Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 27. Tory leadership race: contenders and pretenders About this episode Rishi Sunak. Liz Truss. Penny Mordaunt. Tom Tugendhat. And about fifty others.
Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart discuss the runners and riders in the chaotic Tory leadership contest, with Rory giving an insider's guide into what goes on behind the scenes.
How do you attract support? When do campaigns really start? And who will succeed Boris Johnson?
Reading list:
Tory leadership candidate endorsement tracker (New Statesman) - Ben Walker
Who started each Tory leadership race as favourite? - Tides of History
Instagram:
@restispolitics
Twitter:
@RestIsPolitics
Email:
[email protected]
Producer: Dom Johnson
Exec Producer: Jack Davenport
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Transcript 9,984 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair Campbell? And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in 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.
0:42 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:05 Speaker 02 A BetterHelp ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day. Every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com/rustpolitics.
1:43 Alastair Campbell? Hello. Welcome to the 20th episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
1:47 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
1:49 Alastair Campbell? We hope you enjoyed the three episodes we released last week amidst all the political chaos of Johnson going, not going, kind of going, and the Tory leadership election now. And a big welcome to all our new listeners who find the show while we occupied three of the top four places in the UK podcast chart. So obviously, we are going to talk about Tory leadership, runners and riders, what it's like to be a candidate. And of course, the burning question that every Conservative is asking, whether Rory is going to give his coveted endorsement to any of the so far 11 candidates. We'll also be getting on to the assassination of Shinzo Abe in Japan, the situation in Sri Lanka, and Rory's got a lot to say about recent travels around the north of England. So Rory, you've been up in the north.
2:33 Alastair Campbell? Are you quietly choosing a Northumbrian seat so you can run in the Tory leadership contest, or have you ruled that out?
2:41 Rory Stewart? I'm definitely not running in the leadership, but-
2:44 Alastair Campbell? Breaking news.
2:45 Rory Stewart? Breaking news, Rory Stewart can announce he's not becoming number 23 in the Conservative leadership, no. I've been travelling around and I've been doing a couple of amazing radio things recently. I know you've been doing this wonderful television stuff on how to choose the next prime minister. I've been doing two things. One thing that maybe we can talk about on another episode is I've been working on an amazing Northumbrian. Let me test you on this one, actually, it says he being unfair because you often test me. Have you heard of Basil Bunting?
3:13 Alastair Campbell? Yes, I have. In the email you sent yesterday saying, "I'd like to talk about Basil Bunting."
3:20 Rory Stewart? Well, that's good, lovely that you're being honest about that. So he's an extraordinary figure. In the complete revival of the North East of England, he was an incredible poet, who was quite an old man, was rediscovered by a young, very, very radical teenager, Northumbrian poet called Tom Pickard, and they create it in the 1960s in this tower on the walls of Newcastle, a revival of poetry in the North East. And that's something I'd love to talk about sometime. But the really big thing that I've been doing recently, that I really want to talk about, is I've been doing a Radio 4 show on the history of argument, which really relates to you and me, because it's all about how you agree agreeably and disagree disagreeably.
4:05 Alastair Campbell? Or disagree agreeably.
4:07 Rory Stewart? Or disagree agreeably. And we start right back to the ancient Greeks, we do a lot on rhetoric, and then we get right up to Twitter. We have an extraordinary standoff between, you'll have heard of Lawrence Fox and Ash Sarkar. They end up in the radio studio with me in an amazing tussling argument about Twitter. We've got Labour MPs on, we've got ex-conservative MPs on, we have people from the bigger fringes of stuff, and then we've got some amazing analysts of the way that social media works. And I guess the case that we're trying to make is that if there is any way of saving our democracies, we're going to have to learn to argue better.
4:48 Alastair Campbell? Well, that's very good. I mean, there's a slight problem with this, Rory, is that our podcast is doing so well. As I say, three of the top four last week, and part of that is because people are turning away from radio. You're trying to revive radio now, when podcasts are the future. But what are you doing, man?
5:02 Rory Stewart? Well, the lovely thing is that it's beautifully neat, though, because when our podcast goes out next Wednesday, shortly afterwards, at one o'clock on Radio 4, on the 19th of July, everyone's going to be able to hear the first episode of the history of argument. So we've got...
5:15 Alastair Campbell? How many plugs for the podcast are in it?
5:19 Rory Stewart? So far as many as there are plugs for this amazing BBC Radio 4 show on the podcast.
5:25 Alastair Campbell? I got Fiona Bruce told me off last week because, well, she told me off for interrupting the other guests too much on Question Time, but also I'd been sort of baiting you for failing to mention the podcast when you were on Question Time recently. And I actually, it was a member of the audience who first raised the podcast. So I really felt that was better than me sort of going up front and doing it.
5:47 Rory Stewart? But is it true that with your amazing dark arts, you'd actually organised a member of the audience to mention the podcast?
5:52 Alastair Campbell? Rory, please, please, let's just draw the veil, draw the veil. This is a calumny against natural spontaneity. I've got to say, by the way, last week, before we get on to the Tory leadership, one of them, Nadeem Zahawi, I do think it was one of the most bizarre attack lines I've ever come across, that he, when the Johnson was falling apart, Zahawi literally went around the studios one by one and said that basically this is my fault and that nobody should listen to me. It was one of the most bizarre things.
6:24 Rory Stewart? So for people who haven't followed this, it really was extraordinary. I think it would actually be difficult to miss if you were following it on television, radio, because Nadeem Zahawi did it again and again. Basically, his pitch to say that people shouldn't be turning against Boris Johnson was to say that if they were, they were teaming up with Alastair Campbell, and that somehow getting rid of Boris Johnson was an Alastair Campbell plot. Actually, it was deeply flattering towards Alistair, slightly insulting towards me because I felt I wasn't getting enough credit. But I think the backstory on this is that...
6:55 Rory Stewart? I'd been quite complimentary about Nottingham on the show. So somebody had encouraged him to listen to it. And he obviously had never heard the Rest is Politics podcast before. And he and I are actually friends. So I think there's some very complicated psychological stuff going on. I think what may have happened is that he may have tried to listen to the show, looking for the moment where I say something nice about him. Meanwhile, he would have heard the full force of Alistair under full sail and been so traumatized that for the next 14 hours, he couldn't get your voice out of his head.
7:25 Alastair Campbell? Very odd, very, very, very odd. Now, listen, most importantly, where did you find your ring? Is it the pinky ring from your dad?
7:32 Rory Stewart? It's the pinky ring that my wife gave me. Yeah, it's the very same that we've talked about on the show. And it's, it's so, just very quickly for readers, I was in Buxton in Derbyshire.
7:40 Alastair Campbell? Listeners, listeners, Rory, they're listeners.
7:42 Rory Stewart? Listeners, Buxton in Derbyshire. I was giving a talk at Buxton Festival. It's a great, great event in Derbyshire. And somewhere between giving an event, a talk on the stage in the Opera House, and walking down St John's Road, my ring disappeared because by the time I got to the car, my wedding ring had gone. Anyway, I put this out on social media and four and a half million people saw the tweet. And I think literally hundreds of people, very, very kindly, walked up and down St John's Road, some of them with metal detectors, trying to find the ring. Very generous police officer, who is a great fan of the Rest is Politics podcast, I'd like to put a shout out to you because he also put a lot of time and energy into trying to see if they could find the ring. So I'm feeling very grateful
8:25 Rory Stewart? towards people of Derbyshire. But to be honest, after nearly four and a half million people got involved and hundreds walked up and down the road, I'm not sure whether it's going to be found.
8:34 Alastair Campbell? Well, it was also, I mean, I, I, I think this is the podcast effect again, Rory. I think we're creating a sort of media monster in you. You're getting all these radio programs, you're getting all this stuff to do.
8:42 Rory Stewart? The radio programs were even before you asked. It's difficult to believe.
8:47 Alastair Campbell? But it was, it was actually you losing your ring was, was a thing on the front page of the BBC News website, for God's sake. Rory Stewart appeals for lost ring and 4.5 million people answered the call.
8:59 Rory Stewart? Yeah, no, I think that is the point at which there must have been what's called a very, very, very slow news day. But if anybody ever finds it, or is offered it, Jula's happy to offer a reward. It's got a very distinctive cross on the front of it. Sort of, it's a circle with a cross in it, and it's, it's gold.
9:14 Alastair Campbell? Is your wife cross with you?
9:16 Rory Stewart? No, she's, she's, she's lovely about it. Absolutely lovely about it.
9:19 Alastair Campbell? Okay, good, good.
9:20 Rory Stewart? You've never lost a wedding ring? No?
9:22 Alastair Campbell? We've never had a wedding ring.
9:23 Rory Stewart? Oh, never had a wedding, of course, Alice, that we should get into that sometime because you've had this, you've had this very stable relationship for a very long time, but you've never decided never to get married, is that right?
9:32 Alastair Campbell? Well, we've got, we've got a civil partnership, but I mean, we, I don't wear jewellery, I don't wear a watch, I've never understood the jewellery thing at all. And as you know, Rory, I don't get the pinky ring thing.
9:41 Rory Stewart? You, you think, you think it's a class, it's a class.
9:44 Alastair Campbell? It's on a par with sending your kids to, um, to private school or not knowing what the difference between rugby union and rugby league is unless you look it up on Wikipedia just before we talk about Basil Bunting. Now, shall we talk about, shall we, shall we talk about the, this wretched Tory leadership contest? So I, this is the, my favourite question of the, do you know, we had over a thousand questions this week, but my, my favourite, I'm actually having to look it up because I've forgotten the guy's name already, who is Rayman Christie?
10:14 Rory Stewart? So Rayman Chisholm, let, let's, let's.
10:16 Alastair Campbell? Oh, Chisholm, sorry.
10:17 Rory Stewart? Yeah, Rayman Chisholm is a really, really interesting example of threat. So people who haven't followed, Rayman Chisholm has suddenly popped literally out of nowhere and announced that he wants to be a candidate to be the, the leader of the Conservative Party. So far, Mr. Chisholm, as far as one can tell, has no endorsers. I mean, he hasn't got a sing, single person. And he needs 20 of them to qualify for the next round. And he made this selfie, and I feel slightly responsible for this because during the last Tory leadership, I went around doing dodgy selfies, but this is a very dodgy selfie. It's his leadership video launch. I think he's propped it on the grass in the back garden at home, so it's sort of looking up his nostril.
11:00 Rory Stewart? And he, he doesn't quite sort of time it right. It maybe runs out of battery or something because the end of it goes, there are, I think something like, I'm sort of remembering, trying to remember, but something like, there are three things which are great about Britain. It's resilience, it's create.
11:20 Alastair Campbell? But Roy, let's try, let's try and get inside his head. You say he's quite clever. He's quite interesting. He doesn't remotely think. When you, when you went for the leadership.
11:31 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
11:31 Alastair Campbell? You, you said to me before, you genuinely thought you could win.
11:34 Rory Stewart? Yeah, there's no point in doing it if you don't.
11:36 Alastair Campbell? No, he doesn't, he, please tell me he doesn't think he can win.
11:39 Rory Stewart? No, I'm afraid he may think he can win. I think that's the problem here. I think it's possible that, this is something I really believe that something amazing like probably a hundred, hundred and fifty of the MPs think they should be Prime Minister. I, I've been called by a surprising number of, of friends who are in Parliament asking me whether I think they should run.
12:01 Alastair Campbell? Raymond wasn't one of them.
12:02 Rory Stewart? Raymond was not one, was not one of them.
12:04 Alastair Campbell? Nadeem, did, did Nadeem phone you?
12:07 Rory Stewart? No, I, I think he's, he's somebody who's, who's been confident that he should run. But I'm talking about people who aren't in the running. So you could have had nearly double the list. So Ramon Chischi, just, just on him for a little bit more though, to develop it. He's a fascinating figure. His father, I think, came over from Pakistan, was an imam. So he was a preacher. Rahman was very close to Benazir Bhutto and very involved in the People's Party politics of Pakistan. And then I think I'm right in saying ran as a SDP or Lib Dem candidate against the Tories in an, an election, maybe as recently as 2005, and then came in in 2010.
12:46 Rory Stewart? He's really struggled to find his feet. So he's been in, I suppose, 11 years, only just managed to become a minister in the latest reshuffle. In other words, I think he only made it in after all those resignations that happened just, just before our show, just after our show last week. So he's been in, in, in office as a junior minister for something like, I think, six days now.
13:07 Alastair Campbell? So how many of the, I think we're at 11 now. I don't know, it might be more. How many of them do you think have a genuine prospect of getting into the final two?
13:18 Rory Stewart? I think with the exception of Rahman, the others are much, much more plausible candidates. So most of the others are people who've been cabinet ministers. Or in the case of Tom Tugendhat, he isn't a minister and that's something that people will point out, that he's a guy who's really made a big reputation for himself as Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. The exception maybe in that rule, although she's had some pretty impressive endorsers, is Kemmy Badenoch. So Kemmy Badenoch is very interesting. She's a young British Nigerian woman, aged 42. And she's not been in the cabinet at all, but she managed to get a very early endorsement from Michael Gove, who's quite a big beast in Conservative politics, leadership candidate
14:03 Rory Stewart? himself, twice over, one of the big architects of Brexit, obviously from our point of view, signal boo on the pantomime show. But he's come out for another guy called Neil O'Brien. I mean, one of the ways, what I suppose I'm getting to is, one of the ways that I might think about this is to look at the list of endorsers. And there's quite, if people are interested in the real geekery of this, the new statesman's tried to provide quite a detailed list of who's endorsing who. There's a less accurate version on Wikipedia with some terrible information that somebody's tried to claim that Greg Clark, who's very, very much from the more moderate centre part of the party, they've tried to put him down as a pretty Patel endorser, which I can absolutely assure you, he is not.
14:46 Rory Stewart? But the endorsers are a good way in, because it gives you a sense, for me at least, who are my friends backing, who are they taking seriously? And who are the people, you know, Suella Braverman, for example, there's nobody on her list that I'm particularly close to. So can we say, so something like Suella Braverman, can we just rule her out? No, I mean, if you mean, I definitely would want to rule her out as Prime Minister, but if you mean, can we be certain she won't make it through? No, we can't, because she's got Steve Baker and the ERG, which is a very formidable force on the right of the party that put the hard Brexit together. Are lining up behind her. One of the things, of course, that is very, very interesting in
15:29 Rory Stewart? this is the very high number of people from Black Asian Minority ethnic backgrounds. Camille Bednok, Sajid Jarvid, Rishi Sunak, Nardim Zahawi, Swala Bravman and Rehman Chishti, although I think we should be taking him a little bit less seriously.
15:44 Alastair Campbell? Yes, that's actually more, that's actually, and Priti Patel's in there, that's more than half.
15:48 Rory Stewart? So that is pretty impressive. In some way, it's a testimony to David Cameron, who I've got a lot of grumbles with, but many of these people were brought into the Conservative Party in 2010 by David Cameron, who wanted to make a more diverse party.
15:59 Alastair Campbell? By the way, we should put your new statesman thing in the show notes because that sounds quite interesting. My, the other Rory in my life, my son Rory, he sent me a thing this morning. It was a list of all the favourites at the start of all the historical leadership contests, and it was amazing how many of the favourites did not win.
16:17 Rory Stewart? Oh, that's very good. That's, that's really helpful. So your, your son, the, the other Rory.
16:21 Alastair Campbell? He is the Rory, you are the other Rory.
16:23 Rory Stewart? The Rory, I'm the other Rory. The Rory is, is very interested in, in odds, isn't he? In probabilities and all this kind of stuff. And he's pointed to this extraordinary fact, which is the things that everybody will be excited about, the people that everyone will be excited about at the start. So classically in Conservative politics, it's been in recent elections, these will be big names, people remember Michael Heseltine, Michael Portillo, Ken Clark, these people, Willie White, Laura against Mrs Thatcher.
16:52 Alastair Campbell? Absolutely. White was five to four.
16:54 Rory Stewart? Five to four. Wow, wow, wow. And, and Mrs Thatcher was, Margaret Thatcher was, was much, presumably much less likely to win.
17:01 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's interesting. And, and I guess that's bad news. If that's historical trend continues, that's bad news presumably for Rishi Sunak, who seems to me is the only one who is at least trying to have a kind of grown up.
17:17 Alastair Campbell? Message, even though his message is not that grown up because he's also making lots of false promises and so forth. But I'm finding this contest, the idea of this thing running until September the fifth is doing my head in. I mean, I've not heard any of them talk about poor people yet. I've not heard any of them talk about climate change. I've not heard any of them say that they would, they would do anything to fix the Northern Ireland peace process because they're hooked on this ridiculous protocol. And even the moderates like Tom Tugendhat, and they're also saying that they're backing this ridiculous Rwanda policy. So what it shows is we're completely enthralled now to these very old, right wing Tory party members. They're deciding the future of the country.
17:55 Rory Stewart? Exactly. So just, just to remind, remind listeners, that the reason this is happening is structural. This is why we need to change the structures of British politics, I believe. So these guys have got two beauty contests they've got to pass. The first is they've got to win enough MPs to make it into the last two. So they've got to get the endorsements of the MPs. And, you know, they, one of the reasons you won't be seeing much of them in the media, won't be coming on shows like ours, is that they feel at this stage, all they've got to do is try to win over enough of those 350 MPs to make it through. At the moment, they're trying to get 20, which is their threshold to qualify to the next round.
18:32 Alastair Campbell? How many are already beyond that? Rishi Sunak?
18:35 Rory Stewart? Oh, very few, I think.
18:36 Alastair Campbell? Tom Tugendhat, I think.
18:38 Rory Stewart? I'm not sure, Tom may just have touched it, but the only ones who are comfortably through at the moment, I think Rishi Sunak's comfortably through, Penny Morden comfortably through, Tom's just, just crossed 20, so he'll qualify. And actually, we, we should, while I'm talking to you, I'm just going to pull up this figure because I think it's quite, quite useful because it gives us all these figures.
18:56 Alastair Campbell? Just while you're, you're doing that though, I mean, presumably, presumably you have experience of this. Some of them won't be telling you the truth.
19:03 Rory Stewart? Absolutely. So trying to do it off, off public endorsements. But you're completely right, that many of them will be claiming that they've got this stuff in place, and they really haven't got it in place at all.
19:15 Alastair Campbell? Is it possible, for example, that there will be people who have publicly declared for somebody but actually won't be voting for them? Is that possible?
19:20 Rory Stewart? Oh, yes, because it's a secret, secret ballot. And in fact, it's, it's something that I was able to benefit from during the leadership. Which is that people who felt terrified of Boris Johnson, he was, he's the exception to the real Rory's rule, which is that he was the favourite from the beginning and came through and had this very, very aggressive campaign run by Grant Shapps, actually, who's one of the, one of the candidates at the moment. But some of those people voted for me in the secret ballot, but publicly were declared for Boris Johnson.
19:52 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
19:53 Rory Stewart? So, so there'll be, there'll be a lot of trickery going on. So they might not make it. Some of them who've got even twenty publicly declared, might not actually make it through.
20:02 Alastair Campbell? And Rory, do you not think there's a problem for the Conservative Party with the public, who, we've just had this whole sort of psychodrama on and on and on about Johnson. Of course, it's, it's carrying on with him sort of squatting in checkers and doing his resignation honours and all the sort of stuff that's going to come out, particularly about lebedev, which I think, by the way, is going to get worse and worse for him. But I just think the public must be looking on at this and think, look, we got rid of that guy because we couldn't trust a word he says. And now we're into this thing where most of them are talking absolute fantasy nonsense that they don't believe about spraying around tax cuts, or we can fix Brexit, or we can, you know, all this sort of stuff that they're talking about, ignoring a lot of the real issues. And I think whoever emerges from
20:44 Alastair Campbell? this could start off in, in an incredibly weak position. And it's almost like a parallel universe. The Conservative Party and the Conservative papers are convincing themselves that this is like a breath of fresh air. But I think it's sort of adding to the terrible stale smell around the Conservative Party.
21:01 Rory Stewart? You're completely right. I think that this is one of the ways in which modern politics, but also one of the ways in which Boris Johnson has damaged the Conservative Party, because the lesson that people will have taken from the 2019 election is that he won by making promises he couldn't deliver. You know, he promised huge tax cuts and of course he increased tax. He promised he had an oven-ready deal that would cause no problems in Northern Ireland. And of course, it did cause incredible problems. But he got away with it in the short term in getting through the election. And I I think we talked about this. When I rewatch my appearance against Boris Johnson in the leadership debate.
21:43 Alastair Campbell? So when I was down. You haven't done it again, have you?
21:45 Rory Stewart? I I've not done it again, but but but but I've been thinking about it because it's exactly these issues. And I'm trying to do what you're suggesting here on the show, which is that I spent the whole of that campaign. I talked about what made me ashamed about poverty, what made me ashamed about prisons in Britain. I talked about compromise and moderation. I said I wasn't going to deliver a hard Brexit. I refused to promise tax cuts. I tried to point out that the other candidates were increasing spending and dropping taxation. And they had a seventy four billion pound black hole in their finances, and it got me nowhere.
22:19 Alastair Campbell? Well, it didn't get you nowhere. It didn't get you nowhere. You actually were the kind of Tugendhat figure. I mean, you did sort of emerge quite strongly, but your point is you you couldn't win on that platform.
22:28 Rory Stewart? I couldn't win on that platform, and they will have taken the lesson. I mean, you know, I don't think I I'm that important to them, but I think the more general lesson they will have taken, which is that my attempts to say, OK, I'm going to speak truth. Obviously, people listening are going to understand that you can't promise tax cuts when we don't have any money and when public services are broken and when we need to put more investment in. Didn't really work out. And and they will have done very careful focus groups and opinion polls, which will have told them that the Conservative Party is very, very attached to tax cuts. I mean, it's um.
23:02 Alastair Campbell? But they used to be, in fact, they used to be attached to the idea of being a party of economic credibility. That's going. I thought before, I think we should, before we go to the break, you should give us a sort of line by line on each one of them. But let me just, before we do that, I thought it was interesting and sensible that Keir Starmer actually made quite an important speech about the economy yesterday. And I remember lots of people, there were lots of people saying, why on earth is he sort of making a speech now when the Tory party is tearing it to bits? But I think that was the right time to do it, because I actually think that I've noticed historically how hard it is for the Labour Party to get heard when the Tory party is having a leadership contest. And I actually think Keir Starmer, particularly with his message about the importance of growing the economy, while this lot are spraying around unfunded pledges, I thought was quite a sensible piece of politics.
23:45 Rory Stewart? Very smart, because of course. That there is, as I keep saying, this gaping hole in the centre ground of politics. And it's partly about being able to talk confidently about the environment. But it's also about being fiscally responsible. That that that's the whole point of our favourite teals in Australia.
24:03 Alastair Campbell? Australia, yeah.
24:04 Rory Stewart? And and I think, you know, people who are left leaning slightly forget that they're they're blue green because their blue bit is that they're fiscally responsible. And I think if the Conservative Party begins to lose, as it was under Boris Johnson, a reputation for fiscal responsibility, that is a huge hole.
24:20 Alastair Campbell? I saw, I I I should also tell you, I I I saw Kia, he's my MP and lives near us. And I saw him the other day and I get the feeling, my sense of him, he has become a lot more confident about the possibility of winning. And that is incredibly important in politics. You you it's like you were saying about these candidates. If you wake up and you feel you can win, you are more likely to do the things that take you to that destination. And I and I sensed a real confidence that I hadn't necessarily sensed before.
24:49 Rory Stewart? I think it may be time for us to go into break, but after the break, maybe we will have a little chance just to romp through the candidates because some of them, some of them are pretty colourful and some of them may disappear quite soon if they don't make the threshold. But thank you so much and into the break.
25:02 Alastair Campbell? Cool.
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27:08 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to the Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.
27:12 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, I think you should just, let's go through them very, very quickly, one by one. Sunak.
27:17 Rory Stewart? So, well, I've got a little list here, so.
27:19 Alastair Campbell? Oh, you've done a list, you've done preparation.
27:20 Rory Stewart? A little list, I've tried to do a bit of work a few times. I'm not as diligent as you with you going through the thousand questions, but I've done a little list. So, first one, we talked about briefly before the break. Kemmy Badenoch, Nigerian-British woman, British-Nigerian woman, who went, actually was at school in Nigeria till she was 16. Very young, so she and Rishi Sunak, who you mentioned, both just 42. They will be the youngest prime ministers in nearly 200 years of British history if they become a party leader. And that's really amazing. I mean, it's amazing how, and they've been in parliament a remarkably short time. I mean, they came in and. Twenty fifteen, very, very young people. And so this will be extraordinary. Yeah.
28:01 Alastair Campbell? What was Dave, what, how old was David Cameron?
28:03 Rory Stewart? He was a year older than that when he came in, and he was the youngest in two hundred years. And before that, I guess Tony Blair was the youngest. So.
28:09 Alastair Campbell? Tony was forty three, yeah.
28:11 Rory Stewart? So if politics seems to be just, uh, it's, it's starting from Tony Blair through David Cameron. We've gone into an era where people are, seem to be expecting much, much younger people. Our leaders, you know, obviously, as you can see, I mean, we've felt it with McMillan or Churchill or. But also with Jim Callahan and people, we, we had much older leaders in the past. It would have been very, it'd be completely inconceivable for somebody who came, was elected for the first time in twenty fifteen and who was forty two years old to have become the leader of the Conservative Party.
28:42 Alastair Campbell? Has, has, has Kemi Badenoch got anything to say beyond the culture war stuff, which is what seems to me is coming through from her?
28:48 Rory Stewart? I think she's on the right of the party. She's, sorry, I mean, the, the answer is she's on the right of the party and she is trying to do something which could work, which is, she's definitely a very likeable contemporary figure. She feels much more modern than many bits of the Conservative Party. While at the same time being on the right. And I think that is a quite a sort of powerful mix. It's something that you see sometimes emerging in the United States. Um, uh, but obviously it's not my kind of politics at all. She was a an enormous number of these people are Brexit voters. That, that's another thing which is very striking that the, although the last leadership race, which was only three years ago, was completely dominated by people who voted
29:32 Rory Stewart? uh, remain. It's now a world in which almost all the candidates, I suppose, with the exception of Tom Tugendhat, Jeremy Hunt and Sajid Javid.
29:41 Alastair Campbell? Uh, and, and, and, and Liz Truss, may I say?
29:44 Rory Stewart? And Liz Truss, although she's become a very, very fierce Brexiteer since.
29:48 Alastair Campbell? Well, she hasn't become a very fierce Brexiteer. She has decided that that is the thing to be.
29:53 Rory Stewart? Absolutely, absolutely. So Kemi Badenoch first, probably at the moment got only about thirteen endorsements. And remember, it's twenty they've got to cross. So quite a lot of these people could drop away quite soon in this funny Derby race. Suella, Suella Braverman, we've talked about already, probably eleven endorsements.
30:10 Rory Stewart? Jeremy Hunt not doing so well at the moment, it seems, on the public endorsements. Again, maybe down at about thirteen. He, of course, was the man who was the, one would have thought, would be the frontrunner. He was the guy who was the runner up to Boris Johnson last time round. Very distinguished career, been in politics ten years longer than many of these people.
30:30 Alastair Campbell? Roy, we don't have, we don't have time to fully rebut very distinguished career, but carry on.
30:34 Rory Stewart? Anyway, he was a foreign secretary and that's a much bigger deal than many of the other people that are, that are running in this race and was David Cameron's, David Cameron used to predict that he would be the next prime minister and it's a sign, if as it seems, the tide is moving away from him and he may not even qualify through, which is how the numbers are looking at the moment. That's a real sign of changing times.
30:55 Alastair Campbell? But Roy, I think this, this point about them not telling the truth, you see, I, I thought, for example, they're all trying too hard, so like all of them coming out and saying, we back the Rwanda policy, when we know deep down that he probably thinks it's terrible. Or that, you know, he, he, he was talking about the doctrine of necessity in relation to the, the, the breaking international law and the Northern Ireland Protocol. I don't believe for a second that he thinks that. Or saying that Esther McVeigh, Esther McVeigh would be his deputy prime minister. I think these things lose him support at this stage. I think people think you're not credible.
31:23 Rory Stewart? I, I think that's, that's right. And I think the, the, so Esther McVeigh, as, as people listening probably will know, is a, very much a right wing Brexiteer. Uh, and it will, will be seen definitely for people like me as a very, very odd decision to announce that he's going to put her in as his deputy prime minister. Obviously, he's doing it because he's desperate to shore up Brexit votes and he's hoping she can bring people in behind him. But she hasn't brought that many people in behind her so far. She's brought in her good friend Philip Davis, but otherwise she's not really delivering for him. And I think it was something I did worry about with Jeremy Hunt last time round too, when he started saying that, you know, if he couldn't get a deal, of course he'd take a no deal Brexit and stuff, or that he was going to double defence spending, which meant,
32:08 Rory Stewart? you know, adding forty billion pounds to the budget. These are things, I think people panic in the last moments and they hope, remember what they're trying to do desperately. It's get these MPs on board. And as they're looking at their numbers stagnant, am I going to qualify? Am I going to make it through 20? They feel under more and more pressure to try to make rash promises, win attention. And that's one of the reasons it's it's very dangerous, because once they've made their promises, unless they're Boris Johnson, of course, he didn't care what he said, but most of the rest of them will feel forced to do it.
32:38 Alastair Campbell? Well, Pat McFadden in the Labour Treasury team, I think he put out a thing the other day, two hundred, they're up to about 250 billion pounds worth of spending promises between them.
32:46 Rory Stewart? That's unbelievable, isn't it? So next, Sajid Javid. Again, I mean, I'm very fond of Sajid. He's he's one of the, I think, one of the good guys in Conservative politics. But it doesn't quite feel as though he's got the momentum. I thought his speech was terrific when he resigned from Boris Johnson's cabinet. And I think it's it's a tribute to him that he is one of the few people who resigned actually twice from Boris Johnson's cabinet. But he's also just a, he's just a nice guy. He's a decent, nice man. And I'm, but it doesn't quite seem as though he's got the momentum.
33:19 Alastair Campbell? With him and Rishi Sunak, will it be a problem for them with the sort of the Johnson diehards? That they both seem to me like, I mean, there's no way that Rishi Sunak video was done overnight. And likewise, Sunak's launch and speech, they'd obviously been planning this for some time. Does that get held against them? Or is that just seen as sort of, you know, the rough and tumble of politics?
33:40 Rory Stewart? I think that's the rough and tumble of politics. I think that it's it's been assumed that everybody's had these things planned for a long time. In the, with Theresa May leadership election, I mean, I tried to go from a standing start in April and discovered that some of these people have been at it for well over a year. Had all their funders in place, had all their people in place. So I think, I think actually, in a way, there'll be a sort of grudging respect for the slickness of what Rishi Sunak did, particularly since some of the other leadership campaign video launches are incredibly amateur and embarrassing.
34:09 Alastair Campbell? Penny Morden having Oscar Pistorius in her leadership video, and also Peacock, the British, the great British athlete, Paralympian, who's immediately said, I don't want to be in this. Thank you very much. That was not good.
34:20 Rory Stewart? No, no, no. And some of them, Penny, I'm afraid, there was a bit of that, that the, that the images in the video never quite tied in with the speech. There was a couple of very odd moments. One of them was, we're going to go and choose the next Tory leadership candidate. And then it was very sort of literal minded. There was then a picture of a ballot box and somebody sticking something in the ballot box. And then later on, they said, she said something like, We need to think about the future, but we need to also think about the people who came before us. And then suddenly there was an image of Mrs Thatcher popping her head out of a window and waving.
34:57 Rory Stewart? Anyway, Penny Mordaunt has definitely qualified. And I was sincerely complimentary about her last week. I think she is somebody who is a grown up, sensible person, and somebody that I would be much more comfortable becoming Prime Minister than someone else.
35:14 Alastair Campbell? Is she one of the ones who's been at it for over a year?
35:17 Rory Stewart? Yes, she will have been at it for a very long time because people thought about her running in 2019. So she will have had nearly three years to think about it. And she was pretty badly treated by Boris Johnson because she'd been a Cabinet Minister under Theresa May. She'd been actually quite a distinguished Defence Secretary. But because she supported Jeremy Hunt in the leadership, he very vindictively demoted her to being a junior minister and didn't really use her properly.
35:39 Alastair Campbell? Now that you've said it twice, Rory, you've got to get over this Tory thing about anybody who's served in office has a distinguished career. Jeremy Hunt did very little as Foreign Secretary. Penny Mordaunt was Defence Secretary at a time that our defences, as we discussed last week, are being shredded to the point where our entire army can be fitted inside a football stadium. So I think we've just got to get over this idea that because they served, in particular with Johnson, which was probably the worst Cabinet in our history, let's drop the distinguished adjective.
36:12 Rory Stewart? I'll drop the distinguished. Fortunately, neither of them served in Boris Johnson's Cabinet, which I think is a real tick for them.
36:19 Alastair Campbell? I agree, I agree with that.
36:20 Rory Stewart? They were Ministers under David Cameron and then under Theresa May's Cabinet.
36:23 Alastair Campbell? But you said pretty much the same about Sajid. Sajid was very distinguished as this time and the other.
36:27 Rory Stewart? That's true, that's true. I suppose what I should say is, I'll stop saying distinguished, but what I suppose I mean is they have big senior Cabinet jobs. And that's one of the differences between some of these candidates. Some of them are young people like Camille Bednok, who are on the way up. Others are people who were, I suppose, more big beasts in the Conservative jungle. Priti Patel is obviously a big beast in the Conservative jungle. She's definitely not my type of politics. It's very much a right wing slate behind her. There's nobody I can see supporting her. Who really would be the kind of people that that I would be following. Um Grant Shapps, uh an unusual run so far seems to be only about eight endorsements. So he may not make it through. Um he's a communicator. I mean, he's he's good.
37:12 Rory Stewart? He's pretty good on telly or can be pretty good on telly and radio. But he's um somebody who dedicated himself to taking down Theresa May and bringing in Boris Johnson, for which I find it difficult to forgive him.
37:24 Alastair Campbell? Hmm hmm. How much of the, so you take something like him, right? You say he's got eight votes. How much are the other candidates? The Sunak's and maybe Penny Morden and maybe Tom Tugendhat. And we haven't talked about Liz Truss yet, we should come on to her. But how much of, when you're already through the twenty, how much of time the Rishi Sunak's team now spent in targeting the votes of those who've endorsed the ones who they know are going to fall?
37:46 Rory Stewart? A a lot. So I had a spreadsheet when I was running where I had every single endorsement for every other candidate. And every time somebody dropped out, we would then move very quickly. I had the WhatsApps already written so that at the moment that Matt Hancock, for example, dropped out because he was very much trying to run on the centre left of the party, my WhatsApps went up and I picked up, I think, uh sixty five percent of his vote within two hours when he dropped. So they they will be, I'm sure, thinking in the same way.
38:16 Alastair Campbell? And would Tom Tugendhat, for example, would he think it was even worth chasing after people who were backing Priti Patel?
38:22 Rory Stewart? Um he'll try because in order to win, you've got to believe you can get the full party, but my guess is he won't get any of them. And I certainly never managed it. You know, I I tried, for example, what one of the reasons that um very actually playing sort of silly counterfactuals. But if Sajid Javid had been beaten by Dominic Raab in in, and it was very close. Sajid, I think, just qualified by one vote to go through to the final round against our TV debate. If he'd failed to get that one vote, I probably would have picked up a lot of Sajid Javid's support and then gone into second against Boris Johnson almost immediately. But because Dominic Raab dropped and Dominic Raab was on the right of the party, all of his vote went to Boris.
39:03 Alastair Campbell? So what and what and what sort of things were you saying, what sort of things were you saying to Hancock supporters? Were you, were you being flattering? Were you being, were you making promises? Were you saying things they wanted to hear? What sort of messages would you send?
39:16 Rory Stewart? I think at that stage, getting quite tough and saying, for goodness sake, you say that you care. So I was particularly cross, for example, with a very senior MP called Damian Green, who'd been the chair of Hancock's campaign. I said, you know, you are a quintessential One Nation Conservative. Like me, you can see that Boris Johnson is a monster. Like me, you are going to want to try to get a moderate Brexit done. I am the only candidate. I had the same argument with Sam Jima, saying to him, you cannot possibly believe that any of the other people are going to deliver anything like a moderate Brexit. You're going to have to come on board. But it, it's a tough argument. I lost some of these arguments. Damian Green actually went over to support Boris Johnson.
39:58 Rory Stewart? And because people will be thinking about jobs and the number one question they'll all be asking themselves when you have these conversations is, is this person going to win? Because if they're not going to win, they're not going to give me a job.
40:09 Alastair Campbell? Is it really, is it really as awful as that? They basically, it's all about who's going to promise them to a sort of ministerial position? Is it really as base as that?
40:17 Rory Stewart? Pretty much. You'll find a few genuine, genuine idealists. So people like David Gork were happy to come along with me because he really believed it was incredibly important to make the argument for the centre of the party. People like Ken Clark, who had nothing to lose. But I remember very talented, admirable young MPs actually crying in the library, saying, I'm really sorry, I'm really sorry Rory, but I, I just can't do it. I've got to think about my kids, I've got to think about my mortgage, I, I'm going to have to go with Boris.
40:47 Alastair Campbell? But this just, this just underlines, I think, I think the public are going to get revolted by this process. Seeing these people, most of whom the public have never heard of, coming along and throwing their hat in the ring, and then the sense developing that it's actually all about continuing to play the games that Johnson played and that have turned so many people off.
41:05 Rory Stewart? You're right, and one of the reasons I think it's, we've got to be serious about British politics, is that I think Boris Johnson, although a terrible person, is a product of a system. And we all need to take some responsibility. And I think, remember, the Labour Party also needs to look at itself because it produced Jeremy Corbyn. I mean, there's something about these parties and the way that these things that can produce these extremely unsuitable figures, either very polarising figures or very, very ineffective prime ministers are coming through. And we really need to look at the way in which these parties and the MPs function.
41:45 Alastair Campbell? Now, what about Liz Truss?
41:46 Rory Stewart? Okay, Liz Truss, doing okay, she'll probably make the twenty. But again, it's pretty much the right of the party. It's people like Kwasi Kwarteng coming in behind a couple of her personal friends. So there's a cabinet minister called Theresa Coffey, who's been very close to her for many years. Some of her junior ministers from the Foreign Office, Chloe Smith, another, another close friend of hers from, from her part of the country. So you'll, you'll get, if you really want to get into the horrible nerdy weeds of this, some of this is geographical, some of this is, is neighbours going with you. Friends you used to do, in the case Theresa Coffey did karaoke parties with Liz Truss for many years. But basically, she's picking up the right of the party. As you say, she's reinvented herself from somebody who was a Cameroon who voted Remain into being more on the Brexit wing of the party.
42:31 Alastair Campbell? I, I find, I find the Thatcher channeling very, very difficult to stomach. I mean, I knew Margaret Thatcher, I covered Margaret Thatcher as a journalist for years. And though I disagreed with a lot, I, I was never anything other than a little bit scared in her presence. And I've not felt that with many politicians. I just see Liz Truss as sort of lacking any real credibility as a political figure. Well, it's interesting, looking at the front pages, I was just flicking through the BBC News website and then looking at the front pages, I see that the Mail, which presumably is, you know, how Dacre's still, you know, desperate to get at this resignation period, honours period, and so therefore talking about Johnson betrayal the whole time. But I see their front page today is Johnson supporters talking about backing Truss to stop Sunak.
43:14 Rory Stewart? Yep, there's a lot of stop Sunak going on.
43:17 Alastair Campbell? I know we've talked about how commendable it is to the Conservative Party that half of the candidates are of colour, but how much of that do you think might be trying to appeal to people's racism?
43:27 Rory Stewart? It's a good question. I think the answer is the Conservative Party isn't a racist party. I mean, the fact that almost that such a very, very large number of candidates are not, shows that actually that's not a big problem.
43:38 Alastair Campbell? But the members are not?
43:40 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, maybe a problem with some of the members, absolutely no doubt at all, but I don't think that's the main thing. I think the, I think with Rishi Sunak, it's partly envy. He came very, very quickly up as a high flyer to be Chancellor. I think it's also debates about tax. You'll see that a lot of these candidates are sticking the knife in on Rishi Sunak on tax and implying that if they were in, this is, you know, they're all doing it. You know, they wouldn't have the national insurance rise, they would drop corporation tax, they would, and so I think they're trying to appeal, it's, I don't think it is about that. I think it's about trying to tact the right of Rishi Sunak and make him out as a high tax person.
44:21 Rory Stewart? But, but also Liz Truss was one of the ones who didn't issue a critical letter about Boris Johnson. So if you're a Boris Johnson loyalist, and, and they will censor people out there in the country, I mean, there's a sort of, almost a, you know, obviously I'm obsessed with this stuff, but there is a kind of Trumpian element in the fact that there are people out there in the country who feel that Boris Johnson was betrayed. And there's a bit of a risk here that I think we should return to in another programme, that he may. In an egomaniacal way, think that he can somehow become the king over the water and whip up some pretty extreme, unreconcilable people into trying to take back power again. So anyway, those people won't forgive Nardim Zahawi, for example.
44:58 Alastair Campbell? It's quite interesting how little we've talked about Johnson. The thing about politics is that once you become the past, even if you're still there, you do become the past.
45:05 Rory Stewart? Yeah, that's, that's true.
45:06 Alastair Campbell? I do think though, by the way, I think there are an awful lot of scandals still to come out about Johnson. And this Lebedef thing, the more I dig into it, the more I realise that I think there's a, I really think Labour should be pressing on misconduct in public office, I really do.
45:19 Rory Stewart? I agree, I'm with you on that. So just last two to do, Nardim Zahawi and Tom Tugendhat. So Tom Tugendhat's obviously somebody that you and I have naturally instinctively more sympathy for. He comes from the centre left, the Conservative Party. He never served as even a junior minister under Boris Johnson, so he's got a clean sheet there. He's somebody who was Chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He's very serious about foreign affairs, speaks very articulately about it. He's got some great people endorsing him, Karen Bradley, who I'm very, very fond of and who in fact I saw in Buxton in Derbyshire before the...
45:55 Alastair Campbell? A very distinguished Culture Secretary. A very distinguished Culture Secretary.
45:59 Rory Stewart? Very fond of Karen Bradley, but she, and she was very nice about my lost ring, so I'm feeling particularly fond of her at the moment. But he also has got big Brexiteer Amory Trevellion, who was a member of the Cabinet, big Brexit supporter has come out for him. So he'll be trying to use that to show that he can reach across the party. And then finally, Nardim Zahawi, who, as I say, is a friend of mine, I like very, very much, and probably my saying that is why he got on the show and you got inside his head. But he's been struggling with enormous numbers of questions. He's a big businessman and there's a lot of questions about his tax affairs. He's issued a lot of statements where he thinks he's answered all of those, but more questions are coming. And that, a lot of that actually will be thrown at him not by the opposition, but
46:41 Rory Stewart? by other candidates who are doing their best to blacken the minds of everybody else. So when I was running the... They tried to suggest I wasn't a member of the Conservative Party was one of the great things. Then Boris Johnson put out a front page, sorry Telegraph, whole front page of Telegraph, saying that I was a British intelligence agent. I wasn't quite sure why he thought that was damaging, but.
47:00 Alastair Campbell? I know it's a good, I know it's a good thing. I know it's a good thing.
47:02 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it's a sort of James Bond image. Right, okay, now, we've done a lot on the leadership, obviously. Let's just though quickly, Sri Lanka, Japan, anything?
47:12 Alastair Campbell? No, wait a minute, wait a minute, before you go, you're not going to go this early. If you were still, if you still had a vote, who were you voting for?
47:17 Rory Stewart? Not endorsing yet. I'm holding back the amazing power of the Rory Stewart endorsement to keep people, people on. Go on.
47:25 Alastair Campbell? Now, listen, we said we were going to do Sri Lanka and Japan. I think we should, I think we should maybe do those in question time, because you have got a plane to catch. You're in one airport hotel at Heathrow. I'm in an airport hotel Dublin.
47:39 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I wish I was, I wish I was, I wish I was at Heathrow. I had this classic.
47:46 Alastair Campbell? Where are you?
47:47 Rory Stewart? Well, I'm somewhere out at the edge of Hatton Cross. So I was dragging my stupid wheelie bag through the, through the bus terminal at Heathrow, through back at Terminal Two yesterday. I'd taken the tube out. I got there. It's 11:30 at night. I got to the little Hilton Hotel by Terminal Two, waited in line, got to check in. And then they were like, no, it's not this one. You've got to get a mile, a mile and a half down the route. So off I set with my little wheelie bag again.
48:13 Alastair Campbell? And did you, did you have one of those moments where you, I said, I best admit, I confess, I do get these moments whenever I'm driving past RAF Northolt from where most of our travel in government used to depart. I do get those moments.
48:28 Rory Stewart? You do, no, no, I did, I didn't feel that the glamorous life of a podcaster was quite developing the luxury travel of which I once dreamt.
48:36 Alastair Campbell? No, never mind. But maybe your Radio 4 documentary will get you back on the.
48:41 Rory Stewart? As people, as people who listen next Wednesday at one o'clock on Radio 4 will discover.
48:47 Alastair Campbell? Right. So we should promise that question time, we should kick off with Sri Lanka and Shinjo Arby, as we did not do it in this interesting, very long discussion about what I think is going to be one of the most tedious and toothache inducing leadership contests. How on earth, general relations can last anything from three to six weeks. Why is it taking till September the 5th? To choose a leader and why should they become Prime Minister automatically? Absolute outrage.
49:16 Rory Stewart? And a huge mistake because I think it will create incredible infighting in the Conservative Party and actually damage rather than invigorate.
49:23 Alastair Campbell? Ah, well, that's the that's the that's the upside. All right, Rory.
49:26 Rory Stewart? All right, thank you. See you soon. Bye bye, everybody.
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