When Grace Campbell first dipped her toe into comedy, it became clear she had to address the elephant in the room: her father, Alastair Campbell.
‘I had to acknowledge it,’ she says. ‘I was 24 when I first ever performed at Edinburgh so what else did I have to talk about? I had no other life experience at that point so I will own the nepo baby thing before anyone else can say about me, especially now he’s like relevant again.’
As Grace was climbing the ranks of comedy, former Labour spin doctor and Tony Blair’s right-hand man Alastair was unexpectedly becoming the kingpin of podcasting. His image transformed from a cut-throat voice in the Prime Minister’s ear to the gentle, soft and rational voice of politics alongside Rory Stewart on The Rest Is Politics, currently the most-listened-to podcast in the UK.
‘It’s so weird. Teenagers love him,’ she laughs.
But despite never running away from the nepo baby label, Grace has firmly become one of the most important and most-followed new voices in comedy. The Spectator once described her as a ‘Neponymphomaniac’ because of her frank and honest sets about her sex life.
It was her friend and comedian Sophie Duker who encouraged her to give stand-up a go. When she booked her first gig, she spent the whole day feeling sick with nerves. ‘And then there was an audience of two: my best friends, and then the other acts.’
But she was a hit, albeit with her two best friends, and so the confidence grew quicker than perhaps it should have done.
‘My second gig was a competition and the best person got to go through to some other show so loads of my friends came to that. I was so arrogant and told everyone to come but stupidly got quite drunk before, and I’ve never drunk before a gig again after this. A group of men were giving me s**t, so I poured a glass of wine on them.’
Her last show, Grace Campbell Is On Heat, laid out the reality of being a Millennial woman bare: non-monogamy, mental health, being a woman visible on the internet.
But while she was writing the show, she had an abortion, and the show changed direction to explore the depression that followed and celebrate the women who carried her afterwards. She laughs the pain off now: ‘My dog had come on heat, then I got pregnant, had an abortion and was like, “Oh, perfect! The name really does fit the show.”’
She’s currently on the road again with her new tour, The Lady Is a Tramp. I ask for an example of when she’s lived up to the title of the show. After a few seconds of flicking through the mental scrapbook of her life, she grins: ‘I had sex on the periphery of the Vatican.’
The Lady Is a Tramp debuted to rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe this summer. It was inspired by a conversation with an older comedian who told Grace her approach to comedy was ‘lazy’ and if she kept talking about sex so much she would never break into the mainstream. Ironically, this tour will see Grace playing one of the biggest headlining gigs of her career at the London Palladium, which is, by definition, incredibly mainstream.
‘The show is about people’s perceptions of me and how I absorb what everybody thinks about me, whether it’s online or men I’m dating or friends,’ she says. ‘There’s a story of a man in a sauna who tells me my voice is so annoying that it’s giving him a psychosis, and by the end it’s about the duality of me basically. The lady is a tramp: I’m together and I’m also not.’
The juxtaposition of a woman who doesn’t disguise her messy truth with one who is so effortlessly articulate when it comes to social justice and politics, and who can blisteringly take down right-wing men, is, in part, what has made her brand so successful.
Her ranking of Andrew Tate outfits was one of many Grace Campbell clips to go viral this year, but listen to her on most podcasts and, like her father, she’s incredibly soft and gentle too.
I try not to bring Alastair up too much, but she often does so without any prompt. Her pride in him is only rivalled by his pride in her: He regularly brings Grace up on The Rest Is Politics. Her anarchic comedy could be confronting for some parents to hear, but Alastair remains one of her loudest cheerleaders.
‘My dad was desperate to see me perform,’ she recalls of when she first broke it to her parents that she was going to be a comedian. ‘My mum is very proud, but she’s very anxious. She can’t watch me without picking up on my nerves. When she saw me at Ally Pally on my first tour, she said, “I could tell your mouth was dry the whole time.”’
It’s clear what impact her father’s politics have had on her. She is very firmly on the left and is, above anything else, driven by her morals. When we speak, it’s the day after Alastair’s co-host Rory has gone viral for his dramatic death stare on Newsnight, and she cackles telling me she’s sent every meme on social media to her dad.
It’s also the week after Ed Sheeran returned to the stage following the removal of Macklemore from his tour for saying ‘Free Palestine’. The Shape of You singer, who has up to now got away with being the single most uncontroversial pop star imaginable, was widely criticised for ‘self-victimising’ during his statement, in which he cried on stage and doubled down on his belief that he should be ‘apolitical’.
Grace is the antithesis of apolitical and, though hesitant to talk about it, reveals she put her staunch beliefs before her dream opportunity just last year when she was offered the chance to support US talk show host and one of her idols Chelsea Handler, who has pledged her support for Israel and been confronted by protesters at her shows.
‘I pulled out of doing Chelsea Handler’s tour last year because of Palestine,’ she says. ‘Some people were telling me not to do that but I just felt instinctively it was the right thing to do. People were worried about the repercussions dropping out was going to have for me.
‘When I agreed, I just had no idea which is my fault for being ignorant. It’s not even about me. It’s the fact that I know that anyone who is still defending what’s going on now, it’s gonna age so f**king badly.’
If her father’s politics run through her veins, how has she influenced him?
‘The fact that J.K. Rowling hates both my dad and me is something I’m proud of,’ she says, ‘He didn’t even know how to talk about like a conversation about transgender people and now we speak about it so casually. One of the things that really helped him understand it was I would say I don’t ever feel a physical threat from trans people, I feel physically threatened by straight men.
‘I’m really really proud of him with that. I’ve had lots of people who historically have hated my dad contact me and say, “You can tell that you’ve had a good influence on him.”’
Grace Campbell: The Lady Is a Tramp is touring the UK now and comes to the London Palladium on November 7.