Best of frenemies: do centrist podcasts mark end of political divide?

Former Tory chancellor George Osborne and Labour’s one-time shadow chancellor Ed Balls will launch a podcast called “Political Currency” this week.

The “enormous financial success” of “The Rest Is Politics”, which is hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart, has shown the potential for podcasts that “market themselves at a centrist audience” and “promise to reach across the political divide”, said The Guardian.

But do they represent a wider era of political consensus?

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Dinner table disagreement

The trend for such podcasts shows we are living through a “centrist Restoration”, wrote Juliet Jacques for Novara Media. The “effort to manufacture consent for the restored status quo must be made on all fronts”, she said, including podcasts.

For Balls and Osborne, she argued, politics is “not a matter of life and death due to fundamentally opposed class interests”, but a “dinner table disagreement on which we are graciously allowed to eavesdrop”.

“Central to the format” of such pods, wrote Aditya Chakrabortty for The Guardian, is that “the silverbacks come from either side of a political divide spanning no more than two inches”. They “cannot be too left or too right”, he added, and “they must disagree, but agreeably”.

Centrist dads

This chumminess might not represent a wider sea-change, some argue. Osborne and Balls are “no more likely than Rory and Alastair to be at each other’s throats”, wrote Tom Crewe for the London Review of Books, because “it’s easy, when you don’t have responsibility, to make a career out of open-minded reasonableness”.

Politics “should be what happens when vying social and economic interests find expression in protest and petition, disagreement and debate”, agreed Crewe, and the public doesn’t want a government “that thinks it’s a podcast”.

“Not another one,” groaned Ethan Croft on UnHerd, as he regretted that the new show will be added to the “roster of podcasts presented by two middle-aged blokes and catered to centrist dads”.

The hosts will “sound off” about the “failure of their successors and the disarray of a political atmosphere that rejected their ideas”, he predicted, but they “will not – and cannot – stray” beyond their basic positions, so there is no progress.

Is a “profound sense of disenfranchisement and alienation” on the part of voters going to be “ameliorated by listening to a pair of chummy politicians talk larkily about the most important issues of the day?” wondered Eliot Wilson on the i news site.

There is a “real danger that this becomes another hermetic salon” in which members of the establishment debate “warmly comforting and centrist opinions” in “another echo chamber”, he added.