Alastair Campbell
Appearances
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And we can't see a process. So I look at the stuff. And you sent me some really interesting polling that I read this morning about the reaction to Trump's speech and the Democrats' reaction to it. And there's a part of me that because I look at Trump and think the guy's a liar, he's a criminal, he doesn't care about anything but himself, he hates Canada. How could anybody hate Canada?
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
He hates Europe. He's surrounded by these terrible people like Vance and Musk and Hexen and so forth. But, you know, what even I felt watching the speech I sort of had this sense that I understand why the Democrats are really, really pissed off and really, really angry.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
But when I looked at them sort of holding up their stickers and the guy with the ponytail shouting him down and all that stuff, I just thought, I'm not sure this is helping. You know, to me, what the posture should be is, Jesus, how the hell did we let this happen? How have we enabled this guy to win again? We can't just keep saying he's a terrible human being, he's this, he's that, he's that.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
We've got to look at ourselves and what our relationship with America and the American people is. And so then I look at what I was fascinated in the polling.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
was the the the attacks on trump that seemed to be landing with people were the ones that bernie sanders is making about the billionaire class against against working people and actually his his attacks seemed to be the ones that were it's quite a sizable sample i saw it seemed to be the ones that were that were breaking through and the other stuff that
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
you and I as political nerds and geeks, again, would probably think are incredibly important, like the undermining of institutions, democratic abuse and all that stuff. He was like, oh, well, okay, who cares? Let's just get the economy going.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
What about the process of analyzing defeat? Does that happen? Is there a post-mortem?
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
I don't honestly think that the principles have changed. I think the I think the I think the the atmosphere and the environment has changed. But I'll give you actually I was yesterday I was with a guy you you may know called Matthew Barson used to be the ambassador, the U.S. ambassador under Obama in London. And we were just having a chat about this. Yeah, I know Matthew very well.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
Yeah. He's a great guy. And he and I were chatting about this, that, and the other. And he's over here at the moment. And he was saying to me, he says, you know, you've got to help them get a grip of all these kind of junior ministers they've got. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, what happens every day is that you have a junior minister or somebody who's not top-level cabinet
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
who is pushed out onto the airwaves because every morning the BBC, Sky News, you know, all these different radio and television stations, they expect to have a minister to go out and talk about the stuff of the day. And he says, you hear these guys, and one, they sound like frightened rabbits. Two, they literally sort of just read talking points.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
They don't kind of basically speak like human beings, a lot of them. And he said, and so I was, yes, I was about message discipline, And I still do believe in message discipline, but that's not the same thing as say the same thing all the time. It's have the same conversation.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And this again goes, I'm sorry, you know, people should recognize that Trump for all his evilosity is just brilliant at having conversations with people. He converses when he's talking.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
I mean, to stand up for 100 minutes in front of a group of people, you know this as well as I do, there's nothing much that politicians hate more than listening to other politicians make speeches which they think they could do better. But basically, when Trump's speaking, there's something awful about it, but there's something mesmerizing about it because he's...
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
He's kind of communicating in a different way. So what the conversation I was having with Matthew was basically about trying to inspire and motivate and educate younger politicians and people saying government over here around Europe.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
not to assume that message discipline means be boring not to assume that being mess message discipline means you literally read a line to take off a page you absorb the line to take you have to prod it analyze it you know expose its weaknesses and strengths and and then take it into the conversation with the public And I just think, so I still think message discipline is important.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And I'll give you, I don't know if you follow our, the superior version of football. I know you have that silly NFL thing, right, that you call football.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
But real football. There's a guy called Arsene Wenger who's a very famous manager. He's French, but he was the manager of Arsenal for years and years and years, one of our biggest teams.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And I interviewed him a while back for a – I wrote a book called Winners and tried to learn the lessons of politics, business, and sport and whether you could – and it was some great – I met some great American people, Billy Bean and Floyd Mayweather in the same book about politics. Try and beat that. Oh, wow. So –
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
Anyway, so Arsene Wenger said this thing about, he said, we've gone from, and I think this is so important for politicians to understand what this means. We've gone from a vertical world to a horizontal world. In the vertical world, leaders could sit at the top of an organization, say like Churchill during the war.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And they could make decisions and the decisions could, they go down through the system. Or in that case, through the entire population. In a horizontal system, the leader tries to sit at the top, but is surrounded by noise created by others 24 hours a day. And he says, the thing that really has always stuck with me, he said that...
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
The pressure to be tactical is thereby increased and the response should actually be to be more strategic. And the thing I keep saying to politicians, and Trump again is a good example, is I know it's easy if you're Trump and now he's president, you've got the pulpit, okay?
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
But if you are, I say this to campaigners and to politicians, if you've got a really good message, if you've really got something interesting to say, you'll get it out there.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
You won't get it out there as easily as you used to because, you know, it used to be when I was first in working with Tony or when I was a journalist, if you got the same story in the UK on three national paper front pages, you could say you're going to dominate the agenda for a day.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
what i think you have to accept now is nothing necessarily adopts dominates the agenda and it doesn't matter because what matters is that where you are landing those dots on the big picture you're landing them completely on your terms and what i felt i mean i had you know really enjoyed seeing you at chicago at the at the dnc and i think i got a little bit carried away in the kool-aid of the whole thing
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
When I thought about it on the way home, I thought, yeah, you know what? It wasn't just that the messages weren't really messages directed at people who might be thinking of not voting Democrat. It was also that there was actually a bit of dissonance in a lot of the messaging.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
It wasn't clear whether this was going to be a cost of living election, a community cohesion election, a woke – I mean, I hate the whole debate about woke, but you know what I mean when I say that –
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
I actually think it would give, and this is kind of, I guess, where people like AOC are. I think that in seeding the ground on this whole woke debate, we've conceded to a really bad idea that does really bad things. So I actually argue that fighting for what woke actually means, i.e. being alert to injustice and wanting to do something about it,
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
Um, they, the right, the right are brilliant at this. They, they will take something that they, they worry might be a weakness or an advantage to the other side. And they, they, they poison and contaminate it. And, and, and they do it with the help of a kind of, you know, right wing media ecosystem that then makes the left lose confidence.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And I think on stuff like, you know, like right now, let me tell you, this could be completely wrong because you're in America and I'm not. If I was on a board, like a big conglomerate board, and I know they worry about who and what the government does and what have you, I'd come out and say, this is now the time to absolutely double down on DEI. Because I think it's the right thing to do.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
Even as I say that, I can see why people going into politics might think, yeah, well, look at the polls. The polls are driven. The polls are driven by the nature and the terms of a debate. Control the nature and the terms of the debate.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
My response is that there is something in it, but it's not the whole thing. I always felt during the Blair Clinton, even Schroeder, I mean, now he's kind of, you know, Putin's best mate. But at the time he was, you know, part of the same thing. We had this thing in Germany, the Neue Mitte, the new center. I think that we were doing that on the back of
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
a peace dividend following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, which meant that we weren't having to spend squillions and squillions of money on defense. And we were able eventually to put that into things like schools and hospitals. And the second thing was that our economies were doing really, really well. And globalization was one of the factors.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
What I think we never fully understood or did was warn people that there might be downsides to this. And so I think we got slightly carried away on the idea that here we were in the UK, the US, Germany, some of the countries that had been basically more out of power than in it.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
right, that we felt like we were kind of riding a wave and we were the people that looked to for economic stability and economic growth and economic prosperity. And for us as a Labour government, that was a really, really new experience.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And I think what we didn't do then was understand that a lot of the kind of things that were coming beneath that, the Polish builders, you know, the undercutting of wages and prices, immigration that we were, you know, we were going to business.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
One of our biggest weaknesses in those that period we talked about when Labour was kind of tanking against the Tories, it was because we weren't seen as being trusted by business. So we made a big thing of winning over the trust of the business community.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And of course, the business community, particularly big business, but not just big business, they were saying to us, you know, we don't have the workforce. We don't have the people that we need to kind of do the jobs that need to be done. So we need more immigration. And so, yeah, let's get it. Let's do it. Let's bring them in.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And I think that we just, the unintended consequences of that, I think probably were a factor that led to Brexit. I still think Brexit could have been defeated, but, you know, that was definitely a factor.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
oh just before i talked to you i was doing a an interview with german radio um and trying out my german tommy he's not easy but i just about got there uh and as i was doing it and it was interesting doing it in in a in a what is not my mother tongue because my mother tongue can always find the words and you can usually find the words because you're clear in your in your thinking and as i was speaking
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
i was sort of i felt myself falling between i know what i think and i know what i want to say because these guys are just destroying everything right but a little bit in my head was saying don't say anything that might get picked up and be seen as being unhelpful to get started because you know part of my brain is still trapped in the old job as it were Yeah, I know. I get it. I get it.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
What if what if Friedrich Merz is listening to this or these, you know, is he's in the gym or something on German radio and he thinks, oh, so this is what the Brits think. And there's me thinking this. But what I really think when you say, is there any disquiet? Yes, there is a lot. There was a brilliant interview which you should look up that a guy called Alex Younger did.
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He's the former head of MI6. He did an interview on BBC Newsnight two or three weeks ago now. But it's the best thing I've seen in trying to explain what he thinks is happening in the world. And it's what I think is happening in the world. What I think is happening in the world is that America has reelected
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
elected for the second time a president who is basically sees the world as a place to be carved up by strong men and at the moment there are three there is xi jinping president for life putin president for life and trump basically wants to be president for life and in addition He wants to be the richest man in the world and the most powerful man in the world and the most famous man in the world.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
He's right up there in terms of the most famous. You know Fiona Hill, who was his foreign policy advisor in the first term? She's a Brit. She wrote a fantastic article about her experience with Foreign Affairs magazine. And honestly, it's just so worth reading now because like all of us, I think she assumed that, well, that's Trump done. I can unburden what it was like.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
But she actually made the point that Trump, she made this point that whenever, if Trump was with his advisors, he'd listen to them up to a point. But as soon as a strongman leader came into the room, he would listen to that person. He would listen to Putin or Orban or Modi or Erdogan ahead of his own advisors.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And then the second thing she said was that he absolutely bought this idea that Putin was the richest man in the world. And he really admired it for taking a country and turning it into almost like an extension of his business interests. But you also had an army and a nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons.
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Yeah. And also that he's, you know, he's got stuff all around the world. And there's a huge, I don't know if it is or isn't, but there's a massive property not far from where I live, one of the biggest places. And people say it's owned by, it's owned by a Russian, but basically people say it's owned by a Russian, but it's actually... It's actually Putin.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
So he's got, you know, anyway, so that's, and I, so what I think that, no, there's no doubt when Keir went to, and this was, this was a big deal for him because he's had a pretty tough start as prime minister. Macron gets there, does his thing.
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I thought Macron handled it pretty well, got the balance right between sort of flattery and, you know, French, France's national interest and trying to speak up for Zelenskyy. I think the sort of expectation was that Keir wouldn't be able to kind of pull it off in the same way because he doesn't have those sort of silky, macronist skills. But actually, he did very, very well.
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But there were people who, you know, seeing him, there were objections to Trump. I mean, you know, there's... So that whole thing about, you know, the king wants the second visit to be great and the first, and this is unprecedented, this is historic. I completely get why he had to do it and why he did it. But I think there's a worry now. If there's a worry now...
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It's I guess it's in the space of are we kidding ourselves and thinking that Trump's ever going to give these security guarantees? And if he doesn't, what does that mean to countries like France and Britain saying they're going to put boots on the ground? By the way, I'll tell you who is number one hate figure in the UK right now. It's not Donald Trump.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
I mean, either that guy is utterly malign or unbelievably stupid, and I don't think he's unbelievably stupid. So when he goes on Fox News and he was talking about the Ukraine situation, he was justifying the sort of double bullying of Zelensky, which was utterly revolting. I think people around the world would be sick watching that. But just to wind back a bit, Vance goes to Munich.
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one of the most important defense and security conferences in the world and basically makes a speech talking utter shite about free speech in the uk and france okay doesn't talk about ukraine doesn't talk about the big stuff that was happening right so that was the first thing then what really got people going was he goes on fox news i don't know why they oh do they only do interviews with fox news is everybody else just not allowed to talk to these people
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
Okay. If you jump into him, Tommy, bump into him, will you just tell him we'd love to have him on the rest of his politics?
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So he goes on Fox News and he says, he's talking about the security guarantees of having lots of American companies drilling for minerals is far better than 20,000 soldiers from some random country that hasn't fought a war for 30 to 40 years.
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Well, if you listen to the rest is politics this week, I've listed all the wars in which British soldiers have fought and died alongside Americans in the last 30 to 40 years. And I'll tell you, I've got friends in the British military who have J.D. Vance comes on the state visit. If and when it happens, they're not happy. So and so when I say it was either it was either willful or stupid,
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It's stupid to kind of, why would you want to have a row going about that where you have to come out and say, no, I wasn't talking about Britain. And Rory Stewart on the podcast today, he's listed all the other countries. that were involved in fighting with the Americans. And bear in mind, Trump again today talking about Article 5, saying, well, would they, why should I help them?
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
They're not going to come and help us. The last time Article 5 was deployed was 9-11. And that was because every other country in NATO said, this is an attack upon America. An attack on one is an attack upon all. We're with them.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
and now this guy and what i find what i find most distressing about what's happening and this is what i think is keeping people awake at night uh me included is that we're now in this world where america which whether you like america or not and a lot of people don't like america but we've always and i you know i've always been pretty pro-american in the main but we now have an american administration that treats friends as enemies and enemies as friends
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You know, Zelensky has been abused, derided, briefed against, shouted at, made demands of. Putin, zero. No demands, no harsh words. Zelensky is a dictator, not Putin. Zelensky is the one who started the war, not Putin. I mean, it's mind-blowing. It's sort of gaslighting on a global industrial scale. That's what I think people are finding very, very difficult.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And did he get much play in America? The Vance thing about the random country?
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
Well, the first thing I say is that not least through the work that Steve Bannon does, they're unbelievably well organized. Are there common tactics? Yes. Are there common threads? Yes. Is there a common ideology? I think there is. And Trump is, whether by design or by default, he's become the kind of absolute global pin boy of the whole thing. But I tell you what I'm absolutely amazed at.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
I think I've said this to you before, that whenever I'm talking to anybody about American politics, particularly on the right, or even when we interviewed David Petraeus on the podcast a while back, there's a military guy. And even in that interview, Victor Orban's name came up. He said, to understand what's happening in the right wing in America, you have to understand Viktor Orban.
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These people love Viktor Orban. And then I wind through and I check J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance doing interviews about, well, one of the first thing Orban did, he's very clever. He took on the media, he took on the universities, he took on the courts. Hey, and guess what they're doing? You know, so I think that they join up. It's very interesting, though, when at the last CPAC,
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Jordan Bardella, who's the number two to Marine Le Pen, and he's this young, very handsome, very articulate guy who clearly thinks he's going to be the next leader and probably half of his mind thinks he might even get in there before the presidential election. I don't know. But he pulled out of the CPAC because of the Steve Bannon Nazi salute.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
So I would argue that the AFD, Musk's people, and by the way, I think Musk cost them votes.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
rather than added to them they were they were what was amazing about the german election i went out for the german election they were the polls didn't shift other than the only place where the polls really shifted were for the the left-wing populist party who went almost doubled during the campaign and i think that was musk motivating people who probably weren't going to vote
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
I don't think the FD move. So with the help of Trump, but actually the forerunner of this is Putin, they've established that you don't necessarily have to pay a price for lying. Now, to be fair, our country, Johnson's got spat out the system.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
wasn't over the big lies it was eventually over a kind of smaller set of lies but you know he's gone he probably thinks he can come back but i think he's done but that sort of form of politics and then the other thing i think that they do they're very very good at certain themes that they push the whole time um the thing woke is is obviously one of them climber i am amazed at how they've managed to win this or you know push the dial back on climate as well as they've done
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Again, they do it partly by lying, but they also do it by co-opting people and arguments that go against what we thought was a conventional wisdom. And I remember after the first, Trump's first term, I remember I was doing a thing with Al Gore
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in germany i think or austria and i said to him what are you going to do i mean the climate campaign how are you going to do it with this guy in the white house he's a climate denier and gore said he was pretty chilled he said listen we're just gonna have to work around him you can work around this guy now i think that's and likewise with michael wolf we talked to michael wolf last week and he said don't get too upset just wait the guy out you've got to wait the guy out
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And I think that worked for the first term. I don't think that works for the second term. He's so much more powerful. He's so much better organized, it seems to me. And he's got these people around him and this media ecosystem. I think we're right to be worried about this media ecosystem. And we've got the same thing developing here.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
And they're right, by the way. They're right.
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I think there's a form. Well, The populism of the right to me means you don't see politics as a way to solve problems. You see politics as a way to exploit problems. So I don't think we should do that. I think we should always pursue a politics that is about trying to address problems and make life better for people. The second part of the right-wing populist is polarization.
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We don't exist to bring people together. We exist to drive people into tribes and get them fighting each other. I don't want to do that. I don't think the left should do that. And the third part of their shtick is lying, post-truth. So I don't think we should do any of those things.
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What I do think, however, that we need to learn from them and do better than is done now relates to the way that we communicate and the way that we relate to people in their lives. I feel sometimes that politicians on the left they do think that people are sitting around obsessing about what politicians are saying and thinking and doing. They're not. They're not.
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So how do you get into those people's lives? Or how do you get into their lives in those times when you need to be in their lives, like they're deciding whether or not to vote and they're deciding what to vote. How do you get into them? So that when they're making that decision, one, they know who you are, they know what you stand for, and they quite like it.
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Right now, they don't know who a lot of the other side are. And when they hear them, they just think, I mean, the big thing that's really harming labor here at the moment is people's feeling that, or saying that they don't think the change that was promised has been big enough or fast enough, right?
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Now, and meanwhile, they see Trump with his fucking pen and he's, you know, here's another one and here's another one with banning straws and- Right, executive orders left and right. Right, okay. But what I think is that the processes, the reason why so many young people are zoning out is that one, they can't afford a house. The jobs are pretty insecure.
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They're not going to be better off than their parents. And they look at politics and they see slow processes. often pretty average people not inspiring not motivating and so i think that's the bit of it's not populism um in the traditional sense but how do the politicians on the left become the friends of these people because naturally that's what they should be
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
How have we allowed a situation where Donald Trump, inherited wealth, billionaire, Boris Johnson, who went to the most expensive school in Europe, Oxford Daily Telegraph, somehow becomes a man of the people, Nigel Farage, a city trader. Mm-hmm. And even, okay, J.D. Vance has got the dirt poor background, but he's still Ivy League. Trump's still Ivy League. They're all Ivy League people.
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How have they become the voice of working class people? Whereas people who actually do, in my view, care about working class people, That's why I think Keir Starmer in the UK and Angela Rayner, I don't know if you know Angela Rayner, he's number two, he's got the most amazing backstory.
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But I think if this Labour government doesn't succeed in winning back the working class, and you said earlier about we lost them in part through globalisation, I think we lost them...
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think in the uk we lost a lot of them through the period when jeremy corbyn was in charge because yes it's true fair play to jeremy corbyn he motivated a lot of young people to maybe to the left of you and me to get engaged and get involved but he turned off a lot of people who are what i would call traditional working-class british patriots and back to the thing about big moments one of jeremy corbyn's biggest moments
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um was that he just literally been made leader of the labor party won the election everybody stunned that he'd done it but he did it and one of the first events was this establishment event at st paul's cathedral and he stood there and didn't sing the national anthem and it sounds crazy but it's the sort of thing that people remember they think this guy's not on our side is he
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
Well, I think there's a difference between
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lack of trust in the government and lack of belief in principles and institutions what i'd worry about most if i was american right now was the the sense that the rule of law is is crumbling uh that the institutions that that uphold the rule of law you know the attacks upon judges the the packing of courts all the stuff that we know um i'd really worry about that
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There's a little whiff of that over here at times, but not like there is in the States. So I think where you're absolutely right is you don't want to become, in opposition, the defender of a status quo for which you're not responsible. And that's a real risk for the Democrats right now.
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That's why I think the other lesson to take from actually from Macron, if you look at it in positive ways and from Donald Tusk in Poland, is that, you know, whether it's on the right or on the left or in the center, you've got to have when there is so much kind of angst in the world, you've got to have.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
a disruptive message about the change that you're going to make because so much needs to change status quo just isn't working um and so trump was all about change macron was all about change kirsten's slogan was change
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this thing about trust is really interesting because like you say you said 9 11 the trust levels went up i still believe that when some covid actually is an interesting example around the world yeah lots of anger lots of division but around the world most governments said what they thought should be done and most populations said okay this is tough we get it we'll go along with it right
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I mean, I think the ship was already being righted. So the Labour Party, as you say, out of power for a long time. Mrs. Thatcher wins in 1979. 1983, catastrophic defeat. 1987, she wins again, quite big.
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So what do people understand by government? Government means everything, from whether your streets get cleaned and your bins get emptied, to whether Donald Trump wipes off a nuclear weapon at China one day. Government is the services that we all depend on. Why are people really angry with the last Conservative government? Because they ran the National Health Service into the ground.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
That erodes trust as well. So I think that sometimes when we poll people about whether do you trust politicians, they say no because all they ever read about is the politicians being bad and scandal and what have you. When you explain to people, I think there has to be greater levelling with the public about what politics is, what is good, the good that it does, the bad that goes on.
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How a Political Party Can Rise from the Dead
It goes back to the point I made about my conversation with Matthew.
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have honest conversations with people about what's going on uh don't worry if you say something a bit loose that a paper that opposes you you're going to turn it into a scandal because they're going to do that anyway with something else so i think this trust thing i think it goes back to this thing about having genuine honest conversations with people and showing that you can make change through politics
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And I think a lot of it is about the way, look, Trump is such a polarizing figure. America, I guess this is impossible at the moment. But I think in Britain, with somebody like Keir Starmer in charge, and Germany because of their coalition systems, and France if Macron has a decent successor and somebody in the center wins there. And actually, it's been interesting to see somebody like Maloney
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who has operated in a slightly different way to what we expect. He's still pretty far right and stuff.
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Orban's the only real hard right. Even the Slovakian guy came back in the fold yesterday on defence, you know, at the summit in Brussels. And there's even talk today amongst people I've been talking to who were at the event in Brussels yesterday, there's even talk about, you know, is it time to start thinking about how we get Hungary out of the European Union? I mean, so there is a fight back.
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Well, yeah, so do I. So I think I've waffled on so long, I've forgotten what your final question was now. You're going to remind me.
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So I think that the trust thing is more complicated sometimes than we think. I think the other thing that's going on, there's just lack of deference in the world anyway. That's not necessarily a bad thing. There's lack of respect for authority. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
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But I'd say that Neil Kinnock, who was Tony's predecessor but won, and John Smith, who was Tony's direct predecessor, whose death led to Tony taking the leadership, they were definitely starting the process. But the fact that you're talking about two leaders over successive elections underlines that the Labour Party was very difficult to change. And that led us into this theme of modernisation.
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And the other thing that's happened, it's happening in Australia right now, there's an election coming up in Australia, is that fewer and fewer people always vote the same way. And that is, you've got the Republican, Democrat, and occasionally a third candidate. But in other countries, other alternatives are emerging. Mm-hmm.
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Even though Kia Islam have got a huge majority, it was the lowest joint vote between Tory and Labour there's ever been. So people are looking for alternatives. People are looking for alternatives. And I think we just have to have a more grown-up debate about people with people.
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And the left, maybe the big point I want to try and make to you and your colleagues is that we can't afford to lose our confidence about, you know, without sounding arrogant, being right. These guys, they've got really bad ideas. Look, what Trump is actually doing is bad for America. Bad for Canada, bad for Europe, bad for relations with China. It's bad on so many levels.
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But because they've built this phenomenal political support machine, even the people within that support machine, like Marco Rubio, who know that it's wrong, they've got to go along with it. Whereas what we do when we do stuff, we sort of, oh, I'm not happy about that, so you flake off. We've got to be more confident that we're actually...
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on the big issues of what the world whether it's climate whether it's inequality whether it's the way that we treat each other whether it's we solve problems better in alliance with others rather than hating each other We're right about that. We're always going to be right about that. And so let's just be a bit more confident about it.
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Well, I'll tell you what, if you don't get it, he'd say, okay, I'm around forever. I'm now with Xi and Putin. I know.
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No, that's all. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.
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And once we'd sort of settled on that as the key core theme, everything kind of flowed out from it. And it was also fundamental in signaling to the public that, you know, this guy Tony Blair's a bit different.
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So in opposition, what we were trying to achieve, our objective was easy. We're trying to win and we're trying to win big so that we can get stuff done. The strategy came together pretty quickly around this theme of modernization. And I always say that a good strategy, you should be able to sum up in a word, a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, a speech and a book.
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Now, that's a very top-down approach, okay? And you can argue that in the modern age, maybe there are different ways of doing it. But I would argue that Trump, in a way, does do that. His strategy right now, I would argue, is destruction or it's domination or it's megalomania. I don't know quite how you'd phrase it, but he knows in his head
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kind of what he's doing and why, how everything that you talked about, joining the dots and things, painting a picture. I always used to have this view, this kind of image in my head. So we're starting, you know, you and I obsess about politics all the time and have done for a long time. But I think something that we both know is that most people don't. Okay.
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And that was also, I think, a genius that both Tony Blair and Bill Clinton shared. They know that most people don't follow this stuff very closely. What I always used to have in my head was what we called a big picture. And every time you were doing or saying something, you had the capacity to land a tiny, tiny, tiny dot on that picture.
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And if you didn't land a dot that signed up with the last dot and the next dot, and you were painting a picture on your terms, then in politics, what happens is that your opponents, political or media, they come and wipe out your dots the whole time. So our framing was if it didn't say modernization, don't say it.
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If it didn't speak to the theme of modernization, just go away and stop bothering us with these stupid ideas that are about taking us back, not forward. And the thing about New Labour, New Labour just sort of happened in a funny sort of way because we were doing this conference.
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And you know what it's like when you're sitting around trying to think of a, you've done all the hard stuff of speech writing and policy and all that, you know. But then Tuesday before the conference starts, the set designer comes in and says, you know, what's the backdrop going to say? We had a meeting. I'll never forget. It was me. Tony was there. I was there. Peter Mandelson was there.
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Philip Gould, who was our pollster and strategist, was there. And two or three other people were sitting around. The favourite was a new approach for Labour. And then a subline and a new approach for Britain or something like that. And I thought, one, it's too long. Two, it's a bit winky wanky, doesn't say anything. So I'll never forget it. I just said, I wrote on my pad, New Labour, New Britain.
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And I circled it and I passed it to Philip. And he just went tick, tick. And that was it. But even Peter Mandelson, who was now our ambassador in Washington, no doubt, absolutely loving it. He was right on the outer edge of modernization. He was like uber new labor. But I remember even Peter saying, I think this might be a bit bold for this time. Shouldn't we just wait?
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But one of the great things about Tony was that if you persuaded him of the intellectual reality, of a proposition, he'd go with it. And that is what we were saying. We were basically saying to the public, New Labour means we're going to change the Labour Party.
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As we change the Labour Party, you, the public, need to get in line, understand that with the same vigour, energy and drive and direction, we're going to change the country. And that's why New Labour, New Britain became the strategy. And it remained the strategy throughout the entire time we were in government.
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Well, I mean, I love James Carville and I yield to nobody in my admiration of him and respect for him. But I think I'm more with you on this one. But we had this debate in the UK before the election because people basically people said Labour under Keir Starmer was pursuing a Mingva strategy. Get the barnacles off the boat. Don't upset people. We're 20 points ahead in the polls.
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Let's just go nice and easy, nice and easy, nice and easy. And then you look at the results where on a third of the vote, they get a massive majority. You think, okay, well, you know, that strategy worked. I could argue that maybe some of the difficulties they've had in government have been because of the caution in the strategies then bred a caution in governing as well.
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But I think the Democrat position is, look, I do agree that I think Trump's going to self-immolate, but I wouldn't bank on it because the guy's got away with everything he's ever done, you know, up to and including being a criminal. So I wouldn't. And whenever I hear people saying, just let the other guy screw up, that's not a strategy. The strategy has got to be help them screw up.
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And as they screw up, make sure that the public has switched on to an alternative that's sitting there right in front of your eyes. And of course, if you think about the kind of damage that Trump is doing already to the Democrats, which he did in the election and is continuing to do, I mean, that speech the other night was in Congress.
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It was just amazing the extent to which you just get Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden, keeps going. And of course, I don't buy this idea that it just goes down well with his base. I think there's a broader resonance to be attacking, because people seem to like the way he attacks. And I think the Democrats have got to learn from that.
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But I think the other thing I'd say is that people always think they've got lots of time in politics. I mean, Labour at the moment in the UK, you know, Keir Starmer's doing pretty well on the international front. But on the domestic stuff, you know, we've got a lot of big problems, a lot of decisions that have been made that are really quite unpopular.
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And I bump into some of the labour people and I say, listen, you guys, you've got to do this, got to do that and what have you. And they say, oh, you know, stop moaning on. You know, we've got a lot of time. I say, you haven't got time. You've got two years max.
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then you're into the next thing and and you know where i think your your system doesn't lend itself to what i think the democrats need to do right now is that you know the old cliche about when there's a crisis in the world america doesn't know who to phone in europe right now it feels to me like there's a crisis in the democrat party in the united states and nobody in europe knows who to phone in the democrat party we don't even know who to follow we don't need to be interested in