“It is a bit like that, actually,” he says, licking salt off his fingers.Įvery couple has an origin story, and I would like to hear his and Stewart’s. So will it be a bit like seeing Tom Jones in Las Vegas tonight? Should I expect underwear to be chucked at the stage? I’m teasing but, alas, Campbell seems not to notice. When he and Millar walk their dog in London, they’re constantly stopped by (mostly, it would seem) women. They heard some of them asking each other what words they most like to hear us say, and stuff like that.” Since The Rest Is Politics (AKA TRIP) began, Campbell’s face has, he goes on, become an awful lot more recognisable. “Fiona and Grace thought it was completely mad at the Albert Hall,” he says. Photograph: Twitter / Rory Stewart kind of people make up the audience at these live events? He gives me a look. Rory Stewart in his privy counsellor’s uniform on his way to attend the king’s coronation, accompanied by his wife, Shoshana Clark. “Have you seen the film of Rory in the floods when he went to the wrong side of a bridge?” He emits a satisfied laugh. “We’ve got some great clips for the audience tonight,” Campbell tells me, tearing open a bag of crisps. A break for dinner will follow, and then, at last, it will be curtain up. After this, the two will briefly rehearse tonight’s show on stage. Then he will sign a huge pile of copies of his new book, But What Can I Do? (Why Politics Has Gone So Wrong, and How You Can Help to Fix It), for the punters. First, he and Stewart will record two podcasts: a regular episode, and one in which they answer questions from listeners (both go out every week). It is mid-afternoon now, and in his dressing room – if he has a rider, it obviously includes Jaffa Cakes, and I will shortly get told off for eating some of them – Campbell is steadying himself for the hours ahead. Harrogate, which seats just over 900 people, must seem like small fry in comparison, which may be one reason why backstage, Campbell, at least, seems both so disorganised and so blase (though I cannot entirely rule out the possibility that he is always like this). At the Albert Hall, 5,000 tickets went in a single morning. At the Palladium, they shifted 4,500 tickets for two nights in six minutes (faster than the Foo Fighters, someone will tell me later). So far, they’ve taken it on the road on four previous occasions, having performed it live at the Leicester Square theatre in London, the Blackpool Winter Gardens, the London Palladium, and the Royal Albert Hall. Since then, it has been downloaded 60m times, a figure that makes it one of the UK’s biggest.

The double act in question – Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s bagpipe-playing former henchman, and Rory Stewart, who was briefly the secretary of state for international development under Theresa May – began their podcast, The Rest Is Politics, in March 2022. Who on earth, I might have asked, wants to spend their hard earned money on two hours of unfiltered chat on such subjects as a recent presidential election in Turkey, what might constitute inappropriate behaviour in the House of Commons, and whether the manager of Burnley FC would make a better prime minister than Keir Starmer? Aren’t we all a bit tired of listening to middle-aged men of a certain ilk drone on and on? Wouldn’t people rather just stay at home and watch Newsnight?īut Harrogate, it turns out, isn’t the half of it. All the same, if you’d told me five years ago – or even two years ago – that tickets for the appearance in Harrogate of a double act comprising a former government spin doctor and a former government minister would sell out, and quickly, I wouldn’t have believed you. I realise that its glory days may be over.

Louis Armstrong and the Beatles both played it. Edward Elgar came to conduct his own work here, and Arthur Conan Doyle to deliver a lecture. Beneath its painted coffered ceiling – it is now Grade II* listed – Sarah Bernhardt starred in a special flying matinee of Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux Camelias. Whatever it was called, however, it always drew the crowds. Designed by Robert Beale and the great Frank Matcham, it opened on the site of the former Cheltenham Pump Room in 1903 as the Kursaal – a name inspired by the building on which it was based, the Ostend Kursaal in Belgium (a German word, Kursaal means “Cure Hall”), and which it lost after the first world war, when something a little more patriotic was required. T he Royal Hall in Harrogate has a long and interesting history.

Double whole rest