As many of you perhaps know, Prime Minister Tony Blair was voted out of Parliament just a few weeks ago after a ten year stint at No. 10 Downing Street. The timing, as you may also know, is ripe for a rash of Blair critiques and retrospectives, the first major one being The Blair Years: The Alistair Campbell Diaries.

Campbell, Blair’s Press Secretary and strategist from 1994-2003, kept exhaustive diaries of his time in with the former Prime Minister, and touched on many major events as he and Blair saw them: the rise of the Labour party, the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland, the death of Princess Diana, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and the War on Terror. Most valuable, though, are the moments at which Campbell captures the man behind the nation, defying relentless and crushing pressure to govern in what he hoped were the people’s best interests.

During the time he was in Parliament, Campbell was called Blair’s right hand man and the second most powerful figure in Britain. If he doesn’t know what went on behind closed doors, then maybe we were just never meant to know. But he does dish on Diane Rehm:
Listen to the full interview.