Alastair Campbell inhabits a parallel political universe

Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart have been touring their podcast around the UK this past week, playing venues in Manchester and Glasgow that many lesser comedians, myself included, cannot help regarding with envious eyes.

Two clips have been circulating from these live dates, presumably while the full gatefold album – ‘Live and Mildly Dangerous’? – is being remixed in time for Christmas. Between them, they illustrate a great deal of what many outside the hall find so tiresome, if not downright laughable, about Bad Man and Robin, the deluded duo.

Rory Stewart’s two minutes is a rousing end-of-conference morale booster. It is the sort he feels he should – had fate been kinder, his colleagues more ‘sensible’ – have been making annually to the Tories in Blackpool or Brighton. He used it to challenge the JRR Tolkien allegory forwarded by Elon Musk recently, that the British people are unworldly hobbits, unaware that the evil of Mordor (ie, out-of-control illegal migration) had already come to the Shire (our green and pleasant land). ‘This is not Middle-earth! We are not Hobbits!’, declared Stewart, defiantly stamping his big hairy foot, as petulant as a halfling who has not had his second breakfast.

The other featured Alastair Campbell delivering the speech he wants to hear Keir Starmer make. It began by acknowledging, generously, that Labour’s first government in 14 years has failed to live up to the unrealistic expectations that were fuelled by starry-eyed pundits such as, say, Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell.

Given that Starmer has an approval rating of only around 20 per cent, and that most polls now show Labour coming in somewhere between Lord Buckethead and the reanimated corpse of David Lloyd George, this part of the speech at least seemed promisingly anchored to reality. ‘I know you’re disappointed’, he said. ‘So am I. I’m not stupid, I feel it and it hurts.’ #Sadface. Toolmaker’s Son. The Arsenal.

And what might be driving this disappointment? Broken manifesto promises that tax rises would not harm ‘working people’? At least broken in spirit and consequence even if not – as of the time of writing – ‘the letter’. Broken commitments to ‘smash the gangs’ of people smugglers, alongside brazen, manifestly laughable ‘one in, one out and one back in again’ migration schemes to attach band-aids to the gushing ruptures in our border security? Broken compacts made with our finest traditions of liberty and free speech, with ever more sinister attempts to brand exasperated British citizens as ‘far right’, their social-media posts as a police matter, while violent crime and theft are not? Broken assurances that the conduct of Labour MPs would be a clean break from the shabbiness, sleaze and scandal that they would have us believe were a signal characteristic of the Conservatives in power? And broken hearts, watching the prospects for our young people melt away, as we sadly advise them to seek their fortunes elsewhere? No. Not that. No.

Instead, as you have of course guessed, the breakage that Campbell wants Starmer to address is Brexit. Yes, this is despite the Labour leader’s absolutely categorical assurances over the course of the past few years that he would not seek to relitigate this incomparably divisive and inflammatory issue – that however much he might personally regret the thing, he would now put all his efforts into making it work. And of course, despite the fact that this is perhaps the most politically impossible suggestion, this side of disbanding the Royal Navy, the royal family and the NHS – sorry, our NHS – this is what Campbell actually wants to see from the prime minister. Really?

To ‘steelman’ Campbell’s dreams of rejoining the EU as much as is humanly possible, one should acknowledge that it’s a suggestion not without some popular support. Opinion polls in the past year vary wildly, but they generally show support for rejoining the EU, depending on how the question is posed. Fringe parties that are forthright in their determination to make that happen – principally the Lib Dems and the Greens – may well owe some of their strong polling to this, too.

What is without support is Campbell’s claim that Brexit is a car crash that people have averted their eyes from while bodies are still on the road. That simply doesn’t stand up. Literally anything and everything has been blamed on Brexit at some point or other. No single decision has faced anything like as much scrutiny in the years since.

As for the damage done, it is impossible to be definitive on such complex issues. And there are numerous conflicting studies, but this from the IEA seems to make a pretty sound case that, at the very least, Brexit has not been a ‘catastrophe’.

For what it’s worth, I was not in favour of Brexit in 2016. I did not vote for it, much less campaign for it. On the day itself I was unexpectedly away from home, so couldn’t vote, a fact which I regret principally because it means I’ve had to frame my sympathies in this rather laborious fashion ever since. But I woke up on that Friday in June 2016 fully expecting Britain to have got cold feet and to have climbed back down off the ledge, and I was perfectly comfortable with that prospect. I was genuinely shocked when I turned on my hotel room TV and saw that red slash across the screen announcing that we had voted to leave.

Whatever anxieties I may have had about Brexit, it soon became clear that the reluctance of parliament to honour the deal was the real danger on the horizon. The evasions and machinations of the next three-and-a-bit years were excruciating, and were of course enough to give Boris Johnson a huge majority in 2019 – almost entirely on his promise to get the thing done, regardless of any detail. The idea that masses of people want to go back to replaying that is genuinely insane.

So no, I was not pro-Brexit and I certainly don’t think it has been a huge success. Regaining sovereignty sounds good in principle but there has been precious little evidence of it being regained, or of the opportunities this presented having been seized. Clearly what needs to change in Britain is deeper. There is a strong sense that we live in a country run by herd animals, herbivores with eyes on the sides of their heads, regardless of what flag flies overhead.

Britons don’t want fascism. They don’t want autocracy. But yes, they might, to some degree, want a ‘strong’ man or woman. One at least as strong as Margaret Thatcher – or Javier Milei, if not quite yet Nayib Bukele. They want someone who can see where they are going and what they are aiming for, rather than just sensing the vibe shift in the twitching flanks of the animals to their right and left and moving accordingly. And they are tired of wasting their time on endless, pointless debate on issues that were long ago settled.

This has been the story of the past 10 years, and not just on Brexit. Wasting time discussing whether men should compete in women’s sports, or be allowed to live in – or indeed run – women’s refuges. Whether it’s basically fine that, every week thousands of young men land on our beaches, undocumented and unknown. Whether people should do jail time for tweets. Whether our island’s commitment to Net Zero is going to save the planet, and either shame or inspire China, India and the United States to follow suit.

It’s like a stupid mutant version of the Fukuyama ‘End of History’ thing. As if we’ve convinced ourselves that all our major problems are solved and we can busy ourselves with philosophical curiosities. The left likes to say that MAGA America has become the nation foretold in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, where the US president is a pro-wrestler with a room-temperature IQ. But Centrist Britain is an even more exasperating Deluded Midwit-ocracy, where we debate ideas so stupid only intellectuals could believe them, without even the mental firepower that requires.

And in that regard at least, The Rest Is Politics may be the podcast we deserve.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.