Alastair Campbell on Rory Stewart and the SNP loss

Campbell, who’s 67, says a lot of that isn’t true, but some of it is. “Do I swear too much?” he says. “Almost certainly. Do I have a temper? Not as much as people think I do, but yes. Can I lose my temper with a journalist who’s behaving like a complete dick? Yes I can. When I was in Downing Street, would I sometimes go a bit over the top to good effect? Yes. Would I sometimes go a bit over the top and regret it? Yes. But I honestly think if you take this whole spin thing, I was as nothing compared to some of these guys working for Johnson and Truss. Just nothing.”

Interestingly, he says his public image has shifted in recent years thanks to The Rest is Politics, the podcast he does with the former Tory MP and fellow Scot Rory Stewart.   The two men have different views and are from different backgrounds, but they have a good banterish rapport that’s proved popular. The podcast has also now created a division in the public between the Campbell lovers who like the podcast and the Campbell haters who – you know the word Iraq is about to come up now don’t you? – believe he led a campaign of lies to take the country into a war in Iraq that’s led to millions of deaths around the world.

We’ll talk about his views on the Iraq war and the Campbell haters later, but first I ask him for his verdict-so-far on the new Labour government and he starts by telling me about the bottom drawer of his desk when he worked at Number 10 under Tony Blair. When Labour was elected in 1997, he says, he collected every newspaper cutting that said “this is the week the Labour honeymoon ended” and put them in the drawer and the cuttings kept on coming for three years. He says the problem for the new government is the recent riots mean there’s been no honeymoon at all.

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He does believe Keir Starmer has handled the riots well but more generally he finds the sight of the buses and buildings on fire and the sound of breaking glass make it harder for him to be optimistic about the state of British public life. Campbell has been going into schools recently to talk about his new books on politics for children and teenagers and says he’s never gone into a school without coming out a bit more hopeful about politics. But then rioters take to the streets.

“Right now there’s potential for riots in Bangladesh and Venezuela where dozens of people are killed,” he says. “We’re not at that stage, but I still think we have a political ignorance that’s made worse by prejudice. It’s why this far-right stuff has to be called out. You know and I know that when the newsflash happened ‘Children killed in Taylor Swift party in Southport’ there were people in this country who were sitting there longing for the murderer to be a Muslim because that was exploitable. And even when it turns out that probably he’s not – I don’t know what his religion is – even without that, the facts don’t matter anymore.”

More generally, Campbell thinks the new government has made a pretty good start. But if he does have a criticism, it’s on Starmer’s approach to Brexit. For Campbell, Brexit is one of the worst B-words of all, an event brought about by people in leadership saying reality doesn’t matter (one of whom became Prime Minister - another of the B-words). I tell him some voters are clearly disappointed Starmer hasn’t pushed back on Brexit harder and Campbell says he gets it.

“I don’t think Keir needed to do this ruling out the single market, ruling out the customs union,” he says. “The Tories and Farage and that lot, they were always going to say ‘Labour are going to try and undo Brexit’ so Keir just had to say we understand why people voted Brexit because they were told it was going to change their lives for the better, it’s not worked out well, we’re not revisiting the decision in the next parliament, but we have to fix the damage it has done to the British economy. He could have said that.”

(Image: Victoria Jones/Shutterstock for Channel Four)

One potentially more positive development, says Campbell, is Labour’s relationship with Scotland. He points out how quickly Starmer got himself north of the Border after the election and tells me of the day he bumped into John Swinney at the football just before the election and Swinney told him how much better it would feel to have someone serious in Downing Street that the Scottish Government could engage with. That is a good sign.

I ask why he thinks the SNP did so badly at the election; are they now swirling round the same plughole as the Tories? “What happened for the SNP,” he says, “is that time for a change became really powerful as a mood and the SNP got hit by that, not as hard as the Tories but pretty hard. And let’s be honest, they had given a lot of ammunition for that themselves: Salmond, the whole thing around Sturgeon and the husband and the funding and all that stuff.

“The other thing that happened is because the independence debate went a little bit backstage – certainly not centre stage – there was this much greater focus on public services and people think after however many years it is now: hang on, I get the point about the Barnett Formula, but you’ve had a lot of time to do the reform and it hasn’t really worked for schools and it hasn’t really worked for hospitals; is the policing as good as it might be and so forth, so I think it all came together. I actually personally like John Swinney and I think he’s steadied the ship pretty well, but the truth is time for a change hit them hard.”

Campbell also believes there’s a real potential for Anas Sarwar’s Scottish Labour to do very well at the elections in 2026. “What Keir did at the UK level was he took it from ‘could win’ to ‘will win’ to ‘will win big’ and I think Anas can do the same in Scotland. I’ve watched him closely and he’s got something a bit special.  He takes the job seriously but he doesn’t take himself too seriously and that’s quite a nice mix.” Whether Sarwar does actually do well, says Campbell, will depend to some extent on how well the UK Government does. “What’s happening now is really difficult and horrible but don’t forget: stuff could also go well.”

(Image: Alastair Campbell handles the press)

I wonder if this positive take on Labour comes from his tribal loyalty to it: he worked as Blair’s and Labour’s spokesman for nearly 10 years from 1994 until 2003 and to a large extent Labour is still a big part of his life. I ask who’s in his inner circle of friends and he says he’s still good pals with Tony Blair – he was chatting to him earlier today – and most of his best friends are Labour guys. “I don’t have many Tory friends,” he says. “The relationship with Rory Stewart is interesting because I would say we’ve become very friendly and we have a good relationship, but would we go on holiday together? Doubt it.” So the answer to my question whether there’s an instinctive pro-Labour instinct at work here is yes, maybe. “Rory is probably more open-minded in some ways than me,” he says.

So perhaps now is the right time to bring up the I-word, the war, the reason the Campbell haters hate him so much, and the fact that he’s still a strong defender of Labour on the issue. He tells me some of his friends and family, including his partner Fiona, think he’s started to reveal his doubts a bit more over Iraq than he has in the past and he certainly says there were “shades of grey”. “There was always a different approach to take and other people did take that approach,” he says. “But the people who get to the top are the ones that have to make the really big decisions and that was the biggest decision that Tony Blair ever had to make.”

As we know, his critics say Blair and Campbell made the decision early on to help the Americans come what may and exaggerated the intelligence to get their way. But Campbell feels, first, that he’s often unfairly centred in the story and that it was ultimately the PM who was making the decisions and, second, that there was a genuine feeling in Number 10 that, although there were questions and doubts and alternative views, the intelligence was strong and the threat from Iraq was real. “Loads and loads of shades of grey take you to a place where the decision is made,” he says. “And you then have to do it.”

He also has no time for any suggestion that it’s anyone other than the BBC and its reporter Andrew Gilligan that was responsible for the controversy around David Kelly, the government scientist who was found dead in 2003 after he was exposed as the source of BBC reports about intelligence on Iraq. The BBC and Gilligan were subsequently criticised by Lord Hutton’s inquiry into the affair.

“I’m in France now which is where I was when the whole David Kelly thing was happening,” says Campbell, “and when I got summoned by Lord Hutton and he told me he wanted to see my diaries and all that. I thought ‘f*** what is going on here?’ That felt like I was in this horrible Kafkaesque situation.” But Campbell says the proper target is the BBC and Gilligan. “Their immediate instinct when he ran that report and we complained was to say ‘they’re complaining therefore we must defend it’ as opposed to ‘‘they’re complaining, let’s check it out’.”

He still has concerns about the BBC today. “There are a lot of people at the BBC who don’t believe this but I remain a big defender of the BBC. I think it’s an important part of our soft power, I think some of their journalism is really good, some of their sport is good, some of their culture is great, but I think they have a real problem - this was part of the really big problem with the thing with me in 2003, is that when they’re the story, they’re never very good at dealing with it.”

(Image: With his beloved bagpipes)

He also thinks the BBC has allowed itself to become over-politicised in recent years. “If you think about through that period, the line being run by the right-wing media, and still being run by the right-wing media, was that the BBC is being run by a pack of lefties and the key figure in that story was Andrew Gilligan who turns out to be one of Boris Johnson’s closets associates. You look at where the power lies within the BBC and you’re hard-pressed to say that it’s ‘pinko BBC’.

“I also don’t think it’s defended itself politically very well. I think it’s pandered a bit to the anti-licence fee people rather than explain consistently why they’re good value for money. So I don’t hold grudges against the BBC per se, but Gilligan is someone for whom I have contempt. The people for whom I have contempt is not a very long list, but he and Johnson are both on it.”

I must admit: I’m quite liking this glimpse of the angrier Campbell – a bit chippy, a bit pissed off. And Campbell himself thinks some of it comes from being a Scot in England (his dad was from Tiree, his mum from Ayrshire, he grew up in Yorkshire).

“I had two brothers,” he says, “both dead now, and when we were at school, guess what we were all called by our classmates: Jock. But when I was in Scotland, for every summer holiday, we were English to them. Most of my cousins speak Gaelic but we didn’t so we were English. So I think part of my chippiness, part of my attitude to life, is driven I think by the fact that in Scotland people think I’m English and in England people basically think I’m Scottish. I’ve always had a good life, a good family, was never in poverty but I’ve always felt the underdog thing and I think it comes from this sense of always being a bit of an outsider.”

There’s no doubt about his status now though. “I’m 100% Scottish,” he says, “and Brexit has made me more Scottish” although politically, there’s some nuance to it: “I feel 100% Scottish but I feel that Britain is where I’m from.” And so I ask him where he thinks the independence thing is at and he says if it wasn’t going to move over the line with austerity, Brexit and Johnson, it’s hard to see how it’s going to go much further. One other thing on his Scottishness: his dad taught him the bagpipes and he still plays. How do the neighbours feel about it? No doubts: “If you want to contact my neighbour, she f****** loves my bagpipes!”

But one final point about the chippiness: as it almost always does, it can mask vulnerability and so it does with Campbell, which brings us back to his daily rating system from “1” for great to “10” for suicidal. “When I’m getting suicidal,” he says, “and I’ve not had a really bad episode for a while, when I’m like that, I’ve always got to tell myself life is better than death and that’s why I have my scale.” We talk a bit about the number of young men who are dying by suicide and he says he’s worried that attitudes and awareness have improved but we’ve gone backwards on research and services.

Campbell also has an instinct on the subject of suicide that there’s something lacking in a lot of young people’s lives (and that social media probably doesn’t help) although his recent trips to schools with his books have left him quite positive on the whole. He believes there’s a problem with political ignorance in the UK – not knowing the system, not knowing enough about the issues, and a media that’s swamped with misinformation. But he also tells me a number of stories about well-informed, engaged young people standing up in the schools and asking insightful questions about politics. Such as the young girl who stood up and got to the point quite quickly. “Has politics always been this bad?” she asked. Good question.  

Why Politics Matter and Alastair Campbell Talks Politics are published by Red Shed. Alastair Campbell is appearing at the Edinburgh Book Festival on August 25th at 5pm. He is also appearing at the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on August 26 at 6.30pm in a conversation with Tom Baldwin, chaired by the editor of The Herald, Catherine Salmond.