455. Question Time: Is Europe Already At War With Russia?

Is Europe already at war with Russia — without admitting it? Are the Netherlands still a serious player in Europe? And, should national parks be reshaped for the modern age? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away free TRIP Plus membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP Plus gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠https://www.fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ ⚡ Find out more about how Google’s AI is helping fuel the UK’s growth and transformation and read the report at goo.gle/aiworks. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Senior Producer: Callum Hill General Manager: Tom Whiter Exec Producer: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 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 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 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 already sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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• 1:35Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:37Rory Stewart?

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• 2:00Alastair Campbell?

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• 2:22Rory Stewart?

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• 2:34Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:37Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, we have some exciting news for our members. Tell them what it is.

• 2:42Rory Stewart?

  Well, we have done a deep dive on immigration for the Members' Channel. And we've got some very different voices. We've got Zoe Gardner, who is, I guess we would say, on the liberal side of immigration. Probably actually, she contributed a video which she's sent in. She's a listener and I think she had a lot of popular support from a lot of our members and listeners who broadly sympathise with her much more open liberal attitude. And then we had, I think, this really interesting, challenging voice, Gerhard Knauz, of who, over to you.

• 3:12Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Gerhard, who's written a book about immigration and who regular listeners will have heard on Friday talking about the rise of the AfD, but he's somebody who is absolutely devoted the last couple of decades of his life to studying immigration and immigration policy. They've got a different take. They're both really passionate, really interesting, both got different sorts of insights. And I think this is, as you said in the podcast last week, this is one of the debates of our time.

• 3:36Rory Stewart?

  And really relevant for the whole world. I mean, we'll get on in this Question Time to talking a little bit about Moldova, Czech Republic, Netherlands, where immigration are huge issues. But of course, one of the things that's interesting about the debate is that Gerhard and Zoe very much root it in Britain. What should Keir Sama be doing? What is Farage proposing? How do we think about these issues? How do we deal with them?

• 3:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yep. So that's out on Friday for Members. Deep dive with Gerhard Knauz and Zoe Gardner drops to Members of Restless Politics, plus this Friday. Here's a taste up. How worried are you that the values have been eroded, that actually people are saying, "Just let them drown"?

• 4:13Speaker 03

  We've had 30,000 people now in 10 years die in the Mediterranean. The deadliest border in the world is the border around the EU.

• 4:19Speaker 04

  We can't have a welfare state without immigration in this country, full stop. The fact of the matter is, we depend on immigration.

• 4:26Rory Stewart?

  But that's not a serious reason not to have a cap.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  If people have a safe pathway to reach the UK, they don't get on the boats.

• 4:32Rory Stewart?

  You need a way of controlling borders that does not end up going down the Orban route, the Trump route or the Gaza route.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  If you can't stop the smugglers earning money and people drowning in the Channel, the argument globally will be won by the Trump people.

• 4:46Rory Stewart?

  So don't miss it. Just go to therestispolitics.com to claim your free trial for the Rest is Politics Plus. You'll also enjoy complete ad-free listening, early access to Question Time episodes, members-only mini-series like the one we did on JD Vance, deep dives, and much more. Just head to therestispolitics.com.

• 5:07Alastair Campbell?

  Right Rory, we had a lot of questions on the back of our discussion last week about Moldova. And here's one from Tilly Abrahams. Wants to know our predictions for the Czech election, which is at the end of this week. As with Moldova, says Tilly, this feels like another significant event to test if the people will continue to resist Putin. What are your thoughts? Well, I was very, very happy about the result of Moldova.

• 5:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So often, actually, I think we want to remember to update people on these issues that we raise. So what we did last week is to talk about the fact that the Moldovan election was very tight. There was huge evidence of Russian interference. And indeed, a lot of the things that we predicted might happen did happen. The war indeed. Bomb scares at polling stations around Europe, even one in the United States, because Moldovans living outside Moldova are really important in the vote. We've talked in the podcast before about Moldova's very unique positions, right there on the between Romania and Ukraine. And there's this territory called Transnistria, which is a Russian satellite which has broken

• 6:09Rory Stewart?

  away. And Maya Sandu, who was a World Bank official, who came back to become the Prime Minister. And she's a really interesting figure, maybe a little bit reminiscent of the Georgian president that we interviewed. Little bit, you know, when you hear World Bank official coming back, does it feel a bit sort of 90s technocrats, or a bit like Mario Monti taking over Italy? But she's been a miracle. She won an absolute majority, set up her own party, won with that party, has now won a referendum for joining the EU, won a majority again. And it's, it's really good news for Europe.

• 6:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And I've done some stuff with her before and she's, I find her very impressive. I think it's really terrifying to be the leader of a country like Moldova right now. Population around 2 million. On the border of Ukraine, absolutely on the list of countries that Putin would like to have within his sphere of orbit. And what we talked about last week, we said that the polls suggested it was going to be very, very, very, very close. She got over fifty percent of the vote and the the block of three parties that was second got just over half of that.

• 7:17Rory Stewart?

  About twenty five percent.

• 7:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Turnout, though, they they were they were celebrating the fact that turnout was higher than before, but it's still only fifty two percent, which is low.

• 7:26Rory Stewart?

  Very low. And there was a lot of problem accessing these polling stations. Of course, the pro-Russian side was saying that they were prevented from accessing the polling stations. And of course, the pro-European side was saying, well, one of the reasons why you had to get from the Transnistrian border and then travel twenty kilometers to get to a polling station is they were worried about disruption on the other side. Just as we transition to the Czech Republic, it's something that maybe in Britain, because we're a little bit further away from the frontline, we forget how in Moldova, and as we're about to discover when we discuss the Czech election, how for countries in Central Eastern Europe, Ukraine defines so much. In this case, of course, it's all about Ukraine. Her economy is barely moving. She's been hit by these terrible energy price spikes

• 8:10Rory Stewart?

  because Russia controls her energy. And yet she's won. So the normal story would be, well, Technocrat, World Bank, cost of living bad, energy bad, she's going to be booted out by the populace. And that, as we transition to the Czech Republic, is broadly the soaring of the Czech Republic. So all my friends who are kind of educated university professors and journalists in the Czech Republic will say, basically about the last four years, Czech government, the sort of things that one might be tempted to say if one was defending Kierstama, which is really good on foreign policy, serious people, but unfortunately have a real problem in communicating. And they've had a tough time with costs of living and energy prices in the Ukraine war.

• 8:49Alastair Campbell?

  So this is Peter Fiala, the the Kierstama figure that you're that you're talking about. And he's up against Bariš, who's a has been prime minister before. I wonder whether the Moldova election will have a bit of an impact on this, because I get the sense, and this may be wishful thinking, but I get the sense that the the sense of Russia. Being related to these populist parties of right and left, I think is is out there. Maybe not yet in the UK as out there as it should be, but it's getting there. And so we'll see what happens in the Czech Republic, because the reason why Europe is watching this so closely is because if the pro-Russian, the more pro-Russian candidate gets in,

• 9:34Alastair Campbell?

  then you have this little, this little grouping of Fico in Slovakia, Orban, who, for leader of a country of five million, we talk about an awful lot this podcast, for very good reason, by the way. And then, and then Babas, and you've got a little kind of Eastern Bloc that is frankly, you know, tending to act as a break on what the European Union is trying to do. So yet again, this is, this is essentially a, within, with all the domestic stuff going on, there is also this battle between Europe and Russia, and this is a kind of bit of a proxy vote.

• 10:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, the Czech tradition since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been two totally separate traditions. The, the one that, that listeners will be very familiar with is the tradition of Vaslav Havel, who was president for 13 years, extraordinary writer, dissident, and who really was a visionary in international affairs, helped to bring the Baltic countries into the European Union. Czech Republic very much performing at a much bigger scale, you know, extraordinary for quite a small country, that it was really shifting the world. And then there was an alternative nativist tradition, represented by a guy called Vaslav Klaus, who I think you would have dealt with when you were in government. And we have this kind of playing out again, you know, yet again, we've got a president

• 10:51Rory Stewart?

  who's a sort of rather respectable senior figure, who gives speeches at Harvard, we've got a prime minister who's been there for four years, who was the head of a, a big university and wears a very formal suit all the time and gets huge respect for what he did standing up to Russia. Because the Czech Republic was very, very quick to sign up to the Ukraine war, to production of drones, a lot of his party's policy is about investing in defence. Clear funding for the Czech army and then against him, again, an oligarch, basically, or maybe an oligarch is a strange way of putting it, a multi-billionaire. It's a man worth approximately four billion dollars. That will put him in probably the top thousand wealthiest men in the entire world.

• 11:34Rory Stewart?

  Right, that's that's putting him into the level of the big, big American guys. I mean, slightly below the level of Elon Musk's, but, you know, well up.

• 11:40Alastair Campbell?

  And below Trump since his second term.

• 11:43Rory Stewart?

  Below Trump's second term.

• 11:45Alastair Campbell?

  And Trump's granddaughter, who's now advertising her wares in the White House.

• 11:48Rory Stewart?

  Colossal, unimaginable amount of money. He's a guy who has now started appearing at conferences with Orban. As you say, people like Anne Applebound, who we interviewed on the podcast, when we spoke to her, picked him out as somebody who's very much a fellow traveler now of Russia. And I suppose final thing, as I come back to you, is this story that Fiona Hill, who we interviewed on leading, has now really been pushing, which say we are basically now at war with Russia. And we've seen that with drones going into Denmark, we've seen that with incursions into Poland, we've seen this with incursions into the Baltic, and we've seen it with this electoral interference, which has gone Moldova, Romania, et cetera. Any, any final thoughts on that one?

• 12:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, just on that, the, I mean, the disinformation and misinformation in this election is off the scale. Conspiracy theories abound, real attempt, not necessarily just to undermine the other candidates, but also to basically to try to undermine the institutions. And there was one report that said that fake news, fake news outlets controlled by Russia were producing more content within the Czech current debate than the entirety of the Czech conventional mainstream media. Now, it doesn't seem to have worked in Moldova, so we'll just, we'll see whether it, whether it works here. I'm actually reading this amazing book at the moment, I've nearly finished it, quite short. It's called Wenn Russland Gewinnt, What If Russia Wins?

• 13:13Alastair Campbell?

  It's, and it's written by this, it's actually a lecturer in international politics at the Bundeswehr University of Munich, and it's half geopolitics and half novel. Essentially what happens is Ukraine is forced to make peace at this peace conference in Geneva.

• 13:28Rory Stewart?

  Not implausible.

• 13:29Alastair Campbell?

  Not at all implausible. And it's forced to make peace because a lot of the European countries and America basically think we can't just keep doing this. Zelensky has to go, Zelensky goes.

• 13:38Rory Stewart?

  Not implausible again.

• 13:39Alastair Campbell?

  Not implausible. And then, this is possibly implausible, based on what is projected in Russia as there's massive triumph. Putin steps down and he makes way for this financial figure, forty seven year old guy comes along. Then what happens? You have all these different plot lines going, one of which, this relates to our discussion with Gerald Knaus, where the Russians in Africa, Wagner Group type people, are basically putting lots of Africans onto boats and flooding them into Europe as refugees.

• 14:12Rory Stewart?

  And of course, the example of that is, we did see this through the Belarusian border, where the Russians and Belarusians were pushing migrants up against the Polish border.

• 14:20Alastair Campbell?

  Great. And Gerald said that Putin wanted to get ten million Ukrainians into Russia, he ended up getting four and a half.

• 14:26Rory Stewart?

  And just on this, I mean, in the Czech election, one thing that we haven't talked about is that although there isn't a traditional migrant issue in the Czech election, they have accepted three hundred and fifty thousand Ukrainians. That's about three percent of the Czech population. That would be like about two and a half million Ukrainians coming to Britain.

• 14:45Alastair Campbell?

  So then what happens is that the West, a bit like we did with Putin, we think there's a thaw, and we think this new modern guy from the financial sector is going to be okay. Turns out, Russia is rearming. Three years later, they take a small town and an island in Estonia. And then he then provokes this Article Five debate, where the American president, who's never named, but one assumes it's Trump, and the new president of France, who is Rassemblement National.

• 15:15Rory Stewart?

  The sort of Le Pen figure.

• 15:16Alastair Campbell?

  Le Pen figure.

• 15:16Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 15:17Alastair Campbell?

  They basically do not think that a small town in Estonia is worth protecting through Article Five. Cut a long story short, at the end of the book, the new president comes forward with Putin, now this aging sort of hero in Russia, and Lukashenko from Belarus, to announce that Russia and Belarus are uniting as one country for the next stage of the Russian programme within Europe. It's an amazing book.

• 15:44Rory Stewart?

  Now, next question. Lucas van den Hooyvel. Does the Netherlands still have the political stability to be a serious player in Europe, or is its fractured system now the biggest threat to its influence?

• 15:56Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm guessing that- Lucas van der Hooyvoor is probably a better place to answer than us because he sounds very Dutch.

• 16:04Rory Stewart?

  And we have a lot of Dutch listeners.

• 16:05Alastair Campbell?

  We do.

• 16:06Rory Stewart?

  I've just come back from Rotterdam.

• 16:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 16:08Rory Stewart?

  Extraordinary. Have you been to Rotterdam?

• 16:09Alastair Campbell?

  Many times.

• 16:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's a very striking city.

• 16:11Alastair Campbell?

  I really.

• 16:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you like it, do you?

• 16:13Alastair Campbell?

  This is gonna get me in hot water. I prefer Rotterdam to Amsterdam.

• 16:17Rory Stewart?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 16:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 16:18Rory Stewart?

  Because it's quite, I mean, people who know.

• 16:19Alastair Campbell?

  It's earthier.

• 16:19Rory Stewart?

  It's quite a gritty port city.

• 16:21Alastair Campbell?

  It's a real.

• 16:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 16:22Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, Amsterdam's lovely, don't get me wrong. Amsterdam, the canals, all that stuff. But I found Rotterdam. I once played the bank pipes at a football match in Rotterdam.

• 16:30Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 16:31Alastair Campbell?

  When I was a student, I was drunk. Anyway.

• 16:32Rory Stewart?

  So, yes, I'd just come back from Rotterdam, talking at Erasmus University. I was someone called the Nexus Institute. I had four hundred and fifty, mostly young people there. Lot of them listens to the podcast. I think we did an hour and forty five minutes of really interesting conversation about populism, elections, European politics. But of course, the big story in the Netherlands is Het Wilders, of course, got most votes in the last election. His position in the polls hasn't really gone down very much.

• 16:59Alastair Campbell?

  A bit.

• 17:00Rory Stewart?

  Gone down a bit, but probably still as they go into the next election, he will come out with the most votes. So he's a far right, anti-ismist populist. And actually, in some ways, I hadn't quite got my head around this, but the Netherlands is quite lucky because the right is actually, the far right is split.

• 17:17Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 17:18Rory Stewart?

  Because a guy called Eust Ademan has taken some of Het Wilders's vote. And then there's a guy called Cherry Bode, who's well out there. You know, he's a self-styled conspiracy theorist, but loves the British-American philosopher Roger Scruton, talks a lot of the J.D. Vance language. Very, very interested in sort of theories of conservatism. Put all those votes together. In fact, the the right-wing votes in the Netherlands might well be well up above thirty percent.

• 17:41Alastair Campbell?

  They might well be. They might well be, but then none of the other parties, they're all now committed to saying they would not serve with Wilders. So the last election, it took them seven months to form a government, and it came together of four parties in the in the coalition. But part of the deal was that Wilders could not be prime minister. So Dick Shuf, this former intelligence chief, he was the prime minister. The coalition has achieved next to nothing, without being too rude about it. And it's disintegrated in stages. But the fact that they're all saying they won't serve with Wilders' party means that it's likely, you're right, that he'll probably come first in the poll. But it's likely that whoever comes second is likely then to be asked to form a government.

• 18:23Alastair Campbell?

  And that might be the guy we had on leading, which is Franz Timmermann, who put together this coalition of, this alliance of Labour and the Greens. There's this new guy on the block called Henry Bonenthal, who's a kind of conservative leader, CD, Christian Democrat. But the big loser is-

• 18:38Rory Stewart?

  But more sort of centrist.

• 18:40Alastair Campbell?

  Centrist, yeah, yeah.

• 18:41Rory Stewart?

  And he was a guy that I got a, it seemed to be, certainly with my sort of tiny student audience poll of that, seemed to be getting a wonderful sort of Nick Clegg effect. I agree with Nick as they go into the election.

• 18:53Alastair Campbell?

  That's exactly what's happening. That's exactly what's happening. So he actually might end up as being the one that kind of emerges as the leader of a possible government. And he's come out of nowhere.

• 19:04Rory Stewart?

  Looks like on track maybe for 2024 seats. I don't know.

• 19:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but the big loser since the election is your friend Mark Rutter, Trump daddy.

• 19:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Alastair Campbell?

  His party, the VVD, have really suffered for having gone into coalition with Wilders.

• 19:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's, I mean, this is a story we have to keep coming back to because it's a sort of parallel to what seems to be happening to the Conservative Party in Britain in relation to reform. It's certainly an absolute parallel with what's happened in France, where the traditional right wing party that dominated government for many years vanished in the face of the right. What do you think about how Franz Timmermann, who we've been interviewing on leading, how he's been doing?

• 19:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I, listen, I like him and I liked, I enjoyed the interview that we did with him. And he's showing guts because they had these pretty bad riots, worse than the kind of Tommy Robinson stuff here.

• 19:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it was, which just, I arrived just a day after those riots.

• 19:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and they were bad. And a lot of it was football hooligans.

• 19:58Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 19:58Alastair Campbell?

  Coming together, some of them were doing Nazi salutes, some of them were carrying the, the, the flag, the pre-tricola flag, which is the old kind of, you know, we support the Nazis flag. A lot of violence.

• 20:09Rory Stewart?

  And then other sorts of flags, which are quite complicated because a bit like in Britain. Where there's controversy is now about very straightforward things like carrying the Union Jack or the flag of St George. Um, one very popular flag they were carrying was traditionally just one of the flags of the House of Orange has suddenly become politicised.

• 20:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. And when, in the aftermath of these riots, the right wing parties did not want to say that this was far right violence. They wanted to kind of, somebody called it, they were trying to whitewash it under the banner of football hooligans. And Timmermans stood up in really, really strongly and just called it out for what it is. And I think we'll, I think we'll get credit for that because the two, the more centrist parties were sort of basically a bit worried about offending these people who'd been out sort of beating up policemen.

• 20:57Rory Stewart?

  Final thing, just the culture war thing. Um, I, I was talking to people who were really cross with Frans Timmermans because I think it was Amsterdam had published a series of leaflets on religious festivals in Amsterdam and they had every religious festival imaginable from every religion imaginable, except they decided not to mention Christmas and Easter.

• 21:16Alastair Campbell?

  Oh.

• 21:17Rory Stewart?

  And they were talking about how Timmermans seemed to find it sort of impossible to take a pretty obvious line, which is to say, why don't we include the Christians as well? But maybe that was unfair. Anyway, you can see the culture war stuff going there. The Netherlands is such a, an extraordinary country. The average person in the Netherlands works, I think, an hour less a week than the average person in Britain and is 20% wealthier. Lovely book actually by a former Conservative spad called Ben Coates about the Netherlands, which I share with people.

• 21:44Alastair Campbell?

  It's got the lowest debt in Europe.

• 21:45Rory Stewart?

  Lowest debt in Europe. Has these sort of extraordinary stories? I mean, it, it a hundred percent of, of the key printing for the chips, which are right at the core of the, the AI revolution are produced in the Netherlands. So in a sense, they have a stranglehold over. The American economy, or is it the other way around? Shell, people know about. And then other bits are sort of quite complicated. There's Catholic Protestant split.

• 22:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Rory Stewart?

  You know, what's going on down in the South, where the famous Philips electronic factory used to be now fallen on slightly hard times. But the thing that struck me most is that there is still a bit of an undercurrent of who are we? What do we stand for? You know, people, older people grumbling that in order to study Dutch now in the Netherlands, you have to study it in English. Basically, everybody's now studying English. And, and that they are worried they've become a little bit too sort of bland and global.

• 22:39Alastair Campbell?

  Would you mean at a Dutch university, if you're doing a degree in Dutch literature, you have to do it in English?

• 22:44Rory Stewart?

  Well, somebody, somebody can feed back in to explain what this story is and whether it's fake news. But all the older people around the table.

• 22:50Alastair Campbell?

  You can't just spray fake news like this.

• 22:52Rory Stewart?

  Listen, these were professors around the table, all of them nodded at this statement that basically you can't really study Dutch and everything's now in English. And they were blaming Mark Rutte for it. I don't know whether he's basically pushed more and more education away from Dutch and into English.

• 23:05Alastair Campbell?

  I've seen when I, when I was a busker, nearly 50 years ago now, the Netherlands was my favorite country because the gilder was just the perfect busking currency.

• 23:15Rory Stewart?

  Why?

• 23:15Alastair Campbell?

  Because it was worse, you know, everybody gave you a gilder.

• 23:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Alastair Campbell?

  And it was just worth more than Frank, the, I mean, certainly the lira. Busking in Italy was a nightmare, throwing you sort of bucket loads of paper.

• 23:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:26Alastair Campbell?

  I've always liked the Netherlands. I, I, I actually wonder if Wilders cannot make the election about Islam, which is his big thing and about migration. I wonder if he will do as well as last time. We both thought that if he won the last election, which he did, but didn't get into power himself.

• 23:44Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 23:44Alastair Campbell?

  That that would then fuel this sense of grievance, which he would exploit.

• 23:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Alastair Campbell?

  I think his struggle to do it this time, because the framing of political debate has been so much more about international stuff, Ukraine and Gaza. Gaza has become a massive issue within this election.

• 23:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I, I saw a poll, something like 40 odd percent saying that, that the different parties' stance on Gaza will impact the way that they vote. Now, I think that says to me, that probably means they're leaning more towards the left than towards the right.

• 24:11Rory Stewart?

  Final point is the odd parallels with Nigel Farage, which is that, again, it's a one man party head, Wilders. It's in fact, it's not really a party at all. It's just him. And he seems to find it very difficult to get on with other people, which was always traditionally the story about Farage. And the question is, will Farage be able to overcome that in a way that Wilders has not?

• 24:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we shall see. The other thing, Roy, you'll love this. In fact, you should put this in the updated version of Politics on the Edge. One of the big moments in the campaign will be on the 10th of October. Something called the Central Plan Bureau, which sounds like a sort of OBR for campaigns, they independently present the results of all the different party programmes, and they say how much they think they will cost, and whether the claims about how they will fund them are credible. Well, brilliant.

• 24:55Rory Stewart?

  That's quite good in a world of fake news, isn't it?

• 24:57Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, yeah. But they've got 27 parties.

• 24:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's a lot. Twenty-five parties running the Czech collection. Anyway, time for a break. This episode is brought to you by Google. We won't fully realise the potential gains of AI unless we make it accessible and useful for everybody across the whole UK workforce. That's why Google, for example, are working closely with trade unions.

• 25:19Alastair Campbell?

  AI and trade unions may not sound like the most natural of partners, but the union movement has got a proud history of supporting members from across the economy and preparing them for the ever-changing world of work.

• 25:31Rory Stewart?

  That's why Google partnered, for example, with the community union in the UK on a People's First Skills Pilot called AI Works, and it's designed to see how AI could help workers and ultimately create productivity benefits across the whole wider economy.

• 25:46Alastair Campbell?

  Just a few hours of training could save members almost a month a year on routine tasks, time-free for the work where their expertise really counts.

• 25:54Rory Stewart?

  One community member, for example, working in a supported living home, said Gemini helped streamline paperwork so she could spend more time with residents.

• 26:02Alastair Campbell?

  That's a very powerful story, and it shows the positive impact AI can have on people's lives, making a real difference in the day-to-day.

• 26:09Rory Stewart?

  Find out how Google's AI is helping fuel the UK's growth and transformation at goo.gle/aiworks.

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• 27:10Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics question time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 27:13Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 27:15Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory, cause dear to your heart, question from Julian. Soon we're going to be celebrating the 70th anniversary of the first national parks, one of the many great achievements of the post-war Labour Government. Today they're needed more than ever, but they're under huge pressure. And now there is shocking talks, says Julian, that the government wants to water down planning protections that only came into law a couple of years ago. What's your advice Rory on getting this government to see the importance of national landscapes and parks and back the cause in the way that Clement Attlee did all those years ago?

• 27:46Rory Stewart?

  Well, listen, it's an interesting story, this, which maybe hasn't got quite enough coverage. So the government's considering now putting in an amendment into their bill to water down how much, yeah, how much attention the planners need to pay to the fact that something's a protected landscape, a national park or an AOMB. And it's slightly technical language, you know, whether you have to take into account or have regard for. But the basic drive of this is the Treasury and others are saying it gets in the way of growth, having to worry about a protected landscape. Now, I think that's daft because my question to the Treasury would be this. What are you trying to do, right? Are you trying to build...

• 28:27Rory Stewart?

  Ten thousand houses or some big AI dentist data centre, in which case sure as eggs is eggs, you should not be putting it in the middle of a national park, right? Or are you talking about some small thing like some car park, which is what the current controversy is about? In which case it's not really that vital to your growth agenda and you might as well keep the protection national parks in place.

• 28:46Alastair Campbell?

  Is there any suggestion that they want to do the latter, the former?

• 28:50Rory Stewart?

  They're talking about growth, so I want, I'd like to know from them which bits of their growth agenda are currently impeded by the national park? And what exactly are they trying to build there? The principle that these things that Clement Attlee set up are amazing. We're going to have to build a lot of houses. Our landscape is under a lot of pressure. The government is committed to biodiversity targets, to nature, to climate, and that they're also talking about nudging into the green belt. So they better look after the national parks and the protected landscapes because it's going to be precious, not just for us, but fifty, hundred, two hundred years' time. People will regret it if those things start getting intruded on.

• 29:26Alastair Campbell?

  That's the first I've heard of any suggestion that they might want to build on the national parks.

• 29:29Rory Stewart?

  Well, they certainly want to have, be able to have more freedom in planning. They don't like the fact that the current law seems to restrict and make planners be very careful about what they build.

• 29:40Alastair Campbell?

  And meanwhile, they have announced that they're building the first three new towns they hope before the election.

• 29:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I would suggest this is not a fight the government should be having. I think that they should probably drop, bring that amendment in.

• 29:50Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, listen, Rory, let's cheer ourselves up. A few months ago, you will remember, we mentioned a policy competition for young people by Politica. And this was called Policy Ideas for Positive Change. And the challenge that we threw out along with Politica was for young people to write a one thousand word policy proposal. And they could choose from the online world, social inequality, AI, healthcare, climate, crime, education. And we said we would discuss the policy that was chosen as the winner. The winner is Rosie Holsall. She is eighteen, she is from Yorkshire and the Humber, and her proposal.

• 30:32Alastair Campbell?

  Is that there should be annual provision of free sports bras and fittings for all secondary school girls.

• 30:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and the argument basically is that women participate in sport less than men, and there are lots of issues that come from that, osteoarthritis. And actually, there was some interesting coverage in newspaper last week that people who participate in sport are much more likely to be confident and successful in later life. I guess that's stuff that you'd really buy into.

• 30:59Alastair Campbell?

  Totally, hundred percent.

• 31:00Rory Stewart?

  Massive sport fan. I just met Rosie by accident in the street, walking up here. She was just walking with her friends past the embankment chutes. That was lovely.

• 31:08Alastair Campbell?

  What are the chances? She's from Yorkshire.

• 31:10Rory Stewart?

  In Caddaboy, she must have been.

• 31:11Alastair Campbell?

  What are the chances?

• 31:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Alastair Campbell?

  On the day that we're going to talk about her proposal.

• 31:16Rory Stewart?

  I know.

• 31:16Alastair Campbell?

  Of you bumping into her.

• 31:17Rory Stewart?

  Spooky, isn't it?

• 31:18Alastair Campbell?

  It is really, really spooky.

• 31:19Rory Stewart?

  Makes you wonder whether there isn't a pattern to the universe. And we huge congratulations to Rosie, and people may also like to look at the paper, which we'll share in the links. Some of the stats are quite interesting. One in two women suffer from osteoporosis risk compared to one in five men. Women lose up to 10% of bone density in the first five years after menopause. This condition costs the NHS £1.8 billion annually. Only 36% of girls wear a sports bra for PE, although 84% believe it's essential. 72% feel self-conscious exercising without one, and 69% say they can't run or jump freely without one, which I guess is completely essential for sport. I imagine a sports bra is only part of the general story on women's sport, many, many

• 32:02Rory Stewart?

  other things, but I'm really pleased that Rosie's drawing attention to how incredibly important sport is for development and how sad it is that, according to these statistics at least, women are currently participating less in sport than men at all.

• 32:13Alastair Campbell?

  And I think as we're talking about sport, Rory, we should just acknowledge the women's rugby team winning the World Cup.

• 32:21Rory Stewart?

  Did you watch that match?

• 32:22Alastair Campbell?

  I did, against Canada in front of Mark Carney. He looked very glum by the end. And we should also, even though there were no sports bras involved, we should welcome the fact that the Europeans. I was gonna say thrash. They thrashed for the first two days and then just held on in the Ryder Cup against the United States. And I loved, even though it was a bit childish, I loved watching the entire squad celebrating by singing, are you watching Donald Trump?

• 32:53Rory Stewart?

  Final thing, just to wrap up. It's been sadly a time of deaths. Quick thoughts about a number of people who sadly died this week. I went to the memorial service of John Sandwich, the elder sandwich, a crossbench appear who did really wonderful things, quite quietly for international development, worked with Save the Children, the other major charities through the seventies and eighties, including some pretty tough solo trips through the Sahel. And when he as a hereditary entered the House of Lords after ninety seven, became a real quiet, I mean, he's a real sort of old fashioned voice. He was very tall, a very quiet spoken, very modest, listened very well, but very, very steely and standing up for things like

• 33:37Rory Stewart?

  Afghanistan. But we've also seen this week, the death of Charles Guthrie, Ming Campbell, both of whom you knew well.

• 33:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Charles Guthrie was Chief of Defence Staff in our early time in government. He was an amazing guy. He really was. I absolutely adore Charles Guthrie. I mean, he wore a pinky ring, Rory.

• 33:57Rory Stewart?

  He did. I knew him since I was a kid. I knew, he was my neighbour in South Kent when I was growing up. Yeah, when I was, I knew him when I was like one or two years old.

• 34:04Alastair Campbell?

  Because he was into his eighties, wasn't he? And his wife had already died.

• 34:06Rory Stewart?

  So he was a young Colonel when I first met him. And my dad, who liked this kind of guy, they were great friends. And Guthrie was a kind of all out, you know, Guards parachute regiment, special forces star.

• 34:18Alastair Campbell?

  He was the first, he was the first special forces guy to head the armed forces.

• 34:22Rory Stewart?

  That's right.

• 34:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 34:23Rory Stewart?

  And went into operations quite late and injured himself, I think, falling off a horse and tripping the colour quite late on.

• 34:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. He was, as you know, I don't like pinky rings.

• 34:30Rory Stewart?

  You don't like pinky rings. Says he looking at my ring.

• 34:31Alastair Campbell?

  I liked his.

• 34:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 34:33Alastair Campbell?

  And I, I think I've told you before, one of my proudest moments was when he asked me to go and address a load of military top brass. And he said, Alastair Campbell is the Esche Esch of Spin.

• 34:47Alastair Campbell?

  That was a great trivia. Ming Campbell, I really liked Ming Campbell.

• 34:51Rory Stewart?

  Remind us who he was.

• 34:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he was a, he was a Liberal Democrat MP. He was the leader of the Liberal Democrats between Charles Kennedy and Nick Clegg. Never quite rose to it. I think even though he was only sixty five at the time, there was quite a lot of ages and Tony was still around, young, David Cameron was around, young, Charles had been young. So he kind of made way for Nick Clegg.

• 35:12Rory Stewart?

  And, and his younger life?

• 35:13Alastair Campbell?

  He was a great sprinter.

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  But I mean, like, like a, a serious, like an Olympic sprinter.

• 35:17Alastair Campbell?

  He, he, he ran in the Olympics in Tokyo. He was the captain of the Scottish team in the Commonwealth Games in sixty six. He was once described in the media, regularly described as the fastest white man on earth. Famously beat OJ Simpson, remember him? He beat him in a race once, and a lovely guy. The other person who died this week that was really, really sad to anybody who was involved in the Good Friday Agreement was a guy called Martin Mansa, who was one of the Irish key people in the Good Friday Agreement. So it's been a sad week all round.

• 35:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Ming was on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee with me, so I saw a lot of him. We travelled to Afghanistan together. The lovely thing about these parliamentary committees is you travel around the world together and he was a, I mean, he was a real kind of classic elder statesman, a very, very distinguished, quiet distinguished Scot. And I, I wonder whether there isn't a sort of, um, group of these rather interesting people. Maybe George Robertson is part of a younger group, maybe David Steele is part of a, another generation, but they, they were quite an interesting.

• 36:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The other thing about Ming, because he became a, quite a sort of high up lawyer, and he was very kind of, even, you know, when he was kind of getting on a bit, he was very kind of straight backed and so you always had a sense of him being, from being quite a posh background. He actually came from a very humble Glaswegian background. He also had this wonderful wife called Elspeth, who, um, she was absolutely brilliant and he proposed to her. She was married to a baronet and he, they got divorced and he got to know her, I think during the divorce through the friend of his lawyer. And he proposed to her after two weeks and they were absolutely this sort of amazing, rock solid couple. She died a couple of years ago. And, but she was always very funny because she was called Campbell, as am I.

• 36:58Alastair Campbell?

  And she always used to say, I know how much you hate the honour system. You, I, I insist that you call me lady, lady, lady Campbell.

• 37:08Alastair Campbell?

  She was entitled three times to call herself a lady and he would sort of sing three times a lady to her.

• 37:14Rory Stewart?

  She was the daughter of a sort of classic, almost sort of Charles Guthrie type figure who's portrayed, I think, in, is it Bridge Too Far or Bridge Over the River?

• 37:22Alastair Campbell?

  Bridge Too Far, yeah. By Sean Connery?

• 37:25Rory Stewart?

  There we are, very good. Yeah, that was her dad.

• 37:27Alastair Campbell?

  Her dad was played by Sean Connery, yeah.

• 37:29Rory Stewart?

  Brew up in British India.

• 37:30Alastair Campbell?

  Pre James Bond, yeah. There we are. They don't make characters like that anymore, Rory.

• 37:33Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, except for you and you. Yeah. Right. Anyway, we did have a question last week and sometimes it's nice to come back to questions from last week and a really good listener, in this case Victoria Moore, who was wine editor of the Daily Telegraph, really got into this question of the wines that were served at the Trump dinner. So she says it was Wiston Estate 2016, really excellent sparkling wine made on the Goring family estate in West Sussex. So this is how she explains what was served. The wines were carefully chosen to cover off the host country, which was the Wiston wine, the visitors, which was Ridge Vineyards Montebello 2000 US. Even the big ticket Burgundy paid subtle respect to the visitors because the domain was bought

• 38:15Rory Stewart?

  in 2017 by Stanley Croker, the American billionaire and Arsenal FC owner who donated million dollars to Trump's inaugural fund in 2016.

• 38:23Alastair Campbell?

  How lovely, how generous.

• 38:24Rory Stewart?

  And a rare Scotch originally bottled for the late Queen's golden jubilee and a 1912 cognac from the birth year of Trump's Scottish born mother and was 1945 vintage port in honour of Trump having been the 45th US president. So they really thought through that list. If anyone's interested, the list was Wiston Estate, Cuvee 2016, England, Domain Bono de Marche, Corso Charlemagne Grand Cru 2018, France, Ridge Vineyards Montebello 2000, US Paul Roger Extra Cuvee Reserve 1998.

• 38:51Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think they made a big deal? Because Trump is tea total, he doesn't drink at all.

• 38:56Rory Stewart?

  That's unfortunate. Give it to him, what I just told you that, yeah.

• 38:59Alastair Campbell?

  But do you think they explained, do you think they told him all that stuff and would he have been interested, do you think?

• 39:03Rory Stewart?

  Do you think? Is your sense of his personality, he'd be flattered by all that stuff? That it was the birth year of his mother?

• 39:08Alastair Campbell?

  If he thought that they went to these extraordinary lengths.

• 39:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Alastair Campbell?

  To celebrate his presence in our country, even though he didn't drink. I guess he drinks, did he drink water?

• 39:17Rory Stewart?

  I bet he probably took the wine list back home and like, of course, I guess.

• 39:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and also those things, they always, I remember, I've got quite a few at home of those sort of wine lists and menus where everybody at the table signs them. He wouldn't have got all those signatures, but I guess he does like that sort of stuff. And then we'll probably see it pop up on eBay in a few years, sold by one of his granddaughters.

• 39:36Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, Rory, what did you make of that? His granddaughter flogging hoodies and T-shirts from the White House.

• 39:43Rory Stewart?

  It's unbelievable. I was just talking to David Alasuga, who does the Journey Through Time podcast, which is one of our Goalhanger family of podcasts. And we were talking about the way in which, you know, he used the word Overton window. In other words, the window of what's acceptable has shifted so far under Trump too. I mean, I I notice people say, well, Trump's not so bad because he's not Hitler. He's more like Mussolini. And then people will then say, and Farage is not so bad because he's not quite Trump, you know, and on and on. And and I guess the daughter, the granddaughter comes somewhere into this. Something would have been kind of unimaginable and barely mentioned, barely gets 10 seconds at the end of question time.

• 40:22Alastair Campbell?

  Indeed.

• 40:23Rory Stewart?

  See you. Bye bye.

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