A bad person writes an even worse book | David James

ALastair Campbell is a cult. Ever since this former Downing Street thug was accused of pumping up the “dodgy dossier”, much of the British public has known him as a shameless self-promoter of questionable morals who has managed to reinvent himself as a self-appointed authority on all political matters. The astonishing popularity of the podcast “The Rest is Politics” (aptly described by Ben Sixsmith as “a suffocating exercise in managerial masturbation”) seems to have reached its peak with the announcement that Campbell and his former pal, Tory MP Rory Stewart, will be live at the O2 Arena for The Calm is politics Trip. It will no doubt sell out. Strange days indeed.

The people who will willingly pay to listen to these two politicians of questionable backgrounds argue about why they are right (and everyone else is wrong) are probably the same people who will buy Campbell’s hideous new children’s book: Alastair Campbell talks about politics. This book is aimed at teenagers and is the first of two. The second, Why politics is importantis aimed at 6- to 9-year-olds and we can only hope that it will be buried under the political dirt (much of it coming from Campbell himself) that will be thrown at us all when it is released on the same day as the general election.

Campbell begins …talks about politics comparing himself to Martin Luther King. Read that sentence again and take a minute to process it. He claims that while he “didn’t have the same experiences as King,” his famous “I have a dream” speech inspired Campbell to make the world a better place (he admits he can’t remember much more of King’s speech than those three words). I wonder if the widows of the many British soldiers who died in Iraq have an opinion on whether he achieved that particular goal.

Campbell’s own dream is that “one day in the future, the then Prime Minister of the United Kingdom will post a photo of a tattered copy of this book… with the comment ‘This is the book that inspired me to go into politics'”. His dream, our nightmare. For it is not just the lack of imagination, insight, originality, knowledge, balance or nuance that characterises this book and makes it a book that all aspiring Prime Ministers should avoid, but it is the appalling lack of self-awareness that borders on self-delusion. For example, Campbell offers useful advice to aspiring politicians, such as that they need to have a “thick skin” because since the advent of social media, “name-calling in politics can be really uncomfortable”. When you think of Campbell, do you associate him with someone who brutalised public debate or took it to a higher level? Spend a few microseconds on Google and you will soon find accusations that mobbing, threateningand myself physically intimidating behavior of him.

The book is steeped in his own worries and prejudices, although he manages to wait until page 17 before mentioning Eton and Jacob Rees-Mogg. In fact, he spends as much time on private schools (one page) as he does on whether or not there is a perfect political system (shocker news: it turns out there isn’t). And that’s part of the problem with books like this: publishers (and the authors they pay to write them) think a young audience doesn’t want detail or nuance. The result is that really interesting areas – like the distribution of power in the Middle East – are covered only superficially. Campbell asks himself questions he can barely answer, such as “Are there monarchs with political power today?” Answer: “Yes, quite a lot.” And so he goes on, talking about the time he worked with the late Queen, the time he worked with Tony Blair … his role in bringing peace to Ireland.

Much of it is boring (“What does a minister do?”) or predictable (an interview with Keir Starmer reveals that the future prime minister’s father was a toolmaker and his mother a nurse). But throughout, Campbell’s views are his own: when asked what ministry his young reader would create, he suggests “a ministry to solve Brexit”, followed by a plaintive “sob”; he claims that the Leave campaign “told a lot of lies” and that “some of the richest people” in the country employed “clever lawyers and accountants” to avoid paying tax. We also learn that both the NHS and the arts need more money.

One of the most depressing developments of recent times is the politicization of everything, be it Literary festivalsThe Landscapeor spacewe are constantly told to view every human activity through the lens of activism. For people like Campbell, childhood is a realm of experiences, not of innocence, of bleak “engagement” and campaigning. It is not a place of playing, dreaming, making friends and reading poetry. No, it is another place colonized by “progressive” politics. Such books are almost inevitably both boring and condescending: every page is filled with reductionist, biased statements written in a stridently optimistic tone, and it is all designed to make bourgeois publishers think younger readers will find much more “accessible” than boring old sentences and paragraphs. So we get lots of different fonts, crazy arrows, and an excess of exclamation points and all-caps sentences.

It would of course be unthinkable for a publisher to commission a book from someone who is at the other end of the political spectrum: there will be no Guide to children’s policies by Suella Braverman, not Michael Gove’s Introduction to Leveling Up for Toddlers. What we have instead is a depressing book full of boring information that can be found elsewhere, page after page of left-wing views expressed as common sense, and an authorial voice that in any sane, mature democracy should have been silenced in shame long ago. Only buy this book for someone you have nothing but contempt for.