265. Starmer vs Sunak - Round 2: Who won ‘The Battle For Number 10’?

Rory and Alastair give their immediate reaction to the Sky News leaders event. Who won, and, more importantly, will it have changed anyone’s vote? Plus, how would Rory and Alastair have answered the tricky personal questions? 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Podcast Editor: James Hodgson Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson + Chris Sawyer 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:32Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:35Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart. And this is a session, for those of you not watching live, being done straight after the debate. So this is our instinctive reaction. We're literally on 30 seconds after Rishi Sunak has stopped speaking. Very quick recap for people who haven't seen the debate. This was unusual. It wasn't actually a debate between the two leaders at all. What happened is Beth Rigby of Sky sat down. For, I guess, about 25 minutes.

• 2:02Alastair Campbell?

  Three minutes, yeah.

• 2:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, with Keir Starmer and then took audience questions for Keir Starmer, then sat down with Rishi Sunak and then took audience questions for Rishi Sunak. We've just emerged, it's quite, quite a long watch, hour and a half. Can I start, before we get into the, the details of how they did, given we grumbled about the format last time, you made jokes about 45 second answers, do you think that's a slightly better format that gives you a bit more of a chance to do the job interview?

• 2:31Alastair Campbell?

  I do. I, I think that the, the, the problem with the first format wasn't just the 45 seconds. I think it was also the fact that two leaders who are used to facing each other down over the dispatch box in the House of Commons, it was just sort of a slightly glorified version of that. And once, I think soon, Rishi Sunak had decided attack was going to be his best form of defence, he was going to really go for Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer, I think, was slightly sort of knocked off, wobbled in it, and it just never recovered from that. It just became a kind of bickering match. I thought that, and it's interesting watching some of the reaction to, to the interviews. I think Beth Rigby is a good journalist. I think she's a pretty good interviewer. I think she decided she was just going to sort

• 3:14Alastair Campbell?

  of try and pin Keir Starmer on tax, but I felt that was just a bit futile because he kind of, he, he knows what he's going to say on tax, he's got a manifesto coming, everything's costed, blah, blah, blah. We're not putting up this, we are putting up this, and that's it. And he wasn't going to move on that. And likewise, I felt with Rishi Sunak that she felt she had to be pretty tough with him as well. And the toughness was in two areas. Well, one was on D-Day, which again, and, and the state of the campaign, really. And the other was on the Conservative record. And she was, you know, she was pretty brutal on that. But I, I, I think.

• 3:46Rory Stewart?

  Can I stop on that, just to take your criticism that you just made about the approach to Keir Starmer. Presumably, it's also true that she wasn't going to get that much out of him by asking him, do you feel ashamed of what you did in D-Day, given he's answered that question quite a lot?

• 4:00Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 4:01Rory Stewart?

  And do you not think the campaign's a disaster? He's not going to be like, yeah, you're right.

• 4:05Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, exactly, exactly. But, but, but I think what, I think what she did with both of them was kind of. Not letting them away with stuff, you know, she kept coming back to Keir Starmer about tax and actually I think he handled it pretty well and he didn't get irritated, didn't get irritable about it, he just kind of kept saying the same thing. I actually thought for both, I thought, I thought Rishi Sunak was a lot less confident than the other day and that's probably just because of the state of the campaign. And I thought Keir Starmer was a lot more confident. And I, I also felt and I was pleased that Keir Starmer, in fact, both of them, and I think this was another good consequence of this format, neither of them, although Keir, Rishi Sunak got to it in the end, but they didn't spend the

• 4:49Alastair Campbell?

  whole time attacking the other. Keir Starmer barely talked about the Tories, which I think is the right thing, and I hope he does that when he does the manifesto tomorrow. And so, listen, I thought it was, I don't think it's a, you know, as we said of the first debate, I don't think it's a, a game changer, but I thought that it was, I thought, I thought you got a sense of the audience really not liking Rishi Sunak and really wanting to like Keir Starmer. That was the feeling I got from watching it.

• 5:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I, I mean, I'm afraid it, it was damaging for, for Rishi Sunak and we, we can get into that a little bit, but, but just to, again, for people who didn't watch the debate, and, and maybe for those of you who will, please disagree in the comments section, that's what this live YouTube's about for you to.

• 5:32Alastair Campbell?

  I've got to say Rory, they're still, they're, they're obsessed with your bloody pots. Will you stop asking about Rory's bloody pots? We're not talking about the pot. Just for those who don't know about Rory's pots, Rory confessed on the podcast recently that he bought two pots for, I think, two thousand pounds, since when our listeners have been begging to see the pots.

• 5:53Rory Stewart?

  And I, the complaint was that I'd paid a huge amount of import tax bringing them from Holland and I was complaining about us leaving the European Union as part of my, um, um, so, yeah, just again, to summarize, rough pattern of the debate, so.

• 6:09Rory Stewart?

  Beth Rigby hit Keir Starmer very hard on one subject, which was what taxes are you going to put out? And she kept saying, okay, you're not ruling out these taxes. And she, you know, quite rightly would explain that to the audience.

• 6:23Alastair Campbell?

  Just on that, Roy, she said it in the broader context, though, of you. You once said that Jeremy Corbyn should would be a great prime minister, and you once tried to stop Brexit. That was the sort of, so are you somebody who just kind of changes your mind? And what she was trying to get to, I think, was you'll change your mind on tax. That's kind of, so then she started to pin him.

• 6:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, absolutely. So and his response was very, very firm. So in the background, she's presumably right that he's leaving the door open to increased taxes, which are not the big four that he's ruled out. So he's ruled out the really big tax rises. But she's probably right that he must be considering rerating council tax, looking at capital gains tax, putting up fuel duty, not saying he will, not saying he won't, but she's probably right. It's an option for him. Where I think for the conservative voter, he was probably very, very reassuring, is just how much he's committed to fiscal responsibility. And it'd be a bit terrifying,

• 7:26Rory Stewart?

  I think, actually, in some ways, if you're a progressive, left wing voter who thinks that we should be borrowing more and spending more. But for a conservative voter, that would have been deeply reassuring. There was also an interesting time when he said he didn't want to make the mistake that other Labour governments had done of putting up taxing, tax and spending. How would that come across to you? Because you presumably must sort of bridle at that and think, well,

• 7:47Alastair Campbell?

  I did bridle a bit. I actually think there was one bit where he was talking about Labour, and another bit where he meant he wasn't going to make the same mistake as let's trust his government. But yeah, he talked about, you know, Labour, Labour leaders in the past, you've always pulled the hand on the tax lever. Well, I think we were pretty, you know, pretty good on tax. And we did, we were pretty regular. So, but I think what he's doing.

• 8:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but just quickly, but what that works, of course, is that given that a lot of the Tory listeners think that's what Labour does, it's going to be reassuring for them to hear him say, I'm not going to do what Labour governments normally do, whether or not, as you say, it's actually an accurate description of Labour governments.

• 8:24Alastair Campbell?

  I thought the other thing, and I wonder whether this is the thing that they wanted to kind of land, you know, we talked about how in the first debate Sunak wanted to land the £2,000, tax rise alleged, and Keir Starmer wanted to land the fact that you lot have been in power for 14 years and nothing has got better. He twice used this phrase, either a plan for wealth creation or a plan for growth. He was trading the manifesto, saying this is a plan for wealth creation. And again, he said, you know, you might not hear Labour leaders talk about that. He was basically, and that was also his way of dealing with the Corbyn question. I thought at the start, the Corbyn stuff was getting a bit kind of tedious, but I understand what she was trying to do there, was basically saying, well, you know, you said this then, and now you're saying this. Who are you? And he was

• 9:09Alastair Campbell?

  basically saying, well, look, I'm the guy who realised that we had to change Labour Party, and I've changed it. So I thought he did pretty well. And there's a lot of negativity about Beth Rigby coming through in the chat.

• 9:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, a lot of people.

• 9:26Alastair Campbell?

  I thought he was okay.

• 9:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I got a lot of that. Particularly on Twitter, a lot of people felt she was interrupting far too much. She obviously was very anxious about time. I mean, with both of them, she kept saying, running out of time, running out of time, I've got to get on to the next question, got to get on.

• 9:40Alastair Campbell?

  And both of them gave quite long answers that didn't always need it. I think I wonder with Keir, whether he felt that with the Julie Ettingham one, whether he was just sort of, he allowed himself, he didn't interrupt, he didn't push back. But I got the feeling that the points that he set out to make, he definitely made them. Whereas I felt with Rishi Sunak tonight, he looked a bit broken to me. He looked like he was not enjoying it one bit.

• 10:08Rory Stewart?

  Let's go on to Sunak in a second, but just to summarise, I put out a tweet asking for responses, and I've got hundreds of people writing in, putting positives and negatives on Keir Starmer. And broadly speaking, the positives are that they felt that Keir Starmer connected better with the audience than he did with Beth Rigby. They liked the fact that he said he was not going to be tribal. I like that too. One of the things that I've been talking to you about with our recent conversations with Rachel Reeves and with Richard Phillipson is that I do feel there's a little danger that some of his shadow cabinet can sound a bit tribal.

• 10:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Rory Stewart?

  They have really great backstories. They passionately believe in social justice and they've been Labour born and bred and they can sound like they really don't like Tories.

• 10:55Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 10:56Rory Stewart?

  It's very reassuring for the floating voter to have someone say, I came into politics late. I'm not that tribal.

• 11:03Alastair Campbell?

  And also, I thought you'd like that. And I also, he said something very, very similar about how if he does get into power, that he wants the whole country, regardless of how they're voting, regardless of how they're thinking of voting, regardless of what their politics are, to feel that we all have this kind of vested interest in trying to get the country going again. Now, I thought that kind of big picture messaging was.

• 11:27Rory Stewart?

  One more that I thought he did very well, because we just actually, and people have a chance to listen to it on leading the Richard Phillipson, giving the same answer on the question of what happens to kids that move from one school to another.

• 11:40Alastair Campbell?

  It was different, wasn't it?

• 11:41Rory Stewart?

  Very different. He was very good at empathising, very good at saying, listen, I've got no problem with private schools. I respect aspiration. I've got a lot of time for parents who want to do that for their kids. But I have a problem in secondary schools. I need the money. This is what it's going to be spent on. Six thousand teachers. There's a problem with maths. PE teachers abstinent. It's not a tax on working people. It's just removing a tax exemption. And the whole tone of it was empathetic.

• 12:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Rory Stewart?

  Sounded like he was listening, sounded like actually he was taking seriously the problem. And he kept coming back to this phrase, which I think he does quite well, which is, I'm making tough choices. And he did that with the junior doctor too. And I think that that works well, right?

• 12:23Alastair Campbell?

  And I thought with that one on the private school, he, as with the first debate, the ITV debate, he did not resile one inch from the policy. And he explained it, but as you said, he did it in a way that was quite empathetic to the guy who was saying, look, this could be a problem for me. I thought it was interesting. You can always get a sense of, I mean, I was, I think I told you the other day that I saw a poll that said only 11% of the public are aware that Keir Starmer's dad was a toolmaker, even though in the chattering classes, it's become a sort of, and actually they laughed tonight when he said he was a toolmaker.

• 13:00Alastair Campbell?

  And there was one point, what was the point when there was something that Rishi Sunak said where they laughed at him, which I thought he would have. Was it the house price when he talked about the 19 year old and he said, you know.

• 13:10Rory Stewart?

  It could get a tax price up to 220,000.

• 13:12Alastair Campbell?

  425,000 pounds. Now, all he was doing, this is a classic example, a bit like his thing with the sky, you know, I didn't have sky when I was growing up. Where what he's saying is perfectly reasonable. Okay. He's explaining what the policy is, or the policy would be if they got elected. But he can't feel the politics that if you are using example in that audience.

• 13:37Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 13:38Alastair Campbell?

  Talking about a house of 400, first time buyer at 425,000 pounds. They're gonna laugh at you.

• 13:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 13:44Alastair Campbell?

  And that's just a lack of, that's a lack of political feel.

• 13:48Rory Stewart?

  Okay. So one second, I promise we're going to get on to Rishi, but the negatives on Keir Starmer, just before we go on to Rishi Sunak.

• 13:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Rory Stewart?

  Coming from the feedback.

• 13:58Rory Stewart?

  Boring, too rehearsed, too reticent, no clear answers on tax. A little nervous. Number of people saying he's long winded. Somebody actually quite technically said, if you watch, he often puts the answers at the end. And seems to spend quite a long time getting to them, which means he often gets timed out.

• 14:18Rory Stewart?

  And I, I think, um. You know, there's a, quite, quite, quite how to frame this. But I think a general sense that he dealt very badly with the question on, are you robotic? Very, very oddly, that was the one where he suddenly sounded like a robot whose sparks had gone wrong. Guy was like, do you think you're robotic? He was like, what, what, what, I'm, I'm, I'm robotic. I'm not, I'm not a robot.

• 14:45Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, yeah, yeah, I, I, I agree. That wasn't, that wasn't his best answer at all. I think if I'd have been him, I'd have said, look, you know.

• 14:55Alastair Campbell?

  Beth has already suggested that some people might say I'm boring. I've got to tell you, if you think I'm less charismatic than Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, I'm going to live with it. Play into being a serious politician.

• 15:09Rory Stewart?

  One more question for you. Is there anything more that you can do? Let's say, for the sake of argument, you're keeping back the option of raising certain taxes, but you definitely don't want to say it. What sort of formulations can you use to sound sincere, authentic, and that you're answering the question? Is there any way of saying to the audience, listen, we're not going to raise VAT income tax, corporation tax, national insurance, but we are going to... And yes, you're right. There are other taxes. They're not big taxes. They're not tax on working people. And we've got no plans to raise them. We're not ruling them out either. I mean, is there anything that you can do there?

• 15:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, first off, I thought that Rishi Sunak did it. He actually used the formula that I think is perfectly acceptable, when he said, I'm not going to sit here and predict the economy for five years. And I also think at one point, I think there came a point where Keir could have said to Beth Rigby, Beth, I get what you're trying to do here. We've ruled out certain tax rises, and you're going to go through every other one. Well, just be aware, you're not going to get a different answer to the one I've already given you.

• 16:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So put it to bed very quickly. So the audience then get bored as she tries to do it. Okay.

• 16:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But I think the overall effect was, I think he achieved what he set out to do on tax. I thought that the Q and A, I thought they were both pretty good at it. I mean, I was trying to tell myself, because as you know, Rory, I'm quite tribal, and I like big wins in campaigns. And I really want the Tories... I loved the fact that there was a round of applause when Keir got one of the loudest rounds of applause in the interview, when he said, any government that leaves the country in a worse state than when it started deserves to be booted out. And I felt that really struck a chord.

• 17:12Alastair Campbell?

  But likewise, I thought that I kind of, there was part of me watching Rishi Sunak and starting to feel a bit sorry for him, which, and I can remember once Dennis Skinner... The great Dennis Skinner, who, God, I wish he was still around and knocking lumps out of people like Lee Anderson. Well, he is still around, but he's not standing. But I remember Dennis Skinner once saying to me, when people were sort of starting to feel a bit sorry for Gordon Brown. I remember Dennis phoning me and saying, this is dangerous. You've got to watch this. You cannot allow this to grow.

• 17:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Alastair Campbell?

  Once you start feeling sorry

• 17:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Alastair Campbell?

  for a politician, he's had it.

• 17:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and I think that that's right. So again, for listeners who didn't have a chance to see the debate, Rishi Sunak then comes in after forty five minutes of Starmer, and Starmer has been smiling a little bit, has looked quite confident, sitting back well in his chair. He's got a little bit of chat going on. I mean, a little bit stiff and robotic, but broadly speaking, seemed relatively happy and confident. And I'm afraid Rishi Sunak came on and immediately seemed very tired, I mean mentally very tired, very beaten. There was a, he repeated two lines, which he rarely does, almost verbatim, a line on, I was, you know, I was at this debate with you, and a line, I don't know what the other line is, I'm getting like him, I'm also getting mentally tired. But anyway, he

• 18:32Rory Stewart?

  repeated himself. And then he became, his tone with Beth Rigby was to say to almost every question, you're absolutely right, Beth. You know, it's true. We screwed up on this. What can I say? But I've been in for eighteen months and we're making a bit of progress on the numbers. And then she'd say, yeah, but the numbers are not great, are they? They're going the wrong direction. He'd go, that's right. But, you know, we've reduced this by twenty five percent. Next year, we'll reduce that by fifty percent. And the problem is that, and I recognized it because I sometimes, when I was very tired in my own constituency, would get into this mode, which is disastrous. I would sometimes

• 19:16Rory Stewart?

  be sitting with my constituents late in the evening and I'd be thinking, listen. I'm working really hard. I know a lot about the subjects. I might even know more about the details of this than you do. And I'm going to try to be like, yeah, you're right, but it's all very complicated. And I'm going to try to explain to you. And the problem is that that can seem patronizing. It can seem touchy. Nobody's interested in you signaling that you're working hard, you feel underappreciated, and that you understand the details better than the person asking you the question. And then the final thing is that in the second half, when he's with the audience, it seemed even stranger. There was a moment, I'm afraid, towards the end, where he began to sound, I don't know whether you recognize from this

• 19:58Rory Stewart?

  from your own life, Alistair, but he began to sound like a teacher who'd lost control of his classroom. It was that awful sense of a teacher trying to make it through his lesson plan with the audience, with the children just totally turned off, nobody listening anymore. He seemed 20 years older than the rest of us. He seemed as though he had an essay planned to go through. And we're all sitting there thinking, guys, this guy's lost it.

• 20:22Alastair Campbell?

  What did you make of his, his sugar answer?

• 20:28Rory Stewart?

  So that was the thing. We're on that one. We've, I've tried to do that with Rachel Reece. I've tried to do that with Bridget Philistine. She tried to do it with Kier Sama. You know, it's the end of the interview, you want something fun and personable and jolly. And when she said, you know, Kier Sama, you know, tell us a bit about yourself. He said, well, what people don't know about me is I've got a deep sense of public service, right? So I guess he was

• 20:50Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, do you know what he should have said? Do you know what he should have said? I'm a really, I'm a really dirty footballer.

• 20:57Rory Stewart?

  That's good.

• 20:58Alastair Campbell?

  What it would have been interesting, two, it's true. And three, she would have been taken aback. But Richie told us that he had a terrible diet.

• 21:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. I think that was desperate in the green room. He was watching Kier Sama, not really having an answer. And somebody said, you've got to say something that sounds human. So he sort of pulled that out. But yeah, nobody, nobody, when you're leading the country and trying to encourage an improvement in public health, wants the private set telling

• 21:27Alastair Campbell?

  Arabo the whole time. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody actually just said, actually, there's a very good point. Somebody just said, what Kier should have said is, did you know my dad was a toolmaker? That would have brought the house down.

• 21:42Alastair Campbell?

  Do you know what, there's something annoying about the way they, I mean, it's like you and I do loads of events and people say things like, you know, tell us something funny. And you kind of feel like, say, well, I'm a comedian, you know, if you're a comedian, get my daughter.

• 21:57Rory Stewart?

  But I like your, I'm a dirty footballer. That's good.

• 22:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Rory Stewart?

  That's good. That's good. That's good. You know, I like that.

• 22:04Alastair Campbell?

  What did you, what did you make of the, the questions that were chosen? I mean, it's interesting. I'm assuming that a bit like Question Time, Sky will have sort of sifted the audience, worked out. You know, it's interesting, for example, that, you know, in a place like Grimsby, actually Brexit was mentioned more than in any of the previous debates that we've seen. Brexit in terms of impact on the NHS, Brexit in terms of immigration, Brexit in terms of, of the economy. I thought it was interesting as well that there was, there was a question there about racism in the police and, and, and again, you know, in what we would define as a kind of northern red wall seat, as it were,

• 22:44Alastair Campbell?

  round of applause for the, for the black woman who said, you know, this is a problem, what are you going to do about it? And I think that's the other thing that I felt about this whole debate in the last couple of years, since Johnson really, and since Brexit. This kind of, these mythologies that have developed about politics in one part of the country is completely different to other parts of the country. It's just not the case. Yeah. So I thought the questions, the questions were interesting. There were, you know, the one or two there that were a little bit unexpected, which made it maybe more interesting than the other night as well.

• 23:21Rory Stewart?

  Emily Anderson, should they have talked more about Gaza and foreign affairs, Alastair?

• 23:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they weren't asked about it, and I think that was probably a deliberate thing. I think that what Beth Rigby wanted to do was to really sort of pin them both on domestic stuff.

• 23:39Alastair Campbell?

  And the truth is that on something like Israel Gaza, they're both, they both know what they think, then they know what the politics are. And I think you'd have just had five minutes where essentially it was just, it was just kind of filling time, I'm afraid. They're not, they're not going to make a major announcement of foreign policy, of a change or a different strategy on a live tea debate about domestic relations. So, no, I don't have a problem with that. I, I think, I think there could have been maybe something in relation to Britain's place in the world or the military or something like that. But no, I don't have a problem with them not doing Israel Gaza.

• 24:15Rory Stewart?

  There's a question just come in on seats, and I think this is a really good question. Let's say for the sake of argument, you and I agree that Rishi Sunak is not going to win this election. And I'm afraid he came on to that stage like somebody who knows he's lost this election. I mean, it's, it's a torture.

• 24:34Alastair Campbell?

  I'm still, I'm still not calling it, I'm still not.

• 24:36Rory Stewart?

  No, you're not calling it, but boy is it a torture shame before.

• 24:39Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:39Rory Stewart?

  He's coming and he knows that he's lost. I mean, and we haven't really reminded people just how much has happened between the two debates. I mean, there's been the D Day debacle, there's been Nigel Farage's launch, there's been, and then there's, you know, turns out that his aide has been betting on the date of the election and all this kind of stuff. Day after day after day. So he's got to be, and he's got far too much in his schedule. He's, he's doing more constituency visits than any of the other leaders. And he's just exhausted, ratty, angry. So then the question is, let's say I said to you, Alistair, okay, you're the big strategy boss. We've lost this election. We've got three weeks to go. We're going to turn this on its head. Our objective now is to minimize how many seats we lose.

• 25:24Rory Stewart?

  Is there a different strategy if you just thought, okay, we're going to try to hold on to, I don't know, seats with majorities of over 10,000. We're going to try to make sure, you know, we hold Ken Clark's old seat in Rushcliffe. What can we do to stem the loss? Is there a different strategy for that?

• 25:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there would be, and you know, you have to wonder whether either deliberately or accidentally they have started to go about that strategy. So, walking past the newsagent this morning, I saw the Daily Mail front page was Sunak, don't give Labour a blank cheque. And then you had Grant Shapps, who's meant to be one of their better communicators, on the radio this morning, talking about inventing this phrase, which I don't even know what it means in the British context, but saying, you know, don't give Labour a super majority. In other words, you know, basically raising the prospect of a landslide. Now, I wonder if that is, it could just be that they're kind of thinking out loud and they haven't really thought it through, but if they have thought it through, are

• 26:27Alastair Campbell?

  they basically trying to say to people, in a sense, suppress the vote, make people feel there's no, they don't need to vote. You don't need to vote because Labour are going to win. And that's been my worry about this all along for Labour. Or you are basically targeting your resources and targeting your activity at those seats where you feel that, you know, you may be able to hold on. But I can't imagine, I can't imagine being him and getting out of bed, it's different if you're the Lib Dems or you're the Greens, I can't imagine being Rishi Sunak at the moment or any of his team, getting out of bed and my first motivation, my first thought being, well, I know it's all over, but let's, you know, let's try and not lose too badly. I just couldn't operate like that. I couldn't operate like that.

• 27:11Rory Stewart?

  And in a way, they're not, it's almost too late, isn't it, to change strategy because they've announced their manifesto, we're going to do that, we're going to do a show tomorrow when the Labour manifesto comes out comparing their two manifestos in detail. But there's no longer an option for him to change his major policy things. He's decided he's running on big tax cuts, he's decided he's basically running right. And I think that's a catastrophic error. I think it should have been clear to them that their best hope, I'm afraid, and the loss of the seats they need to hold. I mean, let me try this on you. They should have recognised that they were losing those red wall seats, that the 2019

• 27:53Rory Stewart?

  working class Brexit voting, North Eastern seats, were going to go back to Labour. Their best hope is to try to hold on to the seats, traditional Tory seats with majorities over 10,000. And the way to do that would have been to tack back to the centre. Those seats don't need hard rhetoric on immigration, don't need crazy stuff on on sort of Liz Truss tax cuts. What you need to do is sound reassuring, competent, serious, we're going to be, and give the subliminal message, we're going to be a moderate, credible, serious opposition, holding the flag for a different vision of the country against Keir Starmer. But but they've screwed that, haven't they? They're too late now to do that.

• 28:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think I think to try another strategy now, if you think these, you know, he did, I'm Mr Change, he did, I'm Mr Continuity, he did, I'm Mr Bold, he did, I'm Mr Radical, all these different sort of persona. And, you know, none of them appear to have worked, whereas I think what Keir Starmer has has done is has been very, very narrowly focused on, you know, we've changed the Labour Party, limited changes to the country, not making promises we can't keep, being quite cautious and and at the same time, you know, looking the part, looking and sounding the part much more than he did maybe a couple of years ago. I still think there's a real problem with apathy. I think there's a real, I'd be I'd be fascinated to know how many people were watching tonight.

• 29:19Alastair Campbell?

  It was interesting how many people were saying they won't bother watching, they'll just sort of listen to us talking about it. I hope we've given you enough of a flavour of of what happened. But I I I still feel that I want to really hope for the Labour's manifesto launch tomorrow that it is all about Labour, that it's not about the Tories. In a sense, the Tories have just got to sort of stew in their own in their own juice now. I thought it was very interesting today, I saw a post by Jeremy Hunt on on social media where he was out with his kind of blue rossette on and a clipboard and he was saying, you know, five, five, six hours a day on the door knocker at the moment. Now, he's the Chancellor of the Exchequer in one of what would traditionally be one of the safest Tory seats in the country.

• 30:06Alastair Campbell?

  The fact that he was doing a video talking about how many hours he's actually canvassing and also warning about the calamity that a Starmer government would mean to this country. I thought, my God, you know, he must be genuinely worried about his seat.

• 30:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he's genuinely worried. He's being chased by the Lib Dems, Alex Chalk even more so, Gillian Keegan even more so. So there's three big Cabinet Ministers being chased hard by the Dems. But you can also see in terms of Rishi Sunak's schedule that he's spending increasing time in very safe Conservative seats. I mean, it's a real sort of giveaway.

• 30:43Alastair Campbell?

  So that is part of the of this strategy of trying to, basically trying to hold on to the best of what they've got.

• 30:51Rory Stewart?

  Well, yes, except except it's except I don't think the language is helping. There's been some questions coming in here, say, on what you think about Rishi Sunak as a politician. And just before I come to you on that, I mean, there was a glimpse, I think, in his answers to the audience, the first three answers to the audience, he was actually much better than he was with Beth Rigby. He sort of woke up, he knows the detail of the policy. So when somebody from the NHS says, I've got a question for you, he's able to say, which part of the NHS do you work in? He's able to talk about community diagnostics centres and electoral surgical hubs. You know, you feel his dad's a GP, he breathed

• 31:32Rory Stewart?

  this stuff. You get a sense of why the Cabinet Ministers like him around the table because he's obviously, you know, does his homework, knows the detail, is really into the details of the policy and reforms. Is there anything, though, that you feel, looking at him, that what were your sense of his strengths and weaknesses as a politician? What are we seeing there in Rishi Sunak?

• 31:52Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think he's a very effective politician. And I've thought that the whole way through. I think he's

• 32:02Alastair Campbell?

  He just makes too many unforced errors. He doesn't seem to be able to, you know, I think he's quite into cricket, isn't he? He doesn't seem to be able to see where the ball is coming from. We saw that, you know, classically that within the interview he did with Paul Brand. I mean, God has ever an interview, an ITV interview, that's the one where he came back from D-Day and even, and they put out this clip, well, two things. First of all was him being welcomed by Paul Brand, hey, before the interview's even started, and having a sort of chat, and, you know, this over the top, hey, lovely to see you, da, da, da, da. And then Paul Brand say, it must have been amazing, it's, oh, yeah, we had to come back, you know, overran. And of course, just, and, and, okay, you can say that's a bit accidental,

• 32:47Alastair Campbell?

  right? But then this thing about, you know, Paul Brand starts to say to him, you know, do you really feel you can be in touch with people when you're so wealthy? And again, I think the way to answer that is say, well, I am very wealthy and I'm, I'm, I'm lucky in that the woman I fell in love with is from a very wealthy family. I don't have to worry about those things. But don't think for one second that minimizes my commitment to people who don't have the, that's the way. But instead, he sort of, you know, Paul Brand then gets on this thing, well, what did you, what, what did you have to give up as a child? And I think you just bat those off. Instead of which, he got sucked in, he got sucked in, and eventually he said, well, you know, I didn't have Sky as, I didn't have Sky TV.

• 33:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he, he needed to preempt that and say, no, that's not who I am. And Cameron, Cameron would have been able to do that, wouldn't he? Cameron came from a very privileged background, but he wouldn't have been able to negotiate his way around it.

• 33:40Alastair Campbell?

  And also, he had, he also, Cameron had that line that he pushed the whole time, which was, you know, it's not where you come from, it's where you're going, which is fine. It was like, but he felt comfortable in saying that. And, and I think the other thing he doesn't have, you know, this goes back to something that I've said on this podcast many, many times. I just think he's, he's missed the big moments. And the biggest moment he had was the first moment when he became Prime Minister. He said the right things, professionalism, accountability, integrity. And then he ended up.

• 34:08Alastair Campbell?

  Doing a runner when Boris Johnson got called out as a liar in Parliament, still hasn't really, even tonight, didn't really call out Liz Truss for the damage she's done to the economy and still got her as a candidate. So he's kind of, he co-owns this disaster. And I thought it was a very interesting question. It was the penultimate question I think he got was from the woman who said she used to be a chair of a local Conservative Party and she feels ashamed at what the Conservative Party's become. And she specifically mentioned D-Day, well, that's fair, and that's in the news. But she also mentions, two or three of them mentioned Partygate and she mentioned Truss. And that stuff runs deep unless you cauterize it, and he's never cauterized it.

• 34:50Rory Stewart?

  Maxo and Haye, are you guys taking questions here? Question for both of you. But Haye and Maxo need to actually give us the questions. So Liz Carr, do you think Rishi Sunak will hold on to his seat? Yes, he will hold on to Richmond. Will you invite Sunak and Starmer to vote? We have invited them, but I don't think they're going to come on.

• 35:07Alastair Campbell?

  Not going to.

• 35:08Rory Stewart?

  Why is Sunak going on about stamp duty for first time bias when that's already in place? I think the answer is some of it was a temporary policy and he's shifted up the amount of money.

• 35:17Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I'm loving Matthew. Matthew, the Welsh flag, Sunak looking like he's running out of perseverance. My word, Rory, my word is breaking through. It's wonderful.

• 35:26Rory Stewart?

  That's very good. Hannibal Barker, just started your book, Rory, loving it. Little temp since Alistair's always telling me I need to plug my book. Thank you so much for buying my book, just out in paperback. It comes straight in as number one in the Sunday Times Bestseller. And Hannibal, thank you. And please encourage other people to buy the book.

• 35:43Alastair Campbell?

  What book are your children reading at the moment, Rory?

• 35:46Rory Stewart?

  Well, they're reading the lovely two books that you just gave them. And I had a slightly depressing moment when I came down to breakfast and Sasha, who's been reading your book, said, Alistair's so much more positive about politics than you are. Why do you keep being negative about politics? And I thought, he's now brainwashing my children.

• 36:02Alastair Campbell?

  Good for him. I'll get him to state schools before I'm done.

• 36:05Rory Stewart?

  Okay, sure. How can Sunak's team make him look less tired and lassie before events?

• 36:11Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you can't. I mean, the only thing you can do, you can, sometimes makeup can help you. But I'm assuming he was wearing, you know, TV makeup because you have to do it for the lights. The only way to make yourself look less tired when you are very tired is through finding levels of energy that you didn't know you had. And I, to be fair to him, I think at times I've seen him have that. There have been times when I thought, God, if I was him, I'd be on the canvas and he's managed to get up and show real levels of energy. But tonight was not one of those nights. I thought he genuinely did look tired. Um, and I thought he looked very fed up with it all.

• 36:51Rory Stewart?

  Well, we're, we're coming to the, the very end. Sorry, adabeo adage, can someone explain what stamp duty, stamp duty is? So this is a, a payment that you make when you buy a house. So in addition to the money that you spend for your house, an additional sum goes to the treasury. And depending on how much you spend on the house, that duty goes up. And he's trying to make houses more affordable by saying he won't tax people when they buy houses.

• 37:18Alastair Campbell?

  Um, Nick is, Nick is suggesting that Sunak should drink more coffee, but I've got a feeling he doesn't drink coffee. I think in this weird sugar free, sugary diet that he has.

• 37:28Rory Stewart?

  And it does, the sugar doesn't work. I was trying it today. I've had, like you, a pretty exhausting day running around doing lots of stuff. And I, I was trying to keep myself going on Costa Coffee sugar bars, like these gluten free kind of fudge bars. And of course the problem is you get a crash. Maybe he was just in a sugar crash when he came.

• 37:45Alastair Campbell?

  Roy, did you see that question that just flashed by that says, can you both tell us something funny or interesting about yourselves that we don't know and hasn't been in your book?

• 37:54Rory Stewart?

  Presumably the answer is that you are a dirty footballer, right?

• 37:57Alastair Campbell?

  No, that's not you. Everybody knows that. Anybody who's ever seen you, everyone knows that. I think if you said you were a dirty footballer, that would be a genuine shock. Go on then, tell us something about you that we don't know.

• 38:09Rory Stewart?

  You know that I'm really crap at the bagpipes. Problem is everyone's been spending nearly three years listening to us banging on about this kind of stuff. Um, did, did you know?

• 38:16Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, but I'll take.

• 38:18Rory Stewart?

  Do you know I delivered my first son? We didn't get to hospital.

• 38:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I knew that.

• 38:21Rory Stewart?

  You didn't know that?

• 38:22Alastair Campbell?

  Um, here's one for you. I, particularly with bagpipes, I once played the bagpipes for, uh, Elvis.

• 38:29Alastair Campbell?

  Sorry, for Mohammed Ali. Sorry, Mohammed Ali. Why was I saying Elvis? There's a picture of Elvis there for Mohammed Ali.

• 38:37Rory Stewart?

  That's good. That's very good. Yeah. Okay, I like that. I like that very much. God blimey, but you're right. I mean, now you've done it to me, I now understand.

• 38:46Alastair Campbell?

  It's hard. It's hard. But that's why you should always have a couple of those things up your sleeve. I'm going to send a text here right now. Here, next time you're asked about Saeed, I'm going to just say I'm a very dirty footballer.

• 38:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I did have a really pompous one, actually, when I was running for leadership, I remember. Because you remember that somebody's put in the thread that they remember Theresa May was asked a question. So naughtiest thing she'd done is run across wheat fields.

• 39:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:09Rory Stewart?

  So I was asked by some poor journalist, you know, you know, what's the worst thing you've done in your life? And I said kind of horrible. I turned this kind of 10,000 yard stare and said, well, I spent a number of years in Iraq and Afghanistan. And I've done some things that maybe I don't want to discuss.

• 39:29Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think that really wins you, wins you. No, I don't think so. Basically, I had, I was asked after the Theresa May thing, I was doing a thing where I was asked what was the naughtiest thing I'd done. And it was the day that I stole the Archbishop Cantibbi's mitre.

• 39:42Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes, and with this photograph of you.

• 39:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 39:45Rory Stewart?

  Which was your Twitter handle, was it?

• 39:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it still is. It's my, it's my, it's my WhatsApp thing. So there we are then. So when we, when we sort of summarize then, how do we, how do we summarize that it hasn't really changed?

• 39:57Rory Stewart?

  Well, we summarize, I'm afraid that, well, afraid for those who are sort of soft Tories, that that was very much a victory for Keir Starmer, no doubt at all. He seemed, regardless of the content, he seemed confident, relaxed, smiley. He felt like somebody who was about to be Prime Minister. There were details, you know, he was a bit long-winded. He didn't answer questions necessarily that well. There were good bits, like when he talked about his family. It was a good, good, good comment about him being worried about his teenage kids. But broadly speaking, he seemed, and a lot of this is not about the content. That must be what partly drives people like Rishi Sunak mad. It's about the tone. We talked about this with the Gove, George W Bush debate, where Gove had all.

• 40:38Alastair Campbell?

  Go, go.

• 40:40Rory Stewart?

  All the stats and all the arguments. And George W Bush just seemed relaxed and happy and walked it. So Starmer walked it and, and Sunak came on and unfortunately.

• 40:52Rory Stewart?

  It was that sort of petulant professor trying to hammer facts home to an audience that doesn't want to listen. And you can't can't afford in politics to do either the I'm going to educate you whether you like it or not by giving you facts you haven't thought about thing. Nor, as you said yourself in reference to Dennis Skinner, can you ever allow people to feel sorry for you. And I'm afraid, you know, people, even people didn't like him will just think that is a miserable man.

• 41:24Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Well, I'm not I'm not going. I'm still not going to feel sorry for him. And there were some pretty brutal questions, weren't there? I mean, I jotted some of them down. How do we know you'll still be Prime Minister in a year's time if you win? That was pretty brutal, I thought. Why should anyone believe you when you say, as you went through all the different things they said on net migration? Why should anyone believe you? That got a round of applause. No, he was on a very, very, very, very difficult wicket. And there we are. Poor old Rishi. No, I mustn't feel sorry for him. Mustn't feel sorry. They've done a lot of damage to the country. So Rory, do you think it made you more? Let's get into polling question. Did it make you more likely to vote Labour?

• 42:02Rory Stewart?

  For a floating voter like me, yes, I thought Keir Starmer is beginning to hit his stride with reassuring moderate Tories. And I think they need to be careful leaning too hard into class warfare, which you're getting a little glimpses of sometimes in the backstories that you're getting out of some of the shadow cabinet. They're beginning to lean so hard into they're genuinely, you know, tough backgrounds and stuff. But if it's combined with, I'm tribally Labour all my life, and this country is run by a bunch of, you know, whatever people, then then you are going to start scaring Tory voters a bit. I think what what was good about Keir Starmer is

• 42:49Rory Stewart?

  He just seemed eminently reassuring. And that's a trick. I mean, it's a trick. It's very important, incredibly important for him.

• 43:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and that's even though, as somebody just pointed out, that's quite a thing for you to say when he was also talking about, you know, whacking on tax for private schools.

• 43:09Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. Okay, so for everybody on the live show, I absolutely promise that if you join us for the live show after the next debate, I will show you the pots.

• 43:21Alastair Campbell?

  Oh.

• 43:22Rory Stewart?

  And you'll see whether you think I should have spent so much money paying tax the British government importing them from the Netherlands.

• 43:28Alastair Campbell?

  Did the pots cost more or less?

• 43:30Rory Stewart?

  Charlie96, what did your parents do for a living? Gone very quickly on that one. You say, "My father was a soldier and then a civil servant. What did your father do for a living, Alastair?"

• 43:41Alastair Campbell?

  My father was a vet.

• 43:43Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Thank you very much.

• 43:44Alastair Campbell?

  He was the northern vet, those shirts. He always wore those shirts that you wear.

• 43:49Rory Stewart?

  Those Czech shirts, yeah.

• 43:50Alastair Campbell?

  Those Czech shirts, those vet shirts.

• 43:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you told me, "Panathist vet." Yeah, exactly. Okay.

• 43:55Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, I shall see you tomorrow. Tomorrow, late afternoon. I will be in France tomorrow en route to Germany. I think it's important to take the pulse of the European political scene and possibly take in the Germany-Scotland game. I might just drop in on that.

• 44:12Rory Stewart?

  You might just.

• 44:13Alastair Campbell?

  I just might drop in on that.

• 44:15Rory Stewart?

  Might just, might just.

• 44:17Alastair Campbell?

  But we shall be back tomorrow, late afternoon, logistics permitting, in order to have a chat about both the Conservative. We should talk about the other manifestos as well, but particularly the Tories and Labour manifestos.

• 44:31Rory Stewart?

  Great. Thank you, Alastair. Have a great trip tomorrow. Safe trip.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  We assess, uh, Prime Minister... With high confidence, it was... Russian.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 45:05Speaker 05

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 45:08Speaker 06

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play? Or not? You're the Prime Minister! You've done... Nothing!

• 45:21Speaker 07

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 45:23Speaker 06

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. And disseminated into an operation order. Or Frago.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Or a Frago that says to... Kill the President of Russia.

• 45:36Speaker 06

  Yes.

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