Alastair Campbell is the author of Winners and How They Succeed (Pegasus Books). He was the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s spokesman and strategist, from 1994 to 2003.



I met Dr. Ben Carson briefly in the CBS Green Room as we both were preparing to be interviewed—him about his presidential race, me about my new book. Fair to say I did not feel inspired from our encounter. We talked about gun control, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. On guns, I was shocked by his views, and on Putin, felt his analysis could have come from a tenth grade politics student.

He seemed pleasant enough as a human being, and clearly has a good brain if he is allowed to operate on the brains of others, but really, this guy is one of the frontrunners for your country’s Republican nomination?


Having worked alongside Tony Blair as his spokesman and strategist in three winning election campaigns, and having worked on a number of successful campaigns overseas, I like to think I know a little about how to win in politics. But on a recent short book tour—the book is called, appropriately I hope, Winners and how they Succeed—I was left somewhat bemused by the nature of the race for your White House.

Americans, let me tell you, there is so much to love, yet so much to hate, about your presidential elections.

To love is the scale, as million upon million of people take month after month to decide who should hold what remains, just about, the most powerful political position in the world. To love too are the names and the acts of Presidential history, and their impact not just upon the United States, but on all of us. As for so many political operatives, Abraham Lincoln is my hero, John F. Kennedy a source of endless fascination and Bill Clinton the best of the several I met, from Carter onwards.

To hate, well, that’s a long list too. First, the flipside of the upside: the vastness of the country means timelines and processes designed for a very different age, when candidates took months to travel the whole country to get their points and policies across. In our era of easy travel and mass communication, it makes the campaign way too long, even for a job as important as U.S. president. Then, there’s the money. We in the UK may seem a bit fuddy-duddy with our ban on political TV ads and our comparatively tiny limits on spending, but even with those, we run risks of big money over-influencing policies, and of too few people feeling able to get into the process. Those problems can be multiplied almost to infinity by an American campaign, which needs a billion dollars (or more!) to get all the way to the White House.

There is another big difference. In the UK, while our newspapers often seem drunk and driven by hate and hysteria, we have relatively sober broadcast news media—still the most important bulwark of the Fourth Estate even in the social media age. In the U.S, there is something of a mirror, with the print media tending to the sober, and television screaming so loud it is hard to listen, let alone hear.

Taking in several cities, I started each day of my tour in a gym, on a bike or a treadmill, headphones on, channel hopping between the main news outlets to find out what was happening in the world.

On one of those mornings, the television anchors were digesting the news that Hillary Clinton may have shifted her stance on a trade deal being promoted by Barack Obama. Newsworthy? Certainly. But as the news went immediately to a torrent of comment, I felt little the wiser as to what the issue actually was. What I saw was a succession of anchors, talking heads and candidates’ proxies, all letting us know what they had long thought, good or bad, about the candidate in question. Any ‘news’ seems to be the cue simply for a mass of confirmation bias—supporters get defensive, detractors get aggressive, round and round we go.

No issue—and here we come to something really worth hating in U.S politics—seems to embody this politicized fusion of news and comment more than two of the hot topics while I was there: gun control and climate change.

How these two issues have become so politicized is truly baffling to most people in Europe, where the consensus is that guns are a force for bad not good, and though there can be arguments about the scale of the threat to our world from climate change, that man-made climate change exists is agreed by all but an oddball minority.

To hear Republican nomination candidate Dr. Ben Carson suggesting the Holocaust might not have happened had the Jews been able to defend themselves with guns—where do you even start? As for climate change, the polarized culture means that politics drowns out science to an extent that—not to put too fine a point on it—puts the future of the planet at considerable risk. In the book I was promoting I write about the tendency of politicians to use data not to devise thought-through policy and challenge their own opinions, but for confirmation bias. The climate change deniers in the U.S have this confirmation bias down to a fine, and dangerous, art.

The book is about winners in politics, business and sport, and what we can learn across those sectors. It is partly based on my own experience of political campaigns, and opens with the tenet that strategy is of singular, primary importance. I write that when it comes to campaigns the three most important letters in the English language are OST—O for Objective, S for Strategy, T for Tactics.

Clearly, whether Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton on the Democrat side, or Carson, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio et al for the Republicans, the current O is to win their Party’s nomination, and once that is secured, the O shifts to becoming president. But in the OST process, S is the hard part. The pressures of the modern media age, with 24/7 omnipresent news and social media, place all the focus on the tactical.

In my book, I quoted Arsenal’s cerebral soccer coach Arsene Wenger, who might easily be talking about a political campaign when he says this: “We have gone from a vertical society to a horizontal society where everybody has an opinion about every decision you make, everybody has an opinion on the Internet straight away. Basically the respect for people who make decisions is gone because every decision is questioned. So one of the most important qualities of a good leader now is massive resistance to stress. Under stress you become smaller and smaller until you cannot give out a message any more and that, of course, is something that is vital. Many people underestimate this challenge.”

I was thinking of Wenger’s quote when, back home in London, I watched the first Democrat debate, and saw Hillary Clinton—admittedly helped by Sanders’ saying he was sick and tired hearing about her emails while secretary of state—managing to get above the noise created by her enemies on issues thought to damage her. Meanwhile, as if to underline Wenger’s point, none other than Donald Trump was live-tweeting the debate and, surprise surprise, confirmation bias in full flow, concluding from the off that Hillary was hopeless.

So, looking on from the outside, who appears to this Brit outsider to be meeting that challenge? First, the Republicans, who strike me as a strategic mess. One of the other big stories during my trip was John Boehner wanting to resign as House Speaker, in part because of the Party’s internecine warfare, and the grip of the conservative right. Those same forces immediately saw one of the early runners to succeed Boehner, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, pull out before he got going. This is a Party that appears incapable of uniting around either ideas or a leader. The strong strand of anti-Washington, anti-government opinion is what has led to the three front-runners, non-politicians Carson, Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina, occupying the forefront.

In the prevailing anti-politics mood, being an outsider is a huge advantage. But am I alone in worrying that the total lack of executive political experience of all three is a problem? Building up a business empire, operating on the human brain, and being a company executive, these all require certain skills. But I am not convinced any of them necessarily qualify you for the challenges that will greet the next President.

I left the U.S. not just bemused, but alarmed by the nature of the debate, both its style and its parochialism. The post-Obama president will have to take a lead in issues ranging from a possible second global financial crisis, climate change, ISIL, the Middle East, the reassertion of Russian power, growing inequality between and within nations.

The idea of Donald Trump dealing with any of those fills me with a dread that goes beyond political tribalism. Trump is clearly not an idiot, even if he often behaves like one. Presidents need confidence in their own beliefs. Narcissism is quite another matter. If he becomes the Republican nominee, let alone president, America is sending a signal to the world that politics has become an extension of the media and entertainment industry, not the means by which the world is led through difficult challenges and storms of change.

He, Carson and Fiorina are all benefiting from the anti-politics mood, and Trump in particular—like Sanders on the other side of the divide—from the anger of men and women who feel the benefits of globalization have passed them by in favor of elites. But America needs to be careful what it wishes for. People can feel free to dismiss political experience, but if you are up against a Putin or a Xi Jinping or a Netanyahu, let alone facing up to terrorist organizations intent on destroying you, this experience can come in handy. With Jeb Bush fading somewhat, if Marco Rubio can step up, stay focused on the big challenges, and break through the noise, the nomination is his for the taking—at least once Trump blows up and Carson says a few more silly things.

On the Democrat side, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is playing the role played recently by Labour’s new leader in Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, an insider-outsider with a lot of experience in politics, but mostly as someone railing against the system. Sanders has a set of clear and simple messages, notably like Corbyn a desire to change the economy so it works for the many not the few. He has a nice manner, well deployed in last week’s CNN-Facebook debate, and the benefit of having that ‘man of the moment’ shine, which helped Corbyn to a huge, if unexpected, win.

Clearly I do not know America as well as I know Britain. But just as I have concerns that Corbyn’s shift to the left—a few months after the country as a whole rejected Labour in part because we were seen as too left-wing already—will make it harder to win over the country in a general election, so there are many parts of the States which I cannot see going for Sanders whereas they might go for Clinton. My short tour took in Washington DC, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, big name cities with considerable Bernie support. But I have travelled enough in the past through the less populated and more conventionally American parts of the country to know that many States are not looking for a socialist from Brooklyn to be commander-in-chief.

Nevertheless, with or without Joe Biden in the race—who could certainly complicate things for Clinton—whoever wins the Democratic primary I can see the party uniting around that winner in a way I sense the Republicans will not.

Meanwhile, both Hillary and husband Bill are drawing heavily on a winning quality that is important in these brutal campaigns, and which experience has given to them in spades, namely resilience. Given Tony Blair’s considerable skills as a communicator, I think he was sometimes miffed when I said that Bill Clinton was the best I ever saw. Both were often underestimated—because they were such good communicators, their opponents tended to feel that was all they were. In truth, both were very good at the OST game, in good times and bad. I interviewed Clinton about how he got through the Lewinsky episode—O survival, S focus on the job, T make sure the people knew that was what he was doing, which he clearly did. Clinton said he trusted the public to get to a more nuanced position on his misconduct than his media and political opponents. He didn’t go out and defend himself against every accusation. He left that to others, and just did the job. He passed the Arsene Wenger test with aplomb.

Hillary has strength, resilience and experience, all good winning qualities. But she also needs to remember the words of her husband’s campaign theme song: Don’t-Stop-Thinking-About-Tomorrow. She needs to own the future, not just have a record to defend from the past. And she needs to get heard. Wenger’s words are also relevant to where she is right now. Let the media gorge on the tactics. But the candidate who best ignores the noise, stays true to a strong strategy, and drives that strategy forward, is the one who will be best placed to win. And they will deserve to.

As to what that means for a possible outcome, I am going for Clinton vs. Rubio, with Hillary as the eventual winner. Then again, I predicted she would win last time, and Barack Obama proved her, me and a lot of other people wrong. What Hillary learned from that experience, including underestimating her opponent—and failing to adapt quickly enough to change—could be the difference between winning and losing this time. One of my favorite quotes that I came across in my book research comes from an Irish missionary, Colm O’Connell, who became coach to Kenya’s brilliant athletics squad. “The winner,” he says, “is the loser who evaluates defeat properly.”



I have no idea if Hillary has heard of Wenger or O’Connell. But I believe that politics and business can learn a lot from the best of sport. If Hillary applies the lessons of defeat, and penetrates the media noise with a strategy marrying her strength to a clear vision of the future, both for America and the wider world, she remains best placed to win. I hope she does. Or, to put it slightly differently, I really hope that Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and especially Donald Trump do not. From this side of the pond, the fact they are even being talked of as possible winners is scary enough.

