119. Starmer's most controversial move yet, the truth behind Vladimir Putin, and the Good Friday Agreement

Has Keir Starmer lost Labour the moral high ground after his attack on Rishi Sunak? What is Vladimir Putin really like behind closed doors? Will peace and power-sharing return to Northern Ireland, 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement? Tune in to hear Alastair and Rory answer all this and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. 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 Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:34Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:37Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:39Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, lots to get through. We're going to talk about Labour's, is it ad gate or graphic gate or something gate? It's definitely got to be a gate by now. We're going to talk about Russia and Ukraine. We haven't really talked about our friend Vladimir for quite a while. We should probably talk about what's happened in Nicholas Sturgeon's garden. And I think we should also look forward to the Good Friday Agreement celebrations, which you and I will both be attending because we've been invited to do a Rest is Politics live as part of the official event.

• 2:11Rory Stewart?

  We're looking forward to going to Belfast very, very much. So maybe let's start with Labour. They put out an ad, the Labour Party, an official ad with a picture of Rishi Sunak smiling and next to it the sign, "Rishi Sunak doesn't think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to jail." And underneath the statement that, under the Tories, 4,500 people convicted of sexually assaulting children had not been sent to jail. And then they put out an ad following that, saying, "Rishi Sunak doesn't think adults possessing guns intending to harm should be sent to jail." And then, "Rishi Sunak doesn't think thieves should be punished." So the general tenor of the whole thing is that Rishi Sunak is somebody who really believes

• 2:56Rory Stewart?

  that adults convicted of sexually assaulting children, possessing guns with intent to harm, and thieves shouldn't be punished and shouldn't be sent to prison. And under Labour, everything will be different. And the thing I think that disgusted people most, and this was all the way from writers like Philip Pullman, through to senior Labour figures like John McDonnell, was that first ad, that he doesn't think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to jail. There was a lovely statement actually by a historian called Robert Saunders, who I admire enormously, who I think put it rather well. He said, "One of the reasons we need a change of government is to break the hold of a grotesque political model, one based on vile personal smears, manifestive false claims, and rancid dividing lines.

• 3:39Rory Stewart?

  Labour needs to find a way to defeat that model, not capitulate to it. That dire tweet should go." And what was your thought about this?

• 3:48Alastair Campbell?

  Look, it's one of those things that's kind of... My initial reaction was, "Oh my God, I don't like that. I really don't like that." Because the truth is, I don't much like Rishi Sunak, I don't much care for his politics, I really don't care for his politics, and I'm not sure he's that great as Prime Minister. I also think, by the way, and this is one of the reasons why I think Labour's done this, I think Rishi Sunak is gearing up for a very, very, very, very tough election campaign.

• 4:15Alastair Campbell?

  So I didn't like it. The thing I don't like about it actually relates to a discussion you and I have had many, many times about the failure of our criminal justice system. And it's the fact that they're playing into this message that, you know, all we need to do to sort out problems for people on crime is to put more and more and more people into prison. And I fundamentally disagree with that. I also think that one of the strengths that Keir Starmer has been developing is that he's got this steady, methodical, honest, decent approach. And this kind of risks people being able to say, oh, look at them, they're all as bad as each other. And I think that's a risk that you take at your peril. The next

• 4:56Alastair Campbell?

  thing that I don't like about it is that Keir Starmer is a lawyer, his background is in law, and therefore it's wrong to project yourself so much as the political campaigner in a sense that you push that to one side. Okay. So they're the reasons why, if you like, I don't like it. And by the way, we should put in the in the newsletter, the secret barrister, I don't know if you're aware of the secret barrister.

• 5:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, he wrote wrote a wonderful book called The Secret Barrister, which was the most chilling expose of the British justice system.

• 5:25Alastair Campbell?

  And his point is that there is so much that is wrong with the criminal justice system. There is so much that the Tories have done to damage the criminal justice system. And that is where Labour should be attacking. And he does a very, very, very long explanation as to why he really, really doesn't like these ads.

• 5:41Rory Stewart?

  And a lot of that is about the fact that this is to do with judicial sentencing.

• 5:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly. In the end, in the end, the reason why these people have not gone to jail is because judges have decided that they shouldn't go to jail, and that's their job. So the reasons why I think I have a better understanding, as this row has kind of developed over the last few weeks. The first thing is, I remember when Keir Starmer, you know, Keir Starmer's missions, one of the missions relates to crime, and he made a big speech about crime and criminal justice a few weeks ago, which I read, I read it for, and I thought, that's quite a good speech. That's a really interesting, thoughtful speech. I checked, I don't think it got onto a single news bulletin. So here's the leader of the opposition, trying to make crime and criminal justice a big issue, and it didn't even get on the news. So the first

• 6:25Alastair Campbell?

  First point about this is they have decided that if they're going to get heard on these issues, then they're going to have to go a bit over the top. And now they're going to get heard on other issues. The second thing that I think this relates to is that the Tories have now, what, they've had five prime ministers in six years. And Light Trust, Light Johnson, Rishi Sunak is trying to say, I'm a new prime minister, therefore what goes before me doesn't count. And part of what this is about is trying to pin the whole record of 13 years on Rishi Sunak as the leader of the Conservative Party, which has been in power for 13 years. And I think the next thing I'd say is I think that we operate in our politics by such double standards, largely because of the way our media is. But for example,

• 7:09Alastair Campbell?

  in the House of Commons recently, I remember sort of almost leafy out by chair watching it, when Rishi Sunak said to Keir Starmer, we're on the side of British, the British people, you're on the side of people traffickers. So in a way, it's kind of, they're allowed to do it and get away with it, and it's not a big deal.

• 7:25Rory Stewart?

  I don't think they're allowed to do it, do it and get away with it. I mean, this is where I agree with Robert Saunders. The reason why people like me are so angry with the Conservatives is because they do that. And we've talked about almost nothing else in this podcast for the last year, how disgusted we are by the polarization and post-truth. So I really feel the main reason why many people will be voting Labour is because they're disgusted by that stuff. And not that the Tories get away with it. It's precisely because the Tories do that that people are now more sympathetic to Labour.

• 7:55Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, but in which case, why was there not an outcry when Rishi Sunak said to Keir Starmer, you're on the side of the people traffickers?

• 8:05Rory Stewart?

  I remember so many episodes of huge outcry about all this sort of stuff. Huge outcry about the disgusting comments by Boris Johnson trying to compare Keir Starmer to Jimmy Savile. That was a massive story. Huge disgust about that. I mean, I think what they're doing here, and this is like the 350 million on the side of the bus, which Dominic Cummings deliberately did, knowing that it would anger people so much because it wasn't true, that it would get more press by people expressing their disgust. And I contributed to this. You know, I was one of the people who, because I was horrified by what Keir Starmer said about Rishi Sunak, I ended up retweeting the image with the result that it's now had something like 20 million views.

• 8:48Rory Stewart?

  I mean, it's a classic sort of populist move, isn't it?

• 8:51Alastair Campbell?

  The way you phrase that sentence suggested as a result of your retweet, it had 20 million views. You don't say that, are you?

• 8:57Rory Stewart?

  No, but the main reason it's had 20 million views is, I'm sure, majority of it is driven by people like me disgusted by it. Talking about it in their horror has given it much more visibility than the tweet itself.

• 9:09Alastair Campbell?

  I had a message from a friend of mine who I recently persuaded to join the Labour Party, who sent me a message saying that she'd actually been out canvassing and quite enjoyed it and meeting people and talking to them about politics and blah, blah, blah. And she said, I'm disgusted by this and I'm not going to do it. This is not what I want to get involved in. And I think there are people like that. But I think you have to differentiate between people like us who are in this world, who are constantly thinking and talking about this, and the people that Keir Starmer is trying to reach, who are those who are not necessarily plugged into politics the whole time, and who are not hearing Labour. And that's one of the criticisms that keeps being heard about Keir Starmer is people aren't hearing. As you know, I'm obsessed with football, I'm obsessed with sport. There's a thing

• 9:53Alastair Campbell?

  in rugby in particular, but also in boxing, also in football. If you get the start of a match, you kind of lay one on somebody. You lay one on your opponent to make sure that they know you're there. And if they're going to come at you and play dirty, then they need to understand you're going to be able to play back. And I'm hoping that what this is about doing, because the Tories are going to do this stuff, there's no doubt about this. And so Labour, I think, has decided, this is the local election campaign, which we often would use as a sort of dummy run for some of the tactics and strategies you might use for a national campaign. And I think they're basically saying, listen, if you are going to drag this down, we're going to be prepared, we'll fight with you. Okay? But at the same time, they'd rather not. Now, I'm hoping that's what this is about.

• 10:36Rory Stewart?

  To be fair, there have been no comparable Conservative ads of this sort have been put out at all. What has Rishi Sunak put out about Keir Starmer remotely comparable to saying that he thinks that adults convicted of sexually assaulting children shouldn't go to jail?

• 10:51Alastair Campbell?

  I've already given you an example, standing in the House of Commons and saying that he's a friend of people trafficking.

• 10:55Rory Stewart?

  That wasn't, that wasn't, that's not an ad campaign. Many offensive things they've said in the House of Commons.

• 11:00Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, let me just say, let me just tell you something. About these ad campaigns, it's a tweet with a picture. The other thing I did to try and find out how this is going down, I phoned around a few candidates, Labour candidates, to see how they were reacting to the way that this was going on. It's very interesting. My sense is that people who are in safe Labour seats, a bit queasy, bit squeamish, don't like it. People who are fighting the Tories, who've really been struggling to get a message heard, were less squeamish, I would say. Two, the other thing they all say, Rory, is we're feeling quite confident because we don't see any of the Tories knocking on doors. The Tories are not knocking on doors because they're fighting digital campaigns. Like you mentioned, the Cummings campaign, they're pumping out social media stuff. And after the event, we're likely to see what it's like.

• 11:45Alastair Campbell?

  So I don't think you can pretend that because Labour has done this tweet with a sort of picture that's frankly taking the piss out of.

• 11:52Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's not, it's not just, it's not just a simple tweet taking the piss. Let's just go through this again. Do you think it's true that Rishi Sunak doesn't think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to jail?

• 12:05Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 12:05Rory Stewart?

  Do you think that's true?

• 12:06Alastair Campbell?

  No. What is true is that he talks the talk about being tough on crime and the record of the last 13 years is bad. What I've already said to you is I would prefer that Labour were campaigning on fixing the criminal justice system. My point is, the reason I think they are doing this is because they can't get heard on that and this is their way to get heard. And interestingly, I watched some of the interviews that Labour people have done since then, and they have been able to talk for the first time about the record, about the Tories' record and then about what they do. And now they've moved on to the economy. So there's a very personal ad that apparently is doing the rounds now. And by the way, when we talk about ad campaigns, this is the, this is the new world that we're now in. An ad campaign in the day that I was running the Labour campaign

• 12:50Alastair Campbell?

  meant you were trying to raise sometimes millions of pounds to put posters around the country. This is a tweet with a picture. And the point I was making about taking the piss out of Sunak was actually, Sunak has partly made his name by these very personal, look at me, look at my signature, look at these nice bright colours. That is what he does on social media the whole time. And under the radar, there will be lots of stuff going out now about Keir Starmer. And let me tell you this, Rory, that when the last local elections, if you remember the whole Beer Gate thing, that was a campaign. That was a campaign in which the Tories were working hand in glove with the Daily Mail to read that paper for thirteen days. Now, I don't want Labour to go down that route,

• 13:33Alastair Campbell?

  but I do understand why defensively they need to show that they've worked it out. They've worked out that's why the Tories are going to campaign, and if they're going to do it, they're going to get it back.

• 13:42Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's, I mean, obviously, I think it's completely disgusting, and I think accusing somebody of supporting sexual assault of children is about as low as you can possibly go in politics. I mean, really, really low. And whoever he, Labour thinks they're appealing to there, whatever this voter group is, that they think they can convince that Rishi Sunak is in favour of sexual assaults on children. I'm really disturbed by it. Let's, let's step aside from that for a minute.

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, but I think you're taking, you're taking, you're taking literally what ultimately they are doing as a, a pretty high-risk campaign tactic, I would say. And I think they're showing that if the Tories, because I think you're being far too kind to the Tories in the way they campaign. I think for Sunak to stand there and said, say, you're a lefty lawyer, I'm a, I'm a man of the people, standing with the British people, you're a lefty lawyer. This whole lefty lawyer thing is about basically saying, unless you support what the government does, you somehow are illegitimate in, as being a lawyer.

• 14:39Rory Stewart?

  There's a difference, difference, Alistair, between calling someone a lefty lawyer and accusing them of being in favour of sexual assault on children. Let me quote, Rishi Sunak doesn't think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to jail. Let me now try to move on to the policy, because that's the thing that, that worries me most about this. So Steve Reid, Secretary of State for Justice, is an impressive person. Keir Starmer was the Director of Public Prosecutions. He spent decades of his life professionally involved in this justice system.

• 15:11Rory Stewart?

  So this is a law, the sexual assaults law is a 2003 law brought in by a Labour government, and our sentences for sexual assault on children are incredibly harsh. We impose in Britain longer sentences than in Europe or even in the US. It's a very, very harsh law. The only categories under which you can't go to jail in the sentencing guidelines are nonviolent, short length, not planned, not naked, and taking into account whether the person doing it is disabled, mentally ill, their age. In other words, the 4,000 people who have been given community sentences instead of

• 15:55Rory Stewart?

  being sent to jail are people who judges who have thought very carefully about the individual case have concluded.

• 16:02Alastair Campbell?

  I agree.

• 16:03Rory Stewart?

  Perhaps in this case, the individual is mentally ill, perhaps in this in this case, this was a nonviolent interaction. And the anything that involves touching naked genitalia, penetration, all these things have an automatic custodial sentence. The reason, though, I'm getting so wound up is that I think the reason I left the Tories is I was hated, this kind of politics. And we talk a lot about post-truths and polarization, and these ads are post-truths, and they are polarization.

• 16:37Alastair Campbell?

  And I would prefer, so for example, I read somewhere that one of the one of the people involved in the team that's put this together has advised the Australian Labour Party, I don't know if that's true, but the Australian Labour Party, interestingly, we mentioned recently the New South Wales campaign, they fought a very, very positive campaign, they had the Murdoch Papers trying to destroy them, and they won. And at the end of it, the outgoing Liberal, their Tory candidate, and the incoming Labour guy, they shook hands and said that was a great campaign, and I'd love to be able to think we could get back to that, okay? I don't think that's going to be possible with Lee Anderson-type politics running the Conservative campaign, and I think Labour are just signalling, if you go down that route, well, regrettably, we're going to go down with you.

• 17:22Alastair Campbell?

  And I hope this is a warning shot on that, rather than an indication of the sort of election campaign we're going to have, because if it is, then I'm with you. Shall we talk about Russia? Let's talk about Russia. We disagreed there, fairly agreeably, I'd say, fairly agreeably. Now, the reason I wanted to talk about Russia is that we haven't really talked about Ukraine for a while. And I was trawling through Der Spiegel, which I do every day, and I came across this week to really fascinating pieces of journalism. The first is the, my favourite podcast, after our own, obviously, is Akt Milliarden, which is the Spiegel Foreign Policy

• 18:07Alastair Campbell?

  podcast. And they had an interview with a guy called Kirill Martinoff, who is the, he's a former philosophy teacher, he now lives in Riga in Latvia, from where he runs Novaya Gazeta Europe, which is, and the Novaya Gazeta is a well-established Russian newspaper. The editor, the founder of it, it's been going for about 30 years now, he won a Nobel Peace Prize for his kind of contribution to democratic debate in Russia. They've obviously, like everybody else, where it's now legal to call the invasion an invasion, or to say that it's a war, it's a special military operation. So these guys have decamped to Riga. And it was fascinating to listen to this guy. And by the way, although it's in

• 18:48Alastair Campbell?

  German, the interview itself, if people want to listen to it, is in English. And the guy then, Olaf Hauser, who's the presenter of the podcast, he then translates it. But the interview itself is in English. It's a fascinating listen, not least because he talks about how he assesses Russian public opinion. He basically thinks there's a third of people who are very, very, very concerned about what this is doing to Russia and the world. They're against the war, but they have to keep their mouths shut. The majority, he thinks, are people who just want to live their lives and be left alone. And then there's a, there's a third minority that is passionately supportive of Putin. And his description of these...

• 19:25Alastair Campbell?

  Chat shows or current affairs shows, he talks about this guy Savalioff, who he gives this chilling account of the the formula of these programmes, show a Putin speech, then have six men, nearly always men, he says, sitting around discussing who loves Putin the most, and it's sort of like a show of strength for Putin. They they talk about it in terms that, you know, most people would talk about God. And then finally, they get to a discussion about nuclear weapons and how we need to you need to use nukes. They often talk about London as being the place they ought to nuke first. It's a I really recommend people listen to the guy because it's and and also it's just such courageous journalism as well. I mean, you know, so many we slack journalists quite a lot on

• 20:07Alastair Campbell?

  this podcast, but this is real courage. These guys do what they're doing from Riga.

• 20:11Rory Stewart?

  Part of this extraordinary macho culture is revealed in Dmitry Medvedev, the the former Russian president's president from 2008 to 2012, extraordinary tweet, which which you may have seen.

• 20:25Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, I did. Yeah.

• 20:26Rory Stewart?

  You know, why will Ukraine disappear? Because nobody knows it. And it's written in this very, very weird sort of combination of kind of 1920s shock horror cheap prose, you know, permanently put the nouveau Ukrainian blood sucking parasites on the decrepit EU's arthritis crippled neck. And then the military and sanction campaigns are attempted for PR by political blabbermouths who long ago attested to their impotence and imbecility. It's really, really weird. Russia doesn't need Ukraine, a threadbare quilt torn shaggy

• 21:05Rory Stewart?

  and greasy. We don't need Untu Ukraine, we need big, great Russia. Nobody on this planet needs such Ukraine. That's why it will disappear.

• 21:14Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 21:15Rory Stewart?

  It's very kind of weird language, particularly from a former president, but but it's sort of there's a sort of scatological element to it, kind of horrible, kind of gruesome delight in language.

• 21:27Alastair Campbell?

  One of the things this guy Martinoff talks about is that is that Putin is surrounded by people constantly looking for his approval, telling him the things he wants to hear. And the second, the second thing, which I it wasn't a Spiegel product, but I read about it there, is a an interview with a guy called Gleb Karukolov.

• 21:48Alastair Campbell?

  And it's an interview with the dossier centre. And if people want to check out the dossier centre, warning alert, this is just in full disclosure, is owned by Mikhail Kordikovsky, who is a sort of anti-putin. But Der Spiegel and some of the news agencies have checked this guy out and they're sure that he is who he says he is. And it's an interview with a guy who was in the presidential guard and he was essentially responsible for the security of communications around Putin when he was travelling. And he's now defected, he's in, he went to Kazakhstan on a business trip and he fled to Turkey with his family. And he calls Putin a war criminal, he calls him a genocidal terrorist. But he gives some fascinating insight into how he lives.

• 22:32Alastair Campbell?

  He says he's never, ever, ever seen Vladimir Putin with a mobile phone. And that could be because of security. He says that everywhere they travel, they travel with this 2.5 metre high cube. And the cube is a place that is, wherever they are in the world, they know that Putin can communicate from in there, they believe, securely. He doesn't use the internet, he gets all his information from his close circle. And he thinks that explains why he underestimated the difficulties of the Ukraine invasion. Because everybody close in his circle was telling him what he wanted to believe. There's another fascinating detail, I shouldn't laugh, but he's got these various residences around the place. And he works in these residences and he's often filmed in these residences. But they're identical.

• 23:17Alastair Campbell?

  So he's got the same residency, the same office in St Petersburg, St Petersburg as he has in Sochi. And sometimes, he says, they will send out planes and motorcades that are empty of Putin. Because he wants the world to think that he's on the move, but he's not, he stays in the same place. They say, he said he's paranoid about being attacked, paranoid about being betrayed. He's got his own train, I didn't know that one, he's got his own train with it, which is grey with a red stripe. If you or I were called in to see him, Rory, even for 20 minutes, we'd have to go into quarantine for two, full quarantine for two weeks beforehand. It's a fascinating listen. It's about an hour and a half long. You can get it with subtitles or there's a printed version as well, which we'll put in the newsletter. But it's very, very interesting.

• 24:00Rory Stewart?

  I've been reading an article by a guy called Alexander Matovsky on Putin's popularity. And he says that there are some very well-respected independent polling companies in Russia. You shouldn't assume that all polling in Russia is fake. And the reasons for that, one is that these companies are often under a lot of pressure from Putin. And also because they often report things which are unflattering to Putin. But the one thing that has been consistent is his extraordinary popularity. And just how enduring it's been, you know, net popularity ratings between 60 and 80% compared to the normal US president who has a net popularity rating of 20 to 30%, to put it in

• 24:44Rory Stewart?

  sort of contrast. And this is one of the reasons why actually he has been winning elections often with much less coercion than people would expect. And he tries to get into the question of why Putin is so popular. And bizarrely, it's nothing to do with his performance. It's to do with two things. It's to do with the trauma of what happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union. So the Russian economy went through a collapse twice as bad as the impact of the Great Depression on the European and American economies. It lost half its GDP and of course, lost an enormous amount of its territory. So that humiliation. And secondly, a sense that they need a strong man to give them

• 25:26Rory Stewart?

  hope. And what he's somehow projecting and has managed to keep going astonishingly for decades is, I haven't delivered much for you yet, but I'm the only guy who's going to be able to deliver a few in the future. And how on earth he does that, I think is a real mystery.

• 25:40Alastair Campbell?

  I think surely, I have not read this article, I'd like to read it, but surely he accepts that in what essentially has become, and this guy Kirill Martinoff, he describes it as is now a fascist state. Can you really get into proper polling? Can you really expect people to say what they think?

• 25:58Rory Stewart?

  Well, what Motovski points out is that in the same polls, when they do blind polls and ask them about things like corruption, they say corruption is very bad in Russia. When they ask them about Putin's economic record, they say it's not good. When they ask about inequality, they say it's getting worse. But they like him.

• 26:17Alastair Campbell?

  A fellow, the former security guy who fled, Karukolov, he said that what tipped him from feeling a little bit uneasy about Putin to an absolute sense that this just is unacceptable and I have to do something, was when he went on a trip to Crimea with Putin after the referendum, I think it was 97% or something, backing the annexation. And he said he went out and started talking to people and he found actually there was an awful lot of opposition. And he said that's when his alarm bells started to ring. He believed that this was a real referendum. And he said, he went home and he started discussing it with his parents and said he was really worried because he felt that Putin was just lying about all this stuff.

• 27:01Alastair Campbell?

  And he said, rather than them being supportive parents, they were incredibly angry with him. And they accused him to his face of being a foreign agent, which of course is a crime. And he said that they've actually not exchanged a word since he fled. And he ends the interview with a big appeal to his former colleagues who are looking after Putin. And he accepts, by the way, that Putin, in his close circle, has about 100% support. These are people who are absolutely firm believers in the Putin, the whole Putin project, whatever that may be. But he appeals to them that the only way this is going to be stopped is if the people close to Putin stop being silent.

• 27:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, here's another little plug for a book. So, book by Joshua Yaffa called Compromise in Putin's Russia. So, that tries to focus in on particular individuals and look at how they manage these kind of trade offs in their personal life. As you say, how the captain relates to his parents, how he relates to his workmates. One of the central characters in the book is a zookeeper in Crimea, trying to talk through the way that he engages with Putin's Russia and thinks about it. I mean, there was some, it's interesting. I don't know, maybe it's the deep investment in Soviet studies in the 70s and 80s, just how much high quality work there is on Russia. I mean, there are dozens of books out there. Good book by Timothy Snyder called Road to Unfreedom.

• 28:18Rory Stewart?

  But dozens of really good books looking at this very, very odd phenomenon, which is how Russia, which in 1989, 1991, the plurality of the population, more people than not, really wanted to move in a liberal democratic direction, how that's shifted towards a world in which they think Russia needs to be ruled by a strong man, and how all these individual stories have got there.

• 28:41Alastair Campbell?

  The journalist guy, Martinoff, he's asked by the Spiegel guy whether he thinks that Putin believes the propaganda that he puts out. And he says, I'm pretty sure he does believe in his own narrative because he doesn't understand the country he rules. He's surrounded by artificial views about what that country is. He gets no real information. He only gets information from his advisers.

• 29:02Rory Stewart?

  Maybe your point there is an interesting one, isn't it? That when you don't have a phone and you don't connect to the internet, that protects you from people hacking into you, but it means that you simply can't be reading social media, Googling, doing any of the things that most of us are doing to stay on top of what's happening out there.

• 29:20Alastair Campbell?

  No, but he's also, it's worse than that. He's been told by everybody that he's an absolute genius and people think he's doing marvellous things for the country and for the world.

• 29:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 29:28Alastair Campbell?

  All right, Ray, let's take a quick break and we're back in a minute.

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• 31:52Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest of This Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 31:55Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 31:57Rory Stewart?

  And Alistair, you've just been interviewing Brian Cox. Not the astrophysicist, my friend, but your friend, the star of Succession, the man who plays the kind of Rupert Murdoch figure in that great television series.

• 32:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, although he does say he's not based on Rupert Murdoch. What I love talking to actors about characters, they talk about them as though they're real people. I enjoyed the discussion of, you know, what he really thinks of his children. And he's almost like he's sort of telling you what you don't know from watching the show. And in the end, I said, Rory, Rory, Brian, you do realize this is not a real person? And he, yes, of course, I know that. But I thought he's. I like, listen, I like Brian, I think he's a great actor, but I also do think, one or two people said, you know, why is this guy on leading, he's just an actor. One, I think he's a leading actor and he's a leading cultural figure, but also I do think he's got an interesting political story to tell. Bought up in a pretty poor family in Dundee,

• 32:51Alastair Campbell?

  Labour all his life and was honest enough to tell me that the Iraq war turned him against Labour and he discovered the SNP and has since become an absolutely committed nationalist and still is. The interview was done just before the tents started to go up in Nicola Sturgeon's garden, so, but I think even that won't have changed his view that Nicola Sturgeon's, you know, he talks about her in very, very glowing terms and he says he's remains as committed to independence as ever. So if people want to hear more of Brian Cox, wherever you get your podcasts, just get The Rest Is Politics, Leading.

• 33:24Rory Stewart?

  One of the things that I thought, listening to it, and I haven't reflected on in the past, is the weird relationship between London and Scotland. You talked, you made a joke during the show about how you sometimes wonder whether London and Scotland don't have more in common, partly because the way they voted on Brexit, and you imagine a sort of joint country. But how different that is from the US debate. So in the US, obviously, people who live in what's sometimes called the flyover states, states in the middle of the United States, often have a very hostile relationship to the coast, the east and west coast. And you can get a bit of that in Scotland and Northern England in relationship to London,

• 34:08Rory Stewart?

  right? But it's also very interesting that many people in Scotland feel a huge amount in common with people who live in London in terms of progressive attitudes towards immigration, votes on Brexit, embrace of Europe and the world more generally. And many Scots, as you point out, like to move to London in a way that people in the flyover states of the US, with their suspicion of the sort of what people are now trying to call the liberal metropolitan elite, would not want to move to New York. There's more sympathy. It's a more complicated picture than the US picture of the liberal elite against the rest.

• 34:50Alastair Campbell?

  Interesting. Talking to immigration, by the way, I think the story that most annoyed, angered, upset me this week. Wasn't the Labour ads, it was the schoolchildren being turned away and rock bands being turned away from the UK because they didn't have the right papers, or they did have the right papers, but the Border Force decided that they didn't want them anyway. I mean, school trips, it seems to me that school trips are going to become a thing of the past if we're not careful. School trips from European kids coming here.

• 35:19Rory Stewart?

  And who, which, where were they from, these children?

• 35:22Alastair Campbell?

  They were in a school in France, they had identity cards from France, but their passports were because of their parents' nationality. I think one was Georgian, one might have been, I can't remember what they were, one was Africa, one of the African countries.

• 35:35Rory Stewart?

  Because they weren't, they weren't EA nationals?

• 35:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly. So, but, but, but up until now, they've been fine to come as school parties, but now that's all changed. And it's hitting us massively in tourism now. There's a, there's a thing in one of the papers at the last weekend about how the, the big museums in Paris are talking about a Brexit boon with Chinese and Japanese tourists because they, they're finding it so difficult to get to the UK now. So they go to Paris and base themselves there instead. Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's Brian Cox. He, he, oh, he was very critical of your friend Prince Charles, King Charles, I thought. Feudalism, talked about feudalism.

• 36:13Rory Stewart?

  I, I did slightly listen to it. Wish I'd been on the show. I think you gave him a little bit too much of an easy time. I think he had some bonkers ideas there. One of the things I thought was maddest was his idea about dividing Northern England from Southern England. And that, that goes to the heart of my basic problem with him. On the one hand, he really loved London and felt it had been the making of him and created him as an actor. On the other hand, that North and South England divide, sounds like he's just got a massive problem with Southern England. He wants nobody to have anything to do with it.

• 36:44Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, I have to tell you, as I was leaving his very nice flat in Primrose Hill, his departing words were, do give my regards to Rory Stewart. I've met him a couple of times. I think he's a very, very good chap. So now here you are, just slagging the guy off. Now, I think, Rory, I think your big problem with him is actually that he talked about our obsession with the royal family being a form

• 37:06Rory Stewart?

  Well, I definitely am a big supporter of the monarchy, an unashamed supporter of the monarchy, right. Let's, let's, let's come on to Peter Morrell. So this is just again for listeners outside the United Kingdom, this is Nicholas Sturgeon's husband, who spent most of his twenties and thirties as relatively junior staffer, parliamentary assistants to MPs working for the SNP, famously Alex Salmon, the, the leader, and then became the chief executive of the SNP, and ended up in this very odd position that he was the head of the whole political party and married to Nicholas Sturgeon, who was the, the leader in Scotland, and remained a pretty obscure figure. People don't often concentrate

• 37:50Rory Stewart?

  much on the people behind the scenes. So he's not an elected politician, he's running the political party, but ran it for a very long time. And the problems began to emerge over a six hundred thousand pound donation that came from some lottery winners who gave six hundred thousand pounds to the SNP and are now asking for their money back. In the course of which, Peter Morrell, Nicholas Sturgeon's husband, lent a hundred thousand pounds to the Scottish Nationalist Party for an unexplained reason. And since then, there have been a series of scandals. There's a scandal about him lying about how many members there were in the SNP, which led to his resignation. The police have then

• 38:34Rory Stewart?

  taken him in for questioning. His mother's motorhome, which is worth over a hundred thousand pounds, was taken in on Wednesday morning. And Joanna Cherry, who was somebody I knew quite well, who was an SNP MP in the House of Commons at the same time as me, said this is absolutely par for the course, that she's never in all her life seen such lack of transparency as she saw in the senior figures of the SNP, that she'd served on many boards. But the total lack of transparency amongst the SNP went a long way beyond just the chief executive being married to the leader, that it was a very, very opaque system. Anyway, what are you picking up on it?

• 39:11Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you've you've mentioned that several times before, the the oddity, as you see it, of the leader of the party being married to the chief executive. And I think somebody told me, and this is right, that if the chief executive, for whatever reason, becomes unable to carry out their functions, that those functions pass to pass to the leader, or it might be the treasurer. I know there's some sort of weird setup there. I mean, I think the images of a lot of policemen and women charging into the sturgeon's home and then putting up that tent, I presume that the tent was put up because they were bringing out evidence and they're putting the evidence there and they knew that there'd be media there. But it did, I mean, somebody said on on Twitter, it's all going very Fred West

• 39:56Alastair Campbell?

  up there. It did look like a sort of like a murder scene rather than the, and then there was all this sort of, I don't know, why would they need to inspect the barbecue? Is that about burning evidence or something? And what was the significance of his shovel and his hoe? But I think it's it's impossible not to feel a little bit of sympathy for Humza Yousaf, who has taken over as the new leader. And since when, I've not been aware of a single thing he's said that has not actually been about trying to keep up with this, which I think does pose a huge problem for him going forward and a massive opportunity

• 40:39Alastair Campbell?

  for the Labour Party. Because what it feels like to me is, this is maybe what the kind of thing that happens when one party's been had a lot of power for too long. And they start to think that actually, the normal process of political management don't really apply. And Humza Yousaf, in trying to differentiate himself, has said that there has clearly been a lack of transparency. There clearly have been problems in the way that the party's been run. And whether that then plays into what we talked about last week, whether people start to focus more, well, if they can't manage their own finances properly without the police being called in, what does that say about their running of the things that we rely on, public services and so forth?

• 41:16Rory Stewart?

  And it will also inevitably cast

• 41:20Rory Stewart?

  Light back on Nicola Sturgeon's own resignation, people will begin to feel that she resigned suddenly in the way that she did because she would have been aware that some of these allegations might have been about to come out about about her family. Even if that's not true, I don't know whether that is why she resigned, but it certainly will begin to look a bit odd that all these things are coming out a few weeks after she resigned.

• 41:42Alastair Campbell?

  And Kate Forbes, who was the challenger who ran Humza Yousaf closest to become the current leader, she and some of her supporters are saying that, look, he was the Nicola Sturgeon continuity candidate, they clearly decided to have a very, very truncated election because they knew something was coming and therefore the whole thing should be rerun. So, I mean, the thing is a complete and total mess on so many levels.

• 42:06Rory Stewart?

  I think, I need to apologize just to listeners, you'll hear the call to prayer.

• 42:11Alastair Campbell?

  Never apologize, Rory, never apologize for it, it's wonderful.

• 42:14Rory Stewart?

  Lunchtime call to prayer coming. I think Scotty's got a actually a very beautiful voice. I was saying this to a Jordanian friend of mine who disagreed, but I think the Mozen here has a really, really beautiful voice.

• 42:23Alastair Campbell?

  Is it the same, is it, is it a live thing or a tape?

• 42:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I've got, I've got a live guy here. When I lived in Afghanistan for three years, I lived next to a mosque with a man with a slightly less beautiful voice who cleared his throat very, very noisily and loudly in the early hours of the morning.

• 42:38Alastair Campbell?

  While we're on local and regional culture, I got a pretty stinging email from a friend of mine up in the Highlands, Rory, Peter Newman, who's from Ardnamerkin High School, saying that I was talking quite a lot of bollocks and you were talking total bollocks, these are my words, not his by the way, when we talked about Gaelic last week. And we were, we were failing to differentiate when we were talking about the Welsh language between Gaelic and Gaelic learning and they're two separate subjects. And in many, many local authorities, subjects are being delivered through the medium of Gaelic, which aren't necessarily in those figures that I, that I read out. So there we are. He says Gaelic.

• 43:22Rory Stewart?

  So I think he wants us to say that actually Scottish Gaelic speakers are not that far behind Welsh Gaelic speakers.

• 43:28Alastair Campbell?

  They're somewhere behind.

• 43:29Rory Stewart?

  Because the Welsh are Accounting, Welsh accounting people who are learning.

• 43:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he says nationally, over five thousand children were educated through Gaelic in twenty twenty one. And then there are these children who are learning Gaelic, much as they might learn French, German, Italian, Spanish, whatever. So we stand corrected on that. Peter, thank you for that and give my very, very fondness regards to TJ. Now, shall we talk a little bit about Ireland?

• 43:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, absolutely. We should move on to that. And just, just quickly, just to finish on, on Scotland. I think you made a number of interesting points. One is that this may be an opportunity for Labour. One of the things that is difficult in one party, it's not quite a one party, obviously it's not a one party state. But it has had a bit of a feeling of that. The SNP have been so dominant in Scotland for so long. That people do begin to make strange mistakes. And of course, Scotland can feel compared to the United Kingdom. As though its elite is quite small. You often feel in Edinburgh that everybody knows each other, the judges know each other, the senior police officers know each other. The politicians will know each other even more than people would suggest the United Kingdom. And I think the final thing is this thing we haven't talked about much on the podcast.

• 44:37Rory Stewart?

  But I'd like to do more, which is this whole question of conflict of interest and us beginning to be more honest with ourselves and with others. That you can't have your husband or your wife in an important position professionally related to you, that it's very, very difficult. However hard you try to be certain there isn't a conflict of interest, that you're not doing favours in odd directions.

• 44:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's certainly a massive industry where the polls head in the near future. And I think I said a few weeks ago, Keir Starmer has been making a lot of visits to Scotland because part of the route to Downey Street for Labour has to come through a revival in Scotland.

• 45:12Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Now, Good Friday Agreement, this is something where I want to not talk, but, but ask you questions. Because you were very, very strongly involved. And just before I do it, just to set it up for readers, just to listeners, sorry. My people, Good Friday Agreement was signed on Good Friday, tenth of April nineteen ninety eight. It was the products of a Northern Ireland peace process that began in some ways in the nineteen eighties, got underway properly in nineteen ninety four. But really reached its final stages and its critical final stages when Tony Blair and yourself were in. And of course, the Good Friday Agreement was signed with you very deeply involved, along, I guess, with the European Union, with Bill Clinton, with, with Santa Mitchell.

• 45:55Rory Stewart?

  And it was really remarkable, just one figure before I start questioning you. In nineteen ninety seven, a Queen's University Belfast poll found that although ninety percent of the population, both Catholic and Protestant, supported a negotiated settlement in Northern Ireland, only twenty five percent thought there would be a settlement. And that was only one year before, actually a few months before the Good Friday Agreement actually came through. So can I step back to the first question? What do you think the secrets were of this thing? What made it work? And how has it, with all the challenges and messes? What's made it probably one of the most successful peace agreements that we've seen?

• 46:34Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Lord, it's interesting you mentioned Queens there because that's where they're hosting the event that we're going to be part of next week, which is going to be three days of commemoration, celebration, remembering the people who are no longer with us. But also, I hope, trying to work out how we can keep the thing moving in the right direction. I mean, there's lots of things that come to mind when you ask that question. But I think if there's one, I think it, to be absolutely honest, was a sense of fatigue on both sides. And I think without Sinn Féin, and particularly Adams and McGinnis, moving the direction that they did, and without the Unionists moving the direction they did, led by David Trimble. And then throw into the mix, you mentioned Clinton, you mentioned George Mitchell.

• 47:19Alastair Campbell?

  I think throw into the mix two young, popular prime ministers of the UK and Ireland, elected roughly the same time, coming together with this as a priority. And then having the understanding of the importance of these big strategic polls. Principle of consent, absolutely no change to the status of Northern Ireland without the consent of the people, but an understanding that there had to be a genuine commitment to equality for the nationalists. And then the ambiguity, I guess, I think the ambiguity, there's a lot of, the phrase constructive ambiguity kind of runs through the Good Friday Agreement. And allowing people to identify as British or Irish, I think, became very, very important.

• 48:03Alastair Campbell?

  And then the rest of it was just, frankly, it was just negotiation. And people talk about the Good Friday Agreement or the Belfast Good Friday Agreement. There actually were two agreements. There was two agreements. There was an agreement agreed by the political parties, that was called the multi-party agreement. And then there was the British-Irish Agreement, which was the agreement between the British and Irish governments. And the whole

• 48:25Alastair Campbell?

  The whole time during the negotiations, this focus on Strand One, Strand Two, Strand Three. Strand One was about the, how the Northern Ireland was governed within the United Kingdom. Strand Two was the so-called North-South, which was the relationship between Northern Ireland and the Republic. And then Strand Three was East-West, which was the relationship between the Republic of Ireland and the UK. And I think it was just the ability of this incredible collection of people. I actually think, we talk a lot about how the characters in politics, I'm afraid they do matter, you might not want them to, but the personalities really, really matter. And there was something about those personalities that sort of made it work. And to this day, I can't really understand why it did, but it did.

• 49:09Rory Stewart?

  It's fascinating, isn't it? I was part of a commission called the Principles for Inclusive Peace. And I spent two years, just actually, so the last two years, working with various people from around the world, trying to work out what the lessons were on building peace. And we looked at Northern Ireland and other places. The fashion at the moment, as you know, is not really to focus on leaders. A lot of the focus at the moment is on grassroots activism, on the involvement of civil society, the involvement of women, and people are a bit sceptical about the role of leaders and outsiders.

• 49:45Alastair Campbell?

  I think they were very, very important, and I'm really pleased, actually, that one of the big themes of the Queen's University event is actually the focus on women. And not just the women that we all know, Mo Mollum and Hillary Clinton, who's going to be there, because she's now the Chancellor of the University. But, you know, some of the women's groups and the women's coalition in particular that really did provide that sort of sense of grassroots support. So no, I agree with that.

• 50:13Rory Stewart?

  There's a lovely line that Tony Blair has written, an article which has appeared in the Jordan Times, which I was reading this morning. And it's got a good line where he says, um...

• 50:23Alastair Campbell?

  I suspect that's a syndication situation. I don't, I don't think he...

• 50:27Rory Stewart?

  Oh, come on.

• 50:28Alastair Campbell?

  He may have done, he may have done, he thought, I must get a message to Rory.

• 50:32Rory Stewart?

  I felt very, very flattered that Tony Blair wrote an article in the Jordan Times that reads "Morning on Northern Ireland Peace Process", but he says that you should use outsiders and that insiders often feel that outsiders don't understand the dispute. And Tony Blair has this rather nice line, he says, "Sometimes outsider's the key because not understanding the dispute is the key to resolving it." And I think his point there is that if you're an insider, you're just too caught up in too much knowledge about all the horrors that have happened over the previous decades. It's very, very difficult to step apart from that. And in a sense, it was a strength for the British government, the EU, the Americans, that they weren't as closely involved.

• 51:14Alastair Campbell?

  It was impossible to be there and not get very, very caught up in that sense of the history and where it came from. And, you know, I wrote a piece for the Eye paper the other day, and I recall this talking to Ken McGinnis, who was one of the leading unionist, Ulster Unionist politicians, and trying to persuade him that he needed to try to see things better from the perspective of Sinn Féin, where they were coming from, try to understand where they were coming from. And he said, "Well, it's all very well for you to say that, but it's quite difficult wandering around this building and you keep bumping into people who've been trying to kill you for the last X number of years." And that's the fact of it. That's what we were very conscious of a lot of the time.

• 51:59Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that, you know, the role that I think Tony in particular was able to play, partly because of his youth in the job, partly because of his commitment that both sides accepted was real, but also, I think, partly because he's just very good at that sense of taking somebody else's point, and maybe it's the lawyer in him, taking somebody else's point and then going to the other person. So I wrote in this piece about, I think I'm right in saying that David Trimble did not exchange a single word with Gerry Adams during the entire process that we were there in Castle.

• 52:30Rory Stewart?

  My goodness, I didn't know that.

• 52:32Alastair Campbell?

  And there was one point at which David Trimble was in the gents, having a pee, and who should walk in but Gerry Adams? And Gerry Adams, who was prepared to speak, said something like, "Hey, David, how are you doing?", at which point David Trimble managed to stop himself in mid-flow and disappear into a cubicle and lock the door.

• 52:55Rory Stewart?

  And I think the history of this, I mean, we talked about this, I think, almost a year ago on the podcast, remembering, and we'll remember this when we were at Queen's University Belfast, that Edgar Graham, who was a lecturer and a lawyer and a unionist and a friend and a colleague of David Trumbles, was chatting to a colleague in the middle of the central square in Queen University Belfast in 1983, and was then shot in the back of the head by people from the IRA. And assault on a university lecturer in a university hall, a murder in that way, is something that's very, very difficult to remember and process.

• 53:28Alastair Campbell?

  No, absolutely. And, you know, I can remember, there were various points at which we were getting very angry and very frustrated with various parties as they were, you know, pressing for more or refusing to see somebody else's point, or refusing at points even to discuss somebody else's point. And I think this was another of Tony's strengths, was his ability to always to try to see it from their perspective. So, for example, I remember once when Adams and McGinnis were being particularly difficult about something, and of course, they were, they were leaving, there were various points at which they disappeared and left their phones and went off. And they were obviously, you know, talking to people within the IRA about whether they could get them across the line. And, you know, Tony

• 54:14Alastair Campbell?

  made the point that every time they go off there, that they're running the not-inconsiderable risk that they're going to get a bullet in the back of their head. And all of them had that sense, you know. So we sometimes just trying to be the people in the middle. And I think that's what Tony and Bertie did extremely well. They were the people in the middle. Bertie Hearn, for example, I mean, you know, if you remember, his mother died during those few days, and he had to go, go down to Dublin to attend to that and come back and then back to the funeral and all that stuff going on. And yet, at the same time, sit there often and just take a level of a kind of, you know, Abuse frankly from some of the unionists because he was, you know, he was the leader of the Republic of Ireland. And I think one of the things that's forgotten in a lot

• 54:58Alastair Campbell?

  of this, by the way, is and of course, there'll be a lot of focus on Ireland, North and South, but Joe Biden's trip to the Republic is going to get massive publicity for obvious reasons. And, you know, the Irish did change their constitution to get the Good Friday Agreement through. They essentially, you know, renounced that the notion that the the point of their constitution should be to fight for United Ireland. So there was a lot of big change went on. And if you go through, you know, some of the issues, we talked recently about just some of the issues. So you've got, you know, the whole issues of sovereignty and who is sovereign, discrimination, what you do with the paramilitary groups, policing, decommissioning, demilitarization, then all the civil and political rights that were

• 55:41Alastair Campbell?

  being addressed. It was a massive, massive, massive agenda. And to get that signed and then to get the massive support for it, over 90% in the Republic and over 70% in the North. And then, as you say, despite all the ups and downs and despite Brexit, despite the undercurrents of violence that have been there and that we saw again a little bit at the weekend, it's still on track, apart from the fact that the institutions are not up and running. And the DUP, I really do wish would would kind of make that final leap to say, look, we've just got to do what it takes to get these up and running.

• 56:17Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's such it's such a lesson, isn't it? And I think this is something you've said a lot in the past, that it's not just a question of the signing of the document, it's a question of what happens in the years after and how long that took. I mean, Sinn Fain didn't accept the police service in Northern Ireland until, I think, the early 2000s. And the final weapons were only handed in sort of between 2001, 2005. So it was a long old process requiring a huge amount of patience when you and Tony Blair and others must often have felt huge frustration even after 98. You can't have felt this was done because for the next seven years, it was touch and go a lot, wasn't it?

• 56:53Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'd say that Northern Ireland became a permanent part of of Tony Blair's agenda. And, you know, the fact that Jonathan Powell, for example, who was Tony's chief of staff, but he was also his chief negotiator on Northern Ireland. So Jonathan was never He's constantly backwards and forwards and before him, John Holmes, a civil servant, who was absolutely brilliant and so important in those in those early stages. But no, it became a never ending process. And the the Good Friday Agreement, in a sense, was the was the high point. But then there were plenty of low points thereafter and plenty of challenges that were that were met. And and, you know, Rishi Sunak is now the Prime Minister and

• 57:37Alastair Campbell?

  he's he's got to get this get the thing back on the road.

• 57:40Rory Stewart?

  And we'll do a lot more on this in the coming weeks. And obviously, we'll do a lot more when when we're in Belfast and hopefully interview some people involved as well. But it is a slightly worrying lesson for other peace processes around the world. When we worry about the Yemen peace process, or South Sudan, or Somalia, that how difficult it was in Northern Ireland, even with all the immense resources of Britain, Europe, the United States, which were able to put very serious economic packages in place. I mean, GDP per capita has nearly doubled since since the Good Friday Agreement was signed in in Northern Ireland. Even with all of that, how tough it was and how much the odds sadly are against the processes in poorer countries which are ridden by conflict.

• 58:24Alastair Campbell?

  And I I find it troubling that the the kind of Brexiteers and the and the DUP constantly want to try and play down the role of the European Union. But the fact is, in these peace processes, you need that international support. The role of the Americans, the fact of Clinton being so committed to the process, the fact of George Mitchell being the chair who was kind of respected by all sides and and able to kind of bring his wisdom and patience to the whole thing. It was that that really mattered. And then likewise, some of the economic progress that was delivered with the help of the of the European Union, it's not to be sniffed at. And I think any of these processes that you're talking about, they require international support and international backing. And and and I don't, you know, there's, you could argue

• 59:08Alastair Campbell?

  that without that, that the Good Friday Agreement might not have happened and certainly wouldn't have been endured in the way that in the way that it has. Here's a here's a question for you. What do you think of the 13 years of Conservative rule we will still be celebrating 25 years later?

• 59:28Alastair Campbell?

  What do you think it might be?

• 59:29Rory Stewart?

  The creation of the Canal and River Trust, Alistair.

• 59:33Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, what about austerity? Twenty-five years on, we'll be celebrating that? Maybe gay marriage, but the foundations for that were well, well laid by the time.

• 59:40Rory Stewart?

  And I, normally, we would have said point seven percent for international aid achieving that target, but unfortunately, they then destroyed that.

• 59:47Alastair Campbell?

  That's gone, yeah.

• 59:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, Alistair, I think, let's, let's move towards a close and let's maybe pick this up again when we get to Belfast.

• 59:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, that's one, I shall see you there.

• 59:55Rory Stewart?

  See you there, bye bye.

• 59:57Alastair Campbell?

  Take care, bye.

• 1:00:05Speaker 06

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones, member SIPC.

• 1:00:20Speaker 07

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:00:37Speaker 08

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:00:41Speaker 07

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:00:44Speaker 08

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:00:46Speaker 07

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under seventeen, not a middle without parent.

• 1:00:52Speaker 09

  It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolón Tequila, balanced, delicious, perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth, then hold on tight. One hundred percent agave, zero percent ego. Espolón Tequila, for a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 1:01:14Speaker 07

  Espolón Tequila, forty percent alcohol by volume, eighty proof. Copyright twenty twenty-six, Comparia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.