My breakdown, by Tony Blair’s former press secretary

If there’s one thing you can say about Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s former press secretary, it’s that he tells a good story. A controversial figure on the Fleet Street and Westminster circuit since starting out as an ambitious young reporter on the Daily Mirror in 1982, the workaholic Campbell was launched into a hard drinking culture, which enabled him to accrue another addiction—alcoholism.

He has come clean about his alcoholism in the past, which he admits may have been in part to avoid pejorative headlines from his former colleagues in the press when he took his post in 10 Downing Street. If the Sun was capable of the headline “Bonkers Bruno locked up,” when the boxer Frank Bruno was sectioned under the Mental Health …