146. Putin vs. Prigozhin, the power of Lebedev, and the battle for Southeast Asia

Is this the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin? Did Boris Johnson overrule MI6 during his time as Prime Minister? Will Sunak be able to control inflation? Rory and Alastair answer these questions, plus look at the situation in Cambodia, political activism in Guatemala, Rory's time in the Foreign Office, and much more. TRIP LIVE - Royal Albert Hall - 14th December: Sign up to TRIP Plus below to access today's 10am member presale for our Royal Albert Hall show this December. If you're not interested in becoming a member, we'll tweet a link to the general sale at 10am on Friday 30th June from @RestIsPolitics. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to become a member, or start a free trial today through Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:32Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:36Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:37Rory Stewart?

  And Alistair, a lot to get through today. We're going to begin, of course, with Russia-Ukraine because we're right in the aftermath of this mutiny by the Wagner or the Wagner Group. Then we're going to talk about Boris Johnson's relationship with Russia, and in particular with a man called Lord Levadov. Then we're going to talk about interest rates and what's happening in the British economy. And then we're going to talk a little bit about Southeast Asia and what's happening in Southeast Asia, a region we haven't studied much. But where would you like to begin?

• 2:06Alastair Campbell?

  Well, let's start with, you're a Wagner man and I'm a Wagner. Wagner man.

• 2:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, yes, it's a funny one there. I mean, obviously, the German composer is called Wagner. But for some reason, a lot of the Russian analysts that I talked to call it Wagner. So I'll need to get to the bottom of this.

• 2:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's probably because they've named it. Is it not named after Wagner?

• 2:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, there's a lot of, nobody will say. So neither, neither its founder nor its owner is prepared to say what it's named after or why it's called that.

• 2:32Alastair Campbell?

  It might just be a set of letters if I have nothing to do with the great, the great somewhat right wing musician. Now, yeah, well, you said, when we did the emergency podcast at the weekend, you said something quite interesting. You said this could turn out to be sort of fizzle out in no time. I think we were talking days, or it could become a major turning point in the whole conflict. I mean, at the moment, it looks like fizzle out, but at the same time, listening to people like Alex Younger, the head of, former head of MI6 and listening to Secretary of State Tony Blinken yesterday and other analysts, they seem to be thinking it's like, if not a turning point,

• 3:16Alastair Campbell?

  quite a big moment in the decline of Putin.

• 3:19Rory Stewart?

  It's unbelievable, isn't it? So just to remind listeners very quickly what happened since our emergency podcast. So Prigozhin got quite a long way, or at least his people got a surprisingly long way up the road towards Moscow.

• 3:33Alastair Campbell?

  Up the M4.

• 3:34Rory Stewart?

  Up the M4, that's it. Looked as though the National Guard, which was this, these interior ministry troops that were meant to be defending Putin, were not really intervening. They were falling back. There was footage of Moscow apparently being prepared for defence against their attack. And then suddenly, that evening, an announcement came that the president of Belarus had negotiated with Prigozhin, negotiated with a man that runs the Wagner Wagner Group, and that Prigozhin had decided that in the interests of peace and stability, he was going to turn his troops around. He was going to go into what seems to be exile, probably in Belarus. And the whole thing was over. There's been some great descriptions by Steve Rosenberg, who's been going through. Steve Rosenberg

• 4:19Rory Stewart?

  is Alastair's hero, who's a great musician, but also the long term BBC correspondent in Moscow. Who's been going through the Russian newspapers.

• 4:28Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 4:28Rory Stewart?

  And there's been some extraordinary reporting there because as you can imagine, they are basically saying, this is insane. This is the most terrible humiliation to the state, except for the most loyal Kremlin newspaper, which of course saying, this shows the incredible genius of Vladimir Putin, his stock will rise in the world because he alone managed to bring this thing to an end. Anyway, what's your sense about how Putin comes out of this?

• 4:50Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think anybody comes out of it terribly well. Neither Prigozhin, who did his sort of Bonnie Prince Charlie up as far as Derby and then turned around. And but also I think it does weaken Putin. I, as you know, am in pretty regular contact with the opposition or the exiled opposition in Belarus. And I was talking to them yesterday and again today. And they actually think that, because Lukashenko, you have to remember, is pretty much the only one left.

• 5:17Rory Stewart?

  President of Belarus.

• 5:18Alastair Campbell?

  President of Belarus. He's the only one left over whom, if you like, Putin has complete control. So Lukashenko is trying to sort of present himself as the sort of, you know, the mediator in this. But actually, what his opposition is saying is that this was Putin basically ordering him to to be the person that they could say was doing this so that Putin didn't have to look like he was operating on a par with somebody like like Prigozhin. They believe that that Prigozhin will not be able to stay in Belarus. That Lukashenko doesn't want him there, that he could cause just as much trouble for him as he's been doing for Putin. Thinks that he'll do some kind of deal with him, probably financial, to get him out of the country and get him to to Africa.

• 6:02Alastair Campbell?

  And also that that they do think that this has weakened both Putin and Lukashenko. Their big thing now is they they've still been trying to get Lukashenko indicted by the International Criminal Court. And partly over some of the the sort of, you know, using getting children in there and all that stuff. So the truth is, I don't think any of us know, including Steve Rosenberg. I think hero overstates it, but he's a very, very good journalist. And and I'll tell you the thing that I would, I would strongly recommend if you don't already, people should follow Gary Kasparov. Gary Kasparov, the former great chess grandmaster, who I know quite well, I interviewed him for my winner's book. And I've interviewed him a couple of times since for different places. And he he's the guy who coined the phrase mafia state.

• 6:47Alastair Campbell?

  And he is basically saying, anything that comes out of the Kremlin now is almost certainly untrue. And he also says that, it's interesting, he basically says that there's nothing that can emerge in the immediate aftermath of Putin that actually the West can or should treat with. In a sense, I guess, suggesting there has to be collapse before people can actually start to rebuild.

• 7:09Rory Stewart?

  And you've raised this issue of Belarus, which we should maybe talk about at more length on another occasion because it's fascinating. So Lukashenko has been in since 1994 and it is the last great autocracy on the edge of democratic Europe in this bizarre union with Russia. Lukashenko looked as though he was in trouble a few months ago, but actually clamped down. He has been involved in these extraordinary moves of trying to shove refugees across the border to disrupt the Polish border. And my connection with it, I was briefly up to be the British ambassador to Belarus.

• 7:50Alastair Campbell?

  Were you?

• 7:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, in the mid 2000s.

• 7:53Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, right.

• 7:53Rory Stewart?

  And I was fascinated by this possibility.

• 7:56Alastair Campbell?

  Were we still in power then? Were we responsible?

• 7:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I would have been one of your ambassadors. Yes, exactly. That's right. Exactly. This is 2005. So I was very excited by the idea because at that time, people were very optimistic and people thought it could be an incredible job. You'd go into Belarus, it's 2005, and you'd be part of the movement to get the last dictatorship on the edge of Europe, you know, moving towards democracy, potentially even joining the European Union and all this kind of thing. And here we are, of course, almost 20 years later.

• 8:26Alastair Campbell?

  And he's still there.

• 8:26Rory Stewart?

  Lukashenko is still there, yeah.

• 8:27Alastair Campbell?

  And what's more, do you remember when we talked about this before, we talked about the guy, I can't remember his name now, but the guy who was where the Belarusians essentially hijacked a plane and got that guy who'd been a kind of, you know, big critic of the regime. He's now out there on social media the whole time, basically as a spokesman for the regime. So now Lukashenko is a strong man on one level, but what these guys are saying, he's utterly dependent on Putin, therefore will do whatever Putin tells him, whether that is providing Belarus's military infrastructure to help with the bombing campaign, the illegal deportation of the Ukrainian children or being the middleman in these talks with with Prigozhin. Just out of interest, Rory, why didn't you go to Belarus?

• 9:09Rory Stewart?

  In the end, I was persuaded to go to Afghanistan instead, so I went off to set up the charity in Afghanistan.

• 9:14Alastair Campbell?

  I think your book Walking Across Belarus would have been less less of an international bestseller.

• 9:19Rory Stewart?

  Lot, lot of potatoes. I, I, I think maybe one conclusion we can take from this is a reminder of the fact that the Russian state is still stronger than some people believe, that ultimately Prigozhin must have calculated, a bit like your friend Bonnie Prince Charlie on at Derby, that actually there was no way of making it to the capital city.

• 9:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and that must have been, but was that not obvious to him from the word go?

• 9:48Rory Stewart?

  Which should have been 25,000 soldiers marching up against half a million interior ministry troops.

• 9:53Alastair Campbell?

  Apparently only five that were actually there when at the time of the turnaround. That's like a Burnley away turnout, you know, when we're playing, when we're playing Preston North End, but it's not exactly. I mean, it's a big size of growing people, but you're not going to take on the Russian army.

• 10:08Rory Stewart?

  So this is also a reminder of the challenge that the Ukrainians are going to face in their counteroffensive. So this has been much, much talked about for many months now. And what we've seen is Zelensky travelling around the world, acquiring aircraft and tanks and many other things. And the whole idea, and this is something we'll be talking to General David Petraeus about on leading very soon, is to put together this huge all arms offensive to try to drive through. But a couple of things, one is that the breaking of the dam by the Russians has meant that they don't need to worry so much about a lot of their flank, which is now flooded with water. So they can concentrate up on the northern edge of their flank. The second thing is that there isn't still much air power on the side of the Ukrainians.

• 10:53Rory Stewart?

  And it's very difficult to think of a historical example of a nation being able to advance against a very, very well-prepared defensive line like this. This is not like the Germans turning against the Russians in the early 1940s. The Russians have been hunkering down, there's going to be layer after layer of defence, minefield after minefield. It's going to feel, I'm afraid, much more like trying to advance on the First World War.

• 11:19Alastair Campbell?

  You know, when you said earlier that maybe we've underestimated the strength and power of the Russian state, just as a counterpoint to that, do you get Foreign Affairs magazine or do you see Foreign Affairs magazine?

• 11:31Rory Stewart?

  I do see, I've even written for Foreign Affairs magazine, I'm a big fan of Foreign Affairs.

• 11:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I like Foreign Affairs magazine and they have this thing called, I think it's from the archive, and they posted this weekend, a piece that came out right in the aftermath of the invasion. And it was by a guy called Boris Bondarev, who was, he'd been a diplomat in the Russian Foreign Ministry for 20 years. He was stationed in Geneva at the time of the invasion and he resigned.

• 11:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Alastair Campbell?

  And he wrote this piece and he's essentially defected. I think he still lives in Geneva. He tells the story of how his wife came to visit him and then had to go back and get their cat and it involved a most extraordinary sort of, you know, trip to get back safely. One of the things, the really sort of big points that he made, he said that, if, I'll just read you a very short section from his piece. "For me, one of the invasion's central lessons had to do with something I'd witnessed over the preceding two decades. What happens when a government is slowly warped by its own propaganda? For years, Russian diplomats were made to confront Washington and defend the countries meddling abroad with lies and non sequiturs. We were taught to embrace bombastic rhetoric, to uncritically parrot

• 12:41Alastair Campbell?

  to other states what the Kremlin said to us. But eventually," this is the key point, "the target audience for this propaganda was not just foreign countries, it was our own leadership. In cables and statements, we were made to tell the Kremlin that we had sold the world on Russian greatness, we had demolished the West's arguments. We had to withhold any criticism about the president's dangerous plans. This performance took place even at the ministry's highest levels." And he talked about how disappointed the Foreign Service was that Lavrov, Sergey Lavrov, the Foreign Minister, who they respected at one point, just became the ultimate total yes man.

• 13:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Get myself in huge trouble doing this because I'm aware by doing this, I seem again to be comparing Boris Johnson to Vladimir Putin. So I'd like to put it on the record, I do not think Boris Johnson to Vladimir Putin. But there is something serious about this question about speaking truth to power and letting diplomats do it. This was something that I felt Boris Johnson was beginning to do to the Foreign Office. I mean, I remember this very strongly. I came in as the Minister of State, so I was number two beneath Boris Johnson when he was Foreign Secretary.

• 13:47Alastair Campbell?

  That must be a horrible thing, Rory, to consider yourself to be beneath Boris Johnson must be, that's the lowest form of life.

• 13:52Rory Stewart?

  Pretty good. It's pretty good. And it involves wandering down a corridor once a week to this enormous office, which could have accommodated about a hundred and fifty people looking out over St. James's Park. And Boris Johnson's sitting at one end of the table with a little sort of note to the things he's trying to do this week. But one of the things that was so disturbing was that we were beginning to get reporting from our diplomats on the ground, which was saying every week, another win for global Britain. Global Britain demonstrates its success. And I eventually called in all the ambassadors from my region of the world and said, please stop doing this. This is embarrassing. Why don't you talk about some of our weaknesses, some of our failures, talk about what the US is doing, what China's doing? Don't give the impression that Britain's running the whole continent.

• 14:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Rory Stewart?

  And this got back to Boris Johnson and he called me in and it was the one time I'd actually seen him genuinely angry. And he said to me, Rory, I hear you're contradicting the instructions I'm giving to the ambassadors. So I said, look, I think it's very important that we have honest reporting. And he said, Rory, you don't understand. I used to captain rugby teams. And the way you win a rugby match is by telling the team that they're the best. You've got to boost them, get the morale going. And I said, this isn't a seventy five minute rugby match. Right, this is Britain's foreign policy.

• 15:12Alastair Campbell?

  Eighty minutes, Rory, the rugby matches are eighty minutes.

• 15:15Rory Stewart?

  Oh, thank you very much. That's good. No, that's good. Incidentally, having been teased about my complete lack of understanding of the length for a rugby match, I just want to point out to the audience for a second that Alastair showed us his dog, who was making extraordinary noise in the back of the screen. And I can reveal, for those of you who believe that his dog is a rottweiler, it is not. It is in fact Alastair A.

• 15:35Alastair Campbell?

  King Charles Spaniel.

• 15:37Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Good Tory dog, I'm afraid.

• 15:39Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 15:41Rory Stewart?

  That's what they always, that was a great thing.

• 15:43Alastair Campbell?

  They're the workers' dogs.

• 15:44Rory Stewart?

  The civil war, it was always the standoff between the Cavaliers had those spaniels and the other lot had the pugs.

• 15:49Alastair Campbell?

  Get back to your story.

• 15:50Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so I think that there is something serious here, which is that you have to allow your civil servants to dissent. And the creation of echo chambers is at the heart of everything that goes wrong in government because the general tendency of government is optimism bias, confirmation bias, everybody getting around a table, blowing smoke up the arse of the boss.

• 16:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 16:12Rory Stewart?

  And Boris Johnson was actually making this much, much, much worse.

• 16:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this other Boris, Boris Bendorov, he actually makes that very point. He said it was like living in an echo chamber. And he said it was particularly bad after the attempted assassination of Skripal in Salisbury, where if you remember, a British woman ended up being killed just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And he said that they were all basically, the telegrams were all coming in from embassies around the world saying, you know, that we've persuaded the Foreign Ministry that the British have just, this is just a conspiracy theory, it's part of Russia phobia and so forth. He said, "I saw data reports, for example, that mentioned Ukraine's non-existent biological weapons. I walked around our building, effectively a long corridor with private offices for each

• 17:00Alastair Campbell?

  diplomat, and noticed that even my smart colleagues had Russian propaganda playing on their TVs all day. It was as if they were trying to indoctrinate themselves." And that is when the state, in a sense, the function of the state collapses if you don't have the ability. Because how protected is Putin? I mean Putin was, I've seen Putin's protection, I know how well protected he is, but it will be on a different level at the moment. The fact that he now has two planes flying out whenever he moves, one's the decoy and one's him on it. The fact that he is, I would suspect, and we mentioned on Saturday, a lot of people have pointed out now, that he looked genuinely quite... Not scared, but he looked very, very tense at the weekend.

• 17:43Alastair Campbell?

  And trying to tell the Russian people that this has been an act of strength to to send Prigozhin back with their with their tail between their legs, I think is I think is nonsense. And, you know, I don't think the Ukrainians will be sort of feeling as chipper as they were when they first heard it, because it looked like it was going to be a big moment. But at the same time, it suggests that he's been very fundamentally weakened.

• 18:03Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well.

• 18:05Alastair Campbell?

  Shall we talk about your your former boss then? The man, I can't believe that you actually had to work beneath Boris Johnson. It just feels, anyway, Roy, that must be very hard to deal with. So last night, did you did you watch the link I sent you?

• 18:18Rory Stewart?

  I did, I did. And it's an absolutely mesmerizing link. And we can get into the details of what it shows, but maybe tell listeners a little bit about what it was that you sent me and when they can actually see it, because I thought it was incredible watching.

• 18:31Alastair Campbell?

  We're recording this on Monday, and the programme goes out on Channel Four tomorrow night, Tuesday. But because I was aware of that, I asked them if they could send it to us, so that we could talk about it. So it's the story of the way that the Levadovs, this is Alexander Levadov, former KGB scabbi, and his son Evgeny, who owns newspapers in the UK and is sort of part of the London Glitterati, how they cemented their positions in British political life, including when we were in power. I'd completely forgotten that it was Peter Mandelson who was in charge of, I think, under Gordon Brown, when the the standard went through for Levadov. And he in his line was, well, who else is going to take it over? We'd like to keep the standard, etc. But then when it gets really interesting

• 19:16Alastair Campbell?

  is when you get to Boris Johnson being Foreign Secretary, then Boris Johnson being Prime Minister, and the utter obsession he has with getting Levadov Junior into the House of Lords.

• 19:28Rory Stewart?

  So let's let's just take it back for a second. So Alexander Levadov is a Russian who is the child of kind of intelligentsia parents in the Soviet Union, becomes a KGB officer, ends up as a lieutenant colonel in the embassy in London for four years. So senior person running Russian intelligence operations in London against the British, the late 80s, when he's really trying to get his head around who is the sort of people you should be recruiting and targeting in Britain. Returns after the fall of the Soviet Union and becomes in sequence a successful banker,

• 20:08Rory Stewart?

  so takes over the National Reserve Bank, ends up taking a big stake in Gazprom, big Russian gas company, which incidentally puts Schroder, the German Chancellor, onto its board.

• 20:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Rory Stewart?

  And then ends up with a third stake in Aeroflot. And of course, he and Putin were contemporaries in the KGB. And there are very, very deep, strong links between the former senior, or not senior, even some mid-level and junior KGB officers, and the current ruling elite in Russia. Because as we discussed yesterday, it's not really all about the oligarchs. In a sense, Putin got on top of the oligarchs in a way that Boris Yeltsin didn't, and replaced them with this security apparatus, including people with private armies.

• 20:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he did, he, isn't it more accurate to say that he, he allowed the oligarchs to continue enjoying their oligarchism, but with this security structure making clear that he was in charge and they had to kind of, and that's how he, that's how he became wealthy.

• 21:09Rory Stewart?

  And those that didn't play ball, like Kordikovsky, were sent off to Siberia, or Berazovsky was actually killed.

• 21:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 21:17Rory Stewart?

  So there's a very, very strong sense, and this, you, you talked about the Skripal poisonings, where Sergei Skripal, who was, I think, a GIU officer, was, was attacked with chemical weapons in Salisbury. And then, of course, you, you interviewed the widow of, of another Russian nation, killed in a London hotel.

• 21:33Alastair Campbell?

  Living in Yenka, yeah.

• 21:34Rory Stewart?

  These, and just a little plug there, you can listen to that on The Rest is Politics Leading. But these are signals from Putin that people who were KGB officers and who have made a lot of money in Russia must toe the line when it matters. And this film is very, very strong on showing that when the rubber hit the road on Crimea, for example, in 2014, so when Putin invades Crimea, this family, the Levodets, come out and basically defend what Russia is doing in Crimea. At a time when the British government, the US government, the European Union and everybody... Is saying this is unbelievably dangerous. This is the first breaking of international borders since the Second World War.

• 22:17Rory Stewart?

  And if this is allowed to happen, who knows what else might happen. And of course, we know what else happens. It directly led to the invasions of Ukraine.

• 22:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 22:25Rory Stewart?

  And they're out there doing that. They're doing that partly because they've got business interests in Crimea. They own hotels in Crimea. But also, I suspect, because he can only go so far in challenging Putin and the strategy of Putin. And then, as you say, I'm going to hand back to you here, but the moment where it becomes very weird is the moment at which he decides to buy two of the leading newspapers in Britain, the Evening Standard and the Independent, and begins to sink incredible money, you know, more than a hundred million pounds into loss-making ventures in order to control these newspapers and write op-eds in these newspapers defending Putin's position in Crimea.

• 23:00Alastair Campbell?

  And in the Standard, in particular, relentlessly propagandizing on behalf of Boris Johnson when London mayor and in subsequent stages of his career. But the the the story of of Johnson's visit post the Skripal poisoning, do you remember he was at a NATO summit? NATO had been sort of trying to agree a response as to how to react to this. You know, let's just declare what it was. It was a it was the use of chemical weapons on British soil to kill a Russian citizen, which they failed to do, but they killed a British citizen. And Johnson goes from that meeting to a party hosted by the Levadef's,

• 23:40Alastair Campbell?

  described in considerable detail on this programme, being tracked by intelligence services of Italy because they were worried about what was happening in this thing. Johnson, having got rid of his special branch protection, which I've never heard of done before. I've never heard of a a minister who is protected because they have to be protected because that is the system under which they operate. Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, one or two others are permanently protected round the clock. He ditches them. He goes off to this party. We still don't know what happened. His statement, I mean, we're used to Johnson's mealy-mouthed statements, but my God, the mealy-mouthed statement that he gives to this programme.

• 24:22Rory Stewart?

  His his statement is something like he he doesn't, he's not aware of.

• 24:25Alastair Campbell?

  He doesn't recall. He doesn't recall of any government issues being discussed at the time.

• 24:29Rory Stewart?

  So so just quickly on that one, I see. You remember that the year before, twenty seventeen. I'd been invited to go along with Boris Johnson to stay with Yevgeny Levadov in this villa. And it was amazing for me. I had literally just been appointed as the Minister of State in the Foreign Office. And one of the people who worked with Yevgeny Levadov came up to me and said, Mr. Levadov would like you to come to this lovely party in Italy.

• 24:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Rory Stewart?

  And this party was, I believe, a party that Piers Morgan has subsequently revealed Katie Price famously with Boris Johnson there at the table, took her top off at the table. It was a pretty unsuitable form of party.

• 25:10Alastair Campbell?

  Inappropriate for a British Foreign Secretary, one would think.

• 25:12Rory Stewart?

  Inappropriate. So I said to the person who approached me, I laughed. I said, come on, don't be ridiculous. I'm a British Foreign Minister. I can't go to a party hosted by the son of a former KGB agent. It's completely ridiculous. And the response was, oh, don't worry, Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary is going to be there.

• 25:29Alastair Campbell?

  It's incredible.

• 25:29Rory Stewart?

  So at the very, very least, there is something really weird. I mean, the Deputy Chair of the Italian Foreign Relations Committee on this documentary says, listen, doesn't this guy get enough invitations to parties? I mean, is it really necessary?

• 25:43Alastair Campbell?

  She said, she said, there are lots of ways to have fun.

• 25:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, if it's really necessary, is the Foreign Secretary to go to this castle with the son of a KGB agent? What's he doing?

• 25:51Alastair Campbell?

  And I don't even remember the photograph of him at the airport. Some tourist took a picture of him at the airport looking absolutely wrecked. I mean, like you guys used to look after one of your Bullingdon events. I mean, I know you only did one. I know you only did one. No, but then we get into, what I found, I think a lot of that story has already been told by much of the media. Where I think this thing got really interesting was that you had two former MI6 agents on screen, on camera, just, they could barely contain their sense of shock, exasperation, that they, the security services, having warned Johnson to, first of all, two MI6 guys went to see him to tell him face to face,

• 26:35Alastair Campbell?

  we strongly recommend you do not try to put Levadov into the House of Lords because of the family's continuing connections with the top levels of the Putin. regime. They even sent somebody to the palace to ask if the queen might intervene. And the queen apparently said that this would be that there's a risk that that would look like she was interfering in the political process. I mean, it is incredible. You had two members, you had David Clark, who was on this committee, Holac, the House of Lords Appointments Commission, saying they had never known a situation where whatever objections were put forward, the word came back from Downing Street, this has to happen. And I don't know about you, Rory, I felt slightly sick.

• 27:17Rory Stewart?

  Well, the whole thing was complete, completely bizarre.

• 27:19Alastair Campbell?

  No, when I was watching, when I was watching Lebedev, the film, I've seen it before, but watching in that context, the film of Lebedev taking his seat in the House of Lords.

• 27:28Rory Stewart?

  And being sworn in as Lord Lebedev of Siberia.

• 27:31Alastair Campbell?

  Of Siberia. It's just incredible.

• 27:33Rory Stewart?

  It's kind of extraordinary provocation.

• 27:34Alastair Campbell?

  They must have been laughing their heads off at that point, the Russians.

• 27:37Rory Stewart?

  It's completely astonishing. But can I just take it back one stage? I mean, why is it that, well, I suppose we sort of know, but it is two things. It's money and newspapers are at the key of this. And it's astonishing, the contacts and the power you get with money. When you look at those photographs of Lebedev throwing parties, you see J K Rowling there, you see Tony Blair there, you see Peter Mandelson there, you see George Osborne there, you see the editors, the major newspapers there, they're all there. And I cannot imagine why, famous actors there, what on earth do they think they're doing? I mean, I go back to this question from the deputy chair of the Italian Foreign Ministry, are there other

• 28:22Rory Stewart?

  ways to have fun rather than going to parties hosted by oligarchs?

• 28:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, maybe we can, we'll perhaps do this in the Q and A, because we did get quite a lot of questions about what we thought about Keir Starmer and Wes Streeting and others being at Murdoch's party this week, for example.

• 28:37Rory Stewart?

  Which is, which sent me, I stopped going to, even when I was running for the leadership, even when I was running, going to London.

• 28:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, fair play to you. I stopped going to those quite a while back, but not while I was there, I'll be honest.

• 28:48Rory Stewart?

  But the reason they go is that it's considered incredibly important. And sorry, just to bring it back to me, I mean, I noticed Lebedev's power in two ways. One of them was in a very sort of soft power way. When I was the Minister of the Environment in Defford, dealing with international conservation, he kept reaching out, trying to invite me to go to events in Africa on conservation of big cats. I think it was about lions. And people from his office would come and say, it's going to be amazing. It's going to be this great gathering in South African country with all these billionaires. And we're going to bring together an amazing new initiative to save the lion. So that was the approach when I was Environment Minister.

• 29:23Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 29:24Rory Stewart?

  Then, when I was running to be London Mayor, of course, getting lovely messages saying, well, from Yevgeny Levadov, saying, you know, we get WhatsApp messages. Well, we're going to have to sit down, Rory, now, I think. There's a lot to talk about. And again, the immense temptation, if I'm going to be honest, I'm running to be the independent candidate to be Mayor of London. I want endorsement. It'd be nice to have the Evening Standard coming out strongly in his favour. The temptation, which other politicians must have felt to the nth degree.

• 29:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Rory Stewart?

  And so Boris was right in this. He needed the standard, or it was very, very helpful for him to become Mayor of London, to keep his power. And somewhere along the line, he made friends with this guy, and he ultimately promised him, I guess, that he was going to make him a lord.

• 30:04Alastair Campbell?

  But if you think about what we know about the way that Johnson conducts himself anyway, think about him then, add on the context of he's got rid of his bodyguards. Heaven knows what he got up to. And one of the MI6 guys, his interviews, actually said that just the fact of doing it puts him in a vulnerable position, open to blackmail and the likes.

• 30:25Rory Stewart?

  I think it's horrifying. I'd love us to come back to this, though, because I think I'm still very, very troubled by this question of the influence of money, the influence of the media on our political system, and the way in which, and the cross-party nature of it. Why is it that actors, novelists, politicians in particular, it's politicians we have to worry about, are sucked into this horrible, horrible world of feeling they have to go and turn up to these parties, make friends with these people, and of course, the incredible influence it gives these people on directing policy?

• 30:58Alastair Campbell?

  I, by the way, just before we go to the break, I am a little bit like you. I think I'm putting myself in the same camp here. I got an approach from Lebedev. I can't remember what year it was, but I got an approach. Would I go and have lunch with him? This was after I'd left number 10. And so I went to some sort of rather odd Japanese restaurant in London and met him. And I have to be honest, I took a, he sort of gave me the creeps. I think that a beard that is that well trimmed, I'm always going to be suspicious of. The only point of having a beard to me is you never need to shave. When you have a beard and yet you clearly also shave every day or have yourself shaven, I think there's something a bit wrong. So I can't say I just didn't take the guy at all. It's the only time I

• 31:41Alastair Campbell?

  ever met him. But I remember his opening gambit was something like, you know, everybody I've met in London tells me that if I'm to understand how British politics works, I have to speak to you kind of thing. Bullshit, flattery, blah de blah de blah. He even was asking me if my advice as to who I thought he should appoint as his next editor at the Standard, his next editor at the Independent. And I just thought, I don't know anything to do with this. So the next time I got an invitation to one of his parties, I think I might have went to one of them. But no, not for me.

• 32:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, I mean, I, for me, I think it's there but for the grace of God. I mean, in the end, I said no to the parties. In the end, I didn't go to Africa. In the end, I didn't meet him.

• 32:16Alastair Campbell?

  And you didn't become London Mayor.

• 32:20Rory Stewart?

  Right. Okay. Time on that for a break.

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• 34:43Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics, me, Alastair Campbell.

• 34:46Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. And you wanted to get us on to the economy, right?

• 34:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I just think two things, really. I think it's just interesting that having just spent this two-parter with John Major and the second part very much about his time as Prime Minister and living through the horrors of the exchange rate mechanism debacle and the sense of the country just thinking, do you know what? Not sure these guys can manage the economy anymore. And I wonder if Rishi Sunak is in a similar place right now. He did seem, just he just had a sense of somebody desperately trying to pretend that he was powerful in the face of an economic storm that was coming his way, but he actually has very little power.

• 35:24Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think it's true, isn't it? I mean, I think the awful truth is that politicians have to try to take responsibility, have to project themselves. Is controlling things, but sometimes things that happen in the economy are not within their control. And he believed, and I think a lot of people inside the Treasury believed that inflation would come down in Britain. In fact, a lot of big experts are projecting that, including, I think, Bank of England people. But it's turned out not to be true. Inflation has remained very, very stubbornly high in Britain. And of course, that is a big problem, big, big problem for cost of living, because it wages inevitably don't keep up. People find that all the goods they're buying are getting more and more expensive and they're totally squeezed. But the medicine which you use

• 36:09Rory Stewart?

  to deal with that, which is to raise interest rates, then crushes the economy because it makes it much, much more difficult to borrow and drives up the cost of mortgages. So he's trying to do two things. He needs to bring inflation down and he needs economic growth. And at the moment, he doesn't look like he can have both because as he tries to bring inflation down, he's going to be hitting growth and inflicting a different form of pain on people. In this case, many people who don't have fixed rate mortgages, floating mortgages, may end up having to pay six thousand pounds more a year on average.

• 36:41Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Also, you know, when he came out with his five priorities that he sort of has on a backdrop pretty much everywhere he speaks, the Tories were so bullish about the way things were going at that time, that they said that they'd actually picked them because they felt they were easy to to do. So if you go through them one by one, half in half inflation, well, there's been no fall. And what's more core inflation is rising. Grow the economy. We've got the forecast of the second lowest growth in the G seven. Reduce debt. We're now at more than 100% of GDP. Cut waiting lists. NHS waiting lists are at a record high and they're going to get even higher with yet another strike by the junior doctors with whom the government yet again just seem not to be treating. And then stop the boats. And we've had more than 10,000 small boat crossings so far

• 37:26Alastair Campbell?

  this year. So heaven knows what's happening with these non priorities. If this is what's happening with these so called priorities.

• 37:33Rory Stewart?

  And the reason this is a big problem for the Conservative government is that those priorities pretty accurately reflect the priorities to British public. It's not a bad list of five things that the public really want to happen. And his failure to deliver on them is devastating. But of course, they're all connected. I mean, as I said, it's the debt, the inflation, the growth.

• 37:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I mean, I dug into this quite a lot when I was preparing for Question Time, which we'll talk about in Question Time. But one of the things that I was, I didn't really get this out because it didn't really come up. But looking at the whole thing about mortgages. If you look at the rates for mortgage borrowers in European countries, 3.89% Germany, 2.61% France, 3.6 Netherlands, 3.55 Ireland. That gap between them and us means that we are going to end up paying more on our mortgages. And the composite across Europe is in April for a one to five year maturity was 3.71%. So it's true that everybody's having to struggle with this. But we do seem to be hit hardest.

• 38:39Alastair Campbell?

  And I'm afraid we're back to the elephant in the room. Since Brexit, on five major metrics, our recent economic performance has been wonderful. Real GDP growth ahead, investment productivity, inflation and trade. We've been hit on all five of them, and that is a fact that nobody seems to want to address.

• 38:54Rory Stewart?

  The other consequence of this is at some point we are likely to see the impact on house prices.

• 39:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 39:01Rory Stewart?

  As mortgages become more and more unaffordable, it's going to be more and more difficult for people to afford to buy a house. And prices are going to start falling. And that's going to really test one of the big questions in British politics. We keep hearing in British politics that people want more affordable houses, that house prices are crazy. But that, of course, is true for the 40% that don't own houses. For the 60% who own houses, it's going to be unbelievably painful to discover that the nest egg that they've built up is beginning to lose value. And they're going to have less to draw on when they retire. So it's really testing this question. Do people actually want lower house prices? And what's going to happen politically as those house prices come tumbling down?

• 39:45Alastair Campbell?

  Well, especially as our housing debate in this country has been utterly fixated since Margaret Thatcher's day, between these two twin poles of rising house prices and Thatcher selling off the council houses. And actually, we've ended up in a position where social housing is a real challenge. And actually, I'll just throw you a question, Roy, maybe to conclude this part of our discussion. It was a question that came up for the Q and A. Which was directed to you. Fair enough, you don't want to see building on the green belt, but where are we going to build the new homes that we need?

• 40:15Rory Stewart?

  I'd start in London. So the Mayor of London has thousands of acres of Mayor of London Transport for London land, which hasn't been adequately developed. You could be building and he should be building, not private sector building. I mean, I think the the most horrifying thing, which was started under Boris Johnson, continued under Sadiq Khan as Mayor, is this very, very ugly Nine Elms development. Many, many of those apartments, this is down on the edge of Battersea, many of those apartments are unoccupied. Perfect spot to drive ahead with social housing. The Mayor of London should be building hundreds of thousands of affordable, Mayor of London owned, government housing to manage for the next 50 or 100 years. It would be a fantastic investment.

• 40:55Alastair Campbell?

  Right, but if we're talking about levelling up, I mean, fair enough, we may need more homes in London, but you know, we need, there is a housing shortage for the next generation right around the country.

• 41:04Rory Stewart?

  There is, but it's most acute down in the South East. I mean, and West Cumbria, in fact, has some of the lowest house prices in the country. And I would really like to see a mayoral candidate, and they're just in the process of selecting a Conservative mayoral candidate, but it doesn't matter which party they come from, commit to building hundreds of thousands of state owned houses in London.

• 41:27Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, let's go to, let's go to, as you say, we very rarely talk about Southeast Asia, and we're back to our old friend populism and authoritarianism. We've got an election coming up in Cambodia. Who do you think is going to win that election, Rory?

• 41:40Rory Stewart?

  It's a very, very, very tough question. It could possibly be.

• 41:46Alastair Campbell?

  Hun Sen.

• 41:47Rory Stewart?

  Hun Sen, who's now preparing his great son to take over. So give us, give us a bit of a sense of your sense of Cambodian politics, and then maybe I'd love to step back and just set the bigger Southeast Asian picture.

• 41:58Alastair Campbell?

  I was actually just going to start on, on that bigger picture. Freedom House, which attracts democratic strength across the world. They have ranked four Southeast Asian countries partly free, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. Six countries they define as not free, Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam. And only one country, East Timor, is free. And Cambodia, it is, it's hard to imagine anywhere more completely and totally authoritarian. Hun Sen has been around for 1998, has he been in power?

• 42:33Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 42:33Alastair Campbell?

  The main opposition party, Candlelight Party, has been

• 42:38Alastair Campbell?

  Basically wiped out, they've been barred from the election, apparently they didn't fill in their forms properly, it's the old Russian trick. So you're essentially going to have the CPP, Hun Sen's party, even though ten other parties are registered, they're basically sort of, you know, parties that make you think there is some competition. But he's going to win and he's going to probably get every single seat in the party, in the Assembly. And as you say, he wants his son, Hun Manet, to take over, but he's basically goes around the place saying, he's not ready yet, I'll probably need another, you know, another couple of terms and then, then he can take over.

• 43:10Rory Stewart?

  Then I can head over. The story of Southeast Asia really matters to the world because it is one of the most dynamic economic regions in the world, and it's there right on the cusp between China and the United States. It's had incredible economic growth, lifted enormous numbers of people out of poverty. Many, many companies who are talking about de-risking away from China, looking at moving their manufacturing facilities to Indonesia or Vietnam, the question of India's relationships with it completely fascinating now. But the political story is also tells that very odd story that we keep coming back to, the way the world's changed since the 1980s.

• 43:51Rory Stewart?

  So initially, from the 1980s onwards, it looked very optimistic in Southeast Asia. So Philippines, you remember, you know, Marcos went, Emelda Marcos with her hundreds of shoes and Coria Kino came in, democracy came to Philippines and then Suharto fell in Indonesia, 1998, after the financial crisis, Indonesia set off on a democratic path. But the outliers here were, as you say, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and then most tragically, of course, which we've talked about a bit, Myanmar, where in the 2014 onwards, the lady Aung San Suu Kyi came back, people thought, okay, this is the great progress again towards democracy, and that has collapsed back into horrendous military dictatorship, a failed

• 44:36Rory Stewart?

  state, an ongoing insurrection where the people are 3D printing weapons and attacking the military. And then we've talked a lot about Thailand, which is still in a state of paralysis, still trying to work out where to go with this very odd relationship between the military, the king and the ruling elite on the one hand. And this new opposition coming up. So it's it's broken apart the assumption that we all had in the nineties that economic growth and prosperity went along with democracy. These are countries growing quickly, perhaps the most dynamic economic region of the world, and it's not really going down a democratic route.

• 45:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And the other the other point that we've sort of raised in different parts of the world is this sense that these often very right wing, quite brutal leaders, nonetheless able to build as genuine, even though they might be rigging and fixing elections, but there also is a genuine sense of popularity for some of them, like Duterte in the Philippines, who is utterly brutal in this war on drugs and just, you know, literally people go around sort of just topping people and yet has a popularity.

• 45:37Rory Stewart?

  Now succeeded by Marcos's son, Ferdinand on Marcos.

• 45:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:41Rory Stewart?

  No, no, you're right. These brutal, brutal populism emerging, which which you saw there. I also think there's a very interesting question of how China handles its relationship. I mean, China is immense in this region. So, you know, China's exports from Indonesia to China are about twenty four percent of all of Indonesia's exports. Its supplies from China, about twenty nine percent of all its supplies compared to about six percent from the US. To get a sense of the discrepancy. Perhaps most striking of all, Indonesia, which is meant to have the great navy in the region. I was just talking to an amazing guy called Arne Vestat, who's a professor at Yale. He pointed out that the Indonesian Navy has ten or eleven frigates, half of which are left over from the Dutch, you know, decades old.

• 46:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Rory Stewart?

  China has has had since two thousand and seven seventy seven zero destroyers near Indonesia and that sea. So, yes, growing, yes, prosperous, yes, dynamic, but a very, very difficult relationship to China.

• 46:43Alastair Campbell?

  The other really interesting thing that's been happening amidst the whole sort of global focus on Ukraine. I think in relation to Southeast Asia, the Americans have maybe slightly taken their after ball because they've got so much else to to focus on. So, for example, they're not being as aggressive as they have been in the past about human rights in that. Region. And the other thing that's happening is that within Central Asia, in particular, the the well-known stands, Moscow is losing influence there and China's moving in there as well. And there was a very interesting, was it last month or the month before, middle of May, I think it was.

• 47:21Alastair Campbell?

  There was this China Central Asia Summit where Xi Jinping met with the leaders of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, all the stands essentially, and was sort of wrapping them into the Silk Road and the whole, you know, Belt Initiative. So they are on the move in so many ways. And I think that this is a very interesting example of where the big picture message is, oh, well, China's very supportive or quite supportive of Putin. Meanwhile, they are seeing the weakening of Putin in the stands. And we saw that, by the way, in relation to our previous discussion about Belarus, because the Kazakhs did not want to be involved in the deal to try and resolve the dispute between the Russians and the Wagner Group.

• 48:06Alastair Campbell?

  And and nor apparently did the Iranians. And that's why it was left to Lukashenko. Sorry, back to Cambodia.

• 48:12Rory Stewart?

  No, no, well, I think I think just to conclude, if you care about the world, you need to think about Southeast Asia. Seven hundred million people, very dynamic economies, going to benefit enormously from companies trying to move away from China. Big question about where Indian influence is going to go. And of course, Indonesia, largest Muslim population in the world as well. So there's so much that we haven't covered there and we need to think about as these places get more and more powerful. And don't underestimate underestimate the Philippines economically. It's a place that was always traditionally written off in the seventies and eighties, written off because it had incredible investment in education and English language, but never really seemed to be performing.

• 48:57Rory Stewart?

  But finally, all that investment seems to be paying off. The Philippines economy is going going gangbusters.

• 49:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The other thing that's that's we we've talked a lot about corruption in relation to to Putin and and people, but according to Global Witness, and this is some years ago now, who kind of track corruption around the world. Hun Sen and his family, they were reckoned to be, you know, up in the billion dollar class, which is not, you know, it's not bad going when you're on a pretty small salary, even though you've been there since nineteen ninety eight.

• 49:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, he should be invested wisely, that's.

• 49:29Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:30Rory Stewart?

  He's probably got premium box, probably lucky on the premium box.

• 49:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he's also a big supporter of Donald Trump on Sen.

• 49:37Rory Stewart?

  Right, yeah.

• 49:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so there we are.

• 49:40Rory Stewart?

  Good, okay. Well, Alistair, let's try to finish with one upbeat thing because we don't want to finish on the words Donald Trump.

• 49:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, let's go Guatemala.

• 49:48Rory Stewart?

  Go on, is that going to cheer us up?

• 49:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it might do. There was an election there at the weekend.

• 49:53Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 49:53Alastair Campbell?

  And look, we haven't got all the results yet, but one thing that was very interesting in the campaign was a lot of indigenous women activists who clearly had read the bestselling book, But What Can I Do?

• 50:06Rory Stewart?

  And anyone who's listening to this podcast who's not yet bought But What Can I Do, please buy But What Can I Do?

• 50:11Alastair Campbell?

  Well, actually, Rory, I've got to say, the amount of times that I've plugged it, and you've plugged it kindly on my behalf, anybody who's listened to this podcast and hasn't bought it yet is never going to buy it. Because it's been plugged so much. But no, but they, essentially, what's happened there is that a group of women who have felt that they've not been listened to, not respected, I mean, the political process there, you've got forty four percent of the population are indigenous, and yet they have about under, you know, single figures in terms of representation in the Congress. So it's a group of women who just decided, you know what? We're going to get out there and we're going to do it. And started out on their local councils and then have built up and now have actually,

• 50:52Alastair Campbell?

  you know, started to win representation at a higher level. So I just wanted to say that's maybe a happier note on which to end. And maybe next week we can come back and and reveal what the final result was because they're still kind of trying to work it out.

• 51:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, amazing. I mean, I just caught a New York Times article on this, which, talking about the fact that a lot of the leading candidates have been excluded from the election, which was seen as another kind of worrying sign that Guatemala, like a lot of Central America, is going the wrong direction on democracy.

• 51:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the whole thing about getting rid of candidates is, you know, it's a very, very, very common thing. And just maybe to wrap on this, we talked a few weeks ago about the Greek election. And our friend Tim Bale, who's a bit of an elections geek, he pointed out at the time that there was this thing in Greece called the winner's bonus. And the reason why the Greek Prime Minister went for a second election was because he felt that on the second time round, he would get this winner's bonus. And so it has turned out.

• 51:51Rory Stewart?

  So what's the winner's bonus? Sorry, I don't understand. What's the winner's bonus?

• 51:54Alastair Campbell?

  So basically, there is a thing called bonus seats. It's a system of reinforced proportional representation. So for example, if the first party gets 25%, the bonus is 20 seats. So it's a PR system where the higher up you are, then you will get these additional seats.

• 52:13Rory Stewart?

  I get it. I get it. I get it. The idea is to give a bit more.

• 52:17Alastair Campbell?

  But the ones who don't reach the threshold are knocked out.

• 52:20Rory Stewart?

  So it's a sort of mixed system where you don't end up with quite such potentially kind of compromise coalition governments. You give a bit more power to the one that comes first.

• 52:30Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. So the parties which don't reach a, I think it's a 3% threshold, they kind of just, they get left out. But that means that there is more space then for the parties that do better to get more seats under a bonus system. And that is why he went for a second election.

• 52:45Rory Stewart?

  Right. And Tim, Tim's a supporter of this, or he remains neutral on this? He just thought this is something we should know about?

• 52:50Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know if he's a supporter. He's just somebody who likes us to be factually accurate when we're talking about foreign elections.

• 52:56Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, thank you, Tim, very much for that. And a final shout out, because I'm looking for something to finish on cheerily, to an amazing image that I can see behind you of what seems to be a tree of the day on a canvas in front of your bookcase. It's like a winter tree landscape reflected in a canal with the window reflecting on it.

• 53:14Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, because we've got the builders in at the moment.

• 53:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 53:17Alastair Campbell?

  That is actually the wrong way around. It's, you've got to imagine it sideways.

• 53:23Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 53:23Alastair Campbell?

  I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll take a picture of it.

• 53:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 53:25Alastair Campbell?

  And we can put it in the show notes. It's a picture of a tree on Hampstead Heath.

• 53:28Rory Stewart?

  Lovely.

• 53:29Alastair Campbell?

  It's pretty nice. Yeah. Fiona got it. It was very present a few years ago.

• 53:32Rory Stewart?

  All right. Well, on that, I think we're going to call it to an end. Thank you very much.

• 53:36Alastair Campbell?

  All the best. Speak to you soon.

• 53:38Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

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• 54:35Speaker 12

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• 54:57Speaker 13

  Espolón Tequila. It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolón Tequila. Balanced, delicious. Perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. Then hold on tight. 100% agave, 0% ego. Espolón Tequila. For a real margarita. Ride the rooster.

• 55:21Speaker 10

  Espolón Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaq America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.