Blowing his own bagpipes. (Niall Carson/Getty)
Remaniac, infotainer, mansplainer: these are just some of the portmanteau words used to describe Alastair Campbell over the years. The man himself would prefer we ascribe a new quality to him — “persevilience” — and has written a book of the same name to tell us why. What first began “when a word popped into my head” has since become an obsessive quest: to get persevilience into our heads too, as an appropriately modern virtue for these difficult times. “Language evolves”, Campbell solemnly tells us, and with this book he wants to give it an extra push.
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 emphasises 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.
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 analysing 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, behaviours 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 behaviours 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 behaviours 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 headteachers instruct their pupils about persevilience, and businesses do “persevilience audit[s]” — is unlikely. Surely even the civil service couldn’t operationalise 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.
