Former New Labour spin doctor compares Keir Starmer to George W Bush

Former Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell has drawn a comparison between Keir Starmer and former US president Geoge W Bush.

The architect of New Labour told Holyrood that the prime minister reminded him of Bush in the way he struggled to communicate who he was in the media.

Campbell said: “He reminds me, to this regard only, of George W Bush. George W Bush was somebody who if he was there now sitting on that sofa chatting to you, you would think, what a charming, funny guy. And why has he got this reputation of being stupid, because he’s really clever? As soon as the cameras came on him, he was a different being.

“And I sometimes feel like if you could only see Keir in a kind of real human setting, he can be impressive, he can be charming, be all the things that you’d want a political leader to be.

“There’s something about the mechanism of modern political communication that I think sometimes stops him being himself.”

Campbell spoke to Holyrood in the run-up to the Scottish Parliament election on 7 May. He was press secretary to former prime minister Tony Blair when the 1997 referendum took place and Holyrood was established in 1999.

Asked for his view on the Scottish Labour campaign, he praised leader Anas Sarwar and said he felt “really sad” for him because Starmer’s government had “acted as a massive drag”.

While acknowledging mistakes made by UK Labour in government, he said he was “confident that it can be turned around”.

“If it isn’t turned around, by the way, we are in deep shit. Because if this government, if this Labour government, doesn’t succeed I think we’re going to a pretty dark place,” he added.

The political strategist-turned-podcaster also reflected on his own political journey, particularly in the aftermath of Brexit.

He admitted that his sense of being Scottish has increased in recent years since he lost both his parents (both of whom were Scottish) and two brothers, as well as having a “sense that a lot of what Britain has become post-Brexit, I don’t like”.

On the question of Scottish independence, he said he was still a supporter of remaining in the Union but that he did waiver in the aftermath of Brexit.

He said: “I just thought if there was a way now of me having a Scottish passport, access to the European Union, I’d go for it. But I think that view’s gone backwards since then because I don’t think I changed fundamentally, I think I changed emotionally.

“I still think about how hard it’s been for the UK to extricate itself from the European Union at such a cost, then I imagine Scotland extricating itself from the United Kingdom, even more complicated, even more difficult.

“So, on balance, I’m still a Unionist on the question of Union, but I’m not nearly as passionate about it as I was.”