Alastair Campbell

So Boris could have been, again, you're not going to agree with this, Boris could have been an amazing prime minister.

Two things let him down.

I think he had people around him who did not have his best interests at heart and thought they could use him as an avatar for their ambitions.

Cummings.

Cummings and others, but mainly Cummings.

People have been doing this throughout Boris's career.

He got hit with the challenge of COVID, which was the...

This is exactly the wrong kind of emergency for Boris.

In the way that Ukraine was exactly the right kind of thing, COVID was actually the wrong kind of thing.

There were no inherently right answers.

It was all very difficult.

It was very technical.

It required him to do things which he instinctively didn't want to do.

Like all the lockdowns, really, really un-libertarian.

He was quite a libertarian type person.

All these things were at odds with his belief.

And it just smashed him about and all this kind of stuff.

And, you know, he...

He's always had a degree, and we can discuss how much of a degree, a degree of personal ill-discipline.

We knew that when we as a party chose to make him prime minister.