This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Keir Starmer won a gigantic electoral victory a mere ten months ago, and the right is already ascendant. Instead of the Conservatives taking the fight to Labour, though, it is Reform who are topping the opinion polls. How can we make sense of this strange political moment? It is time to explore the world of right-wing podcasts.
Thankfully, a new podcast from the Spectator promises “sanity and common sense in a world that seems increasingly devoid of both” — presented by Michael Gove.
Quite Right has been launched by Gove and Madeline Grant — Spectator assistant editor and parliamentary sketchwriter. Ms Grant is witty and likeable — a fine podcast host. Mr Gove, alas, is Mr Gove.
In the first episode, the veteran Conservative minister and current Spectator editor makes a knowing reference to “the terrible people who were responsible for government over the last ten years”. “Some of them, shamelessly, are trying to reinvent themselves as podcasters and journalists,” he jokes.
Cute. But a serial killer who makes droll, self-deprecating references to his serial killing is no less of a serial killer. Gove can’t quip his way out of responsibility for years of Conservative failure, in which the man himself supported mass non-EU immigration, lockdown hawkishness and Kemi Badenoch.
Add in Gove’s longtime affection for Tony Blair and support for the invasion of Iraq, and you have a sense for quite how much he represents decades of Conservative destructiveness. I am all for people changing, but in some cases it should involve monastic penitence, not one of the most important jobs in the British media.
Of course, Gove is not the first man to have had a horrendous career in politics and then pivoted to podcasting. Alastair Campbell has had tremendous success convincing well-fed idiots that Tony Blair’s enforcer is a wise moral voice.
George Osborne has had far less success with Political Currency (his podcast with Ed Balls, which only the most desperate insomniacs could love). Gove is more likeable than Campbell and less tedious than Osborne. Granted, this is like saying a person has a healthier lifestyle than Oliver Reed, but it is something.
That Gove is a talented politician always seemed to make him more appalling. Using one’s powers for evil seems more sinister than not having powers to begin with.
This all makes it impossible to like the podcast. Gove mocks Labour politicians, in a recent episode, for struggling to acknowledge the validity of popular concerns about mass immigration.
But what did the Conservatives do if not spectacularly misread the public appetite for Brexit? Gove tells Emma Watson to apologise to J.K. Rowling for her rude behaviour over their disagreements about the trans issue. How about apologising to Britain?
I’m sorry for focusing on Grant’s co-host, especially when her efforts are so effective, but if someone had launched a financial podcast with Bernie Madoff they could hardly have complained if they were overlooked. For the right to be successful, it cannot have the same leaders with different hats.
Younger conservatives and reactionaries have formed a little ecosystem of podcasts. Carl Benjamin set up The Lotus Eaters, Harrison Pitt spearheads Deprogrammed for the New Culture Forum, and Laurie Wastell hosts The Sceptic for the Daily Sceptic.
These platforms have the energy and ferocity of youth. Importantly, none of them are hosted by failed Tory ministers. They have shaken up the right — injecting real determination into a political sphere which is often clubbish and complacent.
They do suffer from repetitiveness, with the various guests and hosts appearing on their various podcasts so often that I wonder if they ever actually leave their podcast studios. I also find their militant traditionalism a bit strained. (Do the hosts bathe in suits?)
But I realise that I might be engaging in a sort of reversal of traditional ageist snobbery here, as the shambolic liberal-minded thirty-something tutting at the kids for their cultured conservative ways. Perhaps I just don’t get it, man.
Foidcast is a recent attempt to be for British audiences what Red Scare was for American listeners — a fusion of “it girl” aesthetics and esoteric right-wing ideology. The hosts seem more genuinely intellectual (and without a thick layer of vocal fry).
Unfortunately, their guest when I was listening was Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin — the ideological grandfather of “neoreaction” and a man with such a chronic case of logorrhea that I suspect that he will still be talking as he is buried underground. Anon and I, from the poster Stakeholder Consultant, is also a promising attempt to engage the “extremely online”.
These offerings resist summation — but so does the British Right in 2025. We have the old guard, clinging to their places in mainstream politics; the young radicals, trying to muscle their way to the top; the fringe mavericks, trying to build some sort of avant-garde that could transcend its obscure origins.
With still the better part of four years to go until Keir Starmer has to call a general election, and many questions to be asked of Reform and the Conservatives, we can expect a lot of strange political and ideological experiments and competition. The counter-revolution might not be televised. But it will be podcasted.
