176. Can the Tory Party be saved?

What actually happens behind the scenes at a Conservative or Labour Party Conference? What would it take to get the Conservative Party back to the centre-ground? What is going on between Kosovo and Serbia? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more on today’s episode of The Rest Is Politics. 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 2:41Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:44Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 2:46Rory Stewart?

  Good, and Alistair, what are we on with this week?

• 2:48Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to have to talk about this wretched Conservative Party conference, which is doing my head in. You want to have a chat about what the centre right, the sort of moderate mainstream Conservative Party does in the face of the nonsense and madness that's going on. And then we want to talk about Kosovo, yet another huge story of international significance, which is getting next to no debating space in the UK media. But I guess we should start with the Tory Party Conference, because I've been, not good for my mental health, but I've been watching rather a lot of it.

• 3:21Rory Stewart?

  So very quickly, on party conferences, I have been to 10 of them. And they, let me just give you a little bit of a sense, because I think the public doesn't always see this, how bizarre they are, the Conservatives alternate, in my time, between Birmingham and Manchester. So they used to do these seaside towns like Blackpool, but now they do these enormous conference centres in Birmingham and Manchester. And there are these very, very long security queues to get in and out and these passes you have to wear, which means it's actually pretty difficult to interact with the normal city around you. Every time you try to pop out for a drink, or if you're an MP with a relatively small salary, you're staying in a cheap hotel on the other end of town, there's a huge line of queues to try to get in and out through these security lines. You then get in.

• 4:05Rory Stewart?

  And in the middle of them, there are all these events happening. So there are the main events, which used to be popular, don't seem to be anymore, but used to fight to try to get in and see the Prime Minister. There are endless stands of people trying to sell you, if you're a Tory, I don't know what they sell at the Labour Party conferences, but I think Tories sell you walking sticks and tweed caps and copies of Boris Johnson's book on the Roman Empire. And then there are these alternations between seeing your constituents, where you have slightly overpriced sandwiches or a cocktail hour at a local hotel outside the conference with your constituents who've come down. But increasingly, they don't come down because they've become so expensive. It's hundreds of pounds to attend.

• 4:45Rory Stewart?

  So the old days, in Blackpool and places where you'd have, you know, 20,000 delegates coming down, have largely gone. So increasingly, you've got business people filling it rather than your own constituents. I would often only have five or six people for my local association there. And then in the evenings, you have these terrifying parties. So you have, you know, Sky News with the music going. You've got this horrible thing we've been seeing, which we really never need to see again, but we'll put in the show notes anyway, of Pretty Patel dancing with Nigel Farage. You have the Scottish Party, which is always one that, you know, you've got to turn up to. Then there'll be a party hosted by Israel. There'll be party hosted by Middle Eastern governments. There will be governments like

• 5:26Rory Stewart?

  Azerbaijan in the old days, always trying to get people in and persuade them to go on an all caviar included trip to Azerbaijan. It's a pretty terrifying set of things. And of course, it's during the MPs' holiday. So many of them are sitting there. They've got to pay out of their own pocket. They can't claim on expenses, this big ticket and their hotel bills. So many of them, I think, just stay away because they can't quite bear the thing.

• 5:49Alastair Campbell?

  I guess I've been to about 20 Labour conferences. But of course, when I was a journalist, I used to go to the Tories and the Lib Dems. And the TUC as well. Okay, what was the difference between them when you went? What's roughly your cliche difference between the three conferences? Lib Dems, you sort of spend most of the time thinking, what the hell am I doing here? I'm not going to get much of the paper from this. But quite nice people and quite interesting. Quite earnest, quite idealistic. Yeah, quite. There was a period, you mentioned the the foundation of the SDP. There was a period when that whole kind of Liberal Democrat space was was much more exciting politically than maybe it is now. And were you ever tempted, when Shirley Williams and Roy Jenkins left, was that a moment where you ever thought?

• 6:34Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, no, I didn't. Did you see them as traitors? Were people like you very angry with them? Traitor overstates it. I understood why they did it, but I did see them ultimately as people who, in the short term, were helping the Conservative Party. But maybe in the long term, I don't know whether you could argue that they they made the Labour Party come back to a more sensible position by leaving. Labour conferences, obviously where politically I feel much more at home. I think I probably it's fair to say I probably have better memories of Labour conferences from my drinking, my drinking days, because of course, there is a phenomenal amount of alcohol gets consumed at these conferences, and that was never very good. Tory conferences, I always felt that I was sort of treated like a, I don't know, there was something about it, they used to like to sort of, I think they knew that they could

• 7:19Alastair Campbell?

  pick fights and I'd get very aerated and angry with them. And but I think the Tory parties in the early days were much, much more stage managed than Labour, and I think maybe we then started to stage manage ours a bit more. But I've got to be honest, I didn't enjoy, when I was working for the Labour Party, I didn't enjoy conferences, because of course, you know, it is a really, work wise, if you're on, if you're with the, working with the leader, it's bloody hard work. He had to go out to all these wretched parties, you know, literally go out and do about 10, 14 parties in the evening, which on the Saturday, Sunday, Monday, before the speech on the Tuesday, I would kind of say, right, well, you go out, I'm staying in there. And I would honestly become incredibly antisocial. And I just, I would see the press twice a day, maybe, I'd make a few phone calls, but

• 8:03Alastair Campbell?

  otherwise I'd work in a hotel room on the speech with people like David. Miliband and Philip Gold and Peter Hyman and we just, that's what I would do.

• 8:11Rory Stewart?

  And the speeches, the speeches were really big deals. I mean, we'll get a chance to talk about Keir Starmer's speech next week, but they were great set piece occasions, weren't they? With huge amounts of expectation riding on them.

• 8:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And also really big moments. And, you know, my first

• 8:25Rory Stewart?

  Was that your clause four moment? Was that conference?

• 8:27Alastair Campbell?

  That was the first Labour Party conference as leader, yeah. And I think my very first conference was Neil Kinnock's Millicent speech, which was probably to this day, the most single, most electrifying speech I've ever attended at a, at a party conference. That was in Bournemouth. I mean, we put so much work into those speeches and I get the feeling these days with, with speeches, I mean, honestly, I've watched some of the Conservative speeches, they've been pretty, the quality's been dire. It really has. There's nobody there with a big argument. I thought James Cleverly, the Foreign Secretary, his was one of the funniest because there were about eight people in the room and his whole speech was about how everybody listened to what Britain said in the world, which we, you and I know is no longer true, particularly since Brexit, but they weren't even listening at his own conference.

• 9:11Rory Stewart?

  I mean, the first thing is the amazing dichotomy of different, different narratives coming out. So I'm very disturbed by some of the stuff that's coming out of the conference and we'll, we'll get into that. And then just to wind me up, one of my former colleagues who's in the cabinet and who I like very much has just sent me an email saying, "Conference is very jolly and Rishi Sunak increasingly reminds me of you Rory." So there we are. That was a, that was a good way to sort of put me on the back foot just before I begin, just before I begin complaining about the conference. No, it's been absolutely terrifying from my point of view. It's as though there is a concerted attempt to try to drive every last moderate out of the Conservative Party. Just to give you three little clips of that. There's Priti Patel dancing with Nigel Farage.

• 9:54Alastair Campbell?

  Horrible.

• 9:54Rory Stewart?

  And Priti Patel giving a speech saying that the Brexit hating, truth suppressing, I think it was truth suppressing, was it, or was freedom denying BBC and so-called mainstream media?

• 10:08Alastair Campbell?

  Her point being that she was to say that GB News was a wonderful TV station.

• 10:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, this right wing news station is absolutely fantastic. They were all applauding. And then you had, um, let's trust signing, would you believe it, signing copies of her mini budget? And speaking to a packed room. Now, admittedly, the room, when I looked at it more closely, looked as though it was considerably smaller. She wasn't doing what Boris Johnson did, which is trying to fill a massive room. But anyway, she got a fair number of people turning up. And Jacob Rees-Mogg, my third thing that really offended me is, you know, we've been interviewing Minette Batters recently, the head of the National Farmers Union. And it's interviewing her on leading, she's going to be coming up in the next few weeks. And she was talking about the incredible strains that the Australian trade deal is imposing on British farmers. And there's Jacob Rees-Mogg out there saying, I love Australian beef. I love hormones in my beef. That's horrifying. Shocking. Anyway, what do you make of it all?

• 10:57Alastair Campbell?

  All of that, all of the above and more. I mean, I, I think that in terms of the, the kind of debate around the, insofar as there is a debate, that the issue that's had by far the most media coverage has been this, will they, won't they HS2 to Manchester? Well, it's perfectly obvious that they're not going to, and that Sunak's going to announce that in his conference speech. But if I hear him one more time say speculation and the phrase, we've got spades in the ground. I, I mean, putting a spade in the ground doesn't necessarily mean that you actually build anything. But he has these sort of little phrases that he uses again and again and again and again.

• 11:36Rory Stewart?

  Do you think that's why he reminds people of me?

• 11:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I hope not. I, I, I'm honest with you. He does not remind me of you at all. And one thing I've noticed about you is that, is that I, I think you, you share my absolute abhorrence. And I know that there are lots of people out there because of Iraq and they think that we're a bunch of lies as well. And I actually am not, and I know that we didn't lie. And I actually find it quite difficult to lie. But I get the feeling that you are as offended as I am by this post-truthery.

• 12:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, on the post-truthery, I have a, a big, big apology to make, which is in the podcast last week, I said that the HS2 H S two costs had risen to three hundred billion and they haven't. I've got that wrong by a massive factor of three, so they've gone risen to just over a hundred billion.

• 12:26Alastair Campbell?

  On that though, Roy, that's really interesting because when you said that, I thought that's wrong. But you sort of, this is how post-truth works. You start to think, oh, maybe he's right, he's probably researched it. But we've had, we've had a few amazing examples recently. We've had Rishi Sunak with his seven bins, okay, complete nonsense. I'm going to stop you having to have seven bins, nobody was proposing it. And in the last twenty four hours, on the conference platform, we've had two members of the cabinet saying things which are just completely untrue. We should put in the, in the newsletter, a clip of the interview that Sophie Ridge on Sky News did with Claire Coutinho, who is a member of the cabinet, where she said, as a fact, Keir Starmer is putting a tax on meat.

• 13:11Alastair Campbell?

  This was a lie that Sunak launched. And honestly, Sophie Ridge tries to get her, just to admit that he's not, that Keir Starmer has not said that. And she sort of goes into this thing, well, people are concerned, people are concerned that people might think about it.

• 13:26Rory Stewart?

  I think it's a, it's a point about the sort of anxiety of politicians to admit that they've been wrong or they've said something that's not true and acknowledge it straight out. What I'd hope that we do at the beginning of that thing is to say, you're completely right. I should never have said that. I was totally wrong. I don't know where that came from. And presumably what she's doing, I guess, is repeating what she's heard the prime minister say without thinking about it.

• 13:51Alastair Campbell?

  This is what makes me worry, that this is some kind of weird strategy going on. The, the whole thing about Donald Trump and his alternative facts, that you just, you make people so confused, they don't know what to believe anymore.

• 14:03Rory Stewart?

  Well, and this, this, this was Dominic Cummings, wasn't it? Which was the, the number on the bus, which I think he did deliberately knowing that it wasn't true, hoping that that would outrage the media into reporting the fact it wasn't true and get more coverage for his lie than he would have got for the truth.

• 14:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly. And a lot of people want to believe that all politicians are liars. And they want to believe that they're all playing the same games. But it seems to me that this this is just reaching the levels of weirdness. So yes, you know, yesterday you had Mark Harper, Transport Secretary, who's who literally, you know, with his mouth, words coming from his lips to the effect that because of this 15 minute cities thing, which we've talked about before, councils will tell you when you can and can't go to the shops. Utter fantasy.

• 14:53Rory Stewart?

  Can I just quickly explain what the 15 minute city thing is? We did talk about it on a podcast, but some months ago now. So 15 minute cities is something which has been championed by many progressive mayors around the world. And it's something I tried to champion when I was running to be Mayor of London, which is the idea of essentially creating smaller, walking accessible communities, making sure that within 15 minutes of where you live, there's a proper mixed urban environment, shops, community centres, ideally libraries, all this sort of stuff. And what's happened is that conspiracy theory has developed in which the idea is that instead of it being a positive thing where you try to create proper mixed urban architecture sense for village, you know, London, maybe a 700 villages,

• 15:38Rory Stewart?

  which is the way I'd like to think about it. They're now trying to suggest that it's a plot, gone once more from Mark Harper, he's saying.

• 15:45Alastair Campbell?

  He's saying that this, what he calls sinister sinister is that councils will tell you when you can and can't go to the shops.

• 15:55Rory Stewart?

  And what shops you can shop in and what you can't. And what he means is by trying to encourage you to shop locally, he's now turned it into they're actually going to dictatorially insist that you can only go to those shops and you can't go to the supermarkets three miles down the road.

• 16:08Alastair Campbell?

  And as with Claire Coutinho, who I think, by the way, I think, I think these people now talk rubbish and lie and gaslight so incessantly that they just don't think they're going to get picked up on it. And because we had as a Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and I think Sunak frankly is in some ways becoming just as bad in terms of his ability to say things that are complete nonsense. But because they weren't really picked up on it by the media, they just sort of think they can do it. So I actually think Claire Coutinho was just a bit taken aback that Sophie Ridge decided to ask her 10 times, whatever it was.

• 16:39Rory Stewart?

  Sophie Ridge did quite gently, didn't she? It wasn't a kind of Jeremy Paxman aggressively. I thought it was quite good journalism. It was quite gentle. She waited, she let Claire Coutinho finish and then she'd just say again, but that isn't the meat tax, is it?

• 16:50Alastair Campbell?

  No, and also kept saying to me, when did Keir Starmer ever say that? And then she said this thing, oh, well, you know, he's a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat and Ed Miliband doesn't like meat because he got photographed with a bacon sandwich. The whole thing was utterly ridiculous. But then you had this thing about, you know, so that they're all ministers, they have to sort of, you know, collective responsibility and all that. So Andrew Bowie, who is a minister of whom most of our listeners probably haven't heard, but he was on the radio yesterday where he was being grilled about Mark Harper talking about the 15 minute cities and the councils. And he said, oh, no, he's got a point because people are very concerned about this. People are very concerned that this is where it might be going. Well, but it's not happening. Nobody's proposing it. Yes, but people are

• 17:35Alastair Campbell?

  concerned. To which the interviewer was Evan Davies. He said, well, they're only concerned because you're trying to make them concerned about myths and fantasies.

• 17:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So one of the interesting things, which is a bit inside baseball, but to explain is that actually people like Andrew Bowie are on the moderate centre left of the party. You know, they were my sort of friends who were more on the remain side. And what's happening, and I think this is what makes it sad, is that everybody's being dragged into this narrative, nor Claire Coutinho. Claire Coutinho is seen as a pretty sort of centrist moderate. So what's disturbing about it is that this sort of narrative, which I guess is in some briefing document, I mean, I don't know whether you did this when you were doing comms for Labour, but certainly what happened by the time I got in, is that you were given these talking points, this is what you have to hammer at

• 18:23Rory Stewart?

  the conference. And it would probably have included references to Labour's environmental taxes, or Labour being soft on immigration, or, you know, Labour pushing for 15 minute cities. And everybody, and this is one of the things that's so sickly about being a politician, is that even people from the centre left who feel a bit queasy about it are being made to read out these talking points because it's what number 10 has told them to do.

• 18:49Alastair Campbell?

  But do they never have the sufficient intelligence and confidence in their own minds to say, I'm not going to talk complete and total rubbish?

• 18:56Rory Stewart?

  The problem is the culture. So the culture is all about loyalty and defending your colleagues. So even if Mark Harper makes a tit of himself, it's not possible for you to distance yourself too much, or that creates a new kind of headline, and then all your colleagues think that you're a monster and you've betrayed them, and number 10 comes after them. What's your suggestion? If you were, boot on the other foot, how would you, if you were somebody from the centre left party who didn't really approve of what Mark Harper had said, and were being repeatedly asked to distance yourself from him, but he's a cabinet minister, what's the best way of handling it?

• 19:30Alastair Campbell?

  Probably by saying that I wouldn't describe the policy in those terms, or I don't know. I think you can do with it quite easily. But they're all just doubling down, and I think we are into this world of alternative facts. I heard a wonderful line about Sunak, by the way, I think you'll appreciate this, as a writer and an academic, somebody who worked with him in the Treasury, civil servant, said the thing about Sunak is that he's all appendices and no forward. I thought that was absolutely brilliant.

• 20:00Rory Stewart?

  It's the details, man.

• 20:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he's not, but it's more that he sort of bounces around. And the thing about the talking points, I saw him doing another interview where they've obviously been told this week is about cars and towns. So we've got the plan for motorists, which I think is a big risk for them, not just because of the environmental implications, but also, let's be honest, driving in Britain at the moment is a pretty horrible experience. So I think you've just got millions of people sitting in cars thinking, God, Rishi Sunak said he was on our side, and here we are stuck in yet another traffic jam or another roadworks where nothing's been done. And the other thing that he did today was he just kept saying the word towns. And so you're right, I think they get these kind of scripts, but he's the prime minister.

• 20:46Alastair Campbell?

  And he's coming over to me as somebody just incredibly kind of piddling. What is he doing talking about 20 mile an hour speed limit? That's a junior transport minister's job.

• 20:58Rory Stewart?

  So let's go, let's maybe jump ahead a little bit and talk about something you you mentioned at the beginning, which is, what would it take to really save the Conservative Party and get it, get it back into the centre ground? And I agree that there will be a lot of listeners who don't care about that. But I think oddly, everybody should care about it. I don't think Britain was in a good place when Corbyn was running the Labour Party. And I don't think Britain will be in a good place if the opposition is run by a bunch of right wing populists. Because we see that, I mean, there's a playbook around the world of how that works out. So just quickly to to get into that, I think the first thing to understand is that already Liz Truss, Priti Patel and others are behaving as though they're in opposition to the existing government.

• 21:40Rory Stewart?

  So the Conservative Party is really wrenching itself apart. And when the Conservatives lose the next election, there will be a leadership election.

• 21:48Alastair Campbell?

  Are you now when or if?

• 21:50Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I'm I'm when. And I think that's, I think that's also what's sad about what, I mean, and more than sad, very, very disappointing about what Rishi Sunak's doing on the environmental stuff. Because I think that he's desperately doing it in the hope that he can claw back a few points. But he's 20 points behind and it would be better to do things which he genuinely believes in or in the long term interest of the party. Now, I don't know, there was an article that I forwarded to you, I don't know whether you looked at it.

• 22:18Alastair Campbell?

  I did.

• 22:18Rory Stewart?

  Where where somebody suggested that actually Peter Mandelson advised Gordon Brown in 2008, 2009 to conduct himself with dignity, accept that he was going to lose, but make sure he didn't lose by too much. So the Labour Party has something to rebuild from.

• 22:32Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know who wrote that. I didn't recognise that at all.

• 22:34Rory Stewart?

  And I guess the answer is you can never do that, right? Presumably no party can ever do that.

• 22:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think you can be realistic, you know, realistic expectations, but you have to fight as though you think you're going to win or you think you can win. And I think Sunak a few weeks ago might have had that mindset. I mean, to be fair to him, I think he's ridiculous on many levels, but you know, he just get out of bed every day and kind of get out there and he's got a bit of energy and he's got a bit of oomph and so forth. But he just, I think he's coming over as increasingly ridiculous with these sort of bouncy interviews. He did one today saying how well everything is going. And you've got to sort of be in the real world. I mean, that event you and I did this morning, when I said to them, you know, has anybody been watching, been following the Conservative Party Conference? I mean, they all started laughing.

• 23:21Rory Stewart?

  So one of the most interesting things, so we did an event together this morning with an audience of I guess about 150 people. And you asked how many of them had thought about being, you know, politicians? And I guess seven or eight put up their hand. I then asked how many of them were members of political parties? And it was sort of two or three, right? So three times the number wanted to be politicians even prepared to join a political party. And that, I think, is, you know, to bring us back to this question of what's happening to the Conservative Party. When my mother was a member of the Conservative Party in her youth, there were 2.3 million members of the party. There are now just over 100,000. That means that in most constituencies, there are, save Tory seats, there'll be 350, 400 Conservative Party members and of those, only about 50 activists really count.

• 24:06Rory Stewart?

  So our democracy at the moment is being driven by 50 activists in each constituency who are much older than the general population, much more right wing than the general population.

• 24:17Alastair Campbell?

  They're the ones that Truss and Patel and Braverman and increasingly Farage, I think. I think the other thing I found extraordinary at this conference. Is the extent to which Liz Truss and Nigel Farage appear to me to be the kind of the rock stars of the week, the ones that are getting kind of, you know, heroes welcome as they go around the place. Liz Truss, who absolutely smashed the economy, and Nigel Farage, who probably has done more damage to the Tory party than any politician since Tony Blair, I'd have said.

• 24:44Rory Stewart?

  No, it's really, really disturbing. So part of the narrative that they're working on, just to deepen the problem for a second, and then on to how the party can be saved, is that they've convinced themselves, the party members, party faithful, that they were betrayed because they voted for Boris Johnson and then the MPs got rid of him without asking them. And then they voted for Liz Truss and the MPs basically forced out Liz Truss and they ended up with Rishi Sunak, who they didn't vote for. And the fundamental problem with Rishi Sunak's campaign, which feels like it's trying to tip towards the right, towards the populist right, feels like it's out of a playbook where we've got the Culture Secretary talking about statues, we've got the Transport Secretary talking

• 25:25Rory Stewart?

  about 15-minute cities, we've got all this talk from Suella Bravman about multiculturalism isn't working, focus on stopping the boat. So it's anti-immigration, it's the culture wars, and now it's the environment stuff. It's let's push out the dates, we don't need to convert petrol and diesel vehicles, we don't need to bring in, bring in alternative energy as quickly as we thought. So feels like he thinks that he might be able to win by creating dividing lines between quite a hard populist right, the sort of 2019 coalition up in the North East, in the same way as Boris Johnson did in 2019. But it's not going to work for them. It's not going to work because Boris Johnson had two advantages.

• 26:06Rory Stewart?

  He was running at a time when people were desperate to resolve the Brexit standoff and he was running against Jeremy Corbyn. Those two things are not true.

• 26:14Alastair Campbell?

  These messages you're getting from people saying that Rishi Sunak reminds them of you. Are they now saying to you that they think it's when not if that the Tories lose? Is that a mindset that you think is infecting the entire Conservative Party?

• 26:28Rory Stewart?

  I think there's a really interesting problem here, which is that a lot of people are very fond of Rishi Sunak, a lot of my friends who are from the centre left of the party. And I think that's partly because they were so traumatised by Boris Johnson's trust. It's partly because he's courteous, he does his work, he reads the details, he delegates. So if you're in the Cabinet, you feel more respected than you did under Boris Johnson's trust.

• 26:50Alastair Campbell?

  He is very right wing though, isn't he? Where his political compass lies, he's very right wing, much more right wing than Johnson in many ways.

• 26:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but nobody quite recognises this, I think partly because he's much more courteous, much more softly spoken, he seems much more reasonable. But you're right, he's somebody who was an early committed Brexiteer. He clearly sometimes seems to talk as though he believes the Singapore on Thames stuff about the British economy. So there's a gap, and I think the explanation for it is that the party is unbelievably loyal. I mean, I think loyalty is at the key of the way these parties work. I also found it difficult to understand why people stayed with the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn was running it. I mean, you know, I and colleagues of mine left the Conservative Party because we could not bear Boris Johnson being our boss, we didn't want to stand for him, we didn't want to campaign for him.

• 27:43Rory Stewart?

  But of course, many of my Labour colleagues stuck with Jeremy Corbyn and went into elections with his face on the manifestos campaigning for him. And that, I think, brings us to how these parties get rebuilt, because probably the only way the Conservative Party will be rebuilt is not through people like me or Ken Clark, who left in disgust. It will be by some of the moderates who held their nose, stayed loyal, put up with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, and eventually, when the party has gone totally mad and decides it has to move back to the centre to win an election, you know, after Suella Bravman in four, five years' time, might rebuild it again. What do you reckon?

• 28:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the only thing about that is that, you see, we didn't expel in the way that Boris Johnson did. So you mentioned yourself and Ken Clark and there are many others, they were expelled and it's very hard to get back in once that's happened to you. There's a couple of things I'd say, though. The first is that I can remember in 1992, the day after Labour lost that election, doing an interview on the television, I was with Peter Jenkins, the then commentator on The Independent. And he said, if Labour can't win in these circumstances, this is in 92, I don't think they'll ever win again. Five years later, we're on a landslide. 2019, Jeremy Corbyn leads Labour to a pretty devastating defeat against Boris Johnson's Conservative Party.

• 29:02Alastair Campbell?

  And here we are, four years later, and the judgement is, including in that room we're in this morning, and pretty much every audience you speak to at the moment, Labour are going to win. So things can turn around, but you need the people in there to turn them around. So Keir Starmer, it's obvious to me, the Tories, one of the lines they're going to run at Keir Starmer, is that, you know, how can you believe a word this guy says when he sat there alongside Jeremy Corbyn, telling everybody he ought to be the Prime Minister? Now, I actually do believe that Keir Starmer, part of his thinking at that time, as he went into politics relatively late in life, was he's looking at Jeremy Corbyn, probably thinking this guy's not going to win. The Labour Party's going to have to be rebuilt

• 29:43Alastair Campbell?

  after he goes, and maybe I can be in the position to do that job. To have got himself into that position, he had to stay as a leading figure in the party.

• 29:53Rory Stewart?

  But it's an interesting question, wasn't it? Because obviously, other people made different decisions. I guess Chuck Amuna left. Trying to think of all the MPs who left at that time.

• 30:01Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Luciana Berger, Chris Lesley. There were people who left, and you could say to yourself, you know, where are they now?

• 30:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And that's, of course, the same with me and the Tory Party. And I think this is why politics is so difficult, because at some level, to get to the top, obviously you have to stay in the game, and that means compromising. If you are too uncompromising and say, I'm not going to put up with Jeremy Corbyn as my leader, I'm not going to fight for him in elections, because I think he's awful, or the same with Boris Johnson, you don't get to stick around. Somebody pointed out that, in a way, this was true in Labour even back in the day, that part of the secret of Labour coming back from the madness of Michael Foot, well, maybe madness is unfair, but the slightly unelectability of Michael Foot, was people like Jack Straw, who, not the Roy Jenkinses, right, not the, so we're

• 30:51Rory Stewart?

  not going back in ancient history. So for younger people, broadly speaking, what happened to the Labour Party in the early 80s, is that Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkinses, were sort of monumental figures in the Labour Party. Really couldn't bear the direction Labour was going in and left to set up the SDP, which was the sort of, at one point, this incredibly exciting centrist party that was dominating the opinion polls. And they seemed to be the noble, charismatic people, and people like Jack Straw, who'd been elected since 79 and stuck around, looked as though he was slightly sort of shilly-shallying around and compromising. But in the end, of course, New Labour was built off the Jack Straw's, it wasn't built off the Roy Jenkins's and Shirley Williams's.

• 31:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and it goes back to something we've talked about a lot, which is our electoral system and the difficulties of being, creating a new political force that challenges the hegemony of the big two. But, you know, Neil Kinnock led the Labour Party through the period that he did, and incredibly well in terms of laying the foundations of what followed, then John Smith, then Tony Blair. And the other point I think is important for people to remember, this thing about how change can happen quickly these days, maybe much faster than it used to, is Keir Starmer was trying to do in one parliamentary term what Neil, John, Tony did over several. Look, I don't know, I'm among those people that you mentioned at the start, who it really

• 32:14Alastair Campbell?

  wouldn't bother me if the Conservative Party didn't rebuild, but I do agree with you that if you have an opposition in our system that is completely Trumpian, you know, dominated by people like Braverman and Patel and Lee Anderson and the populist voices of the hard right, I think that is a real problem for the country, not least because of the message that it sends beyond these shores as well.

• 32:36Rory Stewart?

  And it's going to get much worse because at the moment, they are slightly, you wouldn't believe it, but they are slightly pulling their punches because their own party is in government. As soon as Labour's in government, these guys are going to be appearing on GB News and going far more radical. You know, their statements on immigration and things are going to go out the window because they won't be remotely held back by the sense that they have some responsibility for the situation.

• 33:01Alastair Campbell?

  Another theme that you talk about in your book is the kind of death of shame. Look, I'll be absolutely honest, if I was Liz Truss and I did to the economy what she did just over a year ago... I think I'd immigrate. I think I'd have plastic surgery. I'd change the way I look. I'd probably wear a wig. I'd go and live in a foreign country. I hope nobody would ever see me.

• 33:22Rory Stewart?

  You'd be like one of the great train robbers.

• 33:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, in fact, it's a very good parallel because of course the great trade robbers in their own way saw themselves as these kind of epic folk heroes. And you know that phrase that Ben Elton said about Rishi Sunak, that he's dripping with vanity. Watching Liz Truss yesterday with her sort of these adoring young men all around her, it was horrific. And she's posing for selfies. She's got no self-awareness. She's got no apology. It's horrific.

• 33:54Rory Stewart?

  Okay, let me then, just to close this thing off. So there's a very interesting collection of essays brought together by David Gork, my political hero, called The Case For The Centre Right.

• 34:04Alastair Campbell?

  Have you contributed at all?

• 34:06Rory Stewart?

  I have contributed.

• 34:08Alastair Campbell?

  I think you should declare an interest.

• 34:09Rory Stewart?

  I'd declare an interest, yeah. Contributed essay. Mine is not the most distinguished essay in that group, but it's a it's a great group of people trying to make the case for restoring the Conservative Party.

• 34:19Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, boil it down. Tell me one sentence. If you had to sort of, where's the centre of gravity in their argument?

• 34:24Rory Stewart?

  Centre of gravity is that, in the end, the smart electoral future for any party is in the centre ground. And you've got to be able to win over younger, more educated voters around cities. And that the current path of the Conservative Party, which is appealing to older, less educated people in remote areas, is not a sustainable electoral path. So that's the central argument. But I think they also make some very good arguments for what a better conservatism could be. It could be proud of the Union, really put the Union first. It could be fiscally conservative, responsible in the way that we think about borrowing in debt. It could be generous in international policy and international development.

• 35:08Rory Stewart?

  It could be steely-eyed but determined and idealistic on climate.

• 35:13Alastair Campbell?

  But it's all the things that this Conservative Party is deliberately and willfully rejecting.

• 35:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and the path now to rebuild is difficult because of the people writing for it, people like me, David Gork and Amber Rudd are no longer in. So you've got to get moderate conservatives back into the party. And that also means that we've got to rebuild the Conservative Party in the country. So if people are serious about this, we need 30,000 people joining the Conservative Party who are from the moderate liberal centre to actually change the way the party operates. And then I think probably the party needs to go through a period of defeat. It probably needs unfortunately to elect the Suella Braverman figure, realise how unpopular and toxic that type of politics is, and then find its way back. Because in the end, the Conservative Party wants to win. That's how David Cameron did it. So after the Ian Duncan Smith fiasco, Michael Howard, essentially in the end, the

• 36:03Rory Stewart?

  party members wanted to win. And that's what allowed them to bring back somebody who was more from the centre ground.

• 36:08Alastair Campbell?

  I think Nigel Farage thinks he can end up as leader of the Conservative Party.

• 36:11Rory Stewart?

  Oh, well, we heard that here first. Something to watch.

• 36:14Alastair Campbell?

  Let me just, my final observation of the Conservative Party Conference is, didn't get much coverage, but Jeremy Hunt's speech, I found pretty disturbing as well. I think to put, when you think he's the Chancellor of the East Chamber, dealing with really difficult economic situation, and it seems to me that this government has completely given up on going after the big tax avoiders. And he made a big thing about going for this stuff about people on benefits not being work shy. And I just felt that felt straight out of the populist playbook. And I think we should put in the newsletter, there's a, I don't know who this guy is, but he's called at RedNorthUK. And he did a really

• 36:54Alastair Campbell?

  kind of very, very long thread of real cases of people, including many who've taken their own lives, of people who've been put through absolute hell by this, by the work capability assessment under this government. So I found that quite disturbing because he's meant to be one of the last sort of grown up standing, isn't he?

• 37:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, thank you, Alison. All very, very depressing. But you are going to be going to the Labour Party Conference next week and reporting from the frontline and telling us what you find there.

• 37:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we go for about a day, he said, with much experience of party conferences and not that much enthusiasm.

• 37:31Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Thank you. See you after the break.

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• 39:25Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And we've just been doing a little bit on party conference, but it's a good segue into Theresa May because, of course, Theresa May will be famous both for her Dancing Queen performance at a party conference and also for having a terrible moment where she said she broke down on stage. At one of these big party gatherings and and lost her voice.

• 39:48Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, she lost her voice. She didn't break down.

• 39:50Rory Stewart?

  Well, it was a very, very, I was, I was, you know, it's a very, very strange moment in in her life. But we've, we've interviewed her on the podcast and I think I'm really pleased with the way it's come out. I'd encourage people to listen to it. I think, Alistair, you brought out a side of her that I haven't often seen in interviews. It's a, you know, she can come across, obviously, famously, sometimes a little bit wooden, but I thought she, um, thought she really engaged and took it seriously. And you were quite challenging and it worked well. So I'd really encourage people to listen. What did you think of it?

• 40:17Alastair Campbell?

  Fiona, my partner, um, listened to both episodes in one go because she's a subscriber to therestispolitics.com, obviously.

• 40:24Rory Stewart?

  Well done, her. Yes.

• 40:26Alastair Campbell?

  But she, she said she thought, she thought she came over really, really well. And I said, I was a little bit worried I was maybe a bit too soft. And she said, no, she didn't think that at all, that she thought actually it was quite challenging without being rude.

• 40:39Rory Stewart?

  No, I think, I think you landed everything you wanted to land. I think you made all the points you had, but you did it relatively respectfully and you had a bit of back and forth. I thought that was, that was impressive stuff.

• 40:48Alastair Campbell?

  So if like Fiona, you want to hear part two before next Monday, you can do so by going to therestispolitics.com.

• 40:57Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 40:58Alastair Campbell?

  So there we are. So should we talk about Kosovo, a land, a very, very small land, which is a very large place in my heart. Um, because of course, the Kosovo war back in the late 90s was a, was a huge part of our, our first term. And it sort of feels like it's a little bit on the edge again.

• 41:17Rory Stewart?

  Oh, it's very, it's very, very, very sad. And we've been talking about Kosovo a little bit over the, um, podcast listeners, loyal listeners will remember that we've been raising this as a potential problem area for, for months now. It feels very, very dangerous. And there's a very high likelihood now of a proper conflict breaking out in Kosovo again. But just to go back very, very quickly for younger listeners to the history of this. Kosovo is an area of, um, former Yugoslavia and Serbia, which had a predominantly Albanian Muslim population.

• 41:52Alastair Campbell?

  92%.

• 41:53Rory Stewart?

  92%. So it's, you know, about 1.8 million people and about 50,000 or so Orthodox Serbs. But it is a place that was historically incredibly important in the national imagination of

• 42:06Rory Stewart?

  The Serbian people, because it's the site of very famous Orthodox monasteries, Serbian Orthodox monasteries, but it's also the site of a great battle, the Battle of Kosovo-Polei, which for the Serbs is like Waterloo was for the 19th century for the Victorian Brits. Their great fight against the Ottoman hordes and the defence of Serbian civilisation. So when the Albanian Muslim community was really pushing for autonomy, there was a brutal reaction from Slobodan Milosevic, who was then the leader, which began to result in attacks that were leading to ethnic cleansing. And this is now in 1999. And it is at that point, and I'm going to hand the story over to you,

• 42:49Rory Stewart?

  because you were very closely involved in the UK-US coalition intervention.

• 42:53Alastair Campbell?

  No, I was seconded to NATO. President Clinton asked Tony Blair if I could go and help NATO sort out their comms, because it did become kind of, the propaganda side of things became very, very important. Very, it was, I remember the guy in charge of the whole thing, Wes Clark, who later became a presidential candidate, if you remember, or a presidential nomination candidate. And he, I remember him saying that it was only when we sort of gripped the comms against the Milosevic comms machine, that he felt that he was able to kind of get the military to focus on what it was that they were trying to do. And the reason why that's relevant to what's happening today

• 43:35Alastair Campbell?

  is that there I was, as Tony Blair's comms guy seconded to NATO. And my opposite number doing the job for Milosevic was Aleksandar Vukic, who is now running the country. So there, he ends up running his country and I end up doing a bloody podcast with Rory Stewart.

• 43:53Rory Stewart?

  What went wrong? So I was also there then, I was there as a diplomat. I'd been posted to be the British representative in Montenegro, which is this country obviously between Kosovo, Bosnia and Serbia.

• 44:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Rory Stewart?

  And so I spent quite a lot of time in Kosovo. I had a K4 pass, which was the Kosovo Force Pass. I remember going up to visit some of those Serbian Orthodox monasteries, which in those days were surrounded by Italian armoured vehicles, within 50,000. Foreign soldiers on the ground. And the particular flashpoint was around these northern areas, around Mitrovica, where a Serbian population had been left behind in what was now an Albanian Kosovo-dominated country. And a lot of the efforts, just to fast forward, over the last 24 years, have been trying to resolve the status of those areas. And there have been repeated agreements, four agreements in fact, put together by,

• 44:48Rory Stewart?

  often put together by the European Union or France and Germany, trying to resolve the tensions between Kosovo and Serbia. But to cut to the chase.

• 44:57Alastair Campbell?

  They've never really worked.

• 44:58Rory Stewart?

  They never really worked. And what really became the cause of the real problems that we're now facing was license plates. So basically, Serbs living in Kosovo want to continue to have old license plates, which don't really recognise the existence of the Republic of Kosovo, and the Republic of Kosovo want them to drive around with Republic of Kosovo license plates.

• 45:18Alastair Campbell?

  The thing you've jumped there is that in 2008 Kosovo declared it was independent and has essentially devoted its entire diplomatic policy to getting recognition. And it's almost at 100, it's almost halfway, it's above halfway now, 100 of the 193 United Nations countries recognise Kosovo, including us.

• 45:37Rory Stewart?

  And the United States and Europe. The people who don't, of course, are Russia, China, Serbia, most importantly.

• 45:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and I think there are still five European countries that don't, but they've done a pretty good job on that. But Vukic, president of Serbia, has said that they never, ever will recognise it. And so you've had the plates thing, then we've talked before about the elections of mayors in an election which the Serbs in the north boycotted. So these Albanian mayors were elected on 4% turnouts and that led to violence. And then this latest one. It's very, very hard to work out what's gone on, but essentially, three Serbs, there was a group of Serbs, very heavily armed, engaged in a shootout with Kosovo police officers. One Kosovo police officer killed, three Serbs killed.

• 46:27Alastair Campbell?

  And despite the Serb government saying this was some freelance guy, this kind of rather sinister mafia guy who was running the whole operation, nothing to do with us, Gov. They nonetheless declared a national day of mourning for these three guys who'd been killed, which is what is making, and added to which, the arms that were discovered could only be state-sponsored.

• 46:49Rory Stewart?

  State-sponsored arms, and the Serbs moved serious military units up to the border. So it feels to me as though Vukic was hoping to pull off sort of little green man, Russian-style paramilitary provocation inside northern Kosovo, and then roll the army in to protect the population. So it feels like Northern Ireland, sort of 68, 69, feels like a moment at which you can see what's happening. There's an academic, and we can send a link, who said that people talk about black swans, these sort of unexpected occurrences, but what's happening here is more like a great big grey rhino. The violence that's coming is so predictable. It's like a two-ton rhino sort of snorting at you and charging towards you.

• 47:30Rory Stewart?

  It's been triggered, basically, and here I'm going to take a sort of radical line here, which will be unpopular with some of the Europeans, the Americans. But basically, there are two things going on. One of them is that it was held together by the European Union, promising accession for Serbia. And so long as Vukic thought that Serbia would get into the EU with all that that would mean in terms of freedom of movement and the economy, he held off the confrontation. And Europe basically gave up on that. And Vukic concluded the whole thing was a sham, he was never going to get in the European Union. The second thing, I think, to be clear about, is that it is Vukic, not Albin Kurti, who's at fault here. Albin Kurti, you know, there's a real attempt by the Americans, Europeans, say, oh, blame on both sides, and Kurti's a bit radical and pushing too hard.

• 48:15Rory Stewart?

  Albin Kurti, who's the Kosovo leader, is essentially just insisting on what has been a Greed on these license plates four times in different agreements.

• 48:24Alastair Campbell?

  But your point about Northern Ireland is relevant here because you you now have a situation where both sides are refusing to believe that the other is acting in good faith. And I think that's why the Americans and Europeans, there are, there are things that were agreed that the Europeans appointed to saying Kurti said he would do this, but then he hasn't. For example, it's a greater autonomy for the Serb population living in the north and so forth. But I think you're right. And the other thing is that, you know, we complain sometimes about the kind of inward looking nationalism of of our media, but my God, in Serbia, it's something else. And so at the moment, you know, Vukic is playing into a ramped up nationalist agenda, which is real within the population. It's not just being manufactured by the government.

• 49:07Rory Stewart?

  So one thing we often say on the on the podcast is that you need to look not at what people say in English, but what they say in their own local language. So if you see Vukic being interviewed by Christian Ammappur on CNN, we can share the link, he comes across as incredibly sort of reasonable, holding up the rule of law, nothing to see here, I'm all for peace. But when you read the the Serbian newspapers, you see something very different. So the pro-government tabloid, which is claims to be have the largest number of subscribers in Serbia, runs a headline on the front page, which is Kurti čisti Kosovo od Srbica, which means Kurti is is ethnically cleansing Kosovo of the Serbs. And then it says, Larsni premier takos varnog Kosovo.

• 49:51Rory Stewart?

  So the fake premier of the so-called Kosovo. Us pomoj zapadni mentora with the help of his Western mentors. Sprovodni tiho etniko čistjenje našeg stanovista nakim. So is conspiring with Western mentors to ethnically cleanse our people from from Kosovo. So when that's appearing in the local press, and you can see some outrageous comments by Vucic's Defence Minister and by Vucic himself. They're really whipping up to what's going to be a brutal confrontation. So he's very good at charming when it suits him. He's charming the Americans, he's charming the Europeans, Zvudjic. But when he's talking to his own people, it's all no surrender, no compromise. I will never accept Kosovo being independent.

• 50:35Alastair Campbell?

  I met, I obviously had dealings with him of a non-speaking nature when we were running comms operations against each other. But I met him more recently when I was partly because of the work I was doing in Albania with Edirama. And I had quite a long one-on-one with Vukic. This was after, I don't know if you remember when the extraordinary incident with when Serbia were playing Albania at football and a drone flew in and dropped the Albanian flag and it was just all kicked off between the players and it became a massive sort of diplomatic incident. It was, it was around that time. And it was unfortunate in a way because he had a terrible cold, really bad cold. And as you know, Rory, politicians

• 51:18Alastair Campbell?

  with colds, it's not a good look. But, and he's got quite a sort of, he's a very tall guy and he's very imposing. But he's got, I think he's got quite a weak face. And I think sometimes he has to exaggerate his strength in his rhetoric and with his actions. And you're right, he does a very different shtick for his domestic audience than what he does for the international audience. But I'll tell you the other thing, there was, I mentioned Edirama there. Albania has been, for the first time, I think, a little bit critical of the European Union.

• 51:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, your friend Edirama strangely has been sort of charmed by Vukic and, and seems to be attacking the Kosovo Albanians.

• 51:59Alastair Campbell?

  No, I don't think he's attacking them. I think, I think he's not happy with the way that the European Union are doing this sort of, you know, there's, there's, there's equal, there's equal blame on both sides because I think he's more with you. That in terms of what happened, this attack by the Serbs, by this guy Rudejic and his gang, that has led to the current crisis, I think he feels that the European Union response has not taken sufficient regard of that.

• 52:25Rory Stewart?

  One of the things that we're seeing here is the sort of fantasy of all these populists, Vucic, Orban, et cetera, which is the fantasy that Trump is going to come in and save them. So Vucic got very close to Richard Grenell, who was Trump's special envoy for the region. And I think he very much thinks he's convinced Trump that Serbia is in the right and would want Trump to, he hopes Trump's going to come in a year at this time and withdraw all the American troops.

• 52:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Trump will probably say, well, Vucic is very, very tall and Kurti's quite small, therefore I'll probably back Vucic because that's the kind of how his toddler mentality operates.

• 53:00Rory Stewart?

  No, it's really disturbing. So I guess there are two things. One is, is the European Union going to grow a backbone, recognise how dangerous this is? And secondly, is there any way of getting back to life again, the process to get Serbia back into the European Union? Because there is now a real national security argument. It's now like a hole, a terrible hole in the donut, which if we don't get some kind of reconciliation with Serbia, will be a sort of Russian authoritarian populist proxy bang in the heart of Europe.

• 53:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 53:30Rory Stewart?

  There's an interesting parallel too to the work that you did in Ireland, which is the depth of the history of these people. So I was just looking at the individual biographies and there's been a great report, again by my favourite people, the European Stability Institute on this, which we can share. But the president of Kosovo was driven from Etriz as a child. Albin Kurti, the leader, was imprisoned from 97 to 2001 by the Serbians. The foreign minister, Gavala, had her father and brother murdered in Germany by Yugoslav spies. And on the other side, the Serbian foreign minister, Datsic, was a spokesman from Laszlo from 92 to 2000. And if you watch, there's an extraordinary moment in the Security

• 54:15Rory Stewart?

  Council where Datsic starts attacking this foreign minister, the Kosovo foreign minister, who's had her father and brother murdered and he starts screaming. At the UN Security Council, your hands are bloody, it's your fault, and essentially starts blaming her father and brother for being sort of traitors and separatists. And then she turns around and screams back, you're a small slobodan Milosevic. So there is a real kind of depth of history here.

• 54:39Rory Stewart?

  Which is going to make it unbelievably difficult to reconcile unless the West concentrates, and it will be tragic. I mean, nothing is more tragic than 20 years in Afghanistan, where we go in to get rid of the Taliban, and 20 years later, we hand it back to the Taliban again. But it feels as though we're about to do it again in Kosovo. Bosnia and Kosovo were, of course, the successes. They were the things that made people proud of humanitarian intervention. They ended wars. They set up states. And despite all the grumbles, broadly speaking, the world is a better place for the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and it would have been without it.

• 55:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Rory Stewart?

  But it now looks like it's going to unravel through Western vacillation and weakness.

• 55:13Alastair Campbell?

  The only thing I'd say to that is that the, the, when there was this troop buildup, pretty close to the border, getting way, way too close for Kosovo's kind of security interests. And the Americans did step in and essentially have some pretty hard words with the Serbs. And Vukic came straight out and did a statement saying, it would be absurd for the, how would that possibly help us that we were going to start a war there, et cetera. Now, on the one hand, we've heard all that before from other, other leaders, but this did feel to me like a quick word from the Americans led to a bit of a pullback. But in terms of the fundamentals, they are not in good shape. And, and I think it's something that we'll be coming back to again and again.

• 55:57Rory Stewart?

  Well, pretty depressing, but some very, very interesting stuff. It's an extraordinary story.

• 56:03Alastair Campbell?

  And it's also an amazing place. I, I, I went there after the, the war because of course, once the, once the Serbs had, had effectively had lost and were on their way home, I was then asked to go and, and help sort the sort of, you know, the, the comms going forward. And I spent a bit of time there and it was, it was, it's a very beautiful part of the world. But what was, what was incredible, I was, I was there at the time when the Serbs were literally retreating. So they were coming back and we'd be driving along the road and there'd be sort of truckloads coming the other way. And I mean, the hatreds, you felt it so powerfully. Every time one side passed the other, there were these almost

• 56:45Alastair Campbell?

  sort of, you know, animalistic noises being sort of, you know, they'd stop fighting at this point, but there's still, you could feel the kind of absolute loathing and hatreds and it's still there. And of course, this, um, this region up in the, in the north is, is still very, very, it's more Serb than Albanian and the Serbs in Belgrade want those people to feel, this is why the number plate thing is so kind of visceral, want them to feel that they're Serb, not Kosovan, because they don't, and say they never will recognise Kosovo as an independent nation.

• 57:14Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's very, very sad. And the, and as you say, it's a very, I mean, in some places, a very, very beautiful place with these amazing monuments. Other, other bits are kind of sort of slightly bleak, modern communist, but um, it's an extraordinary part of the world. And of course, it's on this, one of the reasons why it's so raw, of course, is that originally it was on the fault line between the Christians and the, the Ottoman Muslims. Um, and Kosovo, this battle in Kosovo was seen as a kind of existential fight and it is still, still remembered in that way. Anyway, um, thank you. And I, I don't think we're going to resolve it all now, but thank you for, for sticking with it and having a chance to talk about it.

• 57:51Alastair Campbell?

  And see you tomorrow, question time.

• 57:53Rory Stewart?

  See you then. Bye bye.

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