And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN, the Axviles, with your

host, David Axelrod.

I first met Douglas Alexander when I was consulting on the labor campaign in Britain in 2015,

and he was chairman of that campaign, a senior member of Parliament, the Shadow Foreign

Minister, and he was swept away in the tsunami that overtook labor in that election, lost

his seat in Scotland, but remains a really incisive observer, commentator on the politics of

Europe and the US, where he visited the Institute of Politics this week.

I sat down with Douglas to talk about the election that was just held here in the context

of Brexit and some of the other elections we've seen to contemplate where we are and where

we're headed.

Douglas Alexander, first of all, thank you for being at the

Institute of Politics.

We've known each other now through the labor campaign in Britain in 2015, but for all the

time that we spent together, I never really asked you how you came to be interested in politics

and how you grew up and I'm interested in that.

Well, for me, politics was always about serving a community and serving a cause.

My father was a minister in the Church of Scotland for more than 40 years.

My mother was a doctor in the National Health Service, so they were not active politically

in the sense of standing for elective office, but a sense of service animated the conversation

around the kitchen table and the man's that I grew up in.

And they had a powerful sense of, I think, inspired by their Christian values, a powerful

sense of service that they gave to their children of which I was one.

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