For a man who spent his professional life worrying what the red tops would say, Alastair Campbell could barely hold them in lower esteem these days.

The former Number 10 spin doctor, who will this week join the high-profile list of witnesses giving evidence to the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, thinks Britain’s tabloids have ‘lost it’.

His own fraught relationship with the press is well-known from his days as Tony Blair’s director of communications and strategy, at the heart of the New Labour government.

And as he trounces through a critique of a ‘corner-cutting, low standards, reality TV-obsessed’ media, his disdain for its predilection with celebrity reveals a belief that too much of Britain’s press has found its way into the gutter.

“I think the tabloids have kind of lost it,” says Campbell, offering a flavour of what he will tell the media ethics inquiry. “I think there’s a tolerance at the top for too many journalists who cut too many corners. The nationals – too many of them worry more about the impact of a story than they worry about the truth of a story.”

A former Daily Mirror reporter, whose days as Blair’s communications chief are well-documented in his published diaries, he blames a combination of negativity, trivialisation and a culture of celebrity rooted in shows like the X Factor. Politics and government, he says, are ‘only really covered at the level of scandal and crisis’.

“Most stories in most national newspapers most days are presented negatively,” Campbell tells me as we chat during a visit to Manchester to host the M.E.N Business of the Year Awards.

It was the same week in which he has attended the funeral of his best friend and ‘indispensable’ Blair strategist, Philip Gould.

Campbell, 54, who has been practising his bagpiping in the back of the car from London, seems tired but totally engaged in his ‘weird mix’ of ongoing projects – public speaking, blogging, writing (an e-book on happiness), a possible film (about a cyclist) and the bagpipes, which are the subject of a documentary he has been filming with his brother in Scotland.

“You’ve got to have a free press,” he continues as we resume our media debate. “But there does come a point where you look at the sort of press that we’ve got and say is that what free speech is really about?”

He says that, while rightly appalled, the public shouldn’t be too focused on the hacking scandal. “It’s actually about this deeper change in the culture.

“Newspapers have got to be there to kind of annoy people and challenge power, but what’s happened with newspapers is they’ve become a power in their own right and they’ve abused that power.”

Campbell’s submissions to the inquiry were leaked online over the weekend – action that resulted in the political blogger Guido Fawkes also being summoned to appear before Leveson.

A link to Campbell’s papers, containing a string of potentially-damaging claims to lawyers, appeared on the Order-order website run by Paul Staines, under the name Guido Fawkes. Writing on his blog, Mr Staines highlights contentious elements in Campbell's evidence and claimed to have obtained the papers legally.

A statement issued by the Leveson Inquiry read: "Lord Justice Leveson was extremely concerned to hear that a copy of the evidence that Mr Alastair Campbell intended to provide to the inquiry was published on the Guido Fawkes website. The website asserts that this statement was obtained by legal means but Lord Justice Leveson will be enquiring further into this claim."

Campbell says he was ‘genuinely shocked’ to see his evidence in the public domain.

So, given all of this, would Britain be a better place without newspapers, I ask? “No”, he says, not even the tabloids. “But I think Britain would be a better place with very different newspapers to the ones we’ve got.”

And the broadcasters are in his firing line too. “It’s the reality TV, The X Factor, Simon Cowell and so forth, at the expense of investment in good broadcast journalism, of which there’s not much left.”

He agrees there is a difference between the national and regional press who have been less ‘subsumed’ by celebrity (Campbell started his own career on Devon’s Tavistock Times).

“There are some very bad regional papers and some very good regional papers, but the closer the paper is to its community, the more likely it is it will care about accuracy and it will care about the impact it has on its community.”

It’s a distinction that will be hard to make when Leveson concludes and inevitably brings tighter press regulation – something Campbell welcomes.

“The tragedy for the press,” he says, “is that the PCC (Press Complaints Commission) actually had a very good basis. The problem is that a lot of the papers just gave it no respect and the PCC was an utterly useless organisation for the press, by the press, of the press.”

As we talk, the Eurozone is on the brink of catastrophe and David Cameron and George Osborne’s handling of the crisis is the subject of media scrutiny.

“You’ve got this feeling that Cameron’s on the outside. I think Tony would have forced his way in,” he proffers of his former boss.

“Cameron likes to think he’s got a lot of Tony’s strengths but the one he lacks most of all is strategic clarity. We didn’t always have it, but we always strove to be clear about what we were trying to do.”

He claims the current prime minister is too busy thinking of the politics of his own party which, for decades, has been divided by Europe.

“He’s very good at looking the part, but I feel he’s not thought through what he wants to do with the job and what he wants to do with the country.”

But he can think of a man who does know how to manage a financial crisis. “We could do with a bit of Gordon (Brown) at the moment to be absolutely honest,” says Campbell, whose handling of the Blair/Brown fallout  was among the biggest challenges of his time in Downing Street.

On the topic of Labour, Campbell is more cagey, keenly aware that the wrong words would do more harm than good to the party.

Asked whether he thinks Ed Miliband will be their next prime minister, he says: “I hope so.” Pressed on whether Brown lost the last election because of his 'psychological flaws' – a phrase linked to Number 10 and widely believed to have originated with Campbell, something that remains unconfirmed – he simply replies “no”.

Campbell voted for David Miliband in last year's leadership election but says he wouldn't underestimate Ed, who still calls on him for advice (as do the people in Number 10).

“I think he's calm, which is important. I think he’s empathetic, he gets on with people, he has a rationale, he has an argument.”

Would he make a better prime minister than Blair? “I think Tony was an exceptional prime minister. The honest answer – I don't know.”

He says Gould's passing, from cancer, which he later discloses on his blog knocked him sideways, made him think a lot about the New Labour boom years and what he has done since.

“That was an amazing period in all our lives and we still are identified by it. When I die it will be 'Tony Blair's right hand man'. I don’t fuss about that at all.”

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