Alastair Campbell's diary

Arianna Huffington could scarcely believe her luck that the behaviour of traditional newspapers was big news as she arrived in London to launch her online newspaper HuffPostUK, for which I wrote a guest blog. She invited me to speak on the launch panel. I had not expected to like her, but I did. I was surprised, too, to find how much I agreed with Liberty's Shami Chakrabarti, and amazed to find I was the one arguing most strongly for investment in proper investigative journalism.

It was interesting to find myself being described by some journalists as a mouthpiece for News International while the word from within Wapping was that I was persona non grata as a result of my stance on the phone-hacking scandal. It is two years this week since The Guardian revealed the wider extent of the scandal. I did TV interviews saying it looked like phone-hacking took place on a near-industrial basis. I wish I had kept the text messages that came in from senior News International executives and their threats of retribution.

Rupert Murdoch and his senior executives are very clever people. Yet I think there will come a time when business schools examine their management of the hacking scandal as a textbook exercise in how not to do crisis management. I will certainly be adding it to my speeches and seminars on the subject.

On a visit to one of London's many good state schools, St Gregory's in Harrow, one of the pupils asked if there was one thing in Britain I could change, what would it be? I said put an end to all private schools and universally embrace state education. I know it won't happen, but I've always felt we will never become a true meritocracy so long as our top private schools continue to act as a conveyor belt to the establishment top jobs.

This week a new report delivered old news: that the three schools sending most students to Oxbridge are Eton, Westminster and St Paul's, variously the educators of Cameron, Clegg and Osborne. Eton has produced more Prime Ministers than the Labour party, and also the current London Mayor with whom I spent a very jolly Tuesday morning launching four current Etonians on a London to Lisbon bike ride for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research. Louis Metcalfe lost his mother Lily to the disease, and he and his mates have already raised well over £100,000. Boris was there not just to wave at people, pigeons and photographers in Trafalgar Square but because he is godfather to Archie Gilmour, grandson of former Cabinet minister Ian Gilmour, who is one of the quartet. I did the first few miles with the boys and, as we cycled along, Archie told me he is a Lib Dem, not a Tory. Then again, his grandfather was well to the left of most Tories, and as becomes clearer every time I see Boris, he is also trying to be seen as anything but a Cameroon.

With the boys heading to Lisbon, I cut back through the East End and circuitously home to NW3. I love seeing inner-city London from the saddle. I stopped for scrambled eggs at one of the cafés down from Waterstone's in Hampstead. At the next table two German women, well dressed, expensively bejewelled, clearly wives of men who were in money, were talking animatedly. Deutsche Frau 1 wanted to know if Deutsche Frau 2 thought she could book a holiday home for her young lover close to where she and her husband were holidaying in Italy. I knew my German degree would come in handy one day. The scene will find its way into my next novel.

If you haven't noticed I have a new book out, it is because I decided on a novel approach for the launch of volume three of my diaries - no to the book-plugging interview round. The publisher seems to be tolerating my eccentric experiment, which is all about seeing whether social media and word of mouth spread the news faster these days, though they are insisting on a bit more activity for volume four next year.

So I spent publication day travelling to Burnley for the first meeting of the board of the new University and College of Football Business. Based at Burnley FC, partnered with New Bucks University, and opening in September, it offers the first undergraduate degrees in the business of football. It was as I left for home that news broke of the closing of the News of the World. You always know when a story is a big one - the TV and radio stations are so desperate to get voices on to fill the space that they don't mind if you're on a mobile phone in the back of a car. The battery finally died by Watford.
Power & Responsibility: The Alastair Campbell Diaries Volume Three is out now (Hutchinson, £25)