As you may have already guessed, persevilience is a mashup of perseverance and resilience, “perhaps with a little bit of persistence and patience thrown in”. But our author repeatedly emphasizes that the confection is more than the sum of its parts. His friend Keir Starmer, for instance, possesses both perseverance and resilience, but as Labour prime minister “lacked sufficient reserves in the persevilience bank”. In contrast, Tony Blair had reserves in spades. Whether Andy Burnham is truly persevilient remains to be seen, but the signs during the leadership crisis were at least promising. Like a character in a video game, “Burnham’s persevilience simply overpowered Starmer’s resilience, no matter how hard he fought”.

Even at this early stage in the book, I had a few questions, and not just about how the friendship with Starmer was now going. One of these concerned whether readers were supposed to take any of this seriously, though it appears so: a couple of jokes are included, but most of the book’s content is delivered straight-faced. The publisher’s blurb, reproduced on Campbell’s personal website, even compares Persevilience to Francis Fukuyama’s seminal The End of History, trumpeting that it too “has the potential to enter the bloodstream of political conversation and, ultimately, help us better understand and thrive in the ever more challenging world around us”. (I know what you’re thinking — how very ambumptious — but that’s Alastair Campbell for you.)

My next burning philosophical question concerned what the attribute of persevilience really amounts to, given that our author keeps insisting it isn’t just perseverance plus resilience, plus a few semantic sprinkles. Anyone can take two familiar concepts, put them together, and make up a new name for the conjunction. You may have noticed that I just did. One could also observe that on his smash hit podcast The Rest is Politics, co-hosted with the intermittently prignorant Rory Stewart, Campbell is mostly hubristling and shrugnacious; while in the writing of his books, he tends more towards the mawkward. But is the discovery of persevilience any deeper than this?

To be fair, the former Labour spin doctor does have a stab at defining his big idea for the benefit of future dictionaries. Persevilience, he tells us, is “the ability of an individual, group or organization to turn any situation, setback or meaningful experience into a positive opportunity to grow, to advance and secure their core interests and beliefs”. “Positive”, “grow” and “advance” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The aim seems to be to connect the concept of persevilience firmly to Left-liberal values and role models — that is, to differentiate it from its suspiciously conservative-sounding conceptual relatives — and much of the rest of the text bears this interpretation out.

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Fittingly persevilient heroes offered up for contemplation include Campbell’s close friend, the magazine editor Lindsay Nicholson, who lost both her husband and young daughter to cancer; the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bill Wilson and Dr Bob Smith; and Nelson Mandela in his Robben Island days (“he was persevilience in human form, and is now persevilience personified in historical form, for all time”). And whereas Campbell thinks perseverance and resilience are “words of drudge and struggle”, persevilience “is all about hope and progress”, requiring regular doses of optimism and joy.

If you focused only on these particular sections of the book, you might conclude that persevilience is distinguished from its more mundane ancestors by being aimed only at noble social causes, and thrillingly set to “Things Can Only Get Better” by D:Ream. But here we hit a bump in the road; for after a lot of uplifting, air-punching rhetoric, Campbell suddenly admits that persevilience can be dedicated to nefarious ends too.

Through evidently gritted teeth, he states that sworn foes such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage — regularly excoriated on The Rest is Politics — also make the cut. Trump has survived scandals and shootings; Farage has weathered a car crash and a plane crash; both have achieved great political success. Campbell does not flinch from his unpleasant conclusion: “I must reluctantly accept that I cannot stop [persevilience] being applied to certain people just because I disagree with their politics or don’t like the cut of their jib”.

At this point, I longed to ask: but why must you accept this, Alastair? You have made this whole thing up, after all. Can’t you just make it refer to whatever you want? You don’t need to allow that there is, by your own lights, evil in persevilience (even if, as a matter of spelling, this is literally true). It’s your word!

Yet still our hero insists on facing the unwanted conclusion: “persevilience can be used for bad as well as good, wrong as well as right”. And with this admission, the book collapses; for its main selling point was clearly conceived as a guide to changing the world for the better, in a soggy, progressive sort of way. It wasn’t supposed to turn into The Art of the Deal halfway through.

In some ways, it seems absurd to be seriously analyzing this stuff. As the narrative meanders along, the combination of the author’s fierce commitment to his project and frequent repetition of the word “persevilience” becomes exponentially ridiculous and Partridge-like, at times reducing this reader to shoulder-shaking hysteria. How the man could type sentences like “Complacency is a killer of a persevilient mindset” without cracking up entirely, I do not know. Yet at the same time, the book illustrates an interesting fact about modern conceptions of virtuous characteristics, albeit inadvertently: namely, nobody knows whether they are supposed to be valuable as means or as ends.

In antiquity, aspects such as courage and temperance were self-evidently admirable; constituents of a flourishing life, by definition. In early Christianity, too, habits such as charity and prudence were not just the means of getting something from God; on the contrary, they were beautiful and holy in themselves. But as centuries passed, Western culture started to lose the idea that human characteristics could be admirable in this way, regardless of what they led to. Instead, behaviors and attitudes seemed to get their value from contributing to wider desirable ends, either socially or economically or both.

In Victorian times, for instance, industriousness, thrift, and sobriety were prized; each conceived of as likely leading to a more harmonious, economically productive whole. But since the relation between virtue and value was now extrinsic, it followed that you could sometimes use virtuous habits and attitudes for bad ends as well as for good. Industry, thrift, and sobriety could sometimes help evildoers reach their goals more quickly, just as they helped more saintly types.

In today’s liberal and post-Christian climate, neither approach to virtue sits particularly well. There is little agreement about wider social or economic ends: do we want growth, or degrowth? Assimilated social cohesion, or a riot of individuality? Without consensus on shared aims, there is zero chance of agreeing on a particular set of “virtuous” attitudes and behaviors that might count as a useful means — as a useful means to what, exactly? And at the same time, without a classical-style or religious metaphysics, it is hard to justify the lingering sense that some habits and behaviors are just more admirable than others, full stop.

As Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out, what we are left with is a set of outdated intuitions about the virtues, orphaned from the cultural traditions in which they found their original meaning. We can’t decide whether habits like perseverance and resilience are genuinely good in themselves, or whether they inherit their value (or not) from the social goals to which they are directed. And so it is that Campbell’s heart wants to construe persevilience as the preserve of deeply admirable heroes, while his head puzzledly concedes that arch-enemies can be persevilient too.

The lack of grounding is also apparent in his incredibly vague wording about what persevilience really is, and about what it can lead to — the finding of “meaning, purpose, and life satisfaction”, as he puts it at one point. As long as you can’t specify what these things are much more concretely, you leave open the awful possibility — presumably personally devastating to Campbell — that Donald Trump has meaning, purpose, and life satisfaction too.

On the plus side, this also means that the terrifying technocratic future Campbell enthusiastically conjures — a place where principals instruct their students about persevilience, and businesses do “persevilience audit[s]” — is unlikely. Surely even the civil service couldn’t operationalize something this chronically vague. Take my word for it: if you ever hear persevilience being talked about somewhere other than The Rest is Politics, it will be a sign that we are absolutely scrucked.

“The Rest is Fest” is a three-day live podcasting event organized by Goalhanger, the media company co-founded by Gary Lineker in 2014 that is currently the largest producer of podcasts in the UK. Its most popular podcast — The Rest is History, in which co-hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland chattily extemporize their way through some genuinely fascinating material, from the Costa Rican Civil War, to the truth behind the lost city of Atlantis, to history’s “Top Ten Eunuchs” — boasts nearly 20 million downloads per month. Close behind is The Rest is Politics, hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, with over 10 million; and even the least popular shows in the Goalhanger stable have listener-counts comfortably in the millions. Last year, Goalhanger turned over nearly £38 million, making it the UK’s fastest-growing private company. All in all, its podcasts were listened to three quarters of a billion times.

Who, exactly, are these listeners? Before attending, I had naïvely assumed that most of the patrons of The Rest is Fest would be people with a huge, insatiable interest in one specific thing, for whom Goalhanger was simply catering to a pre-existing need: men in anoraks for The Rest is History; culture vultures for The Rest is Entertainment; super fans for The Rest is Football. But in fact, most of my fellow audience members seemed to view Goalhanger as something more akin to the heir to mainstream mass entertainment, navigating instinctively to any podcast with “The Rest is…” in its title in the same, thoughtless way people once flicked on BBC One. One woman I spoke to claimed to listen to all the Goalhanger offerings: “I barely listen to music at all these days,” she said proudly. Several others admitted that they barely even bothered with non-fiction books any more — which one suspects might have something to do with the fact that last year, non-fiction sales reached their lowest levels since 2014. 

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How concerned should we be about this transition? Most of the listeners I spoke to were pretty confident in the mind-sharpening power of their podcasts. One gentleman explained to me that his days used to be filled with “dead time”, whereas now he could spend every minute of every day learning — most recently via a five-part The Rest is History special about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. When I asked him what he had learned from his eight or nine hours’ immersion, he gave me a panicked look. He couldn’t remember too much, he admitted. But Dominic Sandbrook did do a very funny impression of Ian Paisley. 

I suspect this episode might be more revealing than the attendees of the Rest is Fest would like to admit. Podcasts are, as a form, curiously Lethean: you can sit through hour after hour of some “deep-dive” on the battles between the Scythians and the Persians, and still end up with no idea where the Scythians were from, or when the Persians lived, and what they were even fighting about anyway. Walter Ong, the great theorist of the differences between oral and literate cultures, gave a useful description of what might be happening: in oral forms, certain prominent features of written narrative — detailed chronologies, scientific facts, complex causal relationships — are difficult to transmit. What the listener tends to take away from oral forms, instead, are intangible convictions of character and vibe. Modern historiography becomes great-man history; political science gives way to slogans and formulas. In the land of the podcast, simplicity reigns. 

Massive simplification and sloganeering was certainly the order of the day at the Rest is Fest. In the case of the live recording of The Rest is Politics: US, hosted by the US-based journalist Katty Kay and Donald Trump’s notoriously short-lived communications director Anthony Scaramucci, this made for rather good fun. Scaramucci was on fine form, flitting between CNN-style Trump-bashing and winning self-deprecation (“my hair is what they refer to as ‘Latin-American-dictator-brown’”). Kay, meanwhile, gamely fielded the questions the audience had submitted via the massive QR code that loomed above the stage — “Kiss, marry, kill: Vance, Rubio, Trump?” — to all kinds of happy braying from the audience. But by the time I got to the live recording of Empire: World History, a kind of orientalist spinoff of The Rest is History hosted by Anita Anand and the kurta-clad William Dalrymple, things were more fractious. At one point, when the discussion turned to the Iranian Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, a woman near the front got up and started screaming: “He’s our only hope! Our only hope!” Soon, the word “Israel” had been mentioned, and the whole room had descended into boos and hisses, and any hope of “disagreeing agreeably”, as The Rest is Politics’s own self-congratulatory slogan has it, was lost. 

In fact, the more time I spent at the Rest is Fest, the more I began to wonder whether there might not be something slightly paradoxical about the whole Goalhanger project. On the one hand, the podcast as a form obviously favors a certain, simplified, vibes-based conception of the world, that turns all manner of technical disputes into highly personal confrontations. The Rest is Politics interview format, for instance, encourages its listeners to ascribe every policy proposal to a nice, relatable human face. This has some value: political discourse in the UK can tend towards the bloodless and the pedantic, and if the ultimate consequence of companies like Goalhanger is to bring a bit of antagonism back into the political and intellectual discourse of this country, to induce more people to stand up and shout at the mandarins in front of them, to remind people that the rules and procedures by which they are governed might depend on acts of human will, then they can be considered, at least in some ways, a success. 

Except, of course, antagonism and truculence are the very things that the Goalhanger project claims to be trying to expunge from the discourse. After all, if there is one feature that unites the Goalhanger brand, it is a stated commitment to politeness and civility — a conviction that however strenuously people might disagree with each other, they can always adhere to the rules of bourgeois etiquette while doing so. Lineker has actually singled out this dogged commitment to good manners as the reason for the company’s success on several occasions: “There is so much tribalism and division,” he said in a 2023 interview, “it feels as if those who shout loudest get the attention.” His co-founder, Tony Pastor, agreed: “We don’t have people shouting at each other from different positions. We always try to maintain a civility of tone: our phrase is, ‘We disagree agreeably.’” Which, of course, begs a question: if the podcast as a form favors one mode of expression, and the founders of Goalhanger favor another mode of expression, then which of them will win the eventual tussle?

By the time I settled in my seat for my final stop of the day — the live performance of The Rest is Politics in the Royal Festival Hall that was to cap off the Rest is Fest weekend — it had begun to dawn on me that the real reason why the “Rest is…” brand seems to work so well is because what its partisans tend to refer to as “agreeable disagreement” is actually something else entirely. Up on the stage, the hosts chattered on predictably for a while: Rory Stewart apparently angling for some kind of Nick-Clegg-style Silicon Valley sinecure; Alastair Campbell unable to resist a little barb at the media about their hounding of Jason Arday, apparently forgetting some of the media-hounding he had partaken of himself. But it soon became clear that the real excitement was to be supplied by two very special guests: one Israeli and one Palestinian, who had, despite their bereavements, collaborated together to form an NGO. 

Together, the guests mounted the stage and embraced Campbell and Stewart warmly, to a smattering of cheers up in the circle. Then they embraced each other: there were howls of approbation now, filling the hall, from the orchestra pit to the concrete rafters. One of them was passed a microphone; he said something about “working together”, I think, though I could barely hear through the tsunami of applause. The microphone went to the other speaker: he said something about “building bridges”, but it was drowned out by a hoot behind me. The atmosphere was far from “agreeable” now, the audience climbing to their feet, whooping and hollering like they were at a pantomime. But this wasn’t exactly “disagreeable disagreement” either. How could it be, when everyone in that hall, everyone at the festival, everyone listening remotely over the airwaves, everyone in the entire Goalhanger family, agreed with each other already?