It was already a fairly lively Tuesday morning when the former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell agreed to an interview with the Observer.
The party’s disastrous performance in the European elections had reopened a painful debate about a second referendum on any Brexit deal, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission had said it was launching an investigation into claims of antisemitism within Labour.
But Campbell wanted to talk about his new podcast. His daughter Grace had been pushing him to work on a series together and the two were keen to promote their new project – a chatty knockabout entitled Football, Feminism And Everything In Between featuring the likes of Ed Miliband and Rachel Riley as guests.
Except that, two hours before we were due to meet, Campbell was thrown out of the Labour party for having voted Liberal Democrat in the European elections. He voiced his bewilderment on Twitter and prompted a scramble on newsdesks across the country. One of the most controversial figures in recent British politics was suddenly back on the front pages.
At home in north London, father and daughter fuss over making tea. We sit in a triangle at the kitchen table, Campbell on the left, Grace to the right. Rows blaze online and camera crews take their position outside on the doorstep. Campbell’s phone doesn’t stop buzzing. Every now and then, he scans incoming messages or breaks off to take a call in another room.
“You know in The Thick Of It when Malcolm Tucker leaves [government] and he’s just hunched over working in his kitchen which, by the way, looks freakishly like this one?” Grace waves her hand across the room for emphasis. “That’s what it’s like.”
Campbell scoffs. Tucker, an aggressive media manipulator, was a creation always assumed to be based on Campbell in his years working in government for Tony Blair. These days he says he prefers silence to listening to the Today programme, and despite being acutely attuned to everything on the political agenda that morning – the polls, the tweets, the breaking developments – he insists: “I don’t even read the papers any more. I don’t.”
At 62, and with 40 years of Labour membership behind him, Campbell seems weary, rather than furious. “The breach of the rule is in supporting another party and I am very clear I do not support the Liberal Democrats,” he says. “I voted Lib Dem because I support Labour. I’m not a Liberal Democrat. I never will be. I did it because I want the Labour party to do the right thing and this is the only way I can bring that back. I could have – and this would have merited expulsion – I could have made hay with it, but I didn’t want to.”
To the Labour leadership, it seemed he already had. Last Thursday, Corbyn said the matter was “a question of what Mr Campbell said two days before the election, in which he apparently appeared to be supporting the Liberal Democrats. That is clearly not acceptable”.
It remains unclear what Corbyn was referring to. On the record, Campbell disclosed his vote only after the polls had closed, when he was directly asked on air by the LBC broadcaster Iain Dale. But, whatever the trigger, the result came last Tuesday in the form of an email “with regards from the legal and governance unit” from party HQ.
“If you start expelling everyone who voted Lib Dem in these elections,” Campbell blows a raspberry, “there won’t be a lot left.”
By last Wednesday a movement supporting Campbell had sprung up online under the hashtag #expelmetoo, with party members publicly declaring they had not voted Labour in the European elections. Cherie Blair and former Labour cabinet ministers Charles Clarke and Bob Ainsworth were among them.
“I’ve had messages today from people I’ve never had messages from before,” says Campbell, with a shrug. “People I don’t expect it from, people that are much closer to [Corbyn] and his sort of politics, but who say one of two things: either, this is really stupid and it will backfire, or secondly, this is no way to treat somebody who has dedicated most of his life to the party.”
Grace, 25, born just a month before her father joined Blair’s team, is more forthright. Unsurprisingly, perhaps: their podcast was inspired by a frank radio exchange last year when she ambushed her father live on air over, among other things, his use of the word “birds” to refer to women. Today, though, she is resolutely loyal. “I’m pissed off about it [the expulsion] and I’ve lost a lot of faith in the Labour party. I am sure [Corbyn is] loving it.” She leans in and rests her cheek in her hand. “It just feels very personal.”
“I’m not sure he will be, you know,” says Campbell. “And you love Seb [Corbyn, Jeremy’s son].” Still, Grace is upset that many newer members of the party will be gleeful at the news. “Momentum’s tweet was unbelievable,” she says. “A lot of them hate Dad.” Earlier that morning, the pro-Corbyn grassroots movement had tweeted: “Alastair Campbell’s ‘sexed up’ dossier started the Iraq war and left a million dead. Being kicked out of the party is the least he deserves.”
Campbell brushes it off, casually dropping in the fact that Laura Parker, Momentum’s national coordinator, can’t hate him all that much. She delivered a handwritten note asking him for support.
To Campbell, it is clear the Labour party is being destroyed and that there are cracks among Corbyn’s senior team. “I’ve had three people in his office today send me messages saying, ‘What the fuck? I had no idea this was going to happen’”. Campbell’s partner, education campaigner Fiona Millar, left the party months ago after Keir Starmer, sitting at the same kitchen table, promised her the claims of antisemitism within the party would be dealt with within six months. The glacial pace at which the party has moved to deal with the issue compared with the speed at which Campbell was dismissed is an irony not lost on him, but he is unconvinced that there is any coherent strategy behind it.
“They make it up as they go along. They don’t have a strategy, they have a fantasy. Seumas Milne [Corbyn’s adviser] is an old-fashioned posh-boy Stalinist. He’s not really Labour – he never has been. The idea that he stands up for or represents working class people in the north does my head in. They haven’t got a clue about people like that. They’re not motivated by people like that. So far as they have a strategy, it’s basically to get the Tories to implode, make Brexit happen and try not to get the blame.”
Campbell has campaigned vociferously for a people’s vote. Did he ever consider that his endorsement might have been damaging? “I don’t think so. It’s so simple for them to say ‘Oh Tony Blair, urrghh Alastair Campbell, Peter Mandelson, Andrew Adonis’ but who else is moving the debate? We’ve been out there the whole time. Does Nigel Farage worry about the fact he’s hated by a lot of people? No, he just campaigns.”
The EU election results can fairly be taken as a proxy vote on Brexit; nonetheless, Campbell ardently believes a people’s vote could deliver a win for Remainers. “Listen, more people signed that revoke petition than voted for the Brexit party … I honestly believe that if we had another referendum where the choice was to remain in a reformed EU, against a credible, deliverable form of hard Brexit – which is all you’re going to get now – then I think we’ll win, and we will win well. I’m so confident of that.”
Given the party’s position on the second referendum, does he think Corbyn should stand down? “I’m not engaging on that because they are desperate to say this people’s vote campaign has just been a plot to get rid of Jeremy which is fucking bullshit. The people’s vote campaign is cross party, involving Tories, Lib Dems, SNP, Greens”.
“It’s so arrogant to think it’s even about Corbyn,” adds Grace. “As if he’s this little baby that everyone has to protect because he can’t look after himself.” A standup taking her first show to Edinburgh this summer (title: Why I’m Never Going Into Politics), Grace insists she would still “definitely vote Labour” despite her antipathy for the current party leader.
Campbell doesn’t confirm that he would – but he doesn’t say he wouldn’t, either. Does he feel less Labour today? “No, I feel more Labour because of the responses I’ve had.” What does it mean to him, feeling Labour? Campbell pauses, as if it’s obviously rooted in his DNA. “I’m very tribally Labour. The party represents to me a set of values and principles that are standing up for the right people, and they’re not doing that.
“They can parrot ‘For the many, not the few’, but they are becoming a party of the few for the few.”
DREAM TEAMS
Grace and Alastair Campbell ask their podcast guests to pick a six-a-side team, either dead or alive, to change the world. Here is their own selection:
GRACE CAMPBELL:
1. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, US politician
2. Bob Marley, singer-songwriter
3. Reese Witherspoon, actress
4. Donald Glover, aka Childish Gambino, musician and actor
5. Joe Lycett, comedian
6. Munroe Bergdorf, transgender model and activist
ALASTAIR CAMPBELL:
1. Nelson Mandela, anti-apartheid hero
2. Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of US Vogue
3. William Shakespeare, playwright
4. Angela Merkel, German chancellor
5. David Blunkett, former Labour home secretary
6. Shelley Kerr, manager of Scotland’s women’s football team
