Victim hits back at saviour Campbell

Neil Kinnock's done it. Jack Straw's done it. Even little-known Mike O'Brien's done it. Have-a-go heroics, a peculiarly tabloid artform that involves taking on thugs and hoodlums direct, has a long history for Labour politicos.

But when Alastair Campbell, Sultan of Spin for Tony Blair, tried to help out a stranger in need, it turned out to be a tale of the good Samaritan grim enough to make anyone ring the Samaritans.

Mr Campbell, who is to run in the London marathon for the Leukaemia Research Fund, has revealed that while on a training session at his local track on Hampstead Heath, north London, he spotted a group of youths set about a passer-by and beat him up.

It was time to be tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime and Downing Street's one-man antisocial behaviour unit swung into action. "I decided, rashly, to intervene," he writes in this week's Spectator magazine. "I raced across, shouting out loudly in different accents. To my amazement, and relief, the youths scarpered, leaving a bleeding, groaning, badly injured man."

The spinmeister offered to take the victim to hospital or the police station but he asked instead that he be accompanied to a nearby church. Once there, Mr Campbell told the man that if he decided later to ring the police, he could cite him as a witness. He scribbled down his name and number.

The man then peered more closely at his rescuer. "Are you Alastair Campbell? I f***ing hate you," he said. It turned out that the bleeding mugee was a bleeding Liberal Democrat activist. Or, as Mr Campbell explained, "never the most grateful of sorts". That'll be the dying embers of a Lib-Lab pact out of the window then.