11. Putin’s blanket, election fallout, and China in Africa

Beergate, local elections, Tower Hamlets, Northern Ireland, Putin, Chinese foreign policy, Oxbridge, and porridge talk. Join Rory and Alastair for discussion and analysis of all of the above and more, plus plenty of listener questions. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor & Jack Davenport The Week: theweek.co.uk/rest Goalhanger Podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. 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

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• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  So, welcome to episode 11 of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:49Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to be discussing lots and lots of things, matters local and global. Fallout from last week's elections, I've got a particular interest in what's going on in Northern Ireland, where the pro-protocol parties did well, the anti-Northern Ireland protocol parties did badly, especially the DUP, and so inevitably the conclusion from our government is that it's all about changing the protocol. We'll also go global with Putin's military show in Red Square, and also with first Partygate, now Beergate, we'll be discussing what it takes for a story to get its own gate in our dumbed-down media, and we'll take, I hope, quite a few of your questions. But Rory, where do you want to start? There's a lot of places that we can start.

• 2:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, where do we start with the local elections? And let's just start with a little bit of the facts and figures. So Labour gained, this local elections in Britain, Great Britain, Labour gained 108 seats, Conservatives lost 488, and Lib Dems gained 224. Quite surprising, that's nearly twice as many as Labour. Probably slightly larger losses for the Conservatives than most pollsters were predicting, but of course inevitably, as we said in last week's show, not as big a loss as Number 10 were trying to brief out, which of course helps Boris Johnson, probably not a catastrophic enough loss to be able to top him immediately. Labour's got five more councils, Conservatives have lost 11, Lib Dems put on three.

• 3:17Rory Stewart?

  So that's the situation in Great Britain, and then maybe we'll go on to Northern Ireland.

• 3:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I do, I do, I mean, before we leave Great Britain, I do think that the Tories' expectation management was so sort of transparent, but it's just such a benefit to them to have so much of the media that will just play the game for them. You literally had newspapers like the Daily Express saying, "Better than expected results, bullish Boris back on track." I mean, these newspapers have become like pamphlets. You know, we were, we were talking last week about whether it's still, in fact, there was a question this week, is it still worth knocking on doors and putting leaflets through doors? You don't need them if you're the right-wing papers, because you have these, these newspapers, you know, The Sun, The Mail, The Telegraph, quite often on a bad day, The Times, just sort of, and The Express, just coming through and saying what the Tory party wants you to hear.

• 4:07Alastair Campbell?

  So I actually think that the elections were pretty disastrous for Johnson. I think Labour did very well in parts of the country, would like to have done better in other parts of the country. I agree with you, I think the Liberal Democrats... Funny enough, I think did well where they need to do well to help when we come to a general election. I think there was quite a lot of tactical voting going on. I think that would be quite interesting. And Northern Ireland, just, you know, it won't surprise you to know that Northern Ireland just sort of does my head in. Because we have this situation where there's just two points I'd like to start with that never get made these days, which is that Boris Johnson said there would be no border in the Irish Sea. Boris

• 4:50Alastair Campbell?

  Johnson said there would be no checks on goods between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

• 4:54Rory Stewart?

  Famously over my dead body.

• 4:56Alastair Campbell?

  Over his dead body.

• 4:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:58Alastair Campbell?

  The border is there and the body is not dead.

• 5:01Rory Stewart?

  But his body's often doing odd things. Do you remember his body was going to lie down on the runway to try to prevent the building of the third runway at Heathrow?

• 5:09Alastair Campbell?

  Did he put his body on the line for the Afghans? I think he might have put his body.

• 5:13Rory Stewart?

  His body ends up in a lot of strange places.

• 5:16Alastair Campbell?

  It is a large corpus. But I think it's just, these problems that the DUP are now going on about, they stem from two things. Their support for Brexit and their trust in Boris Johnson.

• 5:29Rory Stewart?

  So can I take it back? Because I think not all listeners are necessarily following all the details. So let me try to give my best simple explanation of this. The fundamental problem, which was at the root of what Theresa May was trying to do with her backstop, which was essentially a sort of customs union.

• 5:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Rory Stewart?

  Was to try to make sure that Northern Ireland didn't really need to choose between having either a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, or a border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. And both of them are disasters in different ways.

• 5:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 5:59Rory Stewart?

  Border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain, of course, is a very, very strange thing to do in a single country and very offensive to unionists, who very much feel that they should be full parts of the United Kingdom.

• 6:09Alastair Campbell?

  And it's affecting their trade, which they're.

• 6:10Rory Stewart?

  And it's affecting their trade. And a border, of course, between Northern Ireland and the Republic is a disaster in a very different way. Because in fact, the genius of the Good Friday Agreement rested on being a member of the European Union, because what it allowed is different communities in Northern Ireland to see themselves in completely different ways without having to choose, in effect. If you were republican minded in Northern Ireland, you could be an Irish citizen and effectively feel that you were living in the United Ireland. And if you were a unionist, you could very much feel that you were living in the United Kingdom. And because there were no borders, you didn't really need to choose.

• 6:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 6:45Rory Stewart?

  So the problem with this, of course, is that if you wanted, as Boris Johnson wanted to do, and some of the hard Brexiters wanted to do, to get independent trade deals, in other words, to be able to sign up deals with Australia, for example, they were going to have to have borders. Otherwise, Australian sheep, for example, would come in tariff free into Britain and be able to get into the European Union, where it should be facing thirty percent tariffs that would wipe out European farmers. So quite understandably, Europe was not happy to have Britain signing independent trade deals if it meant stuff flowing into Europe without them being able to check in and stop it.

• 7:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Rory Stewart?

  So there were two answers to that. Either you stay on the customs union and give up on independent trade deals, or you go for these independent trade deals. But if you go for the independent trade deals, you have a big problem because you've got to put a border somewhere. And it was this fundamental truth that Boris Johnson denied all the way through his leadership campaign, all the way through the election. And the biggest example of his claim that he could have his cake and eat it too, was around this issue of Northern Ireland.

• 7:46Alastair Campbell?

  And also, you go right back to the referendum. John Major, who started the whole ball rolling, Tony Blair went to the Peace Bridge in Northern Ireland and were very, very clear that this was a real danger. And now we're here. And yet again, what are the Tories' government doing? Blaming the European Union, saying it's all their fault because they agreed to this protocol, which at the time was absolutely brilliant. The protocol was the thing that allowed Johnson to say, I have got Brexit done. And we're now seeing the consequences. And I think the other thing that's worth saying about the DUP, the DUP backed Brexit. People of Northern Ireland did not, as the majority did not back Brexit in Northern Ireland. The DUP did. They got into bed with Theresa

• 8:31Alastair Campbell?

  May for when the political...

• 8:33Rory Stewart?

  No, they destroyed Theresa May.

• 8:35Alastair Campbell?

  In the way they did, yeah, they did. But they, they, they, they, put it this way, they exploited her political weakness. They got quite a lot out of that in terms of money and power and all the rest of it. And now they're in a situation... Where having, the Unionists having been in, run Northern Ireland when the institutions had been there for a century, they're now saying that because the Good Friday Agreement hasn't delivered them as the number one party out of an election, suddenly it's all about the protocol. And, you know, to be fair to Michelle O'Neill, the Sinn Féin leader in the North, she was very, very clear that the protocol can be changed, can be resolved, that has to be done between the UK government and the European Commission. It is not what

• 9:18Alastair Campbell?

  this election was about. And I think the DUP, they've either got to be serious about maintaining the principles of the Good Friday Agreement, or just keep playing politics. And I think that'll just get people more and more angry.

• 9:28Rory Stewart?

  The whole thing is, is very strange, isn't it? Because it was very difficult to understand why the DUP were campaigning against Theresa May. So let's just get into the protocol for a second and explain what the protocol is, because I'm aware we're throwing all these different things around. So basically, the protocol put a border down the Irish Sea. It resolved the problem, which we talked about, of how is Britain going to have independent trade deals and still have no border between Northern Ireland Republic? By saying, okay, there won't be a border between Northern Ireland Republic. In effect, Northern Ireland remains in the single market, remains in the customs union, goods can flow back and forward, people can go back and forward. So that, to return to what we were talking about, if you were Republican minded, you were living in Northern Ireland, you

• 10:11Rory Stewart?

  could very much feel you were a full citizen of a united Ireland without having to worry about a border, right? But in order to get the trade deals, what Boris negotiated, and this was his oven-ready deal, and which he said was a much better deal than Theresa May's deal, was to put a border down in the Irish Sea so that he could do trade deals between Great Britain and other countries. And these things would then be checked before they got into Northern Ireland, because once they were in Northern Ireland, of course, they could flow freely into the Republic.

• 10:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:38Rory Stewart?

  And what was so bizarre about it is this was, of course, absolutely obvious for two and a half years' worth of the Brexit negotiations. It's what Port Theresa May kept saying. Right? She kept saying, you're not going to be able to get another deal out of Brussels. That there's no other deal that you can get. Brackets, unless for some weird reason, you wanted to put a border down the Irish Sea. But obviously Boris had promised, over his dead body, there would be no border down the Irish Sea. So the question is, what, what were the DUP thinking?

• 11:10Rory Stewart?

  What were the unionists who chose to back Boris' thinking? They actually destroyed Theresa May and brought in Boris. Their refusal to vote, in particular for things like the customs union, that meant that her deal failed.

• 11:22Alastair Campbell?

  But they, but they.

• 11:23Rory Stewart?

  Why did they do it? Because I think they fantasized that actually Boris would not betray them. It's, it's the story again and again in Boris Johnson's life, which is.

• 11:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, as you, as you've said several times, there's nobody who's ever met that doesn't have some story of betrayal. But this is, what is it, this one is enormous. And I can understand why they feel betrayed and let down. But it was pretty damned obvious what was happening. And they have to take their share of responsibility of that. And they're now playing the game, saying it's all about the protocol. We can't go into the, the executive, the good, one of the key elements of the Good Friday Agreement, in terms of the storm and setting up the executive, was genuine power sharing. We talk about a first minister who's appointed by the, who's, who's from the, the party that comes top in the elections, and then the deputy first minister that comes from the second party, which has tended to be a unionist and then the nationalist.

• 12:16Alastair Campbell?

  Now, that has now been reversed, and the T U P don't like that for fairly obvious reasons. But the truth is, the first and deputy titles are somewhat misleading, because you cannot set up the institution without both. Now, the other thing that I thought was very, very interesting in these elections, Sinn Fein did well, but they did well because the other parties, S D L P and the unionists, you know, unionists had a pretty big collapse. But the other interesting story out of these elections was the rise of the Alliance Party, got thirteen point five percent. And that was interesting, because that's basically a sort of, if you like, I think represents a plea for non sectarianism. And if you talk to people in Northern Ireland at the moment, the reason they are so frustrated is because this has taken them back to where the only subject being discussed in Northern

• 13:00Alastair Campbell?

  Ireland politics, we're back to kind of the two, unionists versus nationalists. And the real frustration is stuff like the health service and education and transport and cost of living. These issues are now going to be, have to be dealt with by the government in the United Kingdom, which barely anybody in Northern Ireland trusts anymore. So it really is a bit of a mess and, and, and Johnson's just, he's got to get serious. So when you, yet again, what was their response? We'll tear up the protocol. Liz Truss is in the papers again today. We'll tear up the protocol. This was their triumph. This was how they presented it. What more can the European, I think the European Commission will try to make changes, to try and make it, to try and help sort this thing. But what more big changes can they make beyond something that was done

• 13:45Alastair Campbell?

  for Boris Johnson's government?

• 13:47Rory Stewart?

  Well, because fundamentally, Britain cannot have an independent trade policy and open borders with the European Union. It just can't work.

• 13:54Alastair Campbell?

  Does that mean they're going to go for a trade war instead by tearing up the protocol? Because who's going to be the loser in that?

• 13:59Rory Stewart?

  Logically, you cannot basically import Australian sheep tariff free and have an open border with Europe. So this protocol thing cannot be solved in the way that Boris Johnson wants to solve it. Just on the alliance before we move on, I think that is a really interesting development. So 13% of the vote, and it's a party which started as a moderate unionist party, but now attracts increasing numbers of voters right the way across the spectrum on them. But it's a reminder also, I think we talked about this before, how little people in Great Britain, I think, think about Northern Ireland. It's quite striking, for example, that one of the major policies on the alliance platform is that Catholics and Protestants should go to the same schools.

• 14:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:41Rory Stewart?

  And the fact that they find it necessary to say that is a reminder of how different politics is in Northern Ireland from politics in the United Kingdom.

• 14:48Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and certainly, education is very, very different in Northern Ireland. You say, let's leave Northern Ireland. I'm going to neatly use a bridge or even a ferry to take us from Ireland to Scotland with this brilliant question from Stephen Monroe. Now, I know Stephen Monroe because he works on the Corrane Ferry, which I told you a couple of weeks ago is one of my favourite places in Scotland. His question is this, Rory. With the Ulsterification of Scottish politics since 2014, where does Rory see votes coming for, for this new liberal unionist party that he wants? Do they come from the unionists or do they come from the nationalists? So tell us more. There's quite a lot of interest in your thoughts about an Ulster Union, a Scottish liberal unionist party. Actually,

• 15:33Alastair Campbell?

  I've just said, having said that, Rory, that says slop. You can't call a party slop, can you? Scottish.

• 15:41Alastair Campbell?

  Caledonian. No, that doesn't work either.

• 15:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, it was a bit like Rest is Politics. We couldn't do it. R I P. Wouldn't really sound like it had a long lifespan, did it? I think the answer is that there are many, many people in Scotland who are put off by what they see as right wing Conservative culture war, who don't really think the Labour Party in Scotland has reformed and is a sufficiently flexible modern party, and who don't like the SNP perpetually obsessing about independence and therefore find themselves in a difficult position. They either.

• 16:17Alastair Campbell?

  So you take votes from both sides?

• 16:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, they either hold their noses and vote for Conservative Labour with a lot of reservations, or they hold their noses and vote for SNP with a lot of reservations about about their complaints for independence. If you could produce a party that seemed, well, it's not seemed, was genuinely progressive, genuinely, I think, a party of the centre, but which was not obsessed about this issue of independence, I think you'd get a lot of votes in Scotland.

• 16:46Alastair Campbell?

  Is that not, is that not, is that not the Liberal Democrats? Could that not be the Liberal Democrats?

• 16:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, the question I think that we keep asking in these shows is around the question of, is it not the Liberal Democrats? And obviously, for somebody like me who's obsessed with the possibility of creating a moderate centre party, the question is always, why isn't it the Liberal Democrats? And that's really difficult to answer. I mean, it's been the question really since the 1920s. I mean, Britain is a moderate country. We're a country that basically has a lot of people who want to vote for the centre ground, and for some reason, the Liberal Democrats and its predecessors never really worked. And why is that? I think it's partly to do with the fact that, very sadly, it's got an insane constitution. It's run in a very, very odd way by its members. It's very difficult to reform. So if you and I were to set up such a party or join the Liberal Democrats, the first thing you'd have to do is a Tony Blair style clause four moment,

• 17:33Rory Stewart?

  where you'd have to really challenge the Lib Dems on their constitution, if you were really going to produce a winning machine.

• 17:40Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, now, shall we, shall we go to London? How, how significant do you think that was? And I know you're sort of quite seized, as was I, when you dig into this story in Tower Hamlets. I can remember back in the day, we talked about this when we talked about expectation management. When Ken Baker was Tory Party chairman and went around saying, oh, we're going to lose Westminster and Wandsworth. And then, of course, they knew they weren't and they didn't. So actually, to lose Westminster and Wandsworth and for Labour to win that was pretty seismic.

• 18:07Alastair Campbell?

  But lots has been said about that, maybe less has been said about what's happened in Tower Hamlets, where it seems that somebody who was expelled, done for corruption, is now back as an independent mayor.

• 18:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, let's just sort of, for people not following the stories closely, Ludford Rehman was a, born in Sillit in Bangladesh, he's a, but grew up in Britain, solicitor. He was a Labour councillor in the late nineties and then Labour leader of Tower Hamlet council. And then a system was set up to have a directly elected mayor, an executive mayor in Tower Hamlets. And initially, he was the Labour candidate to be that mayor. But there was a huge controversy, and this is going back to the early 2000s, where it was alleged already that he was beginning to use corrupt practices to try to push himself into being mayor. And Labour deselected him. So he then stood as an independent and won, won once, won twice.

• 19:04Rory Stewart?

  And it was only the second time that he won that people were really able to bring a case to the High Court on electoral corruption. And they won the case in the High Court. They won the case in the High Court, proving that he'd done the most extraordinary things. He had quite clearly been involved in people who were voting twice and fake names on ballots. He was clearly involved in treating voters, it was a very 18th century practice where you buy people meals. He managed to get 101 imams to launch letters, a sort of spiritual campaign for him. He made incredibly offensive false claims about his Labour opponent, accusing him of being a racist. And he seemed to bolster his position as mayor by giving out nearly three million to

• 19:49Rory Stewart?

  completely ineligible local organisations, it seemed, in return for people mobilising their vote for him. So on the basis of this, the High Court found against him, he was debarred from running for five years, he was struck off the list as a solicitor.

• 20:02Alastair Campbell?

  And now he's back.

• 20:03Rory Stewart?

  And now he's back, right? And so what's troubling about this? Firstly, it's pretty troubling, this form of politics. It's clearly what's happening here. And I think, actually, there are different versions of it in different parts of Britain. We were talking a bit about Northern Ireland. I saw a little bit of this in Glasgow, where I saw people campaigning very, very strongly around their Catholic identity and around the Catholic Church, around Celtic Football Club. But here, it's much more extreme. This is really about him mobilising a very traditional Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets with huge pressure from imams, funding which appears to be coming in from local businesses. People worried, at least they claim to be worried, that if they don't vote for him, they're not going to get housing, they're not going to get support. Real political machine stuff that

• 20:48Rory Stewart?

  we haven't seen that much of in Britain. And I think, to cut to the chase, it's an outrage that he was only banned for five years, he should have been banned for life.

• 20:57Alastair Campbell?

  But that sits not very well with your, I mean, I agree, it's pretty extraordinary that he's back in office, but that doesn't sit well with your principles in relation to another area that we often talk about, which is rehabilitation and prison reform. Is there, no, but seriously, is it possible for somebody to be punished in that way and then to come back as a reformed character? That is a fairly rhetorical question.

• 21:21Rory Stewart?

  I don't, I don't, I don't know enough about this, but I believe that if you're debarred, for example, as a doctor, you can't come back. I think, and I think if you're defrocked as a priest, there's no way back.

• 21:32Alastair Campbell?

  Is he back as a solicitor, do you know?

• 21:34Rory Stewart?

  I don't think he's back as a solicitor either. So I think we could look at being a political leader much in the way that we look at more honourable professions and say, if you've broken the professional codes that brutally, you can jolly well go off and do some other job.

• 21:47Alastair Campbell?

  We're back to the theme of who regulates the politicians and who regulates something like the ministerial code when you have somebody in charge of it, the Prime Minister who breaks it. And has a complete disregard for its contents. What you haven't got in Tower Hamlets yet Rory is a gate. I mean, it sounds to me like this should be called Luther Gate. Because that's quite, now I'm gonna, look, we've had Party Gate.

• 22:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 22:09Alastair Campbell?

  We've got Beer Gate and this is all the, I spoke at a conference in Italy a few years ago with Carl Bernstein. Carl Bernstein, as you know, with Bob Woodward was, they were the journalists behind the Watergate story in 1972. And Carl Bernstein's quite a good friend of mine, he's an absolutely top bloke. But he said something very interesting at this conference. He said, Watergate, without blowing my own trumpet, was probably the greatest newspaper investigation of all time. But it was the worst thing that ever happened to journalism. Because ever since then, journalists think that journalism is just about bringing people in power down. And that's all that good journalism is. And in fact, good journalism

• 22:51Alastair Campbell?

  is about informing debate. And good journalism is about exposing wrongdoing, but it's not just that. And so the gate suffix has become one of those awful cliches of what I think is just very, very bad journalism. So I'm going to, before we get on to Beer Gate and Party Gate, and I saw you praising Keir Starmer on social media yesterday. Can you remember the detail of any of the following? Draper Gate, Hinduja Gate, Sheregate, Black Rod Gate, or Mittelgate?

• 23:26Rory Stewart?

  I'm afraid, unfortunately for you, I do remember Hinduja Gates and Mittelgate.

• 23:32Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, why do you remember Hinduja Gate? Because it involved Peter Mandelson and passports?

• 23:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 23:37Alastair Campbell?

  And Mittelgate? Go on.

• 23:39Rory Stewart?

  Mittelgate, I have a vague, no, actually, I must confess, I have, I remember who Lakshmi Mittal is. I don't remember exactly who got themselves in trouble with Lakshmi Mittal.

• 23:47Alastair Campbell?

  The gate was created by the fact that it emerged that Tony Blair had, quote, intervened to help Mittal make a bid for steelworks in Romania. This became Mittelgate. And it led to one of Tony Blair's best ripos, I think it was in the House of Commons, when he actually called it Garbage Gate. And I'm glad you can't, I mean, the Derek Draper one was absolutely extraordinary. Derek Draper, who we've heard and and and seen a lot of recently because of course he's been very ill with with Covid and his wife Kate made an amazing documentary about about how their life had changed because of that. But back in when Derek was an advisor to Peter Badlison,

• 24:28Alastair Campbell?

  he was the victim of a sort of sting operation in which he was taped saying, there are only, I think it was seventeen, there are only seventeen people in this government who count, and I've got them all on speed dial. And that became Draper Gate, okay? So here we are, we're now, we've talked a lot about Party Gate. What do you make? I mean, my point about the gates, by the way, is that we have a pretty ridiculous media in this country. Um, I think our press is, at times like this, much of it beyond a joke. But it's not, it's not funny because it actually does have a very detrimental impact upon our politics, upon our public debate. I mean, it is quite extraordinary that the Daily Mail, at a time of Ukraine, cost of living crisis, NHS record waiting list,

• 25:13Alastair Campbell?

  Johnson breaking the law, all the things that are going on, Northern Ireland, thirteen front page leads on Keir Starmer and a bottle of beer, thirteen.

• 25:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. On the other hand, presumably, the editor also knows what he's doing because

• 25:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think we're going to have a long discussion about Paul Dacre.

• 25:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I mean, let's, I mean, we should have talked about it, but he's, in some ways, he seems to be a pretty successful commercial editor. I mean, these guys are sensing that there's a story there, that there's something that their readers want to read.

• 25:43Alastair Campbell?

  Um, I, there's no doubt he's been a commercially successful, although most of the papers are declining. I don't know where the Mail is at the moment. Um, and actually, I think the Mail's success now is largely down to the the online stuff. But the thing about Dacre is that he, I know him pretty well, although I've not spoken to him since around two thousand, I think it is, twenty odd years, and so twenty odd years better spent by not speaking to him. Uh, but the point is that he is, I think he is a real poison in our national life. I mean, these, for these guys to accuse Keir Starmer of hypocrisy, a newspaper owned by a nom dom, which is perfectly happy to campaign against, you know, tax dodging, edited by somebody who fiercely

• 26:27Alastair Campbell?

  A de-European but very happy to take European grants for one of his many, many estates up in the Highlands of Scotland with another home in one of the tax havens. I mean, these are people who, if they were subject to the sort of abuse, vitriol, scrutiny, investigation that they put upon others, would not survive 10 minutes.

• 26:46Rory Stewart?

  I couldn't agree more, which is why I think I didn't pull you up hard enough a couple of weeks ago where you said in response to my saying actually how unpleasant it is being an MP, you said, well, yeah, they've just got to get thick skins. But I think it's very, very difficult actually explaining to somebody who hasn't been a member of parliament just what you're asking when you say, well, they've just got to have a thick skin.

• 27:08Alastair Campbell?

  I was a bit more sympathetic than that, Rory. I was a bit more sympathetic than that. You have to develop a thick skin, but you also, the other thing, you have to take these people on, in my view. And far too few people in politics are prepared to stand up and say, these people damage our life. We've got an election going on in Australia at the moment with Scott Morrison, who's another kind of Johnson-Trump style populist. And I watched their TV debate the other day with him and Albanese, the opposition leader. And honestly, I felt so sorry for the woman who was moderating it because they just basically sort of shouted slogans at each other. And but then I read this piece by a guy from University of Melbourne, who written, there's a thing called the conversation, which is post-academics writing about, and he wrote this piece about really interesting but searing

• 27:52Alastair Campbell?

  analysis of the impact of Murdoch on Australian politics. I think many of our owners and editors have given up any pretense that they have a positive democratic role. So what you've seen with the Mail in recent days is, and the Sun and other papers in relation to Keir Starmer, is simply an attempt to persuade the public, yes, they don't say this, yes, Boris Johnson's a terrible prime minister and he's done some terrible things, but they're all as bad as each other. We have to show that Keir Starmer is as bad as Boris Johnson. That's what they're doing. And it's got to be called out.

• 28:24Rory Stewart?

  Basically, what these papers are doing is they are party political, aren't they? They're very clear that they're conservative papers and they're supporting conservative candidates. And in fact, they have a tradition, British papers have a tradition of coming out before elections, actually declaring for one party or another. Famously, the Sun came out, coming out against Neil Kinnock, last person out of Britain, turn the lights out and stuff. But you worked for the Mirror, which was basically out to get the Tories. Boost Labour, right? I mean, is the Mirror not just doing the same thing?

• 28:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, what I think is different, I think that the Mirror is, was in my day and is today a paper that supports the Labour Party. But if you look at, for example, the way that Mirror covered the stories about Dominic Cummings, which they broke, okay. Yes, because it was their story, they pushed it very, very hard. But I think if you go back and look at every single thing that Pippa Creera wrote in the Daily Mirror about that, yes, you'll see the commentary, yes, you'll see the headlines that are very kind of pointed. What you don't see is stuff that's just frankly made up. You don't see, I mean, for example, you had a situation with, which Nadine Dorries tweeted out, a picture of Keir Starmer having a curry. Now, you look

• 29:34Alastair Campbell?

  at that picture and you think, oh, well, that must be, he's having the curry at that event. You then see the whole picture, it was with Frank Dobson, who's been dead for several years.

• 29:42Rory Stewart?

  But let me push back on this, though. The Daily Mirror printed stories about Boris Johnson during Partygate, showing Boris Johnson drinking. And of course, those were not actually pictures from that event.

• 29:52Alastair Campbell?

  So, I, look, I, I think what you've seen with the Mail, you've seen it again today, they've been banging on, a recent front page, Keir running away from the opportunity to clear the air. He goes out and does what he does, says he'll resign if he gets a fixed penalty notice, quotes, he's piling pressure on the police. So what they do, this is what I think we mean by.

• 30:10Rory Stewart?

  Let me push back for a second. I agree with you that these newspapers are deeply, deeply damaging. I think where I differ from you, and of course, this is a difficult thing to say to you as a veteran Daily Mirror journalist, is that it's actually going on across the board. I found myself in the Daily Mirror, being accused of saying things that I hadn't said. Some of the most unpleasant experiences of my life was connected with those kind of articles. So I, I think that it is a broader problem of tablo journalism. Now, you're right, of course, that the majority of these newspapers are right wing newspapers. So the Daily Mirror is a bit of an outlier.

• 30:43Alastair Campbell?

  And maybe that is why I defend the Mirror, other than the kind of, look, and I'm not going to defend the Mirror, you know, right or wrong. When the Mirror does stuff like, you know, hacking phones or all the other stuff that goes on, wrong, condemn it. But I think I can remember when I was, you mentioned Neil Kinnock, when I was a journalist covering Neil Kinnock, I remember a trip we did to America when Ronald Reagan was president. And you honestly felt like you were with, I was with, a group of people who were basically part of a kind of anti-Labour squad. And I think that's what you see with with with Keir Starmer. And I think the other point, the other point about Keir, let me just make this point, Roy, the point about Keir Starmer.

• 31:21Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 31:22Alastair Campbell?

  I think they understand that for all that people say about Keir, he hasn't got charisma, all the other stuff that gets said. I think a sort of basic sense of decency and public service is starting to come through about Keir, and I think it's worrying them. So they've got to try and drag him down to Johnson's level.

• 31:38Rory Stewart?

  Course, course, course, and and of course, but let's just get to the Keir thing before we go to the break, which is fundamentally, he's got a big problem. He faced a big political problem. He has made a huge deal, making some very, very strong moral statements about Boris breaking the rules and getting a fine from the Metropolitan Police. I personally think that was a mistake. What he should have focused on is Boris misleading Parliament, Boris Johnson misleading Parliament. Then that I think the public probably sense that, and it's a difficult thing for a politician to say, but that many people may feel that they bent the Covid rules, may feel that what happened in Downing Street was not the most serious thing in the world. What was much more serious was him lying about it to Parliament, him standing at the dispatch box doing that.

• 32:23Rory Stewart?

  If Starmer had really put the emphasis on that, so that you didn't get the Conservatives saying, well, you know, isn't this just a bit like getting a speeding ticket or something, right? And he would have been in a safer position now, but the problem is that if the Durham Police find him, he's put so much emphasis, given the impression that the fundamental crime of Boris Johnson was doing something that got him fined by the police. He really has no alternative other than to resign. And I agree with you, he is a man of integrity. I'm extremely pleased that he's come out and said that he will resign.

• 32:57Rory Stewart?

  But to ask a question that's going to be an uncomfortable question, if the Durham Police find him, if he resigns, what do you think that will actually do? Will that put much more pressure on Boris Johnson? Or unfortunately, do you think Boris Johnson will just shrug it off?

• 33:12Alastair Campbell?

  Well, yesterday, and I having just said that, you know, newspapers do have a habit of making up stories, so I can't pretend it's a hundred percent, but it was being circulated yesterday that when Johnson was told that Keir Starmer had said he'd resign, he laughed his head off. I think Boris, look, we already know that Boris Johnson sort of doesn't do shame, he doesn't do accountability, he doesn't do responsibility, he doesn't do guilt, you know, whatever he feels as he's looking at himself in the mirror, none of us know. But I don't think he will, but I think it does, I think, look, one of the things that's been happening, I think, in our politics and is, and by the way, I agree with you, and I said at the time, that I think it was absolutely fine to attack Johnson over the

• 33:57Alastair Campbell?

  party culture, over breaking the law, but the big point about Johnson was misleading Parliament, it was lying in Parliament. Now, he still maybe got done on that through the Privileges Committee, that could happen. We still haven't seen Sue Gray's report as well, other things may emerge. But I think if you're making a big thing about decency, about values, about standards in public life, then you, I think he had no option but to say, if I'm, now, what I was surprised that he didn't say, unlike Johnson, I will fight this in court if I have to. Because you are really putting your hands now into, you know, I'm sure there are some great coppers in Durham, but, you know, you're talking about

• 34:38Alastair Campbell?

  a police force that basically decided to do nothing about Dominic Cummings. Now, I don't know whether pressure was applied or not, I have no idea. But, no, but at least I think, funny enough, I've just been for a swim this morning, and there was a guy in the queue, he was a doctor, and he just, he just said, oh my God, it was such a relief yesterday to see a politician actually doing something of honour and integrity.

• 34:59Rory Stewart?

  I couldn't agree more, couldn't agree more, and I think that's a good moment, which we're going to go to the break.

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• 37:08Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the second part of episode 11 of The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 37:14Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart. I find it a bit difficult to believe we're on episode 11. It's extraordinary.

• 37:17Alastair Campbell?

  It is extraordinary. Tempest fugit when you're having a great time, Rory.

• 37:21Rory Stewart?

  There we are.

• 37:23Alastair Campbell?

  See how I can do the Latin as well as what's his name? Let's kick off the second part with a question from Isaac Jones. He wants our opinion on recent Chinese escalation in foreign policy. And he says this, "They have more ships than the American Navy. They have a bigger nuclear arsenal, and they are debt-trapping African and Asian countries, which is a way of spreading their power and their influence. And I think the Russians have been, up until their recent problems, have been playing a similar game."

• 37:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think we've got to start first with the scale of China. One of the very strange things is that people forget that from the time of the Roman Empire, right the way through to the 18th century... China was by far the largest country and economy on earth, probably fifty percent of the global economy for that whole nearly two thousand year period. And that the last couple of hundred years have really been the exception with China coming down the ranks and it's now rising up again very, very fast. And if you look at it in purchasing power parity terms, its GDP is immense. And it's very difficult to imagine a world over the next two hundred years where China is not really the dominant power. Hmm. Now, so the question is, what's China going to do with that power?

• 38:34Rory Stewart?

  And this is very, very difficult to answer. My instinct is, having dealt with Chinese diplomats, and actually I was born in Hong Kong, my father spent nearly fifty years of his life working in and around China, is that the real threat that China might pose in national security terms is to Taiwan. I think it's very, very likely that Xi Jinping will decide that part of his legacy involves trying to incorporate Taiwan back into China, and we need to prepare for that and plan for that and think what we're going to do were they to attempt to do that. And remember, it is almost impossible to imagine successfully, sadly, whatever our obligations are towards Taiwan, imagining a major war being fought, because as soon

• 39:15Rory Stewart?

  as those US aircraft carriers begin sailing towards Taiwan and the first one is sunk, which is five thousand American sailors dead in an instant. It's very difficult to imagine the US population wanting to continue that kind of conflict directly. Ukraine is very different. That's being done through a proxy. It's not involving thousands of your own people dying. But I don't think China has the sort of global ambitions which would involve it trying to intervene militarily in places like Africa. In fact, I very much felt when I was dealing with China's ambassador in Afghanistan, that China thought that the United States and Britain were out of their minds doing these military interventions in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and that, as the questioner implied...

• 39:57Rory Stewart?

  China could get much more of what it wanted through its economic weight and force and it didn't need to get into micromanaging the politics of other people's countries.

• 40:04Alastair Campbell?

  But they're very, they are absolute, absolutely ruthlessly focused on a pretty hard edged soft power is how I would put it, right across Asia and right across Africa. And I think we've been a little bit blind to that.

• 40:20Rory Stewart?

  I think that's absolutely right. I mean, if you look where I'm speaking to you now from the Middle East, China has put in something like three hundred and twenty seven billion dollars in investment into this region through its Britain Road Initiative. But I think it's also important to understand there is a weakness there, a potential weakness there. The fact that you own something in another country, Chinese state company owns a port or a Chinese state company owns a mine, we tend to imagine that means that they've got it forever and that they can secure that port and that mine. But of course, as Britain discovered with the Suez Canal, it doesn't always work like that. Britain owned the Suez Canal, NASA decided to nationalise it and ultimately there's not much you can do. And this is beginning to happen in Africa.

• 41:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you also see here, the, I was talking to somebody the other day who was telling me the, the, the, the flight of property capital from London to Dubai as a consequence of what's been happening in Europe, in Ukraine because of all the Russians is, so events will, will drive that change as well. But I think we're kidding ourselves that we don't think the Chinese have been incredibly strategic about what they've done there.

• 41:23Rory Stewart?

  Yes, and, and with a very, very long term plan. But if they, but they have to, like anyone, balance it. African countries can be very nationalistic and if China attempts to overplay their hand, it's perfectly possible that these countries will simply renationalise ports, which is what's actually happened in the Horn of Africa. Countries have turned around and they've expropriated investments from the Gulf, for example, and they could do the same with China. So don't assume just because China's bought a port or a mine that they're going to be able to hold on to it forever.

• 41:50Alastair Campbell?

  No, and, and talking of military power and displays thereof.

• 41:56Alastair Campbell?

  The Putin show was a bit weird in the end. I mean, he didn't look very well for a start. And I always have a thing, when I go to Burnley, if I'm sitting in the director's box, at half time, if it's cold, they come around with blankets and give you a blanket to put on your knees. And I always say, I wouldn't be seen dead with a blanket over my knees. And yet he had a blanket over his knees.

• 42:18Rory Stewart?

  Which is weird, right?

• 42:19Alastair Campbell?

  And he was coughing.

• 42:20Rory Stewart?

  And he's only four years older than you. And, no, it was weird because you're right, he's so keen to, you know, project this super macho image and to give the impression that he can stand in freezing Russian rivers up to his waist. And sitting with a blanket on your lap really does make you look pretty elderly, doesn't it? Something you associate with the sort of bath chair.

• 42:40Alastair Campbell?

  There was a lack of, there was a lack of energy, I thought. Well, put it this way, you remind me a little bit, you know, when you see politicians and you can spot when they are low on energy, but they feel I've got to do energy here, you can sort of.

• 42:53Rory Stewart?

  You felt that with him going up the stairs and he tried to do that classic thing politicians always told to do, which is to sort of run up the stairs. I think Tony Blair was a great one for that. But you could see, I think his left knee is clearly bothering him because he's actually struggling a little bit to get up the stairs at the pace at which he wants. But let me, let me sort of go to the oddity of that story. Everybody was building up that speech. So the great speech, speech, famously, the great military parade, one of these great visions that takes you right back to the Soviet Union, the tanks rolling through goodness knows how many, maybe hundreds of thousands of soldiers marching, all looking over their right shoulder and saluting. But he didn't do what people thought he was going to do. He didn't double down. He didn't make some great

• 43:37Rory Stewart?

  general mobilization, didn't announce that he was going to march to Kiev, let alone Warsaw. And I think that is something that's worth thinking about. Because you can interpret it in one of two ways. If you're feeling more aggressive towards Russia, you would take this as a sign of weakness. And it might encourage some people in the United Kingdom and the United States to think, okay, we need to double down. I would suggest that you might want to take the other conclusion from that, which is that he has, for some reason, decided to so far show some restraint in the way that he responds to the West. Notice, he has a lot of cyber capacity.

• 44:16Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, should not be used as far as we know.

• 44:18Rory Stewart?

  And he's not mounting major cyber attacks against our critical national infrastructure. He could be attacking NATO's supply lines, supplying Kiev, right? The Ukrainians have been firing into Russian territory to stop Russian supplies getting into Ukraine. You can imagine him firing into neighbouring countries around the edge of Ukraine to stop supplies coming to Ukraine. He's not doing that.

• 44:37Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 44:38Rory Stewart?

  And of course, he hasn't triggered a tactical nuclear weapon. And I think that we need to be conscious of that because there's a danger that we have a fantasy now in our mind that it's going to somehow be easy to retake Mariupol, retake Donbass. And of course, that, and we will feel, quite rightly, that that's the just thing to do, that this is a brutal, oppressive invasion, that Zelensky, who is the greatest hero now in the Western world, is desperate to back us in a war to retake eastern Ukraine. But we've got to remember, this is not the Second World War. This is not the Soviets in Afghanistan. It is going to be unbelievably difficult to get Russia out of Donbass.

• 45:23Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know whether you'd have seen it because you're where you are, but yesterday, Ben Wallace made a, I think he may have been, not have listened to you, Rory, last week when you were talking about how the Conservative Cabinet should stop using the Ukraine situation as part of burnishing their leadership credentials, but he was basically comparing Putin to Hitler. But there was an interview with the Ukrainian ambassador afterwards, who was very much trying to push the British government further and into an even harder position than we've taken. I'll tell you the thing that slightly troubled me is, one of the things that's been quite interesting about this whole Ukraine war has been the extent to which the Western intelligence

• 46:07Alastair Campbell?

  seems to be ahead of the game at pretty much every step. And I assumed, reading all the stuff in the build up to Putin's speech, that some of that was being informed by that. So one of the thoughts I had was actually whether they weren't quite as plugged in, or do you think I'm reading too much?

• 46:27Rory Stewart?

  No, I think you're absolutely right. I think we don't have much access to the immediate thinking around Putin. We don't know where the intelligence came from that gave us that initial information on the invasion. But I think we should be very, very cautious about concluding that we have an exact picture of what's going on. I also think that we have to ask the cliched question, which has to be asked again and again, where does this end? You know, what realistically do people think is going to happen here? What really would be involved in trying to do the kinds of things that people in Britain and the United States are talking about? People, when they talk about Hitler, right, there's a lot of talk about, as you say, people use this analogy all the time, now they talk

• 47:09Rory Stewart?

  about Putin being in a bunker. They talk about, you know, how he's got to go. They have a sort of fantasy that, like in Afghanistan, because the Afghan war went wrong, that's going to lead to the collapse of Putin. I think we need to be honest about the fact that there is no reason to believe that at all. There's absolutely no reason to believe that Putin is about to fall. And there isn't much reason to believe that Ukraine is really in a position to recapture eastern Donbass. And so we're getting into a situation in which, yes, they may be able to retake, they had a good operation around Kharkiv, there may be bits of territory going back and forth. But I think setting up a whole mission

• 47:54Rory Stewart?

  based around a very, very unlikely idea, that you're going to be able to retake the whole of Ukraine and then topple the Putin regime, is setting yourself up, potentially if that goes wrong, as I think it will, for years of horror, and years of horror of sanctions on the Russian people, which will, I'm afraid, if they go on too long, may well mean that

• 48:16Rory Stewart?

  The Russian people suffer, but people like Putin can actually survive, as is often the case sadly, with sanctions elsewhere. But time for quickfire questions.

• 48:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, let's get, and let's try and get through loads of these and keep our answers very, I can, I can start with one for you, very, very quick answer.

• 48:30Rory Stewart?

  All right, go for it.

• 48:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, somebody said that they tried your porridge method and were surprised to be impressed by it. So now they want to know, now they want to know what, what their toppings should be.

• 48:42Rory Stewart?

  Ah, well, okay. So the, the key point about the porridge method, obviously.

• 48:45Alastair Campbell?

  That was from Mark Taylor, by the way.

• 48:46Rory Stewart?

  Very good. So just remind people who weren't following, you, you boil the water first, you then pour the porridge on top, or you pour the oatmeals on top of the boiling water. You get it to the consistency you like, you then turn off the flame, put a lid on it, and let it sit for a couple of minutes before you eat it.

• 49:04Alastair Campbell?

  Right, and topping.

• 49:05Rory Stewart?

  And so topping, two things you can do, you can, if you want to be, you can actually stew stuff in the porridge. So you could actually stick some strawberries into the porridge and get them stewed, stewed fruit in the porridge itself. But obviously, if you want to be healthy, this is your great chance to put on all those funny seeds and nuts that the doctors keep encouraging you to eat. I, I also, I also.

• 49:28Alastair Campbell?

  Short answer, Rory, we said, short answer.

• 49:31Rory Stewart?

  Okay, short answer, okay, stop that.

• 49:32Alastair Campbell?

  This is not a book.

• 49:33Rory Stewart?

  I'll leave the honey maple syrup question till later.

• 49:35Alastair Campbell?

  We do not need Rory Stewart's book on porridge. A short answer. Right, you give, you, you fire one at me.

• 49:41Rory Stewart?

  Question about reshuffles. How are they planned? What happens when they don't go according to plan? From Ross.

• 49:45Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, reshuffles are a complete nightmare. They're an absolute nightmare. I think some of the most painful and difficult periods were around reshuffles because, well, look, you know this, I mean, most politicians have a, a bit of vanity. Some politicians have a lot of vanity. They all think they should be chancellor, or if they can't be prime minister. Um. And it's like a sort of gigantic jigsaw puzzle and you do have, you have to recognise there are, there is political power being played out sometimes. So quite often reshuffles were made more difficult because John Prescott was insisting that one of, quote, his people was given a decent job in a decent department.

• 50:25Rory Stewart?

  And was, that was true for Gordon Brown too.

• 50:27Alastair Campbell?

  It was very true for Gordon Brown.

• 50:28Rory Stewart?

  He'd have people.

• 50:29Alastair Campbell?

  Go, Gordon had people that he, that he, you know, and this is not necessarily a bad thing. He had people that he rated and wanted to put in positions, but also that was part of cementing power around the government. And then, of course, the other thing that's happening, uh, in the modern age, I think it did, when I was a journalist, you did used to sort of spend all day just hanging around, waiting for it all to be done. Now it's like every sort of movement, somebody is texting or WhatsApping somebody and it's kind of just all out there. So there's just this never ending rumor mill. I don't believe they change that much unless the, unless the prime minister wants to use them to change the direction of government.

• 51:03Rory Stewart?

  So one of the weird things I think about them, just, just quickly on this, is the sense in which they're like a snowball or a sort of self fulfilling prophecy that if somebody quite obscure is put in the cabinet, they can suddenly become a major player and a leadership contender. David Cameron's decision, for example, to make sure that the first people that he promoted were Liz Truss, Priti Patel, Sajid Javid, Esther McVeigh, had huge impacts on their future in the party. And one of the reasons why Liz Truss is talked about as a leadership contender now is because of that early decision back in the day in the early Cameron administration. If, on the other hand, he promoted other very talented people, Damien Hines, for example, Damien might well now be talked about as leadership, as a leadership candidate in a way that he's not.

• 51:48Alastair Campbell?

  That's why it's called, that's why it's called a greasy pole.

• 51:50Rory Stewart?

  It is a greasy pole.

• 51:52Alastair Campbell?

  It is a bit of a greasy pole. You can go down as fast as you go up.

• 51:55Rory Stewart?

  And but oddly, once you're put in the spotlight, people can decide you're a great performer, but you're not necessarily objectively any better than anyone else. It just happens that people are focusing. Okay. Next question, uh, from Paul. If Starmer and Reiner find and resign, Labour will enter into a protracted leadership contest. Do you think Boris Johnson will use that hiatus to call an election?

• 52:18Alastair Campbell?

  I honestly don't know the answer to that. Look, I think one of the lessons from the local elections is that Boris Johnson's political position is not as strong as these right-wing newspapers would have you believe. I think a lot of people have decided they do not want him as Prime Minister, including quite a lot of conservative-leaning people. I suspect he waited out. He might think he can win a general election, but how often can they keep going? It's like, you know, we're speaking on the morning of the Queen's Speech. So I think Boris Johnson will actually be quite pleased that Keir Starmer's all over the front page, and there's probably going to be as much coverage about the Queen's Speech of the fact that the Queen's not there and Prince Charles is doing it as there is about what's in it, because there's next to nothing in it that wasn't in it last year. How many years can they trot out?

• 53:03Alastair Campbell?

  There's going to be a bonfire of Brexit red tape, we're going to level up, we're going to crack down on protesters, and we're going to boost the cost of living.

• 53:10Rory Stewart?

  It is extraordinary. I mean, a friend of mine, who's a Conservative, former MP, was saying how incredibly weird it is that somebody with a majority like that, majority of 80...

• 53:24Alastair Campbell?

  He's got no programme.

• 53:25Rory Stewart?

  Does so little. It's extraordinary.

• 53:27Alastair Campbell?

  He's got no programme for government. There is no coherent plan for the country. That's what the Queen's Speech is meant to be. This is where the country's heading. It's just the same slogans as last year.

• 53:37Rory Stewart?

  Totally bizarre. Okay, Martin, I was surprised to read in the week 30th April, in addition to all the grief, it's extremely expensive at a personal level to become an MP. Is that right? Okay, let me take that one. Very, very awkward question for any serving MP to answer, because of course the fact is MPs earn into the £70,000 range. Their take-home's a little bit less because they take their pension away, and that of course is a lot more than many listeners this programme will be earning, and it's definitely much, much more than the average income in Britain. But the truth is, of course, that many of these MPs are going into this profession having earned more in previous lives. They will have mortgages. They are having to commute back and forth from their constituencies.

• 54:22Rory Stewart?

  They are spend, they obviously now we're getting into a world where that often used to be topped up in the past with people having second incomes. But if you're an ambitious MP, you want to go somewhere, you probably don't want to have a second income because that'll get you in trouble in the newspapers. People quite rightly ask questions about what the second job is and how you can afford to do a second job. So the truth is that compared to comparable members of parliament in many other places, they don't earn very much. For example, a Nigerian member of parliament, I think earns about three times as much.

• 54:54Alastair Campbell?

  People usually talk about the Singaporean cabinet who are all on over a million because they, they, they, they're determined to get the best, what they see as the best people in there. I want my favourite question of the week, Rory. You may not like this one, but it's my favourite question of the week. It comes from Jack Bailey. He describes himself as a working class kid whose teacher spotted something in him and he got to Cambridge. And he read last week Emma Duncan in The Times bemoaning the fact that Oxbridge is being hurt in the name of equality. And Jack wants to know, is admitting people like me degrading Oxbridge? Or are upper class people worried that their privilege is threatened? It won't surprise you to know that I'm in the second camp on this one.

• 55:40Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think, I think it's a very difficult choice that places like Oxford face because they are trying desperately, quite rightly, to judge who the very brightest students are. And that's a difficult judgment to make with a seventeen, eighteen year old. If one lot of them who've been to private school have been put through a much, much more intensive education system, which has given them a huge opportunity to digest an enormous amount of information and has practised them in producing very slick answers. So if all you're doing. Is looking at how somebody performs in the exam aged eighteen, you are going to tend to take people who've been lucky enough to have the privilege of going through a much more intensive education system, because this is something, again, that, you know,

• 56:24Rory Stewart?

  we keep coming back to. But the truth is that if you go to a private school, you get simply more hours of tuition a week, you get smaller class sizes.

• 56:32Alastair Campbell?

  And they've got the connections, the schools have the connections into Oxford.

• 56:35Rory Stewart?

  And not just the connections, it's not just the connections point, that's a cheap and easy point for you to make.

• 56:40Alastair Campbell?

  No, but it's true, they have, that's what they exist to do.

• 56:43Rory Stewart?

  It's also true that.

• 56:44Alastair Campbell?

  The state schools are less adept at getting their kids in, and it's not just because the kids are less intelligent.

• 56:49Rory Stewart?

  Not just because of connections, it's because of the fact that they haven't been trained as well for that exam. And so the judgment that the universities have to make is to try to work out who the genuinely bright kids are, and they can't do it purely off the exam. They have to wait for the fact, they have to put in some waiting for the fact that people who haven't been trained as hard may perform less well in the exams, but may turn out after three years at Oxford Cambridge.

• 57:13Alastair Campbell?

  They also have to accept, the colleges have to accept that though they, some of them talk a good game on access, the change has not been nearly as good as it could and should have been. I M H O. Anyway, that was my favourite question of the week. Thank you very much, Jack Bailey. What was your favourite question of the week, Rory?

• 57:34Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, look, I'm a real fan of a guy called Tom Morris, who's at Bristol Old Vic, and he's written in, say, you seem keen to break it with a new party, which you might hope might escape the toxic mud-slinging discourse of PMQs, et cetera. But in the last podcast, you defend the opposition architecture of the House of Commons, advocate for the mayoral system, run a committee system, stand up for the adversarial British legal system.

• 57:56Alastair Campbell?

  Very good point.

• 57:57Rory Stewart?

  So wouldn't you, your hope for a new party work better with a more European system that was more PR, more collaborative, and a new circular chamber? What do you think about that?

• 58:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think that question was directed at you. I'm with him. I was arguing for the change of the, and you were saying, no, let's stick with sort of, you know, throwing swords at each other.

• 58:17Rory Stewart?

  I don't think it needs to be an either or. I think you can have a proportional representation system and still have a proper adversarial debate. I think adversarial debate is a really good way of clarifying things and I think it suits a bit of our temperament. And I don't think that we need to think that discussion and argument need really mean that, uh, that you can't find your way towards sensible policies. In fact, I think it's often a really good way of clarifying. You don't want to just be stuck in a gray sludge of fake agreement. You want to get to that moderate radical centre ground through argument.

• 58:51Alastair Campbell?

  I thought your question, favourite question, might have been the one from Ben Gray, who says, Alastair Campbell always sounds like he's right. When was he ever wrong?

• 59:01Alastair Campbell?

  I think, look, we're coming to the end of the podcast. I really don't have time. We'll go into that another day maybe.

• 59:06Rory Stewart?

  And you're going to tell us next time how fast for Pete your part run time was.

• 59:10Alastair Campbell?

  My part run was incredibly slow because I was going backwards and forwards to talk to people. I've got quite a funny one that I think we should close on. But first of all, a comment. Somebody made a comment, Roy, that Rory Stewart can't go on forever being a cross between Ranelph Fides and Alan Wicker. I thought that was absolutely brilliant. But the other, let's try this one from Anthony W. What's the funniest heckle or sledge or put down of an opponent you've ever heard in Parliament? And I'm going to, I'm going to alight on the word sledge, because I think that's an Australian cricketing term. And my favourite was Paul Keating, who I

• 59:49Alastair Campbell?

  absolutely adored, Australian Prime Minister. And he saw off about six leaders of the opposition over his time. And I think actually would have been more than a match from the wretched Scomo, whose elections were made the 21st, by the way. But Keating was up against one of these Tory leaders who was absolutely fulminating, red in the face, raging at him. And Keating got up and says, I think the right old gentleman should learn to calm down. He's no spring chicken. After all, I knew him when he had grey hair.

• 1:00:26Rory Stewart?

  That's beautiful. That's very good.

• 1:00:27Alastair Campbell?

  That was the end of him. That was the end of him.

• 1:00:29Rory Stewart?

  I think it's too good. We'll let you finish on that.

• 1:00:32Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, great. Listen, it's been lovely to talk to you as ever. Have a nice, have a nice weekend, Jordan.

• 1:00:37Rory Stewart?

  See you next week. Bye bye.

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