498. Alastair Reacts to Starmer-Mandelson Turmoil

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2:14Alastair Campbell:Hello and welcome to Arrested Polities Live with me, Alistair Campbell. and it's me Alistair Campbell today without Rory Stewart because Rory's got other things to do we'll be talking about all of this stuff sometime through the week but I kind of felt I had to get a lot of this off my chest. Members, Rusty's Party's members will know that I wrote a note this week saying I've been having sleepless nights and I still am and my sleepless nights they usually happen when I'm anxious or angry or depressed or confused and there's so much out of this Epstein scandal to make me feel all of the above. And it is on so many levels, almost impossible to process both personally and politically.

2:59Alastair Campbell:So let's start with angry. Angry at the content and the context of Jeffrey Epstein, which is so disgusting on so many levels. And frankly, it gets to the point where you can't even read any more of it. I've heard some MPs, some Tory, some Labour, Nigel Farage, a few journalists as well, who've called the Peter Mandelson situation the biggest scandal of the century. And I saw a brilliant response to that from the journalist Marina Hyde, who also, as you know, presents the rest as entertainment. She said it's not even the biggest scandal of the scandal. And so I think we have to understand that.

3:40Alastair Campbell:It is still, when we think about it, this is about abuse. It's about trafficking. It's about the attitudes to women of so many rich and powerful men. And she's right about that. And she's right that it's still not at the centre of this debate. We'll put in the newsletter a terrific piece I read in The Guardian yesterday by Amelia Gentleman, who just chronicled through the files the way that Epstein and co. talk about women and how they see the role of women. And essentially, that can be summed up as logistics, food, drink and sex. And it was a brilliant piece. And it underlined just how horrible and disgusting some of this is.

4:16Alastair Campbell:I also get angry that we all get tarred with the same brush that, and of course now because of the Peter Mandelson Association so clearly established with Epstein, it's as if anyone who knows him somehow enabled Epstein. And that of course totally plays into they're all the same, they're all in it for themselves, nobody has any principles, etc. And we're not all the same. I am very, very proud of the new Labour project and many of the things we did. And despite everything, I still believe that politics and politicians can and should be a force for good. But this government right now is looking like the last one, in terms of seeming like it just lurches from one bad moment to the next.

4:57Alastair Campbell:And that makes me angry. It makes me angry because of the size of the majority of the country gave them, the scale of the things that need fixing, and the way that so much of the first two years seems to have been a bit wasted. Now, it's a week since we started to take stock of all this when the Department of Justice dumped this latest huge tranche of Epstein files. And I still cannot, for the life of me, get my head round how close Peter Mandelson and Epstein seem to have been. I particularly can't get my head round the fact that as I was part of the team trying to advise Gordon Brown after the 2010 election and the inconclusive result, and he was in talks with Nick Clegg to see if we'd get some sort of lib lab agreement that Peter was talking to Epstein and even boasting that he persuaded Gordon to go.

5:48Alastair Campbell:I can't get my head around him sending confidential notes about big economic decisions during the economic crash. Now I've known Peter for more than 40 years. We've had many, many good times together and we've had a few bad. We've sometimes gone a long, long time without speaking, for example, after his second resignation, for which I think he still blames me. I've always known that he's a tricky character, quite manipulative, can be secretive, but also he's very charming and clever. But I cannot fathom some of the exchanges with Epstein. Like when, on the day Epstein was released, they were joking about strippers and young girls.

6:27Alastair Campbell:And I was just thinking, was there nothing in Peter to say, Geoffrey, have you learned nothing about going to jail? Yet also, and here is maybe the first part of confusion and a bit of anxiety. Precisely because I have known him for so long, I do have concern about where this might all end for him. And I don't get how people can go from boasting of being a close friend one day to lock him up and throw away the key, literally the next. Now, as Rory knows, I was angry or certainly concerned at the appointment of Peter as ambassador to the US. I did understand the attraction. He's a big figure, a lot of experience.

7:07Alastair Campbell:I'm sure Keir was attracted to the kind of association with New Labour at the time he was trying to bring the party together. He knows the trade and the global economy pretty well. And Keir also, I think, felt that he needed more than a conventional diplomat to handle the Trump administration. But as risk reward decisions go, I always had a worry it wouldn't end well. I never imagined it'd be like this, but I always had that worry. And I did say so to the people who made that decision. In fact, you may recall Rory outed me briefly on a previous podcast a while back because he'd heard me talking to one of them about David Miliband.

7:45Alastair Campbell:And I still think that would have been a better call. And maybe there's a bit of me angry with myself because I could have made a bigger thing about it. I could have talked about it on here. But I hope listeners and viewers will understand. I am conscious sometimes of having to balance this public-facing podcasting part of my life with the fact that I do often have privileged access to people who expect at least some element of confidentiality when I'm acting either as an activist trying to get something or I'm being asked for advice, as does happen. All that being said, I can't say that I'm terribly impressed with the scale of the dumping and the distancing.

8:25Alastair Campbell:And I just wonder whether it wouldn't have made more sense for Keir Starmer simply to have said that when he appointed Peter Mandelson he made a judgment in the round at the time based on the pluses and the minuses which were fully assessed weighed up and it's now transpired it was a bad judgment and I apologize I think that pushing it all out onto the vetting and being lied to is what has made this to some extent even more a question of his judgment and also the competence of his operation with inevitable changes now underway. I'm also angry that so many in the media, plus people like Nigel Farage and Michael Gove, who said it was such a smart appointment at the time, now say it was so obviously a bad judgment call because I can't stand hypocrisy.

9:11Alastair Campbell:And I know that these people are never challenged over those previous positions. And of course, our media, particularly today, they tend in the main line anti-Labour, which now means anyone who's ever had anything to do with Peter Mandelson is somehow presented as tainted for having failed to know what he was up to and with whom. And you might have seen that in some of the interviews with Labour cabinet ministers in recent days. I also completely understand and get the call from Gordon Brown to clean up politics. And at least he has really deep reasons to feel disappointed and betrayed. And he also has an agenda about how to address all this, similar to some of the points that Rory was making on the main episode this week.

9:58Alastair Campbell:But I also think there's a real risk that when you do it in the way that he did, that just as the expenses scandal harmed the reputation of all MPs, not just the cheats, so too this plays into the reform framing of politics. They're all the same. Everyone's corrupt. The system stinks. Nobody can be trusted. so let's trust the man who sold us Brexit on a pack of lies and is now getting money galore from home abroad and crypto and boasting about it and let's stick him Nigel Farage in Downey Street and one thing that really riles me up and that's the way that the right wing here and in the United States seem to be getting a free pass on all of this I got a text from Tommy Vita who worked for Barack Obama when he was president and he said if Jeffrey Epstein forces out Starmer and Trump survives, I will explode.

10:48Alastair Campbell:There are so many scandals in these files, yet the Trump, Bannon, Musk, Lutnik crowd, they get off so lightly. And I'm also angry about the way that Epstein and his pals like Peter Thiel boasting about Brexit being just the beginning of their libertarian, sovereign individual revolution. And I do wonder when I see that, did Peter not know that that was part of Epstein's game too. Now as for the anxiety, it's about what happens next, what it means for politics and what it means for the country. And if Labour don't get their act together, and pretty fast, then Farage is being gifted power, which I believe would be a complete and total disaster for this country.

11:30Alastair Campbell:That it would lead for Britain to the kind of things that we're currently seeing debasing politics in Trump's America, the victory of slogan over substance, open brazen corruption, the deliberate stoking of division and hate, the use of industrial scale misinformation and lying and so forth, threats to a free media, threats to the rule of law, and seemingly electoral law broken again by reform just this week. It'd also be another gift to Vladimir Putin, and it'd be another gift to the tech bros, to whom, as the files show, this right-wing populism is seen basically as a route to a world in which they, the tech bros, rather than the democratically elected politicians, have all the power.

12:14So I totally get the calls for Keir Starmer to go.

12:18Alastair Campbell:A lot of MPs are angry, and so many in the public are frustrated and disappointed. I'm frustrated, I'm disappointed. I felt for some time that Morgan McSweeney's position as chief of staff was vulnerable because whatever many talents he has that helped Keir become leader and then prime minister, if you're the chief strategy and the strategy is not working or you're the chief of staff and the operation doesn't seem to be working, that is a big, big problem. And it does seem, as he said in his statement, that he was a big driver of this particular appointment. But I think it's important people understand prime minister is a totally different level.

12:55Alastair Campbell:so those people urging change they've got to have at least some idea of what happens next how and why it would be better and I think sometimes people really really underestimate what you need for the job of prime minister I've worked alongside very closely alongside Tony Blair who I thought did the job really well I've worked closely alongside Gordon who took over a very very difficult time and led the country through the global financial crisis in the way that he did and maybe Keir underestimated just how hard the job is too. But I'm far from convinced by the names currently in the frame. And that, I'm afraid, leads me to the most depressing thought of all, that because of the nature of our politics, the quality, if you like, of our politicians and the political gene pool, the nihilism of much of the mainstream media, the anarchy of social media, with dissonance, hypocrisy, short-termism, naivety, industrialised rage and willful ignorance off the scale that we're becoming almost ungovernable, that neither the parties nor the public are really prepared to face up to the big things that need to happen to turn this country around, given the sheer scale of the real problems that we're currently facing.

14:14Alastair Campbell:So that's the confusion to add to the anxiety and the anger and the depression. And I'm normally quite good at thinking ahead. I can usually see a course out of really difficult situations. And right now, today, this Sunday evening, I feel that is very, very far from being easy. and that's why I can't sleep and I know from talking to plenty of other Labour people that I'm not alone there you go monologue over I hope it made some sense to some of you I hope it helped explain why this has been so shattering for so many people why I think actually right around the country people are trying to process what this all means and it's certainly given a hope lots for me and Rory to talk about when we do our next main episode.

15:10Alastair Campbell:But for now, that's it. Bye-bye.