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.
