My God, there are a lot of podcasts out there. Rare is the day that I don’t get a bid to be interviewed on one of them, often several. The downside is the sheer volume, the upside is being able to pick and choose the ones I do, and in recent days I’ve had a good run of pods I wanted to do.
So first there was The Trawl, with Marina Purkiss and Jemma Forte, and what I like about them is that they were radicalised by Brexit. Till that point, politics was something happening somewhere over there, nothing much to do with them.
Suddenly, they saw how voting – or, perhaps just as importantly, not voting – could lead to terrible loss for the country. They were livid at the lies told, the false promises made, the uselessness of the campaigns and the media, and decided to get stuck in, and “do something!”
They talk about a lot more than Brexit, but they do talk about it a lot, and as we approach the 10th anniversary of the referendum on June 23 – surely a moment of national reckoning – the more they vent, and call for the mess to be sorted, the better.
Then there was Tim Campbell’s yet to be released Reworking podcast, which is all about the world of work. Now, I will be honest – indeed, I was, with him – this would probably have gone into the “No thanks” category, had it not been for the fact that I owed him a favour. Oh, and yes, clan ties I guess. Campbells got to stick together.
The favour dates as far back as 2009, when I was pressganged by film-maker Richard Curtis and his wife, Emma Freud, into appearing in a Comic Relief version of The Apprentice, in a men v women contest, in which I led the men, my team comprising Piers Morgan, Rupert Everett, Ross Kemp and Danny Baker. Unfortunately Rupert Everett, not least because he couldn’t stand Morgan’s endless taunting, did a runner after Day One.
Tim Campbell, who had won The (real) Apprentice in 2005, stepped in as a substitute, and frankly made an otherwise near unbearable experience bearable. You try being cooped up with Piers Morgan for a week!
Needless to say, when the finale came, it was down to me or Piers to be fired, and when Alan Sugar delivered the “you’re fired” line at him, it allowed me my one moment of joy in a week living well out of my comfort zone.
“Oh no, Piers… not again.”
Brexit also featured large in my interview for David Frum’s podcast, The David Frum Show. Frum, a conservative, was a speechwriter for former US president George W Bush, but though we differ in our politics, I have always admired his writing and his clarity of thought.
He is now a senior editor at The Atlantic, and his views on Donald Trump and Co are not that far from mine. At the start of the show, he set out how utterly unique is this Iran war, set against many previous US wars that had the specific backing of Congress, a UN Resolution, or both.
As for Brexit, he is capable of the kind of big-picture thinking so lacking in most of his fellow conservatives in the UK, who continue to pretend it has been a success. Through its history, said Frum, the UK has always been the centre of something bigger. Even as the British empire fell away, he argued, we still had a leadership role in Europe and a special relationship with the USA.
“Britain now finds itself alone,” he said. “This is a new experience in your history. The special relationship is more a courtesy now. You’re a European country not connected to Europe.”
So, he went on, we have imposed upon ourselves self-isolation, in trade and in the economy, and in our strategic position in the world. “Trump deception,” he added, helped drive this, the deception being that the harder the Brexit, the greater the trade deal with the UK. We’re still waiting for it.
Another false promise for Marina and Jemma to get stuck into.
And then, there was Jon Stewart, best known for his Daily Show satire, but also now podcasting merrily on The Weekly Show. Like most good satirists, he is bloody clever, and though a good one-liner is never far away, he can do serious as well as comic. Indeed, he reminds me of the brilliant TS Eliot definition of wit: “The alliance of levity and seriousness by which the seriousness is intensified.”
So he does a very good impersonation of Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, but in so doing makes the very serious point that the Democrat leadership lacks the guile and the energy to take on a force as potent as Trump. He gently undermines our own dear prime minister by calling him “Starmer, bless his heart,” before going on to say his ratings are “somewhere between Liz Truss and the Liz Truss lettuce”.
When I go off on one about Trump’s disgusting “I’m glad he’s dead” post about former FBI chief Robert Mueller, Stewart stops me in my tracks. “Alastair, this showed growth. He has gone from man baby, when Rob Reiner died, to petulant teenager now. He’s growing.”
When I turn to war secretary (sic/sick) Pete Hegseth’s seeming glorification of the violence and death for which he is now responsible, Stewart puts a truly horrible thought into my head. “It is sexual for him,” he says. “Look at him when he is talking about it. It’s erotic. There is a revelling in it that is stunning.”
When I suggest more leaders need to call out Trump for who and what he is, and be clearer in their opposition to the Iran war, in the manner of Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, he immediately links it all together: “You’re calling for courage. It may be in shorter supply than oil. There may be a choke point.”
The first time I met Stewart it was as a guest on The Daily Show, promoting my diaries, and so he gave me a suitably hard time about Iraq. He was gentler this time, but made a few tough points nonetheless.
“We weren’t being run by an authoritarian man baby. We DID go through Congress and the United Nations. We did work with allies. And we got the same fucking results.”
Judging by most of the comments on YouTube, people seemed to appreciate this new version of the Campbell-Stewart combo I have now enjoyed for four years on my own podcast, with Rory Stewart. Yes, I have a podcast too. But of all the comments, this one, from @Yournanna866, really spoke to me. “The USA is not like this because he is President. He is President because the USA is like this.” I think @yournanna866 may have a point.
Of course I can’t leave you without a plug for The Two Matts. Just as The Trawl was born out of Brexit, so was The New European, now The New World, and Matt Kelly and Matt d’Ancona bring to their podcast the same insight, wit, intelligent debate – and determination to undo the mess of Brexit – that you find every week on these pages.
Last week, I especially enjoyed Matt K’s suggestion that the focus not be on “rejoin” (the re- suggests going backwards) and a more simple, more active and energetic “join”. I’m in.
