342. Question Time: Farmer vs Starmer, courting China, and the purpose of COP

How would Alastair tweak the so-called “tractor-tax” to appease British farmers? Is Keir Starmer spending too much time abroad? And will international law survive Trump? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy, a green electricity supplier powering homes across the UK. Use referral code POLITICS after sign up for a chance to win a signed copy of Rory and Alastair's books with personalised messages. Learn more at getfuse.com/politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley + Alice Horrell Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:04Rory Stewart?

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• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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• 1:58Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:02Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And we're speaking Rory as it seems lots of farmers are marching on Westminster with what the Sun calls Clarkson's Farmy Army. I'm not sure Jeremy Clarkson is the right leader of this campaign, but there we are. Great question from Franco Patricolo. Will the destruction of British farming be Rachel Reeves' legacy, just like Mrs Thatcher's destruction of the coal industry? For a hand to you Rory, I'm just gonna say no.

• 2:28Rory Stewart?

  So I'm gonna say yes, although of course there aren't as many farmers as there were people working in the coal industry. But one of the things they have in common is that in both cases governments are coming in when there's actually been many, many years of decline already. So what Margaret Thatcher did to the coal industry reflected the fact that through the 70s, the coal industry was already in severe crisis. The Labour government's taken over at the end of a period where in fundamental terms, leaving the European Union was a death blow to British farmers. So long as we were part of the EU, France, Greece, many other places that had big farmer

• 3:10Rory Stewart?

  bases, nearly 10% of the French population is connected with farming even in the part time basis, basically set out with laws to protect small family farms. And they did it through two types of things. One of them was the MP for agricultural constituency, but then I was also the minister in Dafford during this period. So there were two things. There was something called a single farm payment, which basically just gave you money per hectare of land, regardless really of what you did net. And the second thing were these agro-environmental payments, which gave you money for the kind of things you were doing with your land. When Britain left the European Union... And I was still working at DEFRA. I was at DEFRA when we left. We were spending over three billion pounds annually on support to our farmers.

• 3:52Alastair Campbell?

  So how did that relate to the CAP, the Common Agricultural Policy?

• 3:55Rory Stewart?

  It came right out of the core of that.

• 3:56Alastair Campbell?

  So these were the two most important elements for the UK of the CAP?

• 4:01Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. And one of the problems was that there was a huge opposition to the CAP from two sides. There was opposition from the Tory right that didn't like subsidies. And Liz Truss, who was the DEFRA secretary, was one of these big ones. Why should we subsidise farmers? Let free market rip. And the other opposition was from environmentalists who felt that the CAP was keeping alive environmentally unfriendly farming practices. So the fantasy from the right was that you would go to sort of full American Kansas style industrial farming. And the fantasy from the environmental left was you'd basically abandon all the land and you'd go over to rewilding. You just let trees grow naturally.

• 4:43Rory Stewart?

  And the group that's completely squeezed by this, of course, are the small farmers, because the small farmers are neither these huge, big industrial operations, nor are they able to make two or 300 acres work by simply letting trees grow and no income from them. And for me, farming is our landscape, our soil, our nature, our biodiversity. And I'd love if I could convince you sometime to get somebody like James Reebanks, who is an incredibly eloquent, small-scale farmer in Canberra, talking about the transformations he's brought in with nature-friendly farming. And the real goodwill effort a lot of these small farmers made to try to make this vision work, prove that they could produce food,

• 5:27Rory Stewart?

  which we need, because we learnt from Russia, Ukraine, that actually this idea that we don't need to worry about food security isn't quite true. We do need to produce somewhere in food, but do it in a way that respects nature and encourages nature developments. The problem for them now is they're being hit by a lot of problems they inherited from the last government, particularly the government hasn't uprated the kind of support they got from Europe. It's been eroded by inflation. They're getting much, much less income. Now we have a Labour government coming in that's hit them in another way, which is inheritance tax on farms. If you've got a 300 acre farm, which is a very small farm in modern day terms, in somewhere like Wiltshire, and you try to hand it on over to your next generation, you'll be having about half a million pounds' worth of inheritance tax.

• 6:08Rory Stewart?

  And the paradox of this is that farms are on very low incomes. Many of the farms in my constituency were living on 15, 16,000 pounds a year, even if their land was worth a lot. And they're doing it because they're trying to keep something going for profound love of their ancestors, of the land, of the work of farming. But it's not a financially workable system. And that's why almost every other country in the world, from Japan right the way through to France, supports farmers, and why I'm very worried about the direction which things are going in the UK.

• 6:42Alastair Campbell?

  These protests are specifically about the changes to the inheritance tax in the budget, where the government insists that most farmers will not be affected. And you look, this is now a campaign, okay? And sometimes in campaigns, the facts get lost, there becomes a battle of the narrative. The farmers are pretty well organised.

• 7:02Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 7:03Alastair Campbell?

  They've got a lot of very high profile supporters. I've got to say, when you just said that about Brexit, there is something pretty nauseating about the way that the politicians on the right who fought for Brexit now standing up as trying to be the voices of the farmer, given that what they did did so much damage to farming in this country.

• 7:21Rory Stewart?

  Completely heartbreaking.

• 7:22Alastair Campbell?

  And there is no debate about that.

• 7:23Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. And also very sad that many farmers in my constituency's voted for Brexit because they were annoyed.

• 7:28Alastair Campbell?

  Because they were desperate about...

• 7:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And also annoyed by EU regulations. But the fundamental truth, which needed to be got across and we failed to get across in the campaign, is that the best protection for small British farmers was small farmers in other parts of Europe. I don't know why the government's saying most people won't be affected. Because of land values, which are now at least five, six thousand pounds an acre, and in many cases going up to 10,000 pounds an acre, even what's in modern terms would be a very small farm, would be affected by this change. And I think that may be a question of something where somebody in the Treasury did some back of the envelope maths, briefed the Chancellor, told her that very few small farmers would be affected, and... I think it's also going to matter because Labour's taken a lot of rural seats.

• 8:13Alastair Campbell?

  The farmers did sort of swing behind Labour at the last election.

• 8:16Rory Stewart?

  Yes, and you know, you were very pleased to get, you know, we interviewed the head of National Farmers Union. You often talked about the fact that farmers were pro-Labour. So I'm hoping this is something that Labour can do a retreat on because it would be a pity.

• 8:31Alastair Campbell?

  Tweak or retreat?

• 8:32Rory Stewart?

  Let's, I mean, I'm not saying she's going to do this, but let's say I gave you the uncomfortable job, pulled you in and said to you at number 10, let's say, okay, we don't really need a fight with the farmers at the moment and we're not actually going to make that much money off this. How would we set about doing something that gets goodwill again from the farmers and puts us to bed? How would you do that?

• 8:52Alastair Campbell?

  I think you'd tweak it. It's a little bit like the winter fuel thing with this one. I felt there was an argument of what they did on winter fuel. But once they'd launched it and announced it, they kind of let others take over the debate. And I think that's happening with this. You've got to engage in the debate on the facts because the facts get lost. As you started to saw when it was the first question, I just kind of, you know, went on the laptop and I looked at the BBC report of the protest. From April 26, inherited agricultural assets worth more than a million pounds, which were previously exempt, will be liable to the tax at 20%, half the usual rate. Okay. That's, that's quite, that's complicated to take in.

• 9:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Alastair Campbell?

  And it's easy then for the numbers.

• 9:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:33Alastair Campbell?

  To be kind of, you know, used against either side. That's where government has, this is again, I'm afraid, a communications issue. That is where government has to take the trouble to make sure that people understand what the policy is because the facts get lost. Once you're into campaign, you get so-called celebrities involved and the rest of it, the facts get lost. So I think you have to re-win the argument, remake and re-win the argument. If you can't, you tweak it. I don't think you can retreat from this.

• 9:59Rory Stewart?

  You can tweak though. So sometimes it's not always necessary to say, my credibility is at stake. I'm going to stubbornly hold to 100% of this. Sometimes it's actually good to give a little bit of ground through a tweak.

• 10:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. As we did, for example, on pensions. When we were so successful at keeping interest in inflation low, that the inflation link to the pension meant we were giving pensioners a rise of 75p. And there was a massive protest about it.

• 10:24Rory Stewart?

  So how does-

• 10:24Alastair Campbell?

  Gordon Brown tweaked it.

• 10:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, how does that work in Downing Street when the Secretary of State, maybe even the Prime Minister is saying, I don't want to give an inch on this because my credibility's at stake. I want to seem strong. I don't want to look like I'm intimidated by protesters. How do you judge when it's right to tweak and give a little ground?

• 10:41Alastair Campbell?

  I think in the end, it's a question of political instinct and political judgment. We said, day one, if you remember, on the podcast at the Budget, I'd watch this farming thing. Whether they will or not, I don't know. Listen, you can ride a lot out. You can ride a lot out. But given that the farmers were traditionally pro Brexit, pro Tory, and that there was a significant shift, then I just think it's not good politics to have them all offside. Now, and bear in mind, these protests will be weaponized by the far right and by the right of the Tory party. It's already happened. And there is an argument, you know, I mentioned the book Who Owns Scotland? I don't know if there's one for England, but Who Owns Scotland basically is about, you know, who owns the land in Scotland? It's a pretty small number of people.

• 11:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:26Alastair Campbell?

  And it's a pretty, often a pretty small number of corporations and, you know, people, non-doms and all this sort of stuff. That argument has to be out there as well. That doesn't mean you're attacking small farmers.

• 11:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:37Alastair Campbell?

  But you've got to have an honest argument about who owns land, how much they contribute back, how farming is done. Because if you're the government and you don't have that argument, you end up just looking like the guy who's sort of, you know, hitting, as you say, the small farmer.

• 11:52Rory Stewart?

  Next question directed at you from Alice. Is Keir Starmer spending too much time abroad?

• 11:58Alastair Campbell?

  I would say no to that one as well. I can see why people say that. It's the Prime Minister. People have elected him to sort out the economy, sort out the health service, sort out schools, you know, rebuild the infrastructure. But I think if you look at them one by one, first of all- You and I regularly say he's got to build better relations with the European Union. Well, you don't do that by sending a few texts and emails. You've got to sit down. You've got to have really good quality time, one on one with people. And these like this G20 or COP.

• 12:30Rory Stewart?

  Just remind people on G20, so that's just happened in Brazil. And the very interesting thing at the centre of this is that Keir Starmer had a meeting with Xi Jinping. Now, this is very interesting because it shows how marginalised Britain has become. That China is the world's second largest economy and in purchasing parity terms, possibly the world's largest economy. And in six years Boris Johnson didn't manage to meet Xi Jinping. Liz Truss didn't manage to meet Xi Jinping. Rishi Sunak didn't manage to meet Xi Jinping. So it's a big deal that Keir Starmer's met him. And he's come out of it talking quite sort of positively about how, you know, we agreed that we believe in a predictable, consistent sovereign actors committed to the rule of law. We're going to avoid surprises.

• 13:15Rory Stewart?

  So quite friendly language coming out of the meeting with Xi Jinping. What did you make of that? And what challenges might that pose, given that Trump's bringing in a very anti-China White House?

• 13:24Alastair Campbell?

  We actually had a question, there's Ross from Ipswich. The UK needs to attach itself to a larger, dynamic market. Europe isn't growing. That leaves the US or China as markets to attach ourselves to. The US doesn't want to play ball right now. Maybe a bold move to strengthen relations with China would force them to take a UK-US trade deal more seriously. I think Ross is a chess player. I think it was a good thing that he met Xi Jinping. And that's why these summits sometimes can be very, very effective. We had a question about COP. Somebody's saying, is COP actually worthwhile? And I sent you last week, Eddie Rahm, the Albanian Prime Minister. His speech at COP was essentially saying, you know, it was almost saying, what is the point here?

• 14:05Alastair Campbell?

  We all come here, we all sit in the lounge, watching a screen where the speaker who's in the forum is speaking. Nobody's watching, nobody's listening. We're all just chatting to each other about other stuff. There is a use to that. There is a use to that. There is a value to that.

• 14:19Rory Stewart?

  But the challenge was from Dave Smalders, who asked the question. As Al Gore has reminded everyone this year, the three most recent COP summits have been hosted by petro-states and marred by controversy. The optics, at the very least, suggest the model for international dialogue and agreement is broken. Is this event actually necessary? Is there a better way to achieve international climate cooperation?

• 14:36Alastair Campbell?

  I think COP is a part of it. But ultimately, let's just take China again. They're now the biggest emitter in the world.

• 14:42Rory Stewart?

  They're behind the US.

• 14:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so the US and China, the two biggest emitters in the world. It may be that ultimately, this is something else that Trump has to try and sort out bilaterally. Now, his views suggest that he's not up for it, but they will have to be involved in that. So I think COP is part of a process. It's not the be all and end all. But if you go through all the meetings that Keir Starmer's had, and yes, people would rather see him at home. Yes, people want to see him focused on domestic issues. But he has to make the argument, because he's right, that growth does depend on us having good relations with these countries. The big foreign policy stuff, we talked about Ukraine in the main podcast. Every single one of the conversations there at the G20, they'll all be talking about Trump.

• 15:27Alastair Campbell?

  They'll all be talking about, you know, what do we do in relation to Middle East, in relation to Ukraine, in relation to AI? Trump changes the game. Now, therefore, he has to engage in that. What he has to watch out for is the fact that the workload is so intense on the foreign policy front. If you start to give the impression to the public that that's what you prefer, you actually like being on a plane, you like the red carpet when you're arriving in country A or country B. So you've always got to be linking what you do as a foreign policy prime minister to what you're doing domestically. I think he's doing that pretty well.

• 16:03Rory Stewart?

  China, I just looking at a couple of figures, which I think are quite interesting on this. So the Brexiteers made a huge play of this, it's the same question that the listeners asked about. Here's this huge economy, China, growing recently fast, and European Union isn't growing that fast. Why don't we do more with China? The raw facts are that we have astonishingly little trade investment with China. So to put it in context, our imports from the EU are almost 500 billion, half a trillion annually. Our trade with China has increased from 20 billion up to 31.5 billion. Again, foreign direct investment, it's an interesting sort of thing, the large language models are very helpful at organising this stuff. Just trying to get my head around this.

• 16:48Rory Stewart?

  Foreign direct investment from China into the UK is Four point three billion pounds, that's zero point two percent of UK inward investment. It's one five hundredth, whereas from the US, would you rough guess, maybe it's unfair to you. Anyway, answer is a lot, thirty four percent.

• 17:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Rory Stewart?

  So that is a hundred and fifty times greater.

• 17:11Alastair Campbell?

  So the answer to Ross is that would not be a sensible thing to do. Added to which it would damage us with Europe and and the US. I mean, Cameron and Osborne sort of tried a version of it.

• 17:21Rory Stewart?

  Well, they tried a certain, I got a fascinating insight into this because I've been meeting quite a lot of senior Chinese officials. And there's something I didn't realize, they talked about a golden age and famously Cameron took Xi Jinping for a beer and all this kind of stuff. What I hadn't realized is that I was told by this Chinese person ten years after the event that when David Cameron met the Dalai Lama, the instruction went out quietly in China to all the senior Chinese state and enterprises. We're not making any investment in Britain.

• 17:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Rory Stewart?

  And for ten years, British governments were expecting this investment to come, and it never came. And the Chinese wouldn't explain why, but the story that I heard, this is very deep background, but I I believe my source was that they were absolutely told that as soon as Cameron met the Dalai Lama, no Chinese investment is coming to the UK.

• 18:05Alastair Campbell?

  If you were Jonathan Powell, National Security Advisor, both pleased about that appointment, advising Keir Starmer, and the Dalai Lama gets in touch for a meeting, what would you do?

• 18:13Rory Stewart?

  Difficult question.

• 18:14Alastair Campbell?

  I did notice Keir in his statement said that, you know, they always say this, he raised the issue of human rights and and the Uighurs and so forth.

• 18:21Rory Stewart?

  We've talked about that a bit in the past. It's an odd thing that, because I often went into meetings as a Foreign Office Minister with governments, Democratic Republic, Congo, Myanmar, et cetera, raising human rights. And question is, how do you do it? Because often what it is, is just one speaking point amongst eight that you've got. And one of the African leaders challenged me directly on this. He said, you don't care about human rights. And I said, what do you mean I don't care about it? I've just raised human rights with you. And he said, no, no, you're just giving us another, you know, forty million pounds of development aid. So you don't really care about human rights, do you?

• 18:51Alastair Campbell?

  Interesting.

• 18:52Rory Stewart?

  And and often, often, literally, it is, you will remember this, it'll be raise human rights and then ask them to approve a British investment of, you know, X billion pounds to help some British company.

• 19:03Alastair Campbell?

  I may have told you this before, but at the Hong Kong handover, we had to travel to go and see the the Chinese. And all our media cared about was will Tony Blair raise human rights? Will he press them on human rights? And I was getting inundated. So I goes, yes, of course he will do that. So we get there, as you say, you've got a list of things that you've got to say. And Robin Cook was Foreign Secretary, I remember him bristling as the meeting went on and Tony had not yet mentioned human rights. And at one point, John Holmes, Tony's advisor, sort of just scribbles human rights on a piece of paper, sort of shuffles it across like that. And so we've done all the Hong Kong and the business and all the rest of it. And by the way, we should point out, it's horrific what's happened to these democracy guys in Hong Kong. They've been given these very long jail sentences.

• 19:48Alastair Campbell?

  So Tony finally, sort of, and I can, I can feel it is coming. And he's saying, ah, so it's just one more, if I could just raise this, with respect, just raise this issue, and they could feel it's coming as well. And that's the question of, and he's, he's just got the first half of the H out. And Li Pang, who was the, the Chinese Prime Minister, takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and is

• 20:20Alastair Campbell?

  spits into his handkerchief as a way of drowning out Tony about raising human rights. And then, of course, I go back to the press and they say, did he?

• 20:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, he raised human rights.

• 20:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're honest about that because we were guilty of this as a Conservative government just as much. And I'm afraid this is something that journalists don't fully understand. When they ask that question, did you raise human rights? And we say, yes. Of course, the journalists are never in the room. And the real question is what actually is the dynamics in that room? How centrally are you making it?

• 20:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:51Rory Stewart?

  What kind of carrots and sticks are you attaching to it?

• 20:53Alastair Campbell?

  This is why it's quite good, the American system, where they bring in what they call the spray pool at the top. The two leaders will be standing, shaking hands or sitting in a chair. And you throw questions and sometimes that will be the point at which a leader can signal what the priorities are. Now, when I did the briefing afterwards and Tony did interviews, he would talk about the human rights issues.

• 21:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Alastair Campbell?

  And present them in that context of a broader relationship. But like you say, with the Cameron Osborne thing, it's very hard to get the balance right. Then we had your friend when he was Prince Charles, when Zhang Zemin came here for a state visit, do you remember? And Charles basically said he's not turning up for the dinner. Um. I couldn't do that as a king, could he?

• 21:33Rory Stewart?

  No, there's also a problem here, which is that we've been talking about this issue now for, you know, well over thirty years. And has it made any difference? Has China remotely changed its attitude towards Tibet, towards Xinjiang and the Uighurs, towards its own internal distance? And it's not just the British government will raise it. Every European leader, every Canadian leader, every US leader will raise it in the meetings. But so the question really is, in the optimistic story, we're chipping away and by raising it in every meeting over thirty years, eventually something filters through. But I question whether that really is the case or whether actually after thirty years of people raising it, whether the Chinese don't just spit into a hanky.

• 22:11Alastair Campbell?

  But let's take this then from Aidan Gregory. With all that's happening in Sudan, Yemen, Gaza, Ukraine and elsewhere, do you think international humanitarian laws collapsed after more than eight decades? And I might add to that, if it is collapsing, does Donald Trump's reelection aid the collapse?

• 22:26Rory Stewart?

  It very much aids the collapse. So what's the most dramatic example of collapse is Gaza. What is happening in Gaza, I think, will prove over the next twenty years to be more consequential than any other event we've seen, more than the Iraq war, more than the Afghan war. We are totally underestimating the way that people in the Muslim world feel about what's happening in Gaza and a lot of the global south. The way that I think it has discredited the US, it's discredited the international backers. And in recent surveys in Saudi Arabia, over ninety percent of Saudi respondents put Gaza as their number one issue. At the same time, Israel has declared the Secretary General of the United Nations persona non grata.

• 23:12Rory Stewart?

  We have a government coming in with Trump with an ambassador.

• 23:15Alastair Campbell?

  Who says he believes in the one state solution?

• 23:17Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. And Trump, of course, last time round, was the first US president ever to. Publicly reject the two-state solution, move the US Embassy to Jerusalem, accept settlements in international law. I mean, he started this whole stuff and then pushed through the Abraham Accords, which were very, very favorable towards Israel. He's now back in again, and he's back in again with a government that is even harder over on that particular very, very right-wing Israeli perspective on this conflict. And I cannot see how international law really survives. He's challenging the International Criminal Court. He's going to probably defund UNRWA. He's appointed to an ambassador to

• 24:00Rory Stewart?

  the UN, somebody who's incredibly critical of the entire UN system. So this is something we just talked about in an interview that we did with the Embrama. What other international mechanisms emerge to replace what now, I'm afraid, really feels so shabby and discredited? My friend Tom Fletcher is about to start as a big UN Deputy Secretary General, one of the most senior people in the United Nations. It's good on him taking on that job, but it feels very tough at the moment.

• 24:26Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, Roy, quick break, then more questions.

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• 26:16Rory Stewart?

  Okay, here's a question for you. Marine Le Pen. Chantal, what will happen if Marine Le Pen is barred from standing in France's 2027 election?

• 26:25Alastair Campbell?

  Which may happen. If people aren't aware of this, Marine Le Pen is in court. Court case is going on now. Should be a judgment in the next couple of weeks. And the basic charge is that she and colleagues embezzled European Union funds, which were meant to be for their work as MEPs, hiring advisers, aides, who were there, working for them as MEPs, but that money was actually going to their party to help pay off people and whatever. She denies it, but I watched some of it on TV the other day. Some of the fellow defendants were giving very, very unconvincing answers. As to what will happen, the prosecutors are asking for, I think it's five years in jail,

• 27:10Alastair Campbell?

  three suspended, 300,000 euro fine, and barred from office for five years. So if she is convicted and is barred from office for five years, the consequences are obvious. She can't stand against whoever stands in the presidential election.

• 27:25Alastair Campbell?

  She is playing a less voluble, more subtle version of the Trump game plan. She and her supporters are essentially saying this is a political witch hunt. They're out to get us because they don't want her to stand. But it's very, very interesting and, you know, it's one of those where ultimately the verdict will decide what the implications are.

• 27:48Rory Stewart?

  And we're reminded by Trump's reelection of the stakes of this. I mean, if Congress had managed to impeach Trump successfully, if that hadn't just been swung by a couple of Republican senators refusing to go along, we would not be in the mess we are today. That was the great hope, that you could disqualify Trump from standing. And what an enormous difference that would have made.

• 28:07Alastair Campbell?

  People talk about the guardrails. Well, they had four years for the justice and the legal system actually to get him to face justice. He faced it on, to some extent, in relation to the stuff he got convicted for, but in relation to January 6th, the classified documents, all that stuff. That's all now going on.

• 28:25Rory Stewart?

  Do you agree with me that had they succeeded in impeaching him, the likelihood is actually that she would have had a more moderate Republican candidate?

• 28:31Alastair Campbell?

  I just don't know. I don't know the extent to which the Republican Party is already so Trumpified that they would have just carried on that same direction.

• 28:41Rory Stewart?

  I suppose my idea is that immediately after January 6th, quite a lot of Republicans were beginning to distance. He'd lost the election. That was actually a moment to regroup the soul of the Republican Party.

• 28:51Alastair Campbell?

  But he somehow managed to turn enough people in his own direction to keep going. I think you and I both thought at the time, that's it, at least he's finished, but, you know, far from it. Let's just say Le Pen doesn't lose this case and let's say she does win the next French presidential election. Here's an interesting point, which actually we discussed with the Embrama. The next G7 after that, you will have Trump.

• 29:17Alastair Campbell?

  Italy Maloney, Japan, a new conservative right wing prime minister. Canada, probably Pierre Polievre rather than Trudeau, right wing. Le Pen.

• 29:29Rory Stewart?

  Germany CDU.

• 29:30Alastair Campbell?

  Germany will not be Schultz, it will be like that with CDU. So Keir Starmer will be the only left of centre progressive leader at that event.

• 29:40Rory Stewart?

  In the whole G7.

• 29:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Rory Stewart?

  That's amazing. Here's a question from Molly D. How long will the fallout after the violent clashes between Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv fans in Amsterdam be? Give us a brief reminder of what happened during that event and what the political consequences have been.

• 29:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, first of all, it's pronounced Ajax.

• 29:59Rory Stewart?

  Ajax.

• 29:59Alastair Campbell?

  One of the most famous football labels in the world.

• 30:02Rory Stewart?

  Oh dear.

• 30:04Alastair Campbell?

  Keep it in, keep it in, we're keeping it in.

• 30:06Rory Stewart?

  Are you saying I don't know much about football?

• 30:07Alastair Campbell?

  I'm saying you really don't. Ajax.

• 30:09Rory Stewart?

  Really?

• 30:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, we talked about this and the question, how long will it go on? It's still going on. So just to go back, there was this terrible violence.

• 30:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 30:18Alastair Campbell?

  Between Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters playing Ajax and some of it was clearly Israel Palestine driven. There was some really pretty horrific stuff going on, both sides.

• 30:32Rory Stewart?

  And am I right that actually sometimes in Rangers Celtic matches and in Dundee matches, you get some of the same of people flying Palestinian flags, flying Israeli flags? It's a phenomenon in Scottish football as well.

• 30:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, the Celtic Green Beret regularly fly Palestinian flags. This was more, remember Maccabi Tel Aviv do have a bit of a reputation, their fans.

• 30:49Rory Stewart?

  For what? For being very right wing Zionist?

• 30:52Alastair Campbell?

  And also being quite prone to violence.

• 30:54Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 30:54Alastair Campbell?

  Ajax similarly.

• 30:56Rory Stewart?

  Ajax similar reputation being sort of left wing, prone to violence, more pro Palestinian?

• 30:59Alastair Campbell?

  No, just, you know, football violence, football violence, yeah. The Dutch have quite a reputation for all that. So the violence goes off and it is really pretty bad. There's then a real battle of the narrative about who started it, who was the worst and so forth. And that's kind of continued to go on.

• 31:14Rory Stewart?

  And that's the stuff I've seen on social media where there was a flurry of people saying that this had been the most outrageous example of antisemitism and senior Dutch politicians were criticizing antisemitism and then there was a counter blast.

• 31:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:26Rory Stewart?

  From people saying, no, the Ajax fans had made incredibly aggressive anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian comments.

• 31:32Alastair Campbell?

  The Maccabi, the Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and all of those things were true.

• 31:36Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 31:36Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, the Maccabi Tel Aviv were ripping down Palestinian flags from windows. They were singing really horrible

• 31:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Alastair Campbell?

  chants about why are there no schools in Gaza, of course there are no children left, all this sort of stuff, horrible.

• 31:49Rory Stewart?

  And, and on the other side, there was anti-Semitic violence, and then there was a, am I like a train or a tube set alight?

• 31:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So you had things like that. You had a Muslim taxi driver being attacked, his car being kicked, him being hit with leather belts. So that word went round. Lots of Muslim taxi drivers think, well, we've got to get involved. So it sort of spread like that. And, but then what happened on the political front with this rather weird four-party coalition that, you know, remember Geert Wilders topped the poll, but the other parties wouldn't serve with him.

• 32:20Rory Stewart?

  The far-right politician in that lens, yeah.

• 32:22Alastair Campbell?

  So then what happened is that because of things that he was saying, essentially saying this is all.

• 32:28Rory Stewart?

  He's always been very anti-Muslim.

• 32:29Alastair Campbell?

  Very, yeah, very. And he was basically saying this was all the fault of Dutch Moroccans.

• 32:33Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 32:34Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. As a result of which, a minister of Moroccan descent, Nora Achaba, resigned from the government. And this is a very fragile government. So she resigned. There were rumours of lots of other resignations were going to happen. The prime minister called a crisis meeting. The prime minister managed to calm it down for now. So the government is sort of held intact. But it's a bad, bad scene and it's exposed all sorts of rifts and divisions within, within the coalition, but also within Dutch politics and Dutch society more generally.

• 33:04Rory Stewart?

  Lovely question from Craig. What have we been watching recently?

• 33:07Alastair Campbell?

  What, on telly?

• 33:07Rory Stewart?

  In general, I'm taking Craig. Um, I, a couple of things. On telly, I've been watching this very disturbing Netflix series on Jeffrey Epstein. Before we get on to that though, I've, I went to see the Dylan concert at the Royal Albert Hall where.

• 33:20Alastair Campbell?

  Did he get as big a crowd as we did?

• 33:21Rory Stewart?

  He did indeed. He got the same crowd that we did. He'd filled the Royal Albert Hall comfortably. Um, I was sitting right up in the cheap seats up at the top and thinking about what a strange place it was for me. He did it. Uh, you didn't go, right?

• 33:35Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 33:35Rory Stewart?

  But you've been to see a lot of music concerts.

• 33:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, loads. Yeah, I've never, I've never really been a massive Bob Dylan fan.

• 33:42Rory Stewart?

  The way in which it was done was astonishing. It was very, very poorly lit. He'd spent about ten pounds on the stage decorations. There was a sort of folded cloth at the back. He had an amazing band with him. He sung his songs with the same lyrics, but he changed the tunes. And of course, unless you know them very well, you can't hear what he's saying.

• 34:00Alastair Campbell?

  Are you a big Bob Dylan fan?

• 34:01Rory Stewart?

  A mild Bob Dylan fan.

• 34:03Alastair Campbell?

  Is Shoshana a big?

• 34:03Rory Stewart?

  Yes, she's a big Bob Dylan fan, yeah.

• 34:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Rory Stewart?

  But even Shoshana, who knows all the songs very well, you're getting about one word in three, if you're lucky. And the audience was, I would say, about eighty-five percent men. And it was really like a sort of almost religious experience. They were all leaning forward, looking very, very earnest. Judging by, I don't want to offend them at all, because an enormous number of them came up and said they listened to our podcast. There seemed to be an almost a hundred percent overlap between going to the Bob Dylan concert.

• 34:32Alastair Campbell?

  Our audience is young.

• 34:33Rory Stewart?

  I'm not saying they weren't young, there were a lot of young men there.

• 34:35Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, you're getting me saying, when you talk about stooped over and listening.

• 34:37Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, no, just earnest men. And as he made his way through songs where there was barely a discernible tune, and where you couldn't hear a single word, and he's lit very poorly.

• 34:48Alastair Campbell?

  So he's just sort of muttering?

• 34:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but it was like a three-hour sort of flamenco or no Japanese drama performance, where the sort of strange symbolism of catching one word in three. And, and when he finally got out his harmonica, played a tiny amount on his mouth organ, the whole place erupted in cheers when he played about sort of four notes on it, because this was the most exciting thing that had happened in three hours. Anyway, have you been to see any music recently? And then we'll get on to what we've watched.

• 35:14Alastair Campbell?

  Have you been seeing music? I'm talking music. This relates to telly. I was channel hopping the other day. There's so much shit on television. When you, you know that thing on the Sky box, you just go through one, two. Now, if there's no decent sport on, I really struggle to find things that I want to watch. I can always watch the news, but you know, there's too much of that. So I landed upon a channel I didn't know existed called Now Seventies.

• 35:41Rory Stewart?

  Oh, right.

• 35:42Alastair Campbell?

  But they were playing, they were having a now seventies, sixties special.

• 35:47Rory Stewart?

  Oh, all right.

• 35:48Alastair Campbell?

  So it was just non-stop.

• 35:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 35:50Alastair Campbell?

  Sixties music. And yesterday, Rory, do you remember when I was doing one of my little sort of insults of your garb? And you were wearing this really strange upturned jacket. Do you remember what I said you looked like?

• 36:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I can't remember who it's called. It's called Badger or something.

• 36:04Alastair Campbell?

  No, you look like the lead singer of Herman's Hermit.

• 36:08Rory Stewart?

  Herman's Hermit.

• 36:09Alastair Campbell?

  And you'd never heard of Herman's Hermit, right? So I, and the guy was called Peter Noon, I remember him. But I checked, I thought he must be dead because this was in the early, I was only six at the time, thought he's got to be dead. So I looked him up. Not only is he still alive, he is touring all the time as the leader of a new Herman's Hermit band. So I watched that. The other thing, Rory, that I'm sure as a fellow Scot, you watched as well is Scotland winning two football matches in the last few days. I'm sure you watched both.

• 36:37Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. Yeah. You know, that's something you've got in common. I don't want to say this with Donald Trump, but one of the things that comes across all these books I've been reading about Trump is that he's always interrupting meetings to watch the sport. He's always like, I'm really sorry, the Masters tournament is on. I cannot talk about North Korea.

• 36:52Alastair Campbell?

  I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do that. I did sometimes when we were number ten, I, I was capable of if, I couldn't do it with football because you have to concentrate, but I quite often had the cricket in the background.

• 37:01Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 37:01Alastair Campbell?

  If there's a test match in the background, I'd have that on, but I wouldn't leave a meeting to watch it.

• 37:05Rory Stewart?

  Okay. My point about Epstein and the documentary, Craig, thank you for asking what we're watching, horrifying Netflix documentary. But one of the things that worried me is that these documentaries are incredibly popular and they, I suspect, we're thinking about some of the people voting for Donald Trump. They play quite neatly into a lot of the conspiracy theories because this is a story about a man who, as the documentary explains, basically tried to buy out the police, convince the FBI not to investigate, continued for nearly 10, 15 years with his money, inviting very famous people, Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, and many, many others to his island.

• 37:47Rory Stewart?

  And it gives a very, very unpleasant impression of the way in which the elite and money can sort of protect itself. Because it's not mainstream, because a lot of this is being covered in bits of social media, YouTube, I think we're underestimating that and we're underestimating the fact that we feel pretty smug about the fact that this podcast often gets more listeners than a regular CNN show. Joe Rogan is getting something astonishing like 20 million downloads.

• 38:15Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 38:16Rory Stewart?

  And that's rear conversation with Trump. The demographic there that really made the difference to Trump's election, young men turning out, coming out of that. So I just think we're missing so many bits. The sort of media landscape is concealing from us all these stories which come from people watching Netflix documentaries on Epstein. Quickly on Epstein, did you ever meet Jeffrey Epstein?

• 38:36Alastair Campbell?

  I did, I did. In fact, I'm in his black book and I regularly get sort of a sale on social media for being in his black book.

• 38:44Rory Stewart?

  And how did you meet him? Why did you meet him?

• 38:45Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I met him once and what happened was I was, I was going to New York. Rarely I was alone. I wasn't with Tony or, you know, family, whatever, because I was going to a funeral of a friend. And on the plane, a side was alongside me, Ghislaine Maxwell.

• 39:04Rory Stewart?

  Oh, my goodness. Yes, his girlfriend. And of course, you worked for Robert Maxwell.

• 39:07Alastair Campbell?

  I knew Ghislaine very well.

• 39:08Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 39:09Alastair Campbell?

  Um, in fact, another story I could tell you. I once went to Paris with Ghislaine with the ashes of a former Argentine president on a mission that to this day I don't understand. But it was, but anyway, let's stick with Epstein.

• 39:23Rory Stewart?

  Keep the development.

• 39:24Alastair Campbell?

  So Ghislaine says to me, you know, we hadn't seen her for a few years. What are you doing? What are you up to? We chatted away, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then she said, um, why are you going to New York? I'm going to a funeral. Um, what are you doing this evening? I thought I was just going to check into my hotel and then funeral's tomorrow, then I'm going back to London. And I remember this specifically, why didn't you come and meet my boyfriend?

• 39:47Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 39:48Alastair Campbell?

  So she said boyfriend, she definitely said boyfriend. Yeah, okay, I can do that. So I went in, checked in, and then I went round and it was the house where Prince Andrew was.

• 39:57Rory Stewart?

  That enormous townhouse in New York that we keep seeing the front of in my.

• 40:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, you see the front and there's my Prince Andrew sort of.

• 40:03Rory Stewart?

  And it says J E on the side of it.

• 40:05Alastair Campbell?

  Right, went up to where he was in this huge room, lots of kind of very fancy art, amazing furniture, lots of pictures of him with these people that you've talked about.

• 40:18Alastair Campbell?

  Possibly the biggest name dropper I've ever been with. I had no sense of all the stuff that we then came to, you know, that we now know and that lots of people presumably already did know. Ghislaine disappeared.

• 40:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Alastair Campbell?

  For about an hour. And then she came back and sort of how you guys.

• 40:35Rory Stewart?

  And when was this? Can you remember roughly how long ago?

• 40:36Alastair Campbell?

  Oh God, it was sort of early two thousands.

• 40:39Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 40:40Alastair Campbell?

  I think so twenty years ago.

• 40:41Rory Stewart?

  That's quite a long time.

• 40:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 40:43Rory Stewart?

  At the heart of the scandal is that he was successfully prosecuted in Florida and the big stories started coming out. Sort of two thousand five, six. The astonishing thing is that all these people continued to see him years after.

• 40:58Alastair Campbell?

  And fly with him and get sponsors and all that stuff.

• 41:02Rory Stewart?

  And I was sort of wondering about psychology of this. Is it that if you've known somebody like Ghislaine Maxwell for a long time or I've seen for a long time, you sort of don't quite want to believe what's coming out? Because you know, she she also now appears to be complicit in the most horrendous stuff.

• 41:15Alastair Campbell?

  She's now serving a very long jail sentence. I can't pretend I had an instinct about this guy's a terrific kind of sex offender. And Ghislaine is trying to get young women. I didn't have that sense at all. However, he gave me the creeps.

• 41:28Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 41:29Alastair Campbell?

  But he gave me the creeps largely because he just was one of those people. You know, if you said, well, you know, I had a phone call with, I don't know, Javier Solana.

• 41:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 41:38Alastair Campbell?

  Um, oh yeah, I know Javier. Uh, last time I saw, you know, he just, any name you mentioned, he knew him, he was, he was just a sort of show off. And there was something creepy about him. The only thing I remember him is he sat behind the desk.

• 41:51Rory Stewart?

  A talk sheet from behind his desk.

• 41:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 41:52Rory Stewart?

  It's a very weird thing to do.

• 41:53Alastair Campbell?

  So he's a bit weird as well. So but to be honest, partly because I was knackered, I didn't really want to hang around. And so when Gillian came back, he said, anyway, it's been nice seeing you. And off I went. That was it. But because he's a, I think the thing about the black book.

• 42:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 42:05Alastair Campbell?

  So called.

• 42:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Alastair Campbell?

  He's a collector of people.

• 42:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Alastair Campbell?

  So, you know, he gets your number, he gets your email, it's in his book.

• 42:12Rory Stewart?

  And that's part of protection mechanisms.

• 42:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And that was the last, that was the only contact I ever had with him. But I could, looking back, I can see he was a real operator.

• 42:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 42:23Alastair Campbell?

  You know.

• 42:23Rory Stewart?

  Well, one of the tricks he did to protect himself is philanthropic fundraising, which is a big deal in the US. So he would commit to give money, for example, to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. He would say, I'll give it anonymously. So you don't need to get in trouble from taking the money from me. And by the way, I'm also going to arrange for Bill Gates to give money to. He'd insist that other billionaires would come and meet him on his island in order to put this money together, which kept his reputation, his name alive for many years after this prosecution through philanthropic fund.

• 42:57Alastair Campbell?

  But I wonder when the history is written about the Trump presidency. And I know all billionaires are terrible people, right? But when you've got so many of these really wealthy people, kind of as part of the mix, they basically think they're untouchable. And Epstein definitely thought he was untouchable.

• 43:14Rory Stewart?

  And then the swing around is that Musk did a lot of campaigning for Trump, saying the reason why billionaires are supporting Democrats is they were on Epstein's list. So these stories, these narratives are incredibly powerful, I think, in the way they fuel political change, as well as being horrors in terms of the incredible abuse of young, vulnerable, underage women.

• 43:33Alastair Campbell?

  As to what I am watching, it's Say Nothing, which is the dramatization of the book about the Dolores and Marion Price, the IRA sisters and that whole story. It's pretty amazing. The guy, I've got to say, because I know how much you enjoyed meeting Gerry Adams, the guy played Gerry Adams is a very good actor.

• 43:52Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Alissa, thank you for that.

• 43:54Alastair Campbell?

  See you then.

• 43:55Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

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