A professional at work

This has nothing to do with the 50-plus but is about the art of verbal abuse.
For the last week it has been impossible to avoid the face of Alistair Campbell (Tony Blair’s Machiavellian Press Secretary) who has published his diaries.

He is the sort of guy who loves to be hated which accounts for his cheery countenance.

A UK food and TV reviewer, who doesn’t mince his words had a few choice ones to say about the TV programmes that accompanied the launch of the book. I just wish I could write like this.

One thing that’s rarely mentioned about Campbell is that before he was a crap press secretary he was a crap tabloid journalist, with a writing style best described as staccato brochure cliché. It sounded like a series of e-mails left by a bored and not particularly bright office boy to a girl he is trying to impress: long-winded on justification, shortsighted on observation. It was mawkish, belligerent, repetitive and wholly deficient of telling insight. There wasn’t a single passage that would have made you want to be there.

And with that Alistair looked even happier. Dick Stroud