On issues from Trump to Syria, Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s wildly popular podcast The Rest is Politics is actively making its millions of listeners less informed, says James Price
“I wasn’t fundamentally wrong because I was patronising to people. I was wrong because I’m an optimist and I hate the idea of being wrong pessimistically. You can align yourself with the worst instincts of humanity… or you can hope. My bet on Harris was a bet on the American people. It was a bet on hope.”
So goes the sum total of self-reflection from Rory Stewart, former cabinet minister, Prime Ministerial hopeful and co-host of The Rest Is Politics podcast.
It followed the wildly successful podcast (co-presented by former Blair Spin Doctor and dossier sexer-upper Alastair Campbell) making bold, confident predictions that former Vice President Kamala Harris would win the US Presidential election comfortably.
The rest, as we know, is history; Donald Trump won the popular vote, every swing state and both houses of Congress. Listening to this show in the run-up to 5 November last year, then, would have made you actively less well-informed. If I wanted to listen to two patronising men prognosticate with supreme confidence about topics on which they knew little, I would just grab one mate and go to the pub.
Worse than this, they recently flew to Syria to interview Ahmed al-Sharaa, the ex- Al-Qaeda guerrilla, turned insurgent, turned interim President. These keen experts in Middle Eastern affairs, honed from decades of involvement, confronted the former terrorist with such penetrating questions as: “You’ve been a prisoner, you’ve been a warrior you’ve been a leader and now you’re President, does this not feel very very strange?”.
Looking at al-Sharaa with fawning eyes, the pair legitimised a man who has, in the past week, seemingly permitted the slaughter of thousands of innocent Christians in Syria, whom even Bashar al-Assad had protected from such horrors for many years. These are the podcasters from whom hundreds of thousands still get their political takes.
Everyone is an armchair pundit
Why does this matter? The proliferation of podcasts, not to mention social media accounts and the general dumbing down of politics into a spectator sport has profound impacts on ministers’ ability to govern, or even understand the fundamental issues. Now that everyone is an armchair pundit, emotions and personalities prevent the chattering political elite from hearing the signal from all the noise.
A cold observer would have seen that inflation under Biden had hurt many millions of Americans, and fears that Democrats cared only about mad progressive issues were far from unfounded. It’s always the economy, stupid. But nebulous nonsense about Harris ‘spreading joy’ prompted motivated reasoning biases and left ‘professional’ pundits stumped.
More obviously, any idiot could tell you that putting on a suit and reading Why Nations Fail doesn’t make an Islamist into an Oxford PPE graduate.
The obsession with the media cycle was spotted early by Dominic Cummings, who banned ministers from daily appearances, and tried to wean No 10 off the daily communications ‘grid’, the better to focus on chronic issues that really mattered to voters. Chasing short-term headlines is inimical to good government, to the point that, as Cummings notes, MPs don’t even optimise for winning elections so much as clamouring to get on the Today programme.
I used to adore Rory Stewart’s talk about the need for seriousness in politics. But with his constant praise of Angela Merkel – who is lucky that the bar for worst ever German leader is so high – and his myopia on current affairs, he has been hoist by his own petard
This lack of grip on chronic issues like productivity, unfiltered mass migration, cultural decay and ballooning debt is because they are not sexy news stories. And a podcast that talked about the same three things over and over wouldn’t get many listeners. I used to adore Rory Stewart’s talk about the need for seriousness in politics. But with his constant praise of Angela Merkel – who is lucky that the bar for worst ever German leader is so high – and his myopia on current affairs, he has been hoist by his own petard.
The ‘rest’ is not politics (the pun doesn’t even bloody work!). The ‘rest’ is the lives of tens of millions of Brits who are poorly served by a media-obsessed political class hooked on waffle. City AM is genuinely a rare exception; share this paper with your friends rather than the latest centrist dad slop.
James Price is senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute