Alastair Campbell’s diary: Why Mark Carney is one of the luckiest politicians alive

First up Canada, April 28, when, all being well, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney will lead the Liberal Party to victory and establish himself as one of the luckiest politicians alive. Not that long ago, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was enjoying almost Starmer 2024-style leads over struggling prime minister Justin Trudeau. But Trudeau’s departure, Carney’s immediate ascent out of nowhere to the top of their party, alongside Trump’s virtual declaration of war against Canada, have combined to turn things right around.

I am not a betting man, but I feel very confident that before the month is out, the election will have been won by the first Canadian prime minister ever to have visited Burnley’s Turf Moor stadium. History!

You see, for family reasons Carney is a lifelong Everton fan and last year I took him to see his team play mine. They won, helping to propel us towards relegation.

On the way there and back, we talked about what it would take to get him to throw his hat in the Canadian political ring. Back then, I would have put it at well under 50-50. But everything just fell into place. The role of luck in political ascent should never be underestimated.

I was also touched to learn, when finally he went for it, that my book, But What Can I Do?, which urged anyone who could make a difference in politics to do so, had played a part in getting his head right above the parapet.

So it could well be that just days apart, Burnley get promoted back to the Premier League, and Carney wins the election. In which case, I hope I can persuade him to revisit Turf Moor, not as the unemployed Bank governor he was, but as the serving PM of a G7 country engaged in an existential battle with Trump’s US.

Next up, on May 3, general elections in Australia and Singapore. If he retains his position as prime minister, Anthony Albanese will be the first Labor PM to be re-elected since Bob Hawke, who dominated Aussie politics in the 1980s, and the first Australian of any political colour to do so since John Howard, PM from 1996-2007. 

This too will be quite a turnaround, given there was a time when Peter Dutton, Howard’s successor as Liberal Party leader – the Aussies’ version of our Tory Party – looked like he was a genuine threat. But the bookies’ odds are now so short for Albo, they seem to think it is all over.

Yet again, the US election has been a factor, Dutton having long portrayed himself as an anti-woke strongman leader, a vogue losing its appeal somewhat now Trump is back in the White House. Indeed, Dutton has shifted – I paraphrase – from “I’m the man to get on with Trump”, pre tariffs, to “I’ve never met the guy, and unlike Albo never spoken to him.” Too late, too clumsy.

If luck is an important political commodity, so is confidence, and when Albanese was our guest on The Rest Is Politics at the weekend, that confidence was flowing.

Election campaigns are exhausting, even more so when your campaign space is as vast as Australia, and the leaders have to fly here, there and everywhere. But he looked lively and energetic, made no effort to find out what we intended to ask him, set no time limit, and gave no sense of the chronic anxiety which tends to stalk candidates at election time. 

Indeed, off air, he was fretting that all the media talk of a Dutton collapse risked making people think it didn’t matter if they voted Labor or not. Luck good. Confidence good. Complacency lethal.

Though Carney and Albanese will not be able to rest easy until all the votes are in, it really would be a miracle if Singaporean PM Lawrence Wong fails to win in his first election since replacing Lee Hsien Loong, the son of Lee Kuan Yew, founder of modern Singapore. 

Wong is just the fourth PM since Singapore became self-governing in 1959, and his party, the People’s Action Party, has been in power all that time, winning the last election with 61 pe rcent of the vote (low by their standards!)

When I first met him, he was a private secretary to Lee Hsien Loong, and has been through a number of senior government positions before becoming PM. He is, in common with many members of the best paid, often head-hunted, Cabinet in the world, very clever.

I wish I had space here to do justice to the speech he made in Parliament, responding to Trump’s tariffs. Look it up. It was one of the best global leader reactions – calling out protectionism for what it is, but laying out clear plans for his own country to deal with it.

And if you do find time to Google him, look up his guitar playing too. Albo is a massive rock music fan. Wong can play it. His Taylor Swift isn’t bad either.

Last but not least, Edi Rama, who on May 11 will be seeking his fourth term as prime minster of Albania, going one better than my old boss, Tony Blair, whose winning political strategy was the reason Rama sought me out to help him when he was opposition leader. I have been less involved this time, but worked with Rama on the first three of his campaigns, during which I travelled there many times, and therefore have seen the steady transformation of what was until the early 1990s an impoverished Communist dictatorship.

If there is one thing that keeps him going, it is his undying belief that one day Albania and other Balkan States will be fully fledged members of the European Union. It has been an up and down journey so far, and given EU membership has been part of his vision from Day One, you might expect support for the idea – and for him – would wane on the back of the failure, thus far, to deliver it.

But trust in the EU, according to the regular Eurobarometer survey, remains higher in the Balkans than in the EU itself, and highest of all in Albania. On average, 51 per cent of Europeans say they trust the EU, the highest score since 2007. In Albania, the figure is 81 per cent, while 83 per cent of Albanian citizens believe that EU membership would be a good thing. They’re not wrong.