Photograph: Grégoire Bernardi/The Observer
Alastair Campbell is a writer, broadcaster and mental-health activist best known for his role as former prime minister Tony Blair’s spokesman, press secretary and director of communications and strategy, and for his bestselling eight-volume series of diaries about the Blair years. He recently teamed up with former Conservative cabinet minister Rory Stewart to launch an odd-couple current affairs podcast, The Rest Is Politics, and is filming a new reality TV show for Channel 4, Make Me Prime Minister, which he will host with Sayeeda Warsi, the former Conservative party co-chair.
You know what it takes to be a prime minister. How have you felt looking down that grim list of Tory runners and riders?
That cabinet that sat down with Boris Johnson – I can’t, for example, imagine any of them being in the same room as Margaret Thatcher. They wouldn’t have been allowed to carry her handbag. Why is the country allowing – yet again – 160,000 mostly very old and similar people to choose the country’s leader?
Your new podcast with Rory Stewart is presented as an argument across the political divide. But surely the divide now is between politicians who accept problems as complex, and those who will promise people any nonsense to get elected?
There are some serious people on the right. Do Jeremy Hunt and Tom Tugendhat really think it’s a good idea to send people to Rwanda? Of course they don’t. But they won’t say it. The lesson of Johnson, surely, is that if you just bullshit, eventually you’re going to get found out. But not one candidate has talked about housing, or jobs, or climate change, or how they are going to fix the Northern Ireland protocol. They’ve all become imbibers of populist rubbish.
On Question Time recently you spoke of the need to reform political and media culture. What would you do?
I think we are watching the current system breaking. I get completely why Keir Starmer wants to focus on the economy. But I think the whole question about constitutional change is increasingly important.
