A man told him something, so he listened
Suzanne Moore is not enormously impressed by Alastair Campbell.
Post-Blair, Campbell has made a career as some sort of management consultant, banging on about leadership. His thuggishness has never been toned down. Not even in his diaries. Him physically fighting Peter Mandelson during an argument over what the leader should wear while canvassing has always stuck in my head. He has no time for women except the “totty” him and his Westminster cronies rated. On Clare Short, for instance, he wrote “God she does turn my stomach”.
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He was disastrous and bullying as a leader of the Remainers trying to get a second referendum, again shouting over distinguished female journalists.
Now he is reincarnated alongside Rory Stewart in a podcast for centrist dads: The Rest is Politics. They are meant to be opposites: it’s just that Rory also once ran a bit of Iraq as a gap year hobby or something and his arrogance is more patrician.
Both of them belong to the (adopts caveman voice) “Funny chaps… Women” brigade, who regard women as a lesser species. In the most recent podcast, Campbell explains that the fact that trans issues played a part in the Democrat loss was relayed to him by his US pal, the former diplomat and journalist James Rubin. A man told him something, so Campbell listened.
Rubin apparently told Campbell: “You guys don’t get just how big this woke thing is but you haven’t got it nearly as big…” Campbell then muses: “The $25 million spent on ads about trans, Trump talking about kids going in as boys in the morning and coming back as girls in the afternoon, the dressing room stuff and all that. I think we underestimated how much that was getting through to people.”
The fact that for 10 years women have been campaigning, losing their jobs and have been vilified for refusing an extreme trans agenda has passed him by. All of this was presumably, in his eyes, a Right-wing plot, or a silly culture issue – until it caught his attention this week.
It caught his attention so he chatted with another man about it.
Come on, what would Trump know about guys in girls’ dressing rooms?
Only the people already on your side are trustworthy. Only the fears raised by people you agree with are legitimate. It’s the way of things.
It calls to mind Starmer finding it so difficult to define what a woman is until “Tony Blair told me that a man has a penis and a woman has a vagina.” I can only imagine how infuriating it must be for feminists to know that men really are able to understand the problems that women face…as long as another man is doing the explaining.
AoS, I guess that’s another level of mansplaining.
“ Only the people already on your side are trustworthy. Only the fears raised by people you agree with are legitimate. It’s the way of things.”
Alas, Nullius, it is also the way of things that the act of raising fears is only done by people on the other side, and so doing is proof positive that they have now departed your side, even if you thought they were on your side before. JK Rowling went from left wing feminist in good standing to evil right wing bigot in the blink of an eye.