A flat-lay of non-fiction books against an orange background

general-election-reading-list

Features

Books and resources to help you navigate the 2024 UK general election 

How-to-get-ahead-at-work_Hero-Desktop_Penguin

Reading lists

Books to increase productivity, concentration and success at work

And How They Succeed

Winners

Winning is not the important thing, it is the only thing.

This book is a winning project in its own right… I was captivated with the simplicity of the messages and the rich illustrations learned from many lives . . . Alastair Campbell deserves congratulations on an engaging text that can help other talented and committed people with potential for success to become winners themselves.

Law firm leaders preparing for 2016 should read Winners by Alastair Campbell…Campbell tells a fine political anecdote and reports perceptively on interviews with captains of industry, but is most inspiring on sport... Books on strategy and team-working can be heavy-going but he maintains a light touch; and in Adam Smith’s words, gives us some of that “vicarious pleasure” derived from closely observing the “rich and great”.

You cannot read Alastair Campbell’s Winners and How They Succeed without being impressed by how many high achievers he knows. This is a handbook for anyone who would like to be like them

One of the most interesting people in Britain and this book is one of the most interesting about winners.

If there is one book to read on strategy, leadership and how to win it is this one.

Filled with useful tips . . . [Highlights] tangible lessons from a diverse range of interesting people, and I like to read a chapter every now and then to get inspired.

Alastair Campbell was born in Keighley, Yorkshire in 1957, the son of a vet. Having graduated from Cambridge University in modern languages, he went into journalism, principally with the Mirror Group. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, Campbell worked for him first as press secretary, then as official spokesman and director of communications and strategy from 1994 to 2003. He continued to act as an advisor to Mr Blair and the Labour Party, including during subsequent election campaigns. He now splits his time between writing, speaking, politics in Britain and overseas, consultancy and charity, as chairman of fundraising for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, and a leading ambassador for the mental health campaign Time to Change. 
 
He lives in North London with his partner of thirty-five years, Fiona Millar. They have three children. His interests include running, cycling, bagpipes and Burnley Football Club. He has published six volumes of diaries, including the number one Sunday Times bestseller, The Blair Years, a memoir on depression, The Happy Depressive, and three novels.

How people succeed – and how you can, too. 
***Sunday Times no. 1 bestseller*** 
 
Alastair Campbell knows all about winning. As Tony Blair’s chief spokesman and strategist he helped guide the Labour Party to victory in three successive general elections, and he’s fascinated by what it takes to win. 
 
How do sports stars excel, entrepreneurs thrive, or individuals achieve their ambition? Is their ability to win innate? Or is the winning mindset something we can all develop? Drawing on the wisdom of an astonishing array of talented people – from elite athletes to top managers, from rulers of countries to rulers of global business empires – Alastair Campbell uses his forensic skills, as well as his own experience of politics and sport, to get to the heart of success. He examines how winners tick. He considers how they build great teams. He analyses how they deal with unexpected setbacks and new challenges. He judges what the very different worlds of politics, business and sport can learn from one another. And he sets out a blueprint for winning that we can all follow.

My Name Is...

The tenacity Campbell brought to bear in politics is matched here by his gripping inhabitation of his characters. Stunning. - Independent on Sunday

This superb book is sad, terrifying and uplifting in equal measure. Every parent, every young man or woman, and anyone who "likes a drink" should read it.

The tenacity Campbell brought to bear in politics is matched here by his gripping inhabitation of his characters. Stunning,

My Name Is... offers a compelling insight into addiction from the outside in, giving a 360-degree look at the cause and effect of the illness. It possesses an emotional weight for each speaker — an impressive feat when some of these characters feature for less than four pages.

It is a sad and terrifying story, well-researched and timely… Campbell’s idea of telling the story through the self-contained testimonies of every person who came into contact with Hannah during her spiral into self-harm is clever and affords the reader a 360 degree view of what it is to deal with a vulnerable deceitful alcoholic in denial… Campbell has taken the vilified, sprawling, drunken youths caricatured in tabloid headlines and, in one young girl, showed us the damaged human beings beneath. For that he deserves much credit.

A gripping account of an alcoholic teenage girl

There is a touching candid quality about the characters in My Name Is… each one speaks with a breathtaking honesty, no matter how unsavoury or damaging it might be to hear

This is not a quasi-misery memoir. Instead, each chapter is told from the perspective of someone who crosses paths with the troubled teenager. There are 23 of these before the final, achingly sad missive from Hannah herself, which means a lot of characters to get through. But on the whole Campbell succeeds in allowing Hannah’s family, friends and, later, psychiatrists and magistrates, to tell her story.

Alastair Campbell was born in Keighley, Yorkshire in 1957, the son of a vet. After graduating from Cambridge University in modern languages, his first chosen career was journalism, principally with the Mirror Group, a career interrupted in the mid-80s by a nervous breakdown and the diagnosis of a drink problem. Campbell worked his way back to become a political editor and when Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, he asked Campbell to be his press secretary. He worked for Blair – first in that capacity, then as official spokesman and director of communications and strategy – from 1994 to 2003, and returned in 2005 to help Labour win a third election. He now splits his time between writing, speaking, consultancy and charity, as chairman of fundraising for Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, and a leading ambassador for the mental health campaign, Time to Change. 
 
He lives in North London with his partner of 33 years, Fiona Millar. They have three children. His interests include running, cycling, bagpipes and Burnley Football Club. He has published five volumes of diaries, including the bestselling The Blair Years, a memoir on depression, The Happy Depressive, a novel about fame, Maya, and his first acclaimed novel about mental illness, All in the Mind.

She likes a drink. Everyone has a problem. 
 
Hannah is seventeen. A drink makes her feel better. For a bit. But then she feels worse and the pain inside comes back. 
 
This is the story of Hannah’s addiction as seen by the people around her – her mum, her little sister, her best friend, her best friend’s mother, her mum’s boyfriend… 
 
Powerful and passionate, their voices shed a sometimes shocking, sometimes tender light on a life veering terrifyingly off course. 
 
‘Campbell has taken the vilified, sprawling, drunken youths caricatured in tabloid headlines and, in one young girl, showed us the damaged human beings beneath.’ The Times 
 
‘This superb book is sad, terrifying and uplifting in equal measure. Every parent, every young man or woman and anyone who “likes a drink” should read it.’ Anne Robinson

Countdown to Iraq - The Alastair Campbell Diaries

The Burden of Power

The final and most controversial volume of Alastair Campbell's complete diaries: the countdown to Iraq

Alastair Campbell was born in Keighley, Yorkshire in 1957, the son of a vet. Having graduated from Cambridge University in modern languages, he went into journalism, principally with the Mirror Group. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, Campbell worked for him first as press secretary, then as official spokesman and director of communications and strategy from 1994 to 2003. He is now engaged mainly in writing, public speaking, consultancy and working for  mental health charities, and Leukaemia and Lymphoma Research, where he is chairman of fundraising. He lives in North London and his interests include running, cycling, playing the bagpipes and following the varying fortunes of Burnley Football Club.

The Burden of Power is the fourth volume of Alastair Campbell's diaries, and perhaps the most eagerly awaited given the ground it covers. 
 
It begins on September 11, 2001, a day which immediately wrote itself into the history books, and it ends on the day Campbell leaves Downing Street. In between there are two wars: first Afghanistan, and then, even more controversially, Iraq. It was the most difficult decision of Tony Blair's premiership, and almost certainly the most unpopular. Campbell describes in detail the discussions with President Bush and other world leaders as the steps to war are taken, and delivers a unique account of Blair as war leader. He records the enormous political difficulties at home, and the sense of crisis that engulfed the government after the suicide of weapons inspector David Kelly. 
 
And all the while, Blair continues to struggle with two issues that ran throughout his time in government - fighting for peace in Northern Ireland, and trying to make peace with Gordon Brown. And Campbell continues to struggle balancing the needs of his family with one of the most pressurised roles in politics. 
 
Riveting and revelatory, The Burden of Power is as raw and intimate a portrayal of political life as you are ever likely to read.

The Happy Depressive: In Pursuit of Personal and Political Happiness

Now in print, Alastair Campbell’s timely and thought-provoking short book, The Happy Depressive.

Through exploring what happiness is, where it comes from, what it stands for and how it can be created and maintained both personally and politically, Alastair reveals a side of himself that many readers have probably never seen before or didn't know even existed.

Alastair Campbell was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, in 1957, the son of a vet. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in modern languages, his first chosen career was journalism, principally with the Mirror Group. Campbell worked for Tony Blair - first as press secretary, then as official spokesman and director of communications and strategy - from 1994 to 2003, since when he has been mainly engaged in writing, public speaking, consultancy and charity work. He returned to help Labour in the 2005 and 2010 elections. He is an ambassador for the Time to Change campaign to break down stigma and taboo surrounding mental illness. His interests include running, cycling, playing the bagpipes and following the varying fortunes of Burnley Football Club.

Are you happy? Does it matter? 
 
Increasingly, governments seem to think so. As the UK government conducts its first happiness survey, Alastair Campbell looks at happiness as a political as well as a personal issue; what it should mean to us, what it means to him. Taking in economic and political theories, he questions how happiness can survive in a grossly negative media culture, and how it could inform social policy. 
 
But happiness is also deeply personal. Campbell, who suffers from depression, looks in the mirror and finds a bittersweet reflection, a life divided between the bad and not-so-bad days, where the highest achievements in his professional life could leave him numb, and he can somehow look back on a catastrophic breakdown twenty-five years ago as the best thing that happened to him. He writes too of what he has learned from the recent death of his best friend, further informing his view that the pursuit of happiness is a long game. 
 
Originally published as part of the Brain Shots series, the pre-eminent source for high-quality, short-form digital non-fiction.

Power and Responsibility

Diaries Volume Three

The third volume of Campbell's compelling diaries, covering 1999 to 2001.

Alastair Campbell's diaries have the quality of Pepys ... people will be looking for insights and finding them in 100 years' time

Alastair Campbell was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, in 1957, the son of a vet. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in modern languages, his first chosen career was journalism, principally with the Mirror Group. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, he asked Campbell to be his press secretary. He worked for Blair - first in that capacity, then as official spokesman and director of communications and strategy - from 1994 to 2003, since when he has been mainly engaged in writing, public speaking, working for Leukaemia Research, where he is chairman of fundraising, and continuing to advise Blair, Gordon Brown and other leading Labour figures. His first novel, All In The Mind, and an accompanying award-winning TV documentary, Cracking Up, led to him being voted Mind Champion of the Year. A second novel, Maya, was published in 2010, and The Happy Depressive, a candid look at happiness (and depression) is to be published as an ebook in January 2012. His interests include running, cycling, playing the bagpipes and following the varying fortunes of Burnley Football Club.

POWER AND RESPONSIBILITY is the third volume of Alastair Campbell's unique daily account of life at the centre of the Blair government. It begins amid conflict in Kosovo, and ends on September 11, 2001, a day which immediately wrote itself into the history books, changing the course of both the Bush presidency and the Blair premiership. 
 
In this volume, we see that New Labour's honeymoon is well and truly over. In addition to detailing the continuing tensions at the top, here we find graphic accounts of a variety of domestic crises: foot-and-mouth disease and protests over fuel prices which almost brought Britain to a halt. Volume Three includes Peter Mandelson's second resignation, the agonies of the Millennium Dome, and the most unexpected slow-handclapping in memory, when the Women's Institute turned against Tony Blair. Yet despite all the problems - not least the most accident-prone manifesto launch in history, complete with deputy prime minister John Prescott punching a voter - Labour won a second successive landslide election victory. That triumph is intimately recorded here, alongside the high points of this period, such as devolution to Northern Ireland and the fall of Milosevic.

Power and the People

Diaries Volume Two

The second volume of Campbell's riveting diaries, rejoining New Labour as they come into power.

A fascinating, candid account of recent history

Like the Bloomsbury Group of the Twenties, the New Labour clique is churning out an apparently inexhaustible number of memoirs, diaries and memorabilia. Alastair Campbell's diaries are by far the most important record to have emerged. Nothing like them exists in British political writing. They are a product of almost monastic self-discipline. No matter how gruelling the circumstances, Campbell found time to settle down and make a daily record of events, which at the most frenetic times could extend to several thousand words . . . The account of Blair's wise and agile handling of the crisis that followed the death of Princess Diana is powerful and authentic

Plunging into the second volume of Alastair Campbell's diaries is like opening a Samuel Richardson novel. The tone is breathless and excitable and the dramatic world of backstabbing, tittle-tattle and palace intrigue is instantly captivating. Historians will scour the book for valuable new information. Practitioners of media management will regard it as a classic

The real value of the 'complete' diaries lie in their total immersion in the fierce urgency of the present tense . . . The diaries capture what seemed to be important at the time, without knowing where it would lead or what was coming next. So, huge issues creep up without historical fanfare, as the author, at the end of a long day, has no idea how important they will seem the next day . . . Campbell is a great diarist, and precisely because he is not a stylist. His is spare, Orwellian prose, compelling by virtue of his position and his narrative grip - a favourite Campbell word. Whatever you think of Blair and the Blair years, this is what is was like at the time.

It should be required reading for coalition MPs because, despite a sometimes exhausting level of detail, there is still no better minute-by-minute account of what life is like at No.10.

Although there has been no shortage of memoirs from the new Labour era, this is without doubt the most authoritative. Campbell is no ordinary spin doctor. He enjoyed total access not only to Tony Blair and the New Labour court but also to just about every mover and shaker in the global power elite up to and including the US President.

Alastair Campbell was born in Keighley, Yorkshire, in 1957, the son of a vet. After graduating from Cambridge University with a degree in modern languages, his first chosen career was journalism, principally with the Mirror Group. When Tony Blair became leader of the Labour Party, he asked Campbell to be his press secretary. He worked for Blair - first in that capacity, then as official spokesman and director of communications and strategy - from 1994 to 2003, since when he has been mainly engaged in writing, public speaking, working for Leukaemia Research, where he is chairman of fundraising, and continuing to advise Blair, Gordon Brown and other leading Labour figures. His first novel, All In The Mind, and an accompanying award-winning TV documentary, Cracking Up, led to him being voted Mind Champion of the Year. A second novel, Maya, was published in 2010, as was the first volume of his diaries, Prelude to Power. His interests include running, cycling, playing the bagpipes and following the varying fortunes of Burnley Football Club.

Power &amp; the People covers the first two years of the New Labour government, beginning with their landslide victory at the polls in 1997. 
 
This second voume of Campbell's unexpurgated diaries details the initial challenges faced by Labour as they come to power and settle into running the country. It covers an astonishing array of events and personalities, progress and setbacks, crises and scandals, as Blair and his party make the transition from opposition to office.

Alastair Campbell

Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How You Can Help Fix It

'Everything a manifesto should be: heartfelt, hectoring, impassioned, rousing.' The i 
__________________________________________________ 
 
Your country needs you. 
 
Your planet needs you. 
 
Your time is now. 
 
Our world is a mess. It faces challenges that few are prepared to confront. It is littered with governments that lie, led by people who can’t or shouldn’t be allowed to lead. It’s no surprise, therefore, that so many of us feel angry, frustrated and let down. Yet we also feel overcome by such a sense of powerlessness that we find ourselves asking in despair, ‘But what can I do?’ 
 
That question is regularly posed to Alastair Campbell, not least in reaction to The Rest Is Politics, the chart-topping podcast he presents with former Tory Cabinet minister Rory Stewart. 
 
This book is his answer.

Alastair Campbell

Books by Alastair Campbell

Series by Alastair Campbell

The Alastair Campbell Diaries

Articles featuring Alastair Campbell

Books and resources to help you navigate the 2024 UK general election

Books to increase productivity, concentration and success at work

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter