Private Eye marks Campbell's card

Anthony Barnett (London, OK):  Yesterday I queried the way that Alastair Campbell's so-called Diary of the Blair Years an entry on Scotland allegedly written in the past tense even before Blair was elected in 1997 , "Scotland was, as ever, a disaster waiting to happen". Bookworm in the 20 July edition (print only) of  Private Eye has done a more thorough job. He quotes from the depth of the introduction where Campbell admits he has re-written "where the original made no sense or lacked any context" which given the rushed nature of the beast is probably most of the entries! Bookworm spots a number of incongruous past tenses and anachronisms and makes the good point that Campbell should have indicated in the text when he had added to the diary. As you can't read bookworm's judgement on this on-line here it is, Campbell's is "a deriliction of authorial duty which makes his book almost...worthless".