Centrist Dads are back and they’re smugger than ever

The return of the likes of Alastair Campbell must rank as one of the great mysteries of public life

Can you imagine the joy of never being wrong? And better still, never having been wrong – ever. Of course you can’t. All of us make mistakes. Not so for one illustrious tribe in British politics whose galaxy-brain thinking enables them not just to avoid being wrong at the moment, but also ever to have been wrong at all.

I refer to the Centrist Dads – a group of men of a certain age who repeat the worn platitudes of the middle ground of politics again and again until somebody tells them they were right all along. Smug and intellectually lazy, they assume that the middle position must automatically be correct; a sort of compromise between Left and Right. In fact, they suffer from the same logical fallacies as everyone else, albeit with less introspection owing to constantly assuming the moral high ground.

There was a time when people determined that something was amiss with politics; that voters felt isolated from and misrepresented by a careless political elite. For a while, those who had overseen this mass disenchantment were ignored or mocked. Some became figures of fun on prime-time TV, others fulminated in Islington townhouses; many just went out and made a shedload of ethically dubious money.

Now however, like dry rot or Japanese knotweed, they’re back and they’re everywhere. As the ideas that replaced the centrist era are themselves under threat, the old faces have returned to say “I told you so”. Lucky us. The problem is, many people seem to have fallen for it a second time around. Memories, it appears, are short. Certainly short enough to forget the remarkable PR transformations taking place around us.

Standing over them all, like a great leviathan, is Alastair Campbell, who fell the furthest and now, conversely, gets to be the smuggest. His ongoing political rehabilitation and detoxification must rank as two of the great mysteries of public life. While Campbell remains synonymous in many eyes with the lies that took Britain into the Iraq War, and the affair surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, he is now more likely to be found positioning himself as a scourge of post-truth politics or a born-again #Bekind ambassador.

He was implacable during partygate. Deceit in politics – especially the Johnson administration – is a very real problem; but would it be too much to ask that someone other than New Labour’s master-of-spin be the man to condemn it? The sight of Campbell touring the studios as self-appointed national ethics adviser is surely akin to hearing of King Herod’s appointment as the new children’s commissioner.

Campbell most recently appeared on our screens defending Gary Lineker and accusing the BBC of manipulation by the “Right”. One BBC interviewer mentioned the “business links” between the two (Campbell co-hosts a podcast owned by Lineker’s production company), and a flash of the old venom surfaced. Campbell reacted defensively, as if the interviewer were momentarily transformed into an international weapons expert or an Iraqi child.

The accusation of “media manipulation” takes some beating, given that Campbell was himself accused of rough-housing the press, especially the BBC. Memories must be short to forget the resignation of Greg Dyke and other employees following a bitter dispute with the Blair government over their reporting on the Iraq War.

There are degrees of shamelessness. At the soft end, Ed Balls’s transformation from Brownite bruiser to avuncular “Ed” the TV pundit. At the more sinister end, the radio host James O’brien, who styles himself as a great sage in a world of chaos. Naturally the bestselling author of How to Be Right was taken in by claims made by a fantasist about a Westminster paedophile ring, and used his platform to endorse the hoax; a mistake for which, to my knowledge, he has never apologised.

During the EU referendum Sir John Major accused Brexit “pythons” Boris Johnson and Michael Gove of conspiring to privatise the NHS, having dodged (equally false) accusations during his time in No10. Various ex-ministers of the May, Cameron and Blair eras are now lining up to condemn Suella Braverman’s Illegal Migration Bill, despite often presiding over equally authoritarian policies while in office. Even celebrities are getting involved. Consider Frankie Boyle’s volte-face from edgy mocker of disabled kids in the Noughties to back-slapping progressive who often criticises other comedians for their offensive jokes.

What explains these remarkable metamorphoses? In our social mediadominated age, there may be a feeling that things before Twitter simply don’t count. Or perhaps Brexit performed the equivalent of a factory reset on our politics; taking it back to Year Zero and nullifying all outstanding grievances, providing you’re on the “right” side now.

“Put them in charge!” is the Centrist Dads’ constant refrain. If we could just bring back the likes of Campbell, or the great prince across the water – Sedgefield Fortinbras himself – then everything would be OK again. Ironically, “bring back the grown-ups” harks back to an era that pioneered so much of the debasement of the public sphere we now take for granted; the constitutional vandalism, the celebrity politics, the cynical pursuit of wealth and power over principles. Bring back the grown-ups? Anyone but these ones, please.