I know, you know, he knows that Alastair Campbell is not a man people feel neutral about. Mention his name to friends and family, as I did when I was preparing to interview him the other day, and you get smile or snarl. Smile means they’re probably a fan of The Rest is Politics podcast; snarl means you-know-what: Blair, Iraq, WMD, 45 minutes.

I talked to Mr Campbell about all those things of course, and you can see what he said in my interview in today’s magazine. But the other interesting bit was what he said about the future of politics, as in the immediate future (for Labour), the mid-term (for the SNP), and the longer term (for all of us). Was he hopeful? Sort of.

On the immediate future, he was pretty positive on the whole: Labour, he says, have made a good start in government and they’re being quite canny in doing things step by step and not over-promising. On the mid-term prospects for the SNP, he was less upbeat: he thinks there’s a good chance the party could lose badly at the 2026 Scottish elections and he thinks the independence cause is unlikely to move much further if it didn’t move after austerity and Brexit and Boris Johnson.

As for the longer-term, it’s not up to Mr Campbell really, it’s up to the people who’ll be doing politics in 10 to 20 years’ time, such as the kids he’s been speaking to in schools while promoting his new books on politics aimed at children and teenagers. He told one group of pupils recently that someone sitting among them right now could be PM in the years to come and it’s a hopeful prospect; they couldn’t be worse than some of the recent ones.

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In other ways, Mr Campbell is downbeat: he thinks there are good reasons – financial, environmental, ethical – for young people to be disillusioned, and he’s particularly worried about their mental health, partly because he’s struggled with depression himself and knows what it can feel like. Suicide is the biggest killer of men under 30 and we should be doing more to find out why, he says. Attitudes may have improved, but he fears research and services have gone backwards.

It’s also hard to stay positive when the rolling news says riots … riots … riots. But even here perhaps there’s some ground for, if not optimism, then realism. Mr Campbell told me that as part of research for his podcast, he’d been reading about the Bawdy House Riots of 1668 – riots against brothels – and it’s reminder that violent protest has always happened. The recent riots after Southport may be shocking but what history shows is riots have always happened and are never a sign of the end of times; there are always way more people clearing up the streets than wrecking the place and order is restored.

Mr Campbell also draws hope from the young people who come along to his events. These are the people who are supposedly disconnected and narcissistic and ignorant and damaged by social media but there was the eight-year-old boy who said he was worried we were spending less on defence than we did during the Cold War. There was also the girl who asked Mr Campbell why we should listen to a man who organised a campaign of lies to lead the country into war. So, you know: it can backfire, but these are bright kids who’ve done their research. So undoubtedly a sign of hope.

But even though you’ve got to find optimism – and there are lots of bright kids who’ll help you find it – Mr Campbell also believes we need to tackle the ignorance that still exists about politics. He is scathing about the Brexiteers who suggested to people it doesn’t matter if your views are based in reality, you should be listened to and you should have power. And then of course Brexit happened and it didn’t deliver all the things they said it would. Facts were ignored, feelings were prioritised and Mr Campbell’s concern is it helped take us down the road to riots inflamed by anti-immigration feeling.

(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
One of his suggested solutions is we teach politics more and better in schools and that it could help in the long term with what he sees as a problem of ignorance of the issues and misinformation in some of the media, and it’s worth a try. It might also help people care about politics and recognise its importance; Mr Campbell says one of the reasons he’s written his books is to show to young people that politics is part of their lives rather than a foreign country populated entirely by parties, procedures and kings in carriages.

The verdict? There’s a lot to worry about in the future of politics. A 15-year-old boy has just become the first person to be charged with the offence of riot in the wake of the recent disorder. But there are also 15-year-olds who are at home reading about the possible reasons for the riots, and the Cold War and the Iraq War and standing up and asking Tony Blair’s former PR man lots of intelligent questions. Alastair Campbell tells me he’s never gone into a school without coming out a bit more hopeful about politics. So perhaps that’s the sign we should focus on. What would the alternative be?

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.