Alastair Campbell
Writer
159
MENTIONS
87
EPISODES
71
PODCASTS
Search complete. 159 mentions across 87 episodes found for "Alastair Campbell".
Sep 12, 2026
Shumi BoseGUEST
Um, so that, that particular mode of authorship wasn't something that I wanted, but I knew that I wanted to understand the consequences of that.
Shumi BoseGUEST
So, um, I don't know, this is definitely gonna age me for your readers, but when I was at college, my nickname from, I think it was an affectionate nickname, from one of my tutors was Alistair Campbell, um, who, if you don't know, was a spin doctor, uh, uh, i- in the UK Parliament, but would kind of make the story around whatever policy had been decided.
Shumi BoseGUEST
And that was because I was surrounded with fantastically talented people.
Shumi BoseGUEST
I studied at C- Central Saint Martins on a course that is now the architecture course, but at the time was just a multidisciplinary, um, end of, end of the '90s moment of optimism.
David StarkeyGUEST
And he's just like us, you know, the whole profound idiocy of the invasion of Iraq.
David StarkeyGUEST
and with the added dose of lies of Alistair Campbell and the added absurdity of assuming that once we'd actually got rid of the Ba'athist regime, once we got rid of Saddam, you know, that appalling business of digging him out of the hole and whatever, that they would just become like us, that they will become an open liberal democracy rather than addressing fundamental questions, the fundamental questions which seemed to me that this is primarily a religious phenomenon.
David StarkeyGUEST
that you look at the equivalent in this country, which of course, it stares in the face ever more from day to day, it is a religious problem.
David StarkeyGUEST
It is a specifically political problem, because the way in which Islamists and very conscious, as it were, Muslim, almost kind of independent movements of one sort or another, have taken on specific political articulations, first by colonizing sections of the Labour Party, then, of course, creating separate political vehicles.
Claire KimballHOST
summary.
Claire KimballHOST
I think I saw Alistair Campbell on Thursday night.
Claire KimballHOST
the former press secretary to Tony Blair, who's now quite a notable figure in political commentary.
Claire KimballHOST
Of course, the rest is politics.
Jake Wallis SimonsHOST
Yes, I was a lefty student back then, but my instincts were largely sound.
Jake Wallis SimonsHOST
Saddam Hussein was monstrous, but that war was deeply unwise, built on exaggerations spread by the likes of Alistair Campbell, yes, the podcaster, about weapons of mass destruction.
Jake Wallis SimonsHOST
And it threw us into a chaos of jihadism, from which, two decades later, the world has not recovered.
Jake Wallis SimonsHOST
Of course, as 9-11 showed, there was jihadism before the invasion of Iraq.
Bernard PonsonbyHOST
And in this, there has been a lamentable failure.
Bernard PonsonbyHOST
When I was going through school, and I went to what Alastair Campbell would refer to as a bog-standard comprehensive, and then I went on to university, not to one of the ancient universities, but to the University of Strathclyde, when I was on that journey, um, you used to read these things that the Scottish education system was the best in the world.
Bernard PonsonbyHOST
Now, I don't know whether or not that was just a little bit of Scottish gallusness and people repeating it because they thought it was a good line to repeat or whether or not it objectively stood up to any kind of scrutiny.
Bernard PonsonbyHOST
What I will say is that when I went through school and through university, I thought the quality of teaching was extremely good.
Iain DaleHOST
Um, in this book somebody dropped out at the last minute, and there was a, the Scottish, um, political fixer called Henry Dundas.
Iain DaleHOST
Have you ever heard of him? He was very big in, uh, he's basically William Pitt's Alistair Campbell.
Tessa DunlopHOST
Right.
Iain DaleHOST
And so the person dropped out, and I thought, "Well, I'll have to write it then." And of course I've done nothing about it.
Matt d'AnconaHOST
It's really, really knowledgeable on that and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Matt KellyHOST
So listen, enough smoke blowing, but except to say we've now got Alistair Campbell and we've got Emily Maitlis writing diaries for us and we've got the king and queen of UK podcasting.
Matt KellyHOST
Obviously, we are mere jokers in the back of the court.
Matt KellyHOST
Well, I like to think of us
Fran KellyHOST
You know the voice.
Fran KellyHOST
The host of the smash hit podcast, The Rest Is Politics, Alistair Campbell, joins me later this hour.
Fran KellyHOST
For years, debates about the dangers of artificial intelligence have been hypothetical.
Fran KellyHOST
What happens if an AI system becomes autonomous? What if they get smarter than us and start finding ways around the constraints we've built for them? How far are we from a scenario where the machines take control against us? Well, now the prospect of AI going rogue is a lot less theoretical after an unprecedented attack by not one, but a whole host of AI agents from the world's biggest artificial intelligence company, OpenAI, against an AI digital library called Hugging Face.
26 MINS LATER
Fran KellyHOST
He's also got a million Twitter followers and loves Australia and one of our state premiers in particular.
Fran KellyHOST
So much so, he's returning for a national speaking tour.
Fran KellyHOST
Who am I talking about? Alistair Campbell, the strategist who helped sell Tony Blair's New Labour in the 1990s.
Fran KellyHOST
And like all political pundits, he's transfixed by the inexorable rise of political populism, which of course has been turbocharged by Donald Trump, who, by the way, has just offered US voters a brazen political bribe, oh, I mean dividend, but only if they vote the right way.
Sandra SullyGUEST
the story of September 11 and where they were at the time.
Sandra SullyGUEST
And, and he tells a very fascinating tale because he was quite, quite close with Alastair Campbell, who was Blair's, um, you know, chief comms person.
Sandra SullyGUEST
And, um, and obviously he was working for the administration at the time.
Sandra SullyGUEST
But he said what was so difficult was that, was that, um, they were perpetuating the story and, and Saddam wanted to perpetuate the story-
Fender JacksonHOST
I'm Alastair Campbell and you're listening to the Ireland Podcast.
Fender JacksonHOST
Hello, welcome to the Ireland Podcast.
Fender JacksonHOST
This is Fender Jackson.
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