Alastair Campbell and the Philosophy of Persevilience

By Matthew Parish

Monday 19 October 2026

There is something faintly irritating about invented words. The English language already possesses rather a lot of them, and when public figures decide that none is quite sufficient to encompass their latest insight into the human condition, the result can sound suspiciously like the title of a management seminar in an airport hotel. Alastair Campbell’s new word, “persevilience”, is therefore entitled to encounter a certain initial scepticism.

It is a combination, obviously enough, of perseverance and resilience. But Campbell intends something more specific than merely carrying on when things become difficult. He defines persevilience as the capacity of a person, organisation or society to turn a setback, adverse situation or meaningful experience into an opportunity to grow, advance and protect what fundamentally matters. In this sense perseverance and resilience are merely ingredients. Perseverance means continuing; resilience means recovering; persevilience means learning how to become something different, and perhaps stronger, as a consequence of what has happened to you.

The distinction matters because Campbell has accumulated an unusual quantity of experience upon which to test it. His life has included alcoholism, a psychotic breakdown, recurrent severe depression, extraordinary professional success, political vilification, family tragedy, the highest pressures of government, spectacular controversies, political defeats and reinventions. He has been simultaneously one of the most powerful and one of the most hated figures in British public life. Yet now approaching seventy, he remains furiously engaged with politics, writing, broadcasting, campaigning and public argument. Whatever one thinks of Campbell—and he has never been a man about whom everyone thinks the same thing—he has certainly persevered. The more interesting question is whether he has achieved something beyond perseverance.

Campbell’s philosophy begins, appropriately enough, with catastrophe. In March 1986 he was a young journalist working for the Daily Mirror, ambitious, politically obsessive, working ferociously and drinking enormously. The combination eventually destroyed him. He suffered what he has subsequently described as a breakdown involving psychosis, alcohol withdrawal and paranoia. He was arrested and ultimately admitted to hospital, where a psychiatrist began asking him about his drinking and Campbell slowly confronted the fact that something had gone profoundly wrong.

One might naturally identify this as the lowest point of his life. Campbell eventually reached almost the opposite conclusion. Years later he described 7 March 1986 not merely as his worst day but, paradoxically, as in some respects his best, because it forced him to confront the patterns of drinking, overwork and obsession that were destroying him. That is almost a perfect case study in what he now calls persevilience.

Resilience would have consisted in recovering from the breakdown, while perseverance would have consisted in returning to journalism. Campbell did both, but something else occurred. The breakdown became information: it supplied a reference point against which subsequent crises could be measured, and it gave him knowledge about the fragility of his own mind that a person who had never broken down could not possess.

Campbell has explained that when later confronted with anxiety, depression or extreme pressure, he could compare the experience with the catastrophe of 1986: if the breakdown was nine out of ten, how bad was the current crisis really? The earlier disaster thereby acquired continuing utility. It became a yardstick, and Campbell has gone so far as to argue that the experience helped equip him for the enormous pressures of his later political career.

This is an intriguing proposition because it contradicts one of the persistent assumptions of modern therapeutic culture: that psychological damage is principally a deficit to be managed. Campbell does not deny the damage. His recurrent depression has been serious, and he has written with remarkable candour about periods in which ordinary activities became almost impossible. His account of depression is emphatically not one of conquering an enemy forever; it is closer to learning the geography of enemy territory.

But Campbell makes the more provocative suggestion that the experience of mental illness may also generate capacities. He has said that he does not regard his achievements as having occurred merely despite mental illness, but partly because of what surviving it taught him: perspective, loyalty, a thick skin, an ability to absorb setbacks and an understanding of recovery. This is not romanticising depression, because there is nothing romantic about being unable to get out of bed or answer a telephone. Rather, Campbell is making an observation familiar, in another vocabulary, to soldiers, athletes, refugees and survivors of political upheaval. Once a person has discovered that he can survive something he previously imagined unsurvivable, his conception of the possible changes, and thereafter the world looks different.

This explains an otherwise curious feature of Campbell’s career. When Tony Blair asked him to work for him in 1994, Campbell explicitly warned Blair that he had previously suffered a breakdown and still worried about whether he could withstand extreme pressure. Blair hired him anyway. Somewhere beneath Campbell’s anxiety, however, was the knowledge that he had already encountered one form of personal catastrophe and survived it. He then entered one of the most ferocious political environments in modern British history.

Whatever judgment history ultimately passes upon New Labour, Campbell’s years alongside Blair involved an extraordinary intensity of conflict. Elections, scandals, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, endless battles with newspapers and eventually the Hutton Inquiry all passed through a communications operation in which Campbell occupied the centre. By the time he left Downing Street in 2003, even sympathetic observers could see the toll that this existence had taken. He subsequently suffered severe depression and temporarily withdrew from public life, demonstrating that resilience is not immunity and that having survived one psychological crisis does not vaccinate a person against another.

Here the idea of persevilience becomes morally more complicated, and therefore more interesting. There is a cheap version of resilience according to which every disaster is secretly wonderful because it teaches us something. This is nonsense. Some disasters are simply disasters: people die, wars destroy countries, mental illnesses wreck lives, careers collapse and families break apart. There is no cosmic accounting department ensuring that suffering produces an equivalent quantity of wisdom.

Campbell’s idea is subtler because the good does not reside in the catastrophe; it resides in what one subsequently does with it. That distinction becomes particularly clear in his relationship with his elder brother Donald, whose life provides perhaps the most moving background to Campbell’s thinking about mental illness, endurance and dignity.

Donald Campbell lived for decades with schizophrenia. He nevertheless worked, maintained friendships, pursued his passion for bagpipe music and built a life that his younger brother regarded with enormous admiration. When Donald died in 2016 aged 62, Alastair wrote movingly about a man who refused to define himself by his illness. Donald’s attitude was essentially that he had been dealt a bad hand and must nevertheless make the best of it. In retrospect, Donald looks almost like an unwitting philosopher of persevilience before his brother invented the word.

The important point was not that schizophrenia made Donald’s life better, because plainly it did not. Campbell has described the illness in uncompromising terms and has campaigned vigorously for better psychiatric treatment and greater understanding of severe mental illness. The achievement lay instead in Donald’s refusal to permit illness to exhaust the meaning of his existence. He remained a musician, brother, uncle, friend and colleague who happened also to suffer from schizophrenia. One psychiatrist regarded him as an extraordinary success precisely because, notwithstanding the severity of his condition, he worked, lived independently, drove, played music and maintained a formidable network of friendships.

There is something profoundly important here, because persevilience is not the denial of vulnerability; it requires its acknowledgment. Campbell’s public persona once seemed to embody the opposite proposition. As Blair’s formidable communications chief he acquired the reputation of an aggressive political enforcer: relentless, confrontational, intensely competitive and seemingly impervious to criticism. Yet behind that caricature stood somebody who knew perfectly well that human beings can crack. Campbell has argued that self-doubt is not weakness but an indispensable feature of humanity, and his own biography supplies considerable evidence for the proposition.

That insight distinguishes persevilience from macho endurance. The genuinely resilient person is not necessarily the person who insists that nothing hurts, because that person may merely be storing up an explosion. Campbell’s 1986 breakdown demonstrates precisely the dangers of confusing relentless activity with strength. He had been persevering furiously right up until the moment he could persevere no longer.

Persevilience therefore contains an element of adaptation absent from the traditional British injunction to keep calm and carry on. Sometimes carrying on is exactly the wrong thing to do. One must stop drinking, leave the battlefield, change strategy, admit illness, ask for help, abandon an impossible objective, or discover that what appeared to be defeat has revealed something important about the objective itself. Perseverance without reflection may amount to little more than obstinacy.

This makes Campbell’s concept unexpectedly relevant to politics. Political movements are notoriously bad at distinguishing perseverance from obstinacy. They become attached to policies, leaders and slogans long after circumstances have changed. Governments interpret every setback as evidence that they must pursue the same policy more energetically. Ideologues regard compromise as weakness, while nations sometimes continue wars because admitting that their original assumptions were wrong appears psychologically more painful than continuing to sacrifice lives. Persevilience, properly understood, demands almost the opposite: the point of surviving adversity is to allow adversity to teach you something.

Campbell’s own political career supplies awkward examples because his record remains contested. His role in the Blair government and particularly the politics surrounding the Iraq War ensure that any account of his philosophy presenting him simply as a heroic survivor would be absurd. Persevilience cannot mean converting every criticism into further confidence that one was right all along. That would merely be stubbornness wearing therapeutic clothing, and the difference between learning from criticism and developing an ever thicker skin against it is morally decisive.

Indeed Campbell’s concept becomes valuable only when combined with another quality he places alongside it: integrity. His conception of persevilience emphasises not only toughness and positivity but belief and integrity. That qualification is essential. Learning from adversity requires the possibility of discovering that one’s critics were right, that one’s assumptions were false or that one’s conduct contributed to the disaster. Otherwise nothing has really been learned; the individual has merely survived.

This is where the concept expands beyond Campbell himself. Ukraine, for example, understands instinctively the difference between resilience and persevilience. Resilience means repairing the electricity grid after Russian missiles destroy it. Perseverance means continuing to fight despite exhaustion and loss. Persevilience is the more ambitious process by which Ukrainian institutions, armed forces and society absorb the lessons of each assault and emerge altered: decentralising power, improvising technologies, changing military doctrine, strengthening civic identity and discovering capacities that did not exist before the invasion. The suffering is not good, but the transformation it occasions may nevertheless contain something valuable.

The same principle applies to individuals. A failed marriage may teach somebody how to love better, although it need not. Bankruptcy may produce a better entrepreneur, although it may merely produce poverty. Depression may create empathy and perspective, although it can equally destroy people. Exile may create cosmopolitanism or bitterness, while war may produce solidarity or savagery. There is nothing automatic about any of this, and that uncertainty is central to Campbell’s idea.

Therein lies perhaps the strongest feature of his new word. Persevilience describes not a condition but an activity: it is something one does with experience. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s endlessly abused observation that what does not kill us makes us stronger is therefore only half right. Plenty of things that fail to kill us leave us permanently weaker. Campbell’s biography suggests a more credible formulation: what does not kill us gives us material from which strength may be constructed, but the construction requires work.

Campbell has spent decades doing that work. He turned his breakdown into an understanding of pressure and his depression into books and mental-health campaigning. His family’s experience of schizophrenia became part of his campaign for better psychiatric services and against stigma. He turned departure from Downing Street into writing, speaking and political activism. In 2022 he and former Conservative minister Rory Stewart launched The Rest Is Politics, creating an enormously successful political podcast and giving Campbell yet another public incarnation long after his career as a government communications director had ended. Writing, broadcasting, campaigning and mental-health advocacy have all become successive layers of a life that could easily have become trapped within the identity of “Tony Blair’s former spin doctor”.

There is also something encouragingly anti-perfectionist about all this, because persevilience assumes that life will go wrong. That may sound banal, but enormous quantities of modern culture are organised around pretending otherwise. Social media presents perfected lives. Politics promises final solutions. Management consultants offer optimisation. Technology companies promise frictionless existence. Wellness industries sell the fantasy that sufficient discipline will abolish sadness, while artificial intelligence increasingly promises to remove uncertainty, inefficiency and error.

Yet human existence stubbornly declines to become frictionless. People become ill; parents and siblings die; elections are lost; businesses fail; friends betray one another; wars begin; governments make terrible decisions; minds sometimes rebel against their owners. No amount of optimisation will abolish tragedy because tragedy is woven into the structure of human contingency. A philosophy for such a world cannot plausibly promise victory all the time. It must instead offer some account of what to do after defeat.

This is why Campbell may have stumbled upon something more substantial than a clever word for the cover of a book. Perseverance tells us to continue towards the horizon, while resilience tells us how to stand up after being knocked down. Persevilience asks a different question once we have regained our feet: what did falling down teach us about where we should walk next? That question turns endurance from a passive virtue into an intellectual exercise.

Alastair Campbell’s life offers no neat answer, nor should it. He remains argumentative, controversial, politically partisan and periodically depressive. The scars have not vanished; nor have the disputes surrounding his career. Persevilience does not erase the past but incorporates it, and in that respect the concept is more realistic than the conventional language of recovery, which can misleadingly imply a restoration of the person who existed before the disaster.

We seldom return to being precisely the person we were. Campbell’s breakdown remains part of him, just as his depression remains part of him and his brother Donald remains part of him. Blair, Downing Street, Iraq, triumphs, mistakes, enemies, elections won and causes lost all remain parts of the same accumulated biography. The curious achievement is that none has proved to be the final chapter. Approaching seventy, Campbell has invented a word for carrying all the preceding chapters forward without permitting any one of them to dictate how the story must end.

We may smile at the word, and we may even decide that the English language was perfectly serviceable without it. But the idea behind persevilience is harder to dismiss. It proposes that character is measured neither by avoiding catastrophe nor merely by surviving it, but by the intelligence, courage and integrity with which we metabolise experience. The world does not promise to be kind to us, and no serious philosophy should pretend otherwise. Perhaps the best revenge upon adversity is not merely to survive it, but to learn from it—and then to put what one has learned to use.