Alastair Campbell was Director of Communications and Strategy for Prime Minister Tony Blair between 1997 and 2003. Before joining Blair’s team in 1994, he worked for numerous newspapers including the Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror and Today.When giving his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry (30 Nov), Campbell talked about his experiences of the British press - professionally and personally, Carole Caplin's suspicion of phone hacking and the PCC.The main points of Campbell’s evidence are listed below. For a full transcript of his oral evidence click here. For a transcript of his written evidence, click here.On the British press:“I quote there one of Rupert Murdoch's Australian executives who once said to me that British journalism is the best in the world and the worst in the world and it's sometimes in the same edition. I think it's important to remember that some of British journalism is the best in the world. I think you saw -- I watched the evidence to the Inquiry yesterday and I think you saw some very different aspects of British journalism, which included the best and the worst. But the best I would defend, and I do defend a free press.”“My argument that runs through this document that I have given to you is that the freedom of the press that is being defended most loudly by those who describe anybody who dares criticise them as an attack upon the freedom of the press, that actually that has become a press that is barely worth defending. What I think we should defend is a genuinely free press and at the moment I think we have a press that has just become frankly putrid in many of its elements.”On his own press coverage:“I think that people in public life who -- you do develop a very, very thick skin. I have a very, very thick skin. I frankly have reached the point where I genuinely don't care what the papers say about me at all. I've never sued a newspaper. I can always answer back, particularly now in the blogosphere and Twitter and all that stuff, but they know they can sort of get at you through your family. It's almost comical now when I read it, but it wasn't comical at the time. As I say, it's the only time I managed to get an immediate instant apology from the Daily Mail was when they wrote a story about the impact that my father's death had had on me, and the reason it was so easy was because of course my father was alive at the time…”On his direct knowledge of phone hacking:“Well, I'd been visited by officers from Operation Weeting and shown references to me in relation to Glenn Mulcaire and I've also been visited by officers from Operation Tuleta, which I know is not about phone hacking but is about, if you like, dubious practices beyond phone hacking, where I was briefed on computer hacking, not suggesting it was me but just explaining what they were looking into. And also briefed on invoices they'd found, that the Mirror had paid private investigators who were looking at me and Peter Mandelson at a certain point, me and a member of my family and Peter Mandelson at a certain point.”On Carole Caplin:Q. Then you refer to Carole Caplin and say you have no evidence of her phone being hacked.“I should actually interject there that following Mr Staines' publication of my draft evidence, Carole Caplin got in touch with me and said she had been shown evidence of being hacked and said she would be happy to write to the Inquiry about that, if it was helpful.”“She thought -- she'd been shown several pages of Mulcaire's notes. It's interesting. In my -- I talk about leaking information about the activities and movements, because what we found was with Cherie Blair in particular, she was turning up at places and the press were finding out about it. As I say in my statement, I did at times directly accuse Carole Caplin of tipping off newspapers about what she was up to. I've since apologised to her for that because I now realise I was completely wrong.”“As I say, she -- it's probably for her to say what she knows, but she did say if you wanted to hear from her, she'd be happy to write to you.”On editors:“I say there at 097 that during the whole -- when the whole kind of Andy Coulson thing was at its height and people were constantly asked the question, "Would the editor know?", well they wouldn't necessarily know everything that everybody did in pursuit of a story in the newspaper, but they would certainly know that more and more money was being spent on the hiring of private detectives. Did they ever stop and say, "Why are we spending all this money on private detectives"? Probably not, because they know the answer.”On ‘papers as political players, journalists as spin doctors’:Q. That's your basic thesis. You then give us an example in relation to a piece in the Guardian and Ed Miliband's recent speech to the Labour conference. Could you elaborate on that?“I just thought it was again not untypical. She wrote that after the speech there was a sort of – the journalists kind of get together and sort of decide what the line is on the speech. This goes back to the fusion of news and comment. So they tell each other that actually it wasn't very good and he made a mistake saying that, and that actually becomes the news of the speech. That's them if you like as -- that's what I mean by they are the spin doctors. They are the ones who are deciding what the line is and then it gets promulgated.”On the Information Commissioner’s report:“That goes back to my point about the media controlling the terms of the debate. They decided collectively this was of no interest, and I also think there was a failure of politics there that no Select Committee thought it was worthy of pursuit, the government didn't think it was worthy of studying in more detail and -- I mean, there was a real problem that was identified there that's only come to light now. That document's been out there published for years.”“I do think this is really, really important, because newspapers who have been named in this report, several of them have said they've never published stories on illegally obtained information, including Mr Dacre, who said it at the House of Lords committee. His papers are number one and number four in the list of which organisations have the most transactions with the most private detectives trading in private information.”On the harm of press coverage:“I don't think we can tell. But I've mentioned one area already where I think the quality of people who are interested in putting their head above the parapet, not just in politics but in public services, in all those sort of aspects of our national life that attract media attention, there's barely an individual organisation I would talk to in the sort of life that I lead now who wouldn't at some point say, "You know, we get a really, really bad press for what we do", and if you think about -- let's just take -- I mentioned earlier something like social workers. Hugely important. They only ever get defined negatively in most of the tabloid press. That has an impact upon recruitment, it has an impact upon morale, it has an impact upon the service that those people provide.”On the PCC:“That it's failed. That it's failed because this is a body that has been of the press and for the press. That it's had a succession of chairmen and one chairwoman who have been appointed largely as political fixers operating in the interests of the press rather than the public interest. There are other failings that it has which are not necessarily their fault. For example, the fact that they feel constrained from investigating what I would call themes.”“And I just think this entire make-up has been wrong from the start. I understand why it's like it is, because this was the last chance saloon that led to the last chance at self-regulation. So the funding, PressBof, it's entirely funded by the press. Again you could say that's a good thing because it means public money is not being spent on this, but it makes ita vested interest.”“I say in my statement that I would -- I mean, it operated sort of like a gentlemen's club. "Let's see how we can fix this and keep that quiet and calm this down" and the editors, who are on the Editors' Code Committee, they may not be sitting in judgment on individual cases, but they have huge power within the organisation, and in my view, in the body that replaces the PCC, there should be no live current media representatives involved in it at all.”On the future:“I think there would have to be press experience and press presence, but I don't think you could have, as you have now, serving editors, serving newspaper executives, currently in their positions, in senior positions on the regulatory body. So I'm not saying there should be no people with media experience -- and also, this thing about independence it is very, very difficult, because ultimately the government does have to make -- when this Inquiry reports, the government will have to take a position on any legislative change and then Parliament would have to endorse it.”“I say in my submission that the real tragedy for the press and good journalists is that the PCC code is -- it's a very good code, it's a perfectly good piece of word: accuracy, opportunity to reply, privacy, harassment, it covers the whole lot, hospitals, victims of sexual assault, discrimination, children. Had it been adhered to, I don't think we'd be where we are today, and I think it's a perfectly good basis. But I think what an annual report would do – assume there's a new body and there's a new code, or a revised code, but it's the basis of any new code of conduct, then to have an annual report where the regulatory body actually analyses the conduct of each newspaper against the code to which they have all adhered. I mean, newspapers love publishing league tables about schools and hospitals and everything else. You could have a league table of newspapers to see which adheres most closely to its own code, and I think actually that would be -- would help drive up standards in the directionthat they should be driven.”On Leveson’s ‘elephant in the room’ i.e. the Internet:“I suppose what I'm saying in a long-winded way is if you get the newspaper regulation right, I think that will have an impact on the Internet as it develops, but I think there may come a point, and it may become impossible, there may come a point where you have to apply some sort of if not regulation but standards which can be applied to the Internet as well.”On the celebrity culture:“Well, the celebrity culture has taken a pretty fierce grip on virtually all of the media, not just the newspapers, but television as well, and they're in this kind of bizarre symbiotic relationship where the reality TV programmes and the soaps and the Pop Idols and the X Factors create the celebrities which then become the sort of staple diet for the newspapers and the magazines and these magazines have been incredibly successful. As Mr McMullan said yesterday, they're feeding a public desire and demand for this obsession with celebrity and that's forced the newspapers, I think, to set themselves in direct competition with them. I don't blame them for that. I mean the newspapers, they're businesses, they're trying to stay alive in very difficult competitive circumstances, but it does mean that the whole of the media, I think, has moved substantially downmarket.”On the McCanns:“…So when McCanns became a news commodity -- I remember watching when Madeleine McCann first went missing, I remember watching it and there was one point where -- I wish I had now -- I thought I ought to write to these people because you could see what was happening. They thought they were using the media to help them in the hunt for their child, and I could see what was happening, the media were using them to be built into the kind of news commodity which they subsequently became. So that they became "anything goes" people and you could say anything, do anything. As I say in my statement, how nobody from the Press Complaints Commission stood up and said, "Excuse me, what is going on here?" when it was so obvious to anybody who was reading the newspapers and watching the television, is beyond me.”