Opinion
The unbearable lightness of Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell
Albanese was granted the soft treatment that her hosts would want if they were confronted with their involvement in the Iraq War
March 25, 2025 16:19
3 min read
Albanese was granted the soft treatment that her hosts would want if they were confronted with their involvement in the Iraq War
March 25, 2025 16:19Fresh from the awkwardness of lavishing podcast airtime on Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, a reformed jihadi who turned out — quelle surprise! — not to have been reformed at all, Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell have outdone their auto-debasement by interviewing arch-Israelophobe Francesca Albanese.
This was an unlikely pairing. After all, Campbell helped take Britain into an illegal war in Iraq based on dubious evidence, while Stewart, who also supported the invasion, was a card-carrying member of the occupation, having been appointed colonial governor of an Iraqi province at the age of 30. Occupation, Francesca! Occupation! I haven’t had a moment to run this past her personally, but I’d hazard a guess that the ultra-Arabist United Nations Special Rapporteur may in retrospect regard that little act of Western imperialism in a rather dim light. Yet here they were, talking about Israel; that tends to bring people together.
Entirely predictably, Albanese was granted the sort of soft-soap treatment that her unbearable hosts would themselves have appreciated were they ever to be confronted with the record of Britain’s involvement in that spot of bother in Iraq a while back (which both of them have since tried to play down).
First up, the former Labour spin doctor lobbed an easy ball into Albanese’s path. “You’ve been under a lot of attack from people accusing you of being antisemitic,” Campbell crooned. “So, I wanted to give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about your empathy for Israelis [and] your understanding of their position, before we return to what you want to talk about, which is your empathy for Palestinians and for Gaza.”
Albanese knocked it out of the park. Empathy for the Jews? To hell with that. It was “shocking”, she said, that “the word antisemitism is no longer what it was for me three years ago”. The allegations made her “sick in her stomach”, she added — at which we all felt deep sympathy — before claiming that the claims had been “weaponised” against her in recent months.
“Antisemitism is hatred or discrimination against Jewish people because they are Jewish,” she informed us. “Now, the allegations of antisemitism against me have nothing to do with [that]… I’m accused of being an antisemite because I criticise Israel.”
Sure sure. Shall we take a little look at the evidence? America, she remarked in 2014, had been “subjugated by the Jewish lobby”. Amid a storm of outrage she apologised, but this set the tone for much of her perspective since.
On October 7, she posted that “today’s violence must be put in context”. (I can’t recall her ever making the same point about the IDF’s assault on Hamas, which she has repeatedly condemned, quite acontextually, as a “genocide”.) She also posted, “the victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in reaction to Israel's oppression” and expressed doubt about the findings of a landmark UN report which found evidence of Hamas’s sexual violence committed on October 7. Reader, the woman works for the UN.
What else? Ah, yes. Albanese has compared Israel’s war of self-defence with the Holocaust — I’m puking myself a little bit here — and has equated Benjamin Netanyahu with, all together now, Adolf Hitler. You might object that this clearly contravenes the IHRA definition of antisemitism; but naturally, Albanese doesn’t recognise it. This allows her to share how she finds the very existence of the Jewish homeland illegitimate, adding: “It is time to consider suspending the credentials of Israel as a member state of the UN.” But Iran? North Korea? Russia? Venezuela? Zimbabwe? China? Sudan? All totally fine, I assume.
After a bit, Stewart, bless him, gave it another go, inviting his guest to recall any “Israeli friends” she had made while working in East Jerusalem in 2011. Francesca, we’re trying to prove you’re not an antisemite here, you almost could hear him begging. Just give us something to work with. Anything. Her response? It was “very difficult back then” to have Israeli friends. You could almost hear the facepalms in the studio.
But they let her get away with it, just as they had allowed the former Al Qaeda and Islamic State jihadi Abu Mohammad al-Jolani to pose as a slightly-to-the-right of the Liberal Democrats international statesman when they shamefully interviewed him in February, billing him as a “fighter turned President”. Just a few weeks later, his men unleashed their cruel massacres of Alawite, Christian and Druze civilians. Awkward.
In a sane universe, these two contemptible centrist dads — who have almost 1.6 million followers between them on X alone — would never have dreamed of giving such wicked people a platform on their podcast, which (for some reason) happens to be one of the most popular in Britain. But perhaps in the world of liberal podcasting, as in the invasion of Iraq, there is little space for morally sound judgments. What is left? The rest, as they say, is politics.