Book review: But what can I do? By Alastair Campbell (Penguin, 2024)
Alastair Campbell’s new book has become a bestseller across the UK, not just because his writing is good, but because thousands of readers agree that his message should at least be considered. Adrift in an election campaign with two leaders who lack charisma and cannot promise any real improvements on infrastructure, inflation, health or immigration, British voters are naturally asking: “But what can I do?”
A spin doctor/special adviser in the Platonic form, Campbell has written a self-help book. His proposals for salvaging British politics do not follow the trajectory of his own career. In short, it’s about establishing yourself as a journalist, finding a political candidate – Tony Blair – with whom you can foster a strong relationship of mutual trust, leading that person to three consecutive election victories, and reinventing yourself (through a TV series, columns, diary and podcast, “The Rest is Politics”) as an incisive and wry analyst of current affairs.
Campbell rather underplays the British electorate’s “deep frustration and despair” and the accompanying, equally urgent demand that the new government affirm its social mandate and restore its moral authority. In Campbell’s worldview, much of this malaise is the fault of polarizing populists on the right. His targets include not only Boris Johnson, but also Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Scott Morrison.
It may seem biased to assign blame to anyone, just as Campbell’s assessment of how rosy things were in the past (before the global financial crisis, which is crucial for him) may seem overly optimistic. Shouldn’t voters themselves also bear some of the blame? Shouldn’t institutions and habits be questioned? Campbell asserts that “purposes and institutions do not change of their own accord”, yet here he pays little attention to even elementary changes such as the abolition of the House of Lords, compulsory voting, or a better alignment of financial rewards with social values.
Either way, Campbell lays out his guidelines for young leaders of the future. They are encouraged to resist cynicism, to be three things at once (leader, team player and strategist), to be self-confident and to be tenacity (a term Campbell coined to combine tenacity and resilience). These fine people are meant to come from the political grassroots (“locally based and well-informed”), not from the conventional elite of Eton, Oxbridge or Downing Street.
Would such a leader have avoided, in Campbell’s words, the “cocktail of disasters” that recently befell Britain? Ordinary people might quite rationally despair about the post office scandal, blood contamination, lockdown parties, medical waiting lists, planned flights to Rwanda or Brexit. Campbell would counter that “people with values, passion and real commitment are the cure”. In his usual caustic and combative style, Campbell buttresses his case with examples from many other areas of leadership, but the case of football managers is the most insightful.
It makes you wonder: Will leaders selected to “broaden the gene pool” simply burn out, get co-opted, seek the jobs themselves, or succumb to cynicism? Will the uneven performance of relative outsiders like Obama, Trudeau, and Macron provide cause for rethinking?
