Top 35 Alastair Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Like most meaningful activities, campaigns are team games.”

— Alastair Campbell

2. “I think I’m highly loveable.”

— Alastair Campbell

3. “One day, we will look back and wonder how on earth we used to believe that depression was a lifestyle choice, only to be debated and taken seriously when an A List film star took his life, and the world filled with people saying how shocked and saddened they were.”

— Alastair Campbell

4. “I used to be very routine-based and the new thing in my life is not having a clear, full-time existence.”

— Alastair Campbell

5. “The media are obsessed with spin doctors and with portraying them as a bad thing, yet seem addicted to our medicine.”

— Alastair Campbell

6. “My dad, Donald, was a vet and had a practice in Yorkshire. Cats and dogs were his bread and butter, but his greatest love was large animals.”

— Alastair Campbell

7. “We should confine booing in sports arenas to sport. I love a good boo as much as the next football fan.”

— Alastair Campbell

8. “The day of the daredevil reporter who refuses to see obstacles to getting the truth, and seeing it with his or her own eyes, seems to have died.”

— Alastair Campbell

9. “For all that the papers would say I was a liar, I took the words I was saying at briefings as seriously as Tony Blair took what he would say at the Despatch Box. I find it very difficult not to tell the truth. I felt I was accountable for what I said.”

— Alastair Campbell

10. “Some twat with a Trot poster came up to me on the way in and yelled ‘Butcher!’ Traitor!’ at me. I stopped and mustered as much visual contempt as I could, then assured him that if we win the general election then don’t worry, thanks to wankers like him, there will always be another Tory government along afterwards. These people make me vomit.”

— Alastair Campbell

11. “There are many reasons for the decline in royal esteem. One is that so many of the royals are thick.”

— Alastair Campbell

12. “Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.”

— Alastair Campbell

13. “Don’t accept that you are in crisis just because everyone says you are.”

— Alastair Campbell

14. “The royal family’s existence is a constant reminder of the hollowness of John Major’s rhetoric, and idiotic statements by its leading members a constant boost to the republican cause. They’re fine opening hospitals. It’s when they open their mouths they get into trouble.”

— Alastair Campbell

15. “I had a happy childhood.”

— Alastair Campbell

16. “I’m certainly driven, I hate losing, I can be ruthless and short-tempered and terribly competitive.”

— Alastair Campbell

17. “For all its faults, our political process is a good one, and the means by which much meaningful change is made. That is not a very fashionable view to hold, but as someone who has operated at senior levels in journalism and politics, around a decade in each, it is my respect for the media that has shrunk, and my respect for politics that has grown.”

— Alastair Campbell

18. “One in four of us will have a mental illness at some point. That is a lot of people.”

— Alastair Campbell

19. “My aunty says I’m the double of my father. He was a workaholic, which I’ve definitely inherited. And like me, he could be the life and soul of the party, but also quite withdrawn.”

— Alastair Campbell

20. “Greg Dyke is on record as saying that once the BBC was attacked, it was their job to defend themselves. But that is not their job.”

— Alastair Campbell

21. “There is something in me that makes me see things through.”

— Alastair Campbell

22. “The thing about politicians in Britain is that they are out there, you can lobby them, get close to them, there are loads of ways you can protest against them, and booing is a pretty weak way of doing it.”

— Alastair Campbell

23. “May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother, about the Queen – classic Freudian stuff, shrinks would say. I was eight, and refusing to watch the Queen’s Christmas Day broadcast.”

— Alastair Campbell

24. “I hold no candle for George Osborne whatsoever. He has no strategic skills, is a hopeless chancellor, has no idea how most people have to live and his policies are failing and hurting millions.”

— Alastair Campbell

25. “Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that’s where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.”

— Alastair Campbell

26. “In an ideal world, it would not take a film star to get the media focused on mental illness.”

— Alastair Campbell

27. “If you look at the other people around at the time – Charles Clarke, Alistair Darling, Jack Straw – they’ve all gone. And they’re not old. What’s happened is that someone who is quite old – Jeremy Corbyn – is now leader. We have to take some responsibility for that.”

— Alastair Campbell

28. “I have always been driven. I have always believed in what I believe very deeply.”

— Alastair Campbell

29. “I want to write more books, see my first novel made into a film, fight more campaigns, work in more countries. I want to be able to recall experiences that have endured for their pleasure and range and intensity.”

— Alastair Campbell

30. “What concerns me is that the Independent is going, and there are job cuts at the Guardian, but the wretched Daily Mail is still rampant, making lots of money by millions of people clicking on pictures of cellulited women. I think that’s sad.”

— Alastair Campbell

31. “The bad news for journalists today is that the media, however seriously people who are in the public eye take it, is not taken as seriously as it once was – by the public.”

— Alastair Campbell

32. “To me, marriage is partly a religious thing and I’m not religious.”

— Alastair Campbell

33. “I will continue to help the political causes I believe in in any way I can.”

— Alastair Campbell

34. “One of the more fatuous remarks I’ve heard in recent days is that ‘My Life,’ Clinton’s autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth.”

— Alastair Campbell

35. “Jeremy, are we going to play your games?”

— Alastair Campbell