New Shrink for Blair’s Spin Master

Famous as Tony Blair’s communications director—and a survivor of mental illness—Alastair Campbell is out with a new book...about a psychiatrist on the verge of a nervous breakdown. All in the Mind’s protagonist, Professor Sturrock, “is a man at the end of his tether; or, rather, a man at the end of his ideology. His rhetoric isn’t working, which means, more or less, that his patients are not doing as they are told,” writes psychotherapist Adam Phillips in his review for The Guardian. It’s “the story of a man who has just noticed what he has been trying to do with words, and that all the things he can’t do with words may be the things that matter most.” Pretty heady stuff for a communications specialist. Campbell’s follow-up may have to wait: He’s just returned to 10 Downing Street—as an adviser to Gordon Brown.