57. The Week Everything Changed

In a special bonus episode Rory and Alastair discuss whether the writing is already on the wall for Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, how Starmer found his voice and revived Labour, and what the future holds for the UK economy... Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Blackpool live show tickets: Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics special edition with me Rory Stewart.

• 1:48Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 1:49Rory Stewart?

  And this is, I think, you said, I think I agree with you, the week that everything changed. But do you want to tell us why this is the week that everything changed?

• 1:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, two big things. The first is, I think that Keir Starmer found his voice.

• 2:05Alastair Campbell?

  And found confidence. And I think confidence is such an important thing in any campaign, but especially in politics. And I think he has at times lacked confidence. But I think he showed, I think he just, you just sensed he was confident. He thinks he can win. The second thing is that it comes at the time where the Tories are losing confidence, particularly in Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. And of course, the markets have completely lost confidence, which is then just sending the whole thing into a vicious spiral, both economically and politically.

• 2:33Rory Stewart?

  That's an amazing, amazing kind of combination of things happening, isn't it? I think Raphael Barron, the Guardian, put it quite nicely, because the budget, he said, seemed to be the most extraordinary combination of destroying any claims of the Conservative Party to economic credibility, and at the same time focusing on a narrative that they're just out there to help their wealthy friends. I mean, it was almost the worst of all worlds that you could possibly do with a Conservative budget.

• 3:03Alastair Campbell?

  And you, I know, are in Jordan, so you may not have had the pleasure that those of us in this country have had of listening to what I think will go down in history as on a par with Prince Andrew's Pizza Express interview in terms of a disastrous media round. And in fact, somebody's just reminded me that one of Liz Truss's media advisers was formerly an adviser to Prince Andrew.

• 3:29Rory Stewart?

  So just quickly, for listeners in other parts of the world, what's happened is Liz Truss, having been in silence, people were joking that she had become the prime ministerial equivalent of an answering sheet message saying, this is the number 10 switchboard, somebody will get back to you shortly. And then she decided that what she was going to do is not go out on the national media, so not be interviewed by the BBC or ITV or Channel 4, but instead to go out on local radio stations in particular. And she did an incredible number, didn't she? She did sort of, I think I saw 10 or a dozen different local radio stations, one after another that she was doing. And as you say, it was a disaster. But before we get on to the disaster, why was she doing that? What was, if you

• 4:13Rory Stewart?

  were the comms director, what would be the normal justification for why you'd be doing local radio, not national?

• 4:18Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the thing is, there's this thing, if I did one of these the other day to promote the TV programme that I'm doing with Saeda, Saeda will see it, and I basically, you go along, you've probably done it, you go along to a studio, you sit there in front of a microphone, you have headphones on, you put a message out on something called the GNS within the BBC, and regional stations can bid for time, and you maybe do, you know, you can do, I've done, I once did when I had a book out, I did like 25 of them in a row, you do about five minutes just go back to back, and the thinking behind doing it in normal circumstances is that you're, you know, you're showing respect to the regional media, and therefore to the people who are listening to those stations, but politically,

• 5:01Alastair Campbell?

  at this stage, why you would do this when you are being criticised by your MPs, by the markets, by your ministers, by the media, you're criticised for avoiding it, I think they probably did it, the same as Johnson used to do this, where you go out and basically they think they can get an easier ride, and it's almost always a mistake.

• 5:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly, that's, that's the assumption, isn't it, so what they say is, "real people", in inverted commas, and a lot of the talk in politics always about "real people", so "real people", in inverted commas, "listen to local radio, they trust local radio, they're not interested in the echo chamber of national media and all the chat around Westminster", so let's get to the real people, we can have an honest conversation with that, we'll get our message out, we'll reconnect with our base, and we're not going to have to worry about being attacked on the Today programme, that's the kind of theory, right?

• 5:50Alastair Campbell?

  And it is, that is the theory, but it's also incredibly naive, because once you're the Prime Minister, the fact that you're doing an interview with Radio Tees, or Radio Leeds, or Radio Lancashire, the whole of the media is listening, because you're the Prime Minister, and so what's been happening today is the whole of the national media, and people like me, have been following these interviews, and I actually said, I said, this is me just being wise after the event, I tweeted before, when I heard she was doing it, I did a tweet this morning saying, "car crash incoming", because she's doing what Johnson used to do, thinking you'll get an easier ride, do you remember that extraordinary interview he had with STV, that he did a round of regional television interviews, and he got absolutely destroyed by a woman from STV, and today, Radio Lancashire, my favourite

• 6:35Alastair Campbell?

  so far, Radio Lancashire. Where you can actually hear her aides slipping her pieces of paper in these long gaps, where guess what she was asked about in Lancashire?

• 6:46Rory Stewart?

  Fracking.

• 6:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, who would have thought she was going to get asked about fracking?

• 6:50Rory Stewart?

  If she'd listened to our podcast, one of the problems, she's boycotting our podcast because she would have had all the facts at her fingertips, wouldn't she?

• 6:57Alastair Campbell?

  And then Radio Stoke, where the presenter, John Akers, I promise you, if you listen back to it, he knows more about the workings of the economy and the impact of interests, interest rates and inflation than the Prime Minister. That's quite worrying.

• 7:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, presumably, it's logically the case that actually it's incredibly dangerous thing to do because for every single one of those journalists, it is the biggest moment in their career to date. They will put an unbelievable amount of preparation into it and they're going to bring their A game to it. And you're going in every five minutes into another journalist whose entire career is riding on being able to trip you up and take you down. And probably it's safer to go with the Today Programme where they've got out of bed at four in the morning and they're worrying about other stuff before they interview you.

• 7:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and also, also, you know how it works and you know the formula. Look, I think we've got an extraordinary combination here with Liz Truss. We've talked a little bit about this before. I think she is utterly devoid of empathy. I don't think she has any understanding of human beings. She's robotic in her style. I don't actually think she's very clever, I'm afraid. And I think that she's got an extraordinary arrogance. So the fact that today, she kept saying, this is the right plan for the future. And they kept saying, well, that's all very well, but our mortgages are going tits up, our pensions are going tits up, the pound is tanking. And she kept just saying, well, it'll be tough through the winter, but then we had Ukraine and people have started to pull their

• 8:21Alastair Campbell?

  hair out. What are you talking about? And I just, so I think, I think that we've got a, look, the Tory party, your old party, Rory, they're going to have to get a grip of this. But how they, I'm putting down an early marker on this. If they get rid of her, which they're going to have to, there has to be a general election. The idea of trusting this effing Tory party to foist another Prime Minister on the country is utterly unacceptable. That's what they're going to try and do. She's dead. She's toast.

• 8:45Rory Stewart?

  One, one thing I've been thinking about, which comes out of our conversations in the past and Your great hero Moses Naim, who obviously we need to interview on the podcast to talk

• 8:55Alastair Campbell?

  Moses, Moses, Moses.

• 8:57Rory Stewart?

  Populism, post-truth and polarization. Why is it that the world is now producing figures like Liz Truss and Kwasi Kourting? And I think there's a sort of structural thing that we're only just beginning to become aware of. One of them is that the world somehow is accelerating. The leaders we're producing are getting younger and younger. So as far as I remember, you know, Tony Blair was the youngest prime minister for 200 years and David Cameron was the youngest prime minister for 200 years, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But also that we're into a world where Liz Truss and Kwasi Kourting really like to throw out very, very defensive, one-sentence provocative soundbites, you know, that will

• 9:40Rory Stewart?

  say, obviously, what we need to do is cut taxes, we need to cut expenditure. And when you try, and this is true on a human level, when I was with them in parliament, try to stop them and say, but Kwasi, how's that going to work out? Or Liz, but if we cut 25% of this department, we're going to have the problem, problems in the national parks, et cetera. I'd have these conversations with them. They don't want to sit down, they don't want to have those kinds of conversations. There's a sort of attention deficit disorder. And my theory, says he comes to the end of his pompous idea, is that something about the modern world and social media and the pace at which things operate kind of favor or have favored politicians with this sort of attention deficit disorder, the lack of

• 10:21Rory Stewart?

  empathy, the lack of time to mull over things, admit they might be wrong, look at the complexities of things, that something about our culture favors these people and then, of course, puts them in positions where what was their strength in getting elected becomes their weakness in governing, because of course you can't run a country like that.

• 10:39Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I think there's something in that, but I think that is because. They are driven by the pressures that that new world creates in the wrong direction. Now, I'm assuming that even you Rory have heard of Arsene Wenger.

• 10:53Rory Stewart?

  Arsene Wenger, I actually, I really like Arsene Wenger. I'm a real admirer of Arsene Wenger.

• 10:57Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 10:58Rory Stewart?

  And I've actually met him and I actually really like him.

• 11:01Alastair Campbell?

  I've met him many times and it's probably a story for another day. I've even been round at a Waitrose supermarket within buying vegetables.

• 11:09Rory Stewart?

  Does he like the mange too?

• 11:11Alastair Campbell?

  It doesn't matter what he likes. But he basically said, I think I may have told you this before, he said that all the pressures of the modern world, because of the pace of things like social media and 24/7 news and so forth, all the pressures are to be tactical and the response should be to be more strategic. And I completely and totally 1 million percent agree with that. And I think that we do have to, within the British context. So for example, Moises Naim, who you just mentioned, we probably mentioned him more than any other living being in this podcast, but he wrote a piece for the New European a few months ago, where he actually did say that he thought that Britain and Brexit was the really big surprise. He thinks that the world has been surprised that Britain

• 11:55Alastair Campbell?

  has gone down this populist, polarising, post-truth route, because he thought that our institutions were so respected and so seen as being so strong around the world. But I think the thing that helps to drive it in that direction in our country, I'm afraid is our mainstream media. You still have, even in this week, you have had papers like the Express, papers like the Mail, papers like the Telegraph. That guy, I can't even remember his name, there's this guy at the Telegraph, his big line is, you know, Liz Truss must stick to her guns.

• 12:28Rory Stewart?

  Do you think that's Alistair somebody? Is it Alistair?

• 12:31Alastair Campbell?

  Alistair Heath, that's the one. And then you've got the Mail, just sort of, you know, which is literally a kind of, and I use my words carefully, it literally is like something out of 1930s Germany, in terms of anything the government says, they're basically behind it. Now. So you have this, that that produces, if you have, this is why I keep saying, Rory, you disagreed, you pushed back on this earlier in the week. The reason why I keep saying that if this was a Labour government, this is how they'd be being treated. Because let's face it, if any objective judgment was being made of the effect that Kwasi Kwarteng has had on our economy, on our living standards, on our country in the last two weeks, he would be out of a job.

• 13:14Alastair Campbell?

  If this was a Labour Chancellor, he'd be out of a job by now.

• 13:17Rory Stewart?

  But he is, but he is basically out of a job. I mean, I mean, I don't think it's that there's been a conspiracy.

• 13:21Alastair Campbell?

  No, he's not, he's not. He's at the Treasury. He's at the Treasury now, today.

• 13:24Rory Stewart?

  I don't think it's a conspiracy of the media to say he's doing a great job. The entire, the entire country thinks he's doing a rubbish job.

• 13:30Alastair Campbell?

  No, Rory, you're missing my point.

• 13:31Rory Stewart?

  This guy, Alistair Heath from The Telegraph, you're right, is in Lunatic, who's produced a headline saying this budget will go down in history. But he's like one voice out of a thousand.

• 13:40Alastair Campbell?

  No, but Rory, you're missing the point I'm making. Yesterday, trust, we will build a world beating economy. That was the front page of The Daily Express. The, even The Times, by the way, barely covered Keir Starmer's speech. Now, fair enough, they might have been because they thought the Tory story, the government story is more important. But my point is, I think this does play into this.

• 14:01Rory Stewart?

  But this is not just structural. I mean, remember David Cameron complained when he was running against you, or William Hague complained, remember in our interview with William Hague?

• 14:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:08Rory Stewart?

  That you can never get any coverage as a leader of the opposition.

• 14:10Alastair Campbell?

  That's not true.

• 14:11Rory Stewart?

  It's incredibly different. That was what Hague was saying all the way through the interview. Do you remember? He kept saying how tough it was.

• 14:15Alastair Campbell?

  Against us, because we were a government with a proper strategy. That's what he meant. What I'm saying about this government, you were asking the question, how are we producing leaders like this? And I think part of the answer is a combination of a Tory party that's hollowed out, as you were saying earlier in the week about, you know, One Nation Tories have been hollowed out. It's also the fact that social media has driven the debate into these kind of, you know, much more tribally polarised factions and tribes, if you like. But I wouldn't underestimate a dumbed down, very biased, right wing media that is constantly telling.

• 14:51Alastair Campbell?

  The country that these people are better than they are. They are terrible, Rory. We now have both trust is a she can't do this job. I've seen prime ministers, Rory. I know what it takes. She cannot do this job. Quasi-quartet will never be a chancellor.

• 15:07Rory Stewart?

  But you're talking to me as though I disagree with you, right? Nobody really disagrees with you. That's the problem with this line.

• 15:13Alastair Campbell?

  No, this is where you're wrong.

• 15:15Rory Stewart?

  There's a few lunatic correspondents in right wing newspapers that fewer and fewer people read in this country who are saying this stuff. But that's not the reason these people got these jobs. The reason these people got these jobs is the really weird question is why were they selected over Rishi Sunak? Rishi Sunak spent months explaining in real detail why what Liz Truss was proposing to do would be catastrophic, would lead to a run on sterling, would lead to inflation. And it's something about the mindset of particularly in that case, 80,000 voters in the Conservative Party that somehow wanted these soundbites from Liz Truss and didn't want arguments out of Rishi Sunak.

• 15:55Alastair Campbell?

  But this is part of this goes back to my point about dumbing down and making people think that everything's very simple. And if you have a good slogan, that's all you need. And that is what is driving clever people away from politics as well. And I look, I really, you know, I don't want to go on about your school because I'm probably going about it too much. But I do think, I remember Ricky Gervais said, when are we going to learn that the phrase old Etonian should qualify you for absolutely nothing? Quasi-quartet, I think people assume there is an intelligence there because of his background. And this thing, he wrote a PhD about, he goes on about, he got a PhD in economics. It was about, it was about the workings of currency in the 17th century.

• 16:38Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, you know, go and get a few old books, you can do that. He's not clever. You need clever people.

• 16:44Rory Stewart?

  I don't think that, I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. I think he's not wise. I think he doesn't listen.

• 16:49Alastair Campbell?

  You said he was weird yesterday. You said he was weird.

• 16:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's an eccentric.

• 16:53Alastair Campbell?

  Why was he a weirdo as Chancellor?

• 16:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, a lot of weirdos as politicians, I can assure you. A lot of weirdos out there. Gordon Brown was, was, you know, occasionally not always completely.

• 17:01Alastair Campbell?

  Gordon Brown was and is an intellectual giant.

• 17:05Rory Stewart?

  I'm happy to accept he's clever. Doesn't mean he's not occasionally a bit weird. Um, I, I think the quasi quarter, I think it's important not to confuse what his problem is. His problem is not that he hasn't got an enormous IQ. I bet if you sat him down for an IQ test, he's off the charts. The guy gets his first at Trinity Cambridge, he wins university challenge twice. That's not the problem with him. The problem with him is he doesn't listen to people. The problem with him is he doesn't have wisdom. He doesn't have humility.

• 17:31Alastair Campbell?

  No, he's arrogant. He's arrogant.

• 17:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but yeah, and Liz Truss went to a comprehensive school and is even worse than Kwasi Kwarteng. Yeah, he's even worse than Kwasi Kwarteng. So the idea that this is all down to an Etonian conspiracy is missing the point. We've got a comprehensive, educated prime minister who's a disaster.

• 17:46Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, you are, in my view, confusing, educated and clever. I do not think Kwasi Kwarteng is clever. If you were clever, you would not do what he did last week. You just wouldn't do it. And what's more, where you're right is about the arrogance. We're now hearing that there were people, including MPs, including ministers, including the advisers, who warned him this will send the pound tanking. Now, by the way, we put out a thing for questions this morning. We had hundreds of them. One of them said, why is, was Robert Maxwell considered a criminal for destroying our pensions? Mine included because I was on the Mirror. This lot are destroying our pensions.

• 18:25Alastair Campbell?

  This lot are destroying our mortgages. Have you seen, have you seen the figures on mortgages and these, these mortgage deals that are just collapsing? As a direct consequence of a government decision. This lot should be in jail.

• 18:37Rory Stewart?

  On, on most of the stuff, we violently agree and I think we should take a break.

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• 20:44Speaker 08

  Welcome back. A special episode of The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 20:49Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart. So somewhere in the general mess and rage about what's happening is the question about what's happened to the British economy and how Kwasi Kwarteng's action triggered this amazing market collapse and why everybody around the world is so frightened about it. And I guess the first thing that's strange about it is that 90% of the decisions that he made had already been signaled long in advance. The attempts to do an energy price cap, the reversal of certain kinds of taxes, national insurance, corporation tax. The only really new thing that surprised people was dropping the top rate of tax. And that actually

• 21:32Rory Stewart?

  is a few billions out of a package which is nearly 100 times larger. So why did it have this consequence? And I think if you look at the very, very strong response you're getting out of American economists, Larry Summers, Paul Krugman and others, it's because they are very worried about what this suggests, not just about the fragility of the British economy, but about the fragility of the European and American economies as well. Because somewhere in the background is this extraordinary story since 2008 of quantitative easing, basically printing an enormous amount of money, huge rises in public expenditure, which everybody thought was going to cause inflation, or people traditionally would have predicted

• 22:13Rory Stewart?

  would cause inflation, but didn't. So we had this very strange time from 2008 to 2022. And you know, these, the most, one of the most famous investors talking about British guilts, which is what we're just going to talk about, said at the time that guilts are sitting on a bed of nitroglycerine. So the idea was, everybody's been expecting this to blow up for the last 12 years, 14 years, and it's finally blown up. And one of the things I guess that's frightening European policymakers and American policymakers is Do they have similar kinds of vulnerabilities? Because of course, Europe is also having to spend an incredible amount on its energy bills. The US has also got the same problem

• 22:55Rory Stewart?

  of having an enormous amount of foreign money swirling around that can leave very quickly. And somehow Kwasi Kwarteng, who has been deeply disrespectful towards all economic consensus and reckless, but what he's done is with a relatively small move, blow up a system which could blow up elsewhere.

• 23:13Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, Roy, just talking of Kwasi Kwarteng, Kamu Kwasi, I, as you know, I have some connections with some Conservative MPs, and I spoke to two of them yesterday who were on his call. He did a sort of rather panicky phone call with Tory backbenchers. And there were about 80 backbenchers on there talking to him. And he did his thing, which you were trying to defend when he was doing it at the Queen's funeral, sort of, you know, laughing and joking about things. He did actually sort of put out a message to them, you know, basically, if you've got any ideas about how I can steady the ship, then let me know to Tory backbenchers. And he was getting a lot of heat. But he was

• 23:52Alastair Campbell?

  not conceding on the principle that he was, that this budget, mini-budget, mega mini-budget was in any way the wrong course to take. Now, I think a lot of those MPs, certainly the two that I spoke to, basically are not going to be able to back this when it comes before the House of Commons.

• 24:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, one of the interesting things, Alice, which I think is at the heart of this, is do you think those MPs really understand any of this stuff? Because certainly many of the colleagues I had in the House of Commons simply don't understand this level of economics. If I actually asked them what a gilt was, they wouldn't know what a gilt was. I mean, a gilt, obviously, for listeners of the Rest of Politics podcast, is a

• 24:31Alastair Campbell?

  They all know.

• 24:32Rory Stewart?

  A US Treasury. It's the government bonds that we issue.

• 24:36Alastair Campbell?

  It's called a gilt because in the olden days, it had a little gold thing around the, it was literally a piece of paper and it was, it had a gold thing on it.

• 24:44Rory Stewart?

  100%. Now, one of the things that's weird about it is that the government issues these things and it can't really default on them because they're issued in pounds. So they could just basically print more pounds in order to pay you off at the end of your period. But what everybody is really worried about, I guess, is inflation. And maybe this brings us into why People were selling guilts, why they were running away, why we almost collapsed the pension system in Britain, and why people are very worried about mortgages. Because the bottom of the whole thing is what we used to call politely last year, the cost of living crisis, but it's basically just another word for runaway inflation. That's what people are worried about.

• 25:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. By the way, Paul Kelso, who works for Sky, he did a very, very, very good explainer yesterday about bonds and guilts. It was really good. It was about four minutes. And I think he posted on his Twitter feed, but it was, I saw it on Sky and it's worth a look. Because I, I do think we, you know, we, we use these terms as though there's a sort of universal understanding of what it means and, and the impact of it. But look, you, you, you mentioned their pensions. The other thing I think is really, really important, in the last 24 hours, I've, just walking around where I live in North London, I have talked to two small businesses who say they're very close to packing up.

• 26:05Alastair Campbell?

  And the, and the tipping point for one of them was the electricity and gas bills that he just had in. Another one was labour shortages. It's a restaurant where he says he just cannot get the staff at the moment. And the other thing he said was that he's actually having to close down for part of the week because the staff who, who are willing to work are in such a strong position now that they're basing, basically setting the terms of when they turn up to work. And then the other thing is this sense of, we're back to the point about confidence. The third guy just said he feels everything is going so badly wrong that he might as well get out now. Now, once that, once that becomes catching, I, I promise you Rory, when you do catch up with Liz Truss's media round this morning, she will have exacerbated rather than eased that feeling and that mood.

• 26:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And it's all about confidence, isn't it? And when panic sets into markets, as we all know, we all start panicking. I mean, I'm, I'm trying to get a mortgage at the moment and I haven't heard back from the bank. I'm pretty terrified.

• 27:02Alastair Campbell?

  Where, where's this for in?

• 27:03Rory Stewart?

  It's, I'm, I'm trying to buy a house in Scotland.

• 27:06Alastair Campbell?

  You've got a house in Scotland.

• 27:09Alastair Campbell?

  How many houses do you want in Scotland?

• 27:12Rory Stewart?

  Scotland's a very nice place.

• 27:13Alastair Campbell?

  It really is, it really is.

• 27:15Rory Stewart?

  But the point is on mortgages, though, I mean, obviously, I'm in a fortunate position. But I'm just touching the edge of the reality, which is a lot of banks simply don't want to talk to you at the moment. They've no idea what price to charge you on a fixed rate mortgage. And all the other things that you're hoping in your life are going to come together all go wrong at the same time.

• 27:34Alastair Campbell?

  Faisal Islam, BBC, he tweeted this morning, since the mini budget on Friday, 1,621 residential mortgage deals have been pulled from sale. That's a 41% fall. A further 321 products were withdrawn yesterday on top of a record 935 products withdrawn the day before.

• 27:55Rory Stewart?

  So does it sound like I'm going to get a mortgage, Elster?

• 27:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think you might because, you know, you're, but no, but that, that, that, just imagine the number of people and families for whom that represents absolute panic.

• 28:08Rory Stewart?

  No, it's terrifying.

• 28:09Alastair Campbell?

  And it's totally self inflicted.

• 28:10Rory Stewart?

  And it's terrifying and it affects everybody because of course it affects the buyer, but it also affects the seller.

• 28:14Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, absolutely. And then I think we've seen it, we're seeing a 20%. Now, I've never quite understood the, the sort of, you know, fixation in British life on, on rising house prices. But we're now seeing 20% fall. So on every level, and of course, to hear trust today and Quateng apparently on this call as well, basically saying, well, you know, we've got to pin it all on Ukraine. This was happening before Ukraine, Ukraine has exacerbated part of this. But the really big shock, I think, for people is that they've, the Tory party has foisted upon us, a prime minister, and now who has appointed a chancellor. And they, in their ideology, as you described it the other day, have crashed the economy.

• 28:58Alastair Campbell?

  And that is unforgivable, unforgivable.

• 29:01Rory Stewart?

  I also think unfortunately, this is going to drive more uncertainty, more populism, because what it's exposed.

• 29:09Rory Stewart?

  Is the incredible fragility of our entire, as it were, capitalist system. And without sounding too much like Jeremy Corbyn, something very, very fragile and weird and unpredictable is out there. And it's been weird since the 2008 financial crisis. We're struggling possibly with things like secular stagnation. And there are underlying problems that we're dealing with, which, you know, one of the reasons I've been saying we're going into a 10 year recession. And I think we're going into it sooner than we thought is that our populations are aging all over Europe and even in the United States now. People don't want immigration coming in. That causes all those problems you were talking about with your friend not being able to get staff in this restaurant. Climate change is going to impose additional costs, wipe out additional communities.

• 29:52Rory Stewart?

  We're learning, trying to cover the cost of energy bills, that putting the cost of carbon on people's energy bills isn't going to work. Because low income households will literally go bankrupt if you try to do that. Put all of this together, I think the situation is very, very, very gloomy.

• 30:08Alastair Campbell?

  Do you, do you envisage a situation in which, I mean, Johnson went in three years. Do you think Truss can actually survive as Prime Minister up to an election?

• 30:19Rory Stewart?

  I think it's very difficult. I think very, very difficult indeed.

• 30:22Alastair Campbell?

  And do you think, and do you think if she, if the Tories do get rid of her? Do you think they think they can force another Prime Minister upon us with another ridiculous leadership election? Because that would be the only time, the, the only time that there've been, you had Baldwin, followed by Chamberlain, followed by Churchill. Now that was, they were very, very special circumstances. But can you imagine a situation in which Johnson goes for being a liar and a lawbreaker? Truss goes because it's seen that she's utterly incompetent and totally out of her depth. And then somebody else comes in and Johnson doubtless is sitting there thinking, ah, they're going to very quickly realize that I'm the guy they need back.

• 31:00Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's, and presumably Rishi Sunak will also think that people are going to concentrate on the fact that he called all this before it happened. I, I think the Conservative Party is deeply, deeply damaged. And there's almost a sort of psychological sense of self harm here. The appointment of Liz Truss, the decision of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kourting to do this seems so bizarre that you almost get the sense that these parties have a, a natural lifetime, lifespan in office, and by the end they just start doing crazy stuff. You remember the end of the John Major government where they just started producing all these completely weird, unnecessary scandals, as though the party just was eating itself from the inside.

• 31:38Alastair Campbell?

  Do you, let's then talk about the second part of this week, which I introduced at the top, Keir Starmer's speech conference, which, and the Labour Party Conference, I've just actually been reading the Zut Deutschert Zeitung, as I do, and they have a big piece about Keir Starmer having had a very, very good week, and I think a lot of our media said that. What was your sense of, from a man, and I know it's difficult sometimes to get a flavour, but what was your sense of Labour?

• 32:06Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think, I think he has, I think he has come through. I mean, he's been handed an extraordinary gift in a sense, which is that he's up against this completely calamitous government, but he has now got the biggest poll lead ahead of the Tories since 2001. Right, he's further ahead than, than you guys were in 2002, 2003, 4, 5.

• 32:26Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 32:26Rory Stewart?

  I mean, the, the, the top rate of tax cut has been imposed by 69% of those who backed the Conservatives in 2019.

• 32:35Alastair Campbell?

  I, I do think this point about confidence is important, and I felt about, look, Keir's never going to be a Barack Obama orator, he's never going to be, you know, Merkel, although he's probably more Merkel than he is Obama, but I'll tell you what I think he does have, I think, and I think this is getting through, he's a decent person, he's a human being, I think he works incredibly hard, he's done really serious jobs all his life, he's a serious person in a way that Johnson wasn't, and I'm afraid I don't think trusses, because if you're a serious person, you don't do what she did this morning. And I'll tell you the other thing that I think is, is important about, about Keir, he's very calm, and I've noticed that when he's been getting a lot of flak from the Corbynites

• 33:19Alastair Campbell?

  and sometimes from people like me for not being strong enough on Brexit, not being aggressive, not, not having enough oomph and all the other things I sometimes say on here, he's just very, very calm and very, very steady. And I, I've just got the feeling that what happened this week, because you do, you also need luck in politics, and as you say, this kind of fell into his lap at the right time, Labour Party Conference going on, but how you use your luck is a very, very, very important thing in politics. And I, I just had a sense, I really did have a sense this week, possibly for the first time, that Labour can actually win. And once you get that psychology, it's very, very, it's powerful.

• 33:58Rory Stewart?

  I, I think they've got a very, very good chance of winning now. I think it's also true that our least favourite person in the world, Boris Johnson. Was a very nimble, unusual communicator, which Liz Truss is not. And it was more difficult for Keir Starmer to make progress because Boris Johnson's particular capacity for bullshit and invention and wit did touch parts of the country that Liz Truss is completely struggling to touch. People thought he was a kind of character related there. Do you think though, that, and what are the risks? What could go wrong? So they're leading at the moment forty five percent to twenty eight percent, largest lead that YouGov, for example, has ever recorded. So Labour looks like it's unstoppable at the moment. What could go wrong for them?

• 34:43Rory Stewart?

  If we, if we were doing this pod in two years' time and they're not the government, what would it be for?

• 34:46Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, it would be, I mean, I think the, the, Keir has tried to show that he's changed the party. I think what could go wrong is if people, those people in the centre who aren't that bothered about politics on a day to day basis, but they just had a sense about Labour moving far too, too far to the left. I think what could go wrong is if that wing of the party really started to give a sense of the party being, being very badly divided, as divided as the Tories. I think the other thing that could go wrong is, and it's not really a question of what can go wrong, but I think that Keir, obviously Keir's got to be the front and the centre of this, but I think the, the sense of the, there has to be the sense of a strength in depth, and I think that comes through in all sorts of different ways.

• 35:29Alastair Campbell?

  And the other thing I did, the one bit I think he's missing at the moment, which I hope he fills, is the sense of a, of a, I don't mean a big idea specifically in terms of a policy idea, but a big strategic message about the future. I still, I still feel that Labour talks is trapped too much in talking about the past. So for example, this week, there was lots of focus about bringing Blairism back into the party, talking about the past. I'd like to hear a lot more about, to be fair, he did it with the green energy thing. I thought that was good, but you know, artificial intelligence and robotics and the technological revolution, how we make that something that's fair. But I think, look, that where he's in a good position here is that a lot of the the great thing about having negatives thrown at you is you can turn them into positives.

• 36:13Alastair Campbell?

  So what have people been saying about the Labour Party? Don't know what they stand for. Keir, bit boring. Well, those two things can be changed very, very quickly. One, because he's not boring, he's actually quite an interesting guy. And I think once he's got this confidence thing going, I think we'll start to see that much more positively.

• 36:30Rory Stewart?

  When you say he's quite an interesting guy, I mean, I agree with you, he's a competent guy. He's a hardworking guy, he's a professional guy. And he'd probably do a better job as Prime Minister. But why do you think he's interesting?

• 36:40Alastair Campbell?

  Because, well, what I mean by that is that when I sit down and have a chat with him, I find it very interesting to talk to him because I think he thinks about things. I think he's got, you know, I'm a great believer in judging people by those that are close to them. He's got a very nice wife, he's got a very nice family, he's got good friends. I remember I went to the Arsenal Burnley game last year and we met up for a drink afterwards. I was really, you know, his friends that we went to the football with, they were the same people that he'd been going with for years and years and years. They came from different sorts of backgrounds, he's interested in their lives. And, you know, I think he's just got, he's got a very, very interesting backstory. We talked yesterday, we talked earlier in the week about how he allowed himself to be defined as this Islington lawyer. He really came from a struggling past.

• 37:25Alastair Campbell?

  And I think people find that interesting when they know about it. So I think he's somebody who, I've become more impressed by him, particularly in recent weeks and months. I like the fact as well that, for example, on the constitutional stuff, you and I have talked, we talked about this and we're both disappointed that he didn't seem to have a sense of how we felt about how badly this. So what's he done? He's outsourced it to Gordon Brown. Gordon Brown's going to come up with a big report. I'm actually quite excited about some of the things he's going to have in there.

• 37:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 37:55Alastair Campbell?

  He's also good at football, Rory, which is very, very important.

• 37:57Rory Stewart?

  Knows a lot about football. Is he an Arsenal fan? Is that why he was at the Arsenal-Burnley game?

• 38:01Alastair Campbell?

  He's an Arsenal fan. He's an Arsenal fan and he's also, he plays, I think he plays six-a-side football every week.

• 38:07Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 38:08Alastair Campbell?

  He's not quite fit, yeah.

• 38:09Rory Stewart?

  Very good. So Alan Lockey, who's his new speechwriter, if people are interested in getting into it, has written a piece which he wrote a year ago on on Medium dot com and where he talked about the kind of speech that he thought Keir Starmer should write. And actually, it's to Keir Starmer's credit, it's quite a critical speech that this guy read a year ago, saying, if I'd been writing the Labour Party conference speech, this is what Keir Starmer should have done. This is why I'm disappointed by Keir Starmer. And Keir Starmer's rewarded him by making him a speechwriter. And Alan Lockey pulled it out by delivering quite a good speech for him.

• 38:41Alastair Campbell?

  I always think it's a dangerous thing for people to think that politicians don't write their own speeches.

• 38:49Alastair Campbell?

  And that's the other thing, but when I talk about the confidence, though, obviously, I mean, I can remember, you read my diaries, I mean, some of Tony Blair's speech process were absolute nightmare for those of us who were drafting them. But ultimately, the leader and the politician has to own that speech a hundred percent. But I did think, look, I did think it was a better speech. I also thought his delivery has improved a lot. And I think, you know, he's a, yeah, I do, I do think these two things coming together this week are very, very, very significant.

• 39:21Rory Stewart?

  And I think he's a, I think one thing that he needs to do is we've got to avoid the problem that Italy's got into where basically they convinced themselves that none of the political parties had an answer to the economy. The answer, the reason why Giorgia Meloni came through is the consensus is that nobody has any idea what to do. And of course, it's true to some extent that the problems of the global economy, I believe, are now so deep, so structural that the reality is that almost any party is going to struggle. Now, you can make it much worse. Quasi Corten just made it much worse and he tripped it over the edge. But to some extent, what I think he did was a sort of Straw on the camel's back situation.

• 40:04Rory Stewart?

  And, and I think the, the challenge for Kieran is how does he prove that he's able to reassure people that he gets these guilts, he gets what's happening in global currency trading, he understands what's the problems are with British immigration energy and that under him, some kind of confidence can be restored.

• 40:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I totally agree with that. And but I'll tell you the, the other thing, last time I saw him, as it were, face to face, apart from when we did the podcast, I remember him talking about, he just, he'd actually fallen in love, just been to Burnley, and he was talking about a visit that he did there, and he'd been to Scotland, I think it was in Scotland, and he was talking about this wind farm. And he sort of came alive talking about what we could do if we were able to get this, I can't remember these at facts, but he was basically saying that this whole wind farm, wind farm was, was, was being run by stuff that had been constructed.

• 40:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, we got quite a lot of that when we interviewed him, didn't we?

• 40:59Alastair Campbell?

  That's right. Did he talk about it on the podcast?

• 41:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:02Alastair Campbell?

  And I, I think that that's, you know, I, when people sort of, so you, on one, on the one level, you could say, oh God, he's droning on about wind farms. But once people start to think this guy could be the next prime minister, they start to think, oh, he's explaining to me how the modern economy might have to work. And I, do you know one thing that I think, this goes back to our point about sort of dumbed down world in which we're living. I think a big piece that's been lost from our political debate here, definitely when Trump was president in America, definitely in Italy with Berlusconi and that whole era. I think the whole thing of the role of politicians as educators about the real state of the world. I think that bit has been lost and we've got to get that back because that is one of the reasons.

• 41:44Rory Stewart?

  But boy, is it unpopular. Boy, boy are politicians not rewarded for telling the truth.

• 41:48Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory, why do you think this podcast gets as many listeners as it does? I think one of the reasons is that actually, without talking down to people, we kind of dig into things and we try, the number of people, you won't get this as much as I do because you're in Jordan. But even this morning, two people, as I came out of the swimming pool this morning. One of them a journalist, or a former journalist, one of them who said that he worked in banking, and they both said that they listened to the podcast because they found that we could explain things about what was going on in the world in a way that they found digestible. So I think that thing about, I don't mean educating in a sort of patronizing way, I mean just informing people about the real state of the world as opposed to the

• 42:31Alastair Campbell?

  fantasy world that the Tories have talked to us about for the last, well certainly since Johnson, and I would argue since Brexit. Brexit's going very well, apparently, Rory.

• 42:41Speaker 08

  Going very, very well indeed. Okay, thank you, Alastair, very much. I think we're done for our special episode today. Goodbye from me.

• 42:47Alastair Campbell?

  And goodbye from me, and hopefully fairly soon, goodbye from Mr. Trust and Kwasi Kwarteng.

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