35. Al-Qaeda, Pelosi in Taiwan, and working for Truss

Join Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart as they discuss al-Qaeda, Kosovo, Kenya, Tunisia, the 'age of impunity', Nancy Pelosi's Taiwan visit, working for Truss and Sunak, terrorism, and resignation honours. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Show notes: The Holocaust: A New History - Laurence Rees Boris Johnson is planning to fill the Lords with his cronies and legitimise bribery - Gordon Brown (The Guardian) Which prime minister is being described here? - Robert Saunders (Twitter) Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  A BetterHelp ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day, every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com/rustpolitics.

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:48Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:50Rory Stewart?

  And I think you wanted to start us today, which is refreshing. Get us off the leadership a bit. Talk a little bit about some international stuff. What's been on your mind?

• 1:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'll tell you, we'll obviously will come to the whole Truss-Sunak situation, especially after Truss's extraordinary insult of Nicola Sturgeon last night, which I thought was remarkable. But there are three things going on in the world which I am just gobsmacked by how little attention there is in the UK media. The first is what's going on in Kosovo. Now, there was a time in my life, working with Tony Blair, when Kosovo was the single most important thing that we were involved in when we were taking on Milosevic. And you have a situation right now where in northern Kosovo, Serbs who are blockading, they've set up roadblocks to stop traffic coming in and out and to disrupt trade.

• 2:42Alastair Campbell?

  And this is all because the Kosovan government wants them to change their number plates and also their identification papers, because there are about 50,000 Kosovan Serbs who refuse to recognise that they are actually Kosovans. And you've now got a situation where NATO, the Kosovo force of NATO, is saying that they have a watching brief and they're prepared to intervene if instability continues. And the government has had to postpone the measure for a month. But I guess the point I'm making, we have in this leadership election, the Foreign Secretary, and yet we have a Foreign Secretary who strikes me, this goes back to a point you've made before, just seems to have no interest in foreign policy whatsoever.

• 3:26Alastair Campbell?

  The second situation is Kenya, an election in Kenya in a few days' time. And I guarantee that if there is violence after the election, which there often is, that will get coverage. But in terms of what's actually happening, you've got Kenyatta on the way out, you've got him actually turning against his own deputy within the race. But again, I just made the point that there's no next to no coverage of that at all. And then the third one I wanted to mention was this referendum in Tunisia. Tunisia, which is one of the countries that frankly looked like it was coming out of the so-called Arab Spring better than most, where the referendum has just been held, fewer than a third of the population voted, and it is giving the president frankly unchecked

• 4:11Alastair Campbell?

  powers. So I just think it sort of underlines the way that as a country and as a media and political culture, we're becoming ever, ever more inward looking.

• 4:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it is. It's very strange, isn't it? And and anyone who wants to follow these things, I'm afraid the best way to do it is generally the New York Times. So anybody wants to do Tunisia, there's three or four great articles reminding people of how the Arab Spring panned out. Tunisia was, of course, the great start of the Arab Spring that everything came out of. It was the only democratic success, it seemed, of the Arab Spring. Because you remember, in Egypt, return to autocratic rule. Syria had the civil war where the autocrat has confirmed himself and Libya and Yemen basically fell to pieces. So Tunisia was the great hope and it explains also very well just how bad the economy became

• 5:04Rory Stewart?

  and why Tunisians began to feel totally disenchanted. Ended up with nearly a third of young people unemployed, ended up with tens of thousands Tunisians crossing on boats across the Mediterranean. Tunisia was actually one of the most prosperous countries in the Middle East before this happened.

• 5:19Alastair Campbell?

  Why do you think it is that in those circumstances where people are really worried about their living standards, really worried about their prospects, that a president comes along, Said comes along and he basically says what we need is more power for the politicians that you up to now have been blaming. And of course, only a third, 30%, I think it's 30.5% voted. So you can assume that those 70% basically have given up. They've given up on thinking that politics can do it for them.

• 5:48Rory Stewart?

  I guess that the point is that all these democracies are struggling with a tension between an idea which is really embedded, I suppose, in a kind of Chinese model, for some people even a model from the Gulf states, which is autocratic states driving through economic growth. And it's very simplified, but that's definitely a vision that lots of people in the Middle East feel and share. In fact, there was some, we talked about this, I think, on the on the podcast a couple of months ago, that the popularity of China and Russia throughout the Middle East and Tunisia and all these other countries is extraordinary, much higher than the popularity of places like the United States. And they feel that democracy somehow is inefficient and leads to disorder and confusion.

• 6:34Rory Stewart?

  So it's, I suppose it's a kind of grand terms, it's a fight, isn't it, between efficiency on the one hand and liberty on the other. And Tunisia has been the real centre of a free press and it's been very exhilarating for young people, but I think very destabilising for older people. It's had this amazing thing called Eyewitness, which has been run by young activists, which has exposed corruption, which got a presidential candidate in jail. And all of that stuff that obviously is exciting is also, I think, for people when they're in an economic problem and they're unaccustomed to these kinds of things. They begin to blame for lack of progress. But what's your instinct on this?

• 7:11Alastair Campbell?

  I agree with that. I think, I think it's that they, the Arab Spring kind of gave them a lot of hope. It hasn't really materialised. The politicians, I think, were very, very worried by what the forces that it unleashed. And I think what this referendum impart is about is putting those forces back in a box. So I'm afraid, I think, I think if, if my friend Moise Naim is to update his Revenge of Power book, I suspect this Tunisian referendum will be, will be in there.

• 7:40Rory Stewart?

  So we, we talked a little bit about this funny period, 2014 to 16, when a lot of the populism gets going. So that's Bolsonaro, that's Modi in India, that's obviously Donald Trump, that's the Brexit referendum, that's populist government Poland, Orban maybe just a little bit earlier. But that 2014-16 period is also, of course, a time when a very, very strident new authoritarianism starts in the Middle East. So 2014 is when, for the first time, the UAE, United Arab Emirates, that's Dubai, Abu Dhabi, use American weapons to bomb Tripoli in Libya, which they're not permitted to do. These are weapons that were sold to them by the United States and the condition, they didn't use them like that. And they just completely ignored the United States and did it. And that's also

• 8:25Rory Stewart?

  the period where Iran and Russia intervenes in Syria. It's the period where Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched themselves into Yemen. All of this is actually the period which is about America retreating from the world, where that sort of global order is going. So there's something very interesting happening in a very compressed period, which I don't quite understand, but there seems to be some relationship between the rise of populism, the rise of authoritarianism, and the sort of vanishing of American authority.

• 8:50Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's right. And I think the other thing that's happened, David Miliband talks a lot about this concept of the age of impunity. It's the fact that part of those countries, were they to do something, say on the par with what the Saudis have been doing in Yemen, that they would be thinking, oh, what will Uncle Sam be thinking and saying about this? And I think they sort of feel, well, maybe not very much, because they feel that American power, particularly under Trump, was a deliberate strategic decision to withdraw from the world. And now perhaps under Biden, that there is a weakness there. Maybe that's a good point to bring in. By the way, I should say, we're doing a Q and A later in the week, but I should say that those three subjects that I mentioned, Kenya, Kosovo and Tunisia,

• 9:33Alastair Campbell?

  were all raised by our listeners, saying, could you please talk about these? Because we haven't heard anything on our media. And I think the other story, which actually has had quite a lot of play, but I think it's because it involves America and because it involves personalities. But something we've talked about a lot, Taiwan. What do you make of this Nancy Pelosi trip? I think she's arriving, we're recording on the day, I think she starts her tour of Asia, and it's this sort of will she, won't she go to Taiwan? Biden obviously doesn't want to. The Chinese are launching these military exercises to show that they're not at all happy. But what do you make of this one?

• 10:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's definitely a big, big news, because it's the first time that a senior American of that level has been there, I think, in nearly 20 years. And it's at a time when, as we've said a lot, Xi Jinping has been clear that he sees part of his legacy being bringing Taiwan back into China, reunifying in his mind, the old Chinese state. And it's at a time when we are very, very uncertain about what can be done to militarily protect Taiwan if China tried to invade. So one would need to understand how Pelosi thinks this is going to help deter rather than provoke China. Do you have an instinct on why she thinks it's a good, smart thing to do?

• 10:50Alastair Campbell?

  No, I don't. And the other thing is, I mean, I think normally, although she's obviously, she's a very powerful figure within the American Constitution, she's a very, very, very experienced Politician, she has always been pretty tough on China. I think that's fair to say. I think it's perfectly legitimate of her to go to Asia, but it strikes me as really odd that she wouldn't want to do it in conjunction with whatever Biden's foreign policy goals at the time were. And there seems to be a direct conflict going on.

• 11:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and it's a bit awkward because as we approach the midterms, one of the things that's incredibly important for Biden is to show that he's still strong on international security and defence. So I thought initially when I heard this that Pelosi would be doing it to signal that the Democrats were as tough as the Republicans on standing up to China. But as you say, if she's separated herself off from Biden and he's not endorsing it, it's not going to work like that. It's not going to help them in the midterms.

• 11:46Alastair Campbell?

  No, in fact, it weakens him because you get the feeling, I mean, they had this very long conversation by phone, Chinese and American leaders, and Biden was, you know, doing his usual kind of talking point stuff on Taiwan. Xi Jinping was doing his usual not saying very much, but making clear they really weren't happy about Pelosi going there and warning of severe consequences. And they're even, even today, they're starting all these sort of very high profile, quite dramatic exercises that are going on. So it does make it look like Biden is rather at the mercy of events. I mean, I think for her to turn up and start this tour without us even knowing for sure whether she's going

• 12:30Alastair Campbell?

  to go there or not, on the day when, and I know you wanted to talk about this, when Bin Laden's effective successor has been taken out.

• 12:40Rory Stewart?

  Which is really big news. And I don't think people have maybe, I mean, people are struggling to make sense of it. In Shirpo, which is an area of Kabul that I know, it's kind of fancy district of Kabul with a lot of what we used to call narco villas. So if you go to that part of Kabul in Afghanistan, you see these kind of glittering huge buildings covered in glossy pink bathroom tiles where all the warlords used to hang out. It's turned out that Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is the leader of al Qaeda, was some of Bin Laden's deputy, has apparently been hanging out there for a few months, sort of sunning himself while the CIA have been collecting information. And they finally killed him in a drone strike.

• 13:22Rory Stewart?

  And it's really disturbing. I mean, the way the Americans are presenting it depends on which side of the aisle you come from. If you are a Biden defender, you say, well, it shows that it didn't matter that we withdraw from Afghanistan because we're still able to do these over horizon strikes and take out terrorists. Obviously, if you're from the other side, you say, this is extraordinary. You know, this guy, this is the real sign that actually nothing was achieved at all, that it's not just the Taliban has taken over again. The Taliban has taken over again and has invited back in literally the head of al Qaeda, a guy with a $25 million price on his head, and was having him gently sunning himself on the front porch in a fancy villa in central Kabul.

• 14:04Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Roy, let me just push back on this. Do we know that he was gently sunning himself? Or is this, are we falling a little victim here to, might there be a little bit of sort of briefing going on for the Americans to make this guy look somewhat less of a freedom fighter than he might want to?

• 14:19Rory Stewart?

  The man was, certainly man was pretty, pretty elderly. I don't know whether you've seen any of the imagery of him recently. I mean, he's beginning to get quite old. I don't think he's stripping off to enjoy the sun. No, I think that's absolutely true. I don't think he's going for the full Putin. One thing is, is that his life has been very much, or was very defined by drone strikes. His wife and two of his children were killed by an American drone strike 20 years ago now. And that's one of the things that, that obviously deepened desperately the hostility. It's amazing that he's lived so long. I mean, he's been, it's extraordinary that for 20 years, he has been with Osama bin Laden, the number one target of the CIA with untold sums of money chasing him, untold numbers of informants, signals, intelligence. The fact it took them 20 years to get him is

• 15:03Rory Stewart?

  not something that anyone would have predicted in 2001.

• 15:06Alastair Campbell?

  And listen, based on your experience, having lived and worked there, within an organisation as, as kind of opaque as, as al Qaeda, what, what happens next in terms of leadership? Do we know?

• 15:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, there will be a new leader emerging. I think they're in a, they're, I mean, the cliche on al Qaeda is that they are in a slightly more difficult state now. He certainly wasn't as charismatic as bin Laden, didn't have that kind of personality. They've been challenged by the rise of the Islamic State. So in Afghanistan, for example. Al Qaeda is seen as less threatening than a new Islamic State franchise, which is actually attacking the Taliban. And that's been true even in northwest Syria, where some of the Al Qaeda franchises have been seen as less radical than the Islamic State franchises. There was a kind of big, big break off between the two. So are they going to be able to reshape? And are they going to get into a bidding war with a new leader who's going to try to?

• 16:03Rory Stewart?

  I mean, they do operate sometimes a bit like Silicon Valley startups, where they try to get publicity, try to get momentum by horrifying attacks and bombs in order to win back fanatical young followers from other movements. So I think that there is an issue there. And I definitely think, this is an obvious point, but killing an elderly Egyptian is not going to solve the deeper problem of terrorism. And let me just start one second, two on this, because I don't think we've done, I don't think the media sort of talks enough about the oddity of this man and where he comes from. We often talk about terrorists as though terrorism is driven by poverty and unemployment and exclusion. Now, obviously, that wasn't true with Bin Laden, who came from this very wealthy family.

• 16:47Rory Stewart?

  But Zawahiri comes from a, sorry, Zawahiri, my apologies, I'm completely mispronouncing his name, Zawahiri comes from a much more fancy intellectual family in Egypt. He was a surgeon, wasn't he? He was a surgeon. His grandfather on one side was the head of Cairo University and set up the first university in Saudi Arabia. His other great grandfather was the Sheikh Al Azhar, who was essentially the head of the entire Islamic faith, almost around the world, the most senior Islamic cleric in the world. All his relatives were, you know, his sisters, the professor of oncology at one of the best universities in the Middle East. All his relatives are kind of doctors, lawyers, literary scholars, poets.

• 17:29Rory Stewart?

  So it's a really, I mean, I don't know quite, it's difficult to come up with an analogy really in Britain, but it would be like a member of the kind of Darwin family or something suddenly, well, the Darwin family in the 19th century, I'm not sure what they're up to now, but some, one of these sort of grand intellectual university families generating this person. And he spoke all these languages fluently. And I think he started his activism in Egypt, he had a Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, got in trouble first after the assassination of Sadrat, who was the Egyptian leader, but it will have really torn the Egyptian elite apart, a lot of these things, because they're tight, small societies, they all know each other, even more, you would say, than your complaints about Eton.

• 18:11Alastair Campbell?

  Oh Rory, you're obsessed about it, you're obsessed, you go about it every week. I think, no, but isn't the point, though, is that, I was thinking, when you were talking, I was thinking about with David Trimble having lefters in his funeral this week, I was thinking, if you think about the Irish context, there's always an intellectual underpinning to terrorist movements. You know, I was always struck when we were, for example, talking face to face with Gerry Adams, and to a lesser extent with Martin McGuinness, because I always felt with Martin McGuinness that, you know, you knew you were dealing with somebody who was prepared and willing to do some very, very, very, very tough things, and of course, so was Adams as well, but my point is that Adams, you had the sense of somebody who was trying to

• 18:54Alastair Campbell?

  explain a historical context, trying to explain an intellectual context, and I think you saw that on the unionist paramilitary side as well, you had people who, you know, I remember talking to David Irvine, another one sadly no longer with us, on the unionist very, very paramilitary links, and there was, you know, they were, there was an understanding of the history and the power of history and the power that you need. I think we think of, because of the way we portray terrorists as they're uniquely bad people, I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that there is usually a powerful intellectual underpinning to what they're trying to do.

• 19:31Rory Stewart?

  And we often get into this problem when we think about Islamist terrorism, so it's very tempting for people to say, these guys are ignorant, because obviously their version of Islam is a very extreme, very unpleasant version of it. Mainstream people will often say, these guys are just ignorant. Now, they're not actually ignorant in a straightforward sense, many of them, not all of them, I mean, there was a guy called Zakawi, a Jordanian, who wasn't like this, but many of them can recite the entire Quran from one end to the other, can engage you in theological discussions till your eyes are popping out. Now, they may not, you know, many other theologians may disagree with their view, but it's not that these people don't have high IQs and aren't able to manipulate this stuff quite quickly.

• 20:15Alastair Campbell?

  You know, the other word that gets thrown at them the whole time, which I've never fully understood is this idea that they're cowards. I actually think some of these, you know, to do what these guys have done, and I'm not defending it, but to do it requires a huge amount of physical courage.

• 20:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Alastair Campbell?

  And yet we want, so we want, my point is, we want to portray them in a certain way that suits our narrative. And the other thing, Jonathan Powell, who, you know, Tony Blair's chief of staff and who now does an extraordinary work, trying to kind of negotiate between different sides in very, very difficult peace processes and so forth. And he's always been of the view that ultimately, in any terrorist situation, there comes a point where you have to sit down with them. And therefore, if you're constantly just portraying them in a certain relentlessly negative way, it's not necessarily going to get you where you want to be.

• 21:02Rory Stewart?

  Very, very uncomfortable, isn't it? Because one of the reasons we do that is we don't want people to glamorize it. And of course, the terrorists themselves are always trying to glamorize it. One of the things that ISIS recruited on were videos, music videos, basically, making out this life as this incredibly sort of heroic Wild West life. So there'd be images of everybody riding around on their pickup trucks. And in a sense, they were almost making foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq feel like the sort of equivalent of, I felt, 19th century European colonial figures, sort of Lawrence of Arabia in reverse, as it were.

• 21:43Rory Stewart?

  You travel from Cardiff, or you travel from Denmark, or you travel from Yemen and you end up in Syria and Iraq. And suddenly you'll kind of have unlimited power, wealth, authority, nobody can tell you what to do. A lot of that would have been true for these colonial officers, certainly in the earlier periods before proper rule of law were introduced. And I, so that's one of the reasons I think that we are often pushing back and saying these guys are ignorant, they are cowardly, et cetera. I think the more important thing is to be able to be more thoughtful about explaining why they're evil. And I think that it's important to understand that evil people can, of course, be brave. That there wasn't anything cowardly about Adolf Hitler.

• 22:25Rory Stewart?

  And obviously, he was, got his Iron Cross during the First World War because he wasn't that frightened of people shooting at him. And although people say the fact that he killed himself in the bunker showed that he was a coward, that's one way of framing it, but it's more, I think, accurate to say that his whole worldview had collapsed around him. So we have to find a way of saying, these people are evil because of their complete lack of empathy, because of their cruelty, because of their, yeah, their total brutal inhumanity, but not suggest that that necessarily means that they aren't bright or they aren't brave.

• 22:59Alastair Campbell?

  I suspect that some of our listeners are beginning to think that we're sort of, for whatever reason, trying to avoid having to talk about Les Truss and Rishi Sunak, where maybe they're thinking that we should. I wonder whether, I'm not remotely comparing Boris Johnson with Osama bin Laden or any of his successors, but I wonder whether the process to find the next leader of al-Qaeda is more or less democratic than the one that we're choosing with 0.3% of the population to choose our next prime minister?

• 23:29Rory Stewart?

  I think their process is probably more like the old Tory process, which is where it used to be selected by the MPs.

• 23:36Alastair Campbell?

  With the bed in white suits.

• 23:38Rory Stewart?

  I think, yeah, it's a sort of smoke-filled-room senior leadership. Just a last thought, I've never, and, you know, we're on a very, very sensitive ground here, but I do think that this is important to understand when we're thinking about populism and we're thinking about people who are genuinely horrifying threats to the world, is to understand that they can also be very clever.

• 23:57Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, for sure.

• 23:58Rory Stewart?

  It was a huge tradition, talking about Hitler, to always say that he was banal and stupid and half-educated. But actually, when you see his speeches, you realise that he was incredibly articulate and could be surprisingly funny. I mean, it's an odd thing to say, but he succeeded by satirising the establishment. This is something very important to all populism, even people who aren't as evil as Hitler.

• 24:19Alastair Campbell?

  A few months ago, I read that book, Lawrence Ries, is it called The Holocaust? Anyway, it's one of the great books about the rise of Hitler and what followed. And the reason why I'm slightly obsessed with that period of history insofar as it relates to where we are now, is because of the steady normalisation of the incredibly abnormal things that Hitler was doing, and step by step getting away with them and transforming a culture.

• 24:47Rory Stewart?

  And the way in which he does it, so this is why I think it really relates to the danger of populism and indeed democracy that gets close to populism, which is that...

• 24:56Rory Stewart?

  He does it basically by pointing out real problems in society, things that are really wrong with the establishment. So his early speeches in those Munich Beer Halls are very, very witty, well-informed attacks on stiff-shirted, incompetent Weimar politicians. And of course, when he says these guys aren't managing the economy correctly, of course, they aren't. There's rampant inflation, everything's out of control. When he points to corruption, there is real corruption. When he says the Weimar Assembly is a kind of talking shop where nothing gets done, it's true. This is something that you sense actually in all these guys and their rise to power. Now, again, I'm very, very clear, obviously, that we're not comparing these contemporary politicians to Hitler in terms of

• 25:41Rory Stewart?

  the extremity of his evil and his vision. But just if we're talking about political technique, populists gain power because they're very good at pointing out what's wrong with the existing system.

• 25:52Alastair Campbell?

  And exploiting it.

• 25:53Rory Stewart?

  And exploiting it. And their supporters pay less attention to what their positive programme is. What they focus on is their very cunning

• 26:00Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 26:00Rory Stewart?

  negative attack.

• 26:02Alastair Campbell?

  Now, listen, just to depress the world even further, I saw an extraordinary quote from Antonia Gutierrez, the head of the UN this week, who was talking about North Korea and Iran. And he said, "We are one miscalculation, one misunderstanding away from the end of humanity through nuclear annihilation." So as if we haven't got enough to go on, I think we should take a very short break and then come back to talk about how Liz Truss is going to sort it all out for us.

• 26:28Rory Stewart?

  While we contemplate nuclear annihilation, yep.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana a hundred percent online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall and handsome? Not always. I was 6'10" once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven-day return policy at carvana.com.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 27:11Speaker 05

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 27:17Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death. That's what...

• 27:21Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 27:24Speaker 06

  I'm not the first then.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 27:30Speaker 06

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 27:32Speaker 07

  It's me, the.

• 27:33Speaker 06

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 27:36Speaker 07

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 27:37Speaker 06

  What about a third time?

• 27:39Speaker 07

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights, and rental cars.

• 27:45Speaker 06

  Seems like they decided.

• 27:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 27:52Speaker 06

  Time to be the tagline.

• 27:53Speaker 07

  Fine. No one deals more deals than.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  Priceline.

• 27:56Speaker 07

  Please stop.

• 27:57Speaker 06

  Priceline.

• 27:58Speaker 07

  Touche.

• 27:59Speaker 06

  Priceline.

• 28:00Speaker 07

  Priceline.

• 28:02Speaker 08

  This episode is brought to you by Tic Tac. Lace up and get your game on because the Tic Tac lineup just got a new teammate. Dr. Pepper Tic Tac. This new double threat puts two of your favorite flavors into one box of mints. And when two iconic flavors come together, the result can only be iconic.

• 28:20Speaker 08

  Score big. Try Dr. Pepper Tic Tac today.

• 28:31Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 28:35Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 28:36Alastair Campbell?

  And we did a good half hour or so, Rory, avoiding even mentioning the word Liz or Truss. I had a very interesting thought while I was in the shower this morning. This will be the first time in history.

• 28:47Rory Stewart?

  I don't think we want to visualize you in the shower. We don't, we don't need you in the shower.

• 28:50Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, Rory, you'd be amazed how many people want to visualize me in the shower. I get letters from them all the time.

• 28:55Rory Stewart?

  Please.

• 28:56Alastair Campbell?

  But, but the fact is, this will be the first time in our history, assuming Liz Truss carries on on this merry waltz towards Downey Street, that our monarch and our prime minister will have the same Christian name.

• 29:08Rory Stewart?

  Aha.

• 29:09Alastair Campbell?

  Am I wrong?

• 29:09Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, that's absolutely right. No, that's brilliant, isn't it? That's absolutely brilliant. Although some viewers are going to find some obscure prime minister whose name began with George, aren't they?

• 29:20Alastair Campbell?

  They might do, but then I think that, yeah, because there are quite a few prime ministers who have not, including Liz Truss, who have not used their, their first name. I can't remember what her first name is, but it's not Liz.

• 29:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Alastair Campbell?

  The same as Boris Alexander de Pfeffel, whatever he was called. I think, by the way, can we kick off before we get on to Liz Truss? This, am I right to be both alarmed and deeply offended by this attempt that Boris Johnson is making to, having not even served a full term, being hounded out of office in disgrace? Why on earth is he entitled to put anybody into the House of Lords, let alone 50 cronies?

• 29:55Rory Stewart?

  There's a very disturbing article written by your friend Gordon Brown.

• 29:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Rory Stewart?

  Where he has got hold of a letter written by.

• 30:03Alastair Campbell?

  Crosby.

• 30:04Rory Stewart?

  The Linton Crosby, which is this Australian, for those people who don't follow this stuff too closely, is Linton Crosby, as Alastair Campbell thinks, not so successful, but anyway, very, very famous Conservative associated group that ran.

• 30:20Alastair Campbell?

  He has been very successful. I just, I merely point out, our very short termist, myopic, attention stand of a gnat press, calls him a genius, but he was responsible for one of the worst campaigns in history, the 2005 election campaign, that's all I'm saying, which we won despite the Iraq war.

• 30:39Rory Stewart?

  So, so these guys who have done most of these big Tory campaigns, David Cameron's elections, Theresa May's elections, Boris Johnson's elections as London mayor, seem to have produced a letter suggesting not only that Boris Johnson stuffs the House of Lords with his cronies, but also that they make them sign a letter before they go in, promising always and only to vote with the government whip. And that really is mad. I mean, it's true, we've talked about this on the show, that three line whips are very strong, and we've talked on the show about the fact that MPs very rarely rebel against the whip, which is why this thing, they work for you, is a lot of people quote, where they say, look

• 31:21Rory Stewart?

  at your voting record, is very misleading, because when you say, you know, as people will, oh Rory Stewart voted to make people poorer, etc. What they're actually doing is they're saying Rory Stewart's a Conservative MP.

• 31:33Alastair Campbell?

  And for part of the time, a Conservative minister who would have had to resign if he hadn't voted with the whip.

• 31:37Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 31:38Alastair Campbell?

  I was leaping, I was leaping into your defence there Rory, in a very unusual.

• 31:41Rory Stewart?

  That's very, that's very, very kind of you. So, there is a point there, which is right at the heart of our system, which is definitely ministers have to vote with the government all the time. But you need the possibility of voting against. Ultimately, the only guarantee. To stop things going really badly wrong. The emergency brake is people voting against.

• 32:02Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, on the point about the packing of the Lords, I mean, the Lords, which is now, I think, the biggest assembly in the world, apart from the Chinese Assembly, Chinese People's Assembly. Gordon Brown pointed out in that Guardian article that neither he nor Tony Blair even bothered with resignation honours, they're such a ridiculous kind of thing. I mean, I'm not a fan of the honour system at all, as you know, but I just think, why is he entitled to put anybody in the House of Lords when he's just been hounded out of office because he's a liar and a charlatan?

• 32:32Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary, isn't it? But it's a power they have, isn't it? But I agree, on moral grounds, he ought not to be doing it. I hadn't, I wasn't, I didn't realise that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown didn't do resignation honours, but it's a really good thing they didn't because it's a particularly strange, irresponsible thing. The man who really did this in the most horrible way, I believe, was Lloyd George.

• 32:53Alastair Campbell?

  There was a lot of money involved in those, wasn't there? And then, of course, then there was Harold Wilson's famous lavender list. The lavender list, I think, was named the lavender list because that was the colour of the paper on which Marcia Faulkunder wrote down the ones who were to get the honours. But I don't think we can call it, why do we call it an honour system at the moment? Because it's been so dishonoured. I mean, every time I think about Lord Lebedev of Siberia and Hampton, and honestly, I'm going to give another, I'm going to give another plug to that London grad podcast. I really do urge people to listen to the whole thing. And I cannot understand why the rest of the media are not covering it. It's one of the most corrupt and corrupting things I've ever known any country, let alone just Britain.

• 33:31Rory Stewart?

  It's really weird, isn't it? And of course, the reason that I felt very strongly about the House of Lords is because of these cross benches. So there is, there are a group of people, you know, for example, the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees. There are some, you know, very distinguished ex senior civil servants, judges, academics.

• 33:54Alastair Campbell?

  You're back with your distinguished, you're back with your distinguished word.

• 33:58Rory Stewart?

  I'm also in trouble, you're very good at catching me on these words. I'm also in trouble because I've been referring to Rishi, which apparently is forbidden, although you're allowed to say Tony and Gordon all the time, but I'm apparently not allowed to say.

• 34:07Alastair Campbell?

  Tony and Gordon aren't standing to be Prime Minister at the moment, and Tony and Gordon are personal friends. I was talking to Tony yesterday. Not least about you, but anyway, we'll come on to that later.

• 34:16Rory Stewart?

  Here's, here's, so I think that at some point, people are not going to want these honours. And if it's to be refreshed, I would like the thing, I think one vision of it is to say that we don't necessarily need a second elected house with another bunch of politicians, with all the problems we've got in the lower house. We could in fact go the other direction and have a house much more like those crossbench peers, so not retired politicians, but try to select, as happens in some countries, really distinguished diverse senior people to provide, who are non-political, to provide scrutiny and check.

• 34:53Alastair Campbell?

  I just don't think there's such a thing within a political chamber as non-political. I think it's impossible. I think that's a pipe dream. I think we should get rid of the House of Lords in its entirety, turn it into a museum, leave some of the people in there as museum pieces, including the ones who are probably dead even as they sit there. And then we should have proper regional assemblies around the place and have a proper programme of devolution that acts as a sort of revising body.

• 35:19Rory Stewart?

  Can I, can I make a little call out to this amazing Robert Saunders, who's an academic who tweets under @RedHistorian? He's got this fantastic quote, which sounds just like Boris Johnson. He's, it's a journalist writing. "I've detected a strain of brutality in him, the qualities in him that would prevent me from ever collaborating with him. If I were an active politician, these qualities are his habit of leaving people in the search, the reckless instability of his policy. It's true that he goes full steam ahead, but it's all round the compass. His indifference to the truth, his love of plotting and wire pulling and manoeuvring the press, his use of human tools of more than doubtful cleanliness, his terrifying

• 36:00Rory Stewart?

  indiscretions and scarility, especially in the field of foreign affairs. As against these objections, I can understand the enthusiasm he has so often created is due to his dynamic temperament in a lazy sleepy world, to his jolly good fellowship and high spirits."

• 36:16Alastair Campbell?

  This guy should do his own podcast.

• 36:17Rory Stewart?

  It's David Lloyd George.

• 36:18Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, well done, well done, well done. That's good. Sorry, I thought you were talking about Johnson. Well, on the thing about people's character, which I think as we've seen with Johnson, it does in the end come out. And I think Liz Truss, I mean, I don't know Liz Truss at all well. But I'm seeing a very nasty side coming out in her. And I'm getting lots of feedback about nastiness as well. First of all, I thought what she said in the debate, in the, one of the Tory hustings, what she said about Nicola Sturgeon, whether you're an independent supporter or not, whether you like Nicola Sturgeon or not, to say that her strategy of Nicola Sturgeon would be to ignore her, and then for Liz Truss to call another politician an attention seeker, this woman who has put more attention into Instagram than foreign policy while Foreign

• 37:02Alastair Campbell?

  Secretary, is like Boris Johnson talking about somebody else's honesty. It's incredible. I alert people to a wonderful article by a woman who wrote to you and me last week, Rory, called Pauline Buchanan Black. And because I spend more time poring over these emails and tweets than you do, you just let me do the heavy lifting. I'm well aware of that and I'm fine. I'm a team player. So I don't have to think about you in the shower. Pauline Buchanan Black sent us a fascinating account, which is now written a longer version for the New European, excellent newspaper, about her encounter with Liz Truss, when Liz Truss was at DEFRA, where you were a junior minister. And Pauline Buchanan Black was in charge of something called the Tree Council.

• 37:47Alastair Campbell?

  And she said that when Owen Patterson and Caroline Spellman were Secretaries of State, because David Cameron had this huge tree planting initiative, they wanted to be briefed regularly by Pauline Buchanan Black on the progress of this, of this, this programme that, that she was in charge of. When Liz Truss took over, she said, she could not have been more different, more indifferent. And on the one occasion that they met, she kept trying to get in to see her, to brief her, Liz Truss was not interested. When it came for the millionth tree to be planted, Liz Truss was suddenly there with all the cameras. And Pauline Buchanan Black writes this extraordinary account of just how horrible and rude and narcissistic she was.

• 38:30Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that's coming through. And I'm also getting quite a few messages. And by the way, I encourage people to send more from people who have worked in departments where Liz Truss was Secretary of State, who say that actually she was really unpleasant to work for. Now, I don't know if you had that experience or not.

• 38:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, I tell you what I have heard is actually people feeling that working for Rishi Sunak was a pleasant experience. So I'm very struck by somebody I was just speaking to from the Treasury, who said that Rishi Sunak was a good boss, thoughtful, polite, courteous. I also want to make a shout out for Rishi Sunak. I watched that very painful. Did you watch the Andrew Neil interview with him on Friday?

• 39:14Alastair Campbell?

  I did. And we got, we got quite a few questions about people saying that Andrew, they thought Andrew Neil was just incredibly irritating and wouldn't let the guy finish a sentence.

• 39:22Rory Stewart?

  It was a bit weird, actually. And I thought Rishi Sunak did much better than any politician I can think of in that format. Because Andrew Neil really thought he was going to catch him out. And he said, you know, where does Britain rank amongst the top seven economies and this, that and the other, and started throwing questions about Japan and America. And it was very striking that this is something obviously Rishi Sunak is good at. He very calmly said, well, this is the situation in Japan, this is the GDP rate, but this is where their interest rates are, this is where their growth is, United States, this is why it doesn't apply there, because it's a reserve currency. And the impression was, I don't want to be rude to Andrew Neil, but the impression was he just knew much, much more about this stuff than Andrew Neil did. And the problem, of course,

• 40:07Rory Stewart?

  is that Rishi Sunak defended himself, I thought, well, but of course Liz Truss didn't go on that programme. So there was never a chance for the public to compare how she would have dealt with the same attack. But I thought it was unfortunate because actually, Shoshana, my wife and my mother were watching it with me, and both of them just walked out after 10 minutes. They just do not like seeing two men shouting at each other in that kind of way.

• 40:29Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's why our podcast remains at number one for the 7,913th week in a row, Rory, because we very rarely shout at each other. We've only actually shouted at each other once. And frankly, you know, privately, you admitted you, I was right and you were wrong.

• 40:43Rory Stewart?

  You've tried to get the argument going again. Right. I think before we get the argument going again, we better move towards our end. Can you do you want to do you want to give us just one minute on something which you will say, I am not interested in at all and know nothing about, but I wonder whether you had anything to say about, which is the football, women's football.

• 40:59Alastair Campbell?

  The football. There's several things I was interested about the football. The first is, do you know who Jan Arge Fjortoft is?

• 41:04Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 41:05Alastair Campbell?

  Jan Arge Fjortoft was a Norwegian footballer who played for many English clubs and he's a great guy. And I say that partly because I happen to know, because he tells me all the time that he loves my diaries. But he's also now, he does a fantastic podcast on German football, which I listen to. But he actually, he also listens to our podcast and regularly sends questions into the, he sent this one this week, and this is quite good for a Norwegian who's speaking in like his third language. He said, and a footballer to boot Rory, he said, looking at Liz Truss, isn't this just Doris Johnson? I thought that was rather good.

• 41:40Rory Stewart?

  It's a good line, isn't it? Now, come on, come on.

• 41:42Alastair Campbell?

  And on the football, on the football, on the football, it is fantastic. And I want to give a shout out to somebody called Sue Campbell. No relation, but Sue Campbell is somebody who's been around in sport forever. And she's been a huge driver of women's football over like decades and decades and decades. And I saw her on the, on the, when they were lifting the trophy and I saw her there just with all the players. And sometimes, you know, that whole thing about Harry Truman, it's amazing what people can, can achieve if nobody cares who gets the credit. She deserves a lot of the credit for this extraordinary thing. I also know it's very interesting Rory, that Boris Johnson didn't turn up, but Olaf Scholz did. I wonder if Mr. Johnson felt he might have been booed by 87,000 people.

• 42:24Alastair Campbell?

  And I wonder why he hasn't gone to the Commonwealth Games as well. I wonder whether the same reason might be in play.

• 42:31Rory Stewart?

  All right. Well, on that in play, thank you all very, very much for listening. And so it's goodbye from me.

• 42:37Alastair Campbell?

  And it's goodbye from him, me, both of us.

• 42:41Rory Stewart?

  All right.

• 42:42Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 42:43Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye, guys.

• 42:47Speaker 04

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig.

• 42:50Speaker 05

  On October 2nd.

• 42:52Speaker 04

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 42:56Speaker 05

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 43:04Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 43:08Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 43:11Speaker 06

  I'm not the first then.

• 43:12Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 43:17Speaker 09

  Espolon Tequila. It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolon Tequila. Balanced, delicious, perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth, then hold on tight. 100% agave, 0% ego. Espolon Tequila. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 43:41Speaker 05

  Espolon Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaq America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.