Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 498. Alastair Reacts to Starmer-Mandelson Turmoil About this episode How should the government and politics as a whole respond to the latest revelations about the scale of Epstein's influence, and Mandelson's abuse of power? If Starmer goes, who and what comes next? Do the events of the last week make a Farage-led Reform government more likely?
As Starmer's top aid Morgan McSweeney resigns, Alastair shares his honest thoughts on the shattering events of the last week.
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Transcript 2,925 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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2:36 Alastair Campbell? Hello and welcome to Rest is Polities Live with me, Alastair Campbell. And it's me, Alastair 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, Rest is Polities 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.
3:21 Alastair 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 Tories, 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 is Entertainment. She said, "It's not even the biggest scandal of the scandal."
3:59 Alastair Campbell? And so I think we have to understand that 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. I also get angry that we all get tired with the same brush that, and of course, now because of the Peter Mandelson Association,
4:44 Alastair Campbell? 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 it themselves, nobody has any principles, et cetera. 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. 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
5:26 Alastair Campbell? 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 around how close Peter Mandelson and Epstein seem to have been. I particularly can't get my head around the fact that as I was part of the team trying to advise Gordon Brown after the 2010 election and the inconclusive results, 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. I
6:10 Alastair Campbell? 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 forty 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 at Epstein. Like when, on the day Epstein was released, they were joking about strippers and young girls. And I was just thinking, is there, was there nothing in Peter to say, Geoffrey, have
6:54 Alastair Campbell? you learnt 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, 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.
7:36 Alastair Campbell? 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'd never imagined it'd be like this, but I always had that worry. And I did so, 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. 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.
8:16 Alastair Campbell? 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. 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,
8:58 Alastair Campbell? which were fully assessed, weighed up, and it's now transpired it was a bad judgment, and I apologise. 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 judgement and also the competence of his operation with inevitable changes now underway.
9:19 Alastair Campbell? 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 judgement call. Because I can't stand hypocrisy, 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 to do one volume, very, very loud, and in the main, very, very 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.
10:01 Alastair Campbell? I also completely understand and get the call from Gordon Brown to clean up politics, and at least he has a 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. 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
10:43 Alastair Campbell? money galore from home abroad in crypto and boasting about it. And let's stick him, Nigel Farage, in Downing Street.
10:51 Alastair Campbell? 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. 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?
11:34 Alastair Campbell? 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 has been gifted power, which I believe would be a complete and total disaster for this country, 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 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'll also
12:19 Alastair Campbell? be another gift to Vladimir Putin, and it'd be another gift to the tech bros to whom, as the files show, these right, 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. So I totally get the calls for Keir Starmer to go. 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 of strategy and the strategy is not working, or you're the chief of staff
13:01 Alastair Campbell? 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.
13:17 Alastair 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 at a very, very difficult time and led the country through the global financial crisis in the way that he did. And maybe Kier 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
14:00 Alastair Campbell? 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 would be coming 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. So that's the confusion, to add to the anxiety and the anger and the depression. And I'm
14:45 Alastair Campbell? 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, I hope, lots for me and Rory to talk about
15:29 Alastair Campbell? when we do our next main episode. But for now, that's it. Bye bye.
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