The ‘how not to do it’ guide for Keir Starmer from Alastair Campbell

The latest volume from New Labour’s foremost diarist offers lessons from recent history for today’s Labour Party, writes John Rentoul

Campbell, the ‘Good Morning Britain’ presenter who could have been Labour leader (ITV)

The two big stories of the latest volume of Alastair Campbell’s diaries are connected. He tries to sum up the period between the elections of 2010 and 2015 as “the rise and fall of the Olympic spirit” – the London Games being a great legacy of the New Labour years. But the real stories are Ed Miliband’s leadership and Campbell’s own angst about whether to stand as an MP himself.

So the diaries start with the election of the wrong brother as Labour leader, and end with his failure in the general election five years later – with Campbell’s decision not to enter politics in the middle.

Campbell was clear in private that Ed Miliband’s election was a “disaster”. He wrote: “The wrong choice in the wrong way.” But he was such a Labour loyalist that his public comments were muted, and he spent the next five years as a semi-detached adviser to the leader.