62. Question Time: Liberal Democrats, Lordships and Labour's return

Who would Rory vote for in a General Election today? Did Alastair vote for Jeremy Corbyn? Where do MPs work after they've left Parliament? Rory and Alastair answer these questions, plus a discussion of Suella Braverman's take on cannabis, reform in the House of Lords, the relevance of the Liberal Democrats, Poland's right wing government, and much, much more in this week's Question Time. Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  So, welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And a reminder, we've got a live date in the diary to tell you about onstage, performing the Restless Politics Live, London Palladium, Wednesday, March 22. They go on General Cell on Friday, and we will tweet the link in the morning. And now let's get on with some questions.

• 2:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So, well, first question I want to start with is, obviously, I talk a lot about Max Miller, the cheeky chappy, because he played at the Winter Gardens and played at Palladium. And the question is, question from Joe, is what's the best Max Miller joke? So I'm going to give you a Max Miller joke. So for those of you who don't know, Max Miller, great 20s music hall comedian. And so he goes up on stage, he says, he says, I was in Egypt recently and I was hoping to get married. And I said to the Pharaoh, Mr. Pharaoh, will you give me, give me a daughter in marriage? And he said, yes, certainly, certainly I will, Max, certainly I will. I'll give you two acres and a cow. Haven't seen the two acres yet. There we are. That's the joke. Anyway, the only thing that's

• 2:45Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

• 2:47Rory Stewart?

  The only thing that's interesting about that joke is that it's a Lloyd George joke. Because Lloyd George believes that the fundamental way to set someone up economically was two acres and a cow. And a lot of what we do in Africa at the moment is actually about helping people get a cow. Makes a huge difference. In fact, Robert Maxwell, your old boss, said that when he was growing up in Ruthenia in the Carpathian Mountains, the greatest ambition that he'd had as a young man was to get a cow. That's how you made yourself in a village.

• 3:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 3:13Rory Stewart?

  Right, enough of that. Over to you for a better question.

• 3:15Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think that was, I'm absolutely convinced that Max Miller will have got a lot of laughs out of that joke, Rory, but I love the way you tried to turn it into a serious point at the end. I'm going to take you to something more serious. Emma Stacey, I'd like to know your thoughts on nurses being balloted to strike, whether you think we can get the support of the public and will they understand it's not just about pay, but standards of care given due to shortages in recruitment. Vincent Pettavel, as a nurse, I have voted for industrial action this week. I'd love to know both of your thoughts on this. If we as a union vote for strike action, thank you as always.

• 3:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, let me start from my sort of funny ex-Tory background and say firstly that we should have huge sympathy for the fact that nurses are credibly overworked, often very underpaid. And of course, it's got much, much worse since Brexit because all the immigration regulations about bringing in nurses from other countries haven't kept up with the demand. So we're hundreds of thousands of people short. And again, come hundreds of thousands more people short over the coming years. So there is a huge problem. But of course, and this isn't really a good answer to nurses, but it's worth thinking in terms of our programme, our podcast, that this is just the thin end of the wedge.

• 4:28Rory Stewart?

  The entire public sector is strained and stretched and is facing 10% rises in inflation. And that's actually often underestimating it. If you, if you think about going to the supermarkets at the moment, you'll find that many basic goods have jumped much more than 10% in the last few months. You know, people are, you know, if you're buying cheese at the moment, you'll find it's often up 30, 40%. That's true for a lot of other staple products.

• 4:53Alastair Campbell?

  You're taking a long time not to answer the question here, are we?

• 4:55Rory Stewart?

  Well, I suppose what I'm saying is, I think I've got a lot of sympathy, but we should also be aware that there's going to be a lot more strike action by many, many more people. And we're going to find ourselves, I fear, going back to something that's going to feel more like the 1970s. There's going to be a lot of striking going on. There's going to be a lot of inflation going on. And it doesn't matter which government comes in, Conservative or Labour, they're going to be really struggling to control prices, wages and balance the budget.

• 5:22Alastair Campbell?

  If you were a nurse, would you?

• 5:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, if I was a nurse, if I was a nurse, I'd probably go on strike. If I was the government, I'd be completely terrified about what that means. And I'd be worried even if I was the Labour Minister.

• 5:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think also there's a consequence here of previous actions. I felt that the, even far back as the coalition government, I felt there was a strategy that was essentially all about, not criticizing, but, but this constant sort of demanding a public sector workers to do more, a lot of criticism of what they did. And I think that was cranked up under Johnson. Then we had those sort of, you know, clap for carers and don't we love the NHS? And with they were the angels and all that stuff that was sort of pumped out there. And then they do, I think, get a bit of a kick in the teeth. And my next door neighbour's a nurse and, you know, you talk to people who are working the health service at the moment, they say it really is incredibly pressured, very, very difficult. And they feel all they get is abuse from the government. So I completely understand

• 6:15Alastair Campbell?

  both Emma and Vincent. And if only we had a government that actually addressed their concerns rather than sought to exploit them. I think that would be better.

• 6:23Rory Stewart?

  But I'm, I'm with you, but addressing concerns is going to turn out to probably be a Much more difficult poison thing for Labour when they take over than

• 6:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 6:33Rory Stewart?

  We're acknowledging, just saying that quickly.

• 6:35Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Now, listen, we talked briefly yesterday about Ukraine. There's a question here from P E O W. To what extent is a possible return of the Republicans to power in two years in the States a factor in the Ukraine war? Surely if the war is still going at that point and they win the election, Ukraine have an enormous problem. Might Russia start to bank on this?

• 6:53Rory Stewart?

  Well, at the moment, there's pretty strong bipartisan support for the Ukraine war. That's one of the things that Biden's doing, which there isn't much Republican opposition to. The skepticism is only coming from the far Trump wing of the party. So the question is, if Trump wins, yes, there is a problem. I think Trump is, has a very, very odd relationship with Putin. And you will have seen interviews with General Flynn, who was his very controversial national security advisor.

• 7:18Alastair Campbell?

  God, he was awful.

• 7:19Rory Stewart?

  Did you see that interview where he was basically attacking Zelensky? Yeah. So I, I think that there is a very worrying fringe that people will be concerned about. But at the moment, it looks like the leading candidate really at the moment is, is DeSantis. And I don't know how much the UK media have been covering DeSantis, but Ron DeSantis now seems to be ahead of Trump on a lot of the indicators. He's part of this strange American phenomenon of these kind of people who I think he went to Yale University, but was also in the United States Navy, but somehow uses this quite establishment background to be very, very anti-establishment. He just flew a plane load of Mexican immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, which is the kind of super wealthy retreat

• 7:59Rory Stewart?

  of the liberal elite to try to make a point, because he's a Florida politician, that the liberal elite in the United States doesn't really understand immigration because it's not really happening to them in the same way. But anyway, I don't think DeSantis's views on Russia and Ukraine are actually that, are as concerning as Trump's.

• 8:15Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Okay, okay. KT Parker. So Ella Braverman wants to re-categorize cannabis as a class A drug. This would have knock on effects for our already overcrowded courts and prisons, not just overcrowded courts, but courts he can barely get a case through, clogging them up even more. Is Braverman's proposal just nationalist populist madness?

• 8:35Rory Stewart?

  What do you think?

• 8:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yes.

• 8:36Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 8:37Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I mean cannabis is a class A drug. It's like, and also, you know, we were talking, you were talking yesterday about what, what can we do to kind of, I actually think that legalization of cannabis and the marketization of cannabis, which is happening in a lot of different parts of the United States. And I think Joe Biden has moved on this fairly recently as well. You could actually see it as a bit of a, a bit of a money spinner, but I'm afraid Braverman really is. There was a wonderful, um, oh, what does this say? Was it Private Eye? It was a couple of, a headshot of Suella Braverman and Priti Patel. And Suella Braverman's speech bubble says, how do you think I'm doing? And Priti Patel says, I think you could probably be a bit more compassionate. I think when Priti Patel is seen as more compassionate

• 9:19Alastair Campbell?

  than her successor, that we're in, we're in real trouble. Right. Question from you. Go on.

• 9:23Rory Stewart?

  So Perry, why do ex-MPs struggle? Rory made a comment in passing last week that ex-MPs can find it very difficult to find employment after leaving parliament. Can you expand on this? I imagined it to be the opposite, as many seem to fall into comfy roles in the private sector that probably pay a lot more. Now, oddly, that, that just isn't true. And I, I don't know whether you want to talk about Labour MPs who are friends of yours and, and what's happened. But the truth is that the old days may have been true in the 1960s, 1970s, where MPs could go into private sector jobs comfortably after they left, have, have left. Couple of reasons. One of them is that we used to have a lot of nationalized industries in Britain, which were basically controlled by the government. So it was very easy for the government to put ex-MPs onto the boards of nationalized industries. That's all gone. But also the reputation of MPs is so low that people don't think there's

• 10:08Rory Stewart?

  any status on having on their board, somebody who's been a member of parliament. Increasingly, they're looking for, if you're a bank or something, looking for someone on your board, you're looking for somebody who knows something about the subject area. And MPs are not really qualified. I mean, increasingly, they're professional politicians. They, many, many of them now have started as councillors, they've started as party activists, they've done almost nothing else in their lives than politics for 20 or 30 years. And unless they're lucky enough to have a professional qualification as an accountant or a lawyer or something like that, it's very, very difficult for them to get a job. So I, I mean, have you reflected on this? I mean, have you, Labour MPs who've left?

• 10:43Alastair Campbell?

  I, I, look, I, I think if you are. The top level. If you look at how much Theresa May gets paid for, you know, Theresa May was not the greatest authority, but she's in this sort of top league of big money, public speaking sector. I'm sure David Cameron's making lots of money in different ways. Tony Blair makes lots of money. John Major makes lots of money. I think at that level.

• 11:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's Prime Minister. I mean, a Prime Minister.

• 11:06Alastair Campbell?

  And you see people, you see people, and I agree, you see people like George Osborne is making a fortune. Philip Hammond is making a fortune. But I think most MPs, I think you're right. I think they struggle. I think they struggle financially. I think they struggle psychologically. You get good pensions, you guys, don't you? Former MPs get good pensions.

• 11:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, depends. It depends how long you're in the House of Commons. And remember the pension, I don't want to defend MPs particularly, but the pension, it's an unusual job because the salary you enter on is the same as the salary that you would have if you'd been there fifty years. It's, there's no seniority involved in the job because every MP is equal, so they all get the same backbench salary. Pension contributions come off that. It's a decent salary. It's more than most people in Britain get, but it's considerably less than you would get as a GP or as a head teacher of a large school. So becoming an MP is definitely not, not a way to get wealthy and.

• 11:55Alastair Campbell?

  No, I remember Eric Heffer, Eric Heffer, the Labour MP, always used to say there's, there's nothing more X than an ex MP.

• 12:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I, I, I talked to somebody who was my predecessor in a government department who was actually looking at stacking shelves at Tesco's after he left. I mean, it's, it's a, that's, that's obviously very extreme. I mean, that's not usually what happens. Usually what happens is they end up in an even more humiliating world often, which is getting into public affairs. So you get paid not a great deal of money to try to promote some private sector company. And then you get into difficulty because you're accused of lobbying, you're trying to call up your ex colleagues. It's very embarrassing. You sit in the Portcullis, which is the tea rooms, the kind of the more modern tea room of the House of Commons, and you see this slightly depressing scene of your former colleagues coming in table to table, trying to hand out brochures, saying, can I just get ten minutes of your time?

• 12:46Alastair Campbell?

  It's sad.

• 12:47Rory Stewart?

  It's a bit sad, yeah.

• 12:48Alastair Campbell?

  It's sad, yeah. Now Jude Carrier, I read today about the tax breaks being offered to people to set up in Freeport. So I'm very worried about these and what they've been in terms of. Employment, environmental and planning protections that free ports seem to evade. How worried should we be? Well, I think we should be very worried. And we've talked a lot about this in relation to the whole sovereign individual agenda, low tax, no regulation, piss on the workers kind of thing. And the FT at the weekend had a story that even quasi Quarteg has started to get worried. I don't know if you saw this, Rory, basically said that Liz Truss has overruled Quarteng, who wanted to put a limit on the number of applications for low tax investment zones. And I guess the worry, if you're the government, and particularly if you're the Treasury,

• 13:31Alastair Campbell?

  is that you risk losing billions and billions and billions of pounds in lost taxes. And she's really, she's, she's saying that we shouldn't have any limit. Well, is she saying the whole country should become an investment zone?

• 13:42Rory Stewart?

  It's completely catastrophic. So if you set up one of these zones, you can get 100% relief on your machinery investment. You get 100% relief for the first year on your business rates. You get a massive holiday on national insurance. So what is so worrying from a, again, from a sort of one nation, fiscally conservative background, is that this is potentially a blank cheque which could cost the government 40 billion pounds a year in the worst case scenario, if you end up with too many of these things opening everywhere. And generally, what the Treasury has always argued, and would probably continue to argue today, is that it just displaces activity from elsewhere. It doesn't help the overall economy. In most cases, it simply moves investments that would be going into the other parts of

• 14:27Rory Stewart?

  the country somewhere else, but it doesn't bring new investment in.

• 14:30Alastair Campbell?

  Are the investment zones part of the anti-growth coalition?

• 14:33Rory Stewart?

  I think the investment zone sadly, that's a nice question, and I can see where you're coming from there. I think the awful thing is that actually it's what worries me more about the whole stuff, which is it's the growth at any cost, but no revenue from the government coalition. And that's what's, that's why I as a more, you know, conservatives used to be about prudence and restraint when it came to this stuff. And what worries me is if I was, we've talked about this in the past, but Keir Thomas needs to turn it around and say, you know, growth at any cost is a very disturbing thing. Here's a question that I got, maybe quickly on this. Ian Birdso, please can you explain what a one nation conservative is? It's a phrase I just don't understand. And what are you if you're not a One Nation Conservative?

• 15:18Rory Stewart?

  Do you want to have a little quick go at that?

• 15:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, before you do, I remember when we talked about Bill Clinton up in Blackpool, and one of his favorite piece of advice, he said, "Just remember when they talk about compassionate conservatism, the only word that counts in that is conservatism."

• 15:34Alastair Campbell?

  So, explain One Nation.

• 15:36Rory Stewart?

  The One Nation tradition began with Benjamin Disraeli back in the 19th century, and it's essentially about an argument about, yeah, social solidarity, about not having a society that's divided between the very rich and the poor. And it became, under Mrs Thatcher, a slogan for people that, you know, I'm one of them, right? So we would have called ourselves moderate or center, center-right politicians.

• 16:01Alastair Campbell?

  And she called you wets.

• 16:02Rory Stewart?

  And she called us wets. So, yeah, One Nation Tories are wets. That's the traditional definition. And the other side of it are the dry, right-wing conservatives, who, in the case of Liz Truss, tend to this very libertarian view, which is, um, which is the only thing that matters is economics and growth. Just before we go to the break, a little poem, a little 18th century poem for you here.

• 16:25Rory Stewart?

  Actually, it's Yeats on the 18th century. What he would have said about Liz Truss is she's not really a Tory, definitely not a One Nation Conservative. He's what he would have called a Whig. And he says about these great 18th century conservative thinkers like Burke, Berkeley, Goldsmith, he said, "All hated Whigery, that leveling, rancorous, rational sort of mind that never looked out of the eye of a saint or out of a drunkard's eye. All's Whigery now, and we old men are massed against the world."

• 16:56Alastair Campbell?

  Mmm, nice.

• 16:57Rory Stewart?

  So, we stand for the saints and the drunkards in the One Nation tradition. Let's go to a break.

• 17:42Speaker 02

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• 19:04Alastair Campbell?

  Right, welcome back to The Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 19:10Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 19:11Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, you're going to tell me that you, that poem just came out of your memory bank as opposed to you're sitting at a laptop with access to every piece of information under the sun?

• 19:21Rory Stewart?

  Genuinely, genuinely, promise, promise, promise, promise, promise came out of my memory.

• 19:25Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, well, excellent, excellent. Just shows that, and that was learnt at the school that the audience in Blackpool said I should bang on about more. We had a vote, didn't we?

• 19:33Rory Stewart?

  I think I learnt it actually in Indonesia.

• 19:38Rory Stewart?

  Here's relevance to Lib Dems. Good question, I thought, from a guy called Rob Blackburn. As someone highly disillusioned by the collapse of the moderate sensible Conservative Party, but not fully confident in the policies and ability of the Labour Party, I find myself wondering... Where the Lib Dems are in all of this chaos and why they aren't cutting through more. What are your thoughts on this? What do they need to do to find their voice? And I think that is an important question because I think the collapse of a moderate sensible Conservative Party is clear. But I do think that there are, he, he put his finger on some of the things that people will worry about with Labour. Which is, are they fully confident in their fully policies, fully confident in their ability? And where are the Lib Dems? Where are the Lib Dems, Alastair? What's happening?

• 20:18Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they, they of course had the misfortune of having to cancel their conference, didn't they? Because of the, the Queen's death. So I suppose that would have given them a bit of national public attention. They've suffered from two things that have happened in quick succession. One, the coalition, I, I think Nick Clegg was right to take the Lib Dems into coalition. I think if you're fighting an election, you want to part government, you go into it when you get the chance. But that definitely damaged their brand and their electoral standing thereafter because of the all austerity thing and tuition fees and everything else. And then the second thing that happened is that after the last election, you've got to remember that the, the coverage that is particularly across the, the national channel, the, the big national channels, which then sort of feed down into the rest of the media ecosystem, is dependent upon how many seats you have in Parliament.

• 21:03Alastair Campbell?

  So even something like Question Time, I mean, people will probably notice that Ian Blackford is called far more regularly at Question Time than Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats. So these things have had an impact, but then added to that, I think they've made a mistake in echoing Labour's line on Brexit and sort of basically making a gigantic elephant in the room that nobody talks about. They don't have a distinctive economic message. They don't have a distinctive social policy message. They, they will probably say, oh, we have lots of policies, it's just people don't know about them. Well, I'm sorry, in the modern world, that's just tough. You've got to make sure that people do know about them.

• 21:38Rory Stewart?

  Did you work with them closely? I know you were very strongly, obviously, on the Remain second referendum side, which the Lib Dems were on in those days. Did you, did you have a lot to do with the Lib Dems in those days when you were thrown out of Labour? Did you see much more of them then?

• 21:49Alastair Campbell?

  Eh, not really. I mean, I voted Lib Dem in the European elections, but that was about trying to get the Labour Party to change its position, which eventually it did. And the Lib Dems were terribly excited and thought that I was going to become a Lib Dem, which I never was. And I had lots to do with them, but also had lots to do with, you know, pro-Remain Tories during the People's Vote campaign. But I think they are in a bit of a tricky position. But also, I wouldn't rule out that they become very, very significant in this next election, because there are parts of the country where for Labour to win, they need the Lib Dems to do pretty well. I mean, I was down in the West Country recently, and, you know, down there, there are some seats that Labour can take, but there are an awful lot of seats that are going to have to be taken by the Lib Dems. And when we were talking

• 22:30Alastair Campbell?

  yesterday about the polling being so bad for the Tories, don't forget that the SNP is still polling well in Scotland. So that suggests, actually, that, because the Scots are taken into account in the national polls, that suggests Labour are doing even better in England than the polls might indicate. But the Lib Dems are going to have to do well in certain parts of the country if the Tories are going to be got rid of. And I think a big driver, there's always a central question at any general election, there's usually one negative or one positive. And I think the negative question is, we've got to get rid of the Tories, or, you know, can we really afford another term of the Tories? And then more positively, you know, has Labour got the positive agenda to get over the line?

• 23:08Rory Stewart?

  It's such a mystery, isn't it? Because given there are so many people, to some extent, you and me, but definitely many, many people who listen to this podcast, who feel that they are in the centre of British politics and are a bit suspicious of left and right. And given that, actually, for many years, the public opinion was like a kind of belgiar with the votes in the centre and not many votes on either side, it's extraordinary that the Lib Dems have performed historically so badly, that the Liberal Party died in England in the, famously in the early 20s, and that it's never really managed to come back in 100 years. And I, it's a bit mysterious. When I was running to be London Mayor of an independent, somebody suggested that I could reach out to the Lib Dems and see if I could become their candidate.

• 23:53Rory Stewart?

  And the polling suggested that my vote share would have collapsed from something like thirteen, fifteen percent down to five percent if I'd become the Lib Dem candidate. That actually being an independent was a stronger brand than being a Lib Dem in London certainly then, twenty twenty.

• 24:10Alastair Campbell?

  Wow, that's interesting. I mean, I think the, look, we're back to the, we've talked about this many, many times, the strength of the two parties, both the main parties are strong. Somebody once said to me not long ago of Labour, the problem with Labour is it's too weak to win and too strong to die. Now, actually, I think at the moment Labour is in a pretty good position to win. But the Lib Dems, I think the peak, the modern peak was the coalition years and they've paid a price for that. Anthony Bohan.

• 24:37Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 24:38Alastair Campbell?

  It sounds like Paul Dacre and Nadine Dorries will soon be joining the likes of Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Lebedev of Hampton's Siberia. Isn't it time to abolish or reform the House of Lords?

• 24:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, I'm a big reform person. I would like to see a House of Lords. None of the politicians would like it, but I'd like to see it composed of people more like cross benches. I was always very, very impressed by the senior judges, diplomats, academics, people like the amazing Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal in the House of Lords. The quality of their debates was often much, much higher because these guys knew an incredible amount. They'd had very long careers, they had an enormous amount of information. So if you want to see a debate on foreign policy, the House of Lords had a much higher quality of debate than the House of Commons. Military stuff, it's obviously got a lot of generals and defence experts in it.

• 25:32Rory Stewart?

  But what we have to do, I'm afraid, is get rid of the donors and the politicians.

• 25:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but really, the problem with, it is part of the legislative process. So what you're describing is a kind of expert debating chamber, which may have a place in our politics. But I think reform has got to go way further than that. I always had this this dream that in a sense we'd have very we'd have a the House of Commons as the centre of our kind of democratic debate. We'd have really powerful regional assemblies and there'd be some kind of link into that. And then we'd also have the European Parliament. We're out of that now. So there's no point thinking of that for the time being. Look, I've actually written my column for the New European about this this week, pegged to the the new names that have come forward, which I mean, the idea of Paul Dacre, I mean, honestly, Paul

• 26:18Alastair Campbell?

  Dacre, he's done so much damage to our political debate. He's nothing but an establishment hack who pretends to be an anti-establishment. And I felt sort of strangely pleased when I heard that he was definitely going to go there, because I think it so debases the whole thing. It shows that Johnson has learnt nothing. It shows Truss has learnt nothing. And then, of course, we're going to get his resignation on us as well, which are going to be truly horrific. So I'm hoping this is just another nail in the coffin of the House of Lords.

• 26:45Rory Stewart?

  One of the things you will have read is that he's also proposing to do something very unusual, which is in his resignation on us, push MPs who are currently in the House of Commons into the House of Lords, which would trigger a by-election. You'd end up with seven by-elections, which

• 26:57Alastair Campbell?

  And Truss doesn't want that.

• 26:58Rory Stewart?

  catastrophic for Truss at the moment. The reason I'm very strongly against an elected House of Lords is that we would end up in the US problem of the standoff between Congress and Senate. In a way, what's good about the House of Lords is it doesn't have democratic legitimacy. So all it can do is delay legislation. But if you had two elected chambers, the people in the upper house would begin to say, well, we're elected, just like the lower house, we have every right to block legislation. We have just as much democratic legitimacy as they do. And we would then find ourselves in gridlock. So I would much rather go on the crossbench model, have people who are experts, who represent different professions, lean into diversity in the House of Lords, and make it a really impressive debating chamber,

• 27:42Rory Stewart?

  but not have it elected, because I think elected would be gridlock.

• 27:46Alastair Campbell?

  Here's one Rory, similar theme, Jay Hearn, hello from North Sydney, I love Sydney. Will the Liberal Democrats and the Greens increase their seats in the next election? More than 30% of Australian voters did not vote for a major party in 2021. Communities are now running independents in North South Wales and Victoria lower houses and hope to hold the balance of power. So this is our old friend the Teals, isn't it? But I don't think that's going to happen here.

• 28:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, the problem is they've got a single transferable vote system, haven't they? Which allows them to do, which really helps an independent. I think there's a huge market for it. I think there's an enormous market for Teals, which is fiscally conservative, environmentally progressive, candidates at the centre. And I think you could imagine having a really strong, attractive party doing that. But I can't quite see the Lib Dems being that party. Adam Blackburn, would right wing media back Labour again? So the recent polling, are we likely to see the right wing aligned media ever move to supporting Labour? Or have things changed since New Labour and these publications are too far down the rabbit hole to want to realign? Would Murdoch want to back a horse bound to lose though?

• 28:52Alastair Campbell?

  Um, don't know, don't know, don't really care that much.

• 28:57Rory Stewart?

  Oh, you do care, Alison. You're always saying the right wing media is the key to the thing, aren't you?

• 29:00Alastair Campbell?

  No, I've never said it's the key. I think it's the key to the framing of the debate. And that's why I rail at the broadcasters from time to time. No, look, I'd rather the newspapers, all of them, took politics seriously, treated all the parties reasonably fairly and had at least some separation of news and comment. That's gone, it's just.

• 29:18Rory Stewart?

  That's not going to happen. And that's not true of the Murrell of the Guardian either.

• 29:21Alastair Campbell?

  No, I agree, I agree. I think, will they shift? I don't know, a lot depends on how they, I mean, you look at the Express literally every day. It's just like a trust fanzine. It's gone from being a Johnson fanzine to being a trust fanzine. The Mail sort of, you know, is trying to sort of. Face a little bit both ways. I haven't really seen much of the sun recently. I noticed the Sunday Times has become much more critical. So I suppose it's not impossible, but I think at this stage it's unlikely.

• 29:46Rory Stewart?

  I think Murdoch, who's a terrifying figure in so many ways, but I think he likes a winner. And if he concludes that Liz Truss is incompetent and isn't going to win, I think it's very likely that he'll change.

• 29:56Alastair Campbell?

  Don't forget as well, he's, you know, he's, how can I put this gently? He's getting on. Karl Marx.

• 30:03Rory Stewart?

  Karl Marx?

• 30:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I don't think he's the Karl Marx because I saw his grave recently when I went up to see Philip Gould's grave and my friend John Merritt. This one, here's a question directly to me and directly to you. Alistair, did you vote for Labour under Jeremy Corbyn? Yes, I did. And would you expect Corbyn supporters to still vote Labour under Keir Starmer? Yes, I would. Rory Stewart, who will you vote for in the next election?

• 30:26Rory Stewart?

  Cor blimey, it's a difficult one, isn't it? Really difficult one. I would find it impossible to vote, I'm afraid at the moment, for Liz Truss's Conservative Party. I'm just horrified by the direction. It's not what I ever believed in. The thing for me which makes it difficult, and I think for some of my colleagues who are still in Parliament, is that obviously we have been aware for a dozen years or more, maybe many of us 20 years, that being a Conservative is very, very unpopular, that many people think that we are a very, very nasty party, that we're actually out there deliberately to damage people. And we've been trying to defend ourselves and say, no, that isn't what we're about. We are a party that believes in prudence at home, restraint to board,

• 31:08Rory Stewart?

  love of tradition, evolution, not revolution, pragmatism, local communities. And now we have Liz Truss. And Liz Truss is like the worst possible vision. It feels to me, as I imagine Jeremy Corbyn will have felt to moderate Labour voters, that Corbyn sort of revealed a side of far-left Labour socialism that many moderate Labour MPs had been trying to deny and say, we're not a party run by this kind of thing. So Liz Truss is the kind of Jeremy Corbyn of our party.

• 31:37Alastair Campbell?

  Right. So you haven't answered the question. You said you'd find it hard to vote for Liz Truss.

• 31:41Rory Stewart?

  Well, so I wouldn't, I wouldn't vote for Liz Truss. And I'm surprised you were prepared to vote for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party. I'm actually slightly shocked by that.

• 31:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I voted Labour because I thought that was the only way to get rid of the Tories.

• 31:52Rory Stewart?

  And you really thought Jeremy Corbyn would have been better than Theresa May?

• 31:57Alastair Campbell?

  Theresa May wasn't standing, it was Boris Johnson.

• 32:01Rory Stewart?

  Well, how did she vote in 2017?

• 32:03Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, sorry, I voted for Jeremy then, but to be honest, I think one of the reasons Theresa May got a majority is people didn't actually think Jeremy Corbyn could win. And I think one of the reasons that Boris Johnson won as well as he did was because people by then thought that Jeremy Corbyn might win. But I wanted to get a kind of, you know, progressive alliance, I guess, is what I was after. But I think now, I do think that a combination, and even this Coalition Against Growth, whatever it was she came up with, they're trying to get this concept into the public mind that a coalition would be terrible, that if it's sort of Keir Starmer and Nicola Sturgeon, or Keir Starmer and Ed Davey. But actually, one of the upsides of Ed Davey is I don't think people see him as threatening in a way that maybe they did with Joe Swinson. I hope you vote Labour, Roy, but I also hope that if it's in a seat that the Liberal Democrats can win and Labour can't, that you'd maybe vote tactically.

• 32:47Rory Stewart?

  Gabriella, WikiLeaks.

• 32:49Alastair Campbell?

  You haven't answered the question. You haven't answered the question.

• 32:51Rory Stewart?

  Well, I'm definitely not going to vote for Liz Truss's Conservative Party, but I'll have to work out what I do when I get into that.

• 32:57Alastair Campbell?

  And have you not yet decided?

• 32:58Rory Stewart?

  I have not yet decided, no. I've not yet decided. Not yet decided. Okay, here's a question. How do we build political community? E E Frye. Your Blackpool show gave me a sense of political community I'd not felt in an extremely long time. I think that was because the Max Miller jokes that we told are music hall jokes. I felt safe for the first time in ages. How do we build on that? How do we create a community for the disenfranchised, politically homeless citizens of nowhere? What do I do now? There we are, what does E E Frye do now?

• 33:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, E E Frye, what do you do now? First of all, you wait excitedly for my next book, which is going to be called What Can I Do? And then I think there'll be lots of the answers in there. I'm glad that E E Frye felt that about our gathering. I think if there'd been a general election in the hall, Labour would have won. But I think there were Lib Dems in there, I think there were Greens in there, I think there were Tories, I think there were young people who were too young to vote. And I think, thinking about it in the concept of a political community, I think we do have to win this idea. That it's possible to have serious, intelligent, informed debate, that we don't always have to agree with every dot and comma of everything that the other person is saying, but that we can still kind of get along. And I think the other thing we have to do, we have to keep calling

• 34:14Alastair Campbell?

  out the stuff that we disagree with and the stuff that we don't like. And the responsibility to call it out is even greater when the people who are doing the worst things are the people in power. And then I'd say to E E Fry, join a party, whatever your politics are, join a party, join campaigns, be active, stay active, get active and just don't give up hope.

• 34:35Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Okay. Now, final one. I think we're coming up towards the end here. At From Escobar, I came all the way from Warsaw to see you. So he came from Warsaw to Blackpool. That's quite the journey, particularly with the train strikes on. You've not mentioned Poland much in your podcast. What is your take on Poland's crazy right wing government?

• 34:54Alastair Campbell?

  They're crazy.

• 34:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, just just to remind people, so Law and Justice Party, pick fights European Union, taking a very hard line approach to women's rights. It's tried to muzzle independent media, done strange stuff with the courts. So it's very much a nativist populist government, but it's one that of course has caused a lot of confusion. I mean, it's disintegrating European democratic values, but of course the war in Ukraine has given it an opportunity to project itself as the great champion of European solidarity in defence of Ukraine and democratic values.

• 35:26Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Well, first of all, I'm, I think we should thank him. If he if he genuinely came to Blackpool just to see us, I feel rather bad because you did at one point ask people how far they'd come. Nobody shouted out Warsaw. I think Chichester was the furthest away that I heard. So he came from Warsaw. I sort of feel bad that we didn't give him lots of love and special attention.

• 35:45Rory Stewart?

  We should have done. We should have done.

• 35:46Alastair Campbell?

  We should have got him backstage and had a look around and stuff. But I I think there's, there are two reasons, I think, why Poland and its government doesn't get quite the opprobrium that others do. One is that because actually, there are most people these days know Poles. There are a lot of Poles, a lot have gone back, but we, you know, Poles have become a pretty big part of British life. And, and I think actually that's maybe now people get their assessment of Poland through the fact that we know more Polish people, and they seem quite nice and they're very hardworking, et cetera, et cetera. But the second thing is that Orban. Takes most of the heat on the whole sort of busy grad stuff. And I think that Poland stays a little bit under the radar. And your final point about Ukraine, I think, is incredibly important.

• 36:29Alastair Campbell?

  They have, they have shown a very different side to themselves in relation to Ukraine. And because Ukraine has been so defining in, in recent months, that has maybe taken the heat off them as well, but.

• 36:41Rory Stewart?

  I mean, the change is extraordinary, isn't it? Because they were flirting really with kind of right wing nativeist populism and the authoritarian regimes. And then they flipped around and they went from, you remember they were, when there was this problem in Belarus, there were water cannons and truncheons, the Poles driving back Belarusian migrants at the border. Suddenly flipped to taking one and a half million Ukrainians almost overnight into Poland. So it's been a very interesting sort of reshaping. And it's, it's a sign that you can be a strong part of European political values, oddly, while not signing up to the full democratic agenda. Anyway, I, it's something we should explore more. Maybe we should, well, maybe we should do a podcast in, in Poland someday.

• 37:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 37:23Rory Stewart?

  We should go to Poland.

• 37:25Alastair Campbell?

  We should get a train.

• 37:26Rory Stewart?

  We should get a train.

• 37:27Alastair Campbell?

  Because you spend too much time on aeroplanes, Rory, and you, and you would, I noticed your defense of you all you're flying. At least I admitted I felt guilty about it. I felt your defense didn't go down well with the audience.

• 37:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, I sort of thought it was a bit, bit rich when I, for the sake of the audience, I had just completely shattered myself, flying all the way from Jordan to Blackpool and then Blackpool to Marrakech to be attacked for getting on a plane. I thought, screw you, I'll do it on, I'll do it on video conference next time.

• 37:51Alastair Campbell?

  Here's, here's an invitation to get on another very long flight. Somebody with a wonderful name of Fernanda Diaz. I'm a dual British Argentine citizen, living in Argentina since last year. I want to extend a running invitation to you both to come and visit because Rory Wiltshire Martin knew very little about Latin America. So Fernanda, I don't know who you are, I don't know what you do, but thank you for the invitation. And it sounds very, very.

• 38:16Rory Stewart?

  I think we'll be travelling by boat as part of your, as part of Alice's new carbon retake thing.

• 38:21Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, we could swim, we could swim. As you bottled out of the Blackpool swim.

• 38:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I, I would love to hear about your Blackpool swim, Alice. How did it go?

• 38:30Alastair Campbell?

  Well, because you bottled out and because the tide was I didn't think you should be because the tide was so far out. Yeah, dearie me, this is desperate. I decided to leave early and get home, but I went to the line.

• 38:43Rory Stewart?

  It's the one bit, I know I never get to give you comms advice because you're a much more able comms person than me, but my small bit of comms advice is before you accuse somebody else of bottling out of a swim, check you've done the swim yourself.

• 38:56Alastair Campbell?

  All right, guys.

• 38:57Rory Stewart?

  On that, farewell.

• 38:58Alastair Campbell?

  All the best.

• 39:04Speaker 05

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 39:08Speaker 06

  On October 2nd.

• 39:09Speaker 05

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• 39:14Speaker 06

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• 39:21Speaker 07

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• 39:25Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 39:28Speaker 07

  I'm not the first man.

• 39:30Speaker 06

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• 39:45Speaker 07

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• 39:50Speaker 09

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