200. The Israeli settler movement, Ukraine blockaded, and Putin's perpetual power

Is the West moving to a more critical place concerning the Israel-Gaza war? Can Sunak's Rwanda policy be lawfully implemented? What is the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Russia? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all this 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.

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• 2:28Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics, me Alastair Campbell.

• 2:31Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:32Alastair Campbell?

  And before we get going, if you happen to be coming to the Royal Albert Hall tomorrow, Thursday, ahead of that, go to our Instagram page this morning where we've got lots of polls running that we'd like you to vote in ahead of tomorrow night.

• 2:49Rory Stewart?

  And we will be having other events, won't we, next year?

• 2:52Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 2:52Rory Stewart?

  Which will start popping, live events, people come to, they seem to be still sending out about six, seven minutes, but we promised to do more work and get out more around the country.

• 3:00Alastair Campbell?

  And we have promised we will go to Wales at some point, so we have to do that. That is a promise. Now, as for today, we're going to talk Israel-Palestine, lots to talk about on that. We're going to talk Rishi Sunak and his rather tricky week, Covid inquiry and now the Rwanda votes. We're going to talk Ukraine. I know you're very interested in this Polish truck blockade, but also there's on the bigger picture, can the Americans and can the European Union keep funding the Ukrainian effort? And then as COP limps to what looks like a pretty unsatisfactory conclusion, Saudi Arabia and Putin.

• 3:39Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 3:40Alastair Campbell?

  So where do you want to start? Shall we start with Israel?

• 3:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, let's start with Israel. So what have you, I mean, we're now, I guess, two months in. Is your mind beginning to shift? Are you changing your views? I mean, how are you thinking about it now compared to how you were thinking about it a couple of months ago?

• 3:52Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's very, very hard not to feel that this thing is just beyond anything that we imagine. We said, right, if you remember, day one, we said this is going to be unimaginably horrible. I was at an event last night, and I won't name her, but there was a very well-known war correspondent who was there, who said that of all the wars, this has felt like the worst. And I I think that through, right through the whole thing, I've had this sense that the Israelis have decided they're not really explaining the strategy, they're just doing the strategy.

• 4:31Alastair Campbell?

  And what you're seeing is is a a level of of horror, I think now, the normalization of which is is quite frightening. Somebody actually pointed out last week that one of our listeners said, you know, they find it incredible that we didn't even talk about the Middle East last week. Now, it's, you know, lots of other things that we were talking about. But I wonder if that's even within the context of this discussion, whether the normalization of the horror is such that we just.

• 4:59Rory Stewart?

  And and and one of the problems is that it's very difficult to report on. Israel appears at the moment not to be allowing international journalists into Gaza.

• 5:08Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of journalists have been killed.

• 5:09Rory Stewart?

  Which means that it's very difficult to get reporting out. There was a very interesting analysis actually on BBC and we can share the clip with people with an ex U S defence specialist, who said that on single days, Israel was dropping more bombs than in Afghanistan an entire year. And that a lot of the bombs being dropped to two thousand pound bombs, which are really, really big things. Now, they're laser guided, so they hit the precise target that the Israeli military wanted to hit, but the effect on the surrounding area is enormous. And he's really struggling to

• 5:49Rory Stewart?

  understand how all this works. So in order to kill a mid level Hamas commander, it appears as though they killed about one hundred and twenty six people, one hundred and twenty six civilians to get one mid level commander.

• 6:01Alastair Campbell?

  So to take it from their perspective, they think they know where the Hamas commander is. They target him and take him out, but in so doing are taking out dozens of other people, many of whom will presumably have nothing to do with Hamas.

• 6:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and it it does. I mean, again, because of the controversies around the attack on the hospital and because Hamas is clearly a terrorist organisation that.

• 6:29Rory Stewart?

  Can be incredibly dishonest and devious when it wants to be. There's been a real tendency to hold back on taking their word for things. But The New York Times and others, I think, are now pretty confident of the numbers, which are pushing well into 15,000 people, and that the majority of those killed at the moment are women and children. And you can see in the aerial imagery what northern Gaza looks like. So this is a very small strip of land, Gaza, with about 2.3 million people. And of those, the vast majority have now been displaced from their houses, 80, 90%.

• 7:05Alastair Campbell?

  Several, many of them several times.

• 7:07Rory Stewart?

  Many of them several times.

• 7:09Alastair Campbell?

  I saw an interview on Al Jazeera. Somebody said she was weeping, she said she was being moved for the fourth time, following instructions, following the social media campaigns from the Israelis, and she was moving. And the place that they're being told to move to now is literally the size of Heathrow Airport.

• 7:26Rory Stewart?

  A lot of the concentration now is at a tiny strip along the Egyptian border, where there have been some very clear statements from the humanitarian agencies saying there's basically no water, there's no toilets. The World Food Programme is saying that many people are not managing to eat even once a day. And now the fighting is moving to Khan Yunis, which is the population centre in the south, Gaza City having been comprehensively bombed. And then we go back to your question, what's the, what's the objective here? And there are different reasons given by the IDF at different times for what they're doing. So one of those is that this is designed to get hostages returned. That's very unclear for me.

• 8:11Rory Stewart?

  I don't think any hostage negotiator or hostage specialist that I'm aware of thinks that killing over 10,000 people is the way to get hostages returned.

• 8:21Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, hostage release is a specialist thing, normally done by special forces and... People who've got real skills in hostage release.

• 8:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and it's also raises a moral question, ethical question, because if what you're doing is suggesting, I don't know whether this is what they're suggesting, but it sounds a little bit like you're suggesting that you're just going to keep killing lots of women and children until the hostage is released. There's a basic principle, which is very fundamental in the way that we think about law, which is that you don't kill innocent people to force the hand of the guilty party.

• 8:54Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing I was interested, keen to talk about was the issues of the settlements. Don McIntyre, who you may know, who was a journalist back in my day, we were political correspondents together, then he was Middle East correspondent for The Independent for years and he's now, he's out there. He's the guy who wrote this book Gaza, which I mentioned a few weeks ago. And he had a piece in the New European this week, which really, I thought I knew a little bit about the settlement issue, but he, he, he, he's, he's out there now and he's spending time out there, he's in the West Bank. And he was telling the story of how this has just been steadily happening well before October the seventh.

• 9:35Alastair Campbell?

  And that bit by bit, he, he reported from this village called Zenuta, where they've, literally everybody has now moved out, everybody. And then the settlers who moved them out are now on to the next place. And he, he was, he quoted this guy, a shepherd, who talked about these herding outposts. And you can see this, it's like, it's almost like a sort of piecemeal battle that's going on. And including this detail, and Don, Don does love his, um, his sort of colourful details, but where the sheep, the Israeli sheep have been fighting the Palestinian sheep for land. And the Palestinians have now taken their sheep to bring them inside.

• 10:18Alastair Campbell?

  And he says as a result of that, normally the sheep would be grazing for eleven months of the year and only need proper food one month a year. They're now having to feed them for six months of the year, which means that it's utterly unviable. So their businesses are being destroyed, their homes are being destroyed, et cetera. And this is all happening. Most of this is happening, and you've talked before about the delineation of the West Bank, in Area C, which is sixty-three percent of the West Bank, and that's where the two-state solution would be focused.

• 10:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, the core of the Palestinian state.

• 10:52Alastair Campbell?

  And it's just, it's impossible to see how this now happens. And if you tie what Don's writing in the paper to his book, which obviously was published a few years ago, and this tracks the story of this, it's kind of been going on step by step by step by step. And he's very critical of the international community, of the Palestinian leadership, and of the Israelis for the fact that we've just sort of allowed this to happen.

• 11:16Rory Stewart?

  I remember it's a foreign office minister, so I'm a different minister. I was the different minister responsible for Israel-Palestine. And I'm sure like you and like probably most ministers before and after me, I was taken by our diplomats up onto a hill and shown these settlements and made firm statements against the settlements and then came back and had a very tetchy conversation with the Israeli ambassador. And I remember thinking at the time how utterly muddled and confused the international policy was. On the one hand, we were making these statements about settlements, we were making statements about the occupied Palestinian territories, but on the other hand, we were very, very worried,

• 12:01Rory Stewart?

  it felt politically, about in any way offending Israel. And so we were, I almost thought, pretending. That the Netanyahu government was agreeing with us.

• 12:14Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 12:14Rory Stewart?

  And being in favor of a two-state solution and that we all agreed this was the occupied Palestinian territories, when of course they weren't. In fact, he doesn't believe in a two-state solution and he's only once even begun to suggest he was in favor.

• 12:25Alastair Campbell?

  And he'd say, he would probably say to your face, two-state solution, blah, obviously, yes. And then meanwhile, back in Israel, he's doing deals with the Smotrich and the Ben Gavir's who are funding money and guns to the settlers.

• 12:40Rory Stewart?

  Um, now meanwhile, on the other side, and muddling this even more, is another really big story that's been happening over the last ten days, which has dominated the US media, but also slightly the British media, is the heads of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT, who in a big public testimony were asked whether calling for genocide against Jews were harassment, completely failed to answer. They kept waffling about the context specific. There again, a real sign of the way in which obviously this is spreading into so many other areas of political life, polarizing particularly US public opinion almost more than anywhere. Did you watch that? I mean, I thought it was extraordinary that they were so bad at handling public questioning when they would have been trained. I mean.

• 13:24Alastair Campbell?

  One of them resigned.

• 13:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, yeah, Liz McGill, University of Pennsylvania is now gone, partly triggered by a donor who I think was talking about holding back a hundred and fifty million dollar gift to the university. But more fundamentally, if you're asked whether genocide, calling for genocide harassment, you have to say, yes, genocide is completely wrong. And it was very odd that they couldn't do that. Even if you then move on to say, however, within our campus, we question whether that was what was happening. It was a very, very odd, but very, you know, a moment which for the Jewish community in the US and in Europe is just confirming the sense of antisemitism. So there are two narratives happening at the same time. There is the horror of what is happening on the ground in Gaza, the bombs being dropped by the IDF. And on the other hand.

• 14:09Rory Stewart?

  A lot of the conversations on social media is about Jewish communities being very, very concerned by what they see as a rising tide of antisemitism. And on the same side, many of my friends who are concerned about the Palestinian cause are also reaching out to these American universities, thinking that the universities are not giving enough space to people on the pro-Palestinian side.

• 14:30Alastair Campbell?

  We're back to the fundamental problem, which is that it appears to be, even in places where you expect the leaders of those organisations, the universities, to be able to manage these difficult debates, where the polarisation is such that they appear incapable of so doing. Now, I've heard a lot in recent years about this kind of whole woke thing on American campuses. And I've always assumed a bit like that, because I think the woke debate is so absurd on so many levels. But when you see that level of reluctance to say something which you know you have a constituency in your university is going to find difficult to hear, so you can't say it, it's sort of, it's a bit scary.

• 15:14Rory Stewart?

  It is very scary. And it's also interesting that, I mean, you and I instinctively know that sometimes giving a blunt, clear answer is essential. That oddly, politicians are often accused of avoiding questions, but I don't think any politician asked whether genocide was a bad thing would waffle. I also think that, that you talk about woke on campuses. One of the things making it complicated is that there's a big social justice movement that is identifying Jews as being white and Palestinians as being black adjacent. So there's a lot of, a lot of energy from social justice movement taking place. Very strange, given that obviously, you know, Jews and Arabs are very, very closely related ethnically. I think the other thing, maybe just to finish on before we move on to Rwanda, is your thoughts on

• 16:00Rory Stewart?

  The British politics of this. So there was a resolution in the UN which was supported by Russia, China and critically France. So that's three out of the five security members calling for a ceasefire and the release of the hostages. And you would have thought that's a pretty uncontroversial thing, ceasefire, release of hostages. But the US voted against and Britain abstained. And Britain abstained partly because, going back to my time in the foreign office, I keep joking about this, this is ridiculous idea that you find out what the US are doing and do a little bit less.

• 16:32Alastair Campbell?

  Theresa May did not like.

• 16:33Rory Stewart?

  Did not, but it is literally a convention in the British Foreign Service that if the Americans vote against, the UK abstains. However, it was broken once, and it was broken in 2009, where there was another war in Gaza.

• 16:48Alastair Campbell?

  And that led eventually to a ceasefire.

• 16:49Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. That was a war in Gaza in which during that war, 14 Israelis were killed and between 1100 and 1400 Palestinians were killed. The US wanted to vote against the resolution, Britain was going to abstain, and at the very last minute overnight, Gordon Brown's government changed their position, decided to vote in favour, and the US changed its position and abstained. Now, people would say 2009 is a bit different, maybe Israel in that situation was actually looking for a way out in a way that they're not now, US politics was different. But it does show that it can be done. And I would have thought that Keir Starmer and David Lammy need to now get out ahead of this and be calling clearly

• 17:31Rory Stewart?

  for ceasefire. Because if they wait until Sunak and Biden change their minds, it's too late, isn't it?

• 17:35Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I do have sympathy for the Labour's position in that it strikes me as odd that here we are, we're going to talk about Rishi Sunak in the context of Covid and of Rwanda, and the British government's position on Israel Gaza is coming under very little scrutiny, whereas the opposition is coming under massive attack. Lots of MPs say they're getting literally thousands of emails and messages and so forth. Just to go back to the point of 2009, because Tom Fletcher, who we both know, who worked for us and worked for Cameron and worked for Gordon and has been an ambassador, and he had a very, very interesting thread on social media the other day, and he kind of saying

• 18:17Alastair Campbell?

  what you're saying. I'll just go through it briefly. One, it is time for the UK to get off the fence and say unequivocally, all violence against all civilians must stop. Two, this is your point. People say UN resolutions are powerless, but we had a ceasefire within a week of Security Council Resolution 1860, 2009. The horror of civilian attacks by Hamas and Israeli cabinet are of a different scale. But the fundamentals are the same. We must protect civilians in Israel and Palestine, stop the bloodshed, drowning the two-state solution, which is what's happening. And then the key point is this. Prime Ministers all face a choice on the Middle East. Either sit it out, hoping the US put meaningful pressure on the closest ally,

• 19:00Alastair Campbell?

  or go for bold diplomacy aligned with UK interests and values, or take a punt on somehow influencing Netanyahu through private persuasion. Now, there's no doubt, I've been talking to some of Joe Biden's people, their approach has been absolute public support for Israel, and in the meantime, we try and influence the Israelis privately.

• 19:22Rory Stewart?

  And this is just, this is the great cliche diplomacy. I mean, you will have heard it again and again. We're always told when I was a young diplomat, we, you know, we're quiet in public and then privately.

• 19:30Alastair Campbell?

  We're pushing them. And I think they are pushing them. However, the effect of that pushing does not seem very, very strong.

• 19:37Rory Stewart?

  Questions, how's it going?

• 19:38Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. And doesn't Netanyahu listen more or less to Biden or to Smotrich, Ben Gavir and these guys?

• 19:45Rory Stewart?

  I assume, I mean, not to be unfair, but I assume that your close friend Tony Blair is is also in this bind. He presumably thinks that what he's doing is putting on private pressure and not making public statements.

• 19:55Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, yeah. That's exactly what he's trying to do. I think, and that is the classic bind, as you say. But I think that it's very interesting with Tom's point, because Tom's been both as an ambassador and as an advisor, right in there. And I think he essentially is saying that the private persuasion bit, so far as any British influence is concerned, is having zero effect, and a public statement might. I think that's what he's saying.

• 20:22Rory Stewart?

  Good. Okay. Well, I mean, we will keep following it. And it remains an astonishing, the horrible human tragedy, both the horror of what Hamas did to Israelis and those 1,400 people who were killed, and the nearly 15,000 who've now been killed in Gaza. But it's a very different conflict from ones we've seen in the past, because the political context, social media particularly, new types of social movement, mean that it's charged and internationalized in a way that you can't begin to imagine.

• 20:56Alastair Campbell?

  And also, it's like, you know, the other one I feel a little bit sorry for is Guterres. Because there is, there's Antonio Guterres, head of the UN. Now, he is being accused by the Israelis of being anti-Semitic. Why? Because he used this 99 procedure, which essentially is to declare this an emergency. They're saying, well, you didn't do it for Ukraine, you didn't do it for Sudan, you didn't do it for this, you didn't do it for that. So on the one hand, he's pressured from there. On the other hand, he's under massive pressure for people right around the world saying, for God's sake, can't the UN do something? And of course, as we saw from the vote, the UN can only do something if the UN Security Council agrees.

• 21:40Alastair Campbell?

  And there is no fundamental agreement there. And of course, you then, we're going to talk about Ukraine later. You've got the fact that whether all of these things kind of hang together, Middle East with Iran's involvement. You've got Russia, Ukraine, you've got all these different kind of conflicts going on that are frankly part of a very, very big battle between those bodies that are there, split up the UN. You know, democracies, autocracies and so forth.

• 22:08Rory Stewart?

  Which brings us to the news in British politics, which is very, very much dominated by two things. By Rishi Sunak's appearance in the Covid inquiry. But what I'd like to talk about first, which is the Tory party falling to pieces in its fight over the new bill on Rwanda and immigration. So I'd love to do a little explainer on what's actually in this bill. Because I noticed when I was reading the newspapers that none of them actually bothered to really explain what the details of it were.

• 22:36Alastair Campbell?

  They tell you what Marc Francois thinks about it and Bill Cash thinks about it and Ian Duncan Smith thinks about it. But they don't tell you what's in it.

• 22:43Rory Stewart?

  It's amazingly difficult to get to that. Anyway, but give us a sense of what you think of the politics before I get on to the substance of the bill.

• 22:48Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I was trying to tot up. You've talked before about all these different factions. I've been trying to tot up all the different factions now. So apparently Rishi Sunak this morning is having breakfast with a group called the New Conservatives. This is the sort of Danny Kruger, Miriam Cates.

• 23:03Rory Stewart?

  Lee Anderson.

• 23:04Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, is he part of them as well? But is he not part of the Northern Research Group?

• 23:08Rory Stewart?

  He's also part of Northern Research Group.

• 23:09Alastair Campbell?

  So you've got One Nation Caucus, which is, I guess, your sort of Tory party. You've got the European Research Group, which I thought was going to die with Brexit having been done.

• 23:17Rory Stewart?

  That's Mark Francois, ERG.

• 23:19Alastair Campbell?

  And Bill Cash and that lot. You've got New Conservatives. You've got the Common Sense Group, which has got nothing to do with Esther May being the Minister for Common Sense. You've got the Conservative Growth Group.

• 23:28Rory Stewart?

  Common Sense Group is a real sort of much, much older, very senior backbenchers. Sir Edward Lee, Sir John Hayes.

• 23:36Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, blah, blah, blah.

• 23:37Rory Stewart?

  These are real, these are, these are guys who've been on the sort of eurosceptic, ultra-conservative side for a very long time.

• 23:43Alastair Campbell?

  And then you've got the Conservative Growth Group, which is the sort of Lister's mob. That's, that's just half a dozen of the factions.

• 23:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and that's before you got on to the cornerstone group. That's another key player. Yep. So we're recording this on Tuesday ahead of the vote and we're still trying to work our way through this.

• 23:59Alastair Campbell?

  And this is the vote on the, on the main secondary in the bill.

• 24:02Rory Stewart?

  And one of the big questions that's been running is whether these groups are going to vote with Labour to bring down the bill, which is a sort of classic move. So they would be doing it for totally different reasons to Labour. Labour would be voting it down, presumably because they think it maybe is inhumane or illegal to be sending people to Rwanda. The Tory right will be voting it down because they think it's not tough enough, right? And, and this is obviously what we had again and again in Brexit, which is the Tory right voting with Labour to destroy Theresa May's compromise deals on Brexit.

• 24:31Alastair Campbell?

  So is he looking at me accusingly?

• 24:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Says looking.

• 24:34Alastair Campbell?

  As if it's all my fault.

• 24:35Rory Stewart?

  So just quickly on these groups, because I, I obviously know these groups quite well. They're not mutually exclusive. Now, some of them, like the ERG, were these incredibly well organised whipped groups. And under Mark Francois and Steve Baker, they became really important during the Brexit votes because they actually ran their own whipping operations. They had serious money, they had lines to take, they briefed the press. They were also basically a party within a party. The Northern Research Group is run by a friend of mine called John Stevenson, who is the MP for Carlisle and is very much in the centre of the party and is largely making arguments for more investment in Northern England. The Common Sense Group, on the other hand, is much more a cultural group.

• 25:20Rory Stewart?

  It's much more about a sort of particular vision of conservatism. And the One Nation Group, I mean, is a bit of a nonsense. I mean, I certainly found trying to use the One Nation Group and the way that the RG was used, it completely fell to pieces. We had five different candidates in the leadership. Nobody was prepared to take a single position on Brexit. So journalists trying to simplify the situation, I think, are now talking about the five families as a joke about Godfather. But basically, what you're gonna, it's gonna-

• 25:45Alastair Campbell?

  So is Rishi Sunak Tony Soprano?

• 25:47Rory Stewart?

  Exactly.

• 25:48Alastair Campbell?

  It's not working, is it?

• 25:49Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. So basically, it's gonna come down to, are a few grumpy, right-wing Conservatives whipped up by Suella Bravman and Robert Jenrick?

• 26:00Alastair Campbell?

  No, before we go on, I'm really confused. How is Robert Jenrick, who strikes me of the many unimpressive politicians in the current Conservative benches, as one of the most unimpressive in terms of, I just, I see nothing there. Am I missing something?

• 26:16Rory Stewart?

  I don't think you're missing something, and I'm pretty, you know, I am feeling more loyal towards Rishi Sunak on this. So Robert Jenrick was the Immigration Minister. He sat in all those Cabinet discussions. He knows in detail why it is impossible to do what he wants to do. He understands that it would be in contravention to the Refugee Convention of Article 13 of the ECHR, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, he's lucky in some sense to be in the government because he had a big scandal to do with-

• 26:43Alastair Campbell?

  Money.

• 26:44Rory Stewart?

  Richard Desmond and a property deal. And he's now come out and given an interview where he says, "We're not sent to Parliament to be concerned about our reputations on the gilded international circuit," which is basically a way of saying-

• 26:57Alastair Campbell?

  Break the law.

• 26:58Rory Stewart?

  Members of Parliament shouldn't care about international law.

• 26:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Rory Stewart?

  So it's very odd. He's not a secretary of state, he's not in charge of a department, he's a junior minister. And I see this, as when I sound like an old Tory, as deeply, deeply disloyal, as well as being horrified by the position he's taking.

• 27:13Alastair Campbell?

  He also was, I presume, or maybe still is, a close friend of Sunak's.

• 27:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so Robert Jenrick was one of these people who, like Rishi Sunak and Ollie Dowden, came out very early for Boris Johnson. They were the young Turks of the 2015 intake, whose endorsement to Boris Johnson was very important. So I never quite forgave the trio of them for doing that. But I think it's a sign of the way in which so many people in Parliament are behaving at the moment. I mean, they are extraordinary about stabbing each other in the back. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the issue, there's a difference between quietly stepping down and going out on all the Sunday shows trashing the Prime Minister.

• 27:55Alastair Campbell?

  And also, he's got this smugness that, I mean, I just don't know where it comes from. Because the only time I've ever actually met him properly was, I think it was the 2019 election, and we were on a panel together or something. And I can just remember being overwhelmingly unimpressed by, he had no presence. He had no, I had no sense of him having a worldview. He was just like a talking robot. And he's now become this sort of, I could even see that he styled himself. If you saw when he was walking down the street the other day with his sort of, he had a blue jumper on and jeans. And I could tell he said to his wife or whoever's advising him, I think I need to look a bit less stuffy than normal. I think I'll put on a jumper and jeans.

• 28:41Alastair Campbell?

  He sort of walked down the street forcing himself with the cameras. You could see in his head, he's thinking, I must walk normally, I must walk normally.

• 28:48Rory Stewart?

  The problem, I mean, I, so I know Robert Jenrick reasonably well, and I knew him before he was an MP. He entertained me when he was the chairman of his local association, when I was speaking in his constituency before the election.

• 28:59Alastair Campbell?

  So has he sort of come up through that route?

• 29:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 29:01Alastair Campbell?

  Through the party, as it were.

• 29:02Rory Stewart?

  So he'd been active in his local party politics, although he had a job before Parliament too. But one of the reasons it's difficult, I find psychologically to criticize, he's very amiable. And actually, it's a weird thing about Suella Bravman too. I'm horrified by what she does in public. But in person, whenever you meet her, she's very friendly and nice and modest. So I feel, it's an interesting thing. I think what Robert Jenrick's done is awful. But equally, I know that when he's listening to this, he'll feel really hurt. You know, I entertained Rory in my house. I've always been very nice to him. Why is he kicking me on air?

• 29:35Alastair Campbell?

  Talking of kicking on air, I must give a shout out to Nick Robinson. BBC, he did an interview with Suella Bravman, which I spent most of the time saying, for God's sake, put the boot in, for God's sake, we put the boot in. And anyway, he was just, he sort of let her speak. And then at the end, he did this, he did this thing where he basically, isn't the truth that you come on here and you're all nice and in Molineux, but the truth is, you go around, it's all about you, you spread hate, you're vile to your boss. I mean, he really, really, really, really went for it. I think she was quite taken aback. No, so I find the generic thing very, very confusing. But I'll tell you what I find more confusing, is the fact that Rishi Sunak has, I think, made a terrible

• 30:17Alastair Campbell?

  mistake of making this such a massive issue. Even if they get a plane off to Rwanda, and I know they'll do the whole performative thing, but it's going to be what, a few dozen people. The figures for asylum within the whole net migration picture are minuscule. And so he's not putting the energy into tackling the things that really, really, really make this difficult. And he's putting all his capital into this.

• 30:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, so the deal is that the just basic facts, the government wants to move people who come over, particularly people who come over in boats claiming asylum in Britain, wants to move them to Rwanda and argues that Rwanda, a country in Africa with about 10 million people, is a safe third country. And it began this commitment back in the spring of 2022 with Boris Johnson, tried to put people on the planes to Rwanda, was blocked by the courts. And in a final ruling of the Supreme Court in November, the Supreme Court says something quite interesting. What they said is, there's no problem in

• 31:21Rory Stewart?

  theory with the idea that you can have a safe third country, right? That the point is that people need to be safe. And provided they are not at risk of death, torture, persecution.

• 31:34Rory Stewart?

  A third country is fine.

• 31:35Alastair Campbell?

  The principle's fine, yeah.

• 31:35Rory Stewart?

  Principle's fine, but they had significant problems in practice with Rwanda. They even said that they think Rwanda was making a good faith effort to look after people, but they said that actually the record was worrying.

• 31:47Alastair Campbell?

  Not least because of the deal they'd had in the past with Israel.

• 31:49Rory Stewart?

  Correct, so there'd been a deal with Israel and in that deal up to 2018, they, the court found that people who'd been resettled by Israel and Rwanda had then been secretly shipped back to the countries from which they came, so they were at significant danger. So court said, basically, we can imagine a world in which Rwanda can be safe, but it's going to take very significant capacity building to build up the skills, their officials, make sure their asylum procedures are right, and basically make sure that you can be confident that people arrive in Rwanda, properly treated in Rwanda and not sent back to their own homes. The government then tried to respond to this by doing two things in parallel. James Cleverly, the former Foreign Secretary, now Home Secretary, flew to Rwanda and signed a treaty. And actually, that's the good bit of the story.

• 32:31Rory Stewart?

  He signed quite a good treaty in which, very complicated conversation with Rwanda, Rwanda standing up for itself, saying it wants to follow international law, it doesn't want to break the Refugee Convention, and it doesn't want to give up on its own sovereignty, agreed a series of panels and courts which would provide oversight to reassure people and potentially reassure the Supreme Court that people arriving in Rwanda be properly dealt with.

• 32:53Alastair Campbell?

  It was also, it's right, it's the Rwandans who insisted on this point that Jenrick is particularly angry about because that's the bit that he basically saying, well, it means that we're losing sovereignty to them essentially because they've made an insistence about one of the factors in the treaty.

• 33:09Rory Stewart?

  So Rwanda are making two big points. One is they were not prepared to accept a sort of British court making decisions over Rwandan law. What they have accepted is an appeal court, which in Rwandan law, which is a mixed court, which can include a British judge, Commonwealth judges and Rwandan judges, but they want to make sure that Rwanda has its own sovereignty here. And the second point is they want to be consistent with the Refugee Convention, European Convention on Human Rights, this kind of stuff.

• 33:33Alastair Campbell?

  So they're basically worried that Britain is less concerned about international law than Rwanda.

• 33:38Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, they're very keen to say they care about international law and their sovereignty. So this treaty was signed and there was a reasonable chance that you could then go back to the Supreme Court and make the legal argument in the Supreme Court that with all the package of measures that Britain's brought in. And it's and they've basically agreed that Rwandans will not be sent back to Rwanda, that other people being sent back to Rwanda will be carefully looked after, that even if they don't get asylum, they'll get permanent residence, that the UK will pay for them for five years, et cetera, et cetera. But instead of doing that, the government's done the second thing, which is much, much more controversial, which is that they've passed a law saying that Rwanda is safe.

• 34:17Alastair Campbell?

  So Lord Garnier, ex Tory MP, he advises the One Nation Caucus that we talked about, and he has said, this bill is nonsense, it's comparable with a ruling that all dogs are cats.

• 34:29Rory Stewart?

  So it's not

• 34:32Alastair Campbell?

  Is he wrong?

• 34:33Rory Stewart?

  It's not quite

• 34:34Alastair Campbell?

  You can't just sort of have a treaty that says this country is now safe and no court can ever challenge that.

• 34:41Rory Stewart?

  So the complication here is that you guys did it in 2004. So you declared in the Asylum and Immigration Act 2004 that European countries were safe. So Parliament can declare, or has in the past declared, the country's safe. The difference

• 34:56Alastair Campbell?

  European Union fellow states?

• 34:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's a bit different.

• 34:59Rory Stewart?

  But nevertheless, Parliament declared they were safe. The difference here is that they're declaring Rwanda safe after the Supreme Court has ruled that they're not safe.

• 35:07Alastair Campbell?

  Without any change of evidence?

• 35:09Rory Stewart?

  Right, so they are departing from the Supreme Court's judgment to the facts. Now, they're arguing the treaty, which I just talked about, has changed the facts, but the normal way to deal with that would be to go back to the court and make the legal argument in the court. The effect of this bill, if it passes, and it's going to pass this evening, or if it passes, it'll pass this evening, would be to say that British courts can no longer block flights generically. They will be able to hear individual cases, but they won't be able to delay the entire flight while they hear individual cases.

• 35:41Alastair Campbell?

  And that's the bit Genrick says has got to go.

• 35:42Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely, and the government believes 1995% of these cases could be heard in a few days. But the government still wants to defend very strongly, and this is what's annoying Genrick, and that this is vital to get over, why the Tory right is completely wrong on this in every way. The government bill goes further than I and many lawyers would like, but at least it makes sure that if you were in a late-stage pregnancy, you wouldn't be put on a plane. If you had throat cancer, you wouldn't be put on a plane. If you were under threat from the Rwandan government, you wouldn't be put on the plane. Genrick and the right of the Tory party is basically saying that everybody should just be sent out, we don't care at all about any exceptions, any individual cases.

• 36:21Alastair Campbell?

  So if you was if you was still an MP, would you vote for it?

• 36:24Rory Stewart?

  I suspect I'd abstain, suspect I'd abstain.

• 36:27Alastair Campbell?

  Show real leadership.

• 36:28Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, that's right.

• 36:29Alastair Campbell?

  You do what we did.

• 36:30Rory Stewart?

  A noble abstention.

• 36:32Alastair Campbell?

  Right, but the consequence of an abstention would be to contribute towards a Sunak defeat.

• 36:38Rory Stewart?

  So I think, I think the bigger issue here, though, is this whole question about which Germany is looking at as well, and the Netherlands are looking at as well, which is dealing with these illegal crossings to the Mediterranean. So the crossings of the channel are nothing like as horrifying and disturbing as what's happening in the Mediterranean. Mediterranean, it's literally lethal, well over 2,400 died this year alone crossing the Mediterranean. So Germany is looking very closely at this because they would like to have agreements in place, like the British Agreement with Rwanda. And there's a very interesting proposal, again, from my favourite group, the ESI, which is suggesting that actually Germany and France should offer to take everybody who crosses the channel back.

• 37:21Rory Stewart?

  And in return, Britain will agree, this is partly what Labour's been talking about, taking a certain number of asylum seekers from Europe every year. But also that this will then allow Germany to use the treaty with Rwanda to move some of the people crossing the Mediterranean to Rwanda. The argument being here that what should be happening is we should be taking asylum seekers on the basis of need, thinking about how many should be accommodated, taking them from the countries themselves. That's something that we've been talking about in, in previous interviews. In fact, actually, it was something we were talking about with, with the ex Belgian Prime Minister.

• 37:54Alastair Campbell?

  Wie Voschda.

• 37:55Rory Stewart?

  Shortly coming out on leading, where he said it's ridiculous that we can't take people who are persecuted from the countries in which they're persecuted, female judges, from Afghanistan, rather than waiting them to cross deadly crossing the Mediterranean. So a lot is relying on this, and many European countries are very frustrated that they feel that the Conservative government was almost there with the treaty with Rwanda, but they're horrified that they've pushed so far in trying to declare the country safe through law.

• 38:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I, I mean, I think they're going to struggle, even if they get the vote through, I think they're going to struggle. And, and it feels to me like the politics of this within the Conservative Party are, have just become so vicious. I know you don't like me talking about my friendship with Alan Clark.

• 38:39Alastair Campbell?

  But I remember he once, he once phoning me up and saying, you're absolutely, you're home and dry for a decade. And I said, why does this? Because the truth is, we fucking hate each other far more than we hate you. I think that sort of feels like that's where it's at. And also the sort of, the kind of, the same people, I mean, Francois, Duncan Smith, Bill Cash, the same people that we saw endlessly during the Brexit debate. And this pomposity, you know, the Star Chamber has reported and the Star Chamber has decided that this is, I mean, they're just awful.

• 39:14Rory Stewart?

  Just to explain to listeners, the Star Chamber is all this group of right wing MPs sitting around doing a legal analysis and trying to prove that the government's bill isn't tough enough to achieve what they want to know.

• 39:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, we haven't really covered the Covid inquiry, but he's hypnotic, Sunak. Do you know when the thing is really important in politics is the voice? And he's got this suppressed petulance all the time. And he couldn't do it with the judge or the QC, but he's sort of, as I switched off after half an hour, I just couldn't, couldn't stay with it.

• 39:46Rory Stewart?

  Couldn't stay with it. Right, well, shall we take a break?

• 39:48Alastair Campbell?

  Take a break.

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• 41:40Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 41:43Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, I think we should urge all of our listeners who have not so far done so to listen to the latest leading interview with Angela Rayner. I mean, I thought I knew Angela Rayner quite well, but sitting in that studio with her, hearing her talk about her childhood and how she's become the person that she now is was pretty amazing.

• 42:07Rory Stewart?

  It was unbelievable. I mean, if people do, please listen to it. I mean, it's extraordinary. So Angela Rayner, as people who've listened to it will find out, and hopefully many more of you will listen to it, grew up in a family where her mother was one of 12. Her mother couldn't read or write. She was essentially a carer for her mother from a very, very early age.

• 42:28Alastair Campbell?

  She was six.

• 42:29Rory Stewart?

  And, I mean, she really grew up in the most extreme form of deprivation and poverty imaginable in Britain. Left school at 16 with not a single GCSE and is unbelievable. I mean, she's very, very bright. She's very tough. She's very thoughtful. I mean, it sort of left me still with this question, which I guess, you know, given that we're all told to work hard at school because it's really important for our later life, you know, what the secret of this is. And she very correctly, I think, in modesty says a lot of it is luck. She was lucky, but she's also obviously a very, very remarkable person.

• 43:04Alastair Campbell?

  I also noticed that how much more fluent she's become. There wasn't a single question that she flinched from.

• 43:13Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 43:14Alastair Campbell?

  Whether it's policy, whether it was personal, whether it was political. I think she could be a massive asset in the campaign for Labour and in government, actually. And I think it is such an amazing aspirational message to say that you can come from a background that honestly is like anybody who's ever seen Shameless, it sort of feels like that.

• 43:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 43:34Alastair Campbell?

  That kind of dirt poverty.

• 43:36Rory Stewart?

  And she's amazingly sort of frank about it. And also, hopefully, somebody who will really stand up for that section of society who've been shamefully neglected by so many different parties over time, because the sort of poorest, I don't know, half million people in this country often don't vote, aren't courted by either the Conservative or Labour parties. So somebody speaking up for them will be hugely important.

• 43:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think Sure Start, Rory, was a very, very

• 44:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, she made a very good, very good case.

• 44:02Alastair Campbell?

  One of the worst parts of austerity.

• 44:03Rory Stewart?

  Very good case for Sure Start. She definitely did. And how it transformed her ability to move as extraordinary. She said she was never hugged once by her mother, and she had to be taught by Sure Start to hug her own children.

• 44:13Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. So Ukraine, where do you want to start?

• 44:17Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think the first thing is, of course, the obvious, which is we're neglecting Ukraine because we're talking a lot about Israel Gaza. And Putin is feeling pretty pleased with himself. He's now attempting assaults along the entire front line, this massive front line between Russia and Ukraine. He's got 350,000 soldiers mobilized. And Ukraine was supposed to break through, as we've said in a counteroffensive this year, it didn't. Instead, it feels very much like, I don't know, almost like the First World War.

• 44:48Alastair Campbell?

  Stuck.

• 44:48Rory Stewart?

  Trenches, mines. There was a lot of talk about using tens of thousands of small drones to try to break through, but it really does seem stuck. And of course, Ukraine is deeply dependent on money coming in, particularly money from the US, which provides 10 times as much as the nearest, next nearest country. And there's more than $50 billion supposed to be coming from Biden that's frozen. But the US population is increasingly skeptical, particularly Republican voters, overwhelming majority of Republican voters think too much money is going to Ukraine now. Trump clearly signalling that if he comes in, he's going to give up on supporting Ukraine entirely. So Putin's hanging on for that.

• 45:29Alastair Campbell?

  Interesting that Zelensky went to Millet's inauguration and made a big, big show of support. I don't know whether that was sort of saying, I need the populace right. As well.

• 45:42Rory Stewart?

  Very interesting, isn't it? You would have thought of all your priorities. I mean, Argentina is not a huge economy. Millet is a pretty controversial man. He's the man we've been talking about last three weeks with a wig and cloned dogs and who calls the Pope a jackass.

• 45:55Alastair Campbell?

  He had on the Argentine sash to the president's words, he had the five dogs pictures put onto the sash.

• 46:04Rory Stewart?

  And they're actually, because they're claiming they're actually one dog. I mean, they're like Dolly the sheep.

• 46:07Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, they're all the same?

• 46:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:08Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, right, okay. But he knows which is different. But I thought that was interesting that he went there. He's going to see Biden. Biden really is holding out on very, very firm positions at some considerable cost to himself politically, both on Israel. One of the people I talked to in Biden's team, he said, you know, you've got to understand, he really believes this. He's as determined as Netanyahu is that Hamas have to be defeated. But he's paying a price on that politically. And I think on Ukraine, as you say, because the Republican right has become very, very iffy about the money. So there's, there he is on that. And then you've got, you've also been looking at this situation with Poland and Ukraine and this blockade.

• 46:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So since November the sixth, there have been these big blockades done by Polish truck drivers on the Ukrainian border. And now it's happening with Slovakian and Hungarian truck drivers joining. So there are two thousand nine hundred and fifty trucks stuck on the Ukrainian border and about six hundred and fifty Slovakian, seven hundred and fifty Hungarian. This is a very big problem. I mean, some of those trucks have been sitting there for many, many weeks.

• 47:12Alastair Campbell?

  And why they're there?

• 47:13Rory Stewart?

  They're there because at the beginning of the war, the EU said that Ukrainian drivers could come into Europe without having to have a special permit. So they don't have to abide by European working time directives or any of the rules that other truck drivers have to abide by. And basically they're undercutting Polish truck drivers.

• 47:32Alastair Campbell?

  And was that about getting grain out or was it, was it just to help Ukraine?

• 47:36Rory Stewart?

  Getting, it was about two things. I think it's about getting things in and out and also helping the Ukrainian economy. And this is significant, the Ukrainian economy. These delays at the border have probably knocked one percent off Ukraine's GDP at a time when it's already in the most horrible economic turmoil. So it seems mad, on the other hand, to pay credit to the Poles, they were the first country to open their arms. They took in million, over a million Ukrainian refugees. They were the first country to back Ukraine, but it's becoming a big, big issue because lots of Polish truck drivers feel that their incomes and their jobs and their livelihoods are under threat and nobody's standing up for them. It's very resolvable. Either you could return to a permitting situation, which is probably too complicated, but you could certainly provide compensation for the Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Hungarian truck drivers.

• 48:21Alastair Campbell?

  And Hungary, of course, there you've got Orban. He's the one who seems to be foremost in trying to block the fifty billion euros that the European Union is set to contribute towards Ukraine. Almost using it as a pawn in this game where the European Union are blocking funding to him because of some of his breaches of rule of law provisions.

• 48:46Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely, and this also leads into a much, much bigger question, which is the question about European Union accession. So Ukraine is now a Moldova lined up to be candidate states for the EU, and that's a very big issue for the EU. Because the people who support it see it as absolutely critical for defending Ukraine and for the future geosecurity of Europe. But caught up in this are also the Balkan countries, Serbia, Kosovo, who are also waiting for accession to the EU.

• 49:14Alastair Campbell?

  Albania.

• 49:15Rory Stewart?

  Bosnia, yeah.

• 49:16Alastair Campbell?

  Albania.

• 49:16Rory Stewart?

  Albania, yeah. All of which are at different stages. Now, Orban is currently blocking almost all of these things and he's really whipping up in blocking North Macedonia and Kosovo, the idea that these are corrupt countries and a lot of the far right in European elections are going to pretty soon get on to this. So here is a proposal to solve this issue, which we're going to try to push through the European capitals.

• 49:39Alastair Campbell?

  Are we?

• 49:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:39Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 49:40Rory Stewart?

  These countries should all be allowed to come into the single market. So the single market is joining Europe in its freedoms, so that allows freedom of trade, particularly important, freedom of movement of people, puts you into the economic integration with Europe, but it doesn't bring you into the political institutions. You don't get involved in conversations about a European Parliament, Commission. You don't get involved in conversations about a joint European army. It's a position that Norway's in, not in the European Union, but in the single market. And it actually also allows you to make trade deals around the world. So it's a very, very good position to be in, in terms of accessing this enormous market. The only thing that made a controversial in Britain is that it allows European Union

• 50:24Rory Stewart?

  immigration, free movement of people back and forth.

• 50:26Alastair Campbell?

  But you see, I think that's where the, you say this would be sort of way of countering the hard right. I think they would take that as a pretty big campaign issue for them. You know, what, we're bringing all these Albanians and Moldovans and Georgians in to our market.

• 50:40Rory Stewart?

  You mean, you mean across Europe?

• 50:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 50:42Rory Stewart?

  So not, not just in Britain.

• 50:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So I can see, I can see it being politically quite difficult.

• 50:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 50:46Alastair Campbell?

  But I like the big, I like the boldness of it. Big, bold idea.

• 50:49Rory Stewart?

  Big bold, thank you.

• 50:50Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 50:51Rory Stewart?

  So give them the four freedoms, freedom movement of people and all this stuff. Bring them a single market, same way that Norway did. Make sure they meet the single market rules and that way you can offer a deal that works for Ukraine, works in Moldova, but also works for Norway and Kosovo.

• 51:04Alastair Campbell?

  You just sort of bypass all the normal negotiations before entering into the single market?

• 51:07Rory Stewart?

  No, no, you need the normal single market negotiations, but that is an easier path to go on than full EU membership and it, and it will keep the momentum going, keep those countries engaged, achieve some of the geostrategic objectives and then park for later the question of full membership. Cause I think if you push for full membership now, the far right in Europe will derail everything and these countries will end up nothing.

• 51:27Alastair Campbell?

  And as part of this West's politics diplomatic initiative, would the United Kingdom be invited to do the same at the same time?

• 51:33Rory Stewart?

  There we are. It's a very interesting thing. I mean, if the, if the number of countries in the single market outside the European Union grows from Norway to quite a large number, then there's a very natural place for a country like the United Kingdom to redock.

• 51:45Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Very good, very good. And just on, on the, the American politics of this, a poll asking people whether they support what the, the financial commitment America is making on Ukraine. Forty-eight percent think America is spending too much, 27% about right, 11% not enough. Republicans, 65% too much, 52% of independents too much, 32% of Democrats too much. So it's become a sort of left, right thing, which again is, is not going to help the Democrats keep Trump at bay. Now, sort of, you're sticking a little bit with, with Putin.

• 52:24Alastair Campbell?

  He had a rare trip outside of Russia, went to Saudi and the Emirates, wasn't arrested for his alleged war crimes.

• 52:36Rory Stewart?

  Because they're not signatories to the International Court. But it's pretty controversial. So Mohammed bin Zayed, who's the dominant figure in UAE, referred to him as my dear friend. President Putin gave him a 21-gun salute. I mean, it's it's pretty extreme.

• 52:51Alastair Campbell?

  And Mohammed bin Salman.

• 52:53Rory Stewart?

  Who's the effective ruler of Saudi Arabia.

• 52:56Alastair Campbell?

  He saw Putin when there was talk that at the same time he should have been seeing Sunak here, which Ian Duncan Smith, that great diplomat, said was a snub.

• 53:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's it's true that actually Mohammed bin Salman's foreign trips are notoriously unreliable. He keeps saying he's going to get on a plane to Britain and then he reschedules about every two weeks. He was all supposed to be flying to Moscow. One of the reasons that Putin weren't there is that he cancelled his trip to Moscow at Lussum. He also cancelled his trip to the Jordanian Crown Prince's wedding where he was supposed to turn up. So I think Mohammed bin Salman obviously doesn't quite like leaving Saudi Arabia.

• 53:30Alastair Campbell?

  And meanwhile, COP, the Conference of the Parties, trying to save the planet, the future of the planet, it seems that Saudi, to a lesser extent Russia, China, but certainly Saudi, are getting a lot of the blame for making a deal at the moment look like it's impossible because they won't agree to phasing out fossil fuels.

• 53:51Rory Stewart?

  Instead of phasing phasing down, yeah. Yeah, and of course we got that signal, didn't we, from the president of the COP from UAE that he was against phasing out language. Well, I mean, these countries, their entire economies are dependent on fossil fuels, like sort of 80, 90% of their revenue comes from fossil fuels.

• 54:05Alastair Campbell?

  So why did, when we talked to Christiane Fegel, for example, she seemed to think this was all going to be fine and it would lead to some sort of conclusion, but they're all now very, very depressed. I was wondering as well whether, we keep saying sport and politics shouldn't mix, but... You've got this situation now where the Saudis are going to be hosting the World Cup at a time when they appear to be making moves that suggest the world might not be here that long.

• 54:32Rory Stewart?

  Can you just tell me, apparently they were the only ones to bid. How on earth is it possible that they're the only ones to bid? Why does nobody want to host the World Cup?

• 54:39Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you've got a situation at the moment with regard to the Commonwealth Games where there are no bids. They've all pulled out.

• 54:44Rory Stewart?

  Because these things are too expensive and complicated.

• 54:46Alastair Campbell?

  Well, cost, buggeration. I don't know. I think there's, I think that where, certainly when we were going for London 2012.

• 54:54Rory Stewart?

  You were initially reluctant, weren't you?

• 54:56Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 54:57Rory Stewart?

  Because we just did this wonderful interview on leading with Sepp Coe, which is coming out, yeah.

• 55:00Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, yeah. We should tell people about it. We've had lots of interviews. We've done, so we've had Angela Rayner out this week, we've got Tim Peake coming out soon, we've got Sepp Coe.

• 55:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 55:07Alastair Campbell?

  And Guy Fawcett. I've got to say, I thought he was brilliant. And he is so going to, he's going to get up, he's going to get up a lot of the right noses.

• 55:17Rory Stewart?

  The Belgian Prime Minister, yes, yes, yes, exactly. The more, more my end of the listeners may, may get more one up. So just to finish then, Putin's now announced that, as, as we imagine, that he's running in the election. So he's.

• 55:28Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think he'll win?

• 55:29Rory Stewart?

  Well, he's almost certain not just to win, but to be in office now till 2030.

• 55:33Alastair Campbell?

  He's going to be longer than Stalin.

• 55:35Rory Stewart?

  Yep, longer than anyone since I think Catherine the Great or something. Came in in 1999. So it's, it's a long old period. Thirty-one years at the helm is a, is a long old period. That was the sort of, I, I was, my first posting as a diplomat was in Indonesia where Su Hato had done thirty-two years. But that's really getting towards the sort of, that's, that's the big, big authoritarian route of thirty years.

• 55:56Alastair Campbell?

  I, I watched the, um, the announcement and he did it, same as they did it the last time where he's at an event and somebody, a member of the public asks, you know, will you be just thinking about standing again in the next election? And he, he sort of gives the impression he's being dragged, kicking his, oh God, if I have to do it again.

• 56:14Rory Stewart?

  He says, yes, I thought I wasn't going to do it, but now.

• 56:16Alastair Campbell?

  But I think now the state of the world and so forth. And, and then they had a, they had a, a soldier, a few soldiers there and the mother of somebody who'd been killed in Ukraine. I mean, the staging. And I, I don't know, do people? Do Russian people look at it and just think, well, there's nothing we can do about it? Move on?

• 56:33Rory Stewart?

  Well, he's got, it looks like reasonably reliable independent polls that he's got nearly 58% support. And I think it's a more extreme version of what we're seeing with Erdogan in Turkey, which is that there is a section of Russian and Turkish societies that are never going to vote for these men. More liberal, more progressive people are horrified by them, but they don't care about that section of society. They have a base that they're going to mobilize and that base will keep voting for them.

• 57:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and most of his serious opponents are either dead or in jail. We mentioned Erdogan there. What do you think of this sort of David Cameron, Hamzah Yusuf spat?

• 57:10Rory Stewart?

  So just to remind people, what happened is that Hamzah Yusuf had a bilateral with Erdogan.

• 57:16Alastair Campbell?

  At COP?

• 57:17Rory Stewart?

  At COP. And the UK government wasn't informed and UK diplomats were not at the meeting. So I guess there is a principle, which is that if you're not an independent country, you're a devolved administration, you don't conduct independent foreign relations, and that it's very important. It's not just important actually for Hamzah Yusuf. That's what Priti Patel was sacked from the Cabinet for doing, which is having a meeting as a Cabinet Minister without officials present.

• 57:41Alastair Campbell?

  You've been to these, haven't you? If you're there, like, let's say, let's take the personalities out of it. Say you're Sadiq Khan, say you're Mark Drakeford, say you're a Northern Ireland politician, and you happen to go to COP because you're interested in the environment. If you're going to, you're going to run into people, you're going to talk to people.

• 57:56Rory Stewart?

  I think he didn't just run into them. I think it was a scheduled meeting because, and certainly in-

• 58:02Alastair Campbell?

  But he claims that they told the FCDI it was happening.

• 58:04Rory Stewart?

  So in our system, and you would have felt this, like, if I'd been a junior minister at COP and I scheduled a meeting with Erdogan and I was like, well, I just bumped into him, you'd be like, what the F are you doing? Get back in your box. You do not get to have a meeting with Erdogan. Who on earth do you think you are?

• 58:20Alastair Campbell?

  I think you might be right. Yes, you might. I hadn't thought of it, but I guess it's the fact that Hamzah Yusuf, he is the leader of Scotland and of a different politics to the UK government.

• 58:31Rory Stewart?

  I'm sure if they'd arranged it properly, they would have been prepared to staff it. Yeah.

• 58:34Alastair Campbell?

  I was surprised that David Cameron went quite so heavy in his, the penning of his letter. Hey ho, that's it, Roy, for this week. Back tomorrow with Question Time.

• 58:43Rory Stewart?

  Looking forward to it very much. Thank you.

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