208. History's warning to Labour, the Post Office scandal, and Bangladesh's battle for power

How should the fallout of the Post Office scandal be handled? Why do the polls always swing towards the Tories as an election nears? What's going on in Bangladesh? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 1:34Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom, big or small. We're here for all of it, celebrating 125 years with new moments still ahead. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 2:11Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:13Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:14Alastair Campbell?

  And we're in the studio together.

• 2:17Rory Stewart?

  We are.

• 2:18Alastair Campbell?

  Happy New Year in person.

• 2:19Rory Stewart?

  Thank you very much. And you've given me a lovely Christmas present, which is sitting in the corner of the room. A cartoon of Theresa May standing on a bridge to nowhere about Brexit, showing that you've really managed to overcome.

• 2:30Alastair Campbell?

  Shows I'm over it, doesn't it? Shows I'm over it. Now, we're going to talk about this extraordinary reaction to a TV dramatization of a story that's been going for decades. And yet now, as a result of this TV dramatization, has gone straight to the top of the political agenda. That's the Post Office submaster scandal. Very interesting analysis in our favorite paper, The New European, by Peter Kellner, the pollster, about what we should be thinking as we look at polls as they get announced, coming up to the UK general election. Talking of elections, Bangladesh has just had theirs.

• 3:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, second in our year of elections. So we did Taiwan last week, Bangladesh. We'll be doing a lot of elections this year.

• 3:14Alastair Campbell?

  There's actually an election taking place in a country today, Rory. Do you know which country that is?

• 3:18Rory Stewart?

  I do not.

• 3:19Alastair Campbell?

  Bhutan.

• 3:20Rory Stewart?

  My goodness. And a country I know a little bit. But it's a monarchy. And how much independence the parliament has is an interesting question.

• 3:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, but they've got, they've got a, this, the runoff is the second round of the election today.

• 3:32Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 3:33Alastair Campbell?

  So we won't be talking too much about that. We hope happiness is on the agenda today.

• 3:37Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Because famously, yes.

• 3:38Alastair Campbell?

  Famously, they put happiness.

• 3:39Rory Stewart?

  The king's father didn't just look at GDP, he looked at gross national happiness. That's right, yeah.

• 3:45Alastair Campbell?

  And then finally, you want to have a look at the relationship between China and Saudi?

• 3:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Alastair Campbell?

  So there's a lot to be going on with, but let's, let's start with the Post Office scandal.

• 3:57Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's, yeah, can I start then by asking you, when, when did you fully become aware of it?

• 4:03Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know the answer to that question because the, I mean, I've obviously read up on it since this whole.

• 4:09Rory Stewart?

  And where would you have read it, Missy? Because Private Eye did an incredible series of campaigns on it, didn't you? Are you a big Private Eye reader?

• 4:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I read Private Eye. The other people, I think, in the media that we should sort of, you know, recognize. Computer Weekly were, were driving this. There has been a Panorama documentary. I think it was John Sweeney, who's currently doing some pretty amazing stuff in Ukraine. I think he was behind it. There was a guy who wrote a book, there's been a book about it.

• 4:32Rory Stewart?

  A brilliant book. Can I just sort of little shout out to the book, because I've been reading the book. If if anyone is interested, it's called The Great Post Office Scandal. Nick Wallace.

• 4:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 4:41Rory Stewart?

  And it's it's really, really good. I mean, it's a beautiful, it's very beautifully written, but I know it sounds a bit geeky, but as a way of looking at some of the challenges in modern Britain, it does everything. It does technology, it does government, parliament, corporations, the public, and it does it so patiently. Really beautiful book.

• 5:04Alastair Campbell?

  But so, but that's that's what's incredible about what's happening now. So like at the swimming pool this morning, three people mentioned to me, oh, this post office thing is terrible. And part of me goes, that's incredible that everybody's now talking about it. But then there's another part of me that says, why are we only talking about this now?

• 5:21Rory Stewart?

  And what do you think the answer is? What is it? Did you watch the?

• 5:23Alastair Campbell?

  I watched the whole binge watched it. Yeah, I thought it was, I thought it was an incredible piece of television. I thought to take such a complicated story and make it so digestible. I saw an interview with a woman who writes, I think she's called Gwyneth Hughes, and she's older than me. She actually talked about her background as journalism. You can see there's a sort of journalistic thread in it. But it makes you incredibly angry.

• 5:49Rory Stewart?

  And is it, I mean, I wonder whether part of the thing is that the post office was partially protected by two things. One of them is the complexity of computers. Many people, including judges, were reluctant to believe that computers could spontaneously put the wrong figures into accounts. It seemed self evident to them that they would work like a calculator and that if there was error, it was more likely to be human error. I mean, it just seemed bizarre. Can it really be true that a computer can spontaneously double the amount that you owe?

• 6:20Alastair Campbell?

  Hallucinate.

• 6:21Rory Stewart?

  Hallucinate, exactly. And the second thing I think is I wonder whether there wasn't a degree of people being patronizing. And I'd like to sort of explore this a bit, that maybe sub postmasters didn't sound like a sort of exciting story. It sounded a bit kind of obscure. Maybe there was, and I wonder whether this was an issue maybe for editors, that that until that documentary was made, a story of sub postmasters claiming that the computers had let them down just didn't catch the imagination.

• 6:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there was a very, somebody posted yesterday. A picture of the House of Commons a few years ago when this was being debated. And there was a government front bencher, an opposition front bencher and three MPs. And yesterday they they posted a picture and it was kind of, you know, reasonably full. And that is only because of this current controversy.

• 7:14Rory Stewart?

  They're now talking about passing an Act of Parliament to exonerate the postmasters rather than putting it through the courts, which is a really extraordinary move.

• 7:20Alastair Campbell?

  When you can see why some people in the legal profession might be alarmed by that.

• 7:23Rory Stewart?

  I'm a little alarmed by that.

• 7:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, because you're basically saying, well, what if some of them?

• 7:28Rory Stewart?

  Were actually.

• 7:28Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. So that so it's tricky. It's very, very tricky.

• 7:31Rory Stewart?

  And actually, I think yesterday, somebody, I think David Davis, who's who's been in touch with them, said that some of the sub-postmasters he'd spoken to prefer it to go through the normal legal course because they want to be proven innocent in court. They don't just want people to say this was an act of parliament.

• 7:46Alastair Campbell?

  What what was fantastic about the dramatization, and it starts with the words, this is a true story. Okay, so you've got that in your mind the whole time. Now, it is a dramatization. So, for example, in this interview with the writer today, she points out that the the beautiful house where Alan Bates lives in the film is in this fantastic Welsh setting. It's really beautiful. She said, actually, he's got a tiny house and it's just full of all these boxes. So there's bits that you know are dramatized. However, what I think comes through is the the word I invented last year, perseverance. This guy, Alan Bates, is the ultimate in perseverance because most of the time they're getting nowhere. They're getting absolutely nowhere. And yet, suddenly, along comes a break and

• 8:30Alastair Campbell?

  something happens. And I must give, you know, as you know, I'm not very fond of your old school, or indeed your old party, but if I can give a shout out to James Arbuthnot, he does come out as Tory MP, now Tory peer. He does come out as one of the heroes because he is approached by a constituent. He listens. He gets into the detail.

• 8:52Alastair Campbell?

  And he's there the whole way through. And there are other MPs, Kevin Jones, Labour MP, there are other MPs who have been at this the whole time, but most of the time they've been banging their heads against brick walls.

• 9:02Rory Stewart?

  It's amazing, isn't it? Very, very quick, maybe explainer on the story, which the Nick Wallace book does much better than I can ever do. But essentially, the post office, one of the most complex, famous, trusted institutions in British life. And by the late nineties, found itself still processing things in a Victorian fashion. And understandably thought, what we're going to do is we're going to embrace the IT revolution and we're going to computerize things. And at the time, they were dealing with over twenty million customers. They were processing fifty four billion pounds worth of benefits claims. They had nearly sixty seven thousand employees down at the sub-postmaster level.

• 9:47Rory Stewart?

  And the government thought, okay, this was under Peter Lillie, so this is the end of the John Major government. We're going to get a contract and get someone in to computerize it. So it's not all done by hand in the way it was done by the Victorians. They ran a procurement process and they chose a company which eventually was was then largely owned, but eventually basically became part of Fujitsu. And they chose it, and this is another classic government procurement story, basically because it was the cheapest. And you can see the temptation for government to do that. The company then decided essentially to try to bring in a lot of people to build this system. And it rapidly became clear that they had no idea what they'd stepped into.

• 10:26Rory Stewart?

  They began talking about the fact that this was the largest IT project since, I don't know what they can inserting, I don't know, the National Health Service or the Chinese Army. But it was something absolutely gigantic, because they were having to deal not just with benefits claims, but and they were supposed to be also doing a special swipe card for social security things, but they were also meant to be processing Canadian money orders, pool stuff, WH Smith vouchers, you know it. They used a very crumbly prototype system and tried to build on top of it. And one of the things that seems to go wrong, and this is the Horizon system, is, and I hadn't realised this until I'd read the book, that

• 11:08Rory Stewart?

  If you are not very careful about defining stuff called routines and data dictionaries, the computer can end up with a particular category assigned in an earlier version, and then a new category assigned in a new version, and it gets confused. And when it gets confused and it tries to enter a bit of data in a field that doesn't exist anymore because it's been changed in another iteration, many things can happen. It can crash, or it can just start writing stuff and assigning it in a random way.

• 11:37Alastair Campbell?

  So this is like the hallucination of AI at the moment that we're talking about. Is the technology taking on its own?

• 11:43Rory Stewart?

  It's happening for a slightly different reason, but it's another example of when technology can be really unreliable. So with the large language model, it's partly to do with the way that it's predicting the next unit, so that's the AI problem. Here, it's genuinely as though you've told the computer that it's got to drop a blue ball in a red box, and then in the next version of the program, there isn't a red box anymore. So it's been told to drop a blue ball in the red box, and it's now panicking. Does it drop it in a green box? Does it drop it in a yellow box? Or does it just crash the whole system?

• 12:15Alastair Campbell?

  Or it drops it in the wrong place, and...

• 12:17Rory Stewart?

  Exactly.

• 12:18Alastair Campbell?

  So there's one of the most powerful bits of this whole drama is when a woman called Jo, which is the woman who's James Arbuthnot takes up her case, she clearly is panicking because she's doing what she thinks she's meant to do, pressing this button, then this button, then this button. And then when she presses the final button, the money that she's lost doubles. So the ball is being dropped, and she doesn't understand. Then she phones up.

• 12:42Rory Stewart?

  So then she finds, exactly, I think in that case, what she owes the post office goes from, I don't know, two thousand to four thousand pounds, and four thousand to eight thousand pounds. Then she calls up, yeah.

• 12:53Alastair Campbell?

  And they tell her, you're the only one this is happening to. This is the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of this. Everybody who's having this problem is being told by this trusted great institution, you're the only one this is happening to. It's your fault. And that's why this campaign suddenly develops when people start to realise, hey, I'm not on my own.

• 13:11Rory Stewart?

  And then there's all these human bits, which partly explain why these stories become so tragic, because everybody's very isolated. It turns out that the the union or the trade body for the sub-postmasters is absolutely terrible and basically lines up with the post office and rubbishes all the claims and keeps saying the Horizon system is terrific, begins whispering to journalists, maybe these people were genuinely involved in fraud. And then the human bit, which is that if you're Joe and you're not very confident with computers, you may not be certain whether actually you haven't made an accounting mistake somewhere along the line. I mean, it took the great hero of this, who

• 13:51Alastair Campbell?

  Alan Bates.

• 13:52Rory Stewart?

  Alan Bates, who I think had an engineering background, to really say, I am absolutely confident I did nothing wrong.

• 13:58Alastair Campbell?

  So I'm not signing your paper and I'm not admitting to a smaller offence to get off with the bigger one. I'm just not going to play your game. When we talk about guts and courage, that guy, the other thing that's extraordinary about him, I didn't sense any bitterness. The interviewer was trying to get him to dump on Ed Davey, which a lot of the right wing papers and I think probably the government at the moment are trying to do as well, to sort of, let's put it on Ed Davey's watch. And he was saying, no, it's much more complicated than that. This is about systems, this is about what have you. He was happy to dump on the chief executive, Paula Vennells, and this this thing about her CBE. I'm a bit uneasy about the way this is all sort of going on to her and the idea that let's all sign a petition and get her stripped of her

• 14:41Rory Stewart?

  And she's got more than a million people have signed a petition.

• 14:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So more than a million people have signed that. What I think would be terrible is if then, okay, she gets stripped of her CBE, Rishi Sunak stepped in yesterday and said, yes, he'd be very favourably disposed towards the committee reviewing it, blah, blah, blah, as if that's going to solve the problem. This goes back, and you know, it does go back to our day.

• 15:00Rory Stewart?

  And before your day.

• 15:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Peter Lilly announced it in 1995 at the party conference. They then stripped out half of it, as I understand it. This this system was going to extend even wider than the post office. So they stripped it out. But I know that, and I don't know this from memory, I know this because I asked Tony Blair's office about what, you know, their involvement when he was first informed and alerted. My sense is that actually he asked the right questions. As I think Ed Davey probably did, but then you're reliant on the answers that you get. So government trusts the post office, government trusts the post office to tell them the truth.

• 15:36Rory Stewart?

  This is, I think, the other part of the story, isn't it? So you've got James Arbuthnot and others also on the Conservative side. You mentioned Labour MP, but also Oliver Letwin, Mike Wood, Andrew Bridgen, all pushing very hard on this.

• 15:50Alastair Campbell?

  Because they have constituents.

• 15:51Rory Stewart?

  Because they had constituents. And actually, it's one of the things we often slag off MPs, but it's one of the things MPs can be very, very strong on, taking up these cases and pushing it hard. One of the things that surprises me in this story, and you can see James Arbuthnot trying to manage the system. So he goes to meetings with Paula Vennels and with Perkins, who's the chair. Sometimes he's cheered up, so he'll write emails saying, actually, I had quite a good meeting. I think they're going the right direction. He's very excited because they brought in an independent auditorium called Second Sight, which they then fired the day before they were due to produce a negative report. And the thing, though, that does surprise me a little bit in this is that the ministers didn't grip it more.

• 16:33Rory Stewart?

  Because normally, in my experience, if you've got very senior people, so James Arbuthnot was Chair of the Defence Select Committee, he'd been the previous Chief Whip. Oliver Letwin was essentially David Cameron's right-hand man on policy. Those people coming up to you in the lobby saying, we have a real problem, look at it. Normally, I as a minister would really go through the details and push the civil servants very hard.

• 16:57Alastair Campbell?

  But then you're into the problem, which I'm sure we would have had, of at a time when, as you say, there was this sort of technology is going to be the answer to everything. You don't, would you really have been able to get into a computer system and understand it? Or would you not just say to people, right, give them the expert opinion, go and review it and come back to me? And if they're coming back to you saying, this is robust, this is safe, we have been assured, et cetera. Would you then say, well, I know I'm going to look at this again myself?

• 17:26Rory Stewart?

  It's a really interesting question because institutions dig their heels in. And of course, by the time that Joe Swinson or Ed Davey are looking at this, it's been going on since nineteen ninety nine. So it's, there's been, you know, ten, twelve years of the post office and civil servants developing these very robust, confident answers to these questions. I mean, the, the best examples I found of this was when I was the prison minister. I had a constituent come through. A, a man had been released from prison. He had told his probation officer he was thinking of raping again. And then he'd climbed through her daughter's window, raped and killed her daughter and then tried to kill her. And by the time I came along, this had been running for three, four years.

• 18:11Rory Stewart?

  And the view of the civil service was they had done absolutely nothing wrong. And I got a lot of briefing and my predecessors, I think for the previous three years, had just said, we've looked at the evidence. It's very, very sad, but the probation officers followed proper policy. In that case, something about it really didn't smell right. And I was able to reach out to independent people who were outside the system, get the woman in. And in the end, we were able to take disciplinary action, get to probation officers and overturn nearly three years of defensiveness. Now, I don't know whether a minister who really wanted to get their teeth into it, who really sat down with Alan, for example, I mean, that's what I found when I was doing, you know, air pollution stuff or broadband stuff. The, the real key is, do you trust the big activist? Do you trust the Alan figure?

• 18:56Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 18:56Rory Stewart?

  Because if you really trust the Alan figure and put the time in, probably he can guide you to the right answer.

• 19:01Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, hmm. It's hard though, isn't it? And particularly with something like, you know, although the contract that was done with Fujitsu was smaller than originally, you're still talking about massive.

• 19:11Rory Stewart?

  Billions, billions of pounds, yeah.

• 19:12Alastair Campbell?

  Contracts which then, and Fujitsu are well legaled up. And that's the other thing that comes through the drama is the, the unfair or the imbalance.

• 19:24Alastair Campbell?

  Of the little guy against these big corporations. And I saw an interview with the real character in this was this guy who was so convinced of his innocence and so convinced actually deep down that ultimately British justice is fair, that he chose to defend himself and he lost and he ended up bankrupt because he had to pay the post office's costs as well.

• 19:46Rory Stewart?

  Because the post office employing very expensive.

• 19:47Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, yeah. And it was it was horrible to watch because you know, you know, when you're watching these stories and you know where it ends. And I saw an interview with him on television yesterday or the day before. He looked pretty broken, the real human being looked pretty broken.

• 20:03Rory Stewart?

  In the book, there are stories of a man who stepped out in front of a bus to kill himself.

• 20:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's in the drama, that's in the drama.

• 20:10Rory Stewart?

  And and I mean, I guess there's another question about corporations and their ethics. And and I think it extends beyond this to to organizations in general. We've become a world which is very driven, particularly by lawyers. And where the first thing that boards and chief executives often ask themselves is what are we legally obliged to do or what can we use the legal thing? What's lacking here is anyone at the top of these organizations saying, let's take a step back. Is it possible we've done something wrong? What's the right thing to do? Because when they actually set up mediation, they don't really approach it in an open minded way. They're not really listening, they're not really sharing information, they're lawyered up to the hilt and they're just determined to crush the other side.

• 20:52Alastair Campbell?

  I think the really interesting thing is I've been banging on about this thing about how the UK can become a cultural superpower. And television is clearly an important part of that. And you have to take your hat off to ITV. They've invested in it. The writer took three, four years to write it.

• 21:07Rory Stewart?

  And it's a commercial station, so it's not.

• 21:09Alastair Campbell?

  Free to air commercial station, everybody can see it. And it just shows you that television still has that power.

• 21:14Rory Stewart?

  It's quite, it's it's not, it maybe wouldn't been a something obviously commercial. So it took a bit of imagination from the editor and the commission people.

• 21:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, lots of people are now suggesting that Toby Jones, the actor, should play a lead role in a TV drama about the contaminated blood scandal. Perhaps about how Brexit happened, Rory. Perhaps we could have a TV drama about Brexit and the damage it's doing to the country starring these people. When it first started, I was joining that sort of rage of why does it take a bloody TV drama to get people to wake up to this? But actually, I've begun to see it as a as a positive thing. If we talk about housing, if we talked about housing, we would at some point mention Cathy Come Home. That was a TV programme that brought an issue to the fore. So, well done ITV.

• 21:57Rory Stewart?

  And I think part of the story you're telling there is about how important it is to put the individual human. I mean, maybe what we hadn't quite achieved in the last ten, fifteen years of this is really bringing those human stories in a way that only a drama really can. It's when you actually see and feel the human at the end of the story that you get beyond a complicated story of systems procurement, who's right, who's wrong, sub-postmasters into actually feeling the pain.

• 22:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but if you look at the way it's gone in the last few days, this worries me. So what you said about the corporation stepping back and saying, well, actually, have we done the right thing? I think government's got to do that now because this is now on the government's plate, has been for a while. There's a public inquiry going on. That's going to lead to all sorts of conclusions.

• 22:42Rory Stewart?

  Which was set up by Boris Johnson.

• 22:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, which government will have to address. And I just worry a little bit. I've mentioned the petition on the CBE, the fact that Rishi Sunak stepped in yesterday, the fact that they're now saying, let's fast track this and fast track that. What they shouldn't now do is say, okay, this has built up year on year on year. Now it's become a big explosion. We have to react now quickly and do it. They actually need to step back.

• 23:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Alastair Campbell?

  And say, what are the right things to do for the long term here?

• 23:08Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. And then I thought it was pretty strange to see former Justice Secretary saying, let's push ahead with an act of parliament to sort of sort this all out in an instant. I also think this is a chance for us just to reflect for a second on public procurement and what goes wrong. I mean, the National Audit Office found that at least £500 million worth of public money had been wasted on this contract. Fujitsu, the government tried to stop in 1999, tried to take the contract away from them. Fujitsu just dug their heels in, said we're too deep in, and by the way, you need to pay us even more, and won.

• 23:43Alastair Campbell?

  And by the way, have just landed a new massive contract for flood defences.

• 23:47Rory Stewart?

  Right. And I saw this with probation and I saw this with maintenance in prisons, these private companies signing contracts with the government, not delivering. And instead of being penalised, ending up actually walking away with money or getting even more money. And the MOD is even more dramatic. In the MOD, it's tens of billions of pounds going on in public procurement. So getting to the bottom of that is a lot of the questions you keep asking about why we're so bad at infrastructure, why we're so bad at big projects. I mean, the NHS famously, we've never really got a proper unified computer system in the NHS. And part of the reason is, when you look at how much we screwed up trying to do it in the post office, it doesn't feel very optimistic.

• 24:26Alastair Campbell?

  Now, let's talk about the more general political scene. This piece I mentioned from Peter Kellner, he did a very interesting analysis. And so if you go through the last five Tory parliaments which have lasted more than four years, okay, in each one, there is a significant shift towards the Conservatives in the last period of the parliament.

• 24:49Rory Stewart?

  In the last six months.

• 24:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So nineteen seventy nine to eighty three, the poll lead six months before the election was Conservatives were six ahead. Come election day, they won by fifteen percent, nine percent shift. Nineteen eighty three to eighty seven, they were three ahead, six months out. Come election day, they were twelve ahead. Nineteen ninety seven to nineteen ninety two, Labour were five ahead, six months out, the Tories won by seven.

• 25:14Rory Stewart?

  This was the one which Neil Kinnock was supposed to win. That's why they were five points ahead. And then actually, in the end, to people's surprise, John Major won.

• 25:21Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. Then nineteen twenty to nineteen ninety seven, we were twenty two points ahead.

• 25:26Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 25:27Alastair Campbell?

  And we won by thirteen.

• 25:28Rory Stewart?

  Which was still a whack.

• 25:30Alastair Campbell?

  Massive win, but at the same time, it shifted back. Twenty ten to twenty fifteen. The Conservatives were one point ahead, six months out, and they won by seven.

• 25:39Rory Stewart?

  And I remember that. So 2015 election, all of us inside the party, even two, three months out, thought this is going to be a hung parliament, this is going to be a coalition, another coalition with the Lib Dems.

• 25:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and Cameron got a majority.

• 25:50Rory Stewart?

  Interestingly, he hasn't put in the figures for the 2001, 2005, 2010 elections.

• 25:57Alastair Campbell?

  These are all the ones where the Tories are in power.

• 25:59Rory Stewart?

  Got you.

• 25:59Alastair Campbell?

  But even with those, and with those from memory, I think maybe there's a government element to this. I don't think it's as dramatic as this. But the point he's making, this relates to the fact that we've now got a Conservative government, going into an election, a Labour opposition that's very, very far ahead. It's simply, I think if I were Labour, I'd look at this with a lot of interest, because I saw this very starkly with the coverage of Keir Starmer's New Year's speech, which was getting a lot of play. And then up steps Rishi Sunak, and he sort of drops a hint about, you know, my working assumption is the election will be in the second half of the year.

• 26:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 26:35Alastair Campbell?

  Which adds nothing to the total sum of human knowledge, zero. But suddenly, that is all the media are talking about. And then the next day, the coverage of Keir Starmer's speech in The Sun, in The Mail, in The Express, in The Times, was, you know, this was crap, he said nothing, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The press are turning.

• 26:53Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 26:54Alastair Campbell?

  That does have an impact.

• 26:55Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 26:55Alastair Campbell?

  No doubt about that.

• 26:56Rory Stewart?

  You say the press are turning now to be more vigorously pro-Tory in the.

• 27:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, vigorously pro. More than vigorously, it's very hard to be pro-Tory at the moment, because frankly, nothing works in the country. But they're being very anti-Labour. So that is cranking up. So the other thing I think was interesting in Peter's analysis, up to one in three people who voted Conservative last time now tell pollsters they don't know or won't vote. Now, if you think about all the things that have happened in the last few years. If you voted Tory, you've been given a lot of reasons not to. So if you still don't know, my working assumption would be if you are going to vote, the chances are you're looking reasons to go back rather than looking reasons for a different sort of vote. So I just think it's really important that the Labour Party understand, I think they do.

• 27:45Alastair Campbell?

  But my other worry at the moment is that they keep saying no complacency, rightly. No complacency is a very good position to be in, but that shouldn't mean no risk. And it shouldn't mean don't do big, bold things that get you noticed.

• 27:58Rory Stewart?

  Because you don't want everybody sitting on don't know. You want them to have a positive reason.

• 28:01Alastair Campbell?

  You want people to to march merrily to the.

• 28:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, which they did in ninety seven. We keep coming back to that, but there was a real, I mean, I remember still a real sense of excitement.

• 28:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, while Rishi Sunak was on the BBC, Keir Starmer did an interview on on Sky. If I was rather, it was it was standing in for Trevor Phillips is Wilfred Frost, son of David. So it was quite good to see him following in his dad's footsteps. But I watched the whole interview and I I actually thought Keir Starmer came across much better. He's definitely getting better at these interviews. His speech actually was better, but there's there's a disconnect in the Rishi Sunak just has to say, my working assumption is, is leading the news. Keir Starmer can make a big speech about the future of the country and it's not landing in the same way.

• 28:48Rory Stewart?

  Same problem, right? That must have been true when you were in opposition.

• 28:50Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know. I think we, I think at this stage, I would have been disappointed at this stage of the electoral cycle if we weren't leading the news a couple of times a week.

• 28:59Rory Stewart?

  And how did you achieve that? Because the problem for the opposition is everyone's like, well, you can say what you want, but you're not actually in government, so.

• 29:05Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe maybe my memory's not good on this, but I put it this way. We had a goal of making sure we were leading the news a couple of times a week.

• 29:13Rory Stewart?

  And what's what were big stories that you managed to do to to do that?

• 29:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, clause four was a was a big thing because that broke through as a sense of. So then that meant that every time we came up with something that was related to that narrative of changing the party, there was an automatic interest in it. But I think we were probably attacking more. But maybe this is to his credit, the Keir Starmer, I sense, doesn't want to just sort of jump up and attack the government the whole time because he knows that people are going to then say, yeah, but what are you going to do?

• 29:41Rory Stewart?

  But how would you have responded to that when people said, yeah, but what are you going to do?

• 29:45Alastair Campbell?

  You have an answer.

• 29:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 29:46Alastair Campbell?

  You have an answer.

• 29:47Rory Stewart?

  You do have an answer.

• 29:47Alastair Campbell?

  You have an answer. And even if it's just that you're going to tweak this or set up this review or whatever it might be.

• 29:53Rory Stewart?

  You do have an answer.

• 29:54Alastair Campbell?

  You have to have the answer.

• 29:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Alastair Campbell?

  You can't be the opposition leader, I'm not saying this is what Keir does, by the way, but you can't be the opposition leader who is just popping up like a commentator saying what they do is really bad.

• 30:02Rory Stewart?

  And actually, although it's quite rightly, a lot of Keir supporters will say it's very unfair that people keep saying, what's Labour going to do? It's inevitable and Labour needs an answer to that.

• 30:11Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's especially inevitable when you are 20 points ahead in the polls and people think you're going to be the next Prime Minister. Now, I know that they obviously don't want to set out the entire policy programme this far out, but I think the idea that come the day of the manifesto launch, the whole country is going to be sitting there thinking, right, now I'm going to look at this, this and this. You've got to let people know well before that.

• 30:35Rory Stewart?

  And it's also interesting that there are lots of things that you could be doing which might get headlines in an unexpected way. I mean, I remember this when I was Prisons Minister, that four, five years, there hadn't really been any headlines around prisons and my predecessor had said, we can never get any stories around prisons. But then when David Gork and I were really getting going and I was saying, I'll resign unless violence comes down, suddenly we were able to get front pages and it probably could be true in many strange ways. He could do something really interesting on international development and get a headline. He certainly could do something really interesting on health and get a headline. I mean, so I would have thought that encouraging his team, maybe delegating more, there is a sense of quite tight control there. If you really empowered the Shadow Cabinet to really come up with bold, exciting ideas,

• 31:17Rory Stewart?

  you'd probably get headlines because often the papers are kind of empty of stuff.

• 31:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, again, you're right that it's important about the personnel within the Shadow Cabinet. So, for example, I would say that we're streeting. Does get noticed more than the others because he has set a bigger strategic framework on health policy. He's also very active on social media, which is, you know, particularly important going into this election. But I think it's, I think it's more that they, there's that caution, was it Rachel Sylvester wrote a piece in The Times saying, you know, if people actually look at what Keir Starmer is saying, this is a big radical programme of change. And I think that's where Labour has to be coming from, as opposed to the feeling is, let's just let the Tories carry on messing things up.

• 32:06Alastair Campbell?

  And then as we get nearer to the election, we make more of a noise about what we're doing.

• 32:09Rory Stewart?

  But the Rachel Sylvester thing is weird, isn't it? Because it is a bit weird to say about a politician, if you look very closely and read the speeches very closely, it's a radical programme of change, rather than what you'd expect, which is a communications, people make it absolutely clear with clear one-sentence things, what the radical programme of change is. It's not supposed to be like doing biblical criticism, trying to...

• 32:29Alastair Campbell?

  But that's, but that comes back to, so, so in that interview that I mentioned, Keir Starmer did say, well, you know, we're talking about building this many houses, we're talking about this much, this change in relation to the environmental agenda, we're talking about this on childcare. There was a lot of big stuff in there.

• 32:45Rory Stewart?

  But sometimes, very quickly though, sometimes he does get it wrong. I mean, I was watching him being interviewed by Sky and he said, when they said, well, you know, what are you going to do? What's different between you and the Tories? He said, well, the first big difference is we're going to have the fastest sustained growth of any country in the G7. And I thought, kind of answer is that? I mean, it doesn't sound very different to the Tories. I don't think anyone listening thinks the Tories don't want growth. And does anyone actually believe we're going to have faster growth in the US? So it struck me that there's a problem messaging there. That's a weird first answer to the question.

• 33:17Alastair Campbell?

  I, I think that everybody who's a Labour candidate, because candidates have to know this as well, they're out knocking on doors and doing local radio and what have you, they have to have an answer to all those questions. If you're only allowed one sentence, what's it going to be? Now, they've obviously decided the one sentence is, we're going to grow the economy. If you're allowed two sentences, what are you going to say? Well, we're going to grow the economy and here's how. If you're allowed three or four or five sentences, we're going to grow the economy, that's number one, because we want to do this, this, this, this. They've all got to know what they're meant to say. And that's not about sort of command and control, central communication. It's about people now going into a campaign phase. Armed with all the answers to all the difficult questions they're going to get.

• 33:59Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I think they're definitely getting there. They're definitely getting there. And I go back to the other big point. It's not that long ago. In, you know, historical terms, it's just a few years ago, people were saying the Labour Party is finished. And now the criticism is, you know, why can't they just wipe this Tory party out forever? But I think, anyway, back to Peter Kellner's point, I think it's really important that we, no complacency is real. They do understand the polls are going to narrow. When they do, they shouldn't wobble. He has a, he has this other great line, polls wobble about, watch for the signal, ignore the noise. And that's really important because polls are going to come and suddenly there'll be a poll saying, on the back of the the budget, the polls have narrowed. The polls are going to narrow anyway.

• 34:42Alastair Campbell?

  The question then is, how do you react? And you only react not by following the sort of day to day noise. You follow your own strategy, but at this stage, it should be absolutely crystal clear to all those candidates, what they're meant to be saying. Good. Well, maybe time for a break. Take a break.

• 35:02Speaker 02

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• 35:30Speaker 03

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• 36:06Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 36:09Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 36:11Rory Stewart?

  And you were excited by Geva Hofstadt, who we interviewed on Leading.

• 36:14Alastair Campbell?

  I thought it was good. I enjoyed it and we got a lot of good feedback.

• 36:16Rory Stewart?

  Former Belgian Prime Minister.

• 36:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yep. I think a very good question. I was going to raise this on the Q and A, but I'll give it to you now Rory. Why were you so challenging him so hard on Belgian colonialism in the Congo when you do so little to speak up, to apologize for Britain's colonial record?

• 36:33Rory Stewart?

  It's a good, the what aboutery. Actually, it's interesting if you listen to him answer it. The answer is because it's a massive issue in Belgian politics and the Belgian colonialism in the Congo was beyond horrifying. And there's this book, King Leopold's Ghost, which lays out the kind of heart of darkness in the Congo. And it's interesting that Geva Hofstadt doesn't quite respond as clearly as you'd expect. He very quickly says, well, yes, I was just like other nations, we had, everyone had a bit of colonialism.

• 37:02Alastair Campbell?

  He doesn't acknowledge the scale.

• 37:04Rory Stewart?

  But then he goes on to say, like other countries, like the French, like the British, we had an empire. It's interesting how sensitive these issues remain in almost every country in Europe.

• 37:12Alastair Campbell?

  What did you think about what he said about European defence? You know, when he made that point that Europe, between us, we spend as much as China.

• 37:23Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 37:24Alastair Campbell?

  On defence because we're duplicating, because we don't actually come together. Did that make you think differently about defence?

• 37:30Rory Stewart?

  I think it's a question of whether you believe that you can move to a much more integrated federal Europe. I mean, Geva Hofstadt is, I mean, one of the reasons he's fascinating to listen to is somebody who clearly believes in more and faster European integration. And one of his examples of that is if they had a single European army rather than having a Spanish army, an Italian army, a French army, it would be much more theoretically efficient. It's also fascinating, we didn't get on to this, but you know, is he somebody who in a way is part of the reason for Euroscepticism? That he's pushed too hard, too fast, well beyond where most European voters want to be. I mean, he really believes in a vision which isn't very fashionable anymore.

• 38:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Anyway, good lesson. Um, and we've got some good leadings. Can we call them leadings?

• 38:17Rory Stewart?

  Leadings, yes.

• 38:17Alastair Campbell?

  Leadings, good leadings, coming up. Now, we, we keep going on about how many elections there are, and we've just had one in Bangladesh, where I think we could have predicted the, the result and the scale of the victory, because the opposition were boycotting it.

• 38:32Rory Stewart?

  Yes, although it's very, very, very sad, because if we'd been having this conversation fifteen years ago, we wouldn't have felt that we could predict it. I've just been reading a very earnest academic book on Bangladeshi elections, which was published a few years ago, and in it, they believe that there was a set style of Bangladeshi politics, and the set style was supposed to be, one party gets in, does one term, the other party basically riots, boycotts, refuses to participate, and then a military or independent supervised election takes place, and the next party gets in. And this happened in succession between the BMP and the Awami League and BMP, Awami League. And the assumption in this book was

• 39:16Rory Stewart?

  it was all going to swing back again. And suddenly, suddenly Bangladeshi politics changed. And there was real hopes that in two thousand and eight, it would swing back again. Then they hoped that this was going to happen again in the next elections. Then they hoped it was going to happen again in two thousand and nineteen. But as you say, by the time you get to two thousand and twenty four, nobody's hoping it's swinging back. It's become a full one-party state. And it's a one-party state which involves total penetration of the judiciary, particularly at the lower levels, the use of judges to literally bring literally millions of cases against the opposition party. The total corruption and nepotism of local government, all of which is dominated by

• 40:01Rory Stewart?

  the Awami League, her refusal to address a proper independent commission on corruption, which again, people were very enthusiastic about even as recently as sort of two thousand and twelve. And she also abolished the great guarantee of Bangladeshi democracy, which was this independent commission that used to come in for ninety days, which was there to try to ensure.

• 40:22Alastair Campbell?

  Like a sort of caretaker, overseeing the election. When you think about, when we talk about the kind of more autocratic leaders in the world. My Fiona's always sort of thinking, why are they all men? You never see women behaving like this. And actually Bangladesh politics is a story of two women, Sheikh Hasina, who's this is her fourth successive win, so fifth in total. She's been effectively the leader of the Awami League, her party, since the early 1980s. She's now late 70s. And then the other woman, Kalida Zia, her son, I think is still based in London, effectively running their operations out of here because he's worried if he goes back, etc. He just joins

• 41:03Alastair Campbell?

  the many thousands who've been sort of taken out of the game. So you've got these two incredibly powerful women, used to be partners, not partners, but they fought for the same constitutional

• 41:13Rory Stewart?

  changes. Against the military government.

• 41:14Alastair Campbell?

  Against the military. And it's just going backwards and forwards, but now it's not going backwards.

• 41:20Rory Stewart?

  It's not going backwards and forwards anymore.

• 41:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:22Rory Stewart?

  Maybe a quick explainer on Bangladesh, because it's not one that's something that's covered much, but it is one of the most populous countries in the world, 170 million people.

• 41:33Alastair Campbell?

  It's the eighth most populous country in the world.

• 41:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, huge, absolutely huge. And its economy growing fast, it's becoming increasingly important economic power, but we barely hear about it. So what is Bangladesh? Bangladesh is, I guess, the other end of the Indian subcontinent from Afghanistan. It's the other extreme. Afghanistan, dry, mountainous. Bangladesh, low-lying, very, very wet. And essentially, in terms of geography, the great rivers from the Himalayas, the Brahmaputra, the Ganges. And when we say great rivers, you know, these are rivers which are nine kilometres, even 18 kilometres wide. I mean, they're almost like seas flowing down. And a combination of those rivers, the rain and the sea, makes this extraordinary fertile land, but also

• 42:19Rory Stewart?

  a land, of course, that when it's hit by cyclones, early 90s, 140,000 people killed. And it began its modern iteration after the British left as part of this new state called Pakistan. So Pakistan was actually two completely geographically separated entities with over a thousand kilometres between them. Pakistan, obviously on the west side of India, Bangladesh, on the east side, two Muslim countries within one country. And continued to be part of Pakistan until the early 1970s. At which point, the current leader, Sheikh Hasina's father, led a movement initially for autonomy and eventually for independence, which involved

• 43:03Rory Stewart?

  the most unbelievably brutal response by the Pakistan military. How many people were killed in it, we still don't know. Bangladesh believes three million, independent academics believe 1.7, 1.9 million people. I mean, it's just beyond imagining. And the Pakistan military were initially very successful. By May of that year, they had basically taken control of the country. There was insurgency happening, but they had crushed brutally this rebellion in Bangladesh. At which point, the end of the year, the Indian army invaded. And again, you know, in reminiscent of the Six Day War, within a few weeks, Indian army swept across Bangladesh.

• 43:44Rory Stewart?

  The Pakistan military surrendered, withdrew, and Bangladesh became an independent country, but became an independent country, having lost 40% of its GDP, with millions killed, tens of millions traumatised, raped, huge displacements of populations, Hindu populations moving out, people connected to the old Pakistan, West Pakistan, moving out, and then the attempt to create a new state. And then, moving very quickly forward, Sheikh Hasina's father initially came in as a Democrat, pretty socialist Democrat, but he was then set up a one-party state, basically, and was assassinated. Then there were these military coups, which eventually ended up with Khalidah Zia's husband.

• 44:28Rory Stewart?

  Taking over, he was a general and he began to make some moves towards democracy, but he too was then assassinated, at which point a military government took over. And as you say, the the two women representing these two parties, BNP and Awami League, began moving against the military government. And the stories of the nineteen nineties was very, very optimistic because then suddenly we had not just democracy, but the real test that Samuel Huntington, the US political scientist, used to set for democracy. Can you have two peaceful transfers of power? And sure enough, they did.

• 45:00Alastair Campbell?

  And now they don't.

• 45:01Rory Stewart?

  BNP came in, then Awami League came in, then BNP came in, then Awami League came in. And everything looked like you had a democratic system emerging and now it's all gone wrong.

• 45:11Alastair Campbell?

  And the thing about about Sheikh Asina as well, so her dad was assassinated and most of the family were assassinated. And the only reason that she wasn't, and I think her sister wasn't, her sister, who is the mother of one of our local MPs, Tulip Siddique, is because they were in, they happened to be in Germany at the time. So the chances are, if she'd been at home, we wouldn't even be talking about her and we probably wouldn't have much to say about her. So she lives, survives that experience. I think she took refuge in the, in Germany for a while. She's also been in and out of prison. She was done for extortion at one point. Now, whether these are political or not, who knows? She was, she was, there was a warrant for murder at one point.

• 45:55Alastair Campbell?

  And yet, when you, if you, if people, we should put some pictures of her in the newsletter. Because if you, if you just bumped into her, you'd probably think retired doctor, retired head teacher.

• 46:09Rory Stewart?

  Like you, I, I, like you, I, I met her. So as a minister, I went to Bangladesh. She very kindly received me in the, I guess, the sort of equivalent of a presidential palace. And she was, as you say, very, very courteous, middle aged lady. She talked a lot about Tulip Siddique, her niece, who's a British MP, and about her niece's children. And as you say, she seemed very, very amiable and the polite phrase then, so this is, I guess is, is seven, eight years ago, was Closing space for civil society, which was the way that American Britain were beginning to describe what she was doing to undermine the judiciary, shut down NGOs.

• 46:46Rory Stewart?

  But there was still a real hope there that the US, the European Union and the donors, because Bangladesh receives a huge amount of international development money, would be able to put enough pressure on her to clean up her act and hold fair elections. And of course, it's turned out that she has completely ignored this pressure. As soon as she won this election, she was immediately congratulated by China, Russia and India and the US and others.

• 47:10Alastair Campbell?

  China, who, by the way, you mentioned the Ganges, they spent, I think, almost three billion building a bridge with their help. We're back to the whole thing about the, we're going to talk about Saudi and China, but the extent to which China uses this economic clout in these poorer countries means that they probably weren't more worried about their reaction than the Americans, because even Joe Biden had been talking about putting pressure on to make this a free and fair election.

• 47:34Rory Stewart?

  I mean, we don't think much about Bangladesh, but as you say, it's one of the largest countries in the world that's going to become economically more important. And it's probably, just before we move off it, I guess, one way to think about it is the big symbol of the failure of the promise of that liberal world order and democracy, because in the nineties, it really looked as though it was a kind of poster child of a country emerging from military dictatorship, swapping between different parties. Incredible development success story. I mean, it was known in the seventies famously as the development basket case. One of the poorest countries in the world looked like it was going nowhere. And actually, its economy has performed fantastically well. Its garment industry really took off. And sadly, this has all coincided with more and more autocracy.

• 48:20Alastair Campbell?

  She is now the world's longest-serving female head of government and the longest-serving prime minister in the history of Bangladesh. Maybe this should give Joe Biden hope. She'll be, she'll be serving into her eighties on the basis of, of this one. Now, Rory, so we've mentioned briefly Bhutan, we've mentioned now Bangladesh. If I gave you the clue of BBC, where is there another election? In this election year taking place as we speak.

• 48:48Rory Stewart?

  Gosh.

• 48:49Alastair Campbell?

  Comoros.

• 48:50Rory Stewart?

  Comoros, go on, tell us about Comoros.

• 48:52Alastair Campbell?

  The reason why it's interesting.

• 48:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, what is Comoros for a start?

• 48:55Alastair Campbell?

  Comoros is a sort of archipelago of islands and historically they've had these three islands.

• 49:01Rory Stewart?

  Where is this archipelago?

• 49:03Alastair Campbell?

  This archipelago, oh God, you're really testing my knowledge now. It's an archipelago in the Indian, Indian Ocean somewhere. So there is three islands and historically they've sort of said, right, first that island gets the president, then that one, then that one. Okay. And that seems to work quite well. And then along comes our old friend, the change of constitution by Azali Asumani, who is standing for reelection. This was on the 14th, this presidential election, and there'll be a second round in February 25th. But guess what's happening? Opposition essentially saying it's a done deal and there's no point.

• 49:38Rory Stewart?

  And they're boycotting.

• 49:39Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know if they're officially boycotting yet, but they're basically saying that this has been sorted out.

• 49:42Rory Stewart?

  Bangladesh should be one of the signs of that is that although the government claims there was a turnout of 40%, the same senior government figures had said actually the turnout had been something like 23 or 27%.

• 49:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So the electoral commission is completely controlled and they can inflate it. So there we are. And Azali, the reason why he's quite an important figure, Azali Asumani, he's also the current president of the African Union. So he's clearly a big.

• 50:05Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 50:06Alastair Campbell?

  A big dude.

• 50:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, very quickly, I, I wanted to just touch on something we haven't talked about much, which is connections between Middle East and China. So as the world changes, and we've, we've talked a lot about the fact that the G7, which used to be 70% of the world economy is now roughly in purchasing power parity terms, the same size as the BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China. The Middle East becomes a really important swing area. And I think there are two things going on about China, Middle East. One of them is more and more Chinese investment going in. So Chinese investment into oil production, Chinese investment to Sudan, Chinese investment to Somalia.

• 50:48Rory Stewart?

  A lot of Chinese investment connected to its increasingly close ties to Iran, and particular states connected to Iran, which is Iraq and Lebanon. So Iraq, very populous country, but my goodness, it's got a lot of oil. And the Chinese are now going in, and I think one of the big shell contracts has come to an end. And instead of shell renewing, China has gone in and taken a big oil field just forty miles from Basra. But the other side of the Chinese story isn't just them going into more fragile countries and scooping up natural resources. It's them trying to create links with the Gulf, particularly UAE and Saudi. So we talked on the podcast about how China astonished

• 51:28Rory Stewart?

  the world by brokering a diplomatic relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia without the US being aware of it. There's been a lot of increasing moves by UAE to show that it's not just a US satellite. So Mohammed bin Zayed, MBZ, who's the leader of UAE, has done two visits to Russia last year, but he hasn't visited the United States for five years now. You've seen China being given a real red carpet treatment in Saudi.

• 52:01Alastair Campbell?

  Xi was there just before Christmas.

• 52:02Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. And a big, big contrast to the way that President Biden was received. President Biden was greeted by quite a junior person at the airport. Now, what's going on here? I think the Saudis and the Emiratis would probably say it's not about turning away from the US, but it's about hedging and balancing. Last thing, maybe, before I hand back to you, the US is now trying to fight back. So there's an Emirati company called G42, which is their big AI company, which is, you know, one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world, which is trying to get huge contracts in Europe. And the US basically has spent a year putting huge pressure on them to break their links with China and with the Chinese company Huawei, which they've been successful in doing. UAE

• 52:46Rory Stewart?

  then did joint air operations, the Chinese Air Force. It looked like the Chinese Navy was building a base in UAE, which the Emiratis denied. Again, the Americans intervened very hard, and it looks like any of the satellite imagery of the construction of this base has stopped. So the US still seems to be able to have some kind of leverage by being able to control the links.

• 53:09Alastair Campbell?

  Did you see, so in the FT at the weekend, that the head of the Sovereign Wealth Fund in Saudi Open this Hong Kong stock market, on a visit there, before then going off to China. So this is working both ways, they're both looking to each other economically and then that is having the political implications as well. But I think at the moment, if you look at every single foreign policy situation that we've talked about in recent weeks, the pressure or the expectation that the Americans can somehow step in and do something. And we talked last, was it last week, about the Red Sea and the Houthis and these attacks. China has not said a word, so far as I've worked.

• 53:51Rory Stewart?

  It appears to be saying that it's okay, from the Chinese point of view, if the Houthis attack US military vessels in the Red Sea.

• 53:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, by saying nothing.

• 54:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 54:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Whilst at the same time, their shipping continued to go through there presumably.

• 54:06Rory Stewart?

  And I guess if you look at the geography of it, this is partly because China's direct routes into the Middle East are not Red Sea Israel, but are coming instead through the Straits of Hormuz to Iran.

• 54:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Rory Stewart?

  Or hitting the edge of Oman. There's a huge Chinese investment going into a port called Dukem in Oman, which is a big strategic move because it would allow China to avoid having to move ships either through the Red Sea Suez Canal or up the Straits of Hormuz and instead be able to get goods directly into the Middle East from Oman. And it's interesting, in a world where we talk a lot about tech, how much the world still depends on very old fashioned things, container ships, movement of oil and gas, and how things which would have been familiar really in the 19th century, you know, where are your ports, where do you get your fuel in, continue to be central to the way China thinks about the world.

• 54:59Alastair Campbell?

  Now, maybe to close, if you were to think about buying a new car. Would you think about buying a Chinese car?

• 55:08Rory Stewart?

  In order to buy an electric car?

• 55:10Alastair Campbell?

  So what's your straight, if you had a choice, right, I can have an American car or a European car or a Chinese car, what would you buy?

• 55:16Rory Stewart?

  I guess I'd normally go European, American, but what are you going to tell me it's much cheaper to get a Chinese car?

• 55:23Alastair Campbell?

  I'm going to tell you that very, very soon it will become much cheaper, even if the Americans put on the sort of tariffs that they might, it is going to become much cheaper to buy a Chinese car. So are you now going to buy a Chinese car?

• 55:36Rory Stewart?

  I mean, boy, are they ramping up production, aren't they? And of course, this is something where China is in a very interesting position because they're dominating a lot of the industries around climate change, electric vehicles, solar, wind turbines.

• 55:51Alastair Campbell?

  They're also dominating these countries where the minerals are produced for the batteries that they need.

• 55:54Rory Stewart?

  In other words, they're thinking fifteen years, fifteen years into the future and getting this.

• 55:58Alastair Campbell?

  And why are they able to think fifteen years into the future, Ray?

• 56:01Rory Stewart?

  Why?

• 56:02Alastair Campbell?

  Well, does it help that they're not really a democracy?

• 56:04Rory Stewart?

  That probably helps. It's also.

• 56:06Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not arguing against democracy, by the way. I'm not arguing, I'm simply saying that is the advantage they exploit.

• 56:10Rory Stewart?

  In two ways, and I think the other thing is that the Americans have been putting pressure on mining companies to go back, you know, American, European mining companies, Freeport, Rio Tinto, to go back into places like Democratic Republic of Congo, where China's now dominating a lot of this stuff. But of course, they're very reluctant to do so because they will find shareholders and activists saying, what on earth are you doing operating in this place where there's human rights abuses, there's corruption, there's massive environmental problems. So in a sense, the Chinese companies are able to benefit from the fact that they're not held to the same standards, and that's one of the reasons they're able to dominate mining in these fragile areas.

• 56:47Alastair Campbell?

  So average price of a new car in America this year, forty eight thousand dollars. Current tariff on the Chinese cars currently in production will put it up probably to about twenty five, twenty six thousand.

• 57:00Rory Stewart?

  Even with the tariffs?

• 57:01Alastair Campbell?

  Even with the tariffs. So I am suggesting that we should watch out for these two trade names, BYD and NIO.

• 57:08Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, on that, we should end. Thank you.

• 57:12Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye bye.

• 57:12Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 57:19Speaker 04

  There we are, getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with 350 passengers onboard.

• 57:30Speaker 05

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 57:37Speaker 06

  We assess, Prime Minister... ...with high confidence it was Russian.

• 57:43Speaker 07

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 57:45Speaker 08

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 57:48Speaker 05

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself: You want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister! You've done... ...nothing!

• 58:02Speaker 09

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 58:04Speaker 05

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. And disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 58:13Speaker 07

  A FRAGO that says to... ...kill the President of Russia.

• 58:17Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 58:19Speaker 07

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