396. Question Time: It's over for Kemi Badenoch

Why is politics still so elitist? What story is Kemi Badenoch trying to sell? And, how can Dutton escape Trump comparisons? Join Alastair and Rory as they answer all of these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to Question Time episodes to live show tickets, ad-free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ 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 GetFuse.com/Politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producers: India Dunkley, Evan Green Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rory Stewart?

  Rest is Politics is, as ever, powered by our friends at Fuse Energy.

• 0:04Alastair Campbell?

  And when you switch to Fuse, you will receive a trip plus membership with all the perks completely free of charge.

• 0:10Rory Stewart?

  That means exclusive in-depth bonus episodes, you know, like our interview with the Danish Prime Minister and new episodes we're making on niche subjects, ad-free listening, early access to our Question Time episodes, pre-sale tickets for our live shows and much more.

• 0:24Alastair Campbell?

  Just go to getfuse.com/politics and use the referral code POLITICS when signing up.

• 0:30Rory Stewart?

  Fuse is offering fixed electricity rates well below the April cap, with typical households saving nearly £150 on both 12 and 18 months tariffs as of the time of recording.

• 0:40Alastair Campbell?

  And fixing your rate now means you're protected from further rises, which is a rare bit of financial certainty in these very uncertain times.

• 0:48Rory Stewart?

  It's a straightforward way to take control of your bills and receive a few podcast bonuses while you're at it.

• 0:53Alastair Campbell?

  And one bit of policy we can all agree on, cheaper power and podcast perks thrown in. So download the app, sign up with the code POLITICS and visit getfuse.com/politics for full terms and more information.

• 1:12Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:14Alastair 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.

• 1:27Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve 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.

• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:57Rory 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/RestIsPolitics. That's nordvpn.com/RestIsPolitics.

• 2:10Alastair Campbell?

  Politics and the link is in the episode description.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  A BetterHelp ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day, every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com/restpolitics.

• 2:51Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the rest of politics question time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:54Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart. And first question for you from one of our very favourite countries, which is Australia. Tom says, what on earth is going on on the Australian election? And Alistair in particular, are your predictions on Dutton's faltering performance being vindicated?

• 3:13Alastair Campbell?

  Well, of course, you're the you're the master of election predictions, Rory. You know, you put a large sum of money on Kamala Harris. I'm not a betting person, but if I were, if I were a betting person, I would put my money on Albanese right now because I don't think Dutton is fighting a good campaign. And by the way, we should tell listeners that all being well, our next guest on leading will be Mr Albanese, Mr Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia.

• 3:39Rory Stewart?

  Unbelievable. Congratulations. That's amazing to get the Australian Prime Minister right in the middle of an election campaign.

• 3:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I think we have a lot. I think we have a, we have a lot of listeners out there. He wouldn't be doing it for the good of his health. I think he's fighting a pretty good campaign. He's, I listened to an interview he did with Latika Burke, who's somebody who knows Britain, Australia very, very well. And actually, her first question was, you seem a lot more confident than you were last time in the last campaign. And I wonder if that is because he's sort of feeling the the Dutton balloon slightly slightly bursting.

• 4:13Rory Stewart?

  So what is it that Dutton's done wrong? So we've seen people saying that his anti-woke drive hasn't worked out. There's been a certain amount on his his pitch somehow being out of date, that he's he's sounding too Trumpian. What's what's your basic take on what he's doing wrong?

• 4:30Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, possibly a bit unfairly. He's being allied very closely to Trump and he's trying to get away. And the more he tries to get away, the harder it's get. He wasn't helped by one of his candidates talking about making Australia great again. And he was standing in the back room, wincing as she said it. But also, this working from home thing, I think he just thought that as part of the sort of Trumpian and anti-woke so-called agenda, saying there'd be a big crackdown and working from home would go down really well. It went down really, really badly. There's a new thing has developed today. The big story today is about Russia doing some sort of defence deal with Indonesia, which Dutton is trying to get up as a sort of, you know, Labour week on security. But

• 5:12Alastair Campbell?

  it it felt a bit desperate, to be honest. The next debate is happening, I think, on Wednesday. But it's feeling, it's look, a long way to go, but it's feeling that Dutton's just not really cutting through in the way that he probably wanted to. And I think I think some of his MPs and candidates are starting to say there wasn't really a very strong plan.

• 5:30Rory Stewart?

  Part of the problem seems to be that he had some strong plans, you know, like the stuff from working from home, but that he he dropped them. And two quick things. There's a guy called Kos Samaras, who I follow a bit on polling in Australia, who said that the big difference is emerging in housing policy, and that Labour is targeting individuals who struggle to save for a deposit, middle urban areas, regional Australia. But the weakness is that this is an electorate that doesn't believe that the government will build the promised homes. And in contrast, the coalition is focusing on outer suburban communities.

• 6:05Rory Stewart?

  Particularly resonate with the Indian Australian diaspora and people who favour new homeownership in those areas but may not resonate with the bulk of renters. Anyway, that was a sort of kind of detail around housing policy, but that's a bigger question for you, which I think relates to a question that we've just got from Will, which is, is Kemi Badenoch right not to have any policies? It may be a bit unfair to Kemi Badenoch, but it sort of relates to this Dutton point, which is that in the modern world, there seems to be a real problem with announcing too many policies, because as soon as you announce a policy, people attack you and you frequently feel inclined to backtrack on it. You know, you could argue that Labour, to some extent, won the British election without

• 6:51Rory Stewart?

  putting out too many policies and without seeming largely relying on, I don't know, the Conservatives just seeming hopeless and useless and everybody wanted to get rid of them. But the reason, the question to Kemi I wanted to pose is, she's presumably between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, she could think, okay, I don't want to put out too many policies because I'm going to be attacked for them. On the other hand, if she doesn't say anything, she's going to lose momentum, reform is going to develop, Labour will develop and she'll become almost invisible. Ever, do you want that?

• 7:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit harsh to expect her to be putting out policy in the same level as somebody like Dutton, who's right in the middle of an election campaign and wants to be Prime Minister come May the 4th. She's got a while to go if she gets there. I think at her stage in opposition, you need policy, but more than that, you need policy argument and you need a story that you're telling the country about yourself, about your party and about the country. And my sense of her is that the story that she's telling is very locked in that sort

• 8:01Alastair Campbell?

  of right wing media eco sphere, and I'm just not sure the public are listening to it. So like, I'd be very hard pressed, and I'm somebody who, you know, like you, follows this stuff fairly closely. I can't really think of anything that she has said or done that has made a lasting positive impression upon me. I could look at Dutton, who I don't think is having a good campaign, but I have seen him, for example, I've seen him sometimes in the Australian Parliament, being really strong and really quite powerful in the way that he speaks. And I've seen him say stuff about defence and foreign policy and I've thought, oh yeah, he's kind of thought about this. I really, I really don't quite get where she's going.

• 8:43Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, she's up against Farage, who gets away with murder, partly because of the media, I see he was on the Laura Koonsberg show again, the doubtless beyond question time next week. He, he sort of gets an easy ride from the media, but he also gets an easy ride from his opponents. You know, Labour and the Tories don't seem to me to have worked out what is the best way to attack reform. And that means that he just sort of floats from one talking point to the next. So I don't think it's about policy for her, I think it's about overall big picture strategy and what's the story she's trying to tell about the country. Farage does have a story about the country. Basically, he says it's wrecked and it's terrible and everything is awful and put me in charge and it will be fine. That's his basic story. And he's allowed to get away with it.

• 9:26Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so just to try to get our heads around this, because this is, I guess, central to what Badenoch is going to be thinking about, but politicians all around the world think about, which is, you could have a sort of completely novel economic analysis of how you transform British growth, but nobody's got that, right? There's no economist that anyone's got in their back pocket who has some brilliant new analysis of the country. You could be a really strong House of Commons performer, and I guess you also, we keep coming back to New Labour and what you guys did in opposition and how you got yourselves in a position by 97 to win. Part of that is that Tony Blair was a very good House of Commons performer, so presumably, unlike Camilla Badenoch, he was getting quite a

• 10:11Rory Stewart?

  lot of good press for how he was performing at Primus's Questions. We're also told, but maybe this is ridiculous, that, you know, this big speech on tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime was an example of how he managed to find a way of seizing the national narrative. I mean, can you just make the case for if you were looking at New Labour coming in and applying to Badenoch, what sort of things were you doing 94 to 97 that Badenoch should be thinking about doing now and she isn't doing?

• 10:40Alastair Campbell?

  Analyzing where they've gone wrong.

• 10:44Alastair Campbell?

  I think we did a lot of that, working out how she can insert herself into the national conversation in a way that's interesting, rather than predictable. I'd say when I see her at question time, and I do, I agree with you, I think question, I think when you're the leader of the opposition, question time is incredibly important because it's, you know, even though it's not that millions of people watch it, but it sort of somehow feeds into the national conversation about whether you're doing well, whether you're doing badly. And generally, Tony, most weeks, people thought he was pretty good. I think with her, she's predictable in that the subjects that she goes on, the subjects you might expect her to, but

• 11:28Alastair Campbell?

  they often, it feels to me, don't speak to a bigger narrative that she's trying to develop. I just have no idea about what she's trying to say about the country. So when you say tough on the crime, tough on the causes of crime, that was a message about an issue that people really cared about, and it was a framing. It was a framing. What has she framed? What argument is she framed? And then if I look at what she, you know, the thing we didn't have in our day of the whole social media thing, I look at her social media and the Conservative social media, and again, I don't understand what they're trying to do with it. They're just attacking Labour all the time. Well, that's fine. You've got to attack the opposition or the government. But I just, I just don't know what the story is.

• 12:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, so final thing, you're being surprisingly polite, but let me ask you more bluntly and to be more outspoken. Do you think she's going to be here at the time of next election?

• 12:18Alastair Campbell?

  No, I don't. I don't. I think the Conservatives will, the Conservatives, look, I don't know a lot of the a lot of the ones I know have kind of gone, they vanished. But the Conservative Party generally is pretty ruthless and brutal about its leaders. And I was talking to a Labour MP the other day, who said it's really interesting watching the Tories during PMQs.

• 12:42Alastair Campbell?

  They they started off thinking Keir wouldn't be very good at it and he's got better. And they say that when she's on her feet, they look just a little bit soulless and lost. Now, she will feel that if she's got any empathy at all, which I think I'm sure she has, she will feel that. She won't survive unless she finds a compelling narrative about who she is, how she relates to the party she leads and how that relates to the country. Till she gets that, she's not going to break through at all.

• 13:12Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Okay, now we have a question on Labour and the trade unions.

• 13:17Alastair Campbell?

  The trade union movement.

• 13:19Rory Stewart?

  Mel Alastair, you often mention Labour's role in the trade union movement. Can you tell us a bit more about it and how you see the relationship evolving today? And I guess also Captain Gutten, given the Birmingham bin strikers have rejected another offer, is there a government override to end a strike? Some complaints from Birmingham that we were not serious enough about what this bin thing means. Can we just explain to listeners, particularly international listeners, just how bad many people in Birmingham feel things have gone?

• 13:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, although there were two Birmingham people on the radio this morning saying they were fed up of everybody saying that everywhere you go in Birmingham, all you see is rubbish because actually it's been, one of the interviewees actually said, the bags are being piled up very nicely. Come to Birmingham, the bags are piled up nicely. No, this is a strike over changes to working conditions, job descriptions, which the unions say means that some of their their members are going to be thousands of pounds worse off over a year. They've had another ballot and they've voted to continue the strike. The government wants, they want the bins off to clear it up. So it's a pretty grim situation. I mean, Labour and the unions is a really interesting story this.

• 14:34Alastair Campbell?

  I actually wonder if at some point we shouldn't, we keep promising these these mini series and we're going to do, we're going to be doing one, hopefully not too long on J D Vance. But I wonder whether at some point there isn't one to be done on on Labour and the unions. Because it's a story that's more interesting than the than the caricature. I mean, the Labour Party essentially was formed and funded in part by the trade union movement, round back in nineteen hundred. And membership, so today there are something like six and a half million trade union members. Oh, that was twenty twenty three, the last sort of reliable figures. The peak, you won't be surprised, the year that trade union membership peaked, it was nineteen seventy nine,

• 15:16Alastair Campbell?

  thirteen point two million. So that was the year that Margaret Thatcher was elected. And the decline since then, interestingly, most of the decline has been in the private sector. Public sector union membership is still pretty high. And the other thing is that partly because of Thatcher and because of the power of the Thatcher myth, which I think a lot of it is, and also the fact that she did, there's no doubt, she did bring the trade unions down. And also the fact that most of our media framing about the trade unions is very negative, it's still very negative. But it overlooks the fact that historically, and particularly, I would argue during the Second World War, the unions were very, very popular.

• 15:59Alastair Campbell?

  Union membership soared during the war, and I think a lot of the reason for that was, we all know about Nye Bevan, who created the National Health Service, but Ernest Bevin, who was this amazing guy, born in the early eighteen eighties, orphaned at eight, no, next to no formal education, started work at eleven. And by nineteen twenty two, so he would have been, what's nineteen twenty two, he'd been about thirty odd. So by nineteen twenty two, he'd basically created and was running the Transport and General Workers Union, which became the biggest union in the country.

• 16:38Rory Stewart?

  And which is connected to the Birmingham bin strikes, right? This is the Birmingham bin strikes.

• 16:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this is Unite.

• 16:43Rory Stewart?

  Which is the descendant.

• 16:45Alastair Campbell?

  The T, exactly. So the T and G no longer exists.

• 16:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's the child of Ernie Bevan's Union.

• 16:50Alastair Campbell?

  I think he'd have sorted it by now. But the big thing was that during the interwar years, even though he was not in Parliament, he was a big figure in the Labour Party. In fact, there is, you know, there is an argument that he was responsible for Atlee because he made this amazing speech at the Labour Party Conference that led to, essentially led to Atlee replacing George Lansbury as leader of the Labour Party. But then come the war, Churchill clearly recognised something very, very special in Ernie Bevin.

• 17:21Alastair Campbell?

  And he put him in the cabinet, essentially in charge of turning Britain into a war economy. And he did it very, very well. And so, and that's when trade union membership doubled. So you had a union leader, the leader of the T and G in the cabinet, big part of the industrial war effort.

• 17:37Rory Stewart?

  This leads us to the disagreement that we had as fractious disagreement last week about the composition of parliament. And I was trying to use Ernie Bevan as a classic example of this incredible Foreign Secretary who came in. Older, actually, you've just pointed out, older than I realised at the time. I mean, he's almost seventy when he's coming into that job and proved to be this incredible Foreign Secretary, replacing the sort of moustache twirling Anthony Eden. And demonstrating that he was incredibly good at managing the Russians, managing the Americans. And I was setting up this story that in the good old days, instead of having a bunch of people whose parents were politicians and a bunch of political professionals.

• 18:17Rory Stewart?

  We had these amazing trade union legends that gave Labour this incredible confidence and presence in the House of Commons that was lacking. And you then came back to me to say this was all complete nonsense and all your friends who are Labour MPs have been rioting since.

• 18:34Alastair Campbell?

  They weren't rioting, but no, because I coincidentally, I, I, I was asked to go and talk to lots of people who worked for Labour MPs. Young researchers and what have you. And, and so I was asking lots of them about the background and somebody's done a thing using AI, which says that something like twenty two percent of Labour MPs have what he defines as very political parents. I don't know what the very political parent means, but the ones that I talked to, very few were children of MPs. Some were children of councillors, but I think yours was a bit of a caricature.

• 19:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Samuel Colvin, who's one of our, our members. In response to Restless Politics discussion, politicians' political parents spent a couple of hours using pidantic AI to extract political relatives from Wikipedia pages for UK MPs. Twenty three percent of UK MPs have political parents, sixty six percent more than the general population.

• 19:29Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think he means sixty six times more.

• 19:31Rory Stewart?

  Sixty, sorry, sixty six times, sixty six times more than the general pop, yeah. Um, I P P R has also done some really good stuff on this. What they've pointed out is that Parliament's become much more diverse in terms of far more women. So I think it's now thirty five percent of Parliament are female, uh, more diverse, ten percent from minority ethnic backgrounds. Both those are lower than the general population, but it's getting up there. Big transformation in sexuality, but when it comes to people from working class backgrounds, there have been a couple of different studies. Oliver Heath, nineteen sixty four, twenty percent of Parliament was working class, now five percent.

• 20:11Rory Stewart?

  And in sixty four, that was when the general population was fifty percent, it was twenty percent. It's now five percent compared to twenty five percent.

• 20:18Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we got a lot of pushback on this as well, because what's your definition of working class then and now?

• 20:22Rory Stewart?

  So, um, I P P R defines working class as manufacturing or manual backgrounds or unskilled service work, for example, care work, or trade union employees who came from the working parts of the trade union. And on those metrics, they say that in nineteen eighty seven, twenty eight percent came from working class occupations. Today, thirteen percent come from working class occupations. So the big discrepancy, the way in which Parliament doesn't represent the general population, is no longer in terms of women, no longer in terms of diversity. It's increasingly in terms of two things, far fewer people from working class professions and far more university graduates. In fact, more university graduates in the Labour Party than in the Conservative Party.

• 21:06Alastair Campbell?

  In part, that's because there are more university graduates and also there are fewer traditional working class jobs.

• 21:11Rory Stewart?

  But I P P R sets up that, um, so it compares to the general population. So, you know, thirty four percent of the general population go to university, eighty nine percent of MPs. And when it comes to working class occupations, again, the number of working class occupations in the country has come down, but it hasn't come down anything like as steeply as the number of MPs from working class backgrounds.

• 21:34Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's partly, though, that class has changed. I think our, our, our understanding of what class means has changed. So for example, you know, if you're a university student working in a bar and then you end up going into the gig economy for a while, we used to have a much clearer sense of what working class was. And I'm not sure now that, I mean, I agree with you, more than more Labour MPs are now educated at degree level than would have been the case in Ernie Bevan's time. And I also agree, by the way, that we could do with a few more Ernie Bevins. But the other point you made last week is there aren't that so many characters

• 22:13Alastair Campbell?

  then, now as then. I think people like, you know, it's rare that you get somebody as special as he was, and who was clearly so capable. And I think, by the way, you could make the case that in part because of Atlee as the Deputy Prime Minister in the War Cabinet, and Bevan doing the job that he did, I think it was partly because of that and the country getting used to them as figures of government, that helped lead to the landslide that they got in 1945, which included then the implementation of the Beveridge Report, which was in the, I think came out in 1942. So he was a transformational figure. I mean, just to close off the sort

• 22:57Alastair Campbell?

  of brief history of Labour and the unions, the first really big falling out was when Wilson was Prime Minister, and that was over Barbara Castle's famous white paper on industrial relations in place of strife, when the unions ultimately forced the government to back down. And then the winter of discontent and the social contract, which the Tories, you know, the winter of discontent, they still talk about because that was, if you imagine the bin strike in Birmingham, but that sort of thing happening all over the country. But what I think is interesting about the way that Bevan did it, he tried in as a wartime leader, tried to bring business and unions together. And Tony, when Tony was Prime Minister, that was his approach, trying to, not like the Germans with the kind of, you know, the

• 23:41Alastair Campbell?

  whole tripart economic structure, but trying to get better relations between business and unions. And I think that when they feel that there are opposite sides of every argument, then I think your economy is likely to be less efficient. But anyway, we should maybe revisit this because I do think there were some fascinating characters and stories going way back. And of course, you know, when I was growing up, these trade union leaders, they were household names.

• 24:08Rory Stewart?

  So just as we go to the break, I mean, Joe Keenan, as someone who looks at becoming a politician but works odd hours and is very much part of the gig economy, do you think part of the problem in entering politics is the amount of unpaid work and time that's required by local branches of parties? Absolutely. This is the other thing we don't, we're not honest with the public about. To win a marginal seat now, you basically need to be full time in that seat for two years before the election. That means leaving your job, moving to that constituency, screws up your mortgage. If you are not employed by your, as a professional, right? If you're not a spad with your party, if you're not a comms person with your party, or if you don't have a private income and a family supporting you, how on earth are you supposed to do it?

• 24:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Rory Stewart?

  You know, how on earth is somebody from a genuinely working class background supposed to find the money to spend two years completely without an income, working full time on trying to win a marginal seat?

• 25:03Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 25:04Rory Stewart?

  And that's what the trade unions used to do. They used to pay people salaries to help them get into parliament.

• 25:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, last time round, you had organisations like Labour Together who were supporting certain MPs and the trade unions still do have tried to help MPs. But you know, that's a fair point. But Joe, don't let it get you down. Do it. Find a way. You can do it. Get stuck in. I'm assuming now that you're a kind of modernising Labour person who wants to help the Labour Party. Let's have a break.

• 26:08Alastair Campbell?

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

• 26:10Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 26:12Alastair Campbell?

  Here's a nice polite friendly question. Rory, Ross Martin. Do you two represent the failed old politics of the past that's enabled the rise of populism? By not allowing enough political bandwidth in an essentially two party winner takes all system? Take that.

• 26:28Rory Stewart?

  Oh, well, good chance to plug our leading interview with Ezra Klein, which is doing very, very well. Because Ezra Klein formulates it as people from the centre like you and me. Have fallen into the trap when he's being rude. He says that the trap is that the centre left end up. Defending the government even when it's indefensible. And the far right end up always attacking the government regardless. And that this is actually the basic dynamics of politics. So I guess the there are bigger things we can say about how we screwed up, right? 2008 financial crisis, Iraq and Afghanistan horrifying wars. The sense of so many economic problems that are leaving people online, but perhaps more fundamentally.

• 27:13Rory Stewart?

  The risk is that we got into a habit of always saying, oh, you can't do that, you know, that's. Too risky, that's, you know, not in accordance with the law, we can't do the process. And every time anyone said, this is ridiculous, the government's screwing up. That the default is to spring to defence.

• 27:29Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, Ross, when you say the failed old politics of the past, I worry, I worry that what you're saying in that. Is that actually democracy has failed. And that's why I have a really big worry that that's what's happening in in America right now. That essentially what the Trump people say the whole time is everything's broken. The Democrats feel they have to defend the institutions. And it's the institutions, like the courts and the rule of law and a free media. They come to represent in Trump's eyes and his followers, the failed old politics of the past. And I worry there's too much of that in our politics at the moment as well. So if you're saying that politics has failed, you're basically saying democracies failed.

• 28:13Alastair Campbell?

  Because I would argue that the democracies have done better in terms of delivering prosperity for an opportunity for people than the dictatorships. But if we're not careful, that is the road that we go down. And the other thing I think that you mentioned Ezra Klein there, Rory. The other thing I was really struck by in the interview with him, and he was great. And he's such a clever guy. But he was making the point in a way that most politicians can't make the point because it sounds like you're saying people are stupid. But he made the point that actually we are as people becoming more stupid. We are becoming less curious. We are becoming less able and willing to use our powers of reason to think beyond an instant reaction to anything. And I mentioned that piece that David Brooks had written in the New York Times.

• 28:58Alastair Campbell?

  It was the data backs that up. You know, when you look at exam results in America and you look at people's ability to do, maybe this is why Trump's obsessed with his cognitive test. Because the thing about Trump is you usually have to, you know, whatever he's saying is the opposite of what he actually thinks. So he's saying, I'm really clever. I passed this cognitive test. Maybe he's worried about his cognitive skills deep down. But no, so I don't think we represent the feral politics of the past. I think we represent a different generation and we need a new generation to come along and devise the new politics of the future, but don't throw out democracy in the process.

• 29:33Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Okay, Tat Kiernan B. This might be a bit basic, but how important is a party's colour for its perception?

• 29:40Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, well Rory, do you know why my book, the book I wrote for kids, do you know why the colour was pink?

• 29:45Rory Stewart?

  No, why was it pink?

• 29:46Alastair Campbell?

  Because the publisher didn't want it to be red because that would be too labour. And they wanted it to be unbiased. And pink is the only major colour that's never been used by a political party.

• 29:57Alastair Campbell?

  So there you go.

• 29:59Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 30:00Alastair Campbell?

  I think the important, I think, I think the colour's important. I think, I think Labour being red is important and I hate the fact that in America, it's the Republicans that share the same colour.

• 30:09Rory Stewart?

  And red's important because it is revolution, it's socialism, it's.

• 30:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it feels, it feels passion, it feels passionate, red feels passionate to me. Blue feels sort of dull and safe and conservative, so that's why it works for the Conservatives. Green feels green.

• 30:27Rory Stewart?

  And how about, how about black? What would you think about a party that was using black?

• 30:31Alastair Campbell?

  The Christian, the Christian Democrats in Germany.

• 30:34Rory Stewart?

  Ah.

• 30:35Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, I wouldn't go for black, I don't like black.

• 30:39Rory Stewart?

  Does it not feel a bit kind of extremist black or am I getting something wrong?

• 30:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it does, no, it does.

• 30:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Alastair Campbell?

  It's like we see a lot of football hoodigans, you know, the ultras, they get together, they all wear black, it looks a bit scary. When they wear white, they look quite sort of lively and nice, friendly.

• 30:53Rory Stewart?

  Um, do you think yell- yellow might be, isn't that a bit of a problem for the Lib Dems? That it might come across a bit sort of wet and yellow's traditionally associated with cowardice, isn't it?

• 31:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but yellow is more SNP, yellow and black, and the Lib Dems are more orange. Um, the trouble is there aren't, there aren't that many colours. I think, I think more important is the, is the design and the style around it. But no, I think, I think red is, you, you probably won't be surprised to hear this, Roy, I think red is the best political colour.

• 31:24Rory Stewart?

  Well, it really, this stuff really, really matters less than the United Kingdom. Um, but in many, many developing countries where many of the key voters in rural areas are not literate.

• 31:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:34Rory Stewart?

  The question of colours, the question of your slogan, the way that that's presented on the ballot paper, if you can't read the name of the party, can it really matters? And one of the things we've seen in, in electoral chicanery, stealing elections around the world, is changing the rules on how you display symbols and colours on the ballot paper can have a huge impact on results.

• 31:54Alastair Campbell?

  What's your favourite colour? Never asked you that question.

• 31:57Rory Stewart?

  Oh, thank you. Oh, um, oh, I like dark blue. There we are, you see, I'm a Tory, it's been proved, been proved, hasn't it?

• 32:05Alastair Campbell?

  I like claret, see, my favourite colour is claret, because of Burnley, but my favourite political colour is definitely red. Well, look at me at the moment. I'm in dark blue from head to toe. It's literally nothing that's dark blue. With a, with a brandy logo. Right. Finally, Rory. Sandra Stephens, you've not done book recommendations in a while. What have you read, or reread, that's Rory, that you enjoyed? We did actually, I, I was rather, if you've listened to Ezra Klein, I hope people understood my last question. What did he give us? Three book recommendations? Because that's what he does at the end of his podcasts. So what have I read recently? One of them I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I think it was, and that is this book here, Israel, Le piège

• 32:46Alastair Campbell?

  de l'histoire, that Gérard Arro. I hope an English publisher translates it because it's a really, really good book about, if you want to understand Israel from the perspective of a European diplomat who's, who's worked there and tried to be fair to both sides, it's a really good read. We've got coming up on, would I have read this anyway? I might have done, but we've got coming up soon on leading Jonathan Haidt, who's written this brilliant book, The Anxious Generation, how the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. And it is one of those books that did convince me. It moved me in the way I think about this stuff because it's just so well-written, so clearly-written, the data backs it up. So when that interview comes up, I hope people enjoy it. And my

• 33:31Alastair Campbell?

  third one is a book that actually was dropped off for me by a fellow swimmer who's Scottish but lives in Australia. And she knew that I swam at the, the Lido around the corner and she'd left a book for me called Going Under. She's called Shauna Smith and it's a very, very, very powerful account of her descent into alcoholism and her, her, her recovery. And there'll be lots of recovery books, but hers is really good, mainly because she uses diaries from, as it were, you know, all the different stages of her life. So.

• 34:06Rory Stewart?

  There's three for you. What about you? Very good. A couple for me then. Um, new book coming up by John Gantz called When the Clock Broke: Conmen, Conspiracists, and the Road to Trump's America. He basically argues that a lot of the stuff that we're seeing now really begins in the beginning of the 90s. We've talked about this kind of Newt Gingrich, polarisation of America, but also the way in which Reagan- The Thatcher-Reagan Revolution. Thatcher-Reagan Revolution, that's right. So he's absolutely with you on that, with you and your friend John McDonnell and Jeremy on that. He's, you know, he very much finds the story in the 1990s and the beginnings of America's collapse back at that period. The other book, which I didn't talk about enough when we did our Greenland

• 34:49Rory Stewart?

  stuff, is one of my favourite books in the world, which is called An African in Greenland by Tete Michel Compasie, and he's from Togo, and it's just absolutely astonishing. This is a book written, 1950s, Tete grows up. His dad is a small-time employee in the local electricity company, but at home, he's like this sort of grand patriarch, and he has different wives and different huts around his own larger hut. And each month, he invites a different wife in to feed him delicious food. This is in Africa? This is all in Africa, before he goes to Greenland. So what happens is Tete gets ill as a little boy, and his dad is like, "Don't worry, I've got this." And he comes

• 35:31Rory Stewart?

  out and he starts ripping a chicken to pieces and doing a voodoo dance. And Tete's mother, who's this very sort of put-upon junior wife, suddenly loses it with the dad and says, "You are a total idiot. You have no idea what you're doing. I want my son to see a doctor." And this is the beginning of Tete's break with his father and his decision to go off to Greenland. So he arrives, not in the Greenland of today, but in the Greenland of the 1950s, right, as an African. How did he get there? And he basically hitchhikes across Europe.

• 36:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he basically hitchhikes his way across Europe.

• 36:09Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, dear.

• 36:10Rory Stewart?

  And, and then he finds himself, obviously in a pretty unique position because nobody in Greenland had ever seen an African before. So it is the most incredible travel book because you have the perspective of somebody who's grown up on the edge of, literally on the edge of the jungle, in a very, very traditional polygamist society in Togo, suddenly looking at this, the extremity of Northern Europe.

• 36:32Alastair Campbell?

  That sounds brilliant. It also sounds like a really good film. Talking of Greenland, Rory, I was going to mention this on the main podcast, but I thought I probably rant and rave about Trump and Vance enough. How pathetic was it that the woman who runs the American military base in Greenland has been sacked because she sent an email after J D Vance's visit to Greenland, where she, and I've got to hear, she said this, "I've spent the weekend thinking about Friday's visit, the actions taken, the words spoken, how it must have affected each of you. I do not presume to understand current politics, but what I do know is the concerns of the US administration discussed by Vice President Vance on Friday are not reflective of Pitofic Space Base." In other words, she doesn't agree that Denmark

• 37:11Alastair Campbell?

  is a heap of shite, which is what he said, words to that effect. So she's been sacked. This is the country of free, these are the people of free speech, who now want to shut down CBS because 60 Minutes did an item that Trumpy Wumpy didn't like. Oh, God.

• 37:30Rory Stewart?

  Right. Well, on, on that cheerful note, farewell.

• 37:34Alastair Campbell?

  Bye bye.

• 37:35Rory Stewart?

  See you soon.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  The great game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 38:06Speaker 05

  Holding the Russians accountable is well worth it.

• 38:08Speaker 06

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not?

• 38:17Alastair Campbell?

  You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 38:35Speaker 07

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 38:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 38:42Speaker 07

  New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 38:46Speaker 08

  You're my soldier, are you Sergeant Tom MacDuff, Duffy?

• 38:50Speaker 07

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 38:52Speaker 08

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 38:56Speaker 07

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

• 38:59Speaker 08

  We have two tight, deadly key.

• 39:01Speaker 07

  Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.