2. Lying, vanity and friendship in politics

Welcome to the second episode of The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell! With Ukrainian refugees struggling to claim asylum in the UK, why aren't the British government's actions matching up to its rhetoric? Rory and Alastair discuss the importance of personal relationships in matters of state, and question whether the current honours system is fit for purpose after former education and defence secretary Gavin Williamson was given a knighthood. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Goalhanger Podcasts 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/restaspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restaspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Hello, I'm Rory Stewart.

• 1:45Alastair Campbell?

  And I'm Alastair Campbell.

• 1:46Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics. Well, what a start, Alistair. We're top of the iTunes and Spotify charts. Thank you very, very much to everybody who's been joining us. When was the last time, Alistair, you were number one?

• 1:59Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God. Well, I've had a few number one bestsellers, but not for a few years. I think the last one got into the top 10, but not number one. I guess my last absolute number one was when Leave Means Leave named me as their Ramona of the Year. Something I continue to wear as a badge of pride, given how badly Brexit is going.

• 2:18Rory Stewart?

  Ramona of the year, what was it, Ramona of the year 2017?

• 2:21Alastair Campbell?

  I can't remember when it was, 2017, 2018, I may even have won it twice, I get to keep the T-shirt after a while.

• 2:27Rory Stewart?

  My best one was I was made GQ Politician of the Year and I was just getting up to get my prize in this incredible sort of, yeah, in this enormous hall in the Tate Gallery with all these very, very famous people around. None of whom had any idea who I was. I mean, obviously they were kind of stormy, there were these Hollywood actors. And I was just getting up to do my acceptance speech when I got this text from the chief whip telling me I'd just been fired from the Conservative Party and my career in politics was over.

• 2:55Alastair Campbell?

  Was that the one where, I don't know if we're allowed to say this, but was that the one where Billy Connolly made an absolutely brilliant and borderline obscene speech about a comedian who'd just gone before him?

• 3:05Rory Stewart?

  I missed the whole, beginning of the whole thing because I was voting in Parliament. I turned up with a little wheelie bag from Cumbria and a pair of tartan trousers, just in time to accept my prize. I'd missed the whole thing.

• 3:14Alastair Campbell?

  Tartan trousers to go with the pinky ring?

• 3:16Rory Stewart?

  That tartan trousers go with the pinky ring? Come on. So you're sure you know somebody with tartan trousers?

• 3:21Alastair Campbell?

  No, only you, only you. So listen, I suppose we'd better start really where we started and spent most of last week, which is on Ukraine. And I want to kick off, I think, just by talking about the British government and the response in relation to refugees. Because it seems to me to be one of those areas, one where your former department is being missed, the Department for International Development, which this lot got rid of. But secondly, it's just this sense of sort of nothing joined up and mixed messaging. So yesterday I had Liz Truss at the Select Committee saying it's all down to the Home Office and Home Office, Priti Patel in the House of Commons.

• 4:02Alastair Campbell?

  Just so lacking in clarity about what people were meant to do. And meanwhile, I've just been looking at some German and French media. And, you know, we're getting covered round the world as just, you know, the one that's doing the least.

• 4:15Rory Stewart?

  It's shocking. And of course Boris Johnson gave an interview saying that we were right out in front and we were leading the world and nobody was doing as much as us just last week. So I think fundamentally, the problem is they don't really want to take refugees. This is a political thing. And they're dressing it up. They've been embarrassed to say it about the Afghan refugees, where the government announced they were going to take 20,000 and then basically didn't set up the scheme. And now the same with Ukrainians, they want to be able to say they're helping Ukrainian refugees, but at the same time, they've got a voter base that doesn't really want any refugees at all. And I think that's the fundamental thing. So I think it's it's basically nonsense. I think they really are not up for taking people into Britain.

• 4:55Alastair Campbell?

  But do you know something that really depresses me about it is that one of the things that Putin has operated on and has made him the the figure that he now is, is the belief that you don't run government on principles of telling the truth and being factual. And so I've now got to a position when, for example, yesterday Boris Johnson talking about the refugee situation, we've taken him more than any other European country, which just isn't true.

• 5:23Alastair Campbell?

  Or even when he's sort of saying, you know, I didn't intervene in relation to Levadov's peerage, or when he's talking about frankly, anything, there's your mindset now starts to think, well, he's probably not telling me the truth. And I think that given this is, as we discussed last week,

• 5:38Alastair Campbell?

  developing into a kind of global struggle between democracy and dictatorship, you kind of want the democracies to be sticking to those principles of, you know, striving to tell the truth.

• 5:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and I I mean, I'd love to make this something we could talk about more in another episode because obviously, sorry, we've got the Azan, I'm still in.

• 5:55Alastair Campbell?

  Never apologize, never apologize for the call to prayer.

• 5:58Rory Stewart?

  Coming in. But it's something I'd love to discuss more with you because obviously when you were in Downing Street, you were accused of being right at the centre of being a spin doctor and all this kind of stuff. And there was all this stuff about Blair the liar. So it would be good to try to get into the details of where you think the balance lies. And I guess for me, politics is about a middle ground. It's about accepting that politicians are people who are trying to win, they're campaigning, they're trying to beat the opposition.

• 6:30Rory Stewart?

  So obviously, somebody who was a perfect saint is not likely to become prime minister. But at the same time, there have to be limits. There has to be a sense that certain things are off off limits. And trying to work out what that is, what? What kind of truth do you expect from politicians when lying crosses a line? But maybe that's that's a longer, longer issue. Let me just come back to you on the refugees for a moment. Do you think I'm right that fundamentally what's going on is that they think their voter base doesn't want any refugees?

• 7:03Alastair Campbell?

  Whether it's about the voter base or whether it's about them and that they just think, well, part of the whole Brexit thing was taking back control of the borders. And it's a way of sort of showing that. But at the same time, it's this complete disconnect between what they're saying and what's actually happening on the ground. And honestly, I watched some of the TV news yesterday. There was a there was a woman on one of the bulletins who was talking about how she was here. She was wearing a Ukrainian flag. She was Ukrainian, but she came here as a child, spoke flawless English, accentless flawless English. And she's been trying to get her grandmother here as part of the family scheme. But you're just going through the bureaucratic chaos. And honestly, you see these pictures and to be fair, Poland and Hungary have had a pretty bad rep

• 7:48Alastair Campbell?

  as part of the European family in recent recent years and months. But you see them being welcomed in the way that they are. And then you see pictures of these Ukrainians arriving in Calais, looking at little porter cabin windows where there's a sort of URL that they have to take down and sort of put into their phone. And maybe if you phone this number, and then they're told they've got to go to Paris or Brussels. And then they're told that when they get there, the place probably won't be open because they don't have any slots to be. And then Johnson goes up and says, we're processing thousands. As we speak, we're processing thousands. I don't even know what that means at the moment.

• 8:20Rory Stewart?

  It's it's so sad, isn't it? And it's very strange that Britain is now falling behind the so much behind the pack. If you think about it, you know, even post Brexit, you might expect Britain to rank itself alongside, I don't know, the United States, Canada, Sweden, Germany. But all these states are doing so much more internationally on refugees. I was trying to argue that actually it's an opportunity for Boris Johnson if he wants to show after Brexit that he can show moral leadership and that there's an idea of what Britain can do in the world refugees could be part of that and it could be about burden sharing it could be about setting a target so I was very interested in the idea he could say all countries will commit every year to take point zero five percent of their populations

• 9:04Rory Stewart?

  refugees which would be the equivalent to I don't know Ukrainian family of five in a town of 10,000 people and that's roughly where the US is and the Canada is doing better than that and Sweden's been doing very well but it's almost unimaginable now to see Britain playing that role and I don't really understand that I don't understand particularly actually because Boris Johnson in some ways used to have quite liberal instincts used to be you know quite relaxed about socially liberal quite relaxed about immigration why we're now in a world where it somehow seems unimaginable that Britain can take a moral lead.

• 9:37Alastair Campbell?

  But Rory if you go back over your time in Parliament and over the last two three decades the politics of the Conservative Party has focused so much on this issue of keep them out foreign are bad and that is a sort of that sort of populist nationalism is what Johnson has morphed into now I think he I think he sometimes feels guilty about it which is why he feels the need to say the right things and you know we and this thing about this constant even Ben Wallace was doing it I saw him being interviewed and he was constantly saying you know we're leading the world on lethal aid and we're we're showing the way on this this constant talking of leadership and I think to be fair on the

• 10:20Alastair Campbell?

  on the provision of of military support I think the UK has done has done you know reasonably well it obviously not as much as Zelensky wants that's for sure but I think that this constant sort of messaging about we're leading the world we're doing things when they're not doing them. That's what I find extraordinary. And just very briefly, we can talk about this another time if you like, but just briefly on your point about Tony Blair and the spin doctor and all that. I do find it really bizarre that we were constantly accused of lying when we didn't. And we can argue about that till the cows come home. And all the public inquiries, I think, have shown there was no lie, there was no conspiracy, there was just a decision which the government took and some people didn't like it and

• 11:03Alastair Campbell?

  others did. But this lot, who really do lie a lot, I mean, okay, not as much as Putin, I'm not saying it's on that scale, but they do lie regularly in the House of Commons, Johnson does, regularly on the airwaves, his ministers go out to repeat them. And yet there's a sort of normalization to it that most of our media doesn't even bother picking it up anymore.

• 11:25Rory Stewart?

  I'd love to do much more on this. And I'd love to challenge you a bit more on the Iraq stuff and get into that. And we'll do that later in another episode. But I'm reading a book on lying at the moment. And one of the interesting things that this guy points out, he's really in favor of very radical truth telling in daily life all the time. But one of the things he points out is that the problem, if you're in the habit of lying, and this is a problem for Boris Johnson, is it's very difficult remembering what your story was. I mean, if you're telling the truth all the time, then obviously remembering what your story was is a bit more straightforward.

• 11:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Rory Stewart?

  But you then get a bit muddled about what you really thought about things. And instead of really thinking freshly and clearly and thinking, well, what do I really think about refugees? Or what do I really think we should be doing in Afghanistan or Ukraine? You're so caught up in the question of trying to vaguely remember what she might have said in the past or not said, that you can't think.

• 12:17Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure he even cares anymore, though, because he knows. The point you made about people just forget, the media caravan moves on. And the one that really, really stood out to me was when he did that hospital visit during COVID, and the father went up to him and really laid into him and said, you know, you're only here for a photo call. And Johnson literally said, there are no media here, as they looked at the media. It's like, you think, what sort of fantasy world are we in? But of course, Putin, you talk about the book you're reading, one of the books that I, I'm sure you've read this one, and I talk about this book a lot, it's by Peter Pomerantsev, who sounds Russian, is actually British. Nothing is true and everything is possible, which is how Putin made modern Russia. Now, that's where we are today.

• 12:59Alastair Campbell?

  Is the logical consequence of a politics where not only do you lie and you persuade yourself that the lies are true, but as we're seeing from some of the reactions within Russia, I mean, yes, we're seeing some protests, but you're also seeing an awful lot of people who are painting the Z on their shirts and on their cars and they're basically coming out and saying whatever Putin says is true.

• 13:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's amazing, isn't it? So there was this extraordinary bit of trolling which was done by Zelensky. So Putin had put out, you know, he sits at the end of this, as you said, this crazy marble air hockey table, and he's still sitting behind the marble air hockey table with everybody, you know, 100 metres away. But he put out this film which purported to show him sitting with a lot of people around the table with him. And this wonderful research into virtual reality and the way in which special effects are done in movies showed how the whole thing was bogus, that his hand would sort of move through the microphone because the microphone wasn't really there and that the woman sitting on his right was actually looking over his shoulder because she'd been cut from another

• 14:03Rory Stewart?

  picture and the teapot didn't actually have the reflections, the people that should. So Zelensky, when he did his press conference to show he was really there, tapped his microphone to show that it was actually the microphone. But it is extraordinary, as you say, despite all that, we're still in a situation where relatively reputable polling suggests 66% of Russians blame NATO for the war in Ukraine. About 14% blame the Ukrainian government and only about 4% seem to blame the Russian leadership.

• 14:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think it's, look, you say reputable polling and I'm not criticizing the polling company, but I think it is very, very, very hard to get real sense of public opinion in Russia. You imagine you're sitting there, you know that the news is rigged, even if you like it, you know that it's state propaganda. And the phone goes and it's some guy says, you know, this is Vladimir from the polling company, blah, do you think President Putin, you know, you're going to be quite brave in the current climate to say, no, I think he's a terrible man and I think what he's doing in Ukraine is absolutely outrageous. So I think it's very, very hard to get a real sense of that. But I do think that we've underestimated, interestingly, I was, you know, I suppose we could call it our sister podcast, The Rest Is History.

• 15:18Alastair Campbell?

  I was listening to their discussion about Putin's rise. And they played a clip, and I think we played a little role in this because they played a clip of George Bush at his ranch with Putin. Do you remember the famous time when Bush said, I've looked into this guy's soul and I can see a guy that we can work with? Now, the truth is, when Bush first became president, he was very, very, very traditional American view of Putin. He basically, I remember him saying, you know, once a KGB guy or was a KGB guy. And I remember at that point, where because Putin was quite West orientated, quite reform minded, Tony, like, you know, in common with Clinton, in common with others, really felt this was a leader that we could kind of, you know,

• 16:01Alastair Campbell?

  push in the right direction. And I think Tony had some role in persuading Bush not to have this kind of very mono view. And I think it was around that time, in front of, I was listening to Jonathan Powell in an interview recently, and he was, I'd forgotten about this, but when we were at one of these visits with Putin, when Tony and Putin played snooker together or pool, and they had a joint phone call with George Bush as a way of showing, you know, we're sort of coming together. And so I think that sense of, I was going to ask you about this in relation to maybe some of the work that you did when you were Secretary of State for International Development, you're dealing with a lot of, you know, governments that have got a reputation, shall we say, for corruption, whatever it

• 16:46Alastair Campbell?

  might be. I think there's sometimes a danger that we, we think people are like we want them to be.

• 16:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Alastair Campbell?

  I think Putin has exploited that relentlessly.

• 16:56Rory Stewart?

  Couldn't agree more. And I've been looking at your diaries, your volume three diaries, where it's very interesting because of course, Tony Blair and you were taking quite a risk against the British press in the way you greeted Putin. So a lot of the time in the meetings, those early meetings, you're commenting that the British press wants to talk about Chechnya, wants to talk about human rights abuses. And in one of those first meetings, Tony Blair says to Putin, you need to explain better to the world what you're doing in Chechnya, as though the problem is a communications issue. And

• 17:32Rory Stewart?

  I completely understand what's going on. What's going on is that the ambassador to Russia is desperate to try to build good relationships because that's what ambassadors always want to do. And there is a case being made, which was a case that Angela Merkel absolutely believes that the way to deal with Russia was to create such strong economic connections that you would in effect bring them, bring them in out of the cold. But it is something that I saw again and again and again. My, my most dramatic example was with Zimbabwe. So I was the, the minister when Mugabe fell and Mnangagwa took over.

• 18:16Rory Stewart?

  And we should have been a little bit worried about the fact that the guy that was taking over was called Emerson the Crocodile Mnangagwa, probably should have given us a bit of a clue. And the fact that he'd run Mugabe's intelligence and security service and that as a 16-year-old boy, he'd assassinated somebody and had escaped prison because he was too young to, to face the death penalty. I went out there and the ambassador was so optimistic. She had spent a lot of time developing a relationship with Mnangagwa. She was so excited that he is the guy that had taken over and she felt that all these months and years of investment in developing a relationship had come to fruition.

• 18:58Rory Stewart?

  And she was determined to give him the benefit of the doubt, let him run. I was pushing very, very hard to try to set conditions and really watch him. And I remember the first dinner when I arrived in Zimbabwe, sitting with the ambassador and all these leading figures in Zimbabwean civil society, all of them saying to me, this is really good. This is a great new dawn for Zimbabwe. And I got increasingly aggravated because I knew nothing about Zimbabwe. But what I did know is, I guess I'd been to nearly a hundred countries and I'd seen a lot of this kind of optimism in other places.

• 19:38Rory Stewart?

  And eventually I, I bet a very distinguished Zimbabwean human rights activist, a pastor, I, I bet him £50 that everything he was predicting would be untrue and that Mnangagwa would turn out to be as bad as his predecessors. And actually, very sweetly, he tracked me down in Yale just a year ago to pay me my money. But but but it was it was interesting because you got a real sense of tension between the experts. I didn't know very much about Zimbabwe. But also what she picked up as a fresh pair of eyes. So when I went to the meeting with Mnangagwa,

• 20:12Rory Stewart?

  I was the first person that met him after his inauguration. He came in surrounded by these guys in uniform, slightly terrifying guys in uniform, and sat there and kept telling me what a good friendship he had with Joseph Kabila, who was the head of the DRC. And the relationships going back to the seventies with Kabila's father and.

• 20:34Rory Stewart?

  All of this stuff should have been such an alarm bell. And yet the British system was so excited that Mugabe had gone.

• 20:41Alastair Campbell?

  But you you think about it, assuming that, I mean, people keep saying with certain confidence that this, whatever, however, however long it takes, this is the end of Putin. Well, we'll see. But I do, you know, when you think about what a relief will go through the kind of world, the global system, if that were to be the case, you're probably going to see something similar thereafter that whoever emerges, because the state has been hollowed out other than as a sort of Putin shell. I have to tell you that the I'd never had the my first experience of Mugabe was a Commonwealth summit in Edinburgh, where he he appeared absolutely obsessed with the idea that because

• 21:25Alastair Campbell?

  me, Jonathan Powell, two or three other people in Tony's entourage were not married, we were all homosexuals. And he was, then he actually started to say that Tony Blair was a homosexual as well. I don't know if you remember that became one of his, one of his attacks on us, that we were just a government of homosexuals. I don't know why that popped into my head, Rory, as you talked about.

• 21:45Rory Stewart?

  So do you, I mean, one of the things I always got a bit wound up about with David Cameron is that he really believed that personal relationships could swing things. So he was always somehow believing that if he could just get the president of Afghanistan and the president of Pakistan round to stay in Chequers and they had a jolly time at breakfast, it'll be great. And if he, you know, watched football with Angela Merkel, it would all be great. And that little twinkle in her eye would mean he'd get these amazing concessions on Brexit.

• 22:13Rory Stewart?

  What's your sense of how much personal relationships do or don't really count in these things and where the limits of them are?

• 22:19Alastair Campbell?

  I think they do count. I think they are important. But it's interesting that you talk about that in relation to Cameron, whose weakness I would always have said was actually that he. Overplayed his, and you know, I'm sure there'll be other times to talk about the influence of Eton on our public life, Rory, but I do think this sense of, you know, you're taught this incredible self-confidence and you really believe, and I think Cameron really did believe that he was made to be Prime Minister, and that therefore, just as he'd been made to persuade the public to vote for him, to make him Prime Minister, he could persuade people to his will. Now, I think all top politicians have to have that belief that they can persuade people to their will. But I think the, my, I think

• 22:59Alastair Campbell?

  the personal relationships become very important when you are trying to do difficult things together. So I would say that in Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Peace Process, for example, I think the relationships between Tony Blair and Bertie Hearn, and both of them, and Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton, and Gerry Adams, and Tony Blair, and David Trimble, et cetera, they, I think it's sort of, it helped. I think people overstate the importance of the, you know, the, the sort of the shot of them clinking glasses, the shot of them watching the football. I think they overstate that. But, but I think that there can, when, when you've got the people on the same side trying to do very difficult things together, I think it can be incredibly important.

• 23:44Rory Stewart?

  And I think you put, put your finger on the question of the on the same side, because one of the things that is true is that if you're dealing with somebody who's not on your side, it doesn't really matter how charming you're being. I mean, I, I remember feeling this slightly when I was trying to reach across during the Brexit thing. I was trying to work to get a compromise soft Brexit deal together. I think this one was a customs union deal that we were trying to do with Ken Clark. And I remember sensing that the real question was, was it going to be possible for Theresa May actually to come up with a compromise with Jeremy Corbyn? And my sense was, as time went on, it was never going to happen. Now, what I still don't know is, was that her?

• 24:25Rory Stewart?

  Limits as a politician that a different sort of prime minister, if I'd been lucky enough to become prime minister, might I have been able to reach across to Labour and got them behind a Brexit deal? Or in the end, are the interests just fundamentally incompatible? And then in the end, the Labour Party is the Labour Party, the Conservative Party, Conservative Party, doesn't matter how charming you are, they're going to hang Brexit around your neck and they're not going to agree to any kind of compromise deal.

• 24:48Alastair Campbell?

  Well, interesting, I talked to, because I was involved in the whole, you know, post-Brexit people's vote thing, I talked to both sides, I had sort of conversations with both sides around those meetings. The sense that I was getting was actually that people on the government side and Theresa May's side did think there was something possible to be done with Keir Starmer, then the Brexit spokesman, and even with John McDonnell, funnily enough. But they felt that Jeremy Corbyn was in a completely different place and therefore the whole thing kind of went nowhere. But yeah, I think, I think the, look, there's not a politician in the world who doesn't think they can persuade somebody closer to them.

• 25:30Alastair Campbell?

  And the personal relations do matter, there's no doubt about that. But I think, I think we can overstate them as well as understate them. I've got to say at the moment, there's not a politician in the world who doesn't want to have a, pardon Putin, who doesn't want to have a great relationship with Zelensky. Now, that's, that's, that gives him, assuming and hopefully that he survives, that gives him an extraordinary political capital.

• 25:55Rory Stewart?

  Isn't that wonderful?

• 25:56Alastair Campbell?

  Going into the future. You know, we, I know, last night, this is amazing, do you know what we watched on telly last night? We watched The Servants of the People, which is now on Channel Four.

• 26:08Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's on Channel Four now, is it?

• 26:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 26:12Rory Stewart?

  I watched it, I watched it about a year ago, it's brilliant.

• 26:15Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and also you just, it's extraordinary to think, this guy, he's just like a comic actor. Playing becoming the president and now he's the president.

• 26:23Rory Stewart?

  And it's also very funny. I mean, people who haven't seen it, they must see it because the comedy of it, of course, is that he's a slightly sort of sometimes sort of bumbling incompetent premise. It's like, it's more like Veep or something.

• 26:34Alastair Campbell?

  He accidentally, he accidentally becomes president.

• 26:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he's a kind of, it's a sort of Russian tradition or Ukrainian tradition, kind of holy fool. So, sorry, just to explain to people who don't know, this is, this is how Zelensky made his name. He was the star of this television series on Ukrainian television called Servant of the People, in which begins with him as a schoolteacher rattling along on his bicycle. And he finds himself propelled to be prime minister. And he, off the back of this, so off the back of being a sort of satire of what it means to be prime minister, a sort of charming, slightly bumbling prime minister on screen.

• 27:13Alastair Campbell?

  Is he prime minister, is he prime minister or president?

• 27:15Rory Stewart?

  President, I'm sorry, president. He becomes a real president. And it was extraordinary. But initially, people used that to kind of write him off. They were like, oh, he's a comedian. He's like Pepe Grio. He's like Boris Johnson. It's just a whole world of celebrity comedians becoming presidents. But actually, he is razor sharp. And I think people picked up from watching him, his qualities, which are now emerging so well. But I think we're supposed to be going on to a break.

• 27:40Alastair Campbell?

  I think we should do that.

• 27:41Rory Stewart?

  So I think we'll take a break now. And we'll be back very shortly with some questions from you.

• 28:52Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to me, Alastair Campbell, and Rory Stewart for the second part of The Rest Is Politics. And honestly, I must repeat what Rory said earlier. Thank you so much to people, not just for listening, but also for the really kind comments. A little bit of abuse, but we're used to that. But also, we put out an appeal on social media for some questions, and we're absolutely inundated. So we can't go through them all. We're going to pick out a couple each. I want to read this one from Helen Roberts Shaw, who emailed to say she was interested to hear me talking about picking up German again during lockdown. Perhaps you could both talk about languages, the importance of language in politics and diplomacy and wartime situations, and how you both use languages in your work.

• 29:34Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory, I know you're big on languages, not least when you're walking across countries. But do you know the thing that came to my mind when I saw that question? It was actually about a German leader. Angela Merkel speaks obviously fluent German. She also speaks fluent Russian, and she also speaks pretty flawless English. And yet, in her public role as Chancellor, she always, always spoke German. Because she, I think, wanted to communicate to the German people that she was always there for them. But she was very, very good at using her languages in meetings.

• 30:08Rory Stewart?

  I think the language issue is really important. And that there's... One of the sad things is that a lot of diplomats, aid workers, are convincing themselves that you don't need to speak somebody else's language to work abroad. And they convince themselves everybody speaks English. This is very convenient, because it means that you can save a lot of money on language training for people. But of course, the truth is that the advantage of learning the language isn't just that you can talk to people outside the cities, because certainly in the developing world, it's generally only people in the capital, and usually quite elite people who speak English. It's ridiculous for a development worker to suggest everybody speaks English. But it's also that the mere fact of learning the language...

• 30:51Rory Stewart?

  And ideally, living with a family in the country while you're learning the language just teaches you things you can't possibly pick up from a book.

• 30:59Alastair Campbell?

  It also it also signals respect. I think it's important that if you if you I I was always amazed when we were travelling around the world that I mean, for example, one of the times I saw Tony Blair, the most terrified I've ever seen him, was when we persuaded him to speak to the National Assembly in Paris in French. And without boasting too much, Rory, I don't think his French is quite as good as mine. However, he did pretty well and the French loved it. I think they, you know, I think they really sense that it shows respect. I think that's important.

• 31:29Rory Stewart?

  It's a great thing to do. It's a great, great thing to do.

• 31:32Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Rory, I've got a question down here, which is absolutely, this is not for me. This is one for you, and I really am interested in the answer as well. It's from Ed Molder. Ed, thank you for this question.

• 31:42Alastair Campbell?

  I have a question for Rory. If you were offered a job as a foreign policy adviser in a Labour government, would you consider it?

• 31:48Rory Stewart?

  I think definitely I'd be happy to do foreign policy advice for any government that is interested in my views. I think the problem is more likely to be that that people don't want me. Certainly, certainly the current government's not very interested in my views. But yeah, no, I I I I feel very, very lucky, very privileged that I've spent a lot of time working in foreign countries. I'm very interested in foreign policy and I love Britain, so I'd love to provide advice to anyone foolish enough to want to listen to me.

• 32:14Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, let's hope that Keir Starmer and David Lamia are a couteau. Right, why don't you pick out a couple?

• 32:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I've got the honour system. Arise, Sir Gavin Williamson.

• 32:24Alastair Campbell?

  Is that a question from somebody?

• 32:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's Philippa Jane Burns. So she says, appreciate it's off topic as far as the Ukraine crisis goes, but dot, dot, dot, Sir Gavin. Can we have some insight into what discussions would have occurred to arrive at the absurdity? And what he knows about whom for this to have happened? So what do you think about that?

• 32:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I do think that the corruption of the honour system under Johnson is really galloping apace. I mean, you talked earlier about how things just get forgotten. It's not that long ago, the Sunday Times did that big thing about, you know, basically three million for a peerage. I think the whole Levadev story is, I don't think we've gotten remotely got to the bottom of that and Johnson's relationship with him. But I suspect what happened is that, I don't know, but I suspect what happened is that Williamson was told by Johnson when he gave him the boot that, you know, go quietly and... These things matter to you, people. And I've never understood why people care so much about the honour system, but they do. And he's sort of given it as a reward for going away and keeping quiet. He's certainly not. I mean, nobody could argue that he's

• 33:25Alastair Campbell?

  been given it on grounds of his abilities as a minister. I mean, Fiona, my partner, who, you know, is works in education, I think, would say he's probably the worst education secretary that we've ever had. And I just think it makes an absolute mockery of the entire honour system. And I also think the other thing that would have happened is Johnson thought, well, nobody's going to care too much because Ukraine's going on. I'll just sort of, you know, sneak it out quickly.

• 33:48Rory Stewart?

  It's very, it's very weird. One of the other things that makes it so strange is Gavin Williamson came in in my intake, so he's only elected in 2010. So there's a sort of tradition of giving knighthoods to real old veteran MPs. So a lot of the people who've been in, and this was true for Labour and Conservative, been in 30, 40 years, got knighthoods. But it was almost unheard of for somebody like Gavin, who's been in 10, 11 years and is just in his, in his 40s. He's quite a young guy to be given a knighthood. So it will also seem very strange to other members of parliament, you know, who can't quite get what's going on, don't really understand what's, what's happening. It will have been a very specific request, I guess, from Gavin Williamson. I don't think it's something that anyone would naturally have offered because it's so out of the ordinary. I don't

• 34:32Rory Stewart?

  think that it would have been suggested by Boris Johnson. I don't think it would have been suggested by the chief whip. But one of the things we know about Boris is that he quite likes to make people happy. He likes to agree with people, likes to be sort of amenable. And one of the things that kept happening when I was in the Foreign Office with him is that he would agree to things like that and then people would have to run around behind and try to unpick it. So I'm guessing what happened is that Gavin probably himself said, okay, if I'm leaving, at least make me a knight. And he would have said, yes, yes, of course.

• 35:04Alastair Campbell?

  Why, listen, Rory, answer this. Why do people care so much? What difference has it made to their lives?

• 35:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, I guess the the amazing thing about it and all this honour system is that it's a nostalgic confidence trick, because of course, why do we love knights? We love knights because we love knights in shining armour. We love kind of Sir Galahad and Sir Lancelot. So it's a sort of thing from 800 years ago. And there's a weird thing going on in people's minds where they somehow imagine that if they're called a knight, I guess maybe I'm pushing this too far, they're almost becoming a member of kind of King Arthur's court and they're going to become everything a knight is supposed to be honourable and brave. And it's a very weird thing that I felt this a bit with with some of the other awards they count. They also give politicians things like companion of honour,

• 35:53Rory Stewart?

  order of merit, things which are normally given to very distinguished academics. And that's a bit weird, too. It's it's it's it's sort of reminds you of what used to happen in the kind of 1600s, where the king's favourite would be made the made the sort of poet laureate, right? Despite the fact he couldn't really do any poetry, or giving somebody a kind of Nobel Prize for biochemistry, even though you don't really know how to do biochemistry. And you go around pretending somehow that suddenly makes you a genius scientist because you've got this thing.

• 36:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I find I find the whole thing very, very strange. And I when I was in Number 10, I used to have to take an interest because, of course, you know, I was as the prime minister's spokesperson, I was the person who kind of revealed the honours to the world and had to mug up on who got what for what and think through all the questions. And it meant that you used to get lobbied by people. And I've kind of got I used to have a golden rule. If somebody came through desperately asking for something with me, it was a guaranteed way of trying to get their name further down the list.

• 36:51Rory Stewart?

  But so are you saying you definitely would never take an honour?

• 36:54Alastair Campbell?

  No, well, I was I've been I've turned down the House of Lords several times. And I mean, maybe that's not an honour in the same way, because it was about going to do a job. But I I think the whole thing just reeks, as you say, of something from a another world and the whole thing about an empire. Um. No, I'd I'd I would.

• 37:12Rory Stewart?

  Well, the Lord, the Lord thing's even weirder, isn't it? If if the knight thing is is weird, because knights in shining armour, the Lord Campbell of Burnley thing is a is a kind of different, different thing, isn't it? It's um, that's people sort of trading off a sort of almost 19th century Victorian idea that if you're called a lord, you somehow own tens of thousands of acres and you live in some great castle.

• 37:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, some of them do.

• 37:36Rory Stewart?

  Some, some of them still do. That's right. Tony left some of them in, didn't they? But but but of course, everybody else is trading off them, aren't they?

• 37:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Alastair Campbell?

  But they're also legislators. This is the thing. This, this is, I think, why ultimately it does matter. I mean, I heard James Cleverly, um, Foreign Office Minister, who's, who's probably the most ill-named person in politics, possibly apart from Andrew Odonas. And I heard him saying that we shouldn't really get too worked up about Lebedev, because, because he never goes there. And I thought, well, that's a really interesting constitutional argument. We shouldn't care about some guy who's the son of a KGB agent and a mate of Boris Johnson's, and Johnson goes there on holiday without his security detail when it's when he was Foreign Secretary and comes back looking a bit rough at the airport. We shouldn't worry about him going in the House Lords, because he doesn't vote and he doesn't speak.

• 38:23Alastair Campbell?

  What is the point of these people who don't speak and don't vote when they are actually have the powers of legislation?

• 38:31Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary, isn't it? It's, it's really bizarre. And it's sad, because of course you are totally debasing the whole thing.

• 38:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 38:40Rory Stewart?

  I mean, ultimately, presumably there comes a time when, um, one of the reasons you don't want to be Lord Campbell of Burnley, apart from your views on the Constitution, is that you begin to think, well, actually, I don't really want to be associated with all these other people.

• 38:52Alastair Campbell?

  I'm sure. I, I, I mean, I don't know how many people have turned them down. You do see people who've, who turn their honours down. But yeah, I think I, I, I only, when I see some of the people that you now see, I mean, sometimes I watch debates in the Lords, um, you know, there's something really big going on. And you're looking in the background, I'm looking at some of these people. I mean, I've, I've got to be frank, I find it utterly absurd that that guy David Frost is in the House of Lords. And not only is he in the House of Lords, he's now popping up the whole time as a, as a, you know, great right-wing thinker. I just think, where have these people come from? So no, I couldn't, I couldn't bear, couldn't bear being in there.

• 39:28Rory Stewart?

  But, but the, but the weird thing about it is that at its best, if you leave out the politicians and, and the donors, sometimes I really felt the House of Lords was doing a much better job, particularly on things like foreign policy and defence, because you would have people who were professional soldiers, ambassadors, professors. And suddenly the whole thing had a, a level of knowledge of seriousness that you never saw in the House of Commons. And, and I, I, I've always been very interested in this idea that you could almost deliberately make it that. Try to make a, a revising chamber that would deliberately seek to take the most distinguished academics, professors,

• 40:11Rory Stewart?

  you know, civil servants, diplomats.

• 40:14Alastair Campbell?

  You're never gonna say, you're never gonna take politics out of it, are you? It's impossible because who, who appoints them and that whole, you know, the appointments commission. And I don't know the truth about Lebedev and whether the security services were against it, but ultimately, you know, the Prime Minister decides. And we're back to the whole point about where power lies. And I think our entire system historically is, is, is sort of rested on this idea that the system weeds out the bad people and the best people get to the top. Well, that is not working right now.

• 40:44Rory Stewart?

  No, and, and the other part of the system that I think is really troubling is that we're still living in this amateur fantasy. We are incredibly, particularly in public life in Britain, much less professional.

• 40:58Rory Stewart?

  You, you get a sense that, that the contrast, someone like Angela Merkel with a doctorate in, I think it's chemistry or biochemistry. The way that she sat around her cabinet table looking at Covid compared to the way that Boris Johnson can do that, just in terms of her background and skills. Or the contrast between, we're talking about Gavin Williamson. He was made Defence Secretary, having never been remotely interested in defence or foreign affairs, having never been a minister, never stood behind a sat shell, suddenly he's the Defence Secretary.

• 41:25Alastair Campbell?

  Is that a plane now or a call, another call to prayer?

• 41:29Rory Stewart?

  That, that, no, that, that, that's what happens with silencers and Jordanian motorbikes.

• 41:34Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, is that a motorbike?

• 41:35Rory Stewart?

  Sounds, sounds like a, sounds like a plane descending. But just on the Gavin Williamson point, he's made Defence Secretary at the same time as in the United States, the Defence Secretary's over the Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson period, went from. Robert Gates, who was a very senior director of the CIA, through Ash Carter, who was the most distinguished Harvard professor on defence and security, and then Jim Mattis, who was a four-star general in the US Marine Corps. And we're putting up against them people who frankly don't know the difference between a battalion and a brigade before they get the job.

• 42:08Alastair Campbell?

  But he sold fireplaces. He was a great fireplace.

• 42:11Rory Stewart?

  But it's, and actually to have a go, I mean, I really liked Bob Ainsworth. I liked him. He's a good guy. But again, nobody's going to pretend Bob Ainsworth really knew the difference between a battalion and a brigade when he was made Defence Secretary. And I don't understand why we do this. It's not actually that there aren't people in the House of Commons who have a little bit more knowledge of military and foreign affairs, but it's almost as though we deliberately exclude them.

• 42:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I suppose to be fair, Ben Wallace does have a military background.

• 42:35Rory Stewart?

  And he's doing a pretty, he's actually probably doing a better job than the rest of the cabinet, partly as a result. I mean, there are times when a bit of knowledge, a bit of experience matters.

• 42:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, but Rory, we've had enough of experts. Michael, Michael, your friend Michael told us. Listen, what did you get your OBE for?

• 42:49Rory Stewart?

  That was in Iraq. That was for defending my compound in Iraq.

• 42:53Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 42:54Rory Stewart?

  Got to read my book.

• 42:56Alastair Campbell?

  Did you get that from us or from your lot?

• 43:00Rory Stewart?

  Didn't get it from, I got it from actually the Labour Government. That's true. The Labour Government. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the Labour Government. That's right.

• 43:06Alastair Campbell?

  So listen, why don't you give us another question from one of our

• 43:09Rory Stewart?

  Okay, let's, let's, let's get on.

• 43:10Alastair Campbell?

  Listeners.

• 43:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, I quite like Justine Clayton. Used to work for a minister in coalition days. Want to know what the most absurd demand you ever had from a minister, UK or otherwise? You gonna give us a go at that?

• 43:23Alastair Campbell?

  Oh my God. The most absurd demand. You go first. Was that one for me?

• 43:30Rory Stewart?

  Well, I thought it was one for you. I just dropped it on you.

• 43:34Alastair Campbell?

  God, I'm stunned into silence. It's very rare.

• 43:37Rory Stewart?

  But presumably because you've got a lot of absurd demands, right?

• 43:39Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think probably because they knew that if I got an absurd demand, it'd get very short shrift. I suppose they'd be in the area of people wanting me to put words in with Tony about getting jobs for which they were probably wholly unsuited.

• 43:57Rory Stewart?

  And a lot of, a lot of it is about vanity, isn't it? I mean, I've been reading, as long, as well as reading your diaries, I've been reading Alan Duncan's diaries. I've been reading this diary by Sacha Swire and her husband Hugo Swire. And I've been reading David Cameron's memoirs. It's amazing how much vanity there is. And one of the extraordinary things in the Alan Duncan diaries is I sort of appear in lines where I'll say things like, met Rory Stewart today in the House of Commons bar. He said to me that I was a real hero in Nepal for the work that I've done on the earthquake. And then there's no comment at all afterwards. And then he'll be like, just went to Turkey and the ambassador said I'd done an incredibly good visit. I mean, it just on and on, day after day after day, any compliment is just repeated.

• 44:42Rory Stewart?

  Sometimes it's the entire entry for the day.

• 44:44Alastair Campbell?

  Wow. I think, I hope you'd agree that my diary is a little bit more self-deprecating than that. I tend not, I tend to go the other way.

• 44:51Rory Stewart?

  You're not endlessly including people saying how awesome you are. The other thing is they're incredibly interested, obviously, in their cars, in their accommodation, in their status and how often they see the Prime Minister. I mean, it's really bad for you because you get the sense of this very kind of febrile world where everybody is. So Alan Duncan, for example, keeps saying, basically, he keeps hoping he's going to get promoted. The whole thing is about hoping to get promoted.

• 45:16Alastair Campbell?

  Because Alan Clark's diaries are very much like that, but better written.

• 45:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, but it's pretty terrifying that, and it's terrifying also that in a way they've lost so much sort of objectivity or normalcy that they're, they're willing to record this stuff in their diary. That there's never any moment where they say, of course, he was flattering me or obviously not true, or he would say that, wouldn't he?

• 45:48Alastair Campbell?

  Right. So you're reading, so what I've gathered so far today, Rory, you're reading five books at the moment.

• 45:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I, well, I've got, the problem is I've got a Kindle and, and I've been trying to persuade you to get a Kindle out, to which you're refusing to do. One of the weird things is the kind of world's, probably the most famous director of communications in British public life is, seems to be really sort of holding out. I mean, you, you, you do a lot Instagram, Twitter, don't you? But you're holding out against other bits of technology quite hard.

• 46:13Alastair Campbell?

  I am, and I, I'm actually, I'm off to Dublin tomorrow and, and I just had an email saying that there is still this extra form you have to fill in and it's already kind of freaking me out. I've been thinking about it half the time while we're talking. I'm just absolutely useless at it. I look better than I am. Because I tweet and I can, I've just about learned how to do an Instagram Live without sort of, you know, filming it upside down. But I'm really not good. And, and also I've, I've got to say, when I'm reading a book, I, I just love the feel of paper. I love turning the page. I love marking things. I actually, and I know a lot of people don't like this, but particularly with nonfiction, I, I make a lot of markings in the book.

• 46:51Rory Stewart?

  But you, the great thing in Kindle, says he

• 46:54Alastair Campbell?

  I know you're gonna tell me you can do that on Kindle, but you have to, you have to, you have to do thing, you have to do technical things that I don't like doing, Rory.

• 47:00Rory Stewart?

  Oh, good. Let's, let's, just as we wrap up, just to, to explore this topic one last time. Twitter, which you obviously do a lot of, and the way in which social media is having an impact on politics and the way that's changed since you were the director of communications back in two thousand and five. I've got a friend who's an ex CIA analyst called Martin Guri, who believes it's changed everything. He talks about a revolt of the public and that he saw this first in the Arab Spring. And I think he'd say that he saw it in Brexit and many other things, that what social media has done is create these amazing temporary coalitions of protest, which are very good at erupting, bringing things down, but are very bad about being coherent and creating a positive programme. And that this is one

• 47:43Rory Stewart?

  of the reasons for the kind of lurches, the weird lurches for our politics. Do you feel that social media has changed everything? Or is it an extension of what you knew before?

• 47:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's interesting, you mentioned in relation to the Arab Spring. I think, I think it played a huge role in that. Would that have happened without social media? Possibly not. Would Trump have become president without social media? Possibly not. Would Brexit have become, happened without social media? Possibly not. But I still think that if leaders and governments have a really, really clear sense of their own strategy and really prosecute it without constantly worrying about the day to day noise. And I do think, for all that she's getting a lot of flak at the moment of her relationship with Putin in relation to European energy supply, I do think Angela Merkel was a good example of that, of somebody who just did not allow herself to be pushed around by the day to day noise.

• 48:36Alastair Campbell?

  She was somebody, you were talking earlier about whether Boris Johnson knows his own mind. Yes, she was a compromiser. Yes, she was somebody who would, you know, she was very adaptable in some ways, but she knew what she thought. And I, you know, he wouldn't have, Angela Merkel didn't tweet. No, of course, the German government did.

• 48:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Alastair Campbell?

  Um. So I, I think it's still possible. Um. But I think your point about coalition of protests, that's the other thing I think, I think politicians have got to get better at not confusing momentary passing protest and momentary passing ways of opinion with their own strategic priorities, which shouldn't be changed, simply because you suddenly got a trial to pile on on Twitter.

• 49:20Rory Stewart?

  And then the positive, I guess, of this, just in terms of where we are today, is Zelensky himself, who is the most extraordinary kind of master of social media and Twitter. And a lot of the support that we've seen for Ukraine, the incredible speed with which it's exploded, and I think the way in which it's driven politicians across Europe to go much further than they might have done otherwise, is partly about social media.

• 49:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I wonder if part of the German government, or Olof Scholz's, um, pretty dramatic shifts of foreign policy in recent weeks, recent days. I wonder if that is in part because of the fact that the, there was a, you know, again, I was reading about this in a German magazine at the weekend, but there was this across social media, a far bigger explosion of opinion about what was going on than maybe was normally the case in German politics, which isn't as volatile, isn't as angry, isn't as shouty as ours is. Um. So, yeah, I look, there's no doubt it's making a difference, but I like to believe leaders with strategic minds can still lead.

• 50:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And I think your point there is an interesting one, isn't it? Because Scholz was enabled by the social media, but actually in the end, he made a very, very strong, bold, radical call in quite a lonely, solitary way, didn't really tell his party, barely told his cabinet, stood up, made this incredible announcement that ripped up 30 years for his party's policy, that he was going to spend 100 billion euro on defence, that they were going to go up to 2%.

• 50:50Alastair Campbell?

  I've got a standing ovation for it.

• 50:52Rory Stewart?

  I've got a standing ovation, initially stunned, I mean, members of parliament looking at him not quite and then right on their feet and applauding and something like seventy percent of the British, of the German population behind him. And that really showed something else very interesting about political leadership and courage, that you can take a very radical decision almost on your own. And if you're very skillful and you know what you're doing, you can change everything and be popular in the context.

• 51:16Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Also, don't forget, he's doing it very early in his chancellorship, which I think you do have greater power in the early days. I guess Putin is the opposite case. He feels he's got relentless, limitless power after two decades plus in power. But no, I thought the Schultz thing was very interesting. But I do, I think you're right, that social media played a, played a part in getting there. Now, listen, before we wrap up, Rory, I keep digging into stories about your life, obviously, now that we're doing this chart topping podcast every week. But you've been, you walk everywhere, but you've been walking the South Pole.

• 51:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that was really, I mean, that's extraordinary experience. I was there in just now in January, which is basically the only time a normal person can go to the South Pole. It's very strange. You sleep in a tent, it's blazing sunshine all the time. You can't pee on the South Pole, so you have to carry a bottle around into which you pee.

• 52:14Alastair Campbell?

  What do you mean you can't pee?

• 52:15Rory Stewart?

  Well, you're not allowed to leave anything. It's so amazing, actually, the South Pole, this incredible continent, this international treaty set up in the 50s, which stops anybody from mining it, but also means that you're not allowed to leave anything behind. So you've got to take literally your urine and your poo out with you. So you're getting up at two in the morning, it's blazingly bright, you're staggering around trying to pee in this bottle in your tent. It's, and it does feel like another planet. I mean, you realise that underneath this sheet of ice, it goes down in a way that you can't see. Six thousand feet into something that would look like Scottish valleys and Scottish

• 52:55Rory Stewart?

  mountains if the ice melted, but it's just flat right the way across. And, and I was really, I was really, I suppose the thing that inspired me most was that sense of international cooperation that somehow all the greed of the United States and Russia and China and Europe and everybody, at a time when the Cold War was really flexing its muscles, we were able to get together and agree that Antarctica, this enormous continent with the most incredible mineral wealth and oil and gas was off limits and that we've managed to hold to that for decades.

• 53:28Alastair Campbell?

  How many, how many bottles did you need?

• 53:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I took a big bottle, big bottle. And you don't want to drink too much. And then you start getting, then you start getting a headache because that's actually quite high in terms of altitude. The whole thing, I mean, I've, I came up with so much respect. I was doing it at the same time as this incredible British woman called Pola Preet. She's a British Asian soldier, was doing a solo journey from the coast to the South Pole. I came up with so much respect for her, keeping going day after day after day. It's a brutal, brutal environment.

• 53:59Alastair Campbell?

  All right, Rory. Well, I think we've blathered on long enough for episode two. Thank you, everybody who's been listening. Do follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Rest Is Politics.

• 54:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, or leave us an iTunes review. And thank you very much and see you next Wednesday.

• 54:15Alastair Campbell?

  Goodbye.