The Rest is Populism

For even those of us who live the life of the mind it is necessary to have holidays. For me, holidays take the form not of travelling somewhere, but of thinking-about-something-else. So I went on holiday last week.

Yes, indeed, I listened to about 10 hours of The Rest is Politics. You know, the famous podcast with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell.

And I did so, friends, not in the spirit of calumny or condemnation.

There are several things one can do with The Rest is Politics. Let me list them:

• Listen to it on a weekly or daily basis: make it one’s jogging accompaniment, as one womansplains or mamils (I had forgotten the acronym and had to look it up: ‘middle aged man in lycra’).
• Never listen to it, and condemn it as complete centrist Dad rubbish, by pointing to, say, the number of things Campbell and Stewart get wrong, e.g. election predictions.
• Listen to it for a bit, without judgement, to see what they are up to.

Until last week mine was the second attitude. One finds a version of this attitude in the very cutting review put out by the Critic a few months ago that I turned up when looking to see if anyone had written anything: ‘Why on Earth do People Listen to The Rest is Politics?‘ by John Hardy. He writes that it is a “centrist comfort blanket” that has a “hypnotic grip” on the “apolitical middle class” who are flattered into “believing they’re open-minded rather than dogmatic” and also that “they belong to the same elite”. Anyhow, entertaining, but simple.

For my holiday I ventured into the third attitude.

Now, the thing about Campbell and Stewart is that they are genial. They can throw a ball around without awkwardness. That is the atmospherics. Then, in addition, they know about the established political scene of the past 20 years: Campbell, obviously, as part of the Blair conspiracy of 1997 onwards, and Stewart as an unhappy fellow-traveller of the Cameron-Johnson limousine/lying bus of 2010 onwards. So they were, or are, insiders of a sort: and they are gate-opening figures, since they like to tell stories of when they were in a room with Brown/Truss.

There is obviously a North Londonesque bias to this. Campbell is pro-Blair and Brown, and Stewart is anti-Cameron, Johnson and Truss. So the entire thing is a late noise emanating from the good old, worried, late 1990s. But there is enough internal resistance to make it work. One has to admit this. Campbell is a bit lizardesque, gimlet-eyed, but is comfortable, so relaxes into teasing and laughing; and Stewart, as younger – born in 1973 rather than in 1957 – plays the role of the slightly more earnest and argumentative fellow. Apart from Stewart’s slightly over-sibilant and over-croaked voice they are comfortable to listen to: something which became obvious to me as I marvelled as the strange way Ed Miliband spoke (“there is a progressive story to be to be toe-old? – about this govern-ment?”). They sound relaxed, since Campbell can relate everything back to his anecdotes, and Stewart has a pleasant undergraduate freshness in his willingness to over-explain questions and try to think through things.

I haven’t listened to much of their usual podcast. But I have listened to the interviews: the Ed Miliband interview, also Theresa May, Douglas Alexander, Wes Streeting, Rachel Reeves, Jeremy Hunt and a few others, Nicola Sturgeon, though I started with Gove. I couldn’t bear Bill Clinton, who sounded more dilapidated than Joe Biden. What I want to do is engage in a bit of characterisation, but also serious criticism, and not just vituperation.

Campbell and Stewart have made a fuss about how politics has gone wrong. There is a slightly false atmosphere about this, since it carries the implication that things were better before 2010: and let us be clear, the Campbell-Stewart agreement, their fundamental rapprochement, is over the fact that the Conservatives were bad after 2010. In this they are perfectly in tune with the zeitgeist.

They are aware that they are centrists: that they agree on the Customs Union, returning to it; that they are in favour of socially liberal policies; that they want both power and just power. For Campbell this, ha, ha, goes without saying, because he is Labour, and Labour is by definition about justice, innit; whereas for Stewart it is manifest as a sort of moral horror at any sign of classic Tory cynicism. Stewart is especially eager to make sure that nutcase Leftists ‘cost’ their policies: he antagonised Rachel Reeves with this before she became Chancellor, and Zack Polanski more recently. Campbell and Stewart both enjoy the discomfiture of the Corbyn Left, both dislike the ‘populist’ Right of Farage and Trump. They both want politicians to sound off the cuff, which shows something like total political misunderstanding.

They obviously live well, and perhaps this is what John Hardy means by their talk being a sort of comfort blanket. Rory Stewart complained about paying £400 to import pots from the Netherlands; even Rachel Reeves thought they were expensive pots. Most of the pots in my house came from the local supermarket. Alastair Campbell lives in France, and expressed himself in no shy terms about Nigel Farage, Andrew Neil and others who live in France despite being Brexiteers. It was also disconcerting, though perhaps apt, to hear that the recently deceased Tom Stoppard listened to The Rest is Politics, and even thanked Stewart for giving him a reason to get out for a walk when old. Not everyone liked my Stoppard piece, but I think I was right to contrast the strident and highly committed language of the Daily Sceptic with the highly retiring negativity and wry detachment of Stoppard. He liked reading high to middlebrow journalism, TLS, Spectator and all that, and, hell’s bells, he was born in 1937. He was unlikely to have listened to the Delingpod or become a Groyper. I think he was an exponent of the old civility, whereas I think the time has come for some of us to occasionally set aside the old civility, as it has not always served us well. And this is relevant to The Rest is Politics.

You will probably have noticed, as I did, that in the last few years, first in America, then in England, it became common to talk about ‘talking points’. The phrase ‘talking points’ is used by Leftists to dismiss Rightist arguments, and by Rightists to dismiss Leftist arguments. It means: ‘Thing which enable you to express what you believe, including your beliefs, but in such a way that you are just ticking them off a list for the umpteenth time, you bore, timeserver and ideologue…’ Well, Campbell and Stewart certainly have their talking points. These are familiar to you, these views, but the two presenters appear to be in earnest about them.

• Parliament is horrible.
• Brexit was a disaster.
• Climate change is real, the science is proven, oh, we mean there is a consensus, isn’t that the same thing? oh dear! anyhow, back to the point: denial is insane. How can anyone observe what is happening in South East Asia without… etc.
• The COVID-19 pandemic was real and exposed the weaknesses of government.
• Politics at its best is about making a difference^TM.
• Politics, alas, is more often depressing: and they cite Johnson, Truss, especially Truss, Trump, Farage, Cummings, Badenoch, Jenrick, the House of Commons etc.
• Populism is…

And here I have to interrupt. For I am the sort of listener who occasionally, while listening to this agreeable noise, and even feeling fairly comfortable – since it takes me back to the sane old world I left in 2004 (when I left England) – have a nervous critical sense that sometimes come in from a high angle, like an eagle, and begins to argue.

They bandy the word ‘democracy’ around as if they don’t know what it means.

Evidence for this is that they also bandy the word ‘populism’ around.

What is populism? Simple and effective answer. Starkey’s answer. It is democracy when you don’t like it.

Slightly more subtle answer, perhaps less effective (subtlety is like that): populism is a resistance to the attempt to solve politics like a crossword puzzle. Yes, sometimes I think Stewart and Campbell think about politics as if it is a text. Democracy is a good text. So is social justice. If only… Times crossword… 10 minutes… done! But populism is a text-tearing sort of politics. And politics just is not like a crossword.

Why do I say this? Well, because Campbell, especially, often talks about democracy as if we know what it is, but that it is something different from populism. This, on the face of it, is hard to compute. Populists ask for votes. Democrats ask for votes. But Campbell seems to suppose, and I don’t know how far he carries Stewart along with him, that democracy is a text – perhaps written by Anthony Giddens – and that ultimately there is nothing wrong with representatives and lawyers defending democracy even against the voters.

I don’t think they can see that populism only exists because it is a necessary reaction against their style of politics. There would be almost no need for populists if it weren’t for the centrist democrats who tried to tie up the system during Brexit, during Covid, and now want to tie up the system for the sake of Net Zero. By the way, they both are really very silly and irresponsible about the climate.

It is interesting. They are old-fashioned. Stewart is really the first Cameron-Clegg regime of 2010 surviving on like a dinosaur, and Campbell is really the first Blair regime of 1997 continuing on like an even older and more self-satisfied dinosaur. Campbell is unsound on economics, Stewart relatively sound. But they are hostile to Brexit and Covid and everything since: and I would say they don’t understand it because they date the rot to, say, 2016 or, at least, 2008, and do not realise that the rot is much older, and that they themselves and their assumptions are part of the rot.

There is something else. They clearly have reasonably good relations with some pre-politicians and post-politicians on the centre Left and centre Right. They catch people on the way up the greasy pole, and on the way down. They do not catch them when they have power. And so there is something odd and interesting about this. I’d say it means that politics is slightly offstage, as if The Rest is Politics is literally pointing to the fact that politics is offstage. Campbell and Stewart really like a back-story: Reeves and Sturgeon, for instance, getting a sense of global injustice out of some petty injustice they or their families suffered at an early stage, the sort of thing which made it imperative to be bully-girls ever after. The Sturgeon interview was very amusing, as it was only afterwards that Stewart dimly remembered that he had wanted to ask Sturgeon why, if she believed in education, it was much worse at her departure than it was after her arrival. No one joins the dots and asks whether centrist backstory grievancism isn’t part of the problem.

I haven’t listened to many other British political podcasts. Years ago, before Covid but after Brexit, I listened for a while to Talking Politics, hosted by my old teacher David Runciman. It was occasionally interesting: Runciman shares the Stewart undergraduate freshness and ready-reckoning questioning habit. But the problem there was that it was ostentatiously academic, and so came at the cost of allowing none of the interlocutors to admit that he or she had political views. This seemed to me to be a limitation. The Rest is Politics is better, since you know where you are with Campbell and Stewart. Like many I depended on London Calling for a long time, since my political axis was more over there, ranging from liberal conservatism to out-and-out religious reaction. And there hasn’t been anything else. Spectator TV is too stuffy or eager-puppy. Anything with Hitchens or Starkey on it is fascinating but one-sided, as they are essentially great Marxist monologians and not dualogical or dialogical figures.

So that’s the analysis. The Rest is Politics is, in fact, a great statement of hope that we can restore the great world of 1997-2008 with a bit of austerity, plus a lot of spending, a few more anecdotes, some humanity and humility, and without changing any of the sad old assumptions, and certainly without ever criticising the sacred cows of the EU, Covid or climate. Sturgeon said that trans is the vizard of bigotry: the subject on which we can express our misogyny, homophobia and racism in disguise. And Campbell and Stewart said nothing in reply.

The problem with Stewart, Campbell and everyone they interview is that they think they are righter and cleverer than everyone who disagrees with them, who are dismissed as populists. But this is not the case. The Daily Sceptic is evidence that they are wronger and stupider. Campbell and Stewart are shrewd, cynical, warm, human, charming, and wholly wrong about two or three very fundamental things. And at some point the truth will out about this.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.