Alastair Campbell's diary: The bizarre truth about my own vetting for No 10

Hello there, from your Developed Vetted editor at large. Ah yes, some of us got through. At least if I didn’t, nobody told me, and nobody told the prime minister!

But I want to share with you one of the strangest stories of my life, which relates to that process. We had already been in Downing Street for a few months when a man in his 60s, ex-military, came to interview me as part of the DV process that would allow me to be trusted with classified material.

He made clear that it was best to be honest, because if they discovered during the broader vetting process that you weren’t, that would be held against you more than any misdemeanour to which you might admit.

So off we went… childhood, career, family, friends, finances, sex life, health issues, addictions, political connections, outside interests, personal obsessions, regrets… it was like a therapy session, but with no medication at the end.

After a few hours, he left, and a few hours after that, I set off for home. I was into running at the time, but just on the far side of Euston Road, I had an enormous energy crash. Lucozade and a Mars bar were urgently needed, so I stopped at the first corner shop, walked up to the counter, and who should be there but the man who had interviewed me?

I don’t know who looked more shocked, but it was without doubt one of the weirdest coincidences of my life. He must have thought I had followed him. I mumbled something about not having done so.

He said this was his shop, and he did the vetting interviews part time. I bought a Lucozade and a Mars bar, paid, and left, never to see him again! Funny old world.

In a roomful of businesspeople, in one of London’s swankiest hotels, I tried out some of my current favourite instant polling questions.

1. Which country is the greater threat to global stability, USA or China?

2. Which of these positions comes closest to your view on UK relations with Europe? (These go from “join the EU, via closer cooperation” to “no more alignment”).

And 3. Who will win the UK general election? (Labour under Keir Starmer, Labour under a new leader, a Labour coalition, the Tories, or Reform UK.)

As the audience voted on their phones, behind me the numbers bobbed around until all votes were cast. Question 1 was met by a landslide… 91% USA, 9% China. My, my, what a disastrous image Donald Trump is creating for his country in the world, that the business community of what is historically America’s closest ally views a repressive dictatorship as being such a lesser evil than the US administration.

It is hard not to feel that the US has had some kind of social and political nervous breakdown to have landed itself with Trump Term Two, when Trump Term One was bad enough for them not to want the second term when they first had the chance.

But the answers to Questions 2 and 3 indicated that we too have taken leave of our political senses. On Europe, the top choice was that we get back into the EU, closely followed by stronger alignment. Yet on their predictions for the next election, bottom of the list came a second Starmer term, second bottom Labour under a new leader, and top of the list came Reform UK.

Now, a general election is some way off, and a lot of things can happen. But these were people who spend their lives trying to make investment decisions based upon how they see the future panning out.

Is it not nuts, however, that there is an ever-growing sense in the country that Brexit was a big mistake, and we have to rectify it, while simultaneously a belief that one of the chief architects of the mistake, namely Nigel Farage, is likely to become prime minister?

It really is hard to take US politics seriously when it has produced the current total shitshow. But if this is where we are heading, can we really say we are much better?

Accepting the polls might sometimes suggest otherwise but as it happens, I don’t think Farage will become PM. Rupert Lowe is one of the reasons. Whereas I could quite imagine leading Tories wanting to do some kind of pre-election deal on seats with Farage, I think the bitterness between him and Lowe runs too deep, so any support Lowe’s candidates get at the ballot box will probably damage Reform.

Lowe, remember, was elected as a Reform UK MP, then suspended over allegations of bullying, around the time he was becoming more critical of Farage’s leadership. He has since set up Restore Britain, which essentially believes Farage is too soft and lily-livered on immigration, doesn’t push Christianity hard enough, and is frankly just a bit too woke.

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If you think Farage is too much of a liberal, it’s unsurprising that people like me might suggest, as I did recently, that Lowe has “extreme views”. This was also based on conversations I had had with him when he was chairman of Southampton FC, and he invited me for lunch ahead of a game with Burnley.

He was so right wing, it was almost comical, as a succession of Daily Mail editorial talking points poured out of him. Tax bad. Welfare terrible. BBC a national disgrace. NHS unworkable. Immigrants no good. Tony Blair a terrible leftie. Teachers terrible lefties.

Honestly, golf club bores have nothing on Rupe, and it was a relief to escape to the away end for kick-off.

More recently, he did not appreciate my observation that he had extreme views, taking to X to say that I was the extreme one, because I “started an illegal war based on a pack of lies” whereas all he wanted was “my country back”.

Knowing how much these not-at-all-extreme libertarian conservatives believe in free speech, I pointed out that I was merely expressing my opinions, as we were both entitled to do, and asked whether he might like to join me for a long podcast interview to discuss all this in more detail. I thought this might have some appeal given that, as I explained to him, his nemesis Mr Farage appeared to have bottled it on that front.

But no, Lowe was bottling it too. He said that when we met in the Southampton boardroom, he called me a traitor, and nothing had happened to change his view. Only he didn’t. It just never happened.

My offer, however, as a true free speecher – unlike the fake free speechers of the right, for whom free speech means the freedom to agree with them – still stands.

In avoiding what they might consider hostile interviews, Lowe and Farage could be making one of the mistakes Viktor Orbán made en route to his landslide defeat against Péter Magyar in the Hungarian general election. Orbán had transformed the Hungarian media into an extension of his political and personal projects, so much so that Magyar’s first interview on state TV came only after he won! And what a scoop for the broadcaster to get the news, live on air, that the new PM planned to shut them down.

Farage gets such a soft ride from most of the media, while Lowe enjoys the support of Elon Musk and his algorithms – his post calling me extreme got 35,000 likes and several thousand re-posts – that they risk assuming, as Orbán did, that media profile equates with public opinion. Always a mistake. May they keep making it.