25. British scandals, global recession, and Elvis

Join Rory and Alastair as they discuss British scandals, moments of madness, civil service interventions, Starmer on Brexit, technocracy, global economic recession, tech bubbles, China and Taiwan, Xi Jinping, Britain's dwindling military, Lebedev, Elvis, Jimmy Carter and a tribute to Peter Brook. Reading list: Xi Jinping: The Most Powerful Man in the World - Stefan Aust and Adrian Geiges Starmer is right to say Brexit won’t be reversed (The Times) - William Hague Mozart in Motion - Patrick Mackie The State We're In: Alastair Campbell Meets Rory Stewart (Men's Health) - Alastair Campbell Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport The New European Offer: theneweuropean.co.uk/trip 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:49Rory Stewart?

  This is great cliche, obviously, that a week is a long time in politics. In our case, we just recorded this podcast when the news of Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak's resignations broke. So we recorded a brand new podcast, which if you haven't listened to, please do. It's called Sunak and Javid Resign. And now we're putting out the podcast that we were Suppose to put out in the first place. And you'll see in it that we're touching actually on what I think are probably even bigger and more fundamental issues in the background of it. We do talk about resignations and the way in which Downing Street handles resignations, looking at Alistair's experience. But we also get on to really meaty issues. Get on to Brexit, the way the Labour Party is trying to define itself. More fundamentally, though, we look at China and Taiwan and the global recession

• 2:34Rory Stewart?

  and the way in which that really could be the thing that determines our next five or 10 years in a much more fundamental way than we've begun to understand. But before we get on to that, and even before we get on to Elvis Presley and Alastair Campbell's love of Elvis, time to bring in Alistair and how he might react if you were in Downing Street and Chris Pinter behaved in the way that he did.

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  The news that just as soon as he was hoping he was clawing it back a little bit with his G7 trip and his stuff on Ukraine, to then see this news story with Chris Pinter. I mean, just to flip it around for a second, if you were in Downing Street, how do you think people react when a story like that comes in through the door, just as they're trying to get things back on an even keel?

• 3:20Alastair Campbell?

  I think the first thing to say is that people start to feel a little bit sick. You know, you have that sinking feeling in your stomach when you think you're just coming up for water, you're just coming up to breathe and whoosh, something else hits you. But the thing that we know about this guy, you and I both said this in our different ways in the last few weeks and months, we just know that there'll be another scandal along once this one dies out. And what I find incredible, I mean, I don't have any doubts about him, you don't have any doubts about him. And by the way, our men's health interview has been published today. And my God, you come up with some strong, strong stuff about Johnson. I mean, evil is a very strong word, Rory, evil, you say. But let's come back to your views of him. But what I think you then feel is you think, well, I certainly used to think when we were

• 4:03Alastair Campbell?

  in the middle of a kind of, you know, shitstorm, you have to get to the facts, you have to find the facts and you have to then make sure that everybody understands the facts. So I don't know what goes on inside there at the moment, I really don't.

• 4:14Rory Stewart?

  So just, I mean, the one I remember is Ron Davis, which was terrific, wasn't it? The Sun.

• 4:20Alastair Campbell?

  No, it was not terrific. It was really not terrific. It was the opposite of terrific.

• 4:25Rory Stewart?

  Just to remind listeners, the Sun did a story in which they said that he'd been seen coming out of a famous gay sex haunt on the M4. He said he hadn't visited the area for 15 years. And then he changed his mind and said, maybe he had been there, but he'd been watching badgers.

• 4:40Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's worse than that, Rory. It's actually worse than that. You've jumped, you've jumped forward. The initial, the initial story was much worse than that. We got approached by the police before the press were even on to it, and said that there'd been this incident on Clapham Common, where Ron, for reasons unknown to himself, was wandering around Clapham Common. And he got into the back of a car with a man that the police described as a rasta. And then they sort of, you know, cruised around for a bit. And we, it was impossible to get to the truth of the, of the story. So Ron at the Times was in the Cabinet, he was Secretary of State for Wales, quite a sort of, quite an operator politically. And

• 5:23Alastair Campbell?

  the police were really embarrassed. It's like the bit with the whole party gate thing. The police don't like coming into Downey Street and having to tell you stuff. They really don't. So we got Ron, we found Ron and we, we got him in. And Tony, because Tony sort of sensed this might be leading to somewhere quite tricky, we phoned Richard Wilson, the Cabinet Secretary, and said, I think you'd better join this meeting. So Ron, Ron came in and he said, we, we sat him down. And he says, Ron, what the hell's this about? And Ron says, by the way, people who complain we'll ever talk about Wales, let's not include this as being about Wales. This is about very strange stuff. But he was Secretary of State for Wales. And he said, look, I was, I was, I was driving off of Wales and I, I just felt I needed a bit of fresh air. So I go out on Clapham Common,

• 6:06Alastair Campbell?

  I get a bit of fresh air. I meet this guy, seemed like a nice guy. And he said, you ought to go, he said, you ought to go for a curry. I said, yeah, I like curry. Let's go for a curry. So, so we're sort of saying, so what, did, where was your red box? Where were your papers? Well, they were in my car. I left my car. No, I made a ticket in the box with me in his car. I can't remember the detail, which is like 24 hours earlier this happened. So then he goes off, he goes, and I know, I can read Tony Blair's face like a book. I know Tony has decided very, very early, this is toast. And so we have the chat. He digs himself deeper and deeper and deeper. And then eventually Tony says, Alistair, I think you'd better go back to, to the Welsh office with Ron. And talk this over and see where we get to. I go over there, at which time there are

• 6:49Alastair Campbell?

  two policemen waiting to talk to him. And, um, and he asked me to sit with him. I think he thought I was gonna kind of, so I sat and listened to this, just.

• 6:59Rory Stewart?

  Like a sort of lawyer, sitting with him in the, in the.

• 7:01Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know what it was. And then eventually, I remember as well, he phoned up his wife and he sort of said, oh, I've just had a chat with, I just had a chat with Tony and something might be on the news coming up, but just so you know, there's nothing to worry about. And, you know, anyway, two hours later, it's sort of whoosh breaking news, cabinet minister resides over. And here's the thing, Rory, I bet you've never heard of Dennis Wise, have you?

• 7:20Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 7:20Alastair Campbell?

  Dennis Wise, ninety eight percent of our listeners know that Dennis Wise was a very, very, very good, quite dirty footballer. And that weekend, he had been sent off for something or other. And in his after match interview, he said, I don't know what happened. It was a moment of madness. So as I'm talking to Ron, who we get John Sarge at there to do a pulled interview. And Rob says, what do you think I should say? I said, Ron, I just think you should say it was a moment of madness. And he went out, that was his line. And if you remember, he wrote, he wrote on the, um, he wrote on his hands, sorry. And he kept looking, he said, oh, I must say sorry.

• 7:55Rory Stewart?

  That's right. He kept looking at his hands, say sorry. Yeah.

• 7:57Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, it was awful. But listen, honestly, this lot, if that happened to this lot, they'd say, oh, we're having an investigation. Sue Gray is going to be inquiring and then we'll have a parliamentary, da, da, da. And let's, now it's too time to move on. But what's extraordinary about what you heard today from Simon McDonald, and you, you, you must have worked with Simon McDonald.

• 8:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I know him very well. Yeah.

• 8:13Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, Simon's a really, I mean, he's sort of totally straight.

• 8:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Alastair Campbell?

  And he's just very, very proper. He believes in public service. And, and, and he was absolutely devastating this morning. He did a very calm, quiet interview where he basically set out the facts and just says, Downing Street are not telling the truth. Johnson was directly informed of this and they just keep changing their story.

• 8:37Rory Stewart?

  But Simon was the permanent, permanent secretary in the Foreign.

• 8:39Alastair Campbell?

  He was permanent secretary then, and he was, he's now retired.

• 8:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Alastair Campbell?

  And he said that, you know, for somebody like me to come out of retirement to say this is, is, I think it indicates just how, how strongly people feel about what's been happening inside the government. But this is always going to happen with Johnson. You know that and I know that.

• 8:53Rory Stewart?

  The Simon McDonald thing is fascinating. I obviously, he was our permanent secretary. So the senior civil servant in the department when I was the Minister of State and Boris Johnson was the Foreign Secretary. So I saw a loss of loss of him and he spent an enormous amount of time kind of walking around with Boris Johnson and it was fascinating watching the body language because clearly, as you say, Simon McDonald, very, very proper, almost kind of old fashioned type of Foreign Office diplomat, been in, I guess, thirty five years by then. And very grand. I mean, the the senior civil servants office and the Foreign Office is the same size the Foreign Secretary is, this enormous kind of palace he lives in. And I couldn't quite work out, he was always walking around behind Boris Johnson, laughing at his jokes

• 9:36Rory Stewart?

  and sort of backing him up. And I found it very difficult to put a cigarette paper between them. He was very loyal to Boris Johnson, as I guess he had to be as the Permanent Secretary. And I'd get very frustrated with it. I mean, I remember these meetings where Boris Johnson, you know, would sit in our meetings, we'd say, somebody's got to go to the Treasury and get us some money because the core budget of the Foreign Office in those days, and this was partly inherited from Labour, it actually begun to be cut heavily under people like David Miliband, but it, the core budget of Foreign Office was half that of the French Foreign Service, very, very difficult for us to do our business. And Boris Johnson got very angry at the table and said, nobody's giving me any briefings, nobody's telling me what I'm supposed to say to the Treasury. When I was London Mayor, people would give me a proper piece of paper and I could go into the meetings and I knew what to say. So I and Simon McDonald would try to say very patiently, well, look, we

• 10:21Rory Stewart?

  have given you thing, but you want us to run through it again, these are the facts and figures, this is the lack of money. And Boris Johnson getting very, very frustrated again. But I suppose what I'm getting to is it's very, very interesting seeing Simon McDonald now coming out because at the time, whenever I tried to take him aside and say Boris Johnson's going mad, he's letting us down, why on us, he's sending me to Africa when I don't know anything about Africa, Simon McDonald would defend Boris Johnson for health.

• 10:47Alastair Campbell?

  That's interesting because I, but it is very difficult for these civil servants and because they they do in the main, you get the occasional one who thinks, well, I know better than the minister and they have a little bit of a power struggle. But in the main, they are civil servants, they work to the minister and they do tend to defend them. And, you know, I worked with with Simon over all sorts of really difficult, sensitive issues where there were maybe sort of a bit of a difference between Number Ten and the Foreign Office or other parts of government. But I think he always did see his job as trying to kind of reconcile, try to bring people together. I remember when he was ambassador, he was ambassador in Berlin when the embassy moved from Bonn to Berlin. I remember seeing him there. I think I was, I think I'd left by then, but I went over and I was seeing people in Merkel's outfit and, and, and Simon was

• 11:31Alastair Campbell?

  just so, he'd really immersed himself. He was incredibly well informed. He really worked hard. He really had the detail about the job that he was doing. And I suspect that's what in the end has driven him to the edge with this because he knows this is how Johnson operates. But I think he now sees that it's, it's doing damage on a scale way worse than he could even do at the Foreign Office. And that's why he feels the need to, to speak out as he has.

• 11:54Rory Stewart?

  Listen, one thing that we, we were going to talk about to, to move off the subject of Chris Pincher and his, um, his alleged.

• 12:01Alastair Campbell?

  Pincher by name, Pincher by nature, according to Boris Johnson.

• 12:04Rory Stewart?

  And actually, just on that for a second, one of the things that is different between this story and Ron Davis is that he came out immediately, didn't he? He, he immediately, the next morning issued a letter saying, I screwed up, I'm resigning, which I guess from a media.

• 12:19Alastair Campbell?

  Same day, same day.

• 12:20Rory Stewart?

  Which from a media management point of view, I guess is what you would have wanted if the whip had done that.

• 12:25Alastair Campbell?

  The, the, the principle at stake here is if you can't defend it, then he has to go. And I found it absolutely impossible to defend this story about, you know, I met a bloke and he was a nice guy. We went for a curry and, you know, I left my red, I left my red box in the car and no, it wasn't, there wasn't any gay sex going on and bladdy, bladdy, bladdy, blah. But, you know, I might've had a few liaisons. I don't know. I can't remember all that stuff. You just know. Whereas, whereas the instinct of Johnson is always to cover up, always to tell a new set of lies because ultimately he needs these people to prop him up. He needs people like Dominic Raab and Nadine Dorries will say absolutely anything that he tells them to. And the other thing Rory about this, you know, the Conservative

• 13:10Alastair Campbell?

  Party is coming over like, I mean, there's so many of these sex scandals going on, groping. We had the Wakefield by-election because of sexual abuse. And, and have you noticed as well how they call it, they call it inappropriate behaviour? Like it's sort of inappropriate, it's sexual assault that we're talking about, but inappropriate behaviour sounds like, you know, you sort of knocked in, you fell over and hit somebody. So do you want to talk about, do you want to talk about Labour and Brexit? I can feel you gagging to get on to that.

• 13:36Rory Stewart?

  Labour and Brexit, yeah. So I really want to know where you are on this. So actually, we've been back and forth on this a lot. Tony Blair, during this conference that we did last week, basically said Brexit is, is over, that discussion's over for a generation. And that got a really angry response, I think, from Will Hutton and The Observer. And I'd, let's, let's start with that. Do you think Brexit is over for a generation? Do you think Tony Blair's right about that?

• 14:01Alastair Campbell?

  Um, no, I don't. And also, I'm not convinced that that's what he deep down believes. I think he feels that politically at the moment, for the Labour Party to say, our big mission for the future is to reverse the decision of the referendum, is very, very difficult for Keir Starmer. Um, deep down, though, I think Tony, who as you saw from the conference, and from our podcast indeed, which gave us record listening figures last week, by the way, Roy, um, but what you saw is he's somebody who really thinks about detail and about strategy, about consequence. And I think he knows that at some stage, this country is going to have to fundamentally revisit its relationship with European Union, definitely think about getting back into the single market and the customs union, and at some

• 14:43Alastair Campbell?

  point, probably reverse the whole damn thing. Um, and to be honest, that's where I am as well. That is where I am. I can probably be more open about it because I'm not a member of the Labour Party. Um, I was very disappointed by, by Keir's speech, but I understand why he made it in the way that he did. He's not going to like, I haven't written the piece, but he's not going to like the front page of the New European this week.

• 15:03Rory Stewart?

  What is it?

• 15:04Alastair Campbell?

  They are our sponsors. It's basically, it's, you know, you know, the, the picture of the, of the snakes of lorries going down towards the Channel Tunnel?

• 15:12Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:13Alastair Campbell?

  With these, with these three flying pigs coming over the top. And it's saying, you know, I'm going to make Brexit work. And the thing is that we talk about politics wanting to be in the real world. In the real world, everybody now knows that Brexit is taking an enormous chunk of our economy. That's got to be addressed. That has to be addressed.

• 15:33Rory Stewart?

  Let me, let me try to find a middle ground here. So I agree with you, obviously. I voted remain and I did so presumably for many of the same reasons that you and many other people did. However, if it's happened and if all the major parties have said they're going to go with it, and if Keir Starmer said he's going to make the best of it, I guess there is an argument that you can make that we all understand that you can end up with a second best option and then you still try to make the best of it. You don't get the house that you wanted to buy. You don't get the cards you want to make the best of it. So I guess it is kind of the responsibility of these people now to try to make the best of it and try to look at it positively. And there's not, if we're going to be in outside Europe for the next 20 years, there's not much point just spending

• 16:17Rory Stewart?

  the whole time saying it's a disaster. There are no benefits to it at all. We must be able to think of something to do with it, right?

• 16:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I thought that what was for me, I have been sort of nagging and agitating for a while. At the very least, please start calling out the disasters that it's inflicting upon us. Be that in relation to red tape. Be that in relation to the queues at Dover. Be that in relation, this is the one, as you know, that really gets to be the impact upon the Good Friday Agreement and the peace process. All of these things have to be fixed. I think this is what Tony was saying at your conference. This, all of these things have to be fixed and they're not being fixed by the government. And at least the Labour Party is stepping up and saying, we have to fix these things. I get that. And I think thus far, okay. But there's a very interesting letter. I, as you know, Rory, I have massive attention to detail. I do look at the letters in the New European before they go in. And

• 17:07Alastair Campbell?

  there's a letter in that's going in this week. Keir Starmer's ruled out returning to the single market. Therefore, I'm ruling out voting for Labour. He has to understand, it goes back to the discussion we had last about Peter Kelner's polling. He has to understand there are some people for whom what he said this week. Will make it impossible for them to vote Labour. He has to understand that.

• 17:25Rory Stewart?

  So there was quite a good article by William Hague in which he tried to see, so he starts by saying he voted Remain. And then he tries to see what you could do if you were a leader trying to look at Brexit opportunities. So he points out, for example, that there is much more that we could be doing on food and plant checks. And that is something that is likely to cause a problem. There are serious diseases. I'm looking out my window. I'm talking to you in Scotland. I have a cherry disease, which almost certainly came from trees that were imported from Spain. And there will be many other types of management of plants and animal disease that we would be able to do more easily outside the European Union that we were able to do in.

• 18:07Rory Stewart?

  He talks about the fact that there are regulatory freedoms which we could pursue. And if you wanted to make a positive case, the insurance industry, for example, was very interested in certain kinds of deregulation. There are stuff he thinks you could do on gene editing, on AI. And I guess his question is, why has Boris Johnson's government been so slow to try to think of what these opportunities are?

• 18:34Alastair Campbell?

  Because that's not how they're thinking. That's not how they're thinking, is it? The Jacob Rees-Mogg, and I don't know if you've watched any of Jacob Rees-Mogg's performance at the Dispatch box. They're just embarrassing. I don't think they're thinking in those terms. They're just thinking it's all about a propaganda game, a news management game. And we saw that this week. The minute Keir Starmer opened his mouth, this avalanche of social media stuff from the Conservatives, you know, this is the man who tried to get you a second referendum. This is the man who voted against Brexit, whatever number they'd made up on that. So I don't think that's how they're taking it. And that's why I think Keir could get some political mileage out of saying, we are going to fix the problems. But I think making Brexit work. You know, I agree with you. Yes, you can say, let's make the best of it. Let's try and make the best of a very bad job.

• 19:18Alastair Campbell?

  But make Brexit work, sounds to me like they're saying, it can work. When actually, deep down, they don't believe it can. They don't believe it can be done without doing fundamental damage to our economy, to our standing in the world. And look, Rory, you and I talk a lot about foreign policy. You know, from your travels, Brexit has, you can't quantify this, but Brexit has knocked a very large chunk off our soft and hard power standings in the world. That's terrible. Fix it.

• 19:46Rory Stewart?

  How does this position help Labour get votes? What's the play devil's advocate against yourself? If you were sitting in Keir Starmer's team, why has he made this call and what will their calculation be?

• 19:56Alastair Campbell?

  I guess the calculation will be that the Conservatives are determined. By the way, I read a very interesting polling by the Byline Times have done, which suggests that actually Brexit, in terms of the political debate now, people like me, who are on the kind of, you know, very angry about Brexit side, Brexit as a political issue means a lot more to us now than it does to those on the Leave side, a majority of whom are now seeing it as going wrong.

• 20:22Rory Stewart?

  The Daily Mail ran, you know, one of the classic pieces yesterday, one of your favourite type of pieces, and there was a big paragraph in there saying, "We need Boris Johnson because Tony Blair and his centrist conference and all his friends are trying to undo Brexit, and we need to keep Boris Johnson in to stop them undoing Brexit."

• 20:41Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, I wish that were true. But as you, I wish that were true. I don't, I think too many people have given up the fight. So I don't see it happening anytime soon. I think we can have an interesting discussion about what a generation means, the same discussion is currently happening in Scotland, when it was once in a, once in a generation change. But look, there comes a point, I just think we have to live in the real, that yes, they're living in the real politic world, where Brexit is a very difficult divisive issue, but in the real world, a country and a government that has taken a substantial chunk of its economy, and therefore the impact upon public services and the standing in the world. And the other thing, Rory, we've talked so far in this podcast about the fact that Johnson's a liar. Well, we all know that Brexit was won by lies.

• 21:25Alastair Campbell?

  And that, I think that should be pointed out continuously as well. On that, I think it's time for our break. Thank you, Alastair.

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• 23:21Alastair Campbell?

  Right, today's episode of The Rest Is Politics is sponsored by The New European. And I, of course, lots in the paper this week about Labour, Keir Starmer, the post Brexit position. I don't think Keir, as I said earlier, he's not going to like the front page too much. But Rory, what do you, you know, in a nutshell, what did you think of what Keir was trying to do?

• 23:42Rory Stewart?

  Well, of course, the thing that made me saddest is ruling out the customs union. I think that is the most straightforward, least controversial way of addressing a lot of our economic worries. Customs union, just to remind people, means not free movement. So it would still have immigration controls, but it would integrate us much more easily into the European markets and deal with a lot of the problems we're facing in Northern Ireland.

• 24:04Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, Matt Kelly, the editor, did ask me to write the front page piece lambasting Labour. But as you know, Rory, I find that quite difficult to do. So Zoe Williams of The Guardian has stepped in. And she's basically, her basic point, I think, is that there's not that much difference between Starmer ruling out, rejoining, and Johnson boasting about an unready deal. She finds them both sort of, you know, unrealistic. But there we are. So that's The New European this week. And you can subscribe to the paper for just a pound a week. And if you like the actual paper in your hands, you get that delivered to your door every week for just an extra one pound a week. Visit www.the new european.co.uk/trip to sign up. They're the best deals they're offering, exclusive rates for listeners too.

• 24:49Alastair Campbell?

  The Rest Is Politics, and now back to the show.

• 24:55Rory Stewart?

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

• 24:59Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 25:00Rory Stewart?

  Right. So, Alistair, I'd like to get on to speaking at global recession and stuff.

• 25:08Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, before you do, before you do, before you do, we, because we went off on one about Johnson scandals and then Labour and Brexit, I just wanted to know whether you'd in any way adapted, revised, or developed your opinion of my former boss, given that you spent quite a lot of time with him. We talked to him on the podcast, you then went to his conference, you spoke to his conference, you saw him up close and personal. Just wondered your sort of... If there's a new take.

• 25:31Rory Stewart?

  Well, I I think it's a really interesting. I mean, I think the first thing is I'm really, the thing that interests me most is the depth of your loyalty and affection to him is extraordinary. That that's one of the things that I I've taken away from this most strongly, and that says something probably quite positive about him. That he engenders that form of loyalty, right? You work for him very, very closely. And you remain clearly very, very devoted to him. I also thought, again, on the positive, he is extraordinarily across the details. I think there are very few contemporary politicians who are able to digest a brief that well and who remain so relentlessly focused

• 26:13Rory Stewart?

  on those details or who are so articulate in responding to questions with detail. I think there are other aspects in which are probably not, I mean, then there's the other stuff, of course, that I'm still angry about. I mean, I think the Iraq war stuff was mad and the more I think about it, the more cross I get about it. I also think that there's a, on the, on the other side of it, it was an interesting question that came into us from a guy called Thomas Cloughton. Which, so Thomas Cloughton said, having listened to Tony Blair last week, should he not show much greater humility? There seemed very limited curiosity on his part for what he got wrong. His role in the current crisis of legitimacy and governance

• 26:57Rory Stewart?

  and the reaction of the populace against his post ideological style of politics. We surely ought to have learned that a purely technological technocratic ideas offering is unlikely to change the way people conceive of their lives and the world around them. So I've got a bit of sympathy for that because what I did feel about the conference with all his strengths is that it was a bit technocratic. It was a surprising amount was about, you know, new tech applications in healthcare. It wasn't really, it didn't feel like a really rich, compelling political platform. And and I wonder whether if you'd. Been there and you'd been in charge of running the campaign for a party that came

• 27:39Rory Stewart?

  out of that, a new Labour Party or whatever, whether you mightn't have agreed with me that this actually is getting a bit like a series of kind of articles in The Economist and not really something that's going to win a political movement.

• 27:50Alastair Campbell?

  It's interesting, I got a lot of feedback, both for the podcast in which I was involved and for the conference which I didn't attend because I was away making this TV programme. And I'd say the feedback to the podcast was very interesting, the numbers were huge, we got a lot of extra people listening because it was him and we were talking to him. There were some people who said, you know, up with this man, I cannot put, I will not listen to him, you know, tell me when you don't have him on and I'll come back kind of thing, which is quite interesting because I used to get caught in the wash of all the hatred of Tony. And I still get a bit of it walking around the place, but I mainly get quite a lot of warmth out there. And to be fair, so does Tony. A lot of people, the

• 28:29Alastair Campbell?

  thing I took from it was a lot of people who are not really that political, but who I know, who sent me, I'll give you an example, Malky Mackay, football manager, sent me a message literally this morning, said, I'm on holiday, just been listening to your podcast with Tony Blair, my God, that guy is so clever, my God, that guy is so impressive. Loads of people saying, God, I wish we had a serious Prime Minister again. You get a lot of that, I think, from people who are not necessarily in politics, whereas I think if you're in politics, you tend to have very, very fixed views. And a lot of people who can't stand Tony, can't stand me, whatever, they find it very, very hard to move away from that. I agree with you, I think it is a little bit, you know, we just, we talked last week when I said to him, look, you and I used to dispute the whole sort of globalisation

• 29:14Alastair Campbell?

  thing because I think you underestimated the impact on inequality and so forth. And likewise, I think he is a little bit starry eyed about technology and these great tech giants who come in and say, this is the way we can revolutionise this, revolutionise that. But I still think, I, you know, the reason I'm sort of, you say, devoted, I mean, the reason why I still support him is because I think he's a phenomenal intellect, I think he really does understand the modern world, he's incredibly curious about change, and he keeps going and he keeps caring. And, you know, I think that's. In a way, it's a reflection of the failure of the current generation of politicians that we still are deemed to be relevant when we talk about this stuff.

• 29:52Rory Stewart?

  So how about Thomas Cotton's challenge on humility, whether that he thought they didn't show, but maybe that's just the nature of being an ex-prime minister, that maybe ex-prime ministers don't.

• 30:02Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I'll be absolutely honest, Roy, there are some things that we did that, you know, sometimes when I'm, I go into a mode, I can defend every aspect of every policy because I'm, I go back into a mode that I used to be in. And sometimes afterwards, I say to myself, do I really think that? And I reflect on it a bit. And sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. And I don't think maybe Tony, Tony doesn't do that. I think he stays in the mode. It doesn't mean he doesn't reflect, but he also knows that if he suddenly comes out and says, you know what, I think we got this wrong, we got that wrong, that people just sort of think, I think he thinks enough people trash his legacy without him having to do it as well, put it that way.

• 30:37Rory Stewart?

  Listen, one of the things that, I don't know how much it's been reported in the British press, but it's very striking. I've been talking to people on the, on the West Coast of States in the tech industry. And what's happening to tech stocks is unbelievable. So it's, it's the worst moment since 2008. Amazon shares 40% below their high, Facebook Meta 47% down, Peloton 90% down, Netflix 75% down. And people beginning to say that this is feeling like the bursting of the tech bubble in 2000, that this is going to involve trillions wiped off the value of, of these shares and with a roll-on effect right across the American economy. And I was thinking just in sort of the odd effects

• 31:21Rory Stewart?

  that has, I mean, how much, for example, of the philanthropy in the United States is driven by these guys, that if you were running a charity that was trying to fundraise from them, you'd suddenly find yourself in a lot of trouble.

• 31:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Rory Stewart?

  That I remember fundraising for a, I was at Harvard running a centre and I was trying to get some support from our Centre on Human Rights in 2008, nine, when that crisis happened. And how you suddenly found not just that we couldn't get funding for human rights, but that the whole of Milwaukee, its theatre closed, its sports stadium closed, because all these guys were losing their money hand over fist. I don't know whether we've begun to really think about that. And I guess my other thing, which I raised with with Tony Burr, and I want to keep pushing on and get you back on to is China. You've been you've been talking about this wonderful book on Xi Jinping.

• 32:06Alastair Campbell?

  I have the first copy of the translation here, Rory, and I'm going to put it in the post today.

• 32:09Rory Stewart?

  Thank you very much. So that's Stefan Oust, Adrian Giger, Xi Jinping.

• 32:13Alastair Campbell?

  Xi Jinping, the most powerful man in the world.

• 32:15Rory Stewart?

  Brilliant. Okay, so everybody, I will promise to read that and everyone on the podcast should read it. But I suppose what I'm getting to is we haven't begun to think about the risks of China Taiwan. I now think that there is, let's say, a forty percent, fifty percent chance that Xi Jinping will move against Taiwan. And paradoxically, one of the reasons he might do, if he's going to do it, now would be a pretty good time to do it, because he will sense that we are pretty shaken up by the Russia Ukraine situation, that our economies are under enormous pressure. And he will try to gamble that we cannot afford to try to sanction China at the same time as energy prices are soaring. I think he's wrong on that. I think if he did it,

• 32:58Rory Stewart?

  we would try to sanction China. But if we sanction China and counter sanctions come back, the effects on the global economy will be beyond imagining.

• 33:06Alastair Campbell?

  One of the things I took out of the the German book is that Taiwan being reunited, as they say it, with China and under China's complete control is fundamental to Xi Jinping's vision of the world. On a par with Putin and Ukraine, without a doubt. And but it's interesting, just before we go into that, it's interesting what you're saying about tech, because you know Kevin Rudd, the old Australian Prime Minister, who actually speaks Chinese, he's written a book, he wrote his dissertation about Xi Jinping. And he's also spoken to him for hours and hours and hours. And he's now written another book called The Avoidable War. And he, I didn't realise, and you talk about tech.

• 33:50Alastair Campbell?

  Xi has been assaulting the Chinese tech companies for ideological grounds and they have lost two trillion in value and it's one of the four things that Kevin Rudd points to as to why China is not in as strong a position as it thought it would be. The property market, after the biggest boom in any country in the entirety of history, do you know the property market in China is now worth 29% of their GDP?

• 34:19Rory Stewart?

  Amazing.

• 34:20Alastair Campbell?

  29% of the Chinese now and it's in crisis because all these sort of small flats, the sales are just, they've been stagnant for the last 12 months and they reckon that's going to take about 1.4% off GDP. Covid and the zero Covid strategy, they reckon is taking 1.6 off it. His plan for growth in the current sort of plan, and when they have plans for growth, they tend to, you know, they've tended to meet them, is 5.5 and I read something on Bloomberg the other day saying they're going to be lucky to get beyond three. So, and that is leading to, this again is from Rudd's book, it's leading to a sense that the economy is spluttering, the zero Covid strategy is really making that worse

• 35:03Alastair Campbell?

  and the coronation of Xi Jinping as president for life is provoking now quite a lot of division. So I think the Chinese situation is maybe a little bit more, a little bit more complicated.

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  The difficult thing with the stuff is it can cut both ways, can't it? It could be that he's in a more fragile position, so he's not going to risk going for Taiwan, but it can of course work the other way. You get in a more fragile position and you're looking for a way to bolster your reputation, get a nationalist move, doing shut down your opponents and you do it. And I just wanted to really just sort of dig into this because I still think it is the biggest single story. If we're looking at the next five, 10 years, the one thing that will change our lives as we know it, because China is obviously where the solar panels are made, China is where wind turbines are made. 50% of all the profits of many of the major European companies are made in China and Taiwan is where 50% of the semiconductors are made. It is going to be beyond imagining. I mean,

• 35:58Rory Stewart?

  I keep trying to say this, that Russia has a sort of 1% relevance for companies, but China for many companies has a sort of 50% relevance. And so I really think all these international conferences are not yet talking enough about China.

• 36:15Alastair Campbell?

  Totally agree with that. I've been reading up on this new aircraft carrier they've got. Well, it's it's called the Fujian, and the reason it's called the Fujian, I suspect, is because Fujian is the province in China that is closest to Taiwan. So it's quite a provocative name of of a of a new aircraft carrier. They now have, the Chinese Navy now has more ships and submarines than the American Navy. Now, it's true that the Americans have, they have eleven aircraft carriers to China's three, but this one is on a par with the best of the the Americans. And it's got these new sort of mega catapult um devices to get the get the planes off the ship. Um. And there's a slogan on the side of the ship, and this again relates back to the book, because the book is full of of um.

• 37:00Alastair Campbell?

  Basically, Xi Jinping wants to wants the American dream to fail, and he talks about the China dream, and he's got the China dream. And on the side of the ship, it says that this is part of the realization of China's dream of a strong military. It's eighty thousand tons. It's totally domestically designed and built, whereas the previous two aircraft carriers were were were based on Soviet technology. And meanwhile, they, the other thing I've discovered recently, they've just expanded a naval base in Djibouti, they've just acquired a huge port in Sri Lanka in exchange for a debt swap going over a hundred years. And they're also developing this new port in Pakistan. I mean, they are on the move militarily, big style. You're absolutely right, we don't talk about this nearly enough.

• 37:41Rory Stewart?

  And just just on that for a second, I mean, the the, you're right that the Americans have more aircraft carriers, but of course Taiwan is very, very close to China, so close that they can actually fire easily medium range land based missiles.

• 37:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 37:54Rory Stewart?

  You know, ten thousand of them actually straight into Taiwan. Whereas the Americans would have to move their stuff from Guam, which is three days sailing away and would be very, very vulnerable. So it it it is very difficult to imagine how there are any real military options. And when you look at people like Britain, I mean, we we talk about wanting to be ready for these wars, but recent calculations, I believe, is that if we were to fire our artillery at the rate at which the Russians have been firing them, Britain would be out of artillery shells in two days.

• 38:24Alastair Campbell?

  I know, well, we, I I saw I saw a senior military guy the other day who was saying that he he even within the European Union, it's very, if we were to go to, he was sort of going around the countries, and he was saying, he said, yeah, we're willing against Luxembourg, we're willing against Ireland, we definitely would against Baltar. But he was, he was saying, you know, we, people are underestimating that. You know, our military today compared to what it was ten, fifteen, twenty years ago.

• 38:49Rory Stewart?

  One of the problems is, is the army. I mean, the army and the infantry in particular is tiny. I mean, it's the smallest it's almost ever been. And part of the issue is recruitment.

• 38:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 38:59Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's been very difficult really for, I suppose, nearly twenty years to recruit people properly into the infantry. And at the moment, they're saying there isn't a problem, but that's just because they've massively reduced the size of the army. They're cutting it down to sort of seventy thousand people.

• 39:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, you could fit, you could fit the entire army inside, um, inside Old Trafford.

• 39:20Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary. That's extraordinary.

• 39:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The other thing in Rudd's book, by the way, he, he, he talks about, um, he, he, he points to these four things that he thinks are really making China a bit edgier than people realise. One is the property boom collapsing that I mentioned. The second is this sort of two trillion hit on the tech companies. And then he does actually think that Ukraine um, is hitting China much, much harder than people realise because they are the biggest energy importer in the world. Um, and then the, the, the, the fourth thing is COVID. They've lost three, three, they've had three hundred and seventy-three million people locked down in forty-five cities, which are responsible for four percent of their GDP.

• 40:00Rory Stewart?

  It's completely mad. And, and the Chinese are very, very angry about these COVID lockdowns because, you know, my sense on COVID is that Boris Johnson should have shut down much sooner, but that once people had been vaccinated, it was no longer credible to keep locking down. And the fact that China is still trying to pursue a zero COVID policy is mad.

• 40:21Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Just, I don't know why, but it just popped into my head. I know we should promote our own podcast rather than everybody else's. But first of all, people, if people want to see a lighter side of the discussion of our podcast, they should go to Chatterbicks where the two Ricky Gervais sidekicks who very briefly knocked us from the number one spot. I put them in their place, Rory.

• 40:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and but the, the, the risk is you're promoting them up again, Alistair.

• 40:42Alastair Campbell?

  That's fine, because no, we, they're, they're, they're not, they're not coming back anytime soon. Don't worry about them. But the other thing is Tortoise have done this absolutely brilliant series about, they call it London Grad, but it's basically about Johnson and Lebedev. And I honestly, we talked about the scandals earlier. How Lebedev. Is not permanently a huge story in our politics. You should listen to this, Rory. It will make you even angry about Johnson than you already are.

• 41:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think, I mean, I've encountered a bit of this. So he's obviously, Lebedev is particularly personally angry with me because I, on the podcast, remembered this story where we all got invited over to Lake Cuomo to stay with him when Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary. And what I've realised from the personal anger against me and the way that ex-colleagues responded is the way in which power can be exercised is not new to anyone, but the guy owns the Evening Standard. He's been a major donor, not just to the party, but to many individuals. And even when he isn't supporting individuals, they think he might in the future. That's the point about being, I guess, a very wealthy person. And he's also into lion conservation and environmental projects that people care about.

• 41:49Rory Stewart?

  So it's very, you know, it just reinforces my basic idea that we should move away from a position in which the trade unions fund Labour and these rich people fund the Conservatives.

• 42:01Alastair Campbell?

  Totally agree. But there's, you know, Fiona's listened to the whole thing and she was saying that this story about how Johnson, as Foreign Secretary, got rid of all his officials, all his protection officers and went and spent time with this guy, with the dad, who's a KGB agent. And it does make you think whether they're sort of using the thing to get him into sort of compromising positions, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, let's not go back to Johnson. He's a sort of revolting.

• 42:25Rory Stewart?

  Give us, give us Elvis, give us Elvis.

• 42:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Elvis, I've, do you love Elvis, Rory?

• 42:30Rory Stewart?

  I do love Elvis, but not as deeply.

• 42:31Alastair Campbell?

  Do you love him a lot?

• 42:32Rory Stewart?

  No, not as much as you. I'm going to get in trouble on this. You're a much more musical man than me, Alistair.

• 42:37Alastair Campbell?

  I love Elvis and the film, the new Baz Luhrmann film, it's a little bit pretentious at times. But the guy who plays Elvis, Austin Butler, who's an Australian guy, and Tom Hanks plays Colonel Tom Parker. But. There is a very, very strong political element to this thing. There's three things going on. The first is the whole race thing. You know, a lot of people really didn't like Elvis because he was a kind of, they saw him as a white guy singing black people's music at times, and that race thing is going on. And then the whole Elvis the pelvis thing. I mean, you just forget that Elvis was seen as like a massive threat to the moral order of the United States of America.

• 43:14Rory Stewart?

  Because of his hip movement.

• 43:15Alastair Campbell?

  Because of the hip movements. And the actor does them so well. And when you see the, you know, the knickers being thrown and the bras being thrown and all that. But then there's the thing about powerful men wanting to manipulate weaker people. And Elvis's family comes over as quite weak and Tom Parker is manipulating Elvis. And I actually think, you know, should take some responsibility for his very, very early demise. But then the thing that literally had me in tears at the end was Elvis dies. I hope that doesn't spoil the ending of the film, but Elvis does die.

• 43:48Rory Stewart?

  No, no, wait, wait. He's still alive, Alistair. It's from in Berkhamsted recently.

• 43:54Alastair Campbell?

  No, he's the most, he's got more impersonators than anybody on the planet, but he, he, he dies. And what they do over the, over the scenes of the death and the funeral and the, and the mourning and all that is they play Jimmy Carter's tribute to him, which is so moving. It's so moving. And if you want to see a fantastic documentary about a fantastic politician, check out The Rock and Roll President. Jimmy Carter loves music and some of his closest friends. Bob Dylan was a close friend. Seriously, Bob Dylan was a close friend.

• 44:24Rory Stewart?

  But Jimmy Carter, I mean, if you had been his comms director, you would have been enraged. He was the most hopeless president, right? I mean, he may have done good stuff since he left. He may have become a national, but he was really inept.

• 44:37Alastair Campbell?

  Well, look, I, I don't, he, he, he wasn't, he wasn't in the Lincoln League, I'll give you that. But I'll tell you, Rory, I, this programme I'm doing, Make Me Prime Minister, I, I gave the, a few tips to some of the candidates the other day. And one of them, I said, read books, not newspapers, listen to music, not the news. And I really believe that. You learn more from books than papers and music. And Jimmy Carter, he was obsessed with rhythm and blues, gospel, soul, rock. And these guys, honestly, there are pictures of him and Willie Nelson. There's a hilarious story about Willie Nelson went into the White House. And Willie Nelson wrote in his biography that he was smoking dope in there with one of the stewards. And Jimmy Carter revealed that wasn't true, because actually he was smoking dope

• 45:20Alastair Campbell?

  with his son. So honestly, it's a great documentary and and and you'll love it.

• 45:26Rory Stewart?

  So so the other thing that's happened.

• 45:28Alastair Campbell?

  You don't like music enough, Rory. I've noticed this. You're not into music enough.

• 45:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and of course, not also not into sport enough.

• 45:34Alastair Campbell?

  No, music is the language of the soul. And while we're on sport, Rory, tell me three differences between rugby league and rugby union.

• 45:41Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so Rugby League, thirteen players, Rugby Union, fifteen.

• 45:46Alastair Campbell?

  Good.

• 45:46Rory Stewart?

  Uh, different, different scoring, five points for a try in Rugby Union, I want to say three points in Rugby League.

• 45:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you're allowed one mistake, but carry on.

• 45:56Rory Stewart?

  And I think when you are tackled in Rugby League, you kick the ball back in a chicken scratch, and in Rugby Union, you get to ruck on the ground.

• 46:07Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so you've looked at Wikipedia, because I told you I was going to raise Nadine Doris. If you were secretary, if you'd ever been Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, and you were speaking at a conference of Rugby League professionals about the Rugby League World Cup, do you think you would have said that your greatest moment in Rugby League memories was Jonny Wilkinson's drop goal to win the World Cup?

• 46:31Rory Stewart?

  No, I do think there is a point here, which is there's a point about briefing yourself up. I think it's it's acceptable that politicians don't know everything. So Nadine Doris, working class woman, not very interested, she doesn't come from a Rugby League area of the country. But you're absolutely right. If you get one of these jobs, and you're going to one of those conferences, you've got to brief yourself up.

• 46:50Alastair Campbell?

  She did say when she got the job that she was a big fan of Rugby League. Obviously a lie. No, I thought that was incredible. You know with speech, you know how many how many hands speeches go through. Do you know the other thing it said to me? I think it means she's surrounded by a team that wants her to fail. That nobody said to her, you can't mention Johnny Wilkinson, you can't do that.

• 47:10Rory Stewart?

  Okay, listen, very, very briefly, I want to pay tribute to Peter Brook.

• 47:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 47:14Rory Stewart?

  Peter Brook, amazing theatre director, extraordinary, brought Theatre of the Cruelty, did these incredible performances of Mara Saad, nudity on the great stages, National Theatre and the RSC, nine hour performance to Mahabharata, moved to France in the seventies, but the great icon of British theatre. And the reason we want to remember him today is it was said about him that apart from sport, almost anything interests him.

• 47:40Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, very good. Well, the reason we want to remember him is that he's just died. I think we should make that clear as well. But Rory, I'm going to get your interest in sport. You've also got to get into music more, really. I've read your friend's Mozart book, by the way. I enjoyed it.

• 47:53Rory Stewart?

  Thank you. Thank you for doing it. Patrick Mackie, Mozart in motion, highly recommended to people. Quite, quite. What did you think about the book?

• 48:00Alastair Campbell?

  I enjoyed it. I found it quite dense at times. And it's, but what I love about it is it does sort of capture something about the creative process. And I'm obsessed with genius and creative processes. And of course Mozart was a genius.

• 48:12Rory Stewart?

  And that's, that's why he sent it to you. I think he heard you on ABBA and he thought you'd love it. Right. I think we've come to the end of our show.

• 48:18Alastair Campbell?

  I think we have. We're doing question time tomorrow.

• 48:21Rory Stewart?

  Question time tomorrow. Thank you very much, everybody.

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