The battle of the middle of the road political podcasts

By Brian Clegg

Every morning I listen to a podcast on my walk, and more often than not it’s a UK political podcast. Where once they were sparse, there are now huge numbers of middle of the road podcasts to suit my taste – but I have found that some old favourites have become less appetising, displaced by newcomers.

The first to drop off its perch was the BBC’s Newscast. I’m generally a supporter of the BBC, if not the licence fee (or some of its recent news reporting), but the whole point of a news podcast is to be able to be more informal and get away from the restraints of conventional media. The presenters of Newscast are certainly informal, but they dance around issues because of the BBC’s efforts to keep to its sometimes strange ideas of what being impartial is. Also they rarely dig into anything with the depth that a podcast can offer – they cover too many topics, as they aren’t pure politics.

The second that I’m losing patience with is The News Agents. I always really enjoyed Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel as the heart of the BBC’s Americast (which was a lot better than Newscast) – initially, their podcast with Lewis Goodall was a comparable mix of entertainment and insight. However, its middle-of-the-road positioning seems to have drifted to the left – Goodall particularly has some left-of-Labour views that can come through strongly, and it seems to have lost the idea that a podcast has to be entertaining as well as informative. Interestingly, their US spinoff (without Goodall) is much better.

A podcast I’ve only dipped into recently is the fairly longstanding The Rest is Politics. The concept seems appealing – it brings together a Labour and a Conservative ex-politician – Alastair Campbell, Labour’s former spin doctor, and former junior cabinet minister Rory Stewart to chat over political issues, able to debate the topic from both sides. Unfortunately, I find both of them irritating and self-congratulatory, and they are both almost identically placed on the political spectrum, so there is no real debate. That’s another one for the dustbin.

I’ve replaced The Rest is Politics with what could have been an upstart copycat: Political Currency. The format is very similar, but first of all this gives us two top end former politicians, the ex-Conservative Chancellor, George Osborne, and the ex-Labour shadow chancellor Ed Balls. They are far more likeable than the other two, have more real experience to draw on, and do actually disagree about things. There was considerable criticism after the first episode – I didn’t bother to listen to this, as it was bound to be a bit bumpy, but the remainder have, for me, far outpaced Campbell and Stewart.

A final offering is the podcast I’ve stayed with longest – Times Radio’s Red Box. To those who have an aversion to all things Murdoch, this might seem a ridiculous thing to label middle of the road, but it very much is. Presenter Matt Chorley has a wonderful light touch and sees the humour of politics, while the columnists who open each podcast are always very much middle of the road, but with enough individualism to not always agree. The show then features a ‘big thing’ item, which varies from an annotated version of Prime Minister’s Questions, or a monthly focus group to pieces on unlikely topics (most recently ‘secrets of a political cartoonist’), which I often don’t think I’ll enjoy, but in reality find really interesting.

There are, of course many others out there, but we are seeing a real distinction between the best and the also-rans emerge.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.