Back when The New Yorker still did proper long-form articles, one of my favourite pieces traced the saga of the so-called Thomas Jefferson wine bottles. It began in 1985, when Christie’s sold a 1787 Château Lafite, etched with “Th.J.,” for a record $157,000 to Christopher Forbes. Supposedly Jefferson’s, the bottles later found their way into the cellar of billionaire Bill Koch — who then discovered that Monticello scholars doubted their authenticity.
The trail led to Hardy Rodenstock, a flamboyant German collector who turned out, under Koch’s scrutiny, to be one Meinhard Görke, son of a railway official, who reinvented himself with a more glamorous name when he entered the wine world.
The article — and the follow-up book The Billionaire’s Vinegar — is a classic real-life caper of con men, gullible plutocrats, and experts undone by flattery. For the rest of us, there’s a delicious schadenfreude: watching very clever, very rich people duped by something so obvious. You don’t need to be a “super-taster” to spot that serious wine collectors (even historical ones) don’t go around engraving their initials on bottles.
Watching the latest saga of The Rest Is Politics brought me back to that great New Yorker article about the Jefferson wine bottles. The fascination here isn’t who’s on the podcast, or what they say — it’s unbelievably inane. You might as well phone Babestation and ask the girls for their views on fiscal drag.
What’s interesting is the hypnotic grip it has on that supposedly “sensible,” largely apolitical middle class. How do Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart do it? How do two men with identical politics, offering no real analysis, manage to fill concert halls?
They make wrong prediction after wrong prediction — Stewart famously claimed Trump would lose in 2024 because of “low Black male turnout for Republicans,” which is insane even to type — and still their listeners show up, week after week — like old biddies in the Midwest tuned to a radio evangelist, nodding along, mistaking cadence for insight.
The question isn’t what they’re saying — it’s how they’ve bottled the lightning of middle-class reassurance. And for the first time in about two years I think the answer came to me this morning, watching their latest eulogising of the greasy Governor of California Gavin Newsom.
From around 2015 onwards we’ve been living through a return to mass politics
The first reason for its appeal is obvious: accessibility. From around 2015 onwards we’ve been living through a return to mass politics. My abiding memory as a millennial who came of age in the mid-noughties was how apolitical it all felt. Nobody really did politics.
People make much of Howard Stern, Marilyn Manson, and Eminem scandalising the culture — but the important thing to remember is that they weren’t making political statements; they were simply trying to shock. Then Trump descended that escalator in 2015 and blew the circuit. Suddenly the shocking was inseparable from the political. When he said that we (the US) shouldn’t take people coming from “shithole countries,” he was adopting a policy position as much as to outrage.
That fusion of politics and entertainment — what a more hackish writer might call a “return from the holiday of history” — unnerved small-c conservatives in both America and Britain. The old demarcation, with serious politics on one side and mass culture on the other, collapsed. And it’s in that collapse that Campbell and Stewart now perform. After 2016, politics became fashionable, much as feminism had a few years earlier in the early 2010s. Listening to a “serious” podcast meant you didn’t have to do the reading; you just had to listen.
The success of The Rest Is Politics rests on this conceit. Stewart and Campbell, with their trademark mock-modesty, brand themselves “just wet latté liberals.” As in-group signalling, it works two ways. First, it flatters listeners into believing they’re open-minded rather than dogmatic. Second, it reassures them they belong to the same elite — huddled with the hosts, “making sense” of a bewildering world. That’s the distinction between TRIP and a hundred other slop podcasts you could dig up in a 20-second YouTube search. It’s Centrist Dad ZeroHedge with a Farrow & Ball paint job.
I have friends who listen religiously. You can spend fifteen minutes walking them through perfectly straightforward political analysis and they’ll just blink at you. They don’t think about politics the way you or I do.
In the 19th century, parvenues bought leather-bound books by the yard to line libraries they’d never read. This is the same impulse — consuming the trappings of seriousness without ever engaging in it.
They treat The Rest Is Politics like an accreditation in political discourse. For them, nothing exists outside it. They couldn’t name five U.S. presidents before Reagan. Despite their Brexit fixation, they know almost nothing about the EU — most couldn’t even name the current Commission president or the big Euro Parliament Groupings.
If that sounds snobbish, it’s deliberate. Stewart is a genial halfwit, but Campbell’s rehabilitation is grotesque. This is the man who helped sell the Iraq War (and has shown no contrition for this), and was up to his neck in the pressure and spin that ended with Dr David Kelly dead in an Oxfordshire field. That such a figure is now recast as a sort of avuncular raconteur for the podcast generation is obscene. My liberal friend now looks visibly ashamed when I catch him listening — and I’d like that embarrassment scaled up across the country.
