‘The GMB has opened a new door for me’

Alastair Campbell, The Independent

My hosting stint is proof that you are never too old to do something different. One of the things that attracted me was having to brush up on topics that take me a bit out of my comfort zone. Many years ago, as a young general news reporter, I covered the early days of TV-am. It was a huge story for tabloids and broadsheets alike. For the broadsheets, independent morning news TV represented a major shake up in the media and business ecosystem busy transforming itself into something unrecognisable from the media world we grew up in. For tabloids like The Mirror, we had a daily diet of stories about some of the biggest names in TV the “Big Five” presenters David Frost, Michael Parkinson, Anna Ford, Robert Kee and Angela Rippon.

A pack of us based ourselves in the Oxford Arms in Camden Town, running out whenever we saw the photographers leap into action. A few years later I got my own taste of breakfast television when the BBC asked me to do a regular review of the newspapers. It was very different from the modern press review, in which pundits leaf through the papers as the front pages go up on screen. It was more based on the old What the Papers Say model, literally cutting pieces out of papers, composing them as graphics and trying to construct a narrative for a longish piece to camera.

I enjoyed it, not least because I was allowed pretty much free rein to select headlines and stories that suited my own interests and agenda, knowing others with very different views would be allowed to do likewise on other days. I am sure some viewers found my review about high flying Blackburn Rovers losing a European tie to a lowly Norwegian team called Trelleborgs a bit baffling but hey, it was a great day for a Burnley fan.  It was also good to work alongside professional presenters like Jill Dando, one of the nicest people I ever worked with, and Nick Witchell, still going strong back on the Royal beat. I loved talking football too with Bob Wilson, an early example of ex-player turned presenter and pundit. And I loved the make-up team, especially Marilyn who knew of my sweet tooth and had a steady supply of my favourite white toblerone.

By 1994 I was an established regular and the powers that be were sounding me out about possibly quitting newspapers and moving into TV presenting. My instinct was that I was too politically committed to Labour and I knew that while I could get away with a bit of bias on a paper review I would have to be very different in one of the main chairs. But I said I would mull it and meanwhile carry on doing the papers, as well as making a series of political profiles.

As part of the possible transition to a different role Breakfast asked me to be on a panel, with Justin Webb and Matthew Parris, interviewing the contenders to replace John Smith, Margaret Beckett, John Prescott... and Tony Blair. I asked him if he was tough enough for the job, and what skeletons he had that could damage him. I asked him to justify why he felt he could be a PM. At that point we had not discussed my working for him. But when he won, we did, and after a month of even more intense mulling than I was devoting to the question of working for the BBC, I agreed to join him. A career defining and life changing decision. One that I made in the face of intense opposition from my partner and my parents and from Neil Kinnock who told me I would hate it, who said too that I could be “the next Paxman, the next Parkinson, whatever I wanted”. Well, who knows. Because I went the other way.

Apologies for the long historical pre-ramble but it did feel like I was revisiting unfinished business when I sat in one of the two main chairs on the set of Good Morning Britain this week, rehearsing after agreeing to guest present in mid-May. Perhaps that feeling was especially strong because Good Morning Britain is broadcast from TV Centre. I have been on the show many times as a guest but presenting is very different from being there as a pundit or political combatant, or talking about myself, my books, campaigns or other projects. In recent years the chair has been most famously filled by Piers Morgan, like me something of a marmite figure, with an up and down career summed up well in his own Twitter bio: “One day you’re the cock of the north, the next you’re a feather duster.” There can be few people in Britain unaware of how his tenure ended, his storm out amid the controversy over his remarks about Meghan Markle.