My friend Deborah always complains: You are the most crap smoker I know

My friend Deborah always complains: “You are the most crap smoker I know”. But I maintain that though I am not a particularly committed smoker, I am committed to the idea of smoking.
Recent visits to California have greatly increased my commitment I have seen the future and it is ghastly I felt compelled to smoke twice as much there as usual. Contrary to popular opinion, I believe that hard drugs lead inevitably to soft drugs That’s my experience anyway

Even now, though, my habit is not properly formed. After a lifetime of resistance, I finally gave in and started smoking at the age of 35 One drug, as they say, leads to another.

I can go for weeks without a cigarette then smoke millions in a night. It is part of Campbell’s job to supply that need; because if Number 10 doesn’t, its enemies will. I suspect he often feels less like a control freak than a fast-food operative, hurling late- night stories at a queue of ravening sickos.So he’s powerful, rude and committed Whatever the opposite of Luvvie is, that’s Campbell He’s tribal He enjoys his power. Of all the arguments I’ve had with New Labourites, none has been as spectacularly angry as with him.But he is Blair’s true instrument And he doesn’t lie And he isn’t sinister. So if you don’t like New Labour’s tunes, complain to the management Don’t shoot the pianist (or in this case the bagpiper).. IT IS TRUE that peer-group pressure encourages smoking.

Campbell, by contrast, has abolished the unattributable briefings which were the main daily method of spreading poison He speaks on the record. He doesn’t, in my experience, play games.And is he guilty of manufacturing news? Well of packaging it, certainly: the appetite for stories is constantly accelerating and needs feeding, particularly at the weekend, with low-fibre, high-fat munchable stories in brightly-coloured cartons. Ingham’s unattributable briefings felt like anonymous knives in the back for those Tories on the receiving end; and that nasty courtier-politics was one reason for The Independent boycotting and subverting the lobby system when we first launched in 1986. He matters more to the current Prime Minister even than Sir Bernard mattered to Margaret Thatcher.The great difference, so far, is that Campbell has avoided the semi-official destruction of ministers’ authority and careers that marked Ingham’s period. And if, in other respects, they let Campbell trample all over them then they shouldn’t be ministers in the first place. His role as Enforcer, and his friendship with Blair, make him a lot more than a press officer.

He is Blair’s chosen instrument of discipline in a highly disciplined government: his power rubs up against some of the biggest names and egos in the administration That hasn’t helped his popularity. But if ministers leak or brief against one another then, in Blair’s book, they deserve to get whacked. Did that nasty Alastair Campbell call oo a dickhead then? Diddums!)As with Ingham, “press secretary” is a grossly inadequate term for Campbell. Like Ingham, Campbell speaks fluent Anglo-Saxon and has a short fuse. (We shouldn’t, by the way, have any time for journalistic whining on this score. Any self-respecting hack should simply get out the Anglo-Saxon phrase book, and pour it back. Campbell was fated to be famous, or infamous, from the day he agreed to work with Blair.

He was already a colourful and well-known journalist, a good, vivid broadcaster, an occasional pugilist and a skillful bagpiper. Given that, the omnipresent cameras would have made Campbell a public figure unless he hid in his office all day.Ingham is perhaps the more interesting parallel. It is true that he’s not exactly camera-shy and can be seen regularly at Blair’s elbow, like a particularly menacing American presidential security guard.Yet things have changed since Haines’s day. But until he publishes a fat volume of memoirs, in the 2010s, we won’t really know.In the meantime, we can at least begin to measure him against his two best-known predecessors, Joe Haines in the Wilson era and Bernard Ingham in the Thatcher years. Both are men Campbell admires; yet he is already a bigger figure than either of them.Haines has mildly chastised Campbell for being too public a figure. He has no constituency to nurse, no ambitions or interests distinct from those of the Prime Minister.