Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 238. Question Time: Liz Truss, climate change deniers, and why print media is so polarised About this episode What actions can government take to mitigate the impact of smartphones on the mental health of children? What are the advantages and disadvantages of voting for an independent Mayor? With all eyes focused on the Middle East, what is important but flying under the radar this week?
Rory and Alastair answer all these questions and more in this week's Question Time.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair 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.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And 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.
0:42 Alastair 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?
0:49 Rory 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.
1:06 Speaker 02 This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.
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1:57 Rory Stewart? Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.
2:00 Alastair Campbell? And me Anna Scamble. So where do you want to start Rory?
2:03 Rory Stewart? Well, I want to start the question from Henry Swansea. What actions would you like to see this or the next government taking to mitigate the terrifying impact that smartphones have having on the mental health of children in this country and across the world? This is a really controversial thing. As you can imagine, smartphone manufacturers and people in the tech industry are absolutely falling over backwards to give congressional testimony saying there's no evidence at all that spending a lot of time on smartphones has effect on mental health. But there are a lot of mental health professionals and academics who are bringing together what seems to be increasingly convincing evidence that there's a direct relationship between the amount of time that people spend on smartphones, particularly social media,
2:45 Rory Stewart? and real instances of depression, anxiety, and many issues amongst young people. And it then brings us to the question of legislation. China, China's cyberspace administration has proposed limiting children's smartphone use to two hours a day. And I guess being China, they could probably get the manufacturers to put limits on those phones to make sure that that happened. 12 states in the US have been looking at this. UNESCO has been looking at this. We've had stuff in the UK which I strongly support and I cannot understand why it's controversial. I keep getting attacks on Twitter whenever I suggest it. I don't think kids should be allowed smartphones in school. I think it seems ridiculous.
3:30 Rory Stewart? But every time I say it, I get a massive attack accusing me of being a dinosaur.
3:35 Alastair Campbell? What is the argument with that? Because I mean, listen, some schools, the kids arrive and they have to put their phones away. I guess parents want to be in contact with them, worry about them getting home, all that stuff. But I can't see any point. I'm with you Rory, I'm happy to be a dinosaur.
3:49 Rory Stewart? Thank you, that's good. We can be dinosaurs together. No, it's really weird and it's actually true in boarding schools too. I mean, one of the big changes in boarding schools is now kids just spend hours in their rooms just staring at their smartphones. When I used to be doing, I don't know what I was doing, hopefully my French homework.
4:07 Alastair Campbell? Were you? Rory, are you trying to tell me something about what's going on with your visits to boarding schools? What's happening?
4:14 Rory Stewart? Memories, memories going, memories going back. Um, yeah, no. So listen, um, what would be your view on whether, do you think it seems a crazy step for governments to intervene and actually limit? What sort of evidence would you need to say before you thought, you know, Labour, for example, could legislate to say kids can only use smartphones for two hours a day?
4:35 Alastair Campbell? Well, if you remember when we interviewed Hillary Clinton on leading, I was very struck by the fact that she said, you know, every single person that she meets who works in the tech, in the smartphone industry, doesn't know their kids have them till they're like, you know, 21 sort of thing. So there's, there's clear, I, I think sometimes we're too quick to say, right, two plus two equals whatever. You've got, there's definitely a mental health problem, growing problem. I think anxiety with young women, some of the sort of attitudes of young men. I think there's a real sort of mental health stuff going on that we don't really fully understand. And so we're very quick to say, well, this is probably because things that didn't exist when we were growing up, like social media, like smartphones, it must be because of that.
5:21 Alastair Campbell? I think we'd have to know more than that, but at the same time, I think there is enough evidence out there now to suggest that these things are addictive, that they're deliberately addictive. And I think they've created, I mean, this is a political podcast. I think they have created this world in which we, we don't care enough about the stuff that really, really matters and we care an awful lot about stuff that just doesn't. Now, so that is stuff that needs to be looked at. Are we at a place yet where you could have your kid who's got their phone and then, you know, after two hours of use, suddenly it goes dead because the government has decided that that's the limit that you should have? I'm not sure I'd go that far, but I think we're heading in that direction.
5:59 Rory Stewart? And of course, then you'd, I mean, like any kind of prohibition, like prohibition on alcohol in the States and prohibition on drugs, you know, you can then think of a million ways in which people would get around it and do it illegally and goodness knows what you do. But anyway, worth thinking about.
6:11 Alastair Campbell? Now, Roy, talking, talking of getting grief, this is a point that Fiona occasionally makes. Geraldine Perriam, why is it that the majority of books that you both recommend are written by men? It's rare that I hear either presenter commenting on a book written by woman. Is it that they rarely read books by women or that they do read them but don't rate them? Now, I was particularly pleased, Roy, that I spotted that question as I have on my desk, curved in at page 36. Amélie Noton, who is one of my favourite authors, she writes in French, she is French, and I've read, she's written dozens of books and I've read most of them. So I'm giving you Amélie Noton. Who are you giving me?
6:52 Rory Stewart? Well, I recommend it. To be fair to me, I don't like being fair to me, but last week I was recommending a book by Barbara Kingsolver.
6:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, you were.
7:00 Rory Stewart? Called Demon Copperfield, and a book by Donna Tartt called The Goldfinch, both which I've been enjoying incredibly as sort of American coming of age novels.
7:07 Alastair Campbell? Also, to be fair to me, Roy, to be fair to me, I have said on this podcast before that my favourite book about politics ever written was Doris Kearns Goodwin, A Team of Rivals, about Abraham Lincoln. So I think, Geraldine, you've not been listening closely enough.
7:21 Rory Stewart? Well, I've also been reading an amazing book by my colleague here at Yale, I'm talking to you from Yale where I'm teaching at the moment, but my colleague Beverly Gaynor has written, I think, the most wonderful book on J. Edgar Hoover, which should really appeal to listeners of the show, because it's called G-Man, and it's basically about the way that Hoover, who people know, ran the FBI for 40 years, is created in many ways the modern federal state and was right in the heart of fights against communists, civil rights, fights against organised crime, relations with six different presidents, and it's just a really great account of what it's like to form a government, form administration.
8:03 Rory Stewart? So then Beverly Gaynor, G-Man. I've also, listen, while we're doing cultural stuff just for a second, have you seen Zone of Interest, the Auschwitz movie?
8:14 Alastair Campbell? Should have won everything going.
8:15 Rory Stewart? I mean, that was the most, I mean, really striking, wasn't it? For people who haven't seen it, it's, it sounds very disturbing, but it's, it's just so important and moving. I mean, it focuses on the domestic life of the German commandant of Auschwitz and his wife and children, living in a sort of very nice suburban villa with a beautiful garden, and their garden wall is the wall of Auschwitz, and it doesn't show you the concentration camp.
8:50 Alastair Campbell? You hear, you hear it from time to time, don't you?
8:52 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and I just thought it teaches you so much about human empathy, because it reminded me, I guess, of what it must have been like. In Empire, what it was like in the South of America with slavery. I mean, you know, Thomas Jefferson, living alongside tiny huts with slaves living in them in his beautiful house. And the way in which as humans, we, you know, feel proud of ourselves as being good parents and providing nice clothes and little expeditions for our kids, while just on the other side of the wall are other humans living lives of unimaginable horror.
9:27 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but I think it also is, so like the commandant obviously goes off to work. His wife and children don't go off to that place. They go elsewhere. They go around busying themselves doing what kids do and what mothers were doing in that period. He goes off to work and of course he comes back and you have a sense of him sometimes feeling a burden, but it's not, you don't feel that it's the burden of what he's doing. It's just the burden that goes with doing a job. So it's the kind of normality, it's the normalization of utterly abnormal human experience. That's what I found sort of, because you know what's happening, we know as people who sort of, you know, know the story, we know what's happening on the other side of the wall. But you have to imagine it. But
10:12 Alastair Campbell? even as you, even as you're watching the film, of course, we do the same as they're doing. We focus on their lives and what they're talking about, what they're doing and the sort of little problems that they have in their lives. No, it's a brilliant film. I, I thought that, and Sandra Huller, who plays the, the wife, who is also the main character in the other film I thought was brilliant this year, Anatomy of a Fall. I think those two films are the best films of last year.
10:36 Rory Stewart? Yeah, just sort of very quickly, just, I was so struck by her performance because she somehow is, manages to act without seeming to act. I mean, it really feels often as though you're watching a sort of family home footage that you've kind of caught her awkwardly moving with her mother across the garden, but not really that she's an actress.
10:55 Alastair Campbell? Well, the director would be delighted to hear that because I read an interview with him. In which he said that for all those scenes in the garden, they had fixed point cameras just sort of hidden in the trees and and just told them to sort of go out and, you know, do what they did and and sort of the kids running around the garden. So they weren't sort of as it were being followed by cameras anywhere.
11:15 Rory Stewart? I see.
11:16 Alastair Campbell? So that may be why he captured that move.
11:18 Rory Stewart? Final one, final one, just the film got me reading more. And Ordinary Men, the 101 Police Reserve Police Battalion by Christopher Browning is a very detailed account of ordinary Germans in a reserve police battalion killing Jews. And it's unique because he has the archival access to understanding hundreds of these individuals and their day to day life. And it's a description of something that we just keep coming back to, which is the strangeness of the way in which Germany, which by the 1950s had become a very liberal, or many
11:57 Rory Stewart? ways liberal, progressive, empathetic, compassionate society, was capable 10 years earlier of ordinary, normal people doing unimaginable things.
12:07 Alastair Campbell? Anyway, Geraldine, thank you for your question. I'll get back later tonight to my reading of this wonderful book called Les Soeurs by Amelie Nottomb. And I apologize for the fact that Rory ended the question by talking about a male filmmaker. But there we are. One day we'll get it right. Anthony Brown, Rory. I voted Conservative all of my life. That's not me, it's him. Even in 1997, sorry, Alastair, voted to remain, but I'm disappointed with the direction of the party since David Cameron resigned. I feel that the Conservatives are no longer a broad church. I don't feel I can vote for the Liberals. I'm in the ultra safe seat of Devises. I will probably abstain in the general election. Is there anything else that I can do? You said that if you lived in Liz Truss's seat,
12:50 Alastair Campbell? you'd vote for James Bag, this independent who's standing against her. So what advice would you give to Anthony in Devises?
12:57 Rory Stewart? I'd say this is something very relevant to Conservatives, which is what direction does the party head in, particularly after the election? Is it going to go ever further to the right? Is there kind of a Suella Bravman or even Nigel Farage style takeover? Or does it move back to the centre? And I think this is, I think for people who Are moderate conservatives, you have to get involved in the fight to try to stop the party from becoming a party of extremists. And that's about supporting the few moderate conservatives left. That's about making the argument that the reason we're losing is not because we went too far to the left, which is what the Bravermans will try to suggest, but it's that we went
13:42 Rory Stewart? too far to the right. And also that it's healthy for British democracy. Labour will win the next election, but it's important that there is a credible, serious opposition, could be a small opposition, but of moderate thoughtful people. And the survival of the Conservative Party, I think, does matter. I think it would be very dangerous for the country if the Conservative Party collapsed and far-right populism filled that space. I think that's something that we should be celebrating.
14:11 Alastair Campbell? So you're saying you should look at the, if it's a good MP, a good Tory, a sensible Tory MP, you should vote for him?
14:17 Rory Stewart? Yeah, if it's a moderate One Nation Conservative MP, get strongly behind them. And if you really want to be active, go and find those MPs where they're standing in other seats and distance yourself from the right of the party and say, not in my name, I'm not allowing this party to be taken over by sort of mini Nigel Farage's.
14:38 Alastair Campbell? Hmm. Anthony, I would say, look at who came second last time and vote for them. Right, Dominic Mahoney, is it a trope that all populist radical right-wing parties are climate change deniers? Or should policymakers be more subtle in the way they deal with them as a consequence? That's a quite interesting question. We had a, if people haven't listened to it, we interviewed Professor Dieter Helm on leading this week, who's an energy economist. And I thought it was quite a very interesting conversation, actually, Rory, about the whole sort of climate change debate. And he didn't like being, this sort of, you and I both sort of talking about optimism, pessimism. But Dominic's question is quite interesting.
15:21 Alastair Campbell? Do we assume that Donald Trump, Swallow Braverman, Truss, Farage, are they all, you know, on that wing of this debate or not?
15:32 Rory Stewart? Not in Britain. It's pretty fringe in Britain, full climate change denial. It's interesting, when you look at these kind of Liz Truss figures, they're not actually Trumpian. I mean, so, you know, I'm... Profoundly critical of her. I think she's a appalling prime minister. She was a very bad politician, but she doesn't, for the record, for example, think that Biden stole the election. She's not a big climate change denier. She's not leaning into that stuff. And also, I'm quite struck how in Britain, you know, we've been running opinion polls and we'll keep running them. One of the things that makes me, just sort of on a slightly side of issue, optimistic about Britain is that people in the latest poll that we've
16:17 Rory Stewart? put out, and people, please, should look at it and sign up for the Rest Is Politics newsletter to see it in detail, British voters remain concerned about climate change. It's not something that's completely dropped off the agenda. It's also, I think, now that I'm here in the US, and I've been talking a lot to academics here who work on European immigration, I'm quite struck in the polling in Britain, how British voters are less obsessed with with race and religion than voters in many other countries. I thought the anti-immigration sentiment in Britain was frankly often racist. It doesn't look like that from the polling. It looks as though the people who are concerned about immigration in Britain are as concerned
17:01 Rory Stewart? about immigration from Poland as they are about immigration from Nigeria or Bangladesh. And that's quite interesting, because I don't think that would be true in many, many other countries. Do you agree with me?
17:13 Alastair Campbell? I think there is, I think there is a fair amount of racism in our country, and I think part of the immigration debate is about that. But yeah, generally, I do agree with you. I think actually, I think one of the most awful things that the radical right keeps saying is this idea that multiculturalism is a terrible failure. I don't think it is. I think we are actually pretty, I think of most of the major European countries, I think we've done a pretty good job on that. So yeah, broadly, I agree with you.
17:39 Rory Stewart? The two things that the far-right parties, and we'll see this in the June elections in Europe, are going to be running on, one of them is climate, the other is this question of immigration. And somebody, David Frum, who's an American columnist, produced this line. And he said in America that if liberals suggest that everybody who cares about controlling borders is a fascist, it will just make voters sympathetic towards the idea of fascism. So there is somewhere in that question that we've just dealt with from Dominic Mahoney, is this question of how you acknowledge that there are genuine concerns from voters which are not being addressed by centrist parties and how you stop far right populists from monopolising those votes?
18:23 Alastair Campbell? Well, essentially, I did an event last night discussing Will Hutton, with Will Hutton, his new book, where Keir Starmer made a surprise appearance. And I have to say, Rory, he got a very, very, very warm reception from the audience who hadn't been expecting to see him. But in the Q and A, he had to leave to go and vote on the Rwanda stuff. But during the Q and A, we had a question from a woman from Peckham who made a similar point. She said that she felt that she was, she said she came from a very working class background, and she felt that the way that, you know, she's looking at me and Will Hutton, middle class sort of, you know, people from leafy North London think about this issue
19:07 Alastair Campbell? sometimes is that we underestimate the economic impact on poorer people of some of the measures that are that are being, you know, brought in to try to help us get towards net zero. And I thought she had a fair point. And I think that, you know, you and I both talked about the the upstretched bi election and Ule's and the way that the Tories tried to kind of radicalise or try to weaponise that issue after the election. But I think that, you know, the point that Dieter Helm made was that if you're not taking people with you when you're bringing forward these measures, then you are failing as politicians and as communicators. And, you know, I think, I think, I think he had a point on that. Anyway, it was a very spiky interview at times. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
19:50 Rory Stewart? It was, it was good. And it's good because it's, it's pretty serious. And it gets to heart of something that our listeners really care about. And, and it's pretty controversial. And I like that. I think we should occasionally do things which are like that, which takes something that really matters to all of us, climate change, climate science, and then put on somebody who's prepared to be pretty tough and controversial in questioning a lot of what we assume.
20:15 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and questioning conventional wisdom. Okay, Rory, loads more questions to come. Take a quick break.
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21:40 Alastair Campbell? Now David Suter asks Rory, does it matter that the print media are so partisan? And if it does, how can Labour counteract it?
21:48 Rory Stewart? Go on then, over to you.
21:50 Alastair Campbell? Well, what do you think? I mean, you probably know what I think. What do you, what do you think about that? Do you, do you think we have a problem in our political culture? That our media is, our press, print media in particular is so biased?
21:59 Rory Stewart? Well, I think our print media has been a longstanding problem. I mean, I think Rupert Murdoch was a longstanding problem and had a big impact on lots and lots of things in British culture and made British culture worse. And I think often you feel that certain policies, I mean, the Rwanda policy would be an example of that, which are actually completely sort of unworkable.
22:22 Rory Stewart? Policies or recent ideas. I mean, have you followed that there's stories around the Conservatives thinking that they're going to fine rough sleepers £3,000?
22:33 Alastair Campbell? On the face of the bill, that one of the nuisances that will be defined is if they smell. I mean, it's just.
22:40 Rory Stewart? The whole thing is unbelievable because it's a sort of fatal combination of being cruel and also completely unworkable. I mean, you can think of policies which are kind of compassionate and unworkable, or cruel and tough but function. But this is really the worst of all worlds. And but that, I think, is partly driven by the print media. I mean, I don't think these measures are broadly appealing to the public. I think they really are about trying to get a sort of headline in the Mail or the Express.
23:11 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think the partisanship is often less about what they do cover and what they don't. So if you take recent, you know, we talked on the main podcast briefly about about Angela Rayner and her travails. If that had been a Tory MP, the paper which drove it the most and which eventually got the BBC and others to pick it up was the Daily Mail. They tend not to cover scandals which I think are far more significant. You know, if you, how many of our listeners will even remember the name of the donor that we talked about a few weeks ago, who gave him £15 million and said the stuff about Dan Abbot? If that had been a Labour story, we'd still be talking about it. The media would still be going on about it. That guy has never been confronted by a journalist,
23:54 Alastair Campbell? so far as I've seen, not once. Likewise, the guy who got the £5 million knighthood, the guy, some of the Covid contracting stuff. You know, we can, somebody said on the back of the William Rag thing, you know, could have been worse, could have been caught drinking a mojito on the tube. When we say that, drinking a mojito on the tube, lots of our listeners know that was about Diane Abbott, that was years ago. But why do people remember it? Because the press keep reminding them of it.
24:24 Rory Stewart? I mean, it's an interesting one, isn't it? And I remember, I mean, you wanted to lean in hard into this question of cash for honours. And of course, the temptation for me is to say, yeah, but they're all up to it. And to remind you of the problems you got yourselves into for cash for honours. But I guess what you're saying is that, of course, you remember that, but you feel, looking back, that you were given unbelievably painful, hard times about this. And that when the Tories do the same thing, it's not, they don't get as hard a time.
24:55 Alastair Campbell? Well, let's just take an example, Bernie Ecclestone. If I say Bernie Ecclestone, most of our listeners of a certain age will remember what that story was about, because the media went on and on and on about it. What they very, very rarely report is that we gave the money back. Now, and that didn't get reported when, for example, Rishi Sunak was out saying, no, we won't give the money back. So I just think that the worst thing about our print media is the distortion of the debate through them covering only the things that suit their own agenda. Now, I used to do that to some extent at the Daily Mirror, but partly, one of the reasons why the Mirror did it, why I wanted the Mirror
25:35 Alastair Campbell? to stay as kind of openly partisan, pro-Labour as it was, was because the weight of the bias against Labour was so overwhelming. So I think it's the, you know, if you find, somebody regularly posts on social media, you know, when's the next one? Because the Daily Express has had literally identical front pages for the last five Conservative leaders. These are, this is the one, this is the guy, that, you know, back Theresa, or the country's finished. Back Boris, or we've had it.
26:06 Rory Stewart? Two other things to add in. One of them is sometimes conflicts of interest. So the owners of these newspapers having business interests, which are then involved in getting contracts with the government. But the other thing that is happening is that these papers are losing circulation hand over fist. I mean, these are much less profitable.
26:25 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, for sure.
26:25 Rory Stewart? Enterprises. We've seen this, basically, I mean, the Evening Standard, basically, kind of. Shutted and finished, you know, this whole question about who's going to buy the Daily Telegraph is partly about the fact these things have become vanity projects. We talked about GB News, which is kind of losing, what is it, 70 million pounds? Or maybe I'm exaggerating, but 10 some millions in a year.
26:44 Alastair Campbell? I hope the fact that we've been talking fairly regularly about Paul Marshals is one of the reasons why he's pulling out. Maybe he doesn't like the exposure, I don't know. But just on the sort of broader theme of this, Margaret Hodge is running, she's involved in this cross-party commission that I think it's this week sometime.
27:02 Rory Stewart? So she's a, just for listeners, she's a veteran Labour MP who chaired big parliamentary committees.
27:08 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and she's been looking into this whole economic crime area. And this relates to some of the stuff we talk about in relation to standards in public life. So there's an all-party report that's coming out tomorrow, which is all about trying to restore trust in our public institutions, looking at dirty money in our politics, and which is about strengthening the electoral commission, looking at tax havens and trust loophole and so forth. So it's maybe something we could come back to when we've seen the detail of the report. But I think that, in fact, one of the things I mentioned at this event with Keir Starmer last night, so Keir Starmer was saying that as we go to the next election, if he were to sort of do the things can only get better, 1997 sort of thing, he said the country doesn't
27:52 Alastair Campbell? feel like that. The country felt there was a sort of positivity about the place. And I was making the point that I think that the, you know, part of the job of opposition is to create that sense of positivity. But he was making the point that he thinks that the Tories have very deliberately tried to make people feel kind of hopeless about politics. And he said he's worried for the campaign, and I think we're seeing this a little bit with the Angela Rayner coverage, is that the Tories won't be able to say, look at us, what a great record, because they've actually left the country in a worse state. They won't be able to say, look at us, we've got a great agenda for the future, because what is it? They won't be able to say, look at us, aren't we amazing at producing leaders, because they produce these terrible leaders. So what they'll do, to use his phrase,
28:33 Alastair Campbell? is they're going to go very, very low. Now, I think that, I hope that backfires on the Tories, but I actually think that that exacerbates them, that increases the need for Labour, without being sort of, you know, happy-clappy, to use De Tom's phrase. But but actually to sort of generate that sense of you know what, the country can be so much better than this.
28:54 Rory Stewart? Yeah, optimism and hope has to be the has to be the only strategy really, I think, properly for an opposition that's going to come in with a decent majority.
29:04 Alastair Campbell? Rory, just a related question on this, because I've just spotted this one. It sort of makes the point I've been making, MJ1968, why is Michelle Donilon and the apparent £34,000 paid by the taxpayer for her libel case not being highlighted in the news? That's a classic example. If that was a Labour politician back in the day when we were in power, Michelle Donilon, or whoever her equivalent in the Labour government would have been, that would be on the front pages until action had been taken and probably she'd had to pay the money herself.
29:35 Rory Stewart? And editors would would keep running it, wouldn't it? Rolls of Us, Nathan Ray from YouTube, Rory, how effective do you think you would be doing Alistair's old number 10 job? Alistair, how would you get on as a minister or an MP? What do you think your strengths and weaknesses would have been as a minister or an MP?
29:53 Alastair Campbell? Oh, God, I think I'd have been all right. I think I'd have been OK. I'm quite good at making decisions. I think that's the most important thing as a minister. I'm pretty good at building teams. I think that's you were talking about Liz Truss and her inability to sort of focus on the team, quite good at that. I am very, very hardworking and I pay attention to detail. So I think I'd have been all right. I think I'd have found, I think I'd have found some of the the kind of, I don't know how to put this, some of the constituency stuff, I think I'd have needed a bit of help on that. You loved all that, though, didn't you?
30:23 Rory Stewart? I did like the constituency stuff, yeah. I think the bit that I think I would have found doing your job very tough, I don't think that's my my instincts, because I'm not very party political. So I'm I'm interested in the kind of administration and government, running a department or trying to work out what to do about prisons. But I'm not very interested in the kind of stick it to the opposition.
30:44 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but I didn't, I wasn't really allowed to stick it to the opposition much in in the number 10 job. I remember once being taken aside by Richard Wilson, the Cabinet Secretary, who had read a transcript to one of my briefings and he said, look, you know, you shouldn't really say that. So it's a bit of a myth that I use the briefings to kind of whack the Tories or whack our internal opponents.
31:02 Rory Stewart? I got a huge compliment towards you guys from a very, very senior Tory who'd been up against you. And he said, Tony Blair is by far the best. All round politician that he's seen in his lifetime. And he said that was partly to respond to what you were just saying about the next election, that you were able to give a very clear sense in opposition about what you were about. You know, people got the fact that you were going to broadly stay with the kind of free market reforms, the stature, but that you were going to be more social democratic, progressive, compassionate. But also, he said, you were absolutely ruthless. I mean, you were brilliant at the politics bit as well as the idea.
31:41 Alastair Campbell? Excellent, excellent. Well, interesting, last night, the thing you said about the public got a sense of it. So at this event last night, and you know, I accept that people who are on the ticket, it said, you know, Sonia Sodhi of The Observer interviewing me and Will Hutton, right? So you're not going to get the kind of, you know, the Farage lot coming out to see us. You imagine it's going to be quite a left wing audience.
32:03 Rory Stewart? You don't think that's how Nigel Farage wants to spend his evening?
32:05 Alastair Campbell? I don't think so.
32:06 Rory Stewart? Darling, I'm just going to go and hear Will Hutton and Alastair Campbell.
32:09 Alastair Campbell? Talk about the next Labour government. In fact, I did at one point say, is there anybody in this audience who will vote Tory? About 600 people there, and one hand went up. So I thought that was pretty good. But at one point, you know, Rory, how I love to ask the audience what they think about things. And so Will Hutton and I were both saying that we would like Labour to be more aggressive on Brexit, more clear about how they're going to fix the European, the relations with the European Union, otherwise they can't do their growth mission. We'd like them to be much higher profile on the whole Nolan thing and standards. So we went through all the things that they maybe weren't doing as much as I'd like them to do. And then I said to the audience, so you've heard from us, the sort of, you know, we've
32:53 Alastair Campbell? got our complaints, we've got our worries, but in general, do you understand why Keir Starmer is pursuing the strategy that he is pursuing? And overwhelmingly, they put their hands up. So they understood that he's doing everything he thinks he has to do to win. And I think within that, there is a hope, and I think this explained the very, very, very warm response that he got. There is a hope that actually, unlike some of the leaders we've had recently, there's a sort of decency there and a professionalism and integrity there that he actually is going to get a lot of stuff done.
33:34 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it's, I mean, getting things done is the key, isn't it? Because Rishi Sunak's a bit of a mystery here because there's a lot of professionalism. There's a lot of hard work, but it's difficult, I'm afraid, to point to what he's got done. I mean, what's he actually achieved as Prime Minister? And I think that's, that's the odd thing about politics, isn't it? It's the sort of gap between being as Rishi Sunak is very diligent. And I'm sure, you know, probably would be a really good senior civil servant. But the question for Keir Starmer is going to be not, is he diligent and serious? I think people think he is those things, but it's making those big calls. Yeah, it's really someone being able to say two years later, this is what he's changed.
34:16 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, so if we want to be optimistic and hopeful, or happiness index, John Swift, he set as a challenge, your goal is to put the UK in the top three of the World Happiness Report. How would you recommend the next government achieves that? I'll go with number one.
34:33 Rory Stewart? Go on then.
34:34 Alastair Campbell? Proper mental health support in schools.
34:37 Rory Stewart? Very good. Well, my constituency, Penrith and the Border, often was ranked sort of number two or number three in happiness in the UK.
34:47 Alastair Campbell? Nature.
34:48 Rory Stewart? Yeah, nature, community.
34:52 Rory Stewart? I mean, there were other things, I mean, I guess, I mean, housing was expensive, but it was probably more affordable than it was in other bits of the UK. Incomes were low, interestingly, I mean, our average incomes, sixteen thousand pounds a year, because we had a lot of upland farmers in very tough conditions. But was an interesting glimpse if these indexes are to be believed. It was interesting sort of getting your head around why people in Cumbria felt much happier than other parts of the UK and whether it's replicable and whether that's something about which is quite unique.
35:23 Alastair Campbell? The other thing I would do is take a leaf out of Anthony Gormley's book and sort of expansion of the arts for kids again. I think a lot of this starts with how we treat our kids and how we look after our children.
35:33 Rory Stewart? Sense of certainty, sense of predictability. I think there's a lot of anxiety in the world. So it would help if we weren't swapping prime ministers every minute and we had a bit of a sense for long term plan.
35:44 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I suppose dealing with climate change eases anxiety quite a lot.
35:47 Rory Stewart? Anne Leonard, here in the North East, we'll be voting for North East Mayor. I'm interested in your views on what pros and cons of voting for an independent instead of a mayor ally to a particular party. I'm a big believer in mayors being independents. I think it's totally unnecessary for them to be from political parties. I think they get in a lot of trouble being from political parties because either, you know, you're, let's say you're a Labour Mayor of London, you've got a Conservative government, in which case the Tories won't do anything for you, or you're a Tory Mayor of London with a Tory government and then you can't really criticise the central government. So I think independence is the right way to go and I think it's the perfect role for an independent because really a mayor should be a chief executive for a city, not getting involved in the big national party political arguments.
36:33 Alastair Campbell? Well, okay, we should, I don't know if I fully agree with that. We should put, I'll tell you one thing we should put in, we did our own poll last week, but my friend Peter Kelner has done a very interesting piece in Prospect magazine about the Metro Mayor Battles that are coming up on May the 2nd. Dramatic headline, the Metro Mayor Battles That Could Seal Sunak's Fate. The point he's making is that there is an expectation that most of these will go Labour. There are 10 up for grabs and he goes through the ones that are, you know, maybe less certain. West Midlands, Andy Street, who we had on leading, he's facing a real big struggle. Tees Valley, Ben Houchen, who I think should be kicked
37:18 Alastair Campbell? out for the absolute scandal that this Tees Works thing is, but he's, he's got a massive, he actually won, it's an incredible story this, he won by 73 to 27%. In 2021, which in that part of the world is pretty extraordinary. But, you know, that shows that big turn, you can have big turnarounds. You've then got the East Midlands, which could be closed, and you've got York and North Yorkshire. So anyway, it's interesting that Peter thinks they're the results that we should be looking at in relation to any big change or maybe the second.
37:49 Rory Stewart? Good. Finally, from me, Keith Sargent, with all eyes focused on the Middle East, what is important but flying under the radar at present? And we did quite a lot of that on the last podcast, but I'd like to add in a couple of things that I think are flying under the radar. One of them, which we've talked about, but people have forgotten about again, is we should be very, very worried about the Balkans. We should be very worried about Serbian attempts to take back northern Kosovo or reincorporate the Serbian bits of Bosnia back into Serbia, which would undo all the achievements of the 90s in the Balkans. And the second
38:29 Rory Stewart? thing is looking at Azerbaijan and the president there, who remains very, very aggressive. And I think is likely to mount another assault on Armenia. And this will be part of this pattern, which includes Russia, Crimea, Ukraine, of people trying to shift boundaries in a way that hadn't really happened since the Second World War.
38:50 Alastair Campbell? I think the other one that we did talk about a few weeks ago, that still doesn't get nearly enough of the sort of global attention and debate is Sudan. I think that's one of the worst sort of conflicts anywhere in the world at the moment. I also think that, you know, we talked a lot about climate change, obviously, because we were talking to Dieter Helm, and he mentioned biodiversity. I sort of feel the biodiversity loss debate is sort of trailing again. And I guess, listen, this is what happens when you have several really quite difficult and dangerous military conflicts going on simultaneously. But if you just look at the extent to which Ukraine has sort of slipped down the agenda because of Israel, because of Israel, Gaza.
39:34 Alastair Campbell? So I listen, there's certainly enough to be going on. One of the most alarming things I heard on the news this week was this whole thing about bleached coral and the extent to which that is now becoming a massive problem. So I think I'd put biodiversity in there, I think.
39:49 Rory Stewart? I'm going to add in space. We should do something more on space. We did that great leading interview with Tim Peake, the British Astronaut. But space is obviously vital for communications, increasingly vital for warfare. It's getting pretty cluttered. There's a lot of stuff floating around up there and Elon Musk pumping more and more stuff up there. I think we're very likely to find ourselves getting into conflicts in space between the major superpowers that have got the kit up there because controlling space is going to become more and more important to controlling the world.
40:20 Alastair Campbell? Okay, well, and Rory's prediction for World War III happening in space, that brings to an end this week's Q and A.
40:28 Rory Stewart? Thank you, Alistair.
40:31 Alastair Campbell? Very good. All the best.
40:33 Rory Stewart? Bye bye.
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