Alistair Campbell's quandary when daughter Grace found out...

Alastair Campbell enjoys a mixed legacy as both an architect of New Labour who helped the party oust the Tories and the attack-dog press officer behind the dodgy dossier that took Britain into a deeply unpopular war.

And it seems that there was a time when he wasn’t even sure if his own daughter, Grace, thought him a hero or villain.

In his new memoirs, Tony Blair’s spin doctor reflects on the fact that he was the inspiration for The Thick Of It's foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in the mid-2000s.

He recalls his daughter – now a successful comedian – telling him that her schoolfriends 'were saying that Armando Iannucci’s TV satire on a Downing Street spin doctor, the sweary, borderline psychotic control freak Malcolm Tucker, was based on me.

'"Is it?" she asked. 

‘I couldn’t work out from the expression on her young face whether she found the suggestion that I was the inspiration for The Thick Of It worrying or exciting.

‘She broke the silence. "Please say yes."'

Campbell added: 'Now in her 30s, she is a comedian, and she too has turned to her advantage the pressures of life growing up with a father who doubled as a hate figure in the right wing press, by making people laugh about it.'

The 69-year-old does himself a disservice by painting himself as a bete noire of the right. Many on the left despised him too, with Alexei Sayle once complaining how panel shows who booked him were ‘rehabilitating war criminals’. 

– by Jay Richardson

• Campbell’s book, Persevilience: The Word the World Needs Now, is published tomorrow. He and his daughter are pictured together above when they appeared on Channel 4's Gogglebox.

Published: 21 Oct 2026