Alastair Reacts to Burnham’s Speech and Rory’s Viral Stare

Alastair Campbell (0:00)

We like to say we want our politics to be about big issues, and Andy Burnham has just given us all, friends and enemies alike, plenty to chew on. The building of a national care service, reform of the pensions triple lock, education reform, electoral reform, a VAT cut on electricity bills, greater public control of utilities, more council homes, leasehold reform, reform of right to buy, a warning to absent landlords. Some pretty big claims on AI leadership and clarity that Brexit has gone wrong and therefore plans for a new relationship with Europe. Barely a mention of the opposition parties as he renewed his call for a more consensual politics. Plenty of mentions of his deceased father recently passed away and a lot of emotion as he promised to dedicate his leadership to building a country his dad will be proud of. He got a genuinely rapturous reception in the conference hall here in Liverpool. But given the number of big debates he has launched on so many big issues, what matters is the reaction outside. How do the other parties respond as the debate unfolds and the detail is thrashed out?

What does the great British public make of it all? So many big promises at a time of so many big challenges.

Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

Rory Stewart (1:28)

And me, Rory Stewart. And Alastair, you are in Liverpool at the Labour Party Conference. You were there for the big speech of Andy Burnham. Give us a sense of what it was like.

And how many conferences have you been to? You must have been to 30, 40, right?

Alastair Campbell (1:44)

Oh, my very, very first conference was Neil Kinnock's big speech in 1985 That was my first Labour conference. I've been to most since, not all.

Rory Stewart (1:52)

That's a good 40 years of conferences that you have come and gone.

Alastair Campbell (1:55)

It's a lot of conferences. We'll come on to that. And in addition to talking a lot about the conference and the Burnham speech, Rory, we are going to have to, at some point, perhaps towards the end of the episode, reflect on your meme virality, I believe it's called, of the, that, we're going to talk about that. Anyway, let's start with Andy Burnham. I was there, it was a very, really interesting speech, and I thought very, very powerful. I mean, it felt incredibly powerful in Liverpool, in the hall. It really felt like the guy was connecting in a way that very few speakers do these days. And I think partly that was because they really wanted him to do well. But also, it was a well-crafted speech, it was well-delivered. I did think that it was chunky, it was meaty.

And so, yeah, I counted 11 standing evasions.

Rory Stewart (2:53)

And before we get onto the content, which is obviously what people can see a little bit more of on the BBC, give us a sense of feeling of it. I mean, watching it on television, it looked like it was very, very, very natural. I mean, he was walking up and down the stage, but it wasn't sort of stagey. It sounded incredibly sort of relaxed. He managed to almost catch the tone as though he was speaking to a much, much smaller audience working his thoughts out when in fact, he had this enormous call.

Alastair Campbell (3:25)

Well, it is of all the conference venues. I mean, they're all pretty big, but this is Liverpool is big and it's very wide and it's quite cavernous. He didn't have a lectern and therefore he didn't have a traditional auto cue. I think he had a Ed Sheeran type auto cue somewhere down below. So he's looking down a fair bit, but he was very natural and also there were points of the speech where he allowed the just very, very simple thought or concept just to land.

He really only did the rousing rhetoric when he was either coming to the climax or when the audience were getting going as he was speaking. No, listen, I've got to say, one of the things I've said, I said this one, we did the Becoming Burnham series with Steve Rotherham, the Liverpool Mayor. He has grown so much as a politician. He really has.

It was a pretty formidable performance, I thought, and so many interesting angles to it as well.

Rory Stewart (4:25)

It's a speech. I wonder whether it's not a speech that really, a style that really benefits from having been Mayor of Manchester, that it's not a House of Commons style. Nobody will let you make a speech like that in the House of Commons. Any pause you put will be interrupted by someone shouting from the back. It's not even the kind of speech you give to business people or fundraisers. It's the speech of somebody talking in a much more relaxed way to their constituents or their electors.