Matthew Norman: Campbell, with the best bits left out

Not for the first time in the context of Alastair Campbell, but almost certainly for the last, we should offer a quiet prayer of thanks to the state broadcaster. The organisation that removed Mr Campbell from political life at such cost to itself will transmit three hour-long extracts from his Downing Street diaries within days of their publication next month, thus removing all temptation to blow £25 on what promises to be the biggest publishing non-sensation since the Hitler Diaries themselves.

The general form with such a memoir, on what's known in the literary world as the Blunkett Principle, is to buy the Daily Mail for four or five days, plough through the serialisation for the tasty bits, and then wait for the remainder bins at Waterstone's to fill before buying a few copies at £2.99 a time to give as Christmas presents to those relatives who have pissed you off most during the past 12 months.

In this case, that pleasure has been denied us by the author himself. Mr Campbell has taken the novel step of refusing to have his magnum opus serialised, knowing that the Mail has the deepest pockets and fearing that it would buy the rights to distort and abuse his honeyed prose to damage the outgoing Prime Minister and the government he leaves behind. So he turns instead to the one media outlet on which he can rely to handle his words with fairness and truth. The BBC. Somewhere in this lies a little irony, but I can't quite put my finger on it for now.

But what might the viewer anticipate on tuning to BBC2 in July to watch Mr Campbell revive the spirit of Jackanory by reading to us from his work? Well, one of the very few areas of interest that hasn't been censored, so it seems, is Mr Campbell's insane war of attrition over the fully substantiated claims on Radio 4's Today programme about the intelligence reports on Iraqi weaponry. So presumably there will be a lengthy segment on why the BBC (it's driving me mad, but I still can't get a handle on that irony) is devious, malevolent and utterly untrustworthy.

It is at this point that one struggles to imagine what highlights the producer might wish to include. The potty-mouthedness of Tony Blair wouldn't make great telly anyway, but as we know that's gone from the book. The perpetually erupting volcanic feud between Mr Blair and Gordon Brown? All gone. Every seething, passive-aggressive silence, every screaming match expunged. Not a dickie bird remains, according to one writer with contacts who has read the finished version.

If that was one of the two defining stories of Mr Campbell's time in government, the other has been massively censored too. Under pressure from the Prime Minister, he has stricken from the record all conversations between Mr Blair and George Bush that might have cast intriguing light on the war. Cherie has made him remove references to the Blair children, meanwhile, and the Cabinet Secretary may even have obliged him to remove accounts of his dealings with civil servants and ministers past and present.

So no Brown vs Blair, no Iraq (other than the inevitable self-justificatory twaddle about the fight with the Beeb), no gossipy stuff about the kids, not even a recollection about how he told Ron Davies to clear his desk after that moment of madness on Clapham Common, or why he warned Mo Mowlam to watch her step after that unscheduled standing ovation in the middle of a Blair conference speech.

You begin to wonder whether Random House has selected a typeface seldom seen outside Ladybird books to avoid the finished article looking like a leaflet, because it's hard to imagine what is left from the two million words Mr Campbell jotted in his journal over the years on returning home from the office and remembering the need for an additional pension. There is said to be a fair bit about Peter Mandelson screaming and shouting, although since the provocation generally came from Gordon Brown and therefore doesn't feature, these out-of-context rants apparently make Mr Mandelson look even more hysterical than he is. And there is reportedly an immense amount about Mr Campbell's relationship with the media, which may or may not (the smart money's on may) involve a little score-settling. And that is just about that.

All in all, then, we can safely predict that Mr Campbell will prove no Chips Channon, let alone a second Alan Clark. Mr Clark was just about the only Tory with whom the fiercely tribal Campbell was ever friendly, but no hint of the qualities that made the old rogue such a spectacular diarist - a keen appreciation of his own absurdity, the almost total lack of censorship, and the refusal to rewrite history to the benefit of himself and his mates - has rubbed off.

Every diary worth reading, political or otherwise, lives or dies according to its candour. Whether it's Mr Clark reminiscing about ogling a young woman's jiggling globes on a train or plotting with colleagues in the hours before Mrs Thatcher's resignation, or Joe Orton recounting a sexual liaison with a dwarf in Brighton, the reader must feel reassured that he is reading the writer's true thoughts and feelings as recorded at the time; and not an elongated exercise in special pleading, or a document heavily sanitised by its progress through various censorship committees.

In strict truth, although an unbowdlerised account by Mr Campbell would make a livelier read, as an historical record it would have been virtually worthless. Sometimes appearing unstable and on the cusp of psychosis (and sometimes over it, as in his demented storming of the Channel 4 News studio and post-Hutton presidential press conference), Mr Campbell was once dismissed as an unreliable witness by a High Court judge. Anyone who had dealings with him during the Downing Street years will know him to have, at best, a highly selective memory for facts.

So this book surely offers more promise as the set text for a psychiatric convention than a journal offering insight into a fascinating and turbulent era of domestic and international politics. As occupational therapy, an ego-inflating paean to the one-time power of a sad, deflated has-been who, according to his Wikipedia entry, "now spends most of his time giving occasional public talks and supporting his favourite football team, Burnley FC" may have genuine value. As an historical record, it can have very little.

Perhaps in a few years, when he feels the urge for another £1m advance, Mr Campbell will release the unexpurgated version with all the juicy bits reinserted. In the meantime, best stick to the BBC2 highlights and look to the bargain bins for vengeance on Auntie Kitty for that hideous ornament she insulted you with last Christmas.

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