Adelaide Writers’ Week: Alastair Campbell on Trump, Boris and modern politics
Former Tony Blair spin doctor Alastair Campbell is back in town for Writer’s Week to talk about politics, populism and how we arrived at a point where people like Donald Trump get elected.
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Alastair Campbell talks about the three Ps of modern politics. Populism, polarisation and post-truth.
And about how we arrived at a point where people such as Donald Trump and former UK prime minister Boris Johnson ascended to the top of the tree.
Characters, or “chancers’’ as Campbell refers to them, who would never before be considered fit for leadership.
Campbell started as a journalist before gaining a degree of infamy as chief media headkicker for UK Labour prime minister Tony Blair. These days he is a writer, speechmaker and highly successful podcaster and is in Adelaide for two appearances at Writers’ Week.
Blair was PM until 2007 and Campbell believes politics started to fundamentally change not long after.
Not because his old boss departed the scene but because of the long-term effects of the global financial crisis the year after.
“I think people felt the world is getting more and more unequal (after the GFC),’’ he says from his London home.
“The people who caused this mayhem are getting away with it. We, the taxpayer, were bailing out the bloody bankers. We’re paying the price. They’re not paying the price.’’
Campbell believes this caused an anger in the community which opened the door to a different form of politics.
“Populism has always been about kind of demagogic chancers in the main, basically being able to say, ‘I’m with you, the people, and we’re against this mythical elite’,’’ Campbell says.
“The irony being that people such as Trump and Johnson are about as elite as they come.
“When you think that Trump and Johnson, two of the most privileged people you can ever think of, somehow managed to make themselves symbols of that in our two countries. (Former Australian PM Scott) Morrison, I think did the same in Australia. So that’s populism.’’
Dictatorships have always been able to bend reality to suit their narrative, whether economically, politically or militarily. Now democracies are joining in the action.
“Post-truth is more than just playing fast and loose with the truth,’’ he says.
“Post-truth is actually creating a new prism through which we look at the world. Trump is a post-truth politician, Johnson is a post-truth politician.’’
Campbell references his own country’s decision to leave the European Union as an example, also calling Brexit the “biggest disaster’’ and “biggest self-inflicted political wound’’. “We’re living in a post-truth world in Britain, where nobody’s allowed to say that Brexit has been a complete disaster. I mean, it’s mad, it’s a form of madness.’’
As Campbell sees it, the practical outcome of this political approach is that nothing really ever gets done. Politics becomes about grievance rather than solutions. About finding enemies rather than answers. And faux wars against nebulous concepts such as “woke”.
“The world’s always faced big challenges, but if you line them all up, one by one – climate change, massive, artificial intelligence, massive, global terrorism, cross border crime, you’ve got a whole sort of plethora of really, really, really, really big challenges.
“And we have a sort of form of politics that just isn’t remotely geared to meeting the scale of challenge.’’
Campbell hosts The Rest is Politics podcast with former Conservative cabinet minister Rory Stewart. It is monumentally successful.
The Rest is Politics is downloaded about 700,000 times a week and is popular across the UK and Ireland, the US, Germany, France and Australia.
While Campbell will be in the Adelaide Town Hall for a Rest is Politics performance, Stewart will be elsewhere and join via video.
Campbell says he had only met Stewart once before the podcast idea came up. He had been approached by the producers of another popular podcast called The Rest is History and asked if he would be interested in doing something similar on politics. The idea was that Campbell, a Labour man, would be paired with a Conservative. And fireworks would commence.
Campbell has one million followers on X (the old Twitter) and 107,000 on Instagram and started asking for suggestions on who should be the other half of the double act. The name most mentioned was Rory Stewart.
Stewart is a fascinating tale.
Like many Conservatives, he attended the exclusive Eton school. When a student at Oxford, he tutored princes William and Harry.
With their father, the then Prince of Wales, he established an NGO called Turquoise Mountain, which has restored historic buildings, trained more than 15,000 artisans and treated 165,000 patients in Afghanistan, Myanmar and the Middle East.
Stewart served in the British Army, worked as a diplomat in Indonesia and the Balkans and wrote a best-selling book about walking across Afghanistan. He was also the governor of an Iraqi province in 2003 and 2004.
Then he was elected to parliament in 2010 and served briefly in Theresa May’s cabinet before his opposition to Brexit led him to leave parliament in 2019. Although not before he stood for the leadership of the Tory party.
Campbell professes not to quite understand why their podcast is so popular. But maybe some of it is to do with one of Campbell’s “P” words. Polarisation. Perhaps the world is not as polarised as presented and there is a desire for a bit of old-fashioned consensus.
Campbell says they don’t always agree but both come from a centre left and centre right tradition. The motto of the show is to “disagree agreeably’’.
“I think it strikes a chord with people because that’s what most people do in their lives,’’ he says. “We don’t see people doing that on social media. We don’t see them do that in politics.’’
On the podcast, the duo also promote live appearances and always seem a little surprised at the demand for tickets. Their Adelaide performance is a sellout and in England they have filled venues including the Albert Hall and are planning a UK tour later in the year they hope will coincide with the national election. The final stop on the tour is at the O2 Arena in London which can hold up to 20,000 people.
Another part of the appeal, according to Campbell, is the breadth of the topics covered. Of course, they will talk about all the big players. Trump and Biden. UK PM Rishi Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer. But recent episodes have involved in-depth discussions about elections in Pakistan and Indonesia.
It’s a good year to host a politics podcast. There are elections in the US, UK and the European parliament. Campbell says it’s too early to call a favourite in the US presidential election, although he notes his co-host believes neither Biden nor Trump will make the November poll date. He believes Biden has been a good president, with the US economy looking strong, but acknowledges concerns about the president’s age. If elected, he will be 86 by the end of his term. Trump is only a couple of years younger but “still emanates this kind of maniacal energy’’. There is also a desire from some in the US for a kind of “strongman leader’’.
Campbell references the recent simpering interview by former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson with Russian president Vladimir Putin and the admiration Trump has previously expressed for heads of state such as China’s Xi Jinping, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and, of course, Putin. “It’s saying basically, why can’t we have a dictatorship? Why can’t we as long as it’s ours, as long as it’s what we believe in?’’ he says.
And Trump has already said that if elected he will be a “dictator’’ for one day.
Campbell says there is a chance that, as in 2016 when it was widely assumed Hillary Clinton would triumph, Trump will be underestimated. The fact that Trump is still in the race despite refusing to accept the 2020 election result, losing a civil case over a sexual assault and being indicted 91 times for a variety of crimes, is a sign he still has a large supporter base. One that will back him no matter what.
In the UK, despite all the polls suggesting a massive win for Labour, Campbell is refusing to predict a win for his old party, noting that a lot of seats still have to change hands.
He is making two appearances at Writers’ Week. The other is to talk about his latest book But What Can I Do, which he says is a “call to activism’’ for the younger generation. He will be talking about the book with former NSW premier and foreign minister Bob Carr.
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