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 t.