If Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s recent interview of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is anything to go by, I don’t think I’ll be watching The Rest is Politics again.
The interview started off okay. After noting Trump’s threat to punish Spain for refusing to let the US use military bases for attacks on Iran, Campbell invited Sánchez to speculate about what the punishment will look like. So far so good: it’s an important question that many of us here in Spain are asking. But instead of answering it, Sánchez talked about Greenland, Ukraine, the EU’s relationship with the US and the pressing need to strengthen the transatlantic relationship.
Maybe, I was beginning to suspect, accuracy isn’t always Alastair’s top priority
Next a very earnest Rory Stewart asked what could have been done to achieve a more coordinated international response at the outbreak of war. Sánchez then proceeded to tell us that the war will bring casualties, instability, insecurity and an erosion of the welfare state just as the Iraq war did. All very ‘right on’ and politically correct – cue earnest nodding from Stewart – but not terribly incisive and certainly not an answer to the question posed.
Perhaps Sánchez didn’t want to say anything he’d later regret. But aren’t interviewers supposed to press for answers to the questions asked? Apparently not. Instead Campbell wanted to know if Sánchez considered Trump to be ‘far right’. (Spoiler: he most certainly does – he and his ministers are forever telling us so on Spanish television.) But instead of saying ‘Yes, I do’ and then explaining why, Sánchez, mindful perhaps of the punishment that Trump has promised to visit on Spain, instead talked about the importance of international law and told us that it’s very important to fix ‘what is not working in the international order’ and ‘upgrade’ it ‘to the twenty-first century’.
Rory, meanwhile, fretted about the lack of coordination between western allies: ‘How are you going to coordinate?’ is what he wanted to know. Sánchez replied that ‘We need to be more coordinated – that is true.’ And then, perhaps sensing that he needed to flesh that out a bit, droned on at some length about there being too much disunity in the European Union and there needing to be more unity, because a disunited Europe is weaker. This reply seemed, finally, to put Rory’s mind at rest. Personally, I was starting to lose the will to live.
Soon though I was wondering how much Alastair Campbell actually knows about Spanish politics. He suggested for example that Sánchez is a political wizard because he accommodates such a wide spectrum of political views in his cabinet including a ‘right-wing Catalonian’. In fact there are no right-wing Catalans in the cabinet – it’s made up of socialists from Sánchez’s party and a handful of ministers from a smaller party even further to the left.
Maybe, I was beginning to suspect, accuracy isn’t always Alastair’s top priority. At one point he said: ‘As you said earlier, a lot of Brits think it [Brexit] has been a complete catastrophe.’ All I heard Sánchez say was, ‘The UK needs also to reflect on the decision taken with the [sic] Brexit.’
When Sánchez boasted – with some justification, actually – about the success of Spain’s ‘green transition’ I was hoping for a follow-up question about whether the reliance on renewable energy had anything to do with the blackout last April which left millions of us without electricity for hours. Ditto Sánchez’s claim that Spain doesn’t have a corruption problem (in fact Spain has recently dropped dramatically in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index and is now below Botswana and Rwanda). And what about his assertion that as a result of ‘the genocide’ in Gaza, Hamas is now stronger than ever?
But who am I to carp? Campbell and Stewart seem to think the interview was a huge success: Sánchez, we’re informed (perhaps in case it had passed us by), is ‘really brilliant’, ‘a great communicator of values’ and is ‘a phenomenal politician’. Rory in his enthusiasm suddenly started quoting Aristotle on ‘logos, pathos and ethos’, so it was left to Campbell to sum up: the really great thing about Sánchez apparently is that he’ll ‘listen to a question [and] answer the question.’ Hmm… up to a point, Alastair.
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