300. Why Ukraine invaded Russia, the Musk-Trump love-in, and Rory’s visit to Afghanistan

Why is Elon Musk lashing out against Scotland’s First Minister? What are the tactics behind Ukraine’s advance on Russia? How worried should we be by China’s relationship with Serbia? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all this and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, 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. TRIP UK TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: 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. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

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• 2:32Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:34Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:36Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory, thankfully the riots have died down a bit, but I think we still need to talk about them. And not least in the context of social media. I know that you did us all a service by, unlike me, watching the Musk-Trump love-in last night. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about this remarkable development in the Russia-Ukraine war with Ukraine essentially, I hesitate to say, invading Russia, but certainly occupying a small part of Russian territory. We'll talk about that. We then, after the break, we're going to talk about China and Serbia, two subjects that we're both interested in, and a relationship which is developing in a pretty remarkable way. And there's something in particular I want to talk about in relation to that.

• 3:19Alastair Campbell?

  And then you, three years on from the American withdrawal, you are just back from a visit to Afghanistan. So we'll talk about that as well.

• 3:26Rory Stewart?

  Fantastic.

• 3:27Alastair Campbell?

  So let's start with your, I saw your tweet, which made me not want to watch any of it. What was your take on Musk-Trump?

• 3:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, so as you say, I just got back from Afghanistan and I'm in the States, so I'm on American time. So it was easier for me to do this. It was eight in the evening, East Coast time, five in the evening, Pacific time. And it was an amazing, chaotic situation, as people would have picked up. So the story was that Elon Musk had decided to interview Donald Trump on the Twitter platform through space, and it'd been much anticipated. So sure enough, I and millions of other people tried to log on at eight in the evening and found we couldn't go on. And then Twitter exploded with endless people showing sort of dead links, including Bill Ackman, who's this enormous billionaire, pro-Trump funder, who was rather pathetically saying, "Hey Donald, can you tell Elon that I can't get online?" And all this kind of stuff.

• 4:20Rory Stewart?

  So you then got people saying, well, just keep trying. So I tried, I think, thirty two times and finally managed to get on at half past eight, so half an hour late. And there was still music playing, still, still nothing happening. And finally, I guess, about forty minutes late, they sort of rambled into their interview.

• 4:37Alastair Campbell?

  And they weren't, they weren't in the same place, were they? They were in different places.

• 4:40Rory Stewart?

  That was not clear because I was listening to it on audio. I mean, the actual context of the whole thing was a bit unclear. And, and of course, you're struggling with your tech, trying to keep your link alive and vaguely following what's going on on Twitter. I mean, just to sort of add to the sense of the, the postmodern world gone mad, two hundred thousand people plus had gone on YouTube believing they were watching the debates. What they were actually watching was a deep fake of the debate, so AI generating a fake example of the debate, designed to sell cryptocurrency. So all of these

• 5:10Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my lord.

• 5:10Rory Stewart?

  scams and AI and fake and then tech troubles because he'd apparently, he claimed he was suffering a massive cyber attack. So somebody had tried to disrupt the whole thing by

• 5:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, bloody blah.

• 5:21Rory Stewart?

  attacking it. Anyway, so then the interview started. And I think the first thing, Alissa, is to say is that you should not feel that your job as an interviewer is under threat from Elon Musk. It was the most astonishing thing. He basically gave the impression, he said, you know, I, I don't believe in interviews. This is going to be a conversation. But by a conversation, he seemed to mean that I'm not going to think for a second about what I'm going to say, what I'm going to ask him, how to structure it. And I'll just spend the first half an hour vaguely rambling around the fact that I think Trump is a kind of match show strong guy. And just to finish, I think that the main takeaway from the first forty minutes is Elon Musk clearly is somebody who is unbelievably impressed by sort of machismo and strength. So he said that the reason he was endorsing Trump is he'd been

• 6:04Rory Stewart?

  so impressed by how brave Trump seemed after the assassination, punching his fist. And then he went on to say, you know, this is the American way and what countries need to see as strength and resilience and being intimidated. And in fact, he was so over praising Trump that actually, to some extent, even Trump began, which is very unusual, began to sound occasionally more modest than he usually is. And there was a big push from Musk, Musk clearly fascinated with the mechanics of the assassination attempt.

• 6:34Rory Stewart?

  And almost inviting Trump to suggest there was some conspiracy. He kept coming back to, well, how did the guy get on the roof? How did the police? And Trump, to his credit, at least in this situation, was relatively straightforward. I mean, there was some horrible naff vulgar Trump moments, such as him talking about how he'd convinced a friend to give a million dollars to the family and how the person who'd killed me, the great Trumper, there was an enormous amount of narcissism. But he did also manage to pay tribute to the police and security services. Anyway, over to you.

• 7:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm glad to say I didn't watch a minute of it. I woke up this morning, Fiona was reading me an account of, from one of the papers, I think the headline was something like, you know, rambling narcissism, mutual lovin' kind of thing. And then most of the American media was saying there was nothing new, it was all Trump's old top hits. So at one point seeming to suggest that he quite fancied Vice President Harris, which, and again, and given that Fiona and I both have the view that it's with women that he's doing particularly badly, I'm sure he thought that was a really good thing to say, when in fact it wasn't. I think we should park the interview, but let's just talk a little bit more about Musk. Because, let's be frank, when he did his interview with Rishi Sunak

• 7:44Alastair Campbell?

  not that long ago, you and I both thought it was a pretty bad idea. But at the same time, back then Musk was not quite seen in the same way as he is now. And I think what has happened, particularly in relation to, in the UK, to his handling of these riots, his baiting of Keir Starmer, his endless sort of parroting this line that free speech is under attack, and Keir Starmer is the worst thing for free speech in the history of humanity, which is a line being echoed like a lot of his lines by Nigel Farage. But I've just been very interested by the fact, I know you've been looking to this as well, and we should, I want to put in the newsletter, an article that Leighton Andrews, who used to be a education minister in the Welsh Government, is now an academic, focuses

• 8:28Alastair Campbell?

  a lot on politics and media. And he's written a very, very good Substack, and his basic line is he hopes that Labour doesn't go down the route of new legislation. Because he says there is a lot within the existing legislation where he thinks Elon Musk and Twitter are already well Over the line in terms of their breach of the of the Online Safety Act. And so he's he's recommending all sorts of things that Twitter executives in the UK get all before Parliament. And also, I hadn't quite realised that this online safety bill has been now an act. It actually, it is possible to take action against people in foreign jurisdictions if they're having an impact upon social media in our own countries. So I think it's a very interesting, complicated piece about the history of the legislation. But he's basically saying, Musk is a menace and the stuff we can do now.

• 9:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So again, just to take one step back, because we've actually been talking about this, obviously, for a long time. And there was quite a lot about this in our Nick Clegg interview, where he was trying to defend Facebook's role in this. But essentially, social media is now very, very closely wound up with polarisation, so creating populism and driving people apart. Biggest use around online safety, including, as we know, horribly encouraging people to commit suicide and encouraging people to follow extreme dieting.

• 9:42Alastair Campbell?

  End their own lives, Rory, end their own lives.

• 9:45Rory Stewart?

  Yep, and their own lives, I'm sorry. And there have been three basic approaches to what you do about this phenomenon, because social media is different from television and newspapers. Because for a long time, the owners of these platforms have tried to claim that they're not editors, so they're not criminally liable. They've tried to say these are just neutral platforms where anybody can put up stuff and it's not their fault what goes up there. And the US approach has basically been to say that they have a carve out in law and they do treat them as completely neutral. The EU and the UK have broadly agreed on the same approach,

• 10:25Rory Stewart?

  which is to say that actually these platforms can be liable and are responsible for what's up there. But the EU approach, which is under their Digital Services Act, is a slightly broader general duty of care in relation to rights, whereas the UK Online Safety Act, which is still very new, and this is something to talk about, in a way, I was talking to Damian Collins, who chaired the Culture, Media and Sports Committee and has done a lot on this and has actually written well about this for a long time. He was saying that if this act had come in a year ago, or had another year to bed in, and we would be in a better situation because the Ofcom's still consulting on some of it. Some of the stuff still needs to be brought to the public. So.

• 11:04Alastair Campbell?

  It's taken six years from green paper to legislation. We've just underlined how complicated the issues are.

• 11:09Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, but he's saying that if, in a way, these things happen next year, we'd be in a much, much stronger position than we are at the moment. But in the UK law, as you said, and I'll just hand back to you on this, what it's done in the legislation is specify all the existing legislation on incitement, on harassment, and that's important because people like Elon Musk are trying to suggest this is some incredible clamping down on free speech and sort of big brothers after you and the totalitarian state. The fact is that inciting people to threaten or harm others has always been an offence under British law, whether you do it online or not. Over to you.

• 11:47Alastair Campbell?

  This thing about the American Constitution, commitment to freedom of speech, if I were to say to somebody, I think that a mob of my supporters on social media should go and find Rory Stewart and hang draw and quarter him, that is a breach of American law, presumably, if I was in the United States.

• 12:03Rory Stewart?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 12:04Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so this freedom of speech argument in relation to this is nonsense. And what Leighton Andrews' piece points out is that our act, the act that we've got now in the UK, and it's interesting you mention Damon Collins there, because Leighton suggests that the reason why Zuckerberg, Mark Zuckerberg, didn't visit the UK for quite an extensive period of time during the passage of this bill was because he did not want to appear at the DCMS Select Committee. And Leighton is making the point that the top people in the UK on Twitter should be up before the first available committee to ask whether they can justify what Musk has been doing and saying. But the point he makes is that this act applies even if companies are outside the UK, if they have links to the UK, if they have a significant amount of UK users, which

• 12:49Alastair Campbell?

  Twitter does, if the UK is a large market, a target market, which it is, or if it's capable of being accessed by UK users. And he points out also that platforms, not just Twitter, all of them, they are required to seek to prevent illegal content as well as remove it, and especially if that involves racially or religiously aggravated public order offences or is inciting violence. Now, as far as I see it, there has been a lot of racially and religiously aggravated public order offences and the incitement of violence online.

• 13:19Rory Stewart?

  Yep. So the big change with this bill is that in the past, these companies responded to complaints. So it was sort of after the event, somebody complained, they were forced to take it down.

• 13:30Alastair Campbell?

  Like this, like the Press Complaints Commission used to do the same.

• 13:32Rory Stewart?

  Now it's supposed to be proactive. They're supposed to get ahead of it and use their algorithms to prevent it happening in the first place. And they can be fined, they can be fined up to 10% of their global revenue.

• 13:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:43Rory Stewart?

  And ultimately, people in the companies can be held criminally liable. So if somebody burns down a hotel, they could be held criminally liable for them. For the arson, they could be held criminally liable for the murder, which of course is also true for a newspaper editor. If a newspaper editor publishes something that actually leads to some horrible thing happening, they also could be held criminally liable. The interesting thing, though, that's happening now is that up till now, even if Zuckerberg was refusing to appear in front of the select committee, broadly speaking, Facebook, Twitter under Jack Dorsey, the previous owner, were trying to cooperate. What's really interesting now is it sounds as though Musk is lining up for a fight.

• 14:22Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:23Rory Stewart?

  And our system hasn't really been designed for a situation in which these companies completely refuse to cooperate. We, Ofcom tends to assume that they at least pretend to cooperate. And it's going to be really interesting what we then do.

• 14:34Alastair Campbell?

  Bruce Daisley, who was a very senior figure in the pre-Musk world of Twitter, he's on record as saying that he thinks Musk is already in breach of British laws. And this is somebody who used to be at Twitter. And I did some work with Twitter in the early days. And, you know, as I've said to you before, I was quite excited by the whole social media thing. I thought it would kind of be a way of giving everybody a voice, breaking down the old media oligarchies. But what you've got with Musk is a new media oligarchy where there is no accountability whatsoever. He's got these people who work for him at the corporate level, who are pumping out the exact same shit as he pumps out day after day after day. And I think there will come a point where governments will start to realise that this is a threat, this is a danger. I had somebody who worked in the American government who

• 15:19Alastair Campbell?

  Sent me a message asking whether the British government might look at the security clearances of sort of people like Musk. Because you think about Musk, the other thing about Musk, he's not just a kind of, you know, he's more powerful in a way because he's doing all this satellite stuff as well. If you go back to the start of the Ukraine war, and it was all about whether Musk could get his satellites involved and so forth. So you talk about a guy, I'm assuming within America, possibly within the UK, I don't know, who has security clearances to see all sorts of stuff. Now, I just think taking things away from them actually might be a good thing to do. I think that the calling out publicly is important. I actually support Hamza Youssef, who is threatening with legal action because Musk has called him a super racist who hates white people in Scotland.

• 16:01Alastair Campbell?

  Now, taking on Elon Musk in a legal case, you've got to have deep pockets. But I think calling this guy out is quite important, because it strikes me that he is becoming a narcissist, sovereign individual, no power, no accountability of any power that he holds. And that's dangerous for the world.

• 16:18Rory Stewart?

  This then comes back to the thing that will keep this whole thing going beyond Musk, which is the financial interests of these companies. So, as we know, these companies make money through getting as much attention as possible. That's how Facebook sells its advertising. One of the reasons why I should have been much tougher with Nick Clegg when he was trying to say that Facebook doesn't polarise, is there's a very, very good book by two New York Times journalists called The Ugly Truth, looking at the January 6th insurrection in the US, and specifically looking at Facebook. So before the election, for the last US election, Facebook changed the algorithm to favour trusted news sources rather than sort of inco at community groups. And after the election, they turned that

• 17:02Rory Stewart?

  off. And there was a massive spike in encouragement of extremist and polarising rhetoric. Why did they turn it off? They turned it off because their revenue went down when people were just being fed trusted news sources. Their revenue goes up when they feed these lookalike audiences. And the lookalike audience thing, which is essentially creating an echo chamber of other people who agree with you.

• 17:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Rory Stewart?

  Is what leads to a lot of these problems. So for example, if you are a young woman searching for healthy food, that's what Leads you down the tunnel to extreme dieting and anorexic products. That's what in Germany clearly leads people towards neo-Nazi groups. And you can see it on your own Twitter feed at the moment, anyone listening to this who still uses X or Twitter. The algorithm's now been changed so that you see the tweets that they think are for you before the people that you're following. This is all part of them feeding and inciting this stuff.

• 17:53Alastair Campbell?

  I don't suppose the conversation we're having will help, but at the moment when I go on there, the first thing I ever see is something about Elon Musk and it's usually from Elon Musk.

• 18:02Alastair Campbell?

  So I won't go through it now, but Leighton Andrews has got a whole list of things which he says the government can do. Based on existing legislation, responsibility to the Information Commissioner of Ofcom, EU data protection regulators that that we can collaborate with and so forth. So I sort of feel that I could, this could be wishful thinking, but I I sort of sense that Musk is heading for a fall. I also think in relation to the Trump interview, my feeling is that Trump is making a lot of mistakes in the campaign at the moment. I mean, you watched it, I didn't, but what did Trump get out of that?

• 18:34Rory Stewart?

  Very little, except for the fact that it was a real attempt for millions of people for Musk to say, I'm doing this, you know, for independent minded voters who want to have a fair chance to hear the man. And he did give him a lot of softball questions. I mean, he basically allowed him to talk about how he was a hero for an hour and a half. So I suppose to that extent.

• 18:55Alastair Campbell?

  I I I'd be amazed if people stayed with that kind of interview. And to be fair to Trump, you've been fair to him once, I'll be fair to him. Even though he is a narcissist and talks about himself the whole time, he doesn't mind tough questions.

• 19:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Alastair Campbell?

  He quite likes tough questions because it allows him to be tough back. Let's just bring it back briefly to to the UK. We were talking last week about the what lessons can be learned from these riots. And and again, I I want to put in the newsletter a really interesting piece by Margaret Hodge, who I'm amazed because I got an invitation to her her next birthday. Is about to be 80 very, very soon. She's still fit as a fiddle and still going, you know, really going strong on the political front. But she had a very good piece in The Economist, Margaret Hodg's Lessons From East London On Countering The Far Right. And this was, we talked about this briefly last week.

• 19:38Rory Stewart?

  And sorry, for international listeners, Margaret Hodg, very senior Labour MP, who chaired the Public Accounts Committee and had been, I think, the cornerstone of Barking Council at the same time when I was praising other Labour work around the Barking Council.

• 19:50Alastair Campbell?

  But she's also been an MP for 30 years. She's now a former MP, she's in the House of Lords. But she was making the point, I'd forgotten this, I mean, it was such a big thing at the time, Nick Griffin, who's kind of faded from public view really, but he was a very, very high profile figure. She compares him to Farage. He was the leader of the BNP, the British National Party, and he stood against her in Barking. So at that time, you had the BNP fielding 13 candidates for council election in Barking, and 12 of them got elected. And Margaret makes the point that if 51, if they'd contested all 51 council boards, there's a distinct possibility that they would have had a BNP council.

• 20:31Rory Stewart?

  And this is, this is back in 2008. So this is sort of end of Blair, beginning of Brown.

• 20:35Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. She makes the point that turnout was very low. And my friend Darren Hughes at the Electoral Commission, he sent me a list of all the constituencies where there has been rioting with the turnout alongside them. And in nearly all of them, it's below 50%. So for example, Hull East 42, Middlesbrough 46, Rotherham 49. The point that Margaret made is that we talk in our little sort of, you know, Westminster media world and, you know, from our elevated heights, we talk about apathy stopping people voting. She said it was anger that was stopping people voting. And you had to go out, and she went out, she was very open about it. They did focus groups, particularly with women in the constituency. They then had these never-ending conversations with the women about what they wanted in their communities.

• 21:19Alastair Campbell?

  And then set about all, trying to fix all these small things, you know, graffiti, bin collection.

• 21:24Rory Stewart?

  Which is the stuff we did last week about Morgan McSweeney doing it with her in Barking, sorting out the gardens, cleaning up the public areas.

• 21:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And interestingly, Paul Mason, who writes alongside me in The New European, he had a piece recently about how to counter fascism. And one of the points he made was that the role of the local MP is incredibly important. And a lot of these MPs at the moment, these new Labour MPs, they'll be coming in thinking, oh, five of them have gone straight into ministers. When am I going to be a minister? X have gone on to the six select committees. When am I going to be on the select committee? But actually, Paul made the point that this sort of work that Margaret was talking about, which she did back then, is exactly the sort of work that should be led by MPs. Because that is then how you build up the support for politics and you start getting people to understand

• 22:12Alastair Campbell?

  that politics is making a difference. So it's a very interesting piece, a good piece, very well written. It sort of just brings home to you that much of what we're going through now is very similar. She points out, for example, that, I'll just read you this paragraph. The BNP embarking promised a massive council house building programme, as are Reform. They went round the borough with buckets and mops cleaning up graffiti. I don't think Reform were doing that because Nigel Farage seems to have forgotten where Clapton is. They scapegoated immigrants christening one block of flats Kosovo towers, accusing Labour of giving scarce school places to outsiders, producing two photographs of the local market, one allegedly taken in the 50s, filled with white faces, and another they claimed in 2006 dominated by Muslim women.

• 22:54Alastair Campbell?

  All of this, not so different from Reform's unrealistic promises of no hospital waiting lists, low energy bills, lower taxes and zero net migration. So essentially, she's saying it's the same fight and that fight now has to be led by Labour MPs on the ground.

• 23:09Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, we've now got to go, I think, on to a really important issue, which is Ukraine, which we haven't covered for some time. And maybe we should begin with a little bit of a summary of what's been going on. So 2022 February is the Russian invasion, so two and a half years ago now. And initially, great successes from Ukraine, I mean, astonishing that they managed to prevent Russia getting into Kiev and held them back.

• 23:32Alastair Campbell?

  Russia having said it would take a matter of days.

• 23:35Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. But disappointments last year, the great counter-offensive that was supposed to happen, never really got off the ground. And since the end of last year, Russia has very much had the initiative along most of the front lines. Now, that's not dramatic advances, that's a few hundred metres here. It's the capturing of a place called Avdeevka a few miles there. Fundamentally, Russia has ended up controlling almost all of Luhansk and basically all of Luhansk, a lot of Donetsk, probably two thirds of Donetsk and bits of another couple of provinces in the south. And their objective, their immediate short term objective seems to be the Russians to take Donetsk, take Luhansk and push for Kharkiv, which is further north. And morale was beginning to drop strongly in Ukraine. And there are

• 24:20Rory Stewart?

  three fundamental problems. There's a problem around ammunition, partly dealt with because the Americans have sent more money and more ammunition, as have the Europeans. A big problem around training, which we can talk about in a second, and a big, big problem around manpower. But all this narrative was suddenly challenged a few days ago now, on Wednesday, last Wednesday, when, as you say, Ukraine invaded Russia. So some small, relatively small units crossed over into a bit of the border that the Russians have not been worrying about. Most of the fighting had been down the eastern side of Ukraine. Suddenly, the Ukrainians opened up a new front by going into Russia. And this is relatively significant. Probably took 1,000 square kilometres of territory or more, still disputed, probably as many as 200,000 Russian refugees now leaving the area. The Russians then deploying

• 25:05Rory Stewart?

  relatively unformed construct forces to try to take them on. And a big question about whether this is genius on the Ukrainian side. So the argument for why it's genius is that suddenly you can't freeze the conflict, because if you freeze the conflict, Ukraine has a bit of Russia, as well as Russia having a bit of Ukraine. Or whether the danger is on the downside that they've overextended their lines and they're going to really struggle to hold this. And by trying to hold it, they'll weaken the rest of their front line. Over to you.

• 25:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, their military top brass say they've taken 1,000 square kilometres. Rory, do you know what the landmass of Russia is in square kilometres?

• 25:39Rory Stewart?

  No, tell us.

• 25:40Alastair Campbell?

  17,125,191. So we're talking a very, very, very small part of Russia. And it was interesting. You know, last time we did talk about Russia and Ukraine, I don't know if you remember, we talked about how Putin seemed to have got his kind of mojo back. Zelensky was looking a bit tired and lacking in confidence. This week, I would say it's flipped back. Zelensky did One of his famous nightly broadcast to the nation. And it was very confident. He was talking about how, you know, we're taking on the aggressor in their own territory. And it felt like a judo move. It felt like nobody was expecting it. Nobody saw it coming. Nobody imagines for a minute that the intentions of Ukraine upon Russia is the same as the intention

• 26:25Alastair Campbell?

  that Russia had upon Ukraine when it invaded two and a half years ago. But it does seem to have put them off balance. I watched consecutively Zelensky's speech to the nation that he does pretty much every night. Very confident, very upbeat, looked like he'd slept well over the, over the last couple of weeks. He just looked fit again. And Putin looking very stressed, very botoxed, his military team looking as sullen and terrified as ever. And they must be thinking this is a terrible failure of intelligence for them not to have seen this coming, totally taken by surprise. Now, of course, what it's done, the, the way Putin tries to use it in the judo sense is essentially they're now sort of displaying these pictures

• 27:05Alastair Campbell?

  of flats and buildings in parts of sovereign Russia, which are now sort of, you know, look like a war zone. And trying to sort of say that this underlines that they are the aggressed rather than the aggressor. Now, it'd be fascinating to see how long they hold this out because, you know, there is a risk that, yes, they have the success of taking them by surprise. Russia are now going to move troops into an area they weren't expecting to have to move troops to. The Ukrainians do seem to have a new lease of life in relation to use of drones and so forth. But it's kind of one of those things where I've yet to see a military strategist on the television or the radio convincingly give me an explanation as to why this is an act of genius.

• 27:45Rory Stewart?

  Yes, I mean, I've been talking to various people around this. So there's Yaroslav Trofimov, who's a Ukrainian, who's the chief foreign affairs correspondent at the Wall Street Journal, who's written a great book on Ukraine, has tended to emphasize this as an amazing morale boost. That it's the symbolic act that's extraordinary because as you pointed out, it's surprising, takes the fight to the enemy. But it's only can really work if two other things happen. One is they would have to hold on to that territory. And secondly, there would have to be a peace negotiation quite soon. They could hold on to it and there was a peace negotiation quite soon. Then they're in a strong position because they can talk about land swaps instead of just freezing the existing Russian control of Luhansk and a lot of Donetsk. I've also been talking and we've talked about them in the past.

• 28:27Rory Stewart?

  Shashank Joshi from The Economist, who's done a lot of good stuff on this and Jack Watling. They keep emphasizing that we have to not forget that under this sort of tactical victory, there are big strategic problems still facing the Ukrainians. One of them is recruiting enough people. The Russians have done much, much better at contracting. They offer these big bounties, having initially conscripted some people. They now offer very, very generous financial terms. You sign up for a one-year contract and actually it's putting a lot of money into the Russian economy. The Russian economy is now growing very fast. I mean, astonishingly, I mean, this is another thing.

• 29:01Alastair Campbell?

  Three percent.

• 29:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, we don't talk enough about this. I mean, again, it reminds me of what happened when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. And I remember being at meetings with top people inside the British government, who were so confident that the Russian economy would collapse because of our sanctions. And it was the same, you know, when they invaded Ukraine two and a half years ago, they were knocked out of all the global payment systems and there were massive sanctions on Russian gas and oil. The assumption was we'd bring the economy to its knees. The reality is the Russian economy is now performing better than any major economy over the last quarter. So anyway, part of this is putting money into contracts. The Ukrainians, on the other hand, most of their recruits are older. And if you go to Kiev, I was talking to somebody who just got back from Kiev. The young people are still running the cafes or in the streets.

• 29:45Rory Stewart?

  And it's partly because they refuse to join the army because they don't trust their commanders not to use them as cannon fodder. They don't believe in the training and because also there's not proper troop rotation. So if you're sent up to the frontline, you're just stuck there. There's not much sense that you're ever going to be removed and you think you're going to be stuck there until you die. And that brings us to the final thing, which is training. So we've talked a lot about training and Germany's been doing training, Britain's been doing training, but it hasn't managed to get Ukraine into the position to do these combined arms maneuvers. It's not able to coordinate properly artillery, tanks, infantry on its advances. And there are lots of reasons for that, but probably the most fundamental reason is Ukrainians won't take their frontline troops back to train them.

• 30:30Rory Stewart?

  And they certainly aren't prepared to take them out of the country. And we aren't really prepared to do significant training inside Ukraine itself. So the result is that you have an undermanned, undertrained Ukrainian army. And that will still be the vulnerability despite this tactical success.

• 30:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I do. Just on this point about morale, though, it is important. And I think that if you go through the things that bear in mind that the Kremlin is still saying everything is going according to plan. You know, this is a problem, but we can deal with that. These people will pay a heavy price, but everything is sort of on track. They've been saying that for two and a half years, including in the first few days when they said that the plan was to do it in a few few days. If you go through the things that from a Ukrainian perspective, where you're probably thinking we're doing better than people expected to. It strikes me that they've mastered this kind of drone warfare stuff. They've managed to get drones right into Russia, including as far as the as the Kremlin. They've got pretty consistently their shelling towns and villages close to the border. We had the mutiny, I mean, it seems so long ago now, but we talked at length about it at the time.

• 31:30Alastair Campbell?

  The mutiny by the Wagner mercenaries, who then marched on on Moscow. And of course, he's dead now. Like, I see another critic fell out of a window last week as well.

• 31:39Rory Stewart?

  Just over a year ago at the Wagner mutiny, yeah.

• 31:40Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. We don't know the number of Russian casualties, but we know that it's very, very large. And you've also had quite a few warships going down in the Black Sea. So if you're sitting there as Ukraine wanting as, and I mean, Zelensky, one day, somebody will, well, there'll be books written about these nightly broadcasts that he does because he manages somehow to keep the same message going, but make them sound fresh and energetic and so forth. So I think the morale point is not to be underestimated. I just don't see where they go from here in terms of that particular piece of the war.

• 32:14Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's take a break and remember to keep coming back to this.

• 32:17Alastair Campbell?

  See you in a minute.

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• 33:49Speaker 05

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• 34:25Rory Stewart?

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

• 34:28Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, before we go into China, Serbia and your trip to Afghanistan, David Davis.

• 34:35Rory Stewart?

  This is an interview we did in leading with a senior Conservative politician, an older senior Conservative politician.

• 34:41Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. And it seems to have gone down very, very well with those who thought that Rory Stewart was giving him a hard time. I don't think David will have appreciated. Most of our guests get pretty positive commentary. He didn't. And if I tell you what my missus said, Fiona, she said she thought you had the patience of a saint.

• 35:04Alastair Campbell?

  She thought he was arrogant. She couldn't stand the way that he wouldn't accept that he ever got anything wrong. And she couldn't stand the fact that he sort of looked at something like Brexit and just sort of laughed it all off.

• 35:16Rory Stewart?

  The most astonishing thing for me was I challenged him over the fact that he had voted against gay marriage and asked him whether he regretted it. And he said he understood it very well. And the reason he voted against it is that Church of England priests would be compelled to marry gay couples regardless of their religious beliefs. And it's just simply wrong. I mean, it's completely upside down. In fact, you can't actually get married in the Church of England if you're gay. And this was a, the gay marriage legislation was about the civil law, about the government, it wasn't about imposing things on churches. So it really made me wonder, did he really lead a campaign against something without even understanding the basics of the legislation?

• 35:56Alastair Campbell?

  Well Rory, he's not here to answer for himself.

• 35:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Anyway, the only thing I would say though, is I get beaten up so much generally by your supporters whenever I'm aggressive towards Labour MPs. They all believe I'm terribly biased. So I hope they understand that I'm equally capable of confronting Conservative MPs.

• 36:12Alastair Campbell?

  There was also, I posted yesterday a collection of four photographs that sort of summed up the interview because it started with him looking very, very jolly and quite fresh. It had me sort of looking on smiling quizzically. You had a very.

• 36:28Alastair Campbell?

  Peevish, aggressive look. And then it ended up with him sort of slumped back in his chair, like somebody had kind of knocked him out. So I do strongly recommend that people listen to it. It's very, very interesting, very enjoyable. And yeah, he probably does come over as rather glib at times. But there we are.

• 36:44Rory Stewart?

  Now, you've, you've come across something which I was very interested in, but it's China and Serbia. But I want you to begin by taking us back to your memories of this extraordinary event where you, having been running things in Downing Street for Tony Blair, were sent to Kosovo. So we're now in 1999. This is the Kosovo invasion. So everybody remembers Slobodan Milosevic, who was then running Serbia, had deployed troops into Kosovo, which was an autonomous area of Serbia with a very strong Albanian population, was engaged in ethnic cleansing, driving out Albanians across the border. NATO intervened to protect the Albanian population and challenged Milosevic. This was after the wars in Bosnia, so very

• 37:25Rory Stewart?

  much in the Balkans in general, very sensitive time. You were deployed. And at that point, NATO managed to drop a bomb on the Chinese embassy, on which, over to you.

• 37:34Alastair Campbell?

  This is what I wanted to raise, because when I was in Paris for the Olympics, I picked up my favourite monthly newspaper, Le Monde Diplomatique, which had this huge article about China-Serbia relations. And basically said that this was the incident, which at the time, we thought we handled masterfully after the terrible mistake that was made in terms of diplomatic reparation.

• 37:55Rory Stewart?

  Just remind us of the incident. So.

• 37:57Alastair Campbell?

  I'll tell you what I'll do, Roy. I don't think I've done this on the podcast before, but I'm going to read you a very short extract from my diary of May 1999. "I went to bed, was asleep, when the phone went and it was switched, the Downing Street switchboard, with someone from SHAPE, that's NATO, an American, very clipped, very precise. "Mr. Campbell, General Clark asked me to call you and let you know we've hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade." He said it in exactly the same tone as he might have said, General Clark has had his breakfast and is now on his way to work. I asked him to repeat, which he did, word for word. I assumed it wasn't deliberate, I said. No, sir, came back the robot voice, it was an accident. Then this is me, fucking hell, 24 carat disaster. First a convoy, we'd

• 38:41Alastair Campbell?

  hit a convoy, then a bus, then a hospital, and now we've hit the Chinese fucking embassy. I got out of bed, started ringing around the other capitals and working up a response. There was nothing to do but admit to a terrible error. Depending on how the Chinese react, this could be absolutely disastrous. Three days later, Monday, May the 10th, very short this, the Chinese are being a lot trickier now. Hypocritically, given their own position on demonstrations, they're now encouraging the demos, the demos going on all over Europe, to go on. And their media has still not reported NATO's apology and admission of error. So it's the Chinese, as if we just decided to take out their embassy. TB was even more pissed off with the Russians, found their basic attitude that what happened inside other people's countries was their own business disgusting, when you thought

• 39:26Alastair Campbell?

  what Milosevic was doing, added to which they were perpetually looking for money out of it. Now, to this day, I believe 100% it was an error, okay?

• 39:35Rory Stewart?

  I'm just going to interrupt for a second, just to give, give people the details. So we're here in May, what happens is a B2 stealth bomber with two pilots flies over, it checks the list of places that they're not supposed to strike, and this place isn't on the list. And they fire five precision missiles, which accurate to within 13 metres, straight into the side of the embassy, killing three Chinese diplomats, two of them women. Yeah, back to you. Yeah.

• 40:03Alastair Campbell?

  So that happened. And, I mean, I was, as you say, I was at the time seconded to NATO. So I was talking to people like Wes Clark, who was the Supreme Allied Commander. And put it this way, if it was deliberate, they were doing a very, very good job of hiding it from each other and from everybody else. But to this day, what this, the reason why this article really caught my eye, is because both the Serbs and the Chinese thought, and it would seem some of them continue to think, that we, NATO, were taking out a Serb transmission centre that was based inside the embassy. Now, if we were, then that was news to me, and it certainly looked to me like it was news to General Clark as well. And it's now a Chinese cultural exposition space.

• 40:47Alastair Campbell?

  Xi Jinping opened it or laid the first stone to it. But it comes on the back of a really incredible growth and development in relations between China and Serbia. Five and a half billion dollar total from 2014 to 2023. Great quote in this piece from a woman who's involved in looking at the regulatory authority that looks after the environment. And there's a lot of environmental protesters against some of the stuff that China is doing inside Serbia. And the quote is this, "Any decisions concerning China are a matter for the president's office." And the relationship between Xi Jinping and Aleksandar Vukic, the president of Serbia.

• 41:28Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, you sent Rory an account of a meeting they had in May where the, I mean, it was a love in. The words that they were exchanging were absolutely remarkable in terms of the sort of the mutual respect. And, and, and one of the things that plays at play here, China's never recognized Kosovo. In all of Xi Jinping's statements, he talks about respecting Serbia's sovereign independence and territorial integrity. And we know what he means by that. And they've even been persuading other countries which have recognized Kosovo as an independent nation in the past to change their position and recently did that, for example, for, for Nauru.

• 42:06Rory Stewart?

  This is a funny moment for the two of us because it's a moment where we, we coincided before a sort of strange coincidence of being in Iraq. Because I was deployed as a British diplomat to be the British representative in Montenegro. At this time, I was going in and out of Kosovo because we were worried that following on, Montenegro being a country just south of Serbia. Worried that following on from the Bosnia wars and the Kosovo wars, we were going to end up with a Serbia-Montenegro war. So as I was shuttling back and forth as a, a British diplomat between Sarajevo and Pristina, you had been sent out to run comms for NATO. Tell us a little bit how you came to get that job. How long did you go for? Were you, were you living like, I mean, I was staying in, on people's floors. How were you, how were you living in Pristina at the time?

• 42:52Alastair Campbell?

  No, I was mainly based in Brussels, Rory. When I did go to Pichtina, I was staying in tents similar to those of the officer class, put it that way. Quite good catering and all that stuff. But no, what happened was that a previous era, when we bombed a convoy, had led to absolute chaos in our communications. Because all the independent countries, all the different countries, America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, all said different things. The blame game got played. And it was truly awful. It went on for weeks. And it was Clinton, Bill Clinton, who said to Tony that he thought I should go out there and just try and coordinate and try and grip it.

• 43:33Rory Stewart?

  And so can I just get you, what's involved there? I mean, when Bill Clinton thinks we need Alistair to do this, what in the back of his mind, and without flattering you too much, but what do you think he reckons the difference between a good and a bad comms operation is? What is it that he was hoping you would be able to do that wasn't being done in the past? And just give us two or three ingredients of the kind of things that you might do in managing that kind of operation, journalists, to try to bring a bit of order to things?

• 43:58Alastair Campbell?

  I think the main thing would be coordination and discipline. Coordination. So for example, when it came to the Chinese embassy thing, we coordinated the response.

• 44:07Rory Stewart?

  And what does that mean? How does that work?

• 44:08Alastair Campbell?

  What it meant, what it meant, so like in my diary, I said, phoning around all the other capitals, get a message out. Nobody says anything until we all say the same thing.

• 44:16Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so just sorry, to get to sort of brass tacks, the idea is, I want to be called first. That's hence you being woken up in the middle of the night by General Wesley Clark's man. And then you immediately get out of bed and you say, everybody silence, no communication. We're going to have a central communication, which I'm going to bring together. Is that right?

• 44:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And then what would happen, we had these, myself, Catherine Collin, who went on to be French Foreign Minister, who was Sheeran spokeswoman, Jamie Shea, who was based in NATO, Jamie Rubin, who was the American State Department Assistant Secretary of State.

• 44:47Rory Stewart?

  Who we've just interviewed on leading.

• 44:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, a guy called Uwe Carsten-Haier from the German government. So we had the sort of the main NATO plus the main. Countries, we all had the capacity to call a conference call at any time 24 hours a day. So any one of us could have done that. And this was obviously a massive thing. It was going to be a massive thing. So that's the first thing, coordination and discipline. And Javier Solana, who was the civilian head of NATO at the time, if he and Wes Clark had not been supportive, it wouldn't have worked. They realised we needed to bring a bit of campaign discipline. And so it was about, you know, getting the best people, getting good people from London, Washington. I made some of my most enduring friendships,

• 45:30Alastair Campbell?

  including with Jamie Rubin, as it happens, through the fact that we sort of brought in from people from different parts of the world. We were in the same place, access to the same data, access to the same information, and over time persuading the military that this was going to help them.

• 45:44Rory Stewart?

  And so the fascinating thing is, we're now, this is 1999, we're now in 2024, right? So 25 years later, this single accident by two pilots and a B2 stealth bomber has serious international strategic repercussions because, you know, as we've pointed out, Xi Jinping, when he does the Chinese premier, when he does his visit to Europe, visits France, sure, that's his main visit, but then the only other countries he visits are Hungary and Serbia. And we can develop this a little bit more. And I'm going to share for real geeks, a speech that Viktor Orban has just made at a summer camp, where he talks about geopolitics, talks about Hungary's relationship with China, Hungary's relationship with the US. He has a moment in it where, you know, he's very pro-Trump, as you can

• 46:28Rory Stewart?

  imagine. But it is absolutely fascinating. And I'd love us to come back to it. We don't maybe have the time now, but maybe do a proper discussion on Hungary. Because it is so revealing. Orban, more than anyone else, this populist leader in Hungary, more than anyone else is the kind of intellectual leader now of this strong man philosophy. And it's got everything in it. It's got the anti-immigrant stuff. It's got Christianity against Islam. It's got LGBTQ. It's got Donald Trump. It's got China. It's got the whole worldview here, which maybe we can...

• 47:00Alastair Campbell?

  But Ruri, you also sent me something very interesting this week, which I have to confess, I had to go to Google Translate to help me, because it was in Hungarian. You don't speak Hungarian, do you?

• 47:09Rory Stewart?

  I do not. I speak a little Serbian.

• 47:11Alastair Campbell?

  But it was very interesting. It was very interesting, because essentially, this was a very long article in Hungarian. Showing that the Hungarian government is actually deliberately, willfully undermining the Schengen border by, from July, Russians and Belarusians able to come in with so-called national cards. Now, what, see, what you've got is a small country, you know, as you know, we interviewed your friend David, General David Petraeus, and that'll be on the lead soon. And you made the point, he was making the point that Orban, that Trump was kind of aping Orban, this tiny country, which has now got such power within the European Union, which has such a hold over the American right, which is, he was a sort of idol for

• 47:55Alastair Campbell?

  people like Nigel Farage and Richard Tyson, all this lot, and yet continues to be allowed to operate, kind of hiding in plain sight, doing all the stuff which everybody in Brussels knows is bad for the, for the European Union.

• 48:09Rory Stewart?

  Well, Alice, really fascinating, and thank you for, for raising that with us.

• 48:12Alastair Campbell?

  And now Afghanistan, because you have been there many, many times in the past, you've just been there again, three years on from the chaos of the withdrawal. So what's your take?

• 48:23Rory Stewart?

  Well, it was an extraordinary trip, and I felt very, very lucky to do it. And it's very strange. I mean, I first saw Afghanistan just at the end of the last time the Taliban was in, were in power. And when I saw it then, Afghanistan, Kabul particularly, was a ghost town. There were, many of the buildings were in ruins, there were almost no cars in the streets. You could get across the city in about 10 minutes. This time I turned up, and it was astonishing to discover that on the surface, it felt as though very little had changed from before the Taliban takeover. So the airport was looking smart, the traffic was very, very busy, huge traffic jams in the streets, the streets were very busy. But you could immediately see one change, which is that there were far fewer women

• 49:06Rory Stewart?

  in the streets, and those that were, were very carefully covered, and that men were almost all in shawakamis, in traditional dress. There were far fewer people wearing western dress. It is though different. So first thing, of course, Taliban control, very, very restrictive on women. And I travelled around the country, I wasn't just in Kabul, I went out to Bamiya, and I went out to Bandi Amir, and Again and again and again, you were encountering not just, well, men mostly, because I was mostly meeting men, talking about how angry they were that their daughters were not able to continue into school and that many of them had teenage girls stuck at home who were very depressed, very alienated.

• 49:45Alastair Campbell?

  Drew, if I could just jump in there on the point about women. So I was in Paris for part of the Olympics, as you know. And in the cycling road race, I noticed two female Afghani athletes. Now admittedly wearing the old flag.

• 49:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Alastair Campbell?

  Um, but I checked out six, there were six Afghan athletes in Paris, three men, three women. Now, I presume none of them could be there without the permission of the Taliban.

• 50:07Rory Stewart?

  Correct. They were sent by the Taliban government under the old flag. So the Taliban's attitude to women, I mean, is very, very restrictive. I mean, it's much worse than, for example, in Iran.

• 50:16Alastair Campbell?

  So why would they allow women to take part in the Olympics?

• 50:19Rory Stewart?

  Because they are not the Taliban of the 1990s. The 1990s, they were even more restrictive. 1990s, you remember, they were basically hanging televisions from trees, doing public executions in the stadium. This time, they are encouraging women to continue in business. So there are many female businesses they're supporting, for example, because their economy is in, in collapse.

• 50:42Alastair Campbell?

  But they still can't do higher education.

• 50:44Rory Stewart?

  Well, and one of the madnesses is that they're allowing female clinics to run with female doctors and nurses. But they're not allowing the next generation of female doctors and nurses to be trained. So how are they supposed to replace them? There's a complete contradiction between the Ministry of Employment, that seems to be happy for women to work, and the Ministry of Education, that doesn't seem to be happy for women to get the skills they would require to go into the workplace. So that, that central horrifying fact. But I was also there visiting Turquoise Mountain, which is the, the charity run by my wife, Shashana. And there it was very striking that she still had 4,000 female weavers working on the ground, getting incomes, still able to run primary schools, female health clinics.

• 51:27Rory Stewart?

  Despite the evacuations, the horror, the, the charity kept going. And I saw Taliban ministers walking around this project. And there is clearly a tension within the Taliban. Taliban government, there are more liberal factions, or I mean liberal maybe is pushing it, but there are factions that definitely want to get women back into education. And then there's much more conservative push from Kandahar, from the mullahs in Kandahar, who want a much more conservative vision. It's not really a Muslim vision, it's like a conservative tribal southern Afghan vision of women. And then the other big fact is security. So Afghanistan is much, much safer, much safer than it's been any time 20 years.

• 52:05Alastair Campbell?

  Because the Taliban's not bombing the place up?

• 52:08Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, they shouldn't get much credit for it. The reason it's safer is they're not doing it. But the truth of the matter is that, you know, I could stop and have a picnic by the roadside. I could go for a walk in the hills, I could ride donkeys. I mean, these are the things which would have been very, very stupid to do for any time in the last 20 years. And that does make a huge difference to Afghans.

• 52:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:28Rory Stewart?

  And, you know, I went to this lake 300 miles from Kabul. And it was basically like Bogner Regis, there were these sort of thousands of Afghan families out there on, on little pedal boats, swan pedal boats on this lake and little tents and picnics happening. Again, that's stuff that you haven't seen for 20 years. So.

• 52:45Alastair Campbell?

  Did you suggest to the, any of the mullahs that they market it as the Bogner Regis of Afghanistan?

• 52:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, yeah, I think they'd struggle to do that because at the same time, I saw one of them pulling out a taser and threatening women for getting too close to a particular group of men. So it's a very, very, quite how to put it, I mean, the Afghan economy is in crisis. Treatment of women is bad, but security is much better. And I suppose if I'm going to sort of conclude, it does bring us to a theme that we touch on a lot, which is how one thinks about authoritarian governments. It is a sort of microcosm of that because it was a democracy before, you know, everyone with their purple fingers, Hamid Karzai, Ashraf Ghani voting, but it was a very dangerous place and it was a very corrupt place that was growing a lot of drugs.

• 53:29Rory Stewart?

  Now we're a country which is safer, you're much less likely to get killed, there are far fewer drugs being grown, and it's less corrupt. And the Taliban are actually able to pursue infrastructure projects which were blocked by corruption. But there's no liberty, there's no freedom and there's poor treatment of women. So you can see why some Afghans. Feel that the situation's improved.

• 53:49Alastair Campbell?

  On this drugs issue, I'm fascinated by this because back in the day, I remember having lots of meetings with Richard Dearlove, who was head of MI6 at the time, and talking about the importance of, you know, sorting out this drug trade. And it struck me that what we, when the Americans were doing was giving lots of money to lots of people, to distribute to lots of farmers, to persuade them to grow something other than opium.

• 54:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, we literally, you're quite right. We literally gave billions of dollars to various Afghan intermediaries.

• 54:19Alastair Campbell?

  And what did they do? Did they just take the money and then the farmers carried on growing? Is that what happened?

• 54:23Rory Stewart?

  Yep. But broadly speaking, that's right. There's some great work that's been done with satellite imagery, which just shows the poppy fields growing and growing and growing all the way during the US, UK intervention. Afghanistan, didn't matter how many billions we spent, the total amount of drugs produced just went up and up and up. And when the Taliban came in, they very significantly reduced the amount of poppy cultivation. And they didn't do it by giving people money because they didn't have any money. They did it by saying this is illegal and implementing the law.

• 54:49Alastair Campbell?

  They wouldn't have seen it as a, as a way of giving themselves a bit of an economic leg up.

• 54:53Rory Stewart?

  Well, well, this, this, some people say that one of the reasons why they collapsed in 2000, 2001 is that by stopping the poppy production, they lost so much revenue from the government. I mean, Afghanistan was making billions of dollars a year from producing 90% of Europe's heroin. And so the Taliban, to some extent, are cutting off their nose to spite their face. And, and this is one of the enduring tensions between the Taliban and the outside world. They're saying, you know, we're making all these efforts to reduce the drug heroin production. We're bankrupting our country doing it and we get no credit for it. So the question of whether the Taliban's going to be able to negotiate their way back into some kind of stable situation, is development aid going to go in again? I'd like to pay

• 55:35Rory Stewart?

  tribute also to the work of the British diplomats and indeed, a lot of the international diplomats who are navigating a very difficult situation. So the British diplomats going in and out of Afghanistan, we don't have a flag there, but they're thinking hard about how we get support to Afghan people without propping up the Taliban regime. The American government's been quite imaginative about trying to work out how to keep charities operating without sanctioning the Taliban government.

• 55:59Alastair Campbell?

  What are they doing with this? I read the, the The Taliban have said that they're no longer going to recognise diplomatic missions, Afghanistan diplomatic missions that were set up by the former Western-backed government. Is that not just sort of passports, visas, all that stuff? So is that just not a recipe for chaos?

• 56:16Rory Stewart?

  It is a recipe for chaos. The Afghan Embassy is right next to Hyde Park. It's a building just on that road that goes out in London, up past the Science, Music and Natural History Museum. And that's where I went to get my visa three weeks ago. And sure enough, the people in it were diplomats who were employed by the Republic Government, the previous democratically-elected government, and the Taliban continue to keep them there. But the Taliban have just now announced after three years, it seems, that those embassies are no longer going to be supported and no longer be able to issue visas, which is a real problem, presumably not just people like me, but for the many, many Afghans I saw queuing up for visas in that embassy.

• 56:50Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, Rory, listen, you've clearly had a good time. I guess two questions for me to end, one from me and one from Jack Cryon, which he submitted to the Q and A, but I'm going to cheat in line in this one. My question is, did you meet people that you knew in your previous time in Afghanistan who said that things were better? Did you meet people who said things were worse? And Jack's question is, what does Rory think of the Taliban trying to turn Afghanistan into a tourist destination, which with your portrayal of picnics by the roadside is, you know, maybe helpful?

• 57:19Rory Stewart?

  Firstly, to Jack on travelling to Afghanistan. Listen, don't travel to Afghanistan. I mean, I went there because we have a charity on the ground and we're supporting an NGO on the ground, and it's a country that Shashana and I lived in, met in, and I've spent many years living there. There is very, very clear, strict Foreign Office travel advice against travel to Afghanistan, and there is a reason for that. Four weeks before we went, a French and Spanish tourist who had turned up in the bazaar in Bamiyan, which is one of the safest parts of the country, was shot dead in the market. So do not travel to Afghanistan as a tourist. In relation to what people felt.

• 57:58Rory Stewart?

  Look, I think people are depressed. I saw many people that I knew in the old dispensation. I think people accept that security's improved. They accept that there are opportunities to do things, but they're very worried about the economy. They feel that they can't criticize the Taliban government in any way, particularly the sort of people, obviously, that I know best, who are often more liberal, more progressive, people living in urban areas, are depressed and worried about the situation. But I don't think they see any alternative. And their dream is that the Taliban reform and that a reformed Taliban government manages to reengage with the international community. But they're not that confident this is going

• 58:41Rory Stewart?

  to happen. It's very odd being in a country run by religious men, very odd being in a country where, you know, the Taliban Minister of Culture, for example, who I met briefly, is engaged. He, you know, he operated like sort of classic politician. He was friendly to people. He listened to them. He took a great interest in projects. But the reality is he and I think the entire cabinet, basically, are religious mullahs. And it's a very, very odd way of running a country.

• 59:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I know that they have a pretty grim attitude towards sport, which I don't know how you hang sport from trees, but I think they used to do that in the past as well. So a very big shout out from me for Manisha Talash, who is an Afghan refugee in Spain, who took part in the Olympics for the refugee team. And above all, Rory, you must share with me the pride in Cindy Ngamba, who is a Cameroonian-born lesbian boxer, who has got a degree in crime and criminal justice from the University of Bolton, and who won the first Olympic medal for the refugee team. And if only we'd had a more enlightened approach to refugees, it could have been another GB medal. But there we are. Cindy

• 59:53Alastair Campbell?

  won it for the refugees. And also in the closing ceremony, Rory, I know you watched the opening ceremony, I don't know if you watched the closing ceremony, but at the end of it, when they have an athlete from all of the, each of the five continents, and they now have one also from the refugee community on the platform at the end, and it was Cindy Ngamba. So there we are.

• 1:00:09Rory Stewart?

  Great.

• 1:00:10Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 1:00:10Rory Stewart?

  See you soon. Thank you, Alison.

• 1:00:12Alastair Campbell?

  Take care. Bye.

• 1:00:15Speaker 05

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

• 1:00:19Speaker 06

  On October 2nd.

• 1:00:20Speaker 05

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

• 1:00:25Speaker 06

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess.

• 1:00:28Speaker 05

  And Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:00:30Speaker 06

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:00:32Speaker 07

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

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:00:39Speaker 07

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:00:41Speaker 06

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