THE OUTCOME of the general election could not be entirely taken for granted, former press secretary at Downing Street, Alastair Campbell, said in Dublin yesterday.
The long-serving media adviser to British prime minister Tony Blair said he was always hesitant about TV debates between party leaders because they were used as an excuse for the media to report on media issues.
He said, after an economic crisis, whether in Ireland or any other democracy, the government of the day inevitably paid a price in political terms “even if it has not all been their fault”.
Mr Campbell, who is in Ireland to promote Power and the People, the newly-published second volume of the “unexpurgated” diaries of his years working with Mr Blair, said good preparation was the secret of any successful election campaign.
“You have to know what your main message is going to be, the policy areas that you want to focus on.
“You need to know where you think you are weak as well as strong.
“You need to try and work out how you are going to come under attack, as well as how you are going to defend yourself.
“That’s stuff that you should have done long before an election has been called.”
Asked for his impressions of the current election here, he said: “I think you are still in the post-crisis phase, and that plays itself out economically and politically. The election obviously is a consequence of that.
“My sense of it is that people have really engaged.
“You don’t go through an economic crisis like that without the Government – any government, not just an Irish government – paying a price politically even if it has not all been their fault.”
He added, however: “Even though most people seem to think the outcome will be Fine Gael probably in coalition with Labour you meet enough people, who know what they’re on about, who are still not totally sure.
“In the end it is the beauty of democracy that it is about individual people, most of whom you and I have never met, who are making their decisions based largely on what’s happening in their own lives. That’s the way it works.”
Asked about his attitude to party leaders’ debates on TV, he said: “They do matter but, again, I was never a great fan of them when we were in opposition.”
Mr Campbell speaks at Queen’s University, Belfast, on Monday night, Trinity College Dublin on Tuesday and University College Cork on Wednesday evening.