PV’s argument was that while the 2016 referendum had yielded a narrow win for those seeking to leave the EU, now that it was becoming clearer what Brexit meant in practice, and apparent that major constitutional change was involved, there should be a referendum to confirm that the country was happy with the eventual deal. Yes, he has since written many books, including novels and a volume about mental health (he suffers from depression). It was not an easy message to communicate, in the face of Leave’s success, and the relentless accusations that we were seeking to defy “the will of the people”.

The Liberal Democrats, at the time arguably the most anti-Brexit party, became seized by an absurd conviction they were on the verge of electoral triumph, so fell into the trap the Tories were laying to get the opposition parties to back an early election in December 2019, which they would make all about Brexit. He persuaded Cabinet Secretary Sir Robin Butler that government communications had to be modernised, and the government set up the Mountfield Review. In March 2017, GQ began to film the interviews to use as part of their digital platform, beginning with an interview with Owen Jones, and then Tony Blair.This is a book for supporters of democracy,” he states, and in many ways it is everything a manifesto should be: heartfelt, hectoring, impassioned, rousing. When will the Establishment afford us with a fully codified Constitution available to all Citizens any place any time? Being from a pharmacist family I think you can speak to many from Tory backgrounds bewildered by the out of touch people running the country after a fashion.

An Old Etonian who once tutored Princes William and Harry, he was in the Black Watch before he went up to Oxford, and joined the Foreign Office after he came down. When Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon revealed to Campbell that Kelly had talked to the BBC, Campbell had then decided, in his own words, to use this fact to "fuck Gilligan".In 1982, Campbell moved to the London office of the Daily Mirror, Fleet Street's sole remaining big-circulation supporter of the Labour Party. Fiona [Millar, his partner] and Grace [his daughter] thought it was completely mad at the Albert Hall,” he says. The only time I’d ever had a proper conversation with him was in Steve Kinnock’s garden [Kinnock, the Labour MP for Aberavon, knows Stewart from Brussels, apparently].

Though the media was always keener to take older, better-known faces, we were pushing these young people on screen too, and they did a great job. He has since then been a prominent supporter and advocate for the mental health anti-stigma campaign Time to Change. Facilitated by the brilliant Julia Macfarlane of ABC News and joined on stage by students from UCL Political Science, Alastair will seek to address the challenge laid out in the sub-title of his book: Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How YOU Can Help Fix It. His main interests outside work are cycling, open water swimming, running, bagpipes and following Burnley FC. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel to be alerted when the recording is uploaded, or just check our channel after the 24 May, when the video should have been made available.Campbell was born on 25 May 1957 in Keighley, West Riding of Yorkshire, son of Scottish veterinary surgeon Donald Campbell and his wife Elizabeth. Ultimately, where I think the whole thing fell down was in the formal leadership within the campaign, and in the erratic leadership provided by the politicians outside it. Campbell attacked the news media for their obsession with him, and eventually began to pull back from frontline work and delegated direct briefing of the media to others, but, if anything, his profile continued to grow. Campbell said that he had waited until Labour were in opposition before appearing on the show and that the date was a coincidence as it was the only time he was free. Campbell has been cited as the inspiration for the character of Malcolm Tucker in the BBC political satire comedy The Thick of It.