political journalist.

“I couldn’t have got through it without Fiona [Fiona Millar, his partner, mother of their children and aide to Cherie Blair] and our families. And it taught me that although you make a lot of acquaintances, journalism is very here and now. I felt I sorted out from all the people I used to go on the rampage with the very few whose friendship and judgement I could trust. The truth is that there wasn’t much to a lot of the people I just went out and got smashed with. And what I felt I discovered from all that was a sort of inner strength in myself and a political core that up until then I had been coy about. I didn’t want people to think I was motivated just by politics, but that whole experience taught me that I was.”

When the time came to spring from one culture to the other, Campbell appears to have been no more sentimental about his departure from journalism than he was detaching himself totally from alcohol: “I was very clear that my relations with journalists would change, would have to change. I was very clear with those who are in the mainstream of political journalism and who were, quotes, friends, close quotes, that I didn’t think I could have friendships with people who are writing about [the Labour Party or] the Government every day. Clearly, you still have relationships, you get on with some people better than others, but I was clear that I now had a different job to do and my loyalties were to Tony and the Labour Party and, now, Tony and the Government.”

He sees clearly his role as the Prime Minister’s occasional hit man as well as communicator: “I know my instinct and sometimes I just have to stop myself because I want to start whacking the Tories. So I don’t go to briefings and say, right, here are 10 reasons why Michael Portillo is a complete prat. I thought Richard Wilson [Sir Richard Wilson, Cabinet Secretary] put it well when he went to the Select Committee last year and basically said, ‘Look, you can set the Government’s policies in a political context, but what I don’t want you to do is go in there throwing bricks and bottles. And I think that’s right. If William Hague launches an attack on the Government, on the Prime Minister, in a particular way, it is perfectly justified for me to go and rebut the arguments and say, ‘Tony’s view is ABC’. What I can’t do on a day when, say, I should be briefing on the Northern Ireland peace process, is to go in there and take up half-an-hour tearing lumps out of the Tories. I am conscious of that and I am conscious that I am a target for a lot of the press as well as the Tories. I think the whole spin phenomenon, this stuff about me, is totally overblown. It’s unhelpful, but then you mustn’t not do your job properly because that problem is there. You’ve got to do the job as you think is right.”

As the afternoon wore on, Campbell dealt succinctly with a number of topics that have thrust his name into the national press more frequently, but even less favourably, than those of David Beckham and Posh Spice, plus the political and medialandscape as he sees it:

His power within Government

“Look, I don’t have any power independent of the Prime Minister. Full stop. You can go back through my old [newspaper] columns and see what my views are on all sorts of different issues, where, if I had ‘power’ I would be sitting here trying to change policy. And I don’t. What I can do, if this or that policy is going through the system, is say, ‘Look, you do realise that if you do this, this is what people are going to say about it’. Or I can point out that it is inconsistent with what we are trying to do in another area. But what I am not doing is sitting here thinking, ‘Right, I’ve got an agenda and I want to try and get it imposed.’ I think Tony uses me in part for my knowledge of the media, in part for my political judgement, but he also knows that I will always, whether to the editor of a national newspaper or to him, say what I think. But in the end, he makes the judgements, not me. I am mindful that I am paid for by the taxpayer [his annual salary of £93,562 is more than that of some Cabinet Ministers]. And it is nonsense to say I am the first Prime Minister’s press secretary to sit in on Cabinet meetings. Joe Haines did. John Major’s guy did. So I think this power thing is overdone. It is partly due to the media being obsessed with its own little world. Most political journalists probably see me more than anybody else and I think they elevate my significance because of that. It makes them feel important.”

Does it irritate him, I ask, when he is referred to as “the real Deputy Prime Minister”?

“Forget it. It doesn’t bother John Prescott and it doesn’t bother me.”

Lunch with Mirror Group chairman Victor Blank

“The only reason I was in the Gay Hussar was because a few days earlier, at Jill Craigie’s memorial, the boss of the Gay Hussar was there and asked me why I never went there anymore, because I used to be in there all the time when I was a journalist. I said I hardly ever went out to lunch, but that the next time I did I would go there. So no conspiracy theory, I’m afraid.”

“I don’t see the need to go into what was discussed.”

Blair’s sons and the Oratory School

“Well, on the kids I am going to be very fair to the media. By and large they have been very fair to us in relation to the Prime Minister’s children and I do try to draw the line about talking about anything to do with the kids.”

But did he protest when the Blairs decided to send Euan to the Oratory School in Fulham?

“I would have pointed out where it would go in press terms, but in the end decisions like that are entirely a matter for him and Cherie. In a sense, it illustrates my point – you can give people all sorts of advice and, let’s be honest about it, there was a big press fallout about it.”

His spokesmen in the Press

“Look, I’ve never been backward in coming forward about my views. And twice a day I’ve got a platform where I can let off steam if I feel the need. And I am clear about what my job is – to put the Government’s case as effectively as possible, [so] if the Government’s case is being misrepresented in one part of the media and I think it is a good idea to go to another part of the media to try and redress the balance, then that’s part of the job. I used to work for Roy [when Greenslade edited the Daily Mirror], so I know him well. But David Aaronovich wrote a piece [in The Independent] saying he thinks the Government is doing a pretty good job most of the time and got written up in parts of the rest of the media as one of our toadies and one of ‘my people’. I could count on the fingers of one hand the conversations I have had with David Aaronovich since the General Election; in fact, I can probably count them on two fingers. I think journalists should get credit for making up their own minds about things.”

The Routledge ‘block’

“All that happened there is that someone asked me who I rated and, maybe it is a terrible thing to say, but I said, er, Tony Bevins was a very good journalist. I mentioned three or four other people I think are very good journalists. The idea that I was blocking one person is absurd.” But, I inquire, were you specifically asked about Paul Routledge? “No, I was not.”

The Guardian and the Government

Sleaze

The Government and the Murdoch Press

“Question: was it a good idea for Tony to go all the way to Hayman Island and make that speech [in 1996]? Answer: yes, it was. Why? Because it was an important platform, it was part of the broader argument that was going on. In Government, was it damaging? I don’t think it was. People in the non-Murdoch part of the media are neuralgic about Murdoch and they’re neuralgic about ‘spin doctors’ [but] I think there is a disproportionate interest in that relationship [between Blair and Murdoch]. In relation to how the Government makes decisions, such as the future funding of the BBC, I don’t think Rupert Murdoch and News International get treated any differently to any other major media organisation.”

The Blair-Brown “feud”

Changing role of the media

“I think there were a lot of lessons to be learned from the Kosovo crisis. Lessons for us and lessons for the media. I made what I thought was a rounded and sensible and measured speech, pointing this out. Beforehand I said [to his staff], ‘Let’s sit down and work out what they’ll say about it. Oh yeah, John Simpson will say this, the guy from Sky will say this, the Daily Mail will say this… You just knew it, because they seem to think they should have a monopoly on comment. Well, we’re entitled to comment, too. The modern media is part of the political and democratic process. We’re all entitled to have a view and if they get stories we think are wrong or unfair, I’m entitled to say so.

“I think on some days there is very little difference between the papers. Often you are just as likely to get trivial garbage in a broadsheet as you are in a tabloid. I got as many questions about Cherie’s pregnancy from the broadsheets as I did from the tabloids. The sort of belief that Medialand and the whole little world in which they operate is in itself in the news has changed newspapers. I’m not tarring them all with the same brush – I think there are still a lot of journalists who worry about getting things right. But I think the pressures on them are to get the story regardless; to get the story first, wrong, rather than get the story at the same time as everyone else, right. All those stories about Mo (Mowlam), for example. I don’t like saying this, but we believe a lot of those stories were invented. I believe journalists make up quotes, or maybe they get somebody, who’s not very important, who says something as an aside at some do or other, and they turn that into a senior minister or a senior source or a senior aide and one quote becomes four and all the rest of it. I hate to say it, but it’s true, with the Sunday papers in particular. Very rarely at my Monday briefings do I get asked about stuff in the Sundays, because I think now the daily papers accept that it goes on.

“I think you have got a situation where a lot of right wing journalists do not like us much because we are a Labour Government and some left wing journalists do not like us much because we are a New Labour Government. Also, I think, culturally and instinctively – and I am not complaining about this – journalists on the left are more comfortable with having a go at the Government than not. But I think this does mean that when it comes to comment and analysis I am not sure the media gives a very balanced picture of the Government. When different advertising agencies were pitching for the Labour Party’s Election account, apparently the one that won did as part of their presentation an analysis of positive and negative coverage of the Government in one set of Sunday newspapers. The positive ran to a handful of cuttings. The negative had been copied on one roll of paper, which they rolled out the length of the entire room and beyond.

“You are genuinely in the age now of 24-hour media; it never stops, stories are moving all the time. The broadcasters have got an absolutely monopoly on ‘now’, on immediacy, which is a big advantage to them, yet for some peculiar reason in this curious relationship [between broadcasters and the press] I think they are still the lesser partner. The press is still setting their agenda, which I think is bizarre and odd and shows a terrible lack of self-confidence in the way they work. A good example was when Rhodri Morgan was being interviewed on Today and Sue MacGregor said to him, ‘Now we hear John Prescott is taking on this special role to connect with the Labour heartlands’. Now, all ‘we hear’ was was some piece of nonsense in The Independent that morning – ‘Prescott to lead heartlands fightback’, or whatever. I happened to be speaking with John Prescott that morning and he said, ‘What was the stuff on the radio?’. So there is the Today programme, flagship programme and all that, picking up something from the newspapers and, instead of trying to check it out independently, saying ‘We hear that’!”

The Lord Winston affair

I should declare than I have known Campbell for a long time – we worked together at both the Sunday and Daily Mirrors – and our families have been friendly for many years. I now see him rarely, but to me it seems the weight of office has changed him only minimally. Just turned 43, he appears to be physically in good shape and his face remains unlined. As ever, he is quick to laugh – but one suspects that living in a state of permanent hostility with members of his former trade has both made him tougher, in the sense of harder, and dictated that he construct a shock-proof second skin behind which he can withdraw whenever necessary.

“There’s no point in pretending,” he muses. “If you are dealing with the press, you’ve got to be able to stand your ground, you’ve got to be able to mount an argument and you’ve got to be able to take a load of flack. They’re not shrinking violets, are they?” Has the second skin, the permanent flak jacket, been seriously pierced? “My folks hardly read the papers, but people will always tell them if there is something horrible about me – somebody will say, ‘Look what he's up to now’. When the Oborne book [his biography of Campbell] was coming out in The Express, the Mail did a spoiler which had this line about how one of the great formative experiences of my life was when my dad died when I was ten. Which was a big shock to me and an even bigger shock to my dad, who is very alive. It was quite upsetting. It went for all of us, really – my kids didn’t like it, my dad didn’t like it, my mum didn’t like it. To be fair, Dacre put a correction in straight way, without any argument. [Yet] I still get my parents saying to me they’ve seen something in the Mail – my dad read a piece, by Bruce Anderson, about sinister whispering against Mo Mowlam, which was based on bugger all. My dad, who has been described as dead by the same newspaper, said, ‘Why are people putting the boot into Mo Mowlam’. You’ve got to explain, and the trouble is you can’t get around to every single person who’s reading stuff in newspapers that’s wrong. Believe me, there’s a lot that’s wrong – and you never get a real sense that when newspapers get things wrong there’s anybody getting bollocked for it.”

Only questions about his domestic life (other than a query about his relationship with Charlie Whelan, Gordon Brown’s late press secretary, which I put twice and each time is met with unenthusiastic mumbles the tape fails to pick up!) are met with anything other than super-confidence. Is it true the Prime Minister has urged him to marry Fiona?

“He does it on a regular basis and he’s joined in that by the children [three sons, aged 12, 10 and 5]. I don’t know why we haven’t, really. We’ve just never got round to it. Fiona’s office is directly above here, but on most working days I hardly see her. I may bump into her two or three times a day. When we go home, we don’t talk about work much. One of us always goes home reasonably early and at least once a week I don’t come in until late, so I can take the children to school. I’m pretty ruthless about my time. I hardly ever go out for lunch, I hardly ever go out to dinner. I am working from about seven in the morning until eight in the evening and often do a few hours after the children have gone to bed. I don’t honestly recall ever having a full day off and that includes holidays. It’s partly the way I am. I can’t do something unless I do it one 100 per cent.”

He remains close friends with Blair, but says: “We don’t socialise much now. Maybe two or three times a year – the kids see their kids every now and again. He’s a very focused character and I’m a very focused character. If he’s got any spare time, he wants to be up in the flat and if I’ve got any spare time, all I want is to be at home. It’s all about focus. In the end it’s about being able to put on blinkers and keep focused on the things you need to be focused on. I think in the early days I was probably over-reacting to things. Sometimes I lost my rag too quickly. Now I do it more slowly!”

Surrounded by photographs of his family, bits and pieces of the children’s school art, a picture of the Prime Minister outside No. 10 and a cluster of mineral water bottles, the shirt-sleeved Campbell appears totally relaxed. Focused, of course, but relaxed. “I do have a sense of being part of something really quite important and fundamental and exciting that’s going on,” he tells me as I prepare to leave. “You do occasionally sit there and think – it sounds corny to say it – this is history being made, this is the country turning in a new direction and you’re part of that. I have a sense that when I’m old and grey I’ll look back and say, ‘That was quite something’.”