Politics and Government
Shortly after Blair won and became leader of the Labour Party in 1994, Campbell left Today to become his spokesman. Having recovered and become teetotal, he told Blair about his alcoholism, which Blair did not see as a problem. He played an important role in the run-up to the 1997 general election, working with Peter Mandelson to co-ordinate Labour's campaign. He also worked hard to win support from the national media for the Labour Party, particularly from the newspapers who for many years had been anti-Labour. By March 1997, many of the leading newspapers – including The Sun, once a staunch Thatcherite paper – had declared their support for Labour.
He moved into government when Labour won the general election in May 1997 and was the Prime Minister's chief press secretary until 2000. He then moved to the post of Prime Minister's Director of Communications which gave him a strategic role in overseeing government communications. He was sponsored by the US President George W. Bush to complete the London marathon in aid of a cancer charity, Leukaemia Research.
Read more about this topic: Alastair Campbell
Famous quotes containing the words politics and, politics and/or government:
“Our family talked a lot at table, and only two subjects were taboo: politics and personal troubles. The first was sternly avoided because Father ran a nonpartisan daily in a small town, with some success, and did not wish to express his own opinions in public, even when in private.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)
“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“All forms of government symbolize an immortal government, common to all dynasties and independent of numbers, perfect where two men exist, perfect where there is only one man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)