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The first thing you see when you walk into Alastair Campbell's Hampstead home are the framed political cartoons by artists such as the Daily Telegraph's Nicholas Garland and the Guardian's Martin Rowson that adorn the hallway walls, suggesting that Tony Blair's former spin master does indeed possess a sense of humour.
However, the 51-year-old, who was born in Keighley, South Yorkshire, hasn't always enjoyed a cordial relationship with the British media, which makes the generally positive reception that his debut novel All in the Mind has received all the more remarkable.
"Given the press that I usually attract, the reviews have been far better than I envisaged," says Campbell as we settle on a couch in his kitchen.
"Some of the press will just say 'whatever we think of it, just say it's crap because it's by Alastair Campbell.' But some of the best reviews have been in the papers that loathe me."
Indeed the novel - which centres around Professor Martin Sturrock, a psychiatrist who has mental health issues of his own - has received mixed reviews.
In the Guardian, psychotherapist Adam Phillips hailed it as "a frightening account of a mind giving way" while in the Sunday Times, Peter Kemp lambasted Campbell's writing for being "on the most part unwaveringly banal".
"The reaction that matters to me most is from the people that I know," argues Campbell. "The reviews from the mental health profession are also important and they have been good. Part of the reason why I wrote it along with the documentary Cracking Up that I did for the BBC about my own breakdown was to help break down some of those taboos and stigmas. The experts all say that it's a problem getting people to be open, getting them to say what's wrong with them, because they're frightened to admit these things that have got a taboo attached to them."
Indeed, whatever the critical opinion of All in the Mind, Campbell has been praised for his candid honesty about his own history of depression. He first experienced mental and drinking problems while working as a journalist at the Daily Mirror in the late 1980s. After making a full recovery, he was teetotal throughout the decade that he spent as an aide to the British Labour Party, first in opposition and then as Director of Strategy and
Communication and Tony Blair's Press Secretary after Labour swept to power in 1997. However, he suffered a recurrence of his condition after resigning in 2003 following the controversy that raged over his handling of the public relations surrounding the British involvement in the invasion of Iraq.
"I drew very, very heavily on my own depression but I should say by way of rebuttal that I didn't visit a prostitute halfway through like Sturrock does and David the depressive gets depression more intensely and more often than I ever got it," says Campbell, referring to one of the psychiatrist's patients. "But I know those feelings and the drinking. His consumption is based on mine but he's regularly consuming over a long period of time while I consumed for a short time prior to going off the rails."
Apart from David, Sturrock's patients include Emily, whose face was terribly scarred in a fire, and Arta, a Kosovar Albanian refugee who had avoided being attacked in her volatile homeland only to be raped after settling in south London.
Although she didn't think that the book worked at all until the last few chapters "when it becomes well written and quite moving," expat New Zealand author Stella Duffy, who reviewed the book on BBC Radio Two, was impressed by how it "took the traditional feminist line that rape is about power, not sex, and is damaging to the women involved no matter how men might like to think it's empowering".
"She said that if it didn't have my name on it, she would have thought it was written by a female mind," says Campbell. "That amazed me because I am not exactly a new man," he adds gesturing towards the plate that he left on top of the dishwasher, which he doesn't know how to work.
As in Duffy's last novel The Room of Lost Things, which revolved around a Brixton drycleaners and its diverse range of customers, Campbell portrays Sturrock as a fulcrum, around which the other characters oscillate.
"He is the dynamic, the one constant thing running through it," he says. "His patients are more or less getting better but he is not doing very good at all, his own issues are crowding in on him. It's a very old story: 'Who heals the healer?' I see the book as pro-psychiatry because it's one of the toughest branches of medicine. All they've got to go on is what they see and what they're told. It's not like taking someone's blood pressure or x-raying a broken leg.
"When it's 'all in the mind,' it's a lot harder for the medics, who are expected to be miracle workers by patients and the patients' families."
The inspiration for All in the Mind came to Campbell while he was cycling around north London. "I saw a funeral and it got me thinking about whether the person who had died - because there was a massive crowd - had known just how many people they'd touched," he says. "By the time I got home, I had the idea for the novel. I wrote it without telling anybody, I didn't even tell my partner Fiona I was doing it until I'd done the first draft because I wanted to satisfy myself first; if I wasn't happy with it then I wouldn't have continued."
Campbell has now "broken the back" of his second book, which is about "friendship and celebrity. The main character is a mega-celebrity and it's the story of her relationship with an old schoolfriend." He also has plans for a third novel, which "might be more political. I'm really glad I didn't do a political novel first. That would have been so obvious."
After devoting the past few years to public speaking, charity work, sport and Labour Party fundraising, Campbell recently returned to the political arena to help his old friend Peter Mandelson, the erstwhile Secretary of State for Trade and Industry who was himself brought back from the cold last October by Gordon Brown as Business Secretary.
"I'll do more and more as we get towards the election," he says. "I've got a different take on it now. I did my job for 10 years and I did it flat out 24/7. Part of my job was to try and stay on top of things and co-ordinate different activities, which is bloody hard to do in the modern media age. If you take your eye off the ball, all sorts of things can go wrong."
