422. Things Can Only Get Better? Starmer's Stormy First Year

What have the Labour government achieved since the general election one year ago? What are the hardest challenges Keir Starmer must face? How has Donald Trump monetised the Presidency of the United States? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Join with a FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com, for exclusive bonus content including Rory and Alastair’s first ever miniseries The Real JD Vance, early access to Question Time episodes and live show tickets, ad free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit GetFuse.com/Politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith and Adam Thornton Assistant Producers: Evan Green, India Dunkley Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:50Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:53Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:55Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, to keep things simple, let's do first half on the UK, Labour one year on, all sorts of rebellion going on right now. And I'm really keen part two to look at Donald Trump and the monetization of the American presidency, or as one headline in the States put it, the looting of America. So I think we should do that after the break. So Rory, here we are, we're almost exactly a year to the day when Keir Starmer was elected with the landslide majority. And there's been lots of reviews and he's done a few interviews and done a bit of mayor call for about mistakes. And it looks like the week of the anniversary is going to be dominated by this welfare rebellion. We are recording before the vote

• 3:38Alastair Campbell?

  on the welfare reforms, but a lot of people will be listening to it afterwards. But what do you make of it so far?

• 3:44Rory Stewart?

  Firstly, I think to be generous to him, my goodness, modern politics is difficult. It's a really tough game. And you can see, and we'll get on to this probably in tomorrow's podcast, when we talk about new options coming out of the US where Mamdani, the potential candidate for New York mayor, shows a much more radical approach that people like Starmer could be looking at, including wealth taxes. So very, very difficult, I think, occupying the centre ground, which is what he's trying to do. I think he basically comes across as a technocrat in a world in which people aren't looking for people to tinker around the edges, but they're looking for much more revolutionary change. And I think, and I'd love to come on to you with this, I think one of the problems is

• 4:29Rory Stewart?

  Handling the modern Labour Party and what the Labour Party thinks about the world and how it views the world. So where do you want to start? Do you want to start on the kind of big picture of how he's done over the last 12 months, what's been happening the last few weeks, how this relates to positioning himself in the world or the Labour Party? Where would you like to start?

• 4:47Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, let's just start with a kind of overall analysis of how the year has gone and what the, if you like, looking back what the story of this year has been. I think there are two stories. I think one has been, I'm afraid, the steady consolidation of the return of Nigel Farage to the centre of British politics. And I think that's a story partly about Labour, but more about the Conservatives, that the Conservatives seem just to have imploded after the general election. And I think the story of Labour, you and I regularly, when we're out and about doing things, and I always do this with audiences, given these three choices, has the government performed as you expected, better or worse than you expected? And I would say that there's still goodwill, but I think disappointment

• 5:32Alastair Campbell?

  is the word that keeps coming up, people just a bit disappointed. Not sort of, some people are furious, but not kind of, not the sort of fury that there was with the Conservatives towards the end. But I think disappointment, that a government that's come in with such a majority, with such a mandate for change, has just left people feeling a little bit, a bit underwhelmed. And the point about the modern Labour Party, I don't sense that this is a party or a government at ease with itself. And I don't think that's necessarily because of any great ideological divides either. I think by and large that those MPs who were elected were quite happy about the programme on which they were elected. But I think they feel, one, that they're not listened to. And of

• 6:15Alastair Campbell?

  course, every MP thinks they should be listened to. I don't think there's ever been a Downing Street that hasn't had MPs from the party of government saying, they don't care about us, they just think we're lobby fodder. But I think we weren't great at it at the start, but we got a lot better as time went on. You do have to listen to MPs. This welfare rebellion was a long time in the brewing. You've been hearing from people, I've been hearing from people. And I think that there's a great quote from George W. Bush, he said that when he arrived at the White House, he thought politics is all about policy. And when he left, you realised it was all about relationships. And I don't think they're good at working the many, many, many relationships that

• 6:57Alastair Campbell?

  you have to work at. And if people listen to leading this week, we talked to the Cypriot president, Nikos Christodoulides, and he was very interesting because, of course, he could not have been warmer about Keir Starmer. And what it says to me is that Keir has been very good at building those sorts of relations. But of course, because he has been so focused on foreign policy, Ukraine, Gaza, Trump, G7, NATO, all this stuff, which you have to do as Prime Minister, maybe the domestic, both in terms of relationship and policy, has been neglected.

• 7:28Rory Stewart?

  First thing you mentioned is this incredible story around Reform. So Reform famously came out of that election where you and I were up all night in that Channel 4 studio with a very small handful of seats, five seats. They are now in a position, according to some of the internal polling that people are seeing, and that this is the sort of stuff that's scaring the Conservative Party, where they could be on track for 260 seats after the next election. I mean, I guess you would say, believe it when we see it. But one of the things that happens in the first past the place system is when you get a critical mass of votes, you can actually flip the system in your direction. So the Tories could end up with 40 or 50 seats and Reform with 265. And Labour probably with

• 8:12Rory Stewart?

  fewer seats than Reform, but may be able to cobble together a coalition with Lib Dems, Greens, SNP, in which case suddenly British politics is much more like European, putting together these coalitions to keep up the firing. Second thing, this point about what the problem is. Well, there's one problem, you're absolutely right, which is relationships. And the second problem, I guess, is whether we call it narrative, or story, or ideology, or what's the big idea coming out of this government? What does it really stand for? And let's get on to that in a second. Just my pennyworth on relationships. I spent an hour on the phone with a friend of mine who's a Labour MP who's sitting on the House of Commons on Sunday. And they were really interesting for me because part of it was

• 8:55Rory Stewart?

  a story that would have been familiar for Conservative MPs, talking about David Cameron. So sorry that I remember when I first entered the House of Commons. This leadership is out of touch. They don't really understand what it's like on the street. Still quite a lot of residual anger about the way in which Keir Starmer brought in bright young things from the centre and pushed aside longstanding Labour activists in constituencies and really annoyed local parties. And I guess some of that may be about some of the children of your friends, maybe some of these sort of glamorous, this phrase red princes. Some of the people that were brought in over the last few weeks, the general sense that longstanding Labour activists have been displaced for bright young things.

• 9:36Rory Stewart?

  Gaza, of course, which we've talked about. Remember before the election, Keir Starmer gave an interview in which he appeared to say that blocking food from Gaza was in accordance with international law. And then a few days later clarified and said that wasn't what he meant. But the MP I was talking to said, there's something wrong there. They got in touch with the whips within minutes of Starmer's interviews. And within a few hours, there were many, many of them saying, you're going to have to clarify what you were saying here. And it took nearly a week for him to really come out and clarify. So there's that stuff. And then I think the final thing is the general sense, and this is what I want to come back to you on. And I've been talking to a number of former Tory colleagues,

• 10:21Rory Stewart?

  you know, Daniel Finkelstein, Matthew Paris. I've also been talking to Tom McTague, who's just taken over as the new editor of the New Statesman. One of the points is just, this is Labour. Daniel Finkelstein's got an interesting point, which is we always have this idea that you can be more radical challenging your own party base. This is called the Nixon to China story. And Daniel Finkelstein is a bit sceptical about Nixon to China because he says, actually, if Labour's leaders start challenging their own party by cutting welfare and pushing ahead with mini austerity, actually, it's incredibly dangerous. Anyway, over to you on that because I guess part of this used to turn story is winter fuel allowance and now disability benefits where

• 11:06Rory Stewart?

  essentially the Labour Party in the House of Commons has said, I think, hold a second, we're Labour, we're not in the business of cutting money for disabled people. We're not in the business of cutting money for pensions.

• 11:17Alastair Campbell?

  On the specifics of the issue, I think it's almost like the rebellion or those who have decided that they were prepared to vote down the government on the second reading of a bill. Which is quite a big thing to do. I think it's partly a build up of things. And it does relate to this point about them asking themselves. What is Labour for? Because you talk about these bright young things that were brought in. Lots of bright young, actually, one of the best things that the Labour Party did, I think, at the last, before the last election. Was really to focus on candidate selection. Get good people from all sorts of different backgrounds, including some good young people. Get them into seats that were winnable. They win those seats. Then I think a lot of them are sitting around thinking, well, okay. Now, what are we supposed to do? When I was walking into the studio, I was listening to um.

• 12:02Alastair Campbell?

  An interview with one young MP who said he hasn't met Keir Starmer since the election. Now, Keir Starmer is incredibly busy. But I can, you know, I remember there was a point, Tony Blair was very, very busy. And by the way, we did have a welfare rebellion in the first year. I think we had just under fifty MPs. Voted against what we were doing to bring in changes on lone parent benefits. But there came a point, I can remember Sally Morgan, who was in charge of our sort of, you know. Political management within Downing Street, reaching out to MPs, to the whips and so forth. And she ended up advocating that Tony literally had to carve out time in the diary every week. Where they would come in, sit around the table with Tony, whether in his office at the Commons or in Downing Street.

• 12:44Alastair Campbell?

  We, we did it region by region. Sometimes we did it interest group by interest group. But it was just a way of sort of making them feel heard. And above all, I think, more importantly, being listened to. And I think what a lot of people have felt on this, they'd been saying for ages. I, Fiona and I were in France a while back. This is a few months ago now, just after the welfare bill was announced. And we met somebody who's actually in the House of Lords, but former MP and said. My constituency, you're talking about something like six out of ten people are going to get hit by this bill? That is unsustainable if you're an MP in that constituency. So, and by the way, Alan Campbell, no relation, the chief whip, he was starting to be briefed against, as you

• 13:28Alastair Campbell?

  know, he wasn't reading the mood of the PLP, et cetera, et cetera. The whips have been telling them about this for weeks and months. So I think there does have to be a reset about the relationship with the PLP. Otherwise, this will happen again.

• 13:40Rory Stewart?

  So again, the MPs I've been speaking to, and admittedly some of them are on the left of the Labour Party, but the consistent story is we've been flagging these problems for a very, very, very long time. Now, some of it will annoy if you're Rachel Reeves listening to this, or Starmer listening to this, because predictably, when you're against something, you couch it in terms of all we're asking for is an independent review, all we're asking for is an impact assessment, the government's pushing ahead with this without thinking about enough. And of course, I recognise that, because when I was an MP, trying to stop anything that David Cameron was doing, I was always like, well, you know, I'm not against the policy, I just want a bit more time to look at, do an impact assessment.

• 14:18Alastair Campbell?

  The consequence of that in this situation are that already they have moved the debate into by how much is Rachel Reeves going to have to raise tax next time round. So there are consequences to the choices that you make, and there are consequences to the choices that you don't make. But I think that has fuelled the sense of disillusionment, because there's all this stuff about, you know, Morgan McSweeney, Keir Starmer's chief of staff, saying that, you know, we need to show them who's boss and de-select a few and threaten them with losing the whip and all this sort of stuff. And once you have MPs saying, I'm not really buying that anymore, then psychologically, within the PLP, you have a bit of a problem.

• 14:58Rory Stewart?

  Just to remind people, in the early stage of the government, Keir Starmer was very, very radical with stripping people of the whip, including people like, well, Jeremy Corbyn famously expelled from the party, but then rebels over the two-child benefit had the whip suspended.

• 15:12Alastair Campbell?

  John McDonnell, people like that.

• 15:13Rory Stewart?

  And at the time, I thought, whoa, this is quite extreme, because in fact, Cameron didn't strip the whip off people for those kinds of things. When people rebelled over Brexit, for example, in the early years, they were still allowed to remain in the party. But it's now changed to a policy which is quite dramatically in the other direction of a sense that there are these continual U-turns. And I was trying to think about what Tony Blair would have done, or what Margaret Thatcher would have done, or what John Major would have done in these kinds of situations. Major oddly would have made a real business of it, probably mistakenly. So over Maastricht and this kind of things, Major would try to make all these votes a

• 15:56Rory Stewart?

  vote of confidence in his leadership and eventually triggered an entire leadership battle to try to reassert authority. So probably Starmer is correct in saying that you turning on this is the lesser evil compared to turning the whole thing into an existential crisis. But it does mean that the story that we got in the run up to the election, which was the Starmerism, insofar as there is Starmerism, or I don't know, Rachel Reevesism, is a very kind of fiscally cautious, let's keep taxes down, let's not borrow too much, let's cut public spending, is now running against the reality of what the heart and soul of the Labour Party is. And the heart and soul of Labour Party is about social justice.

• 16:36Rory Stewart?

  And I don't think any Labour leader has actually tried. I think we underestimated how radical what Reeves and Starmer were trying to do was, because we gently thought, well, it's a bit like Blairite centrism, but it isn't really. Because when you came in, partly the public finances were in a different state. So actually, in the end, Gordon Brown was able to increase NHS spending by, I don't know, what it was, 30, 40% over time. Yes, you controlled public spending, but you weren't actually going for this kind of swingeing welfare cuts. I can't think of a Labour leader who's actually tried to do stuff which, according to the

• 17:18Rory Stewart?

  Labour MPs I'm talking to, would have meant hundreds of thousands more people going into poverty, tens of thousands more children going into poverty. Am I right?

• 17:25Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the front page of the Financial Times today says that even with the concessions that have already been made, you're still talking about the possibility of 150,000 more people going into poverty. Look, I think you started right at the beginning by saying you shouldn't underestimate how hard politics is today, and it is, it's hard everywhere. I mean, I've been quite surprised just the extent of media hostility to Keir Starmer is sort of pretty relentless now. And so they're they're operating in a very, very difficult environment. In those circumstances, I think that I'll quote another American president, Bill Clinton. He said, anything that goes wrong in your politics or your life is a teachable moment. So the question is, this is clearly something that's gone wrong.

• 18:08Alastair Campbell?

  This last, this, the handling of this bill, the content and the handling of the bill have gone wrong. And there's a danger, by the way, that it continues to go wrong because the latest argument that, you know, will be played out in the Commons today, Tuesday, is that the, there, there is a kind of a timing issue between consultation and implementation. In other words, implementation is going to come before proper full consultation with disabled people and the groups that the, that represent them. And so I think the, the, the teachable moment part of this is actually when you're making these big reforms, the announcement is not the moment. The moment you have to turn that whole thing into a much longer term process.

• 18:52Alastair Campbell?

  Otherwise, these resentments that build up, they suddenly spill out. And so I think there will have to be a change in the way that number 10 operates, the way that government business is handled. And the debates around this, because the point is, if you were, if you voted Labour, or you became a Labour MP and gave up whatever you were doing before to become a Labour MP, and then you find that, okay, I'm totally on board for sorting the public finances, we've got to fix the foundations, totally on board for emphasizing the Conservatives have left an absolute car crash. But then as you fix the foundations, which is what they say they're doing, and I support that as a sort of mindset, then for your first big battle essentially to be about winter fuel allowance.

• 19:37Alastair Campbell?

  And basically done not because of any sort of value judgment about rich people shouldn't have it, people like me, your mum, we shouldn't have it. But much more, we've got to make the numbers add up. And then the welfare debate, they've never fully established in the public and the parliamentary mind, is this about saving money or is it about trying to get people into work who could work? So those debates have clashed along and that says to me that the sort of intellectual thinking and the rigor. That you should apply to big reform wasn't being done in the in the development of policy.

• 20:10Rory Stewart?

  I think that this line that keeps coming back and and Tom Baldwin, who you know quite well, has written, as has Josh Glancy, as has Tom McTague, there have been all these one year on big interviews and they're remarkably repetitive when you read them back to back.

• 20:26Alastair Campbell?

  Tom's is the best, though. Tom's is by far the best.

• 20:28Rory Stewart?

  Tom's is Tom Baldwin or Tom McTague, your friend Tom.

• 20:32Alastair Campbell?

  Tom Baldwin.

• 20:32Rory Stewart?

  Your friend Tom Baldwin.

• 20:33Alastair Campbell?

  Tom Baldwin, who was singing our praises on a on a rival podcast.

• 20:36Rory Stewart?

  No, I think Tom McTague's is brilliant too. Let me just give a little shout out to Tom McTague. Tom McTague gets to the heart of something.

• 20:43Alastair Campbell?

  What have you got against Josh Glancy? Is he just disappearing?

• 20:46Rory Stewart?

  I like Josh Glancy's too. Listen, on the repetitive thing, it's interesting. You can see that all of them have been promised. And it's an interesting question that three major things, The Observer, The Financial Times, The New Statesman, have all been promised these one-year-on big story. And they've been given a lot of access. And Starmer keeps coming back to certain central themes, the death of his brother, the firebombing against his house, the trip to Ukraine. And he keeps apologising, I got this wrong, I got that wrong, this has been a teachable moment, I shouldn't have done this. He wants to emphasise in all of them that his speech about immigration, where he used this this phrase about a nation of strangers.

• 21:24Alastair Campbell?

  A land of strangers, yeah.

• 21:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that he regretted it and he didn't really realise what he was doing and he'd done it because he was stressed at work. But one of the things that Tom McTague gets to, which I thought was really interesting, is that he says to Starmer, after spending a long time with him, essentially, I think the deal is that Tom comes in, he says, I've just become the editor of The New Statesman, you've been in a year, this is your big chance to lay out what your big vision is. You keep saying people don't understand your policy. Let's really pin this down. Let's make this a story. This is what Starmer's about. And he tries and tries and tries. And at the end of the interview, he says, listen, I don't know whether I'm missing something, but I'm getting the impression that you basically don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the country.

• 22:08Rory Stewart?

  You don't really have a kind of big radical new idea because your fundamental belief is that basically things are okay, that the problem is that the Tories were more than a bit incompetent, useless and evil. But if we can get back to managing things, well, things will be fine. The basic economic structure is fine, the basic tax settlement's fine, the NHS is fine, just needs to be managed better. And Starmer essentially says, yes. And I think Tom's insight is that is very unlikely to work in modern politics, where most people in Britain think things are not fine. They think the system is broken and government's broken, politicians are out of touch, and they need something much, much more radical.

• 22:53Alastair Campbell?

  Tom, the other Tom, Tom Baldwin, and this is becoming a little bit sort of Westminster bubble, as two podcasters discuss three interviews with a prime minister one year on. But I think, I think of all of them, Tom Baldwin is the one who knows Keir best in terms of having spent more time with him. And what I think Tom would say to what you've just said, is that he doesn't believe the country's broken, because he doesn't believe that British people are broken. And he doesn't want to spend his whole time running the country down. Sort of leave that to Nigel Farage, as it were.

• 23:27Rory Stewart?

  Although he did try it, didn't he? He had that famous speech last summer where he basically did say, everything's crap, Britain's broken. That was the joke of, which you've produced before, which I think we took from Daniel Finkelstein, which is, Britain is broken, let's not do anything about it.

• 23:40Alastair Campbell?

  But the point about, about that, in these interviews, he has been saying that he, one of his regrets was that he felt he was too negative about the country when he came in, because they were trying to pin so much on the Tories. I actually do think a narrative that can work is that the Tories took this country to a breaking point. And we feel that right across the piece in our public services, in our social structures, in the way local government works, et cetera. It's not broken, but they got damn close. We have got to fix it. Fixing it's going to take time, fixing it's going to take difficult things. But here's the better tomorrow you're going to have. Don't fall for the better yesterday that Nigel Farage is offering.

• 24:18Rory Stewart?

  Fixing it, though, is interesting because if you look at the details of what fixing it looks like, it's not, and we're going to come on tomorrow's podcast to talk about a Mamdani in New York. It's not a radical fixing. And I remember this when we interviewed the first minister of Wales. So that's a really extreme example. I mean, Wales is in real trouble economically, socially. The fundamental economic indicators in Wales are terrifying. I mean, that's a nation which I'm afraid, if you looked at from a macroeconomic point of view, is not doing well. But I remember the first minister of Wales, when I tried to encourage her to say, is there something wrong with our structures, our economic system? Maybe I was trying to invite her to be a bit more left wing and say, actually,

• 25:01Rory Stewart?

  markets aren't really working inequalities to extreme. We need to rethink the way our whole economy works. She didn't want to do that. She basically said, no, no, the basic economic structures are fine and we're gonna fix it. And I think the same is true with Starmer and Reeves. I mean, their analysis is not completely different to the analysis that a lot of my Conservative colleagues were pushing for. So let's look, you know, non-dom taxes, well, Jeremy Hunt had started down that track. VAT on private schools, that was something Michael Gove really wanted to do. Investment in infrastructure, well, a lot of that was kind of leveling up Boris Johnson. He put a lot of money into that and there's been some shifting around where it goes. But it's pretty similar. I mean, Rishi Sunak wants to put a lot of money into supercomputers and AI.

• 25:44Rory Stewart?

  Peter Carr wants to put money into supercomputers and AI, but in a different way, but it's broadly the same story. Housing, again, as I've said, probably the thing I'm most excited for from Labour, I think, most potential. But again, it was something that Cameron was trying to do an enormous amount, put a lot of talented housing ministers in and failed. So it still feels as though he's hoping that he can fix it. I don't know, it's as though he's inherited a kind of old banger. And he thinks that with a kind of relatively modest budget, he can get the car running pretty smoothly again. And you know, a little bit of work on the engine, a little bit of work on the paintwork. Let's get a few more thousand teachers into school. Let's put a little bit more money into the NHS, everything will be fine.

• 26:29Rory Stewart?

  Whereas there are a lot of people out there, I think from the left of the Labour Party to Farage on the right, who are saying, ah, this, this old banger is really broken. And you're not going to be able to continue to drive it for the next 15, 20 years, just with this, the kind of money you're putting into it.

• 26:45Alastair Campbell?

  I've, as you know, going to quite a lot of schools and I've been struck in the last two or three that I've been in, just how disappointed and defeated people feel. There was one head teacher I saw who said, look, it's great that, you know, free school meals, but we kind of, we have that in London anyway. And, and he actually said, I don't see that as an education policy, it's a child poverty policy. Something else he said, which I thought was really interesting, was that he said, something happened during the pandemic that we don't yet understand.

• 27:20Alastair Campbell?

  He, this is a primary school where he was saying that some of the really young kids are not toilet trained. The, the, the rise in special educational needs is off the scale. And of course, as we go further down the track towards will she, won't she have to put up taxes? One of the things that's coming into, into view is, oh, well, are we spending too much on special educational needs? And the answer is, well, we're spending a lot more, but that's because the need has grown and we haven't fully got to the bottom of why. So another, another head teacher I saw recently said that I'm literally running to stand still and I cannot deliver proper education for the kids who are in here. Now, this is okay. Labour would say, well, we've only been a year.

• 28:05Alastair Campbell?

  What I would say is that at this stage of a year in, Under New Labour, David Blunkett in education, teachers and head teachers had lots of excitement about things that they had heard were coming. And I think that's where, what you're saying, what I think I'm saying, what these guys are saying, there is at the moment a gap between what people feel about the state of the country and the policy solutions that are being offered to fill that gap. And I think the first year, okay, you can give them some credit for fixing some of the foundations and real wages are rising, where streeting is getting the waiting list down, some houses are getting built, although the numbers are pretty terrifyingly

• 28:50Alastair Campbell?

  low when you look at the pledge of 1.5 million. But there is going to have to be an acceleration of policy, momentum, change. Don't forget, it's change that they were elected to deliver. And Keir Starmer's clearly not somebody who's comfortable in the big narrative thing. I get that. And, you know, when I heard, I heard Tom Borland talking about this earlier, and he was, he was saying that people are sick of being offered big change that never comes. So actually, maybe over time, this style will work.

• 29:22Rory Stewart?

  I, I don't buy this Tom Borland line. I think he's right about Starmer. I think Starmer doesn't believe in Starmerism. And I can completely empathise with that because I felt, you know, like Starmer, I'd been a sort of civil servant, and I felt I'd been quite proud of what I'd done in my jobs in the past, and therefore I could do the same thing when I became a minister. And my experience becoming a minister is, politics is completely different to managing a business or a civil service department. You're not really in the business of just rolling your sleeves up, doing a seminar, looking at the evidence, making a kind of marginal decision and then weighing it up. And what makes the difference between a great politician,

• 30:03Rory Stewart?

  a poor politician, isn't how many hours you work, how smart you are, how careful you are. It's the big story. And I think that it's never been true that great politicians can get by without a very, very clear narrative and vision. And it's Even more true today in the world of social media, in this modern world, that's impossible. It it just doesn't work. And I don't know what Tom Baldwin's political experience is, that he somehow thinks this is okay. I mean, it's fine as a way of expressing Starmer. It's a fine as a way. I mean, I remember when I was running to be Prime Minister, trying to say to my team, I'm very suspicious of big ideas. I'm very suspicious of slogans.

• 30:45Rory Stewart?

  I just want to roll my sleeves up and get things done. I just want to make things work better. Basically, you could sense they were thinking, ah, this doesn't quite work. And of course, now, looking back on it, I realise that the only things I really managed to achieve were much bigger, bolder. You know, I'm going to resign in prisons unless violence comes down. I'm going to double the climate spending in DIFIT. And so I I don't quite get the Baldwin. I can't quite believe it. It doesn't seem to me that it can work, this, there's no Starmerism. I don't believe in big ideas.

• 31:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it worked for Albanese, similar sort of approach. I think the other thing that Tom's doing is taking the experience of Keir Starmer as a leader of the opposition. Don't forget, he was written off as leader of the opposition at several points.

• 31:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 31:27Alastair Campbell?

  And basically saying, he keeps being written off, people underestimate him, and that plays to his advantage over time. Where I think it is different is that government is so much harder and so much more complicated. You know, maybe we maybe before we go to the break, just just sort of wrap up on, but by sort of reflecting on what they can do better in the second year. Because, believe me, I was talking to one of the key strategy people recently, and he said, well, we've got time. You guys keep going on about, you know, you're going to run. But the fact is, you don't have that much time. A year has gone. And there is still, I always talk about three currencies in politics. You've got the economic stuff, the value of your pound goes up and down, the strength of your

• 32:09Alastair Campbell?

  economy goes up and down. But the other two currencies that really matter are reputation and goodwill. You need goodwill for when you have these really tough times. So what they've found is that actually, they've drained within the PLP, the Parliamentary Labour Party, they've drained quite a lot of the goodwill currency. And because they haven't delivered a lot of like, for example, getting the welfare bill through without this kerfuffle and this massive debate and rebellion, that has drained their reputation for competence. So that is their reputation. So those currencies have to be re, you have to redevelop them. You have to win back the goodwill. You have to win back the reputation. And then you have to keep going on with the difficult decisions you've

• 32:50Alastair Campbell?

  got to make. And I think the, the, the one Labour MP I was talking to, who, not one of the new ones, but somebody who probably is in that category that feels a little bit ignored and overlooked. She said that, you know, when you guys were in charge, right? We moaned a lot. We did moan a lot, but we sort of, we sort of felt you guys knew what you were doing most of the time. And that gave us, and also we knew that you, you were at least reaching out. And you might be reaching out. I mean, I heard Diane Abbott being interviewed on the radio the other day, and you know, Diane Abbott, who's probably levelled more criticism my and Tony's way the most. But she did make that point. She said, look, you know, Tony, I disagree with so much of what they did. But the phone was always

• 33:33Alastair Campbell?

  there. They, they were always willing to talk to us and so forth. So I think there's got to be that resetting relationships. And then with the public, you know, I'll keep saying this to Kim, I'll keep saying it publicly as well. I think this idea that a narrative is somehow spin, a narrative is the means by which you exercise leadership to people who are not listening all the time.

• 33:57Rory Stewart?

  I've always believed in your view there because narrative is leadership. Narrative is telling the entire civil service what the big idea is. I remember Margaret Thatcher's ministers saying, the great power of the narrative is that it allows delegation. That every one of her ministers could answer the question, what would Margaret Thatcher be doing? And all the civil servants understood what was supposed to be happening. Two final things from me. I think the Labour Party isn't acknowledging that right at the centre of our problems is that our government structures are broken. My 10 years was all about learning how this parliament, this electoral system, this party system, this ministerial governmental system.

• 34:40Rory Stewart?

  Is really broken and just doesn't work and needs very, very fundamental constitutional reform. And the second thing is my experience from Cumbria, which was that many of my constituents were bewildered by the fact that they were told that the country was getting ever wealthier, but that they couldn't keep things that they'd taken for granted in the 1940s and 50s. So if the country's getting wealthier, why do we have to lose our community hospital? Why are we losing our fire station? Why are we losing our police station? Much of my life as a constituency MP was demonstrating to try to keep things. I was endlessly out fighting to save things all the time. And so the experience in particularly in Northern England is this government, it's

• 35:25Rory Stewart?

  not that things are remaining the same. It feels as though things are getting worse. Some thought needs to go from the government's point of view on what's going on there. You know, why do farmers feel their lives are getting worse? Why do teachers feel they're close to breaking point? Why do communities feel so angry and ignored? And I don't think I'm getting from the government an analysis of that problem or a solution.

• 35:48Alastair Campbell?

  So final point, Rory, marks out of 10 on the five missions, growth.

• 35:51Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's, it's fine, but pretty anemic. I mean, it's, it's, it's all about, you know, other countries are doing really rubbish. So maybe we're doing this, but it's certainly not enough growth to generate anything.

• 36:01Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, health?

• 36:04Rory Stewart?

  Just, just came out of a hospital, talked to you. And I thought it, as many, many of the old strength we need, says the NHS, I think the problem there is going to be productivity. We've put a lot more doctors in. We're not yet seeing the results in terms of patient outcomes.

• 36:17Alastair Campbell?

  Crime?

• 36:19Rory Stewart?

  Again, people pretty angry about that. And most of the polling suggests they're not cutting through on that.

• 36:24Alastair Campbell?

  Class ceiling, getting rid of the class ceiling?

• 36:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, again, it's, it's not, it's tinkering. It's not social democracy. It's not, we're going to create a profoundly more equal society. It's, we're going to do a few billion here, a few billion there. But fundamentally, Britain will remain unequal.

• 36:39Alastair Campbell?

  And the fifth mission, the green one?

• 36:41Rory Stewart?

  Well, there, they're being much more imaginative. They're spending much more money. And there, I suspect they may much, make much more progress. I, I guess the question is, how does that fifth priority really work for voters and the economy?

• 36:52Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. So Rory Stewart's well out of five.

• 36:56Rory Stewart?

  How would you mark them on those five?

• 36:58Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, growth, I would say five, five out of 10. If they're really serious about growth, you have to look at every policy through the lens of growth, and that would absolutely say, get back in the customs union. I've been saying that fairly consistently. Um, on the, on the education one, I'd, I'd have been more positive until the last week, when I'd been inside a few schools. Health, I think they're doing better. Green, I agree with you, I think they're doing better. Crime, jury very out, and I think that they, that the Home Office was a bit of a loser in the spending round, so that's going to be tough for the police.

• 37:30Rory Stewart?

  Time for a break.

• 37:33Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still add. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 38:22Speaker 05

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 38:33Speaker 06

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 38:39Speaker 07

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

• 38:43Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 38:46Speaker 07

  I'm not the first then.

• 38:47Speaker 06

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 38:58Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 39:01Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, there's lots we can talk about in relation to Donald Trump, but I've been logging a lot of the stuff that relates to the money that he and his family are making. And it's beyond, it's off the scale.

• 39:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, I was talking to a constitutional lawyer at Harvard. And he said to me that the biggest, most unambiguous story is corruption. In a sense, the jury's out on quite a lot of the other democratic backsliding, you know, is he going to respect the courts, isn't he? What's he going to do with the federal, local? But the one thing that's changed in a way that has taken us almost back to the 19th century is the old corruption with a capital O has come back into American politics.

• 39:47Alastair Campbell?

  Do you mean the capital C?

• 39:49Rory Stewart?

  O and C maybe, old corruption.

• 39:51Alastair Campbell?

  The O.

• 39:52Rory Stewart?

  The old corruption was a big revolutionary symbol. And of course, it feels like 18th century British politics. I mean, it's the stuff we tried to clear up with the Victorians.

• 40:03Alastair Campbell?

  But it's also a very, very, very modern version of it. So I was reading something the other day, his crypto earnings now are probably greater than his property earnings, which is pretty cool. And last night, Rory, just think of all the things that are going on in the world now, that the American president could go on to his money-making Truth Social post network and say something. So this is the one from last night, from the President of the United States. Trump fragrances are here. They're called Victory 4547 because they're all about winning, strength and success for men and women. Get yourself a bottle and don't forget to get one for your loved ones too. Enjoy, have fun, keep winning. And there's a link to the website and a picture.

• 40:48Alastair Campbell?

  There you are, Rory. It's a slim-looking Donald Trump done in the form of an Oscar on top of the thing that you spray with his signature across the top. Now, you're laughing, we can all, we could all laugh at it, but can you imagine, not just any president in history, can you imagine any current world leader doing that? And then you've got Trump sneakers, you've got Trump watches.

• 41:10Rory Stewart?

  It is pretty amazing because because you're right, the reason we don't get any other current world leader doing it is that even in the poorest countries in the developing world, corruption has gone completely central to everything in politics. I mean, obviously, if you're a Nigerian politician, or if you're in China, or you're in Vietnam, or Cambodia, or in Indonesia, corruption is the number one thing you say about your politicians, and it's the number one thing that your president tries to pretend to be cracking down on. In fact, you know, most of the electoral campaign, if you're running to be Nigerian president, is I'm going to eliminate corruption, right? So you can't in those countries go around blatantly taking, you know,

• 41:52Rory Stewart?

  jets from other countries, you can't go around launching meme coins, NFTs, generating money in this kind of way. You have to try to do it secretly.

• 42:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:03Rory Stewart?

  Trump's totally open style implies firstly that America oddly, he must sense that America doesn't really care about corruption, that his voters are not worried in the way that Nigerian voters are about corruption. Otherwise, he wouldn't be doing it so openly.

• 42:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, where you're right, he's definitely doing it absolutely openly, and that's what a lot of the Republicans, some of whom must feel very uncomfortable about this, their line of defense is, well, look, this is all out in the open. He's doing it all out in the open. But it's now it's now reaching over into policy. So for example, he is yet again on his Truth Social, where he, you know, makes a lot of money out of that as well. He's been posting about Netanyahu's court case, his corruption case. And he's been saying that Netanyahu is a great guy, and he's a war leader. Leave him alone, drop this case. It's like the witch hunt against me. There's a story today about Bukhely in El Salvador wanting some of these gang members. He wants them sent back.

• 43:07Alastair Campbell?

  Not because he's, you know, cares about their welfare or anything else, because he's worried about whether they would testify to some of this, maybe the connections there. So he's sort of linking up with other leaders that have got corruption issues outstanding against as well. But really, just to go through some of those, you mentioned the meme coin. Okay, a state-owned entity in the UAE has put in $2 billion into this thing.

• 43:32Rory Stewart?

  Into the meme coin?

• 43:33Alastair Campbell?

  Into the meme coin. So they reckon they've raised, and they reckon they've made about 320 million in trading fees. They reckon Baron Trump, the young one, has earned up to 40 million because he's a, he's one of the founders. The other way they're making a lot of money is through legal settlements with the media, and also Jeff Bezos paying Malani $40 million.

• 43:55Rory Stewart?

  To make a documentary on Amazon?

• 43:57Alastair Campbell?

  To make a documentary on Amazon, which may or may not get aired.

• 44:01Rory Stewart?

  Can I just put in a small footnote on the meme coin to remind people? So Javier Selgas, of one of the big shipping companies in Mexico, bought $20 million of Donald Trump's meme coin with the money from his publicly listed company. And in his ruling with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is the big US regulator, he stated that this was a good use of the money of a publicly listed company of shareholders, because he knows that if he buys meme coins from Trump, they will then get a concession on the trading terms that they get with the United States, and therefore the company will be able to

• 44:42Rory Stewart?

  make money. So that it's not even a secret. The thing there is that you get a statement to the SEC literally saying, acquit pro quo is you buy these meme coins, and in return, we can be confident that our company will benefit. The same, we've talked about this in the past, you can also buy these things in order to get the Department of Justice to drop its investigations against you. So.

• 45:06Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'll give you one. Justin Sun, who's a Chinese billionaire, who photographed recently wearing a $100,000 Donald Trump watch, he spent $75 million buying crypto tokens from this thing, World Liberty Financial, which is the thing that's set up by the Trump family and the Whitcoffs, his sort of great special envoy doing Marco Rubio's job. Five weeks after Trump became president, the SEC, that's the Securities and Exchange Commission, they dropped a civil fraud case against this guy. Um. Now, could be entirely coincidental, could be. However, I think it's fair to say that we're talking here about somebody who's not averse. We keep talking about him being

• 45:48Alastair Campbell?

  transactional, a transactional leader. That's the sort of transaction that we're talking about. And to cap it all, you have Eric Trump, one of the sons who's sort of does, he and Don Jr. are doing a lot of the business for the family. He does an interview in the Financial Times at the weekend, where he actually presents the family as victims. We would be making so much more money if my dad had not gone into politics. If there's one family that's not benefited from politics, it's the Trump family, you know.

• 46:18Rory Stewart?

  And, and he says, he also says, I have to look after my children. It's very unfair. I've got a, I've got a, you know, why, why am I not allowed to earn the money to look after my children?

• 46:26Alastair Campbell?

  And me, and meanwhile, 5.5 billion deal for a golf resort in Qatar, uh, which will include a seven kilometer long entertainment district, 18 hole golf course, and a legends theme park. And that's a deal led by a real estate company owned by Qatar's sovereign wealth fund. So we're seeing, why did he, why was his first trip to the Middle East, uh, not to Israel and Gaza, but to, to the rich Gulf Petro states? Answer, because he was doing loads of deals with them.

• 46:56Rory Stewart?

  Can I quickly just remind people on the meme coin? Because I, I know some listeners will be less, less into this. So, um, the, the meme coin is you basically buy something that would be like, um, the virtual equivalent of getting a kind of gold coin with Alistair Campbell's face on it. Let's say Alistair issued in, in the real world.

• 47:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 47:16Rory Stewart?

  You could collect, uh, 5,000 lovely gold coins with Alistair's face on it, right?

• 47:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, even I would buy that.

• 47:22Rory Stewart?

  Right. So these things, these, these are the virtual equivalents. Now, there, there are a couple of great advantages to them for the Trump family in making money. Um, one of them is that they are classified under US law as collectibles rather than investments. So they completely escape normal scrutiny about pump and dump.

• 47:44Rory Stewart?

  Conflicts of interest, mis-selling. So in the normal world, if I issued a product, let's say I was issuing, I don't know, an insurance policy, or I was telling you that I was going to build a monument and you were giving me money. A lot of law exists in the US to protect you as the investor to stop me running a Ponzi scheme, to stop me effectively stealing all your money on false pretenses, doing nothing with it, and then running off with it, right? But once something's classified as a collectible, it escapes most of those rules. And of course, they make it even easier for themselves because they locate some of the jurisdictions outside the United States, so there are trading platforms located in China.

• 48:26Rory Stewart?

  The second thing that it gives you, which is really helpful for corruption, is you have a leaderboard with a transparent wallet, which lets you know who's bought the most of them. So you can know that the Chinese investor has bought, you know, tens of millions of that. The top buyers get the Trump watch, that's part of the deal, and then they get invited to dinner in Mar-a-Lago if you've been a big donor. So it's a beautiful thing. And you, as the Trump family, get two advantages. Number one, you can pump and dump. So one of the things that happened is the prices massively spiked. Let's say the Alastair Campbell coin went up to $85 and then dropped down. But of course, what one assumes is

• 49:11Rory Stewart?

  that the Trump family sold at the top of the market. The price came tumbling down and everybody who bought lost. And the second thing is it's a beautiful way, totally unregulated, of I buy the Alastair Campbell coin and in return, I get access to Alastair Campbell and presumably the influence that Alastair Campbell can come to bring. But this is the President of the United States. This is not my friend Alastair.

• 49:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but also, if you think about, I mean, let's just assume, I mean, our friend Scaramucci says that Eric and Don Jr. are both dumb as rocks, but let's assume they're not. Let's actually say that they're really clever, they're really smart, and if they were in business and nobody knew who they were, they'd be really, really effective, okay? Even if you assume that, the truth is, what they're doing all the time is trading on the marketing of one of the most famous names in the world, aka Trump. So when they're going and doing these projects that they're doing at the moment in Saudi, in Qatar, in the UAE, in Serbia, in India, in Oman, they're doing all these deals and

• 50:14Alastair Campbell?

  they get through the door largely because their name is Trump. And I think the definition of corruption is the use of your political position to advance your own personal interest. Now, they say, well, he doesn't get involved in this, that and the other. I'm sorry, there he is yesterday on his Truth Social, posting his fragrance for profit. And he does it with bibles and he does it with, he's now got a new club, there's a new Trump club in Washington, $500,000 membership.

• 50:48Rory Stewart?

  Which, which his kids have set up with the Whitkoff kids. I mean, this is another part of the story of the kind of nepotism and family connections here. I mean, I used to, like, I'm sure many of your friends and Jonathan Powell and others, as you get involved in international governance, particularly in the 90s and 2000s, we spent a lot of time travelling around the world, talking about corruption, because one of the big ideas was you needed to do governance reform.

• 51:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 51:12Rory Stewart?

  A lot of development agencies, Diffit and everyone involved, you know, a lot of my meetings in Nigeria were on corruption, etc. We've forgotten, I think, in a way, what the theory of corruption is. And corruption is a lot of different things, and Trump's doing almost all of them. The first type of corruption is what's called embezzlement, where you take public money into your own pocket. And you can do that in different ways, right? You can do it by getting, as he did in the first administration, an enormous amount of public money spent on security for Trump properties. Or the second thing, most recently, is local state money goes into Trump-affiliated companies to do disaster relief work. Second sort of thing is foreign emoluments, where foreign governments give you money

• 51:57Rory Stewart?

  to your company, money to your kids, money to your plane, and in return, you do tariff stuff. Third thing is nepotism, that's a kind of different thing. That's about giving your friends and family jobs. So that's putting Jared Kushner or your daughter into jobs, that's putting your children's father-in-laws into jobs. A lot of this stuff's about children's father-in-laws.

• 52:20Alastair Campbell?

  Fathers in law, Rory, I think we.

• 52:23Rory Stewart?

  Fathers in law. Then there's then there's misuse of office. So he does a lot of that. So for example, using the Department of Justice to target your opponents. There's obstruction of justice. So that's blocking oversight. And and how does this all have a result? Well, why does it matter to Americans? Well, it matters to Americans because in the end, what it leads to is everything beginning to go wrong in your economy. Once you have an economy where you can bribe or influence or get access to the leader just with money, government resources begin to flow into inefficient projects where you've been bribed. Regulations

• 53:05Rory Stewart?

  begin to get dropped. So you begin to get rid of regulatory agencies. So there's more and more environmental damage done by these companies as they roll it out. The quality of public administration begins to decline because there's not much reason for civil servants to function. And you get into this incredible vicious cycle where because you're paying the government to speed things up, the government has an incentive to slow things down, waiting for the money to come in. So all of that comes, all of that is what Trump begins to deliver for the American people.

• 53:40Alastair Campbell?

  And don't forget that one of the first things they did when they came in, part of the sort of Project Twenty Five playbook, was to get rid of a lot of the investigators and the authorities that investigate corruption. And then to put somebody in the Department of Justice, Pam Bondi, he was just a basic cheerleader for MAGA. They will want us to laugh at the fragrances, to laugh at the sneakers, to laugh at the bibles. But the fact is, there isn't that much transparency. But Forbes and Bloomberg, if you sort of follow the way they cover this stuff, they're talking about his his wealth since he became president going up at roughly a rate of a billion dollars a month. Now, tell me in

• 54:20Alastair Campbell?

  which any other presidency, we've said before, Jimmy Carter, he got rid of his peanut farm. Hillary Clinton, do you remember Hillary Clinton made, I think it was a hundred thousand dollars. Out of an investment that she made in something or other 12 years before Bill Clinton became president, and this was a massive scandal during the campaign. This guy's doing it in plain sight, day after day after day. My final question was this, do you think people never cared? Or do you think that Trump's people are just so dominant in the media ecospace and absolutely prepared to take him at face value with anything he says?

• 55:04Alastair Campbell?

  And so much goes on that it just gets blown away. Do you think deep down, people still do care?

• 55:09Rory Stewart?

  I think, of course, many, many people still care, but I think this is part of the bigger story that we're talking about, about the collapse of the normal, traditional liberal democratic values. Because we had a story that we believed in very strongly for probably 150 years, which is that you would have a better government if you had all these other institutions. So the reason, one of the reasons that we believed in civil society, media, NGOs, was it checked corruption. You had all these independent third sector organisations which were there to call out.

• 55:52Alastair Campbell?

  That's why they've gone after them as well. Well, listen, we're going to talk about some of them in question time because we're going to talk about Gavi, we're going to talk about the impact of USAID, and we're going to talk about this rap duo that you and I had never heard of, Bob Villain, that now everybody's talking about, it would seem. And yeah, I'd say they've played the media and politics like a fiddle, as publicity stunts go.

• 56:15Rory Stewart?

  And two other big stories that we're going to cover tomorrow are going to be the new candidate for the New York mayor, Mandani, and what's been happening in Rwanda and Congo with a peace deal. Thank you very much indeed.

• 56:28Alastair Campbell?

  Take care, bye.

• 56:33Speaker 05

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

• 56:37Speaker 06

  On October 2nd.

• 56:38Speaker 05

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 56:43Speaker 06

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess.

• 56:46Speaker 05

  And Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 56:48Speaker 06

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 56:50Speaker 07

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stalled, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 56:54Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 56:57Speaker 07

  I'm not the first then.

• 56:59Speaker 06

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.