He did so because the crisis – like the war that precipitated it – was discretionary It didn’t have to happen. It was, to a great extent, a storm of his making.Our political Lucifers – and again the comparison with Mandelson is apt – shine brightly in the firmament for a while, but fall to earth for lack of the saving grace of common sense. There is no doubt that he wanted to leave last April, if not before. Unusually for a political insider, his wish to spend more time with his family was not a euphemism for jumping before he was pushed. But it was against his every instinct to leave Downing Street at a moment when the Labour government was facing its gravest crisis in more than six years in office. He served the Prime Minister loyally and fiercely – too fiercely, in the end, for the Prime Minister’s good. We shall not, and for the sake of our democracy should not, see his like again.
Who knows? His departure has created a vacuum, which may at best be filled by a return to the collective responsibility of cabinet government.
By his own account, Campbell is a driven man. A man who stood at Tony Blair’s right hand for nine years, and who exercised a power unknown and unsought by previous Downing Street press secretaries. Only Bernard Ingham, for Margaret Thatcher, had anything like the same profile. But Ingham was a civil servant who had once worked for Tony Benn and who observed the traditional distinction between party and government Campbell was different. A few have settled old scores (itself a Campbell speciality), but most of them gave credit where credit was due. Here was a man who, together with another obsessive, Peter Mandelson, learnt the lessons of previous Labour defeats and engineered two unprecedented landslide victories for a previously unelectable party.
Forty-six is an early age to be reading one’s own obituaries, but that’s what Alastair Campbell was able to do at the end of another Hutton-heavy week. “There is some uncertainty about where it is going”, he said. “In all probability, within the next month we will know its future orbit with an accuracy which will mean we will be able to rule out any impact “I would say there is no cause for concern at all.”. Dr Alan Fitzsimmons of Queen’s University, Belfast, one of the expert team advising the UK Near Earth Objects Information Centre, based in Leicester, said there was no cause for concern about the asteroid. The probability of the asteroid hitting earth however, is just 1 in 909,000 and the risk of impact is likely to decrease further as experts collect more information. In the unlikely event of it hitting earth, the rock would have the force of 350,000 megatonnes – around eight million times more powerful than the bomb dropped at Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War. It has been classified by astronomers as “an event meriting careful monitoring”.
The asteroid, known as 2003 QQ47, is around two-thirds of a mile wide and could hit the earth on 21 March, 2014. Scientists today warned that an asteroid was on a possible collision course with Earth. They could not eat during the flight, and carried just two-thirds of a litre of water each, accessed through tubes in their helmets. A Royal Navy vessel was standing by to pick them up from the Atlantic.. They will, though, be a long way below the typical orbiting altitude of spacecraft or satellites. The International Space Station orbits at about 240 miles; and 200 miles is the lowest altitude feasible for a satellite. The team hopes to reach a maximum of 132,000ft.QinetiQ 1 will be mounting several experiments, with sensors on board to collect data about temperature and pressure, which will help scientists to plan hypersonic flight vehicles of the future.The duo have been waiting since July for a suitable weather window, after bad weather prevented an attempt last year.
