The Left-leaning men we thought would have our backs are deaf to our voices and deaf to our struggle to protect our rights
: David Rose
In the mists of time (well, 2001), Alastair Campbell wrote a piece about how much he disliked the Royal family. One of the things he most resented was “the arrogance of unelected power”. That, surely, would be his specialist subject on Mastermind because he is never out of public view barracking the audience on how the world should be run. He is rude, abrasive, bullying and often completely out of touch.
Post-Blair, Campbell has made a career as some sort of management consultant, banging on about leadership. His thuggishness has never been toned down. Not even in his diaries. Him physically fighting Peter Mandelson during an argument over what the leader should wear while canvassing has always stuck in my head. He has no time for women except the “totty” him and his Westminster cronies rated. On Clare Short, for instance, he wrote “God she does turn my stomach”.
This man, remember, tried to destroy the BBC when he accused it of reporting that Blair’s government had exaggerated its claims around Iraq’s possession of weapons. And yet, he continues to appear on the Beeb, as some kind of expert. An expert in self-delusion. When he guest edited a magazine I was associated with in 2009, The New Statesman, I resigned. This was but a gesture, but why was a magazine of the Left, which vehemently opposed the Iraq war, handing over the reins to this macho warmonger?
He was disastrous and bullying as a leader of the Remainers trying to get a second referendum, again shouting over distinguished female journalists.
Now he is reincarnated alongside Rory Stewart in a podcast for centrist dads: The Rest is Politics. They are meant to be opposites: it’s just that Rory also once ran a bit of Iraq as a gap year hobby or something and his arrogance is more patrician.
Both of them belong to the (adopts caveman voice) “Funny chaps... Women” brigade, who regard women as a lesser species. In the most recent podcast, Campbell explains that the fact that trans issues played a part in the Democrat loss was relayed to him by his US pal, the former diplomat and journalist James Rubin. A man told him something, so Campbell listened.
Rubin apparently told Campbell: “You guys don’t get just how big this woke thing is but you haven’t got it nearly as big…” Campbell then muses: “The $25 million spent on ads about trans, Trump talking about kids going in as boys in the morning and coming back as girls in the afternoon, the dressing room stuff and all that. I think we underestimated how much that was getting through to people.”
The fact that for 10 years women have been campaigning, losing their jobs and have been vilified for refusing an extreme trans agenda has passed him by. All of this was presumably, in his eyes, a Right-wing plot, or a silly culture issue – until it caught his attention this week.
While most people have nothing against trans people, there are issues when women’s rights are under threat. Trump’s campaign zeroed in on what makes people uncomfortable: male rapists in women’s jails; trans women (biological men) competing in women’s sports who have the advantages male puberty has given them; and medical intervention (puberty blockers and surgery on young children).
Following the publication of the Cass report here, Labour have moved away from this extreme trans agenda and self identification and are coming to a more sane position. Campbell has utterly ignored all this. He says he listens to his wife and daughter. His daughter, Grace, is a “sex positive” stand-up comedian who wrote a piece about her abortion recently. It turns out that, unfortunately, biology IS real.
Being ignorant does not stop Campbell and Stewart opining. They could go and inform themselves. Andrew Neil is certainly trying: last year he even admitted he had come late to the argument as he didn’t realise it was so important. He named the women who have done the “heavy lifting” and said he now has a reading list.
There was no such humility from Campbell, who immediately demanded JK Rowling come on his piddling podcast. I have it on official authority that Jo Rowling is washing her hair every night for a thousand years. It is hardly difficult to know what this amazingly articulate woman thinks, as she spells it out on X so clearly that surely even lunks like Campbell could read it.
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