Alastair Campbell likes to be kept busy. Throughout our conversation his phone buzzes incessantly, with “30 or 40 different bids to go on television” and discuss the week’s events coming through. He doesn’t pull his punches, either; to say he’s a polarising figure would be rather understating it. “I make strong impressions on people,” he tells me, “some people loathe me and some people think I’m the bee’s knees”.
Campbell combines politics, podcasting, and mental health advocacy, and remains as influential a public figure as ever. 50 years ago though, he was a newly-matriculated undergraduate at Gonville & Caius studying foreign languages. He talks about Cambridge with little enthusiasm; shrugging off the experience of applying, he tells me “I hadn’t thought about […] whether I wanted to [go], whether I cared; it didn’t bother me”. Campbell admits that he was “a bit snarky” in his admissions interview, and that he arrived with a chip on his shoulder, certainly not seeking to “make the most of it”. After some thought, he settles on a much blunter summary of events: “There was a lot about [Cambridge] I really didn’t like”.
Campbell paints a colourful picture of the environment he found. Caius didn’t allow women in until 1980 and seemed to offer “a kind of private school conveyor belt”. Both students and fellows would be “marching around in gowns,” or even “military uniform,” soundtracked by grating “braying accents”. He gravitated towards a small group of three or four mates, but for the wider community he met, he says, with a look of slight disdain, “I’d never known people like that before”. Those student friendships he did make, he tells me, are long-lasting, but were likely borne out of a mutual fondness for “drink and anti-establishment[ism]”.
His drinking at this time casts a long shadow. For Campbell “drinking […] was probably a bigger driver in my life than anything” while at University. He reels off his problems, counting them on his fingers, “I drank too much, no doubt about that, I sometimes made myself ill with it […] there was a lot of anger in me at the time”. This, he would only later come to identify, was depression, and Campbell speaks about his experiences of mental health in an unflinchingly honest way. He’s unperturbed as he describes the effects of depression and alcoholism, how he sat in the cinema “feeling absolutely paranoid […], thinking something really terrible is about to happen”. He calmly talks through feeling “almost […] imprisoned,” how he would say to himself “this isn’t for me, but I’ve got to be here”. At Cambridge, by his own admission, Campbell was angry, he was “prone to violence” and fighting, and was “probably quite lucky to stay in”.
“There was a lot about [Cambridge] I really didn’t like”
There were a few happier moments, he points out. He smiles while telling the story of he and his friends inventing a new language, “where you change every vowel in every word to another vowel”. The three of them who speak it fluently still write to each other in the code. Though it seems it was his year abroad that most meaningfully improved Campbell’s time at Cambridge; when asked if it changed anything he says, with no hesitation, “Yeah. A lot.” He relished growing up and becoming “much more independent”. Arriving in France “on my own, with one bag, one heavy suitcase, maybe 30 quid in my pocket […] I saw my parents maybe once in the next year”. The distance between him and Cambridge seemed to do some good, he enjoyed the escape from “Voltaire and Balzac and Molière and all this stuff,” and enjoyed the opportunity to simply speak the language. “When I got back, I think I was in better shape,” he adds.
After leaving Cambridge, Campbell worked odd jobs, including as a roulette dealer. He busked for a while, and was “making money playing music, footloose and fancy free,” and he assures me that he is a better musician than Tony Blair. Yet his alcoholism persisted, he “was still getting pretty whacked most days,” and when he was a young journalist for the Daily Mirror he still drank. All of this culminated in a psychotic breakdown in 1986.
Speaking now, almost 40 years on, Campbell is quite circumspect. “I do thank my breakdown for quite a lot, actually,” he tells me, “I think it made me more resilient”. Faced with the prospect of returning to the Mirror in the immediate aftermath, Campbell says “even though the whole thing had been the worst period of my life on one level, within a few weeks I’m telling jokes about it”. Again, he seems to shrug off the problem and speak about depression in a refreshingly ordinary way. The breakdown toughened him up, and it gave him a “thick skin”.
“Some bloke, sitting in his underpants on his mum’s sofa, saying that I should be shot, it doesn’t bother me”
This “thick skin” has clearly been tested over time. Polarising as Campbell is, this resilient quality is probably useful. He tells me that it is about “working out what really matters;” for any public figure, “people have their views of you, that’s fine, but ultimately there aren’t many people whose views really, really matter”. He laughs slightly while talking through his social media comments: “some bloke, sitting in his underpants on his mum’s sofa, you know, saying that I should be shot, it doesn’t bother me”.
That’s all very well and good, but if you are receiving bloodstained letters in the post and if, upon arrival at the Hutton Enquiry in 2003, you are greeted by an angry mob calling you a murderer, even the most resilient of people might be stretched somewhat. Campbell reflects a moment and says quite simply “it is amazing what you can get through”. Again, Campbell seems remarkably immune to others’ opinions: “if somebody’s going to throw a placard at you, as long as it doesn’t cut my head open it’s like ‘Ah well.’ It didn’t really bother me”. He describes blocking out the noise outside the court, being laser-focused and “absolutely in the mode” while giving evidence. His police escort apparently offered him a backdoor way in, to avoid the protestors, and Campbell simply said “No, no, no. Bollocks to that”.
The Hutton Enquiry was one of the final chapters of his time in Downing Street, six years marred by ”tiredness” and “overwork”. Campbell talks about how he kept working to “fight my way” through “bad days,” and that to stop, or to even take a holiday, became impossible. It’s hardly surprising, then, that upon leaving government, Campbell “didn’t have a clue” what lay in wait. He suffered a “very bad depression” as he realised he’d “crashed into a kind of non-life”. Describing this period as the “toughest mentally” in his life, he talks me through a heart-to-heart he’d had with his partner, journalist Fiona Millar, on Hampstead Heath in “about 2004, 2005,” where “I ended up punching myself in the face, […] a very primitive form of self-harm”. Once again, Campbell’s honesty is slightly disarming, but he insists that he’s “never felt personally, the stigma and the taboo” surrounding conversations on mental health. His communication and campaigning, skills he developed in government, are now devoted to mental health advocacy.
“Life’s more challenging today than it was in my time”
These will be familiar to any listener of The Rest is Politics, the podcast he hosts alongside Rory Stewart, that has become a phenomenon particularly among younger audiences. “We did the tour last year and I think it was the Albert Hall, they reckoned about a third of the audience was under 30,” he tells me. When asked if it’s a bonus to have a younger audience that might be more receptive to conversations about mental health, Campbell switches straight back into campaign mode. At a societal level, he worries that mental health support is “going backwards,” and that changed attitudes are not enough when “services just aren’t there,” and that “people who don’t have money” have no way to access mental health services.
There are around 2 million people on mental health waiting lists at the moment, and Keir Starmer has come under fire for not committing enough resources to mental health support. Campbell remains a proud Labour man, and I press him on whether he feels the current Labour government are doing as much as he would like; he hesitates slightly, before saying “I do worry that mental health is not the priority I’d like it to be”. He thinks some more and then is pretty adamant: “I’d like more to be done, to be honest”.
Campbell speaks now in a world that, while not without its shortcomings, is far more receptive to conversations surrounding mental health than the Cambridge of the 1970s. He admits, however, that it’s “very hard” to maintain good mental health in contemporary Britain. So when I ask him whether he thinks he’d have enjoyed Cambridge more were he to matriculate now, in 2025, his answer isn’t exactly encouraging. He’d certainly “make the most of it,” but says, blunt as ever, “life’s more challenging today than it was in my time”.
From the “climate” to “populism,” there’s seemingly very little to inspire hope. It’s this exasperation which appears to fire Campbell up though. He tells me “if I can set my mind to something, I can do it”. It’s clear he’s not worn down by his life in the public eye but rather remains as energised as ever. Not a bad thing at all, as there’s clearly more than enough to keep him busy.
