Review: THE REST IS POLITICS LIVE, Royal Albert Hall

The joke has it that you can walk down any street on a warm summer’s evening and have your nose filled with the smell of meat being barbecued and your ears filled with podcasts being recorded. If politics is your chosen subject, the challenge is to carve out a niche outside the fear that straitjackets so much of the BBC’s output, but does not descend into the shouty partisan brawling of Fox News and its imitators. The Rest Is Politics has done that and, after two hours that passed in the blinking of an eye, it’s not hard to see why.  

The stars are Alastair Campbell, former Downing Street Director of Communications and Strategy and Rory Stewart, former Cabinet Minister. Be wary of that adjective former - both remain extremely well-connected and, far from living on past laurels, they revel in the licence to be indiscreet afforded by their current unattached statuses. Of course, an audience of fans are very keen to probe them on ambitions for the future, perhaps not fully cognisant of the fact that assumption of high office by either man would slay their golden goose.

For now, we enjoy a sparkling conversation that ranges from backstage gossip about what Rory’s pre-teen kids said to Alastair to an inside track on the terrible events in Gaza, to video clips of Rory halfway up a tree and Alastair failing to pass the ball successfully to Diego Maradona, Rory giggling at both, Alastair chippily justifying himself as always.

After the interval, they take questions tweeted in by the audience, supplemented by a surprise appearance or two on video, Campbell direct in his bluffness, Stewart’s half-hearted reticence masked by an ever-present sly half-smile. Both are supremely gifted communicators and entertain and inform without (and this is something you really only realise on the way home) giving too much away that we didn’t know beforehand.

Not that the thousands that filled The Royal Albert Hall will care. Many were back for a second Christmas show after last year and many had bought the two men’s books in the interval (I can recommend Campbell’s multi-volume Diaries for anyone with an interest in contemporary British politics). 

It was a mixed house too, old and young (if overwhelmingly white) with the whiff of the pejorative phrase ‘metropolitan elite’ clinging to their smart-casual outfits. This was a gathering of ‘Middle London’, a subtly different tribe to the lauded ‘Middle England’, more socially liberal, left rather than right of centre, engaged by global politics, abhorred by the parochialism of so much that passes as news in the press. What was revealing is how very clearly they identified Stewart as one of their own, a candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party as recently as summer 2019, lest we forget. That is more a testament to how far party politics has moved in four years rather than the man himself.

Perhaps what really sells the show and its parent podcast is something beyond erudite, informed conversation, something that speaks to the fractured, individualised, lonely world in which we live today. I know from the feedback we get from the podcasts I do on football and cricket nostalgia, that it’s the interpersonal alchemy that makes the difference. 

We spend too much time alone; we’re exposed, directly or indirectly, to hostility through our screens or in real life too often; we’ve not quite worked through the shock of lockdown and what that did to our psyches. Campbell and Stewart remind us that grown-ups can have deeply-held differences of opinion without destructive disagreement, enjoy different identities without the need to assert one over the other; acknowledge mistakes made and minds changed and move on. 

The Rest Is Politics Live is something of a strange comfort food, not without its spiky elements, but ultimately a window onto a more gracious world, one in which discourse, even political discourse, comes with a smile and not a snarl. If the two principals are not engaged by weightier matters come December 2024, I’ll be back to wrap that warm blanket round me again.     

The Rest Is Politics is available on a range of platforms     

Photo: Goalhanger Podcasts

   

   

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