257. Diane Abbott, Nigel Farage, and how to plan a campaign

Why can't Keir Starmer make a decision about Diane Abbott? How do parties prepare for an election with no warning? Why is Nigel Farage getting so much media coverage? Join Rory and Alastair on this episode of The Rest Is Politics as they answer all these questions and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP FIRST 100 DAYS TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen 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

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

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• 2:28Alastair Campbell?

  Hello, welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:32Rory Stewart?

  And me Rory Stewart.

• 2:34Alastair Campbell?

  And here we go Rory, another live YouTube. I'm assuming that the technology is working.

• 2:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, at least my mother with any chance of luck will be listening. So we're a week into the election and it's kind of very strange, isn't it? There we were coming down on a train with me trying to bet everyone on the train carriage that wouldn't be an election. Suddenly bang, there's an election. And now these party machines, which I guess have probably spent months practising and thinking what they would do, have now unleashed, exploded into this election and we're a week in. Can I just begin by taking you back to the 97 election and giving us a bit of a sense of

• 3:19Rory Stewart?

  what happens in the first week of an election? Do you remember anything about, was it a surprise for you? Did you get much warning on when it was going to happen? Or Major ran it as late as he could, didn't he? So he sort of knew when it would happen?

• 3:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he ran it as late as he could, which was very, very frustrating and exhausting. We kept thinking, oh, there's your lovely clock. We kept, we kept thinking that, that, you know, it was going to happen, then it didn't, and then eventually it did. I mean, there is something about it that you've done so much planning. But then stuff happens. And so there's this constant battle between trying to keep on your own strategy and having things, you know, unleashed upon you. So for example, you know, take yesterday, for example, the, our poll, everybody's poll has shown that the National Health Service is like the number one.

• 4:09Alastair Campbell?

  That and the cost of living are the two massive issues for the public. Yesterday would obviously be, they'd obviously decided the first big thing would be Keir Starmer's set side is stalled, Rachel Reeves does the economy, then West Streeting does a big thing on the health service. And that was yesterday.

• 4:23Rory Stewart?

  Can I sort of just set the big context? So for listeners, I guess this will be true for Labour now and probably true for you in 97, at least when I was. Running, for example, for the London Merrill race, we had gridded out for the last, I think, forty five days of the campaign. We had an announcement for every day. We had a different location. We had a different speech. We had a different journalist lined up. So and we tried to create a narrative pattern so that there'd be a big moment every few days, a smaller moment every other day. Is it a bit like that?

• 4:58Alastair Campbell?

  It is. Yeah, you've got you've got the there's so much, even more so now, I'd say, but so much focus on the leaders. So what the leaders doing is massively important. Who your other key campaigner for the media is that day. So like today, it's Jeremy Hunt for the Conservatives. It seems to be Darren Jones, the Shadow Chief Secretary for Labour. So yesterday, and then, as you say, you're dotting around the country. So for example, it's it's possible to see at the moment, Rishi Sunak, I think I'm right in saying, is seems to be focusing mainly on seats which are already conservative. That's a very defensive strategy. Keir Starmer kicked off his strategy in Sussex, a very aggressive constituency strategy. That may change, but

• 5:39Alastair Campbell?

  the plans will all be in place. But then yesterday, what you know, I said when we did the first podcast last week after the election was called, there will always be things which come up and surprise you. And not just surprise you because of what the event is, but the extent to which it takes over. So for example, I suspect Rishi Sunak had Rishi Sunak did not know that Michael Gove and Andrea Lesan were going to pull out when they did. That would have knocked him a bit off course yesterday.

• 6:06Rory Stewart?

  Just just stop on that before we get on to Labour being knocked off course. That presumably would have meant that in the first two days, the campaign, when he was really in his dream, would be getting headlines bang on the policies he wanted to sell. Instead, The Times will be leading with Michael Gove stepping down and sort of panel Jerics to Michael Gove. Is that right? So there's partly just sucking up oxygen problem.

• 6:28Alastair Campbell?

  It's part. Yeah, because the if you think about what they've tried to do, they've tried to get the focus, first of all, on this national service thing. Then on the, what they call this triple lock plus on pensions. So they've been trying to do that. And on both those occasions, they have managed to land that message, no doubt about that. But at the same time, there's been this other stuff going around. So yesterday, Wes Streeting wants to set out his big plan on health, he's doing a visit with Keir Starmer, out with junior doctors and all that stuff. And Diane Abbott becomes the main story on the news.

• 7:05Rory Stewart?

  And again, just, just, just again, for, for listeners, just a quick reminder of this story. So Diane Abbott sent out what she said was an early first draft of a piece which basically said that Jewish people and Irish travellers did not experience racism in the way that the black community did. This led to her apologising, going on an antisemitism course, being, I think, suspended from the Labour Party. And the question then was, would she run again? And this became relevant because obviously Jeremy Corbyn, who's basically been thrown out of the Labour Party, is running as an independent against a Labour candidate.

• 7:49Rory Stewart?

  And Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott obviously represent the key momentum left, traditional, kind of more radical edge of the Labour movement. And the line from Keir Starmer has been, no decision's been taken as yet. This is a decision not for me, but for the National Executive Committee of Labour. But

• 8:08Alastair Campbell?

  Of which he's a member.

• 8:10Rory Stewart?

  Of which he's a member. And of course, many of the senior members are his absolute loyalists. So I suppose a cynic might say he probably has a little bit more influence over that process that he's conceding when he says it's nothing to do with him.

• 8:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And I mean, I think the, the thing I would say about it is that it seems to me that a year is quite a long time to be able to get the end, to the end of a disciplinary process. It's a very long time.

• 8:35Rory Stewart?

  Particularly over a single article. I mean, you wouldn't have thought it's that complicated. You look at what she said, and then you talk to her and she does her course, and you can get it through in a few months, right?

• 8:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I'd have thought so. So, so what, what probably is going on at a deeper level throughout this whole process, I mean, there's been a lot of talk, I know people in, in that local Labour Party, and I think the feeling has been in recent months that she probably wasn't going to stand. That she was finding the whole thing pretty difficult, that she's, you know, she is, she does get phenomenal amounts of abuse on social media and that sort of stuff. And added to which, probably feeling, look, Keir Starmer's message is my changed Labour Party, maybe feeling, well, I'm not really part of that. But if your, Fiona was, my Fiona was mentioning last night that, you know, Jeremy Corbyn and

• 9:25Alastair Campbell?

  John McDonnell, I think I'm right in saying, rebelled against the Tony Blair, Gordon Brown government more than anybody else. We never thought of kicking them out. You have to sort of manage those situations. Now, the thing about, so Keir Starmer has been projecting new Labour Party, change Labour Party, and you couldn't get a bigger symbol of that than Jeremy Corbyn's no longer in the Labour Party. So would, on that strategy, would it please them for Diane Abbott not to be a candidate? Then probably, because she is, as you say, very much part of that Corbyn set, very much part of the problems that frankly led to the catastrophic defeat of 2019.

• 10:07Alastair Campbell?

  But at the same time, she is extremely popular amongst a lot of people in her constituency. And, you know, we were talking on the main podcast this week about Harriet Harman, Margaret Hodge, Margaret Beckett, these kind of giants of the Labour Party and the respect there is for them stepping down. I think there's maybe a feeling that this is not being handled in the same way. Now, there's obviously been discussions going on between the Labour High Command and Diane Abbott. And it seems to me that something went wrong when somebody, God knows who, briefed, presumably trying to be part of this Keir's change Labour Party strategy, briefed that she would not be allowed to stand. And then she's all over the place, saying, oh, what the hell is going on?

• 10:50Alastair Campbell?

  And it's becoming, you know, the feeling I got from what she said yesterday is that I get the sense that she's thinking about standing as an independent if the Labour Party don't allow her to stand.

• 11:00Rory Stewart?

  And

• 11:03Rory Stewart?

  I guess if you're Keir Starmer's team, it's annoying because it's the the main reason it's annoying is that it's taking the oxygen out of West Streeting being able to do big announcements on the NHS which aren't being properly covered. It's not really necessarily that you're going to lose many votes. I mean, there will be bits of the Labour left that will be irritated, but they're irritated with Keir Starmer anyway because of Jeremy Corbyn and because of Gaza. And they think that he's sort of betrayed them anyway in there. And that Labour's being and we'll get on to this, Labour's being too tight on things like tax and spending.

• 11:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:39Rory Stewart?

  So he's not he's not going to worry too much about that. And he's not going to worry too much about the Tory voters, because in fact, the Tory voters aren't very fond of Diane Abbott anyway. And therefore, him having an argument with Diane Abbott, you know, probably helps him a little bit with them. So it's largely that it's a distraction from the policy that he wants to land, right?

• 11:58Alastair Campbell?

  It's also you've you've had a sense of the Conservative Party being kind of all over the place, very factional, very divided, and of their campaign getting off to a bad start. And you've had a sense of Labour being absolutely rock solid and their campaign getting off pretty solidly. So it sort of chinks away at both of those things. I think I agree with you. I think ultimately, this plays this plays to those who actually want Keir Starmer to be projecting a change Labour Party. I guess having a row with Diane Abbott maybe helps on that. I don't think it helps overall, because it just gives you that sense of, well, you know, who's got a grip here? And I thought it was very interesting. I don't I don't think it worked, but Jeremy Hunt, who's being interviewed on the Today program

• 12:43Alastair Campbell?

  this morning, he'd obviously been told because he sort of said, one final point, if I jumped in at the last. And it's sort of it wasn't even what they were talking about. But he said, you know, if if if Keir Starmer can't deal with Diane Abbott, what's he going to be like with Vladimir Putin? I just saw this.

• 12:58Rory Stewart?

  Right, right. It's kind of slightly pathetic. But but the fact that he's doing it shows that they they hope this little little.

• 13:04Alastair Campbell?

  Look, one other thing on that, Rory, it was it was it was slightly lauziated yesterday to see. The Tory Party Chairman, Mark Spencer, the chief whip, sort of the former chief whip, standing up and sort of trying to be the big friends of Diane Abbott. And I was thinking, if these people are fans of Diane Abbott, how about giving back the £10 million they took from the guy who said that he wanted somebody to go out and shoot her. So, you know, it's, it just, the whole thing added to which, maybe we should talk about this economy stuff now. It, it just is starting to feel like a very, I don't know, very traditional sort of, you know, bang campaign.

• 13:47Rory Stewart?

  And very, very, very sort of, Richard, just before we get on to the economy, can I, can I just give us a sense briefly of the first week of your Labour campaign in 97? What, what sort of things were going well and what were throwing you off balance as you went into that very successful campaign?

• 14:05Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, we, from memory, I think the first visit we did was to Gloucester. And again, a bit like Kier, it was, it was saying there's no no-go areas. And we did have a very.

• 14:18Rory Stewart?

  Gloucester currently had a Tory seat at the moment with Richard Graham as the MP.

• 14:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. And, and, and, and probably again, you know, somewhere that Labour may be quite hopeful. But, and we did, we did, we did have a bit of a, a stroke of luck because on that first visit, that was the day, right at the start of the campaign, that The Sun came out for, for Labour, The Sun newspaper as opposed to.

• 14:44Rory Stewart?

  Which presumably is not just great in terms of Sun readers, but also created a story in and of itself because.

• 14:51Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 14:52Rory Stewart?

  All the other newspapers were like, this is crazy, The Sun's come out for Labour.

• 14:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and, and they, look, I've always said, I, I think we overstate the importance of newspapers, particularly now. I know you sent me a message yesterday, blimey, you know, the Evening Standard's going from, and the figure, this, the, the, the circulation figure's gone right down. The papers still have a.

• 15:11Rory Stewart?

  Just quickly on that, Evening Standard's gone from, when I ran in 2019 to be Mayor of London, there were 850,000 daily readers of the Evening Standard. Five years later, there are 200,000. Makes complete difference to local democracy. If you were running now as an independent for London, you you simply don't have a newspaper to cover these issues in the same way. And they're going from a daily newspaper down to online weekly. So basically, the Evening Standard is finished and over. And and you and it's a big, I mean, I know you don't like doing journalist indoor baseball, but it is extraordinary because it also is a big significance for journalists, their incomes. You know, people were saying that they used to be able to pay their month's rents on writing a feature article for the Evening Standard.

• 15:57Rory Stewart?

  Now the thing's given out free and now it's not giving out at all. And and actually, that's a problem, just just to be serious for a moment. I mean, you and I do this show, but we are partly reliant on the incredible work done by journalists and newspapers and radio and television for a lot of the basic research and stories. And as their income streams collapse and their advertising revenue collapses, the general knowledge of not just the public, but of commentators is going to collapse with them. You just, I mean, just, there'll just be less reporting on London, won't there? Just as there are on, as we talked about in the past, on other regional issues.

• 16:32Alastair Campbell?

  No, and also, I mean, you know, we we talked, I think, on the on the podcast of the Q and A last week about the the the risk to local democracy of of people just not being properly informed. And and if you're not having a a really seriously informed debate across the media, added to which, and this actually, I think, leads me on to what I think the Tory, the Tories are up to at the moment, what their kind of overall communication strategy is. I don't think they really care about having their policies ripped apart on the radio and the television. I think they're just landing very big, bold messages. So like today, they they're saying Labour has a secret plan to put up VAT. Labour have come out and denied it, but what you can guarantee is that there will be

• 17:17Alastair Campbell?

  social media advertising going out to those people they think will be swayed by that. So, you know, bring back national service to the appealing to particularly to older people. Triple lock on plus on pensions. Labour are going to put your taxes up. Labour are going to do this. And I don't think they care about this sort of scrutiny because they're just landing the message.

• 17:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, so something very interesting here. We'll get more into this over the next few weeks. So at the centre of this, and we'll talk about that later, but at the centre of the Conservative campaign is somebody called Isaac Lovito.

• 17:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Rory Stewart?

  And Isaac Lovito is an Australian strategist who made his reputation in Boris Johnson's very successful 2019 campaign. And he's got this, he originally had a theory which was called the 80 20 theory, which was going to be they were going to defend 80 seats and then target 20 opposition seats. That seems to have gone, as you say, if you watch Rishi Sunak moving around the country, not just recently, but actually the Financial Times did an amazing analysis since January. He's almost entirely, he's done an incredible number of visits, like sort of four concessions he does in the week.

• 18:21Alastair Campbell?

  The guy, the guy gets around, there's no doubt about that.

• 18:24Rory Stewart?

  But he's targeting generally defending these kind of red wall seats with majorities around 10,000, which is obviously worried about. So Lovito's got this theory that an election campaign is like a legal case. You make an opening argument, then you do an evidentiary phase with more detail, then you have a closing argument. But there's a paradox, and I'd love you to kind of answer this paradox. On the one hand, they are going with stick to the plan, you know, whatever that plan is supposed to be. So safety first, security, stick to the plan, talk about national security. And on the other hand, they're talking about move fast and break things, let's throw out crazy policies. Let's be the underdog. Let's throw Labour off balance. Let's make that so. Presumably there's a problem. You can't be doing both at the same time, right?

• 19:10Alastair Campbell?

  Um, well, Labour has a sort of reverse of that because they're actually, both Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have used this phrase in the last couple of days. Stability is the change.

• 19:24Alastair Campbell?

  So in other words, in other words, we've had utter chaos. We've had Liz Truss, we've had Johnson, we've had 50,000 ministerial changes and all this stuff. Stability is the change.

• 19:36Rory Stewart?

  Ah, it's beautiful.

• 19:37Alastair Campbell?

  So this is sort of a mirror of that. But at the same time, they're trying to do the same thing. They're saying that they want you to think that, for example, on the health service, there are going to be more NHS appointments. For example, on on mental health, there's going to be mental health support in schools, et cetera. So they want to say there's going to be change, but on these stable foundations. I thought, by the way, just on Rishi Sunak sort of getting around the place, there is, I want to try and help our viewers and listeners to unpick some of the sort of the stuff that you see that isn't quite what it seems. So I just found it hysterically funny that there's Rishi Sunak, I don't know if you saw this, being filmed

• 20:17Alastair Campbell?

  walking down a railway platform where there are no other people, wearing his hoodie and a backpack, a backpack, getting on the sleeper to go to Cornwall. Yeah, now, one, he has got, rightly, a team of close protection people who are normally not meant to be more than a yard away. They'd be told, stay out of the shot. They think, two, there's a busload of journalists who are about to be decamped to get off the train as well. But this the shot was meant to say, this guy's just going around the country on his own with his backpack.

• 20:52Rory Stewart?

  Then there was this slightly thing, sad thing, which maybe he didn't quite articulate it right. They interviewed him in Cornwall and said, how does it feel? You know, you've come here on the train instead of being in your private helicopter, your private plane. And he said, he said, yeah, it's, it's really, it's really great being on the train. I've taken lots of video and photographs of my kids, almost as though he'd just been on a spaceship.

• 21:15Alastair Campbell?

  Or he'd never been on a trade before. Anyway, so but look, give him that. He's got energy and he's getting around. But I think that he, there's something about, I honestly recommended, I said this at the time, if I wrote my new European column about it, I said, somebody should make Rishi Sunak listen to the interview that we did with Mitsotakis, the Greek Prime Minister. I listened back to it yesterday for the first time since we were in Athens a couple of weeks ago now. But I listened back to it in the car with Fiona and we were driving along and she said, why can't all politicians speak like this? Because if you remember, he was just, he was absorbing questions and then answering

• 21:58Alastair Campbell?

  them in a thoughtful way. And the thing about Rishi Sunak, he's just got this manner that that is sort of, he's kind of just, he's saying the same things again and again and again. They have to do that, but say them like they're coming out of your brain, not out of a script. And there was a wonderful shot, I don't know if you saw yesterday, there was down in Cornwall, he was doing one of those sort of rather weird things where he's constantly turning around. Sometimes you see his face, sometimes you see his back. And he was face onto the camera and there was a young woman behind him who was pulling the most extraordinary faces as he was sort of, you know, coming out with his bold plan

• 22:38Alastair Campbell?

  and he's this and he's that and Labour will do this. And I think he's, there's something inauthentic about the, this kind of constant parroting of the same lines in a way that doesn't feel like they're coming from him.

• 22:53Rory Stewart?

  It's very weird, isn't it? And it's something that was very much part of the Cameron call. I mean, it was, it was partly the way in which, well, I suppose it's actually Linton Crosby, the Australian strategist of the day, pushed this idea of getting the message out. And I remember when I was an MP being, doing Question Time, you'd be sent into training sessions where you'd spend two, three hours with people from Conservative Central Office and from Number 10 with a script and they would practise you on the script. And the people that they liked were people like Liz Truss and Priti Patel, who

• 23:35Rory Stewart?

  would literally simply repeat the same line. Priti Patel, I remember in the 2015 election.

• 23:42Rory Stewart?

  Produced the same set of seven words, seven times in a two and a half minute radio interview. And, and I think Rishi Sunak's come from this, and it's very odd because there are many other professions where people will say similar things a lot. And the ones that spring to mind are teachers often have to say similar things a lot. Doctors, priests, right, they're often repeating the same message. But somehow they don't sound like politicians. And I think the difference you put your finger on is that the teacher, the doctor, the priest is at least minimally listening and is able to adjust a little bit

• 24:22Rory Stewart?

  to what's been asked and the context and, and can reflect a little bit on what they're saying and can put in a bit of a joke. Somehow the politicians and Rishi Sunak is a key example of this. But I, I did feel it unfortunately a little bit with the Rachel Reeves interview. That's been an interesting one because we, we've talked about that a bit and I would recommend people listen to it because I think it's both deeply reassuring for centre voters who are worried that Labour would spend a lot more. I mean, she could not be more clear that she's not going to raise taxes or be spending much more. But I also had a very broad range of reactions to listening to it. There were people who, you picked up on this, who thought I was too aggressive with her.

• 25:06Rory Stewart?

  In my defence, I would say she is going to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And therefore actually I have a real obligation probably to be tougher than, actually and tougher than I was with Kwasi Kwarteng, who isn't going to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who was a catastrophic Chancellor of the Exchequer and it's now a bit of history. But, but then a lot of people, I think, sharing my sense that she too, like Rishi Sunak, there was a sense of set lines.

• 25:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:33Rory Stewart?

  And not much stepping back and forming the context.

• 25:36Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, I've got to say that while we've been chatting away, I was thinking, why are there no questions coming through? And the reason is that I had the button on private chat, but I've now pressed it on comments and we've had thousands. And I'm going to kick in, I, you meant, there's one here, there've been quite a lot. About the upcoming TV debate. Now, so on Tuesday evening, there's going to be a debate between Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. And I should say, by the way, that you and I are going to do one of these immediately after the TV debate.

• 26:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Alastair Campbell?

  And that will be.

• 26:16Rory Stewart?

  Cup of coffee. We're going to get used to this because we're going all night, aren't we, on the Channel Four election night?

• 26:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And we did. I did. Did you stay up to 11 o'clock last night to watch our, our debut?

• 26:26Rory Stewart?

  No, I wanted to be fresh because I'm doing this and I'm doing London Palladium tonight. So I wanted to try to get a bit of sleep.

• 26:32Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, wow. You're in Scotland as well?

• 26:34Rory Stewart?

  I'm, I'm in Scotland now and I'm rushing down after this to do.

• 26:36Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent.

• 26:37Rory Stewart?

  That's 2,200 people on Palladium tonight. So.

• 26:39Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, make sure you plug the podcast, not just your book. Okay?

• 26:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 26:42Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, Patrick O'Brien here. Nick Clegg received a positive bounce in 2010 post televised debates. Can you see any, any outside of the two main parties making similar inroads this time round? I imagine that's why Labour and the Tories have stitched up the first one. So it's just the two of them. And I've seen very little. I've seen a little bit from the SNP saying that this is anti-democratic and that they're the third party, they should be involved. I've not seen much from the Lib Dems. I think these TV debates, they're interesting TV debates and we can talk about this more when, when the first one happens. But we spent most of 1997 trying to avoid TV debates while pretending that we weren't.

• 27:23Alastair Campbell?

  We, we, we didn't really see much. Tony was so far ahead. And, and my, my worry with TV debates, less so now. My problem with TV debates is that they just give the media an excuse to talk about themselves and talk about the importance of the media. And there's too much of that already. But I think these two will be interesting because I think you're going to, I'm sensing in both Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, a bit of hardening against each other. I noticed in his Q and A the other day, Keir Starmer started calling him Sudak quite a lot. And, you know, just these little things that you notice.

• 28:05Rory Stewart?

  A little one here. Bowserfly. So many questions coming in. And thank you, guys. And we'll, we'll get through as many as we can. Bowserfly asked about the SNP and polling. I'm obviously up in Scotland at the moment and it's very interesting.

• 28:21Rory Stewart?

  For those listeners who aren't focused on Scottish politics, the SNP has had a really torrid time. Nicola Sturgeon, as people remember, had a great reputation coming out of Covid, but she's had these incredible criminal problems where she was actually questioned by the police and her husband's been arrested and formally charged. There's now been this case with Matheson, the health secretary, who spent £11,000 on holiday on Morocco, live streaming four football matches without understanding how roaming charges work, then tried to charge it to Parliament claiming that he'd been using

• 29:01Rory Stewart?

  his iPad for work. And in a very bizarre moment, the SNP leader decided to defend him for far too long. So all of this has added to the kind of chaos around the SNP. So if you look at the place where I am at the moment, which is Perth and Kinross, on the new boundaries, notionally, the SNP would be about 24,000 votes, the Conservatives at about 20,000 votes, Labour at about 4,000 votes. So not a place that would be a Labour target. And in fact, that's the story of Scotland. All six seats which the Conservatives hold, SNP are number two. All six seats that the Conservatives are targeting, SNP are number one. So actually, in an odd way, there's a Labour SNP fight, and then there's a Conservative SNP fight, but there isn't really a Conservative Labour fight in Scotland.

• 29:46Rory Stewart?

  Interesting. And I think what we'll find here is that the SNP vote, very depressed, people, many people saying on doorsteps, I was talking to Luke Graham, who's the Conservative candidate here for some time, and he was finding on doorsteps, there's still a loss of residual support for independents, but it doesn't feel like an independence election. No. So people saying, you know, my heart's with independents, but I'm frustrated with the health service, I'm frustrated with education. Of course, the Conservatives are hoping that that may help them.

• 30:19Alastair Campbell?

  Now, there's a question here, Nicholas Hammersley, why is Nigel Farage getting so much air and print time? He's not even standing, and he's definitely not a serious commentator. I mean, I do find this absolutely extraordinary. He comes out the other day and says he is not standing, and he gives us his reason, the fact that he finds, he thinks that America is now more important, and the American presidential election is more important than this. Since when? He has barely been off the airwaves. Now, Nigel Farage is a very good communicator, and he's a very, very effective populist, by which I mean, this is something that Mitsutakis said, where basically he exploits problems to his own political advantage. But what on

• 31:02Alastair Campbell?

  earth? I don't even, sorry, Gita Guramurphy, who is a presenter on the BBC, and she was forced to apologize on air by a BBC management that can't even have had a discussion with her, because it was while she was still presenting the programme. She was forced to apologize because she said, after they'd covered live, this guy who is not a candidate, they covered live his speech in Dover about small boats, immigration, Rishi Sunak's failed, etc., and where he talked about invasion, he talked about all the sort of usual stuff that he does. And she came back, so he's had this uninterrupted, his platform on the BBC, and

• 31:45Alastair Campbell?

  she comes back and says, so there's Nigel Farage with his usual inflammatory, his customary inflammatory rhetoric. She's forced to apologize. Now, she could have phrased it better, maybe, live television. "Customary inflammatory rhetoric is a statement of fact about Nigel Farage", and then, as if that's not bad enough, she has to apologize by a management, as I say again, they cannot possibly have had a discussion with her. I later discovered, if you look at the, they didn't even watch the whole speech before telling her to apologize. And next thing, we've got the first question time of the election campaign coming up, BBC Question Time, the programme which frankly made Nigel Farage. And guess who's on it? Wes Streeting,

• 32:29Alastair Campbell?

  Wes Streeting, fair enough, he's a Labour, yeah, Shadow Health, and he's a candidate. Damien Hines, fair enough, not top flight Tory, but he's a serious guy, and he's a candidate. They've then got Nigel Farage, Piers Morgan, and the Bishop of Dover.

• 32:49Alastair Campbell?

  In other words, totally playing in to the Farage agenda. You you might as well just say, let's just have an immigration special because Farage has said that's what this election is about.

• 32:58Rory Stewart?

  Let's get on to just something coming off the back of that, which is we've got a lot of questions here. I've seen probably thirty, forty coming in about Farage. And this relates a little bit to the Restless Politics opinion poll that we put out this week. And one of the things I think that we can read in it is that the votes that the Conservatives are pursuing are going to be the sort of Farage Reform votes. That's where they're hoping to get their votes. And partly this is that they're pursuing a strategy of really leaning into the over sixty fives. And the over sixty fives matter more and more. Twenty years ago, probably nine million people over sixty five. Now eleven million people over sixty five are all living longer. They vote more than other people.

• 33:44Rory Stewart?

  But it's really dramatic. This is probably the most dramatic figures we've ever seen in terms of the gap in ages between the two parties. Labour totally control younger voters, including this vital fifty to sixty four group is voting Labour. And the Conservatives are just now nineteen points ahead with the over sixty fives. And so it'd be really interesting to work out what's different between being fifty to sixty four and being sixty five and up. Apologies for my my funny funny clock.

• 34:16Alastair Campbell?

  I like your clock.

• 34:20Rory Stewart?

  But what one thing that I think we can say.

• 34:23Alastair Campbell?

  I love the fact, I love the effect that it it does the full hours at half the hour.

• 34:28Rory Stewart?

  It's a bit weird, that isn't it? It's showing half past nine, but it's ringing the full hours. Yeah, I agree. So one thing I think we can predict is that the next big policy announcement coming out of the Conservatives, I think, will be immigration. So this is me going out bold. They will go for a really aggressive attack on immigration to shore up that over sixty five vote. And they'll do it because they can see in the numbers that their biggest opportunity is getting more and more of those older Reform voters over to their side.

• 35:01Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. The the, no, listen, you're the the I saw a poll yesterday where Labour, I think from eighteen to thirty five, Labour were over fifty percent, the Tories were were eight.

• 35:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so.

• 35:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and just very quickly on that. I mean, it is amazing, but it's also an outlier because Thatcher in 1984 won forty two percent of the eighteen to twenty four vote, which was nine points more than Labour. So it's not always true that younger voters vote left. And in fact, if you look at Marine Le Pen and some of the populist far right parties in Europe, they get a surprising, Heidvilders in Netherlands, surprising amount of younger vote. Quite a good article actually by James Marriott in the Times today, from which I'm stealing quite a lot of this, called Don't Assume Younger Britons Are All Lefties.

• 35:52Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Oh, no, listen, the, the, there's a survey I quoted recently where the decile of the population on every continent in the world, most attracted to authoritarianism is the young. So it's a kind of very mixed picture. Here's an interesting one, Rory. David Howes, by the way, there's lots about Diane Abbott and I, I, listen, I've not seen the papers today, so I don't know, but lots of people saying this is all about, the Times have been the ones sort of really twisting the knife on this Diane Abbott thing. I don't know what that's about. Anyway, David Howes, the Abbott thing. Well, okay, but what about Gullis and the heroin dealer? Have you seen this one? This is a picture of this, of Gullis, this Stoke-on-Trent

• 36:34Alastair Campbell?

  TP, be photographed on a sofa with somebody who it turns out is a heroin dealer campaigning together. I've got no idea, I know nothing more than that. But that Mr. Gullis, I mean, he's not quite a Portillo moment, but that will be, that would be quite fun.

• 36:48Rory Stewart?

  Simply Sam, Simply Sam asking in South West Norfolk whether you should vote, if you want to get out rid of Listras, whether you should vote for the independent James Bag or whether you should vote elsewhere. I think, and I, I would strongly support voting for the independent James Bag in South West Norfolk as a way of getting rid of Listras. I think he is credibly the person who can beat her. He's had Martin Bell, the famous white suited independent campaigner down campaign for him here. Had a few hundred people at his launch. Yep, sorry, over to you.

• 37:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Martin Bell, that's the other, you've taken me back now to nineteen ninety seven, because that was one of the first big things was.

• 37:27Alastair Campbell?

  The, we had Neil Hamilton, who was one of the sort of symbols of sleaze in the Tory party and he was, he was defending Tatten. And a bit like Rishi Sunak can't get rid of Liz Truss, John Major seemed unable, because of local control of Tory parties, to get rid of Neil Hamilton. So we had this idea that we should try to persuade the local Labour and Lib Dem parties to stand down and then find the ideal anti-sleaze candidate. And we had all sorts of feelers out. And then I got a phone call from a guy called Tom Stoddard, who was a photographer, at the time going out with Kate Howie, then Labour,

• 38:11Alastair Campbell?

  now sort of, you know, pro Brexit, DUP, God knows where she is, in the House of Lords, I think. And Tom said he'd been at this event with Martin Bell. Martin Bell, my God. And so I had a, I had a few phone calls and a meeting in a, in a restaurant in Hampstead with Martin Bell. And so, and that was a big thing, when, when Martin Bell emerged in his white suit. So yeah, Martin Bell backing Mr. Bag is probably quite a good thing for them. But who, who was, who was second in Liz Truss's seat last time? Was it, I think, I think Labour got quite close in 1997.

• 38:48Rory Stewart?

  She's got a big majority there, though.

• 38:50Alastair Campbell?

  Did you see yesterday?

• 38:52Rory Stewart?

  Listen, just a couple of quick things, just on questions, well, because people are being so kind and bringing in so many. Aaron asks pros and cons National Service, that I think quite pompous, see, we might refer him to the last podcast we put out where we did quite a lot.

• 39:04Alastair Campbell?

  And we were both moderately pro.

• 39:07Rory Stewart?

  Moderately pro, yep. Stirred up a bit of controversy there.

• 39:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Rory Stewart?

  There was a question about my ring. This is an Oura ring, which tells people how you sleep and how much exercise you take. There's a question from Gemma Masters about Labour's TikTok campaign, which she thinks is very childish. And maybe we could have a look at that at some point. Have you seen the TikTok?

• 39:29Alastair Campbell?

  I've seen some of it. And some of it is, I don't know if it's all on TikTok, but I've seen things, for example, where they're doing Rishi Sunak's diary. And they have Rishi Sunak writing this stuff. And it's sort of very childish handwriting. Some of it's quite funny. I think you've got to be careful with this because. You've got to operate this, these campaigns, particularly now, they're operating at many, many, many different levels. So I think if you just look at the TikTok and think that's all they're doing, I can see why that would piss you off. But I think if you see it in the broader context, but there will be, listen, let's be honest, there will be examples in the next six weeks of some truly terrible campaigning and by all sides, there just will be, because they're getting,

• 40:12Alastair Campbell?

  they're getting used to this. I thought Rishi Sunak's first attempt at a TikTok thing was, I mean, it was very well made, but it was, you know, bold plan, Labour's got no plan. It was the same sort of, the same sort of messaging.

• 40:26Rory Stewart?

  Let's maybe, as we come to the end, because we did promise to do this, I think, which is to try to do a little bit of more serious policy. And to say it's worth looking at Wes Streeting's stuff on the NHS, which, as you say, maybe didn't get quite as much coverage as it could. I noticed, though, he managed to get the Daily Telegraph to let him write a piece, which presumably would have been a bit of a coup to get right wing voters reading him.

• 40:53Rory Stewart?

  And he's got, he's said that he wants to get from an 18 month waitlist down to 18 weeks, which is something that's not been achieved in decades. He points out that we're currently spending four out of every £10, the daily spend of the government on the NHS. And Sajid Javid, in our leading interview, made the same point, the £168 billion elephant in the room. He talked a lot about using, this is Wes Streeting, the Labour Shadow Health Secretary, using spare capacity in the private sector and doing partnerships with things like High Street opticians, which I think is very, very sensible. But, but, but it's actually something that, a little bit like only Nixon can go to China, maybe only a Labour Health Secretary can be quite so open about using the private sector.

• 41:37Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. No doubt about that. And I guess the other, the other big policy stuff today is, the focus today is going to be on, on tax, but it's such a sort of... I find it such a depressing debate. It's basically both the main parties terrified of people thinking that they're going to put their taxes up, so therefore saying they're not. And I think people should listen to Paul Johnson at the I F S, Institute of Fiscal Studies. He's he's simply saying, if you look at the actual numbers of the plans that are already there, then we are facing some very, very, very, very tough choices.

• 42:13Rory Stewart?

  And we're getting we're getting on, aren't we? And he basically says you can either spend less or tax more or borrow more. There's only three choices. And when your public services are an absolute crisis, yes, of course, you know, you can reform these services, but in the short term, you're going to have to put some money in because the reforms take time. And you've got to have a financial cushion while you're forming. Maybe eventually you can reduce costs in the NHS and education, but goodness gracious me, you need money in the short term. So that'll have to be taxes up or more borrowing. And of course, the Conservatives are understandably, you know, going very, very tight on this stuff

• 42:58Rory Stewart?

  and announcing ever more restrictions and cuts on public spending. And as you say, Labour's response is to say there's not going to be a cigarette paper between us and the Tories on this stuff. We're also going to say no rise in income tax, no rise in VAT, and that we're going to get the money from from from growth, basically, yeah.

• 43:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Listen, let's let's close on this because I know how much you Tories like Trollope. One of those authors who nobody, nobody ever reads, they only reread Trollope. You always reread Trollope. But David has sent in a quote from the Duke's children. "Canvassing is not a pleasant occupation. Perhaps nothing more disagreeable, more squalid, more revolting to the senses, more opposed to personal dignity can be conceived."

• 43:51Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Oh, I like that.

• 43:53Alastair Campbell?

  We don't agree with that, do we? People love knocking on doors and having conversations if you're told you're all the same, you're all useless, you're all liars.

• 44:02Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people out there today.

• 44:08Alastair Campbell?

  Thousands of candidates already, although the Tories have still got to find a few more. I must say, Rory, I was very, very pleased that Georgia Gould was on the list of.

• 44:16Rory Stewart?

  Yep. She's done. So yes, a little plug when we go cross party and we're not disagreeing agreeably for Georgia Gould. She was an exceptional one. Again, I keep coming out being boring about London, but she was an exceptional leader of her local authority in London and she really did some great stuff on planning. She was inclusive. She was thoughtful. She wasn't too political. And now she's on the list to be an MP. And I think she and potentially a much older figure, Douglas Alexander, hopefully a part of the future of the Labour Party.

• 44:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, I was pleased by that. There's some very good, there are some very good new candidates, no doubt about that. Slightly overshadowed today by the Diane Abbott row and also Faiza Shaheen in Duncan Smith's seat, where that one seems to be a bit of a problem yet again over stuff on social media. My God, social media is a bit of a nightmare. But I think what I wanted to say, Rory, is I think we should wish whatever party, those thousands of people who are out there as candidates, we should wish them all the best because it's going to be a really long six weeks in their lives. And it's just incredible that of all those thousands of candidates, BBC Question Time could only find two to

• 45:34Alastair Campbell?

  appear on the first election programme.

• 45:37Rory Stewart?

  Unbelievable, isn't it?

• 45:38Alastair Campbell?

  But hey, let's have Farage appears Morgan.

• 45:40Rory Stewart?

  And something to just think about as the final thing from the Question Time, which is somebody saying, could we please do our live streams outside office hours so that he doesn't have to pretend to be working while staring at us?

• 45:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think there was a lot of that during Covid, wasn't there? All right, Roy, lovely to see you as ever. Great, okay. Thanks again. See you very soon. Bye bye.

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