It’s difficult to avoid politics these days, what with the rise of the far-right across Europe and North America. In amongst all the misinformation and propaganda, it’s important to make sense of all the noise going on.
We’ve found The Rest is Politics podcast to be enormously beneficial in all of this.
Hosted by Alastair Campbell (a left-leaning former Labour MP) and Rory Stewart (a left-leaning Conservative), they offer a calm and collected take on weekly news with their experience, intelligence, and calm demeanours.
Calm and Collected News Discussion in… The Rest is Politics
If you spend any time on Twitter you’ll quickly be overwhelmed by the fury of particularly hard-right leaning Republicans and Conservatives. The abuse they fling about is astonishing. Amongst that lot you’ll find left-wingers plugging away and offering rebuttals or putdowns.
At this point we think all of it is a waste of time and Twitter (X, if you must) should be shut down. All proceeds of Elon Musk’s wealth can be forwarded to various charities etc.
Anyway, the point of that bit above is to get us onto The Rest is Politics as a podcast.
Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart are from opposing political ideologies, one left and one right, but being grown adults they’re able to have a debate about things. Easy to forget that’s possible. They consider each other’s stance and respond without hurling insults.
If you follow our site you won’t be surprised to learn we’re pretty hard-left leaning with our views. Conservatives would consider us batshit insane commie bastards, or whatever, and dismiss our “libtard” opinions without much consideration.
Oddly enough, it was watching the 2023 Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary that made us realise the importance of balancing out opinions. When he was in politics, as a Republican, he actively hired left-wing experts into specific roles as he felt both political sides would learn from each other.
That’s what this podcast is about and it’s a breath of fresh air.
They can get heated and passionate about a topic, sure, but it never reaches the standards of geezers in a pub slugging fists at each other. Naturally.
It’s also one of the major mainstream platforms challenging Donald Trump’s bizarre behaviour (i.e. narcissistic personality disorder) and flagging up the inherent lunacy of the woke mob moral panic (see the American Hysteria podcast for more on that).
We’ve found the podcast therapeutic as the pair offer a calm analysis of everything going on. If you want to make sense of an increasingly maddening world, it’s a vital listen.
You can find it on all the usual platforms—Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube etc.
It’s free to listen to the podcast, but if you subscribe you can remove the ads and all that jazz.
We should note that, since its launch in 2022, The Rest if Politics has remained the most popular politics podcast in the UK. That status has led to them hosting annual live tours, with a November 2025 schedule including a Manchester event—we’ve got our ticket and will see them in six months!
The Rest is Politics: Meet the Hosts!
The hosts are very impressive and have a chequered history in politics, as political commentators, and writers. Here’s a brief summary of what they’ve been up to.
Alastair Campbell
Campbell worked for the Labour party during Tony Blair’s PM run. As you can see with his interview with film critic Dr. Mark Kermode above, he was the inspiration for Malcolm Tucket from In The Loop (2009) and The Thick of It.
He’s a good sport on this podcast and happy to poke fun at himself, never claiming to be perfect. As he left politics a while ago, he’s now a journalist, author, broadcaster, and mental health activist.
Rory Stewart
Stewart is an academic, broadcaster, and former politician. He was a Conservative MP who even stood to be leader of the party (and Prime Minister) in 2019. However, the Tories did the remarkably clever thing of, instead, choosing the hopeless balloon Boris Johnson and his habit of pathological lying.
Stewart left the Tories in 2019 as a result. He’s since written books such as Politics On the Edge (2023), which was very well received, and hosts this successful podcast. He was also called by The Telegraph a “leftist” (WOOOOKE!!!), despite his position in the right-wing Conservative party and holding left-leaning right-wing views. Clever stuff, The Telegraph!
Having listened to this podcast for a year now, he’s genuinely keen to address inequality in the world (which has impressed us), such as tackling extreme poverty.
