Early and Personal Life
Alastair John Campbell was born on 25 May 1957 in Keighley, Yorkshire, son of a Scottish veterinary surgeon, Donald Campbell, and his wife Elizabeth. Campbell's parents had moved to Keighley when his father became a partner in a local veterinary practice. Donald was a Gaelic-speaker from the island of Tiree; his wife was from Ayrshire. Campbell has two elder brothers, Donald and Graeme, and a younger sister, Elizabeth. Even though Alastair was born in Yorkshire, he would go over the county border to Lancashire to watch Burnley Football Club with his father, Donald.
He attended Bradford Grammar School for a short period of time, followed by City of Leicester Boys' Grammar School and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages, French and German, for which he received an upper second (2:1). He later claimed he wrote essays based solely on works of literary criticism, often rather than having read the works themselves. He spent a year in the south of France as part of his degree course.
Campbell became interested in journalism. His first published work was Inter-City Ditties, his winning entry to a readers' competition in the pornographic magazine Forum. This led to a lengthy stint writing pieces for the magazine with such titles as Busking with Bagpipes and The Riviera Gigolo, written in a style calculated to lead readers at the time to believe they were descriptions of his own sexual exploits.
Campbell became a sports reporter on the Tavistock Times. His first significant contribution to the news pages was coverage of the Penlee lifeboat disaster. As a trainee on the Plymouth-based Sunday Independent, then owned by Mirror Group Newspapers, he met his partner Fiona Millar, with whom he has three children, two sons (born November 1987 and July 1989) and a daughter (born May 1993). Campbell is an atheist.
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