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Series 2 kicks off with Gabby Logan speaking to author, political strategist and podcaster Alastair Campbell, best known for his six-year stint as former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s director of communications. Among insight from his political career, he tells Gabby about his lifelong fear of financial insecurity, how he made a fortune busking round Europe, and the reason Fiona takes the money reins at home – and why he thinks Gordon Brown’s wife does the same.
Join Gabby Logan every week as she speaks to some familiar faces about their relationship with money, the financial lessons they've learned on the road to professional success, and how they're investing for their family's future.
Visit ii.co.uk for more investing ideas and information.
Gabby Logan: Hi, I'm Gabby Logan, and this is the ii Family Money Show. In each episode, I speak to a familiar face about the role money has played in their family life and professional success. In this episode, I'm joined by Alastair Campbell, the Author, and Political Strategist, best known for his six year stint as the former Prime Minister Tony Blair's Director of Communications.
Despite returning briefly as an Advisor to Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, Alastair left frontline politics in 2003 to focus on his partner, Fiona, and their three children, as well as writing and raising awareness about mental health issues, and drawing on his own personal experiences to help others.
In our interview, Alastair opens up about his lifelong fear of financial insecurity, why he hands over his family's financial reins to his wife, and he thinks former Chancellor Gordon Brown does the same, plus how he made a fortune busking around Europe with his bagpipes.
Gabby Logan: Alastair Campbell, If I was to describe you as Author, Political Strategist, would that encapsulate enough for you of what you are and who you are?
Alastair Campbell: Yeah. Author, I write books; Political Strategist, I don't do that as much as I used to.
Gabby Logan: Podcaster?
Alastair Campbell: Podcaster, could do that. Mental Health Campaigner. Editor at Large of the New European.
Gabby Logan: You’ve got a lot of jobs. I mean, there was a lot to unpick when looking at your biography, and so much to get into. I'm not sure we're going to have the time to do everything. But this is essentially about money and finance, this podcast. And actually, it's interesting how talking to people about their lives through that prism reveals quite a lot about them and their motivations.
Let's go back to your family life as a kid and how important money was or wasn't; what kind of a role money played. Were you aware of your parents having any struggles? Did you feel that money was abundant? What was it like?
Alastair Campbell: It's really interesting, and I was thinking about this before we started, I was thinking, “Me and money, I don’t know what to say really,” because my childhood, I wasn’t aware of it really. My dad was a vet. I tell you; my first financial memory is of him sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday night, and I'd say, “What are you doing?” He said, “I'm going through the accounts for the week,” and I didn't really know what that meant. But I can remember his chequebook, he had these chequebooks out, and his bills, and I can remember he did used to complain a lot about vets in Yorkshire not paying their bills on time.
But I never had a conscious – I never had a sense of us being worried about money, whereas I knew I had friends at school who did. And I can remember when sometimes when we used to go on holiday. All our holidays were in Scotland, a bit like with you with Wales, we were always Scottish, and Scotland was kind of where we went all the time.
And I do remember some of – maybe some of – I remember my dad came from a croft, his father was a crafter in the Hebrides, and I do remember having conversations about how they saw him, now he was a vet he must be absolutely rolling in it, and blah-blah-blah, and they’d had to struggle and stay on the island, and all this stuff.
But I think the other thing I’d say is I don’t ever have a memory of my parents being money conscious, thinking that money was a big deal either way.
Gabby Logan: So, you had enough; there was never a sense of not being able to have new shoes for school, or being able to go on a school trip. So, there was enough, but it wasn’t the priority.
Alastair Campbell: No.
Gabby Logan: Because what I find interesting in these conversations is people who aren’t aware of their parents’ finances or struggles, they often choose careers themselves that aren't motivated by that kind of financial security. They just tend to do things that they really love. And inevitably, because they're on this podcast, they become successful at it, because they've got a passion for it. So, when you were sitting down, thinking about where you wanted to go in life, was money ever a factor for you?
Alastair Campbell: I don't think I ever had that “I want to be rich” thing. But I did always have worries about money. For example, my first real earning, apart from odd jobs when I was at school and stuff, but when I was a student I became a busker with my bagpipes, and it was just an accident. I was learning, I was doing Language at university, I had a year abroad.
I actually went without my bagpipes, but then when I got there, I remember my dad and my mum were coming out just to see me. I think it was the first time they'd been abroad. Well, first time they had – I can't remember. One of them had to get a passport, I remember that, and they came out to see me. And I said to my dad, “As you're driving down, because you're driving down, bring my bagpipes, OK?”
Now, after they left, I went to this little village. I was in Nice, right, and I went to this little village called Èze where they make all the perfume, and I found this really quiet car park away from everybody with no cars, and it was in the middle of Winter. And I just blew the pipes up, I tuned them, I gave them a bit of a go, and I was just playing a few tunes, and within about half an hour I had a crowd round me and they were throwing money into the box; cash, coins.
“Oh, this is interesting.” I honestly hadn't gone out with a view to busking. And then I thought, “Well, if it's like this in an empty car park” –
Gabby Logan: Car park, yeah.
Alastair Campbell: – “in a tiny little village, what’s it like in the pedestrian precinct in Nice,” right. So, I went down the next day to the pedestrian precinct in Nice, and honestly, I was rolling in it. An then I travelled all around Europe. I travelled all around Europe with the pipes and I was never broke. Honestly, I made a lot of money, all in cash.
Gabby Logan: There can't have been too many people competing for the bagpiping post or stand in the busking community. You must have been the only one, right?
Alastair Campbell: No, I met one. There was one other, and I like to think I was a better player than him. But you are right, the thing, the great thing about the bagpipes is that you drown out the others. Singers, the guitars, they’ve got no chance. And you know down in the South of France, those terraces of restaurants, right?
Gabby Logan: Yeah.
Alastair Campbell: I had a mate who had a motorbike, and I used to get on the back of the motorbike, playing the pipes, we'd arrive from a distance, right. We'd go up and down the thing, the terrace at about a hundred miles an hour, doing wheelies and playing the bagpipes, right. People would laugh, et cetera. We'd stop, he would take off his crash helmet and go round and collect the money, back on the bike, and off. So, we could do about 10 restaurants in two minutes.
Gabby Logan: You were absolutely raking it in.
Alastair Campbell: If you were a guitarist or a flautist … Yeah, we were, we were absolutely raking it. We actually set ourselves the target one day, starting in Brussels and finishing I can't remember where, Strasberg or somewhere, and we set ourselves the target of doing £1000 equivalent in one day. This was in 1977.
Gabby Logan: Wow.
Alastair Campbell: And we just fell short, but we weren’t far off it, yeah. Yeah.
Gabby Logan: What age were you, Alastair, at this point?
Alastair Campbell: Twenty.
Gabby Logan: Right. So, you went back to university with a lot of cash.
Alastair Campbell: I can't deny that I spent a lot of cash while I was away, but yeah, I had cash. And I went back, and I put it … You’ll like this, you investment-type people will like this, I put it all into a building society account.
Gabby Logan: Did you?
Alastair Campbell: I did. And what’s more, I did, and when I – Fiona will tell you, when we first met, and for a long time thereafter, I never went anywhere without my building society passbook in my inside pocket.
Gabby Logan: I remember those little books, those little …
Alastair Campbell: Yeah. With the handwritten … Every time you went in, you gave it to the woman or the guy behind the counter. They had to count the cash, write it in. So, you had this; I’ve got it somewhere, you’ve got this handwritten record. And I had this thing, I think it – I don’t know where it came from – I had a pathological fear of being in debt. And my building society passbook was a reminder that I always had cash somewhere.
Gabby Logan: So where did that come from?
Alastair Campbell: I've still got it by the way. I don't know really. Maybe at a subconscious level, I remember my dad, when I was about nine or 10, and he had his – because he had his own practice up Yorkshire, and he had this really bad accident with a sow, this sow, that attacked him while he was vaccinating the piglets. And he was an hospital for a long time, and then he came back, and he couldn't quite get going again with the whole 24/7 practice thing.
So, he sold the practice, and he joined the Ministry of Agriculture for a quieter life vets job as it were, and we got moved to Leicester. And I often think that was like – just when I know I have sessions with my psychiatrist about my depression, that's the one big moment of trauma that I can find in my childhood. And it didn’t necessarily feel like that at the time, but I think it was this sense of having less security.
And the other thing is I was conscious of the fact – at least I think I was, this might just be memory or rationalising it today – I was conscious of the fact that we moved to a much smaller house. And I don't know whether, again, at a subconscious level, I wasn't thinking, tight, so he’s had this accident, and our whole life has changed, and we’ve had to move in the middle of school term to a place that we don’t know, didn’t particularly like to be honest, and we were living in this … You know, listen, it was a really nice house, but it was a much, much, much smaller house. So, I don’t know where it came from.
And I’ve always liked cash. When I was a kid, when I was a teenager I worked on my uncle’s farm up in Scotland, and I actually did it because I liked going there, and I liked him, but he paid me every week in Scottish £1 notes. Hundreds of them. And, again, I would keep these over the Summer, and I had this pile of – stack of – £1 Scottish notes, and part of me was thinking, “I can’t wait to go to the building society and pay this in.”
Gabby Logan: So, going back to – that makes sense, that experience makes sense, and why you would have some deep-seated fear of perhaps losing all your money, or not being able to afford what you previously had. In terms of the lessons that they gave you, apart from the ones that you were observing, did they ever sit down, your parents, and say, “When you get your first job, make sure you take out a pension,” or “make sure that you put something aside.” I mean you had your building society account; we know that. Did you get any of those kinds of lessons from them?
Alastair Campbell: No, not really. I think both my parents were driven. They were much more driven by what I would call human values than financial values. I remember when I went to university, and had a grant. I went very young, I went literally straight from A-Levels, and I can – I remember my dad dropping me off at Cambridge, and he gave me two things. He gave me a Tenner, right, and said, “Get something decent to eat tonight, and don’t spend it all on drink,” right. And he gave me an envelope, inside of which was a letter, and then at the end it was a quote, that quote from Hamlet that loads of kids have been given when they’ve left home; “This above all, to thy own self be true, and it must follow as night the day that canst not be false to any man.”
Gabby Logan: Oh.
Alastair Campbell: And that was it. So, no, there was no big sit down. I think also they had worked – I think they knew, because, I don’t know, I don't think they worried about me when it came to finances, whereas maybe they worried about my siblings a bit more, particularly my older brother who had schizophrenia. And so, he was always – once he was diagnosed, that was always going to be quite a struggle for him.
Although, funnily enough, he ended up – after – he was in the army and then he got invalided out of the army, then he scratched around trying to get different jobs while he was coming to terms with this wretched, horrible illness, and he ended up thinking that he was a great insurance salesman. And he kept wandering from insurance salesman job to insurance salesman job, and I was always his first customer.
And funnily enough, the other day – in fact it was around the time you got in touch to ask me to do this, we got a letter out of the blue from an insurance company about the maturing of a policy that I honestly didn’t know I had.
Gabby Logan: Oh. When I hear people have those kind of stories –
Alastair Campbell: [unintelligible 00:13:00].
Gabby Logan: – I always think –
Alastair Campbell: Yeah.
Gabby Logan: – “How do you not know?” But you’ve probably been sold so many by him over the years.
Alastair Campbell: It was quite a few. It was quite a few. And this one was like – his first one was Scottish Amicable, then there was Scottish Provident, then there was Leicester something-or-others. And then he worked in Leeds, and I always used to say – and he’d tell me, he’d phone me up, “Ali, I’ve got a great new job, and I’m doing insurance again.” “Oh god, here we go.” “And it’s only a Tenner a month. Give us a Tenner a month …” and, you know, this will make you this, and it will make you this. Anyway, this one, I can’t remember how much it was, but it was in five figures, and it came in just out the blue.
Gabby Logan: And what did you do with it? That’s interesting how your financial attitudes changed. Would you go and blow that money, because you didn't know it was coming in, on something that you really fancy? Or would you put it into another account, or ISA, or whatever it is that you do now?
Alastair Campbell: You know what this is – I don’t know what you and Kenny are like, but I don't do anything. So, Fiona does literally absolutely everything. So, basically I give it to her, and then what happens to it happens to it, and I wouldn't have a clue.
Gabby Logan: is that because you are irresponsible?
Alastair Campbell: No, no. I'm not a spendthrift, I mean, I'm not [poor? 00:14:22 ], I like to think I'm pretty generous, but I'm not a big consumer. I don't see the point of having more than one car, I don't really go – now that we've got this house in France we don't really do holidays other than coming here. I don't have a watch; I've not worn a watch since I've got a mobile phone. I think “What is the point of having a watch when your time’s on the mobile phone?” I'm not a big consumer, I don't spend loads. I actually don't like being in shops is the honest truth, I get a bit edgy in any retail environment. And it's not because I'm going to blow loads of money, it's just that I'm not interested.
Gabby Logan: You're obviously a massive football fan, so what would you think of spending a lot of money on a trip to watch Burnley? If Burnley were playing in Europe, right, would you be like, “Yeah, I don't care what it costs. I'm going to watch them play on Tuesday night or Wednesday night.”?
Alastair Campbell: Well, when we were in Europe a few years ago, I went to every game. So that was Aberdeen, Istanbul, and Athens, with one of my boys and, yeah, and it was whatever. Honestly it didn't matter. Yeah, so that would be me being a spendthrift –
Gabby Logan: A luxury.
Alastair Campbell: – by my right minds. And we'd stay in a nice place and we'd, yeah...
Gabby Logan: And so, as far as you're aware, Fiona's doing very sensible things with the family finances.
Alastair Campbell: Well, I'm not sure about that because we recently had some work done, and she was like, “Oh, we've been a bit cleaned out on this,” and I'm going “Well, hold on a minute. What does that even mean when I work my balls off, and sell loads of books, and make loads of speeches that people bizarrely pay me to say what I think about the world,” and you're telling me, “Oh, well, it'll be all right. Once we’re through this, it’ll be fine.” But, yeah, I do trust her.
What we don’t do, I don't – the only shares I own – you mentioned Burnley, the only shares I own are in the University College of Football Business which started at Burnley. And I only bought them because it was started in Burnley. I didn’t buy them as an investment, although as it happens they’ve done really, really well, so I’m not a share owner.
Yeah, I think we’ve got an ISA, and I remember when we took them out, Fiona went low risk and I went high risk, and hers has made way more money than mine. She told me that fairly recently, and she said “Yeah, so you should have just stuck with me on the low risk one and then it would have been fine.” And apart from that, yeah, I do trust her. Yeah. Yeah.
Gabby Logan: And so, all that work you’re talking about –
Alastair Campbell: And sometimes I don't want to think about it.
Gabby Logan: No, it doesn't interest you enough to really dig deep into it. So, it’s a good job that she is interested enough to go off and sort stuff out. Going back, take a step back a bit to your first working job if you like. Your first career was obviously as a journalist. How motivated were you when you were negotiating your own contracts and things? Were you quite good at pushing a hard bargain and making sure you were paid a decent wage?
Alastair Campbell: Yeah, I probably was. I'm not great at asking for money, but I've never been scared of saying, “Hold on a minute.” For example, just this morning I was talking to this guy in Ireland who asked me to go and speak at a conference, and he told me what he wanted to pay me, and I said, “Well that sounds fine, but I don’t want to get there and find that you’ve got five other speakers there who are being paid double,” which was a way of saying –
Gabby Logan: I want top whack.
Alastair Campbell: – am I being paid the most here, right. Yeah. And she said, “Ah, I see what you mean.” He said, “Well I’ve got a couple here that are on-board,” and so I said, “Well who are they and what is it?” And by the end of the conversation –
Gabby Logan: You were top dog.
Alastair Campbell: – I’d sorted that out as it were. No, I was joint top dog with some guy who I’d accepted was a topper dogger.
Gabby Logan: OK. That won’t be the clip we use to advertise the podcast. “Topper dogger.”
Alastair Campbell: No, you don’t want to do “topper dogger,” do you? That is not a … No. No. But of course, when I was a journalist, when I started out as a journalist, I think we were on about three grand a year. It was something ridiculous as trainees. But then I did find that I was doing loads of freelance stuff, because we were down in the West Country, and it wasn’t that well covered by the national papers. And there were some really big stories happening when we were down there, the Penlee Lifeboat Disaster, we had a very famous murder case that was happening that was a big running story, and I found that I was making quite a lot of money on the side just by working for the paper I was working for, and then firing stuff to the nationals.
And I found that very easy to do, and then when I then started to go into national newspapers, what I tended to do was to look around the newsroom and say who was I on the level with and then make sure I wasn’t being paid less than them. That’s how I approached it. But if I suddenly found out that somebody was paid double it didn't bother me that much.
Gabby Logan: Because, of course, when you go into government, you are then, I assume, pretty structured in terms of what you can earn because you are obviously open for scrutiny. So, you've left behind the possibility when you're working in that commercial environment of newspapers to earn what you want to earn, and be freelance, do whatever you like, write books, go on telly. And then when you work in government it's – as we know, the Prime Minister’s finding it very hard to survive on his salary. So, what was your compromise, if you like, at that point? How hard was it to negotiate a salary in government that you felt was commensurate with your talents and what you were offering?
Alastair Campbell: Well, it didn't really work like that because what happened was, when I started working for Tony Blair in Opposition, so I had three years being employed by the Labour Party. And that was a big, big pay cut. And one of the difficulties about doing the job, given that Fiona and the rest of my family didn’t want me to do it anyway, you’re doing something that most of your family don't want you to be doing, and you're taking a massive pay cut, it wasn't easy, right.
When we got into government, of course that then – I had quite a big pay rise, but as you say, that’s your lot and you’re paying tax. And the other thing people don't maybe understand about special advisors – I wasn't a civil servant I was a special advisor – is that you're not on that civil service pension scheme –
Gabby Logan: Oh right, OK.
Alastair Campbell: – but one of the things now is that over the years we probably haven't put enough into our pensions. And I meet friends and colleagues – I was at a thing at the French Embassy the other night in London, and there were colleagues there, about my age, who were senior civil servants, and of course they’re not – they’re doing perfectly fine, thank you, without doing any work at all because they’ve got a very good civil service pension.
But I never really worried too much about that. And also, I may say, Gabby, at the risk of dragging this into the political arena, I'm not sure the current government are that bothered by the rules. I think they're making money all over the shop. Even the thing about getting other people to pay for your wallpaper, I'm afraid in our day that did not happen.
Gabby Logan: Well, that’s what I was intimating when I said that the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to be able to live on his salary. Obviously there seems to be some grey areas, doesn’t there, about what’s going on at the moment in terms of what’s declared and what’s not.
Alastair Campbell: Mm.
Gabby Logan: Were you quite strict about that? Or did it feel to you that there was a very strict code of conduct that was being adhered to at the time when you were in Tony Blair’s government?
Alastair Campbell: Yeah, and also I am very strict like that. I am when it comes to stuff like … And partly that was the press guy in me, knowing what the media would do with it –
Gabby Logan: The scrutiny.
Alastair Campbell: – if they found that people were bending the rules and so forth. Yeah, so I was very, very strict, and that led to all sorts of real difficulties. I mean when I think about the thing with the flat in Number 10, and how Johnson and Carrie Simmons, and the stuff with the wallpaper and the refurbishment and what have you. I can remember when Cherie, Tony’s wife, Tony and Cherie got a new bed for the Number 11 flat where they were living, right. Now they paid for it themselves, but I can remember the absolute hoo-ha in the papers like The Mail about “They’ve spent X thousand pounds on a bed,” right, you know, it was like …
Whereas now, I mean this lot get away with so much. I’ll tell you another thing, Chequers, people talk about all these. I don’t know whether Johnson does this, and I'd be very surprised if he does, but I can remember that Tony and Cherie had to pay themselves for all these dinners that they hosted down there.
Gabby Logan: Yes. Yeah.
Alastair Campbell: And I was certainly keeping across that and saying that we've just got to be very, very careful about this stuff.
Gabby Logan: It is a compromise in many ways, obviously, because what the Prime Minister earns is a lot of money, but of course, compared to what people like that can earn in the private sector, we all know that they could earn a lot more money if they were working in banking, or if they were working in less noble arts, let's say.
So, there is this sense, isn’t there, and Tony Blair’s gone off and done very nicely after he’s been in government. When you take that pay cut, as you, yourself, could have earned a lot more staying in the commercial sector, that’s a moral and a purposeful decision, almost, that you’re making. But then are you thinking, “Well, later on I’ll get myself back on track.”? So, I'm going to not have a pension right now; I'm not going to contribute as much as I did to my private investments because later on I'll be working back in that commercial sector?
Alastair Campbell: Mm. I don't think I thought like that. It's like when people – you know, one of the big earners in my life has been my diaries. The first deal I did for the first as volume of my diaries was – this was in the day. I mean book deals aren't as big as they used to be, but it was like it was a lot of money.
And so, when people were interviewing me about the diaries, “When you kept the diary were you thinking one day you’ll publish them and make loads of money?” And the truthful answer is “No, I wasn’t.” I mean, look, part of me, when I was working with Tony Blair, part of me thought I want to do this job, and I want Labour to stay in power forever, because that's where my politics are.
Gabby Logan: So, you would've been doing the job forever if it had gone well.
Alastair Campbell: I think it's impossible to do it forever, but I certainly – I don't think I was thinking about money in that way. And do you know, when I did leave in 2003, I hadn't talked to anybody about leaving apart from a very, very, very small number of people. Tony, obviously; Fiona and the kids, obviously, but apart from that, because it was … You know, if you remember the circumstances in which I was leaving at the height of the Iraq war, and the Hutt enquiry and all that, and I’d been trying to get out for some time, but I couldn’t talk to anybody about it because at the time it would have been a big story, so I kept it very, very tight. And what it meant was I couldn’t stand out –
Gabby Logan: You couldn’t find a job.
Alastair Campbell: – to potential employers.
Gabby Logan: No.
Alastair Campbell: No, so I didn’t. I literally left, I had nothing. I went from this full-on job to thinking, “Right, what do I do now.” And then I had various strokes of luck. One of the first things that happened actually was – I don’t know if you know a guy called Keith Blackmore who was the Sports Editor at The Times, and he got in touch and asked me to write a series about … He said, “Look, how do you fancy doing something non-political?” I said, “Well, it depends what it is.” He said, “Well, just think, you could write a sports column for us.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know about doing a weekly column, but what about if I write a series about who is the greatest sportsman or woman of all time, and I basically go around the world interviewing loads and loads of famous and brilliant sports people about who they think it is?”
Gabby Logan: What a great job to create for yourself.
Alastair Campbell: Exactly. And then the speaking thing. I mean, I remember Al Gore, I think it was Al Gore who said that the post-politics speaking circuit should be classified as white collar crime where you get offered ludicrous sums of money to go up and talk. And that, once I realised that that was there, and I knew it wouldn't go on forever, although to be fair, I'm doing one in Africa next week, so it can go on forever, but it doesn't go on forever in terms of being satisfying if you like.
Gabby Logan: So, the freelance lifestyle, which is notoriously precarious, and there is a temptation as a freelancer to always say yes to everything because you never know when it’s going to dry up, but you’ve obviously reached a point where you’re so confident in what you do that actually you can create space to do your writing, create space presumably, as well, for your own mental health. Because you’ve realised along that journey that it’s not great to be over busy and to fill all the gaps in your life. But there is the side of the freelance world which that financial insecurity can be a driver, can’t it?
Alastair Campbell: Yeah. When I meet people who are freelancers who basically operate in a world where they want to get to about, I don't know, 35 grand a year or something and they're working flat out to do that, I think that would scare me. So, I mean, look, I'm still in that space where, as you know because we've done stuff together, I will often speak at schools and colleges and charity stuff, pro bono. But when it is a bank, I will ask for quite a lot of money. So, if you know you've got a few of those in the diary going forward, then that's the kind of financial base.
Then this maybe goes back to the insecurity we talked about earlier, if I look at a given week in the next few months and there is no earning event in that, I get a bit panicky.
Gabby Logan: A little bit antsy.
Alastair Campbell: I know it’s ridiculous, but I do, and I start to think “Right, I’ve got to put something in there.” So, yeah, until recently really I’ve never really had that mentality, because when I was a journalist I was full-on, salaried, and as you say in politics and government, salaried, not allowed to make money on the side. And I never saw myself as anything other than a full-on salaried person. But now, I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think I could give up the freedom that I’ve got.
Gabby Logan: You are an entrepreneur. You're one of Margaret Thatcher's dreams. She wanted everybody to be their own boss, didn’t she? I don’t think you're going to like that comparison, are you?
Alastair Campbell: No.
Gabby Logan: Let's talk about somebody in politics that you probably do have a lot more admiration for. Gordon Brown, as Chancellor, obviously had to make big financial decisions every day. When you've got somebody like that who's your colleague, you're seeing them all the time, do you ever ask personal financial issues? “What are you going to do with this?” “Are you planning on raising this?” “Do I need to move some money to there?” Did you ever get any advice or tips from Gordon?
Alastair Campbell: No, never. And again, that was … I think some people in politics probably are doing that, trying to find out what’s happening because it affects them. That kind of thing never, ever crossed my mind. Do you know what, I don’t think it crossed Gordon’s mind for himself either. You know, if you think about being the Chancellor, you’re making decisions that will affect you and your family as well.
I thought you were going to ask me whether I'd ever asked Gordon about how he managed his own financial affairs for himself personally. And I don't know this, but I'd be very surprised if Gordon is anything other like I am with Fiona.
Gabby Logan: So, Sarah does everything when it comes to their family finances.
Alastair Campbell: I'd be very surprised if he's too closely focused.
Gabby Logan: You've talked about asking your kids, and Fiona obviously, but discussing decisions with your family, quite regularly actually, already today, and that they didn’t like some of the decisions that you were making. So, I get the impression that the Campbell household, growing up your kids were very involved what was going on and heard lots of really interesting conversations, I’d imagine, as well. How much did you talk to them about their own finances when they were kids? And how aware were they of savings and putting money aside, or thinking about the future? Did that ever come up?
Alastair Campbell: No, no, not really. Again, I think we, I think Fiona and I, like our parents, like my parents and Fiona's parents, I think are the same, is that I think we were much more interested in hoping that they were growing up as good people rather than that they were obsessively focused on money.
Now as it happens, our oldest child, Rory, he's a professional gambler mainly in football, and does pretty well. He’s got a good company, I think his political values are in the right place, but so he's obviously into money, and I think understands money much better than I do, understands the way markets work probably better than I do.
And then our second boy, Callum, he's in the film and strategy world. And, again, I think quite canny, but not driven by money, just not driven by it. And our daughter, Grace, who you've met, she’s a comedian which is – you know, some of them get very, very, very, very, very rich, but most of them don't. It’s a precarious existence, and I think Grace is honest enough to admit that she does OK, but could she have done it without knowing that mum and dad were in the background and would help her out if need be because it’s tough.
Gabby Logan: Yeah. And does she rely on the Bank of Mum and Dad sometimes? Or does she have to do a supplementary job? Does she have to work somewhere she doesn’t really want to?
Alastair Campbell: The very short answer to that is 100 percent the former.
Gabby Logan: Right.
Alastair Campbell: And she's very good at playing the card of, “Well you weren't around enough when I was growing up, so you owe me.” She’s pretty good at that one.
Gabby Logan: So, she's good at manipulating her dad?
Alastair Campbell: Yeah, but I’m pleased in a way though that they’ve all ended up doing very different things that they wanted to do.
Gabby Logan: Mm. They followed their passions, which is …
Alastair Campbell: Yeah, yeah, I guess that’s right. And I think with Rory and his company, look these things go down as well as up, that's for sure, but it’s sort of … He’s in his thirties now, and I sometimes do think, “Well …” You know, this goes back to my insecurity about being insure. It’s really weird; that’s what it’s about, it’s I fear being financially insecure. And part of me thinks, “Yeah, Rory will look after us, he’s doing well, and he’s generous and what have you.”
So, I’ll tell you the other massive fear. I don't want to come over like I’m completely useless, but I am at a lot of things. But another, I’ve told Fiona a million times there is no way in the world that she can die before me, because I honestly – Gabby, this is going to sound pathetic, I don’t even know how to get into our bank account.
Gabby Logan: Alastair.
Alastair Campbell: If you told me to do online banking, you might as well tell me to do a lecture in Swahili. I can't do it because I've never done it.
Gabby Logan: She's going to have to write a manual or something.
Alastair Campbell: Passwords for …
Gabby Logan: Yes. A load of passwords. She’ll have to write a bible for you of passwords.
Alastair Campbell: I keep asking for it and it never comes.
Gabby Logan: Alastair, we've learned a lot about your financial education and theories; you’re not materially motivated, your wife pretty much takes care of everything when it comes to any investments or accounts, you’re definitely happy that your kids have followed their passions and not pursued careers based on money. You didn’t have that very insecure background when it came to money as a kid; you didn’t seem to worry too much apart from that one moment which perhaps has led you to not ever want to be in debt which is no bad thing.
But I wonder, of all the periods, the busker in France, the young journalist with his first salary doing his work on the side as well, or the man in government, or even the man now who's doing a lot more freelance work, which have you learnt the most about money, would you say? Which period taught you your best lessons?
Alastair Campbell: I think probably the busker because I think what it taught me was that you can get out there and just make money. And even though – this sounds really weird, we've just been at a wedding in Switzerland, and I played the bagpipes, and I know – I know that if I really fell on my uppers I could go out and play my bagpipes and there would be some people who’d put money in my box.
Gabby Logan: Thanks for listening. If you’ve got time, please like and follow the ii Family Money Show, and leave us a review or rating in your podcast app. You can find loads of ideas on how to plan for you and your family's financial future at ii.co.uk. I'll see you next time.