340. Question Time: Assisted Dying, Texting Macron, and the Politics of Scandal

Are Alastair and Rory starry-eyed about Australian politics? What have Alastair and Macron been texting about? And, what does the world look like without America at the centre of it? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy, a green electricity supplier powering homes across England, Scotland & Wales. Use referral code POLITICS after signing up to win a TRIP merch bundle. Learn more at getfuse.com/politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley + Evan Green Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producers: Nicole Maslen 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

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. And 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:58Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics, question time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:01Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. So, listen, we were talking, and we slightly let people down on the last episode, because we began on the fact that I was intrigued to see you sending some very fluent French texts back and forth with Emmanuel Macron. And that then led into Keir Starmer riding down the Champs-Elysees in, what was it, was it a tank, was it an armored personnel carrier? Anyway, some piece of military kit that the two of them rolled down the Champs-Elysees on, to celebrate Armistice Day together. And it's an interesting question, isn't it? Because Starmer suggested that he doesn't want to be part of the Customs Union, the single market. We are at a moment where, as

• 2:41Rory Stewart?

  Trump disengages from NATO and from the Ukraine-Russia confrontation, the pressure for Europe to step up will be bigger. And Britain is, of course, along with France, the largest, most significant military power in Europe. And that relationship is going to be key. Tell us a little bit about where you see the potential. And could it be overblown? Am I too excited about it? What are you thinking about this?

• 3:04Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the first thing to say Rory is this is question time. And the question that we had on this, that I'm looking at, was Joey McCarthy, what did you think of Macron and Starmer riding a military vehicle, no, it wasn't a tank, through the streets of Paris? Will we be seeing them on the We Have Ways podcast in the near future? I suspect not. And Rory, the way you phrase that question, you do this very subtly and very cleverly. But you basically seem to be saying that because I was having a text exchange with Emmanuel Macron, as a result of that, Keir Starmer went down the Champs-Elysees in a military vehicle. I did not know Keir Starmer was going down the Champs-Elysees in a military vehicle until I read about it in the media. So I just want to make that

• 3:46Alastair Campbell?

  clear. That being said, yes, I do occasionally speak to Emmanuel Macron, because I was involved in his first campaign in particular.

• 3:56Alastair Campbell?

  I thought it was really interesting. So Keir Starmer became the first British Prime Minister since Churchill to have the honour, and that's how the French very much see it. This is an honour. We're inviting you as a fellow world leader to come and share in this amazing event. Obviously, the British-French ties, military ties, very, very strong. But I think it was a very deliberate decision by Macron. If you remember, one of the first things he did when Trump was elected first time around was to give him that honour. And of course, Trump loved all that. Now Macron is in a difficult position politically. He's in a second term and he can't

• 4:39Alastair Campbell?

  do a third term. He had that snap election that you advised him against, which ended up with the government kind of in crisis. Michel Barnier has calmed things down. But at the same time, Macron is not as powerful a figure in Europe as he was. But he is still the President of France. He still passionately believes, we talked about this last week, that amazing speech he made at the, that meeting of European leaders after Trump was elected. Do we want to write history or do we just want to read history? And I think this is him saying, look, I didn't think Brexit was a good idea for you, and I thought it was a bad idea for Europe, and I hope that you'll sort of think about more sensible relations. Meanwhile, we have to be serious about European foreign and

• 5:21Alastair Campbell?

  defence policy. And I think having Keir Starmer there was very much part of that messaging to the world, which I think is a very important message.

• 5:29Rory Stewart?

  Macron's really getting leaning into, obviously, this more confident, aggressive language. He gave this speech in which he said that Europe is in danger of becoming the world's herbivore, following Trump's reelection, and it's going to be eaten by the carnivores. So he obviously has been pushing this vision of Macron really becoming a bloc independent from China and the United States in everything from defence and security to, I guess, AI and tech. Is that something that you can see Starmer wanting to get behind? Or is Starmer's personality more sort of, as you'd put it, more pragmatic, less utopian, more tentative about, less likely to buy into kind of grand French dreams?

• 6:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think we'd be wrong to see it as a grand French dream. I think it's Macron, albeit from a more limited position of power than he had maybe in his first term or the start of his second term. I think he's just telling a few home truths about the nature of power in the world. And we talked in the main podcast about Germany. So Trump is going to be taking office as Germany will be in the middle of an election because the current German government has not been able to hold a coalition together. That's pretty chaotic. It will be happening at a time when, if you read the opinion polls, Marina Le Pen, without doing very much, is kind of, you know, pretty much on the march. It will be doing so at a time when in Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, you've had the rise of

• 6:52Alastair Campbell?

  the far right and also even within Scandinavia. We've seen within the Swedish government, the fact that the true Democrats are now pretty powerful there and not to mention the Netherlands and so forth. So, you know, I think Macron's just telling a few home truths, both about the nature of European politics, but also about the nature of European power. And of course, from the British perspective, you know, Macron's there clearly wanting Britain to be part of this debate, but we're doing so from outside the European Union. And of course, the Brexiteers are saying, well, this is fantastic because we'll be able to do, cut out and do a trade deal with America. I mean, that's for the birds right now, it's for the birds.

• 7:28Rory Stewart?

  But do you think that ideologically, personality terms, Starmer is up for an exciting, bold new vision of Europe's role in defence and security in the world? I mean, we had a question here, which I thought was quite interesting on this. Casimir Hedley Walker, as a UK voter who resents having to care about the American elections more than others, such as the German ones, and we've definitely done quite a lot on German elections recently, I was wondering if there's a way to reshape the international order away from America. Is this possible? Would a space left by American dominance just be filled by another national strongman? Now, before we get into the details of Casimir's question, which I think is a really good one, what do you think Starmer's instincts is?

• 8:10Rory Stewart?

  Is he somebody who sympathizes with Macron's home truths? Or would he fall into the category of the slightly cynical friends that I have in Germany who think, oh, well, this is Macron being a bit grandiose and it's not really very realistic?

• 8:23Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's not a question of it being realistic. I think if we don't take that approach. We've got real problems because from the British perspective, you know, we are, whether we like it or not, we are right on our own. The special relationship, it was interesting when we did the podcast from New York, Anthony Scaramucci was very much saying, yes, it's real and, you know, the new incoming administration will see Britain as the most important relationship. I'm not sure about that. I'm not convinced of that. At some point, I think Keir Starmer is going to have to make a pretty big choice. Well, no, he's going to have to straddle both. He's going to have to, he's going to have to try to develop closer relations, economic and political, with the European Union at the same time as trying to maximize the possibilities of the fact that we do have historically this very close relationship with the United

• 9:08Alastair Campbell?

  States. And of course, he does it with a very mercurial president coming in. But if you look at the numbers, Rory, on, just to take trade, so take imports, fifty five percent European Union, ten percent United States, ten percent China, twenty six percent rest of the world. Our exports, forty seven percent European Union, fifteen percent United States, six percent China, thirty two percent the rest of the world. So what Trump does, because he's the three hundred pound gorilla, is he comes in and makes people think, right, the decisions all have to be about Trump. But if, if as a result of that, we decide, right, well, let's just put all our effort into getting much, much closer to America at the expense of a relationship with the

• 9:52Alastair Campbell?

  European Union, I think that would be a terrible mistake.

• 9:54Rory Stewart?

  It's also, as we've discussed before, the world has changed so much even since the Brexit vote, because the Brexit vote happened at a moment where the Brexiteers could still be relatively optimistic about global free trade. You know, it was the very end of the period where it felt as though free trade was expanding in the world. But that year, of course, Trump was elected and that was the beginning of a move towards protectionism. So Trump put up big tariff barriers, Biden kept them in place. Global trade has now halved. So having been growing at about twice the rate of global GDP, it's now running at about that trend rate. So we're now in a world in which it's completely unrealistic for Britain to fantasize

• 10:38Rory Stewart?

  about a world of new trade deals. In fact, many people are very worried in the US that Trump, who basically believes tariffs are the answer to everything, is going to put not just 60% tariffs against Chinese goods, but 20% standard tariffs against all goods from everywhere else in the world. That would include the United Kingdom. And so there's that. And then there's the security story, which is that the fantasies that David Davis and Michael Gove and others had about being able to do trade with China, of course, don't make any sense in a world in which we're very aware that Xi Jinping is a strategic rival and where we've seen with Russia, Ukraine, the dangers of being very open to economies

• 11:22Rory Stewart?

  that that can get us into military entanglements. So the pressure to push back towards a customs union with Europe is much, much stronger than it would have been eight years ago.

• 11:30Alastair Campbell?

  I had a thought. And also, you talked in the main podcast about, you know, we need big goals and big targets and what have you. And I was saying, yes, we do. And sometimes they're necessary, but also they can lead to disappointment. So then you had Brexit, and you had Johnson and Gove and Davis and the rest of them saying, you know, these trade deals are going to fall out of the sky. We're going to have this amazing deal with America. It hasn't happened. It was probably never going to happen. And if it happened, if the UK government now said, right, the big goal, we're going to try and get some sort of massive, fantastic singing and dancing American trade deal. I mean, just think about the effort that you've got to go into to do that, dealing with the Trump administration.

• 12:11Alastair Campbell?

  So I think we've got to be careful about not falling into this trap of because Trump has been elected and because, you know, he is such a sort of high profile, forceful figure in the world, that somehow we have to shape our foreign and economic policy around his arrival. We don't, you know, I think Kirsten would have thought carefully about, oh, my God, Trump's just been elected. I really want to be seen riding down the Champs Elysees with Macron. Well, I'm glad that he decided the answer to that was yes. I was on the Sophie Ridge program on Sky and Sam Coates, the Sky Political reporter, he was doing a thing about how much time Keir Starmer was spending abroad. He listed all the visits that he's done and he was in Samoa for the Chogum.

• 12:55Alastair Campbell?

  He was in Paris and now he's in Baku for COP. Now, look, there is always a danger with prime ministers that you discover as, you know, and I discovered this, to be honest, is that sometimes the foreign policy side of stuff is more interesting and there's a danger that you take your eye off the ball. But I think at the moment, in this period of history and of all the challenges that we're facing as a country that has, you know, in my view, made the catastrophic decision to leave the European Union, this foreign policy stuff and the relations that our leaders develop, they really, really matter to the stuff we need to do domestically.

• 13:32Rory Stewart?

  We had a question from Jane Abbott, which I think, just to finish off this whole question raised by Casimir about what happens to the world as the US leaves. She asks what Trump's election means for Saudi and Iran. And I think let's just touch on that very quickly because

• 13:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Rory Stewart?

  you can see that Saudi has kept going with an Iran deal. And it looks like the deal, it's still pretty shadowy, but looks like the deal will be that the Iranians are supposed to stop their backing for the Houthis in Yemen. And in return, the Saudis are going to stop backing some of the insurgents in the Arab areas of Iran. And this is presumably because there are two possible options that places like Saudi face towards Iran. One of them was to say Iran is an existential threat, so we're going to line up with the US and Israel as our protectors against Iran. The other view is maybe we need a détente with Iran and that actually the best way

• 14:30Rory Stewart?

  of guaranteeing our security is to have better relations with Iran. And the fact that Iran proved in its missile exchanges with Israel to be less powerful than people anticipated. Maybe means that Saudi can be a bit more confident about balancing itself towards Iran, and that's going to put it in an interesting position with Trump. Because I think we've assumed because Jared Kushner and Trump's family have made a lot of money in UAE and Saudi, and that he seemed to have a good relationship with Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Zayed in UAE, that's going to continue forever. I'm not sure that's true. I think we could be getting into a world where as Saudi and UAE become increasingly wealthy and confident, they're going to increasingly show their

• 15:14Rory Stewart?

  independence, not just from the US, but even from a new Trump administration.

• 15:18Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. I think you're right, that this is not as straightforward as maybe we might think. I think that we should come back to this and do a big thing on what Trump relations with some of those big powers in that region will be. I think we should come back to that on the main podcast sometime. There's a question here that I'm gagging to ask.

• 15:36Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 15:36Alastair Campbell?

  Izzy, should there be a limit on the number of former prime ministers who can attend Armistice Day? And I got a message while I was watching the Senate events on Sunday, I got a message from a friend of mine who's in the special forces, and it just said WTF, look at the state of them. So let's just go through this. Keir Starmer's the Prime Minister.

• 15:57Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 15:58Alastair Campbell?

  And then you've got John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, who looks ever more like Michael Fabricant, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak. And somebody pointed out that we had 24 years for four prime ministers, and then six prime ministers in eight years. And there's a line down that you say is becoming, looking more and more like Jim Callahan, namely David Cameron, that the dividing line does seem to be, does seem to be Brexit. When Richard Nixon fell from grace, was he then involved in all the big sort of national events? Don't know. And Liz Truss, Roy, my favourite tweet

• 16:41Alastair Campbell?

  of the week, somebody pointed out that if Liz Truss lives to 96, she will spend more days at the Senate than she spent as Prime Minister in Downy Street. How's about that?

• 16:54Rory Stewart?

  That's, that's pretty good. Okay, Alastair, quick break, then more questions.

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• 18:47Rory Stewart?

  Now, here's a niche question which is going to test you, Alistair, and maybe a trick question. Thelma Montez, can you please discuss what's going on in Equatorial Guinea, Alistair? No free press means there's limited reporting, but it looks like a sex tape scandal could be sabotaging Mr. N'Gongga's chance at the presidency. What are your thoughts?

• 19:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you knew that I knew about this because I sent you a link to a report about it and said, "My God, as sex scandals go, this is something else." So Equatorial Guinea, have you ever been to Equatorial Guinea?

• 19:23Rory Stewart?

  I have never been to Equatorial Guinea. I really wanted to go when I was Africa Minister, but it's ex-Spanish Guinea. It's 1.7 million people, very, very oil-rich, massively corrupt. But yes, it's somewhere I don't think, actually, the British government has an embassy. So they tended to try to send me places we had diplomatic representation.

• 19:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, so essentially what this story is about, and it is very, very hard to get your head around this. So as you said, there's no real free press, but there is social media. And several hundred videos have been leaked on social media and they're sort of flooding. Everybody's sharing them with each other. And these are videos of a guy whose nickname is Bello, because he's apparently quite good-looking. His name is Balthazar Ebang Ngonga. And it's him having sex with different women in his office and elsewhere. And a lot of these women are the wives of people who are already in the government.

• 20:25Alastair Campbell?

  So there's a lot of kind of, I suspect, a lot of family repair work going on right now. But the reason this guy Ngonga, he's a nephew of the current president. He's a guy called Teodoro Obiang Ngama.

• 20:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Alastair Campbell?

  And I'll be honest, I didn't know his name until I looked it up. Because Equatorial Guinea is a country that I've never been to and I don't know that much about. But he's 82 years old and he's, as you say, presiding over a pretty corrupt country with a very small, incredibly wealthy elite and lots of the people who live there are actually living in poverty. There's been a lot of big scandals, including one of the president's sons, who's now the vice president. He once paid a quarter of a million dollars for a glove that was encrusted with crystals that previously belonged to Michael Jackson.

• 21:20Rory Stewart?

  That's good luck.

• 21:20Alastair Campbell?

  There's no opposition. Activists tend to get chucked in jail.

• 21:24Rory Stewart?

  Obiang, just quickly, a little fact on him. He's the second-longest consecutively-serving current non-royal national leader in the world, behind Cameroon's Pobia. So he's been... Basically, the president of Equatorial Guinea since 1982, right the way through to 2024.

• 21:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this guy, Mr. N'Gongha, seems to have a certain charm for the ladies, is all I can put it. But bloody hell, you talk about government splits. When these guys see their wives, and includes some of the guys who run the army, their wives. So anyway, it seems that this guy, N'Gongha, fancies himself as taking over as president.

• 22:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 22:04Alastair Campbell?

  But what I don't know is who took the videos, whether he took the videos.

• 22:08Rory Stewart?

  The allegation is that he took the videos himself, whether he was taking the videos for private consumption, or whether he thought it'd help him. One small edge on this. Sarah Lepido has done an incredible interview, if you people have time, with the niece of the current president of Equatorial Guinea, whose father, Francisco Masias, was the first president of Equatorial Guinea. And her story is incredible. So she's a young Guinean woman, whose father was the first president, and at the age of seven was sent off to school in North Korea, in Pyongyang, and went off to an elite school where Kim Il-sung would check up with her on the telephone from time to time. While she was there, Obiang, the current president of Equatorial Guinea,

• 22:52Rory Stewart?

  killed her father, who was accused of incredible human rights abuses. She then grew up in North Korea, before eventually moving to Spain, and she's had a lot of very, very difficult, low-income jobs around the world, and has now published a book called Black Girl from Pyongyang. So Sarah Lepido's interview, I think, is worth listening to, but it's also an incredible insight into a woman whose life is sort of beyond imagining, to be a president's daughter, brought up in a boarding school in Pyongyang, this very close relationship, and probably the best insight into the North Korean regime. That I've come across, but now on a rather unfortunate journey to try to clear her father's name, the dictatorial uncle who was the previous president of Equatorial

• 23:35Rory Stewart?

  Guinea. So people who want to pick up on that, that the podcast is called Transition on the Wire.

• 23:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Roy, I think there's definitely a film in the the sex tapes. The story you just told is a movie as well.

• 23:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think Equatorial Guinea could be a massive series of movies.

• 23:52Alastair Campbell?

  I think it could. Talking of movies, by the way, I went to see Blitz this week.

• 23:56Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes.

• 23:56Alastair Campbell?

  It's absolutely fantastic.

• 23:58Rory Stewart?

  Oh, go on, tell us a little bit about it.

• 24:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's about the Blitz. It's about Saoirse Ronan, who the Irish actress who's playing a Cockney mum with a mixed race son. The son is a young boy played by a young actor called Elliot Hefferman, who's absolutely amazing. Paul Weller, musician, he's the granddad, sort of tinkling away at the piano. So it's about the Blitz and it's honestly, it's a Steve McQueen film and it's it's one of his best, I think.

• 24:26Rory Stewart?

  Oh, brilliant. Well, here's here's my little cultural plug. I went to see the Silk Road exhibition at the British Museum. And that is amazing because it suddenly reveals that Anglo-Saxon Britain, you know, famous, these are dark ages after the Romans left, when we really seem to be a pretty cold island cut off from the world, had far more contacts with Central Asia. There's a coin of Offa who built Offa's dike that border with Wales, which is an Arab coin that says Alalaa Illalaa Muhammad Rasoolalaa. So there's no God but God, Muhammad's his prophet. And on the other side, it says Offa Rex. And then there's a Sassanian bowl made from Persian silver, found in a church right up on the Scottish

• 25:09Rory Stewart?

  border and fragments of Chinese silk from treasuries in Europe in the late 8th century. So unbelievable. And they've brought, I'm sort of slightly resentful of this, I trekked halfway across Central Asia to see this incredible mural in a relatively remote part of southern Uzbekistan, which has now been moved wholesale to the British Museum. So you can turn up and see it there. And it appears to represent Korean ambassadors turning up. In a Central Asian court.

• 25:36Alastair Campbell?

  Very, very good. We're going to stick on culture for a bit.

• 25:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, go on then.

• 25:41Alastair Campbell?

  I'm reading a brilliant book at the moment by a Bloomberg journalist called Stephanie Baker, called Punishing Putin.

• 25:47Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes.

• 25:48Alastair Campbell?

  It's about all the sanctions that came on the Russian oligarchs and so forth. And it just underlines when we talk about the deal that you might do with Ukraine, unpicking a lot of this stuff, I think will be a big part of that as well. Anyway, we're talking too much and not having enough questions here, Rory.

• 26:02Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, Gabriella Newt then, this is a good question for you. I find Rory and Alice's view of Australia rather starry eyed. Where were the mentions of populism? You only look at the recent Indigenous vote to see the spread of populism, the lies disseminated by the Murdoch newspapers, the levels of multiculturalism and acceptance seen in the United Kingdom and nowhere to be found in Australia. What are your thoughts? Well, I'm not sure about that. I think Australia in a way was lucky.

• 26:25Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I think she's, I think she's, she's got a point. I am definitely starry eyed about Australia.

• 26:29Rory Stewart?

  Go on.

• 26:29Alastair Campbell?

  I always have been, but I do think the, the voice referendum defeat indicated a kind of underlying failure, refusal to settle some of their big historical questions. I think there is quite a lot of racism and sexism around in Australia. But I, you know, I love going to Australia and I love the place. But, and I know Rory, you have become, if anything, even more starry eyed than me.

• 26:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, so let me try my Australia theory on you and tell me where I'm missing it. So one of my ideas is that compulsory voting means that there's less populism. And that that may also be, and this is an uncomfortable thing to talk about in the future, that actually their very strict controls on illegal immigration have also meant that far right populists haven't got away. And maybe also the fact that Pauline Hanson, who some listeners will have heard of, turned out not to be a very effective politician. But am I right in saying that in some ways Australia's avoided some of the populism problems that we've had in Europe and the US?

• 27:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I would argue the current Liberal leader, Dutton. I think he's giving it a pretty good go on the populist front. I think you're right about compulsory voting, though. Remember when we interviewed Peter Malanowski as the Premier of South Australia? And you see his idea, by the way, about banning social media for kids is now being, we said it was taken up by the federal government and it's now actually it's going through. So that's a pretty big deal. But he made the point that he felt that what compulsory voting did was it forced the politicians to understand that most people, this is a point Dominic Sandbrook made on our, one of our live streams from New York, most people don't think that much about politics. So what the, what the compulsory voting does is it means that you have all the people who like

• 28:12Alastair Campbell?

  you and me and lots of others who think about politics all the time. You have loads of people who think a bit and then you have loads of people who barely think about it until they get to an election and lots of them in our country and in America don't vote. He says what compulsory voting does in Australia is it means that the politicians never forget that they're talking to all of those people. They're not just talking to a narrow group of people that might be their base or might just be the ones that they know are going to vote. And I think that does, it does make, his view very much is that it means that it makes politicians much more rooted in the real world and to be frank, most people want to live somewhere in the centre. They're not extremists in the main.

• 28:52Rory Stewart?

  The only shock I had on compulsory voting, having been, as you say, very starry eyed on it, is saying to a couple of people in Queensland, I stopped one person and said, you've just had an election, haven't you? And he said, really, have I? And I said, I thought you had compulsory voting. And he said, well, actually, the registration's not that tight up here. I was up in the danger.

• 29:10Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Lord.

• 29:10Rory Stewart?

  Then I met another person who was working on a road and I said, have you just voted? And he went, yeah, yeah, I just voted. And I said, I said, what do you think the result? And he said, oh, I didn't know there'd been a result. So I said, what, so I said, what were you, what were you voting for? And he said, well, I get fined if I don't vote. The fine is tiny. It's like, you know, forty, fifty quid. But, but everybody's trooping in to vote. But he's, when I said what happens, he says, well, me and my mates, we just go in and we just, we just play the numbers on the, on the ballot paper.

• 29:39Alastair Campbell?

  I should say, by the way, last time we talked about Australia, I made a bad error.

• 29:43Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes.

• 29:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, do you remember I said that the map of if you take Tasmania out, which is

• 29:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Alastair Campbell?

  liberal, that the Queensland election was the first state that had gone non-Labour.

• 29:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Alastair Campbell?

  But in fact, Northern Territory had had an election, which I'd forgotten about. So apologies, Northern Territory, although they've just brought in what I think is a dreadful, dreadful change. They've lowered the age of criminal responsibility to 10.

• 30:06Rory Stewart?

  Ooh.

• 30:07Alastair Campbell?

  Which I just think is terrible. I think there's a bit of racism in that as well, because that's basically about being able to say, oh, well, if these Aboriginal kids are going to run around causing trouble, they've got to know what's coming to them. I think there's a bit of that going on. I'll probably get into trouble for saying that one now, but anyway, apologies to Northern Territory. I've got that wrong. Now, Rory, there is a really big issue and a really big question.

• 30:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 30:27Alastair Campbell?

  Freddie Holston, is Keir Starmer right not to put pressure on Labour MPs to vote in favour of the assisted dying bill? It's hard to see why anyone would want to deny a person a dignified death. What are your thoughts?

• 30:40Rory Stewart?

  That's just a contradiction there in the question, isn't it? If it's genuinely true that it's hard to see why anyone would disagree, why do you need to have a three line whip? Why not let MPs vote on their conscience and vote independently? That's something that reminds me, I often got that from constituents. I don't want to be mean to the person asking the question, but there's a weird combination of two things happening there. On the one hand, somebody believing that there's an obvious moral answer, and on the other hand, trying to rely on party whips and three line whips to force MPs to vote in a particular direction that they agree on.

• 31:11Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. The reason why I think it's right that it's a free vote is because it is, you know, we talk about issues of conscience. I think this is something where people should be allowed, entitled to really think deeply about it and then come to their own, their own view. Instinctively, I am in favour of the bill. I'm in, I think Kim Ledbetter, who is the MP who's brought this forward as a private members' bill. And people remember she was the, she became an MP on the back of her sister Jo Cox being murdered. And she, she replaced her. I know Kim well. I think she's a terrific woman. I think she's a very, very, really good person.

• 31:50Alastair Campbell?

  And I think she comes at this from that perspective of saying that, you know, as we get older, as illness becomes more complicated, as people have to sometimes spend the last few years of their lives in absolute abject pain and misery, et cetera. People should be entitled to end their own lives without that being called, as it were, suicide. But what was interesting, we're recording this on Tuesday morning and I did the Today Programme this morning, talking about our friend and colleague Gary Lineker. And I was on at eight twenty. So they, as ever, they call you up early and you sort of listen to the programme beforehand. The item before me was Kim talking about the safeguards that are included in the bill,

• 32:32Alastair Campbell?

  which are very considerable. Two doctors, a judge having the final decision, right to appeal, et cetera, et cetera. So I felt the safeguards were very, very strong. And I listened to her and I nodded along. And I thought, yeah, she's absolutely right and I hope she wins. And then on comes Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat leader, speaking in a personal capacity. And he made a very interesting argument about whether people who were feeling weak, feeling vulnerable, feeling old, feeling ill, whether they would feel psychologically pressured to end their lives earlier than actually deep down they wanted to. And whether they might not even raise that. And I thought, hmm, yeah, interesting. And that's why I thought, and he then went on to say that I think that this is one of those issues

• 33:13Alastair Campbell?

  that really does need a careful, thoughtful debate. And I hope that when it comes before Parliament in the next couple of weeks, that that's what we get. I, as I say, instinctively, I back Kim Ledbetter and I think it's the right thing to do. But I, I recognise that there are lots of arguments and lots of real concerns. And, and Parliament is the place where they should be thrashed out.

• 33:35Rory Stewart?

  Let's do that. And I, I think this is somewhere where, again, we will disagree agreeably. I'm more sceptical about this. Well, let's get Kim Ledbetter on. Let's get her on leading.

• 33:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 33:44Rory Stewart?

  And let's, let's have the chance to thrash that out there. And let's just finish with a final plug for David Petraeus. Give me a brief sense of what she thought of the David Petraeus infi. We did just to remind people, he was the commanding general. In Iraq and Afghanistan, he was the CENTCOM commander, he was then the director of the CIA. I mean, as somebody who at one point was considered to be a real candidate for the US presidency, potential candidate for Trump's Secretary of State, really major foreign policy thinker, big intellectual Princeton graduate, American general. What was your sense of of him and the interview that we've just put out?

• 34:18Alastair Campbell?

  I thought he was a really impressive character and obviously quite amazing CV. When I listen back to it, because if you remember when we did the interview, he's a very, very hard guy to interrupt.

• 34:29Rory Stewart?

  He doesn't like being interrupted, does he, no?

• 34:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's not he doesn't like it, it's just the way that he speaks. He doesn't leave pauses between the sentences. So normally you get a pause in the paragraph, he just sort of, you know, rushes on. I thought he had some really interesting stuff to say about political leadership. He echoed, I mean, we've got to be careful not to just agree with people when they say things that we believe, but I, he echoed my views about Rumsfeld. He was very interesting, I thought, on George Bush. There have been two George Bushes, the one that let Rumsfeld get away with stuff, and then the one that got a grip, who he felt was much better. I thought, I really liked his, it won't surprise you to know, I really liked his views on Brexit, which he put in the security context, which is kind of what we were talking about earlier, that, you know, Europe needs a strong Britain

• 35:14Alastair Campbell?

  because we're a serious military power. I thought, how can we put this politely, Rory? He doesn't lack confidence, does he?

• 35:23Rory Stewart?

  No, but I suppose maybe in a general, that that's can be useful.

• 35:28Alastair Campbell?

  When he said that thing about, somebody said to him, you know, General Petraeus, you on crutches is a better soldier than anybody else without crutches. I thought, hmm, okay, yeah.

• 35:38Rory Stewart?

  I mean, obviously, the one of the main themes that comes through is that he's the only person I've come across who's more competitive than you. So I thought it was quite, quite an interesting.

• 35:45Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Rory, Rory, he beat me hands down on that. He, listen, if I've ever been in hospital, I've been, I've never been in hospital for a long time, and I've certainly never been shot in the chest like he was. But when I'm in hospital, I go in hospital, I think, oh, God, a bit of rest. He goes into hospital, having been shot in the chest, he's got drips all around him, and he rips them all out and does fifty press ups in front of the nurses to to show that he's ready to leave. I think he beats me on the competitive front. Finally, Rory, what about another leading interview we did recently, Gary Lineker?

• 36:19Rory Stewart?

  Gary Lineker.

• 36:20Alastair Campbell?

  Stepping down from Match of the Day. Now, Rory, he and I were talking last night and suggesting that if I stepped in to replace him, which I think is what Gary wants, I don't know whether I've repaired the bridges with the BBC enough since 2003, maybe not, but he did suggest that maybe you you could sort of make the occasional appearance.

• 36:37Rory Stewart?

  I think I'd be brilliant. I think I'm exactly the person they want to hear about. I mean, I think, following on my massive credibility on predicting US elections, I think my ability to predict football outcomes in the UK could be enormous.

• 36:49Alastair Campbell?

  Let's just give it a go, Rory. I mean, the Pep Guardiola situation right now, do you think it's a crisis or is it just a problem?

• 36:55Rory Stewart?

  I think it's an opportunity, Alistair.

• 36:59Alastair Campbell?

  And it's an opportunity for whom? Who is it an opportunity for?

• 37:03Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's the paradoxical thing. I mean, on the one hand, I thought it was an opportunity for Pep, but then again, strangely not.

• 37:11Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Alan Shearer, eat your heart out. Okay, Rory, see you soon.

• 37:16Rory Stewart?

  See you soon. Bye bye.

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