During a sensational four-minute spell today on the Andrew Marr show, Alistair Campbell appeared to have a panic attack.

Viewers watched open-mouthed this morning as Andrew Marr’s aggressive questioning about the WMD dossier and Blair’s ‘beyond doubt’ claim to the Commons appeared to leave Alistair Campbell speechless.
Gulping for breath and clearly upset by the question, Campbell took a good five minutes to recover,and even then still seemed shaken.
Significantly, the moment at which Campbell’s words would no longer emerge directly followed a strong suggestion by Marr that both the spin doctor and Blair ‘sexed up’ the case for war. It was clear that Campbell was lost for an answer.
At the start of the slot,the former Blair aide told Marr he had “a problem with the current media culture”. Later he said that people wanted ‘authenticity’ in their politicians. This gave one an eerie feeling that Alistair Campbell perhaps suffers from some form of dissociative mental illness – given his obvious and long-standing role in both creating the culture and encouraging politicians to ‘act’.