Alastair Campbell visits Warwick

Alastair Campbell visited the University of Warwick earlier this week for a book signing and staff conference for Rethink, the mental health charity.

Campbell arrived at Scarman House on March 21 to sign copies of his books ‘The Alastair Campbell Diaries,’ ‘The Blair Years’ and ‘All in the Mind’ with the aim of raising money for Rethink, a charity which aims to improve the lives of those suffering from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression and other such mental illnesses.

Although the conference was well-attended, Campbell seemed disappointed at the lack of student turnout for the signing and unaware that term had finished for Warwick students. Twitter was engaged to encourage student turnout, with Campbell tweeting “Signing books to raise cash for Rethink at Scarman building Warwick Uni if any students want to pop in” via his Blackberry at 12.21pm, but with no other apparent advertising.

Other conference attendees included Communications Director of the Terence Higgins Trust Genevieve Edwards. On his blog, Campbell wrote that he was there to speak on communications and stress the importance of communication for people who deliver services to the mentally ill- issues such as fundraising, organisation morale and the ability to “influence local and national politicians and policy-makers”.

He wrote: “I spoke as I often do of mental illness as the last great taboo, the reason why there remains the need for the ‘Time to Change’ campaign.” He also commented: “it is impossible to have any kind of genuine dialogue with health secretary Andrew Lansley on his planned reforms”.

Co-founder of Warwick Labour Rory Kinane said: “It’s a shame that more students weren’t aware of the visit, but… it was out of term time and so few were around.” In fact, Warwick Labour Society were not aware of the visit, which Kinane commented would have helped: “We would have promoted it… and put posters up. But it’s very hard to get students to turn up to [events] out of term-time.”