Failure, it is thought, is what sells, and what people want to hear and read about. I am not so sure.

One in four of us will have a mental illness at some point. That is a lot of people.

This may sound arrogant, but I believe that if we'd done teamship better, we'd still be there. Where we fell down was the inability to hold together. We should have learnt from the great football teams. The players may not like each other. They have egos, they have their own ambitions, they have different personalities, but they are still bloody good teams.

Paul Keating told us before we were elected that you can do deals with [Rupert] Murdoch without saying you were doing a deal. Did we do that kind of thing? Maybe. But from around about the turn of the century, I felt strongly that we had to do something about media ownership and self-regulation. Tony [Blair] disagreed.

My public caricature - that of a self-confident alpha male - is only partly accurate.

The thing about politicians in Britain is that they are out there, you can lobby them, get close to them, there are loads of ways you can protest against them, and booing is a pretty weak way of doing it.

Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.