326. Labour's first 100 days, the Tory leadership race, and Japan

How have the first 100 days of the new Labour government gone? Who will be the next leader of the Tory party? What is happening in Japanese politics right now? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy, a green electricity supplier powering homes across the UK. Use referral code POLITICS after sign up for a chance to win a signed copy of Rory and Alastair's books with personalised messages. Learn more at getfuse.com/politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen and Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter 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.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents on average eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo.

• 1:23Speaker 04

  Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

• 2:06Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.

• 2:42Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:45Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alasdair Campbell. We're going to start today by talking a little bit about Alex Salmond, former First Minister who passed away at the weekend. We're going to talk about Labour's first hundred days and we're recording this on the day they've got this big investment conference going on with lots of people wondering why it's happening before rather than after the budget, the budget which we're still waiting for. And then we're going to talk about the Tory leadership. We haven't really talked about that much, but we're now down to two. And judging by the reactions of people around the country on our tour, it is the two that they would least like to vote for in terms of this is members of the public. We're then in the second half going to talk about Japan. Got a snap election coming up very, very soon and Japanese politics actually is endlessly fascinating, but gets next to no coverage frankly in most parts of the world, but I

• 3:30Alastair Campbell?

  don't know if it's a language thing, but Japanese politics is very, very interesting. And then we're going to talk about Viktor Orban because happily, when he was at the European Commission the day, he, if I may sort of lower the tone a little bit, he got his ass kicked by lots of people in the European Parliament. So I thoroughly enjoyed that.

• 3:47Rory Stewart?

  And Alasdair, we're recording just after the death of Alex Salmond, the kind of towering figure for a long time in the SNP, First Minister of Scotland, just died in North Macedonia and somebody who I knew reasonably well, but I think you knew better than me. Give me a sense of him.

• 4:01Alastair Campbell?

  I knew him a bit when I was a journalist, of course, he was an MP from. Nineteen eighty seven, big figure in the SNP. He was, as we said when we were doing our event in Glasgow, which we did shortly after he died. He asked me to be part of the independence transition team, should there have been independence. That sounds absolutely amazing because you were supposed to be on my side campaigning for the union. Yeah, which I was. But your view was that in the very sad situation that it went independent, you'd be prepared to nobly. Yeah. Support the independent country. Yes, because had Scotland chosen independence, I think it would have been in everybody's interest for that to be. All right. Effective and efficient. So he asked me to be part of that team. Obviously that became to pass. Did you actually begin any planning for that? Did you begin thinking about what the transition would be like?

• 4:46Alastair Campbell?

  I did begin thinking about it. He definitely was thinking about it a lot. Because then I guess it would have been like Brexit. They would have woken up next morning. What the hell do we do now? And everyone would have been like, where's the planning? And exactly like Brexit, I don't think they did have answers to big questions like currency, like military, like the nuclear question on the defence side of things. There are lots of questions they didn't really have answers to. So whether that was just him trying to sort of be nice to me, or whether he had a serious plan for it, I don't know. But I sensed he was doing more transition thinking than had happened on Brexit, for sure. And then the other thing, I once, when I was interviewing for, I used to do this monthly interview for GQ. And I think Farage was the first person I did. I think Salmon was the second. And he was so relaxed. It was on the day Tony Benn died, bizarrely.

• 5:27Alastair Campbell?

  The reason I remember that is because Tony Benn died, we were both getting inundated with messages like you do when people die. You know, well, it happened when Salmon died, didn't he? Everybody's saying, would you do a tribute? Would you do a tribute? So we actually delayed the interview while the BBC sent up a pool camera and we both did in tributes to Tony Benn. Then we went off and did this interview. And maybe because we spent several hours together, he was, I think, more relaxed than he probably would normally be in interviews. And he came up with two extraordinary lines which made massive news, like for days. And both of them damaged him quite a lot. One was, he basically talked in rather admiring terms of Vladimir Putin, which really wasn't very sensible for a British politician at the time.

• 6:07Alastair Campbell?

  And the second thing, we were talking, I was kind of praising him for the work that Scotland was doing vis-à-vis alcohol and trying to sort of. Changed the culture on alcohol. And he said, he had this phrase where he said, well, we've got to get over this image of Scotland as being a nation of drunks.

• 6:21Rory Stewart?

  And did you, and just because you're, you're very. I mean, along with many other things, you're a very experienced journalist and we, we don't talk maybe enough about how politicians get themselves in trouble in interviews and what's going on in the journalist's head when that's happening. So when you're sitting there with Salmon and he says this, as an experienced journalist, do you immediately know that you've got a line? And are you thinking, sitting there thinking, oh, okay, let's see where this goes on Putin. Let's see where this goes. Or do you not really notice till the end of it?

• 6:49Alastair Campbell?

  No, I knew as soon as he talked about Putin.

• 6:51Rory Stewart?

  And I guess.

• 6:52Alastair Campbell?

  By the way.

• 6:52Rory Stewart?

  And I guess as part of your profession is to, to let him keep going.

• 6:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I thought it was genuinely interesting that he was, in, in fact, the reason I thought of it is when I interviewed Farage.

• 7:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Alastair Campbell?

  A month earlier, he had done something very similar, which landed him a bit of hot water.

• 7:06Rory Stewart?

  So everyone you're interviewing was going pro Putin.

• 7:08Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. And so with Salmon, I remember it, I remember thinking, this is a bit warm. I wouldn't be this warm about Putin. So he, he did keep going. And by the way, when it came out, when the magazine came out, it's led the news in Scotland. And then in, in First Minister's Questions, he was getting absolutely hammered for it.

• 7:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, I guess one of the things that that maybe suggests is that there's a sort of thin line, isn't there, between being a sort of frank, larger than life politician and being a little bit on the kind of populist edge, isn't it?

• 7:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 7:37Rory Stewart?

  And I think he got in trouble also for doing interviews. I can't remember whether it was Russian or Iranian.

• 7:43Alastair Campbell?

  He was a big contributor. He was an interviewer.

• 7:45Rory Stewart?

  And was paid.

• 7:45Alastair Campbell?

  On much of the day. He was being paid quite a lot of money.

• 7:47Rory Stewart?

  Paid quite a lot of money to do that. So I remember reading a biography of him, quite a good detailed biography of him. And we see this with Salmon, we'll see this from a concern. See it again with Mary Black that we've just been talking to a couple of days ago, that these different generations of nationalist politicians, each, I think, almost a generation apart, bringing a very, very different history.

• 8:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:07Rory Stewart?

  Because Salmon started at a time when the SNP was almost nowhere. I mean, that party had almost disappeared. And the SNP achieves this famous success in nineteen sixty seven with Winnie Ewing. And has good results in seventy four, the two elections there. And then it's almost wiped out again, as you. Go into the early eighties, nowhere, and then gets three seats in nineteen eighty seven, which I think he's one off. So he's very much part of being with a party through its real wilderness, struggling years, when it almost looked like it might disappear. And then building it up to this incredible electoral force, which totally dominated Scottish politics. I mean, by twenty fifteen, I think the SNP was the third largest party in the United Kingdom.

• 8:50Alastair Campbell?

  In the whole parliament. Well, you know, when we, when we established the Scottish Parliament with the Scotland Act in nineteen ninety eight, with Donald Durr as the first minister. The electoral system, I'll never forget this, we had this meeting with Donald Durr and Pat McFadden, who was number ten advisor on devolution.

• 9:06Rory Stewart?

  And who's now a very big figure in Keston's step up.

• 9:08Alastair Campbell?

  Senior cabinet minister. And remember us talking about, you know, that you could do this system, you could do that system, we were talking about the different electoral systems. And the one we went for, part of the reason was that it would mean that no party would ever be absolutely dominant. And the reason for that wasn't to stop the SNP becoming dominant, because at the time that seemed very, very unlikely. It was to stop us becoming absolutely dominant, because to have us dominant in the UK and in the Scottish Parliament, et cetera. And literally within like a decade, as you say, the SNP were virtually all powerful. To a point that somebody, a young person growing up today, probably thinks that the SNP has been the natural party of government in Scotland forever. Whereas in fact, we were the natural party of government.

• 9:50Rory Stewart?

  Labour was so dominant.

• 9:51Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of that was down to him.

• 9:53Rory Stewart?

  And I remember in twenty ten, coming into parliament and being mocked by the Labour MPs that there were more pandas in the Edinburgh Zoo. I think there were two of them than there were Tory MPs in Scotland. And then within five years, Labour, which, you know, controlled Scotland, had been almost entirely wiped out and knocked down to, I think, one remaining seat. They too were half the number of the pandas in the Edinburgh Zoo.

• 10:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and of course, the reason we were interviewing Mary Black, which we'll put out in leading in the next few weeks, is that we'd interviewed Douglas Alexander. He was the guy that she knocked out in Paisley. And she was part of this sort of big force of the SNP within the parliament. Another thing, just as we were talking there about Salmon, the very canny politician. I remember at the time of the Scottish referendum in twenty fourteen, a couple of things that he did, which I think were really, really smart. I think he ran rings around Cameron. They discussed how they were going to do the referendum. First was lowering the voting age, which I wish we'd done for Brexit.

• 10:44Rory Stewart?

  And getting rid of the thresholds. So when they tried a referendum in nineteen seventy nine, and in nineteen seventy nine there were rules in place, which meant that you had to get, I think it was an absolute majority of the whole population. And of course, by changing those rules, David Cameron opened the window for Brexit. Well, sorry, some of those rules had already been changed, hadn't they, under Blair? But it's really significant, the rules of a referendum are vital and were vital for Brexit.

• 11:07Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing he got was the right to vote in the Scottish referendum for people who came from other parts of the world. So Latvians and Lithuanians and Belgians and so forth. And there are quite a lot of Europeans who, obviously having settled in Scotland, he was thinking, and he was right, maybe we're going to be more minded to vote for this great country that had given them their future, et cetera. And then the other thing he did really cleverly, I thought was clever. I remember spending a lot of time in the referendum. Why shouldn't my parents, who are as Scottish as Alex Hammond is, why shouldn't they be allowed to vote in this? And so I said, I remember saying to him, what did you say when Cameron raised the idea that Scots living in the rest of the UK should have a vote? And you know what he said? He never raised it.

• 11:52Rory Stewart?

  That's terrible.

• 11:53Alastair Campbell?

  Isn't it?

• 11:54Rory Stewart?

  The other thing that is so interesting about this is the sense that these referendums are much more voluntary. And maybe the big genius of Sammond is getting the referendum at all. I remember, obviously, the Brexit referendum was voluntary. But I remember also in twenty nineteen that the basic consensus amongst many of my friends in the Scottish Conservative Party was that we couldn't avoid another referendum. Nicholas Surgeon was getting a real head of steam up, saying, post Brexit, Scotland deserves another referendum. And Boris Johnson, who knew nothing really about Scotland and was very unpopular in Scotland, said, no, we're not going to have a referendum. And we all thought, well, he doesn't understand Scotland. This isn't going to work for him. He's going to be forced to have a referendum. And he wasn't. It is very interesting and must be very frustrating for the SNP,

• 12:38Rory Stewart?

  the power that Westminster has to basically decide whether to grant these things or not.

• 12:42Alastair Campbell?

  I also think that the reason why I think the dial has moved backwards on independence and that was very much the mood at our meeting in Glasgow. They were all basically of the view, when we did a show of hands, that the desire for it has gone backwards rather than forwards in recent times.

• 12:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, on a show of hands, it felt like it was closer to half-half saying that they would have voted for independence when the referendum was held in 2014, whereas now it seemed to be more two-thirds, a third against.

• 13:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. And also, when we asked about whether they thought it would happen in their lifetime, I think it had gone backwards. But I thought that the absolute high point of those who were hoping for independence was just post-Brexit with Johnson in charge. And I think if they can't get it over the line to a place where it's just absolutely overwhelming the demand for it, then it's unlikely to happen.

• 13:29Rory Stewart?

  Right, well, I'm going to take my jumper off because we're about to hit Labour's first hundred days.

• 13:33Alastair Campbell?

  Or is it because this room is quite hot?

• 13:36Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, no, no. I'm going to roll my sleeves up.

• 13:38Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, right. Oh, Keir Starmer rolls his sleeves up.

• 13:40Rory Stewart?

  He does, he does, doesn't he?

• 13:41Alastair Campbell?

  His dad was a toolmaker.

• 13:42Rory Stewart?

  Very good, thank you. Right, okay, Labour first hundred days.

• 13:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:45Rory Stewart?

  So the narrative, says he pompously, has basically been set up, which is, it's not been great, but it's early days and it can be turned around. And to some extent, my dear friend Alastair Campbell, I think, is responsible for setting some of that narrative. That's very much the way that you presented, you know, acknowledged things haven't gone brilliantly. I noticed you do some other brilliant tricks that other people picked up.

• 14:05Alastair Campbell?

  Go on.

• 14:06Rory Stewart?

  You don't deny the problems around the freebies. What you say is, there were freebies. It's nothing compared to what that monster Boris Johnson did with the millions that he gave these things. Nevertheless, you know, if you campaigned to improve standards in public life, which we absolutely should have done.

• 14:24Alastair Campbell?

  And should continue to do.

• 14:25Rory Stewart?

  And should continue to do, then I think, you know.

• 14:27Alastair Campbell?

  So what do you make of that framing?

• 14:28Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think your framing is being very successful. Let me, however.

• 14:32Alastair Campbell?

  No, because you're always asking me to sort of talk as a communications director. What do you, as a politician, make of that framing? Is that good framing?

• 14:39Rory Stewart?

  No, I like it because I think what you do there, which I feel my colleagues don't do enough, is find a way of admitting that there's a problem in the middle of that sandwich, rather than denying. I think one of the stupidest things a lot of my Conservative colleagues do is to deny an obvious problem. What you've done there is you've said good stuff, bad stuff, not as bad as them, good stuff in the future.

• 15:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:01Rory Stewart?

  Um, no, no. So I think that's very good. Now, moving off the tactics of how we communicate it. One of the things we've been talking about a lot on these live shows is actually what could you do to create growth? And the obvious point, which is that there's nothing unique about the Labour Party saying they want growth. Obviously, the Tories said they wanted growth. The question is, how do you create growth? And I've kind of honed my view down to the idea that there are basically two obvious things they could do. And then there's the sort of Keir Starmer option as the third one. So the two obvious things they could have done. The first one is a more left wing position. Fine. Borrow more, tax more, spend more on public infrastructure, spend more on public services.

• 15:44Rory Stewart?

  Stimulate the economy, which I think is roughly what Jeremy Corbyn would have wanted to do. And a little bit what Keir Starmer sounded like when he was running for leadership. Second option is your friend and former leader Tony Blair, who has spent a lot of time with the Tony Blair Institute over the last three, four years, writing what almost could have been the Labour manifesto. And the two big things there are technology and globalisation. So it's a lot about the ways that you can use technology and a lot about the ways in which Britain could open to the world and, to be fair.

• 16:17Alastair Campbell?

  And also, I guess, using AI to reimagine the way that the state works.

• 16:22Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. That's all connected to that. And I, and I think also probably, not probably, definitely like you and me, a much closer relationship with the European Union as part of that. Keir Starmer instead is doing neither of those things. And my question is, how is he going to avoid the real risk? And the real risk is the risk basically of being a slightly softer version of the Conservatives' problem. And the Conservatives' problem was austerity, basically. They never really felt they could raise taxes or borrow more, didn't want to in their case.

• 16:57Alastair Campbell?

  Although they ended up doing both.

• 16:59Rory Stewart?

  They ended up doing both. And they also never actually radically reformed. They never really changed the way the NHS delivered stuff. They never really changed planning.

• 17:10Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they did, the Lansley reforms, but they were a total disaster.

• 17:12Rory Stewart?

  And then they backed off, they backed off on. And in housing. Which again, as you know, we all talk about this all the time, you're often making the comparisons to China and France, that we spent 200 million planning the Thames Tunnel without even building it. We've been talking about, as you point out, the third runway since you came in in 97. We need to build houses. 750,000 people came to Britain last year and we built 20,000 houses. So that could be done, but to do that stuff, you'd really need to be a sort of, almost a Labour at Margaret Thatcher. You'd have to come in and really knock some heads together, take a lot of risks, cause quite a lot of short-term pain in order to completely change those things.

• 17:51Alastair Campbell?

  Which on planning, we'll see whether they're going to do it. They're certainly talking the talk about it. And likewise, I think it's interesting, this, we're talking on Monday afternoon whilst this big investment conference is going on in the Guildhall. And it's, I thought it was interesting that, I don't know who, whether this was briefed or whether it just sort of spilled out, but the news this morning was all about they're going to deregulate, slash red tape, et cetera, which again, to a sort of, you know, a home Labour ear is not necessarily what you expect or want to hear. But I just wonder whether put the two together and they are essentially looking like they're spoiling for fights on two fronts. Fights which they're more likely to be having with the left than with the right. And is that a deliberate strategy? I don't know.

• 18:35Rory Stewart?

  I don't know. And I also, with deregulation, I remember Cameron brought in Lord Young, who'd worked with Margaret Thatcher. And there was an idea when he came in in 2010 that for every new law we introduce, I think they were going to remove two laws. And of course, basically that didn't happen. Over 14 years, I don't think people feel that Britain is much less regulated than it was 14 years ago. In fact, you know, people like my mother, who keeps being quoted as a straw person on this podcast, almost says, you can hardly believe there was a Conservative government when you look at questions like deregulation. She feels like the state's getting ever more regulated, ever more suffocated. So if the Tories couldn't deregulate, how likely is it that Labour's going to be able to do it?

• 19:17Alastair Campbell?

  And also deregulation's sound, like red tape. Is one of those things that people just think, well, that must be bad. But red tape means rules, it means order, it means health, it means safety. One of the proudest achievements of Harold Wilson's government, as Alan Johnson was saying when we talked to a leading about his book on Harold Wilson, that's our second part out this week, by the way, was he brought in the Health and Safety Act. And Alan said it with real pride, both being Labour and talking about Wilson.

• 19:43Rory Stewart?

  Because the figures are unbelievable. Sorry, just on that. In a typical US factory in New Jersey before the First World War, you had a 5% chance of being killed during your working life and a 30% chance of being seriously injured. So that workers' protection and all this stuff was unbelievable because these places were so dangerous.

• 20:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Rory Stewart?

  And so this legislation, I mean, totally changed the world. And obviously, we all get really annoyed that we're all told to wear hard hats.

• 20:11Alastair Campbell?

  That's a great example, by the way. The construction industry, the fact that at the London 2012, that entire Olympic project, designed and built without a single loss of life on a building project like that, and compare that to the places where you don't have.

• 20:25Rory Stewart?

  No, it's amazing.

• 20:26Alastair Campbell?

  So the question is how you persuade business that these regulations are not going to throttle them.

• 20:30Rory Stewart?

  But then, of course, that £200 million spent on just the planning of the Thames Tidway Tunnel, a lot of that is, of course, around this regulation. And another problem for Labour is a lot of that regulation is environmental. So a lot of it is, how do you make sure that when you build the Thames Tunnel, you are not affecting biodiversity, you're not putting too much pressure on carbon, you're not affecting the tidal flows that might flood elsewhere. And so if Labour really pushed ahead with deregulating on housing, they're having two battles, aren't they? They're having the battles with the NIMBYs, the sort of Tory voters in the Shires who don't want houses going up in their backyards.

• 21:10Alastair Campbell?

  Well, everybody's got a bit of NIMBY in them because that culture's developed.

• 21:13Rory Stewart?

  Everyone's got a bit of NIMBY, but you're also having a battle with the sort of stuff that the Tories were always grumbling about, you know. And it's true, this stuff does happen. I mean, in my constituency in Cumbria, I would go to see builders who had been delayed for six months because somebody thought they were newts. In the area and, you know, sure enough, two newts were found and moved and then people began to wonder whether newts really needed to be protected as much as they were being protected. Apologies though for people listening, if you're getting sirens and ambulances and trains, it's because Alistair and I are currently in Cardiff.

• 21:46Alastair Campbell?

  And also, I've just seen our two giant trucks arriving along with our tour bus.

• 21:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, pretty cool.

• 21:53Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, it is a bit ridiculous, is it? They are giant trucks with all our gear.

• 21:57Rory Stewart?

  Was that a sort of very clever attempt to try to get off the question of what Labour's actually going to be able to achieve?

• 22:02Alastair Campbell?

  No, because I don't think you can accuse me of being tribal here, because the other thing, well, let me make my final point before we go into the ridiculousness of the Tory leadership contest, which no doubt you'll sort of tell me is one of the giant wonderful contests of our time. The other thing that's really important when you're challenging this stuff, when you're having to make people confront difficult things like, we're building a prison in your constituency, or loads of new houses are going up, but we haven't yet decided how many new schools are going to go with them and all that. You need a lot of goodwill in the government reputational bank. And that is why I'm going to stop calling them missteps, I'm going to call them hiccups. These hiccups that we've been having in recent weeks over expenses and Louise Hague saying that a company that was coming to the investment conference was a rogue employer and all that,

• 22:45Alastair Campbell?

  that these hiccups have to stop and the missteps have to stop is because reputational banking, having currency in the reputational bank is really, really important when you start to do very difficult things.

• 22:59Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. And I guess relentlessly disciplined communication. I mean, if you're going to build 300,000 homes a year, and therefore you're going to be having fights with 50, 60 constituencies a year.

• 23:12Alastair Campbell?

  And their MPs.

• 23:13Rory Stewart?

  And their MPs. You really, you really need to frame that from the beginning in a very clear way. Presumably you want to get in a situation where when the housing starts, everybody already has in their head the justification and the phrase, they knew it was coming, it's to do with the government thing. So whatever the line is, you know, in order to grow, we have to build, whatever it is, needs to be in people's heads.

• 23:34Alastair Campbell?

  The growth coming through building and investment is a perfectly good message. And I think, look, I think this Investment conference is interesting. You've got some very, very, very big names there and talking about very big sums of money that they want to invest. And also they did sort out the Louise Hague thing and that company did attend. And likewise, they had a piece, I think it was in the Times, of some really big names saying this is a great place to invest, etc.

• 23:54Rory Stewart?

  And it was interesting then, because some of-

• 23:56Alastair Campbell?

  It's odd that it's happening before the budget.

• 23:59Rory Stewart?

  It is odd. That is odd timing, because it could happen anytime, couldn't it?

• 24:02Alastair Campbell?

  I think it would have been. Well, maybe they should have another one after the budget, probably. They should have a budget that is for investment, it is for growth, and then they should do another one.

• 24:09Rory Stewart?

  It was an interesting statement, that letter too, because some of it was praising the Labour government and some of it was praising fundamentals of Britain that preceded the Labour government. So praising the government's stability. But they also said Britain is a good place to invest because of the English language, because of what they see as a good skilled workforce, because some of the investments that have been made in infrastructure, because the way that Britain is positioned with its universities, etc. So let's hope. And we'll move on to Japan after the break, but it's such an interesting question, what you do with these economies. I mean, if you step back and put Britain in the context of all the other economies that is struggling around the world.

• 24:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I thought Peter Kyle, who we both rate, he was doing the Morning Media this morning and I heard a few of his interviews on the train down. And he was very, very, very, very good, but I would like a better answer on whether single market customs union might not be a way of addressing this. But anyway, there we are. Listen, as a bridge to the Tories, why don't you just tell our listeners, because you claim that I'm too tribal when I talk about Labour, I'll allow you to tell them, what of these live shows where we've already talked to, you know, we're well into five figures, the several thousands of people that we've talked to? What have they said about, in answer to our question, with the Labour government, whether disappointed or happy? And what have they said about the Tory leadership contest?

• 25:27Rory Stewart?

  It's been very interesting. The lovely thing about live shows, and thank you to everybody who's come to see us, and we've been travelling around the country and we're talking now in Wales and we were in Scotland yesterday, is that you get the interaction, which of course we get and we're very grateful on emails and Twitter on the podcast, but it's a bit more virtual, whereas in this case it's very live. And we do a lot of dodgy, incredibly non-scientific shows of hand.

• 25:49Alastair Campbell?

  Polling, we call it.

• 25:50Rory Stewart?

  Polling, we call it.

• 25:50Alastair Campbell?

  Polling, yeah.

• 25:52Rory Stewart?

  And obviously, we need to point out that it's not necessarily the case that the audience coming to hear us is representative of the entire population of the United Kingdom. They may be selecting some ways. Somebody was saying, he was at Scotland Show, that it's actually much younger than a lot of these things. And actually, that's true if you look at the data on our podcast.

• 26:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Rory Stewart?

  We're very skewed towards eighteen to thirty five. Anyway, that aside, when you ask people what they think of Labour, you ask three questions. Alistair tends to ask this. Do you think they've done as you expected, better than you expected, or worse than you expected? And the results are usually about half as they expected, about half worse than they expected, and almost nobody better than they expected. Four or five hands go up.

• 26:33Alastair Campbell?

  I think you've been quite generous there.

• 26:35Rory Stewart?

  You think slightly more worse?

• 26:36Alastair Campbell?

  I think your Labour tribalism is taking.

• 26:40Alastair Campbell?

  I think, I've got to be honest, where I'd be sitting looking at the audience is, maybe this is just because of my depressive mindset, I think worse than expected has been winning.

• 26:50Rory Stewart?

  Is getting slightly ahead.

• 26:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think it's even more than slightly. I'm really shocked you said that. Have you got a problem with your eyes?

• 26:55Rory Stewart?

  I was trying to be fair.

• 26:56Alastair Campbell?

  Trying to be.

• 26:58Rory Stewart?

  Just in case, it's like this, we have this awful thing called a tribalism buzzer that we've got on stage.

• 27:01Alastair Campbell?

  We need to get one for you.

• 27:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I know. Well, I mean, obviously, the idea of it just got on my head there.

• 27:06Alastair Campbell?

  I also had one guy in the hotel in Scotland who said, I was one of the hands up for better than expected, but that's because I thought they were going to be really, really terrible, and they've only been terrible. And he was a list. But I'll tell you what I think is there, and this was particularly the case in Manchester, there is still an awful lot of goodwill to Labour.

• 27:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 27:27Alastair Campbell?

  They desperately want Labour to do well, because I think they know, they know how important it is. If this Labour is a one-term government, where does it go? Does it go back to these mad right-wing Tories? Does it go reform? Where's it going to go?

• 27:37Rory Stewart?

  And of course, to my frustration, I keep hoping that I can get the crowd to say they're going to go for a third party that's neither Tory or Conservative, and I'm not.

• 27:44Alastair Campbell?

  And it does work, working out as one of the best laugh lines of the whole event.

• 27:47Rory Stewart?

  I'm just not getting the hands on that.

• 27:48Alastair Campbell?

  So listen, tell our listeners what they've been saying about the last three, the final three.

• 27:52Rory Stewart?

  So we started doing this when the candidates were James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch, and Robert Jenrick, and we've kept doing it. Even since James Cleverly has been knocked out and the results are absolutely astonishing. So these are crowds which in Birmingham, I guess, was pushing towards four thousand. Manchester cumulatively, we had over five thousand people.

• 28:11Alastair Campbell?

  Glasgow, two point eight.

• 28:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly. So anyway, these are quite relatively large numbers of people and we are saying to them.

• 28:18Alastair Campbell?

  If you were a Tory.

• 28:19Rory Stewart?

  If you were a Tory, who do you think, who do you think is most prime ministerial and could be most of a threat to Keir Starmer? In other words, who would you?

• 28:26Alastair Campbell?

  And who would you vote for?

• 28:27Rory Stewart?

  Who would you choose? Yeah. And the result is usually that out of these thousands of people, you get five or six hands for Robert Jenrick, four or five hands for Kemi Badenoch. I would say that's within a statistical margin of error. Yeah. And, and then you get ninety nine percent of the hands going up for James Cleverly, who of course has just been knocked out. I also got in trouble. I noted that his campaign was being run by Grant Shapps, who was the master of the dark arts behind Boris Johnson's campaign with these amazing spreadsheets. And in an interview, just at the final moments, he was asked what he thought about the different candidates. And he said, as the chair of Robert Jenrick's campaign, I mean, James Cleverly's campaign.

• 29:10Rory Stewart?

  So I, I said, is it possible that when Grant Shapps was encouraging people to vote for, because there's an allegation that

• 29:17Alastair Campbell?

  Swapping, trading votes.

• 29:18Rory Stewart?

  Trading votes, that he, he actually might have been on Robert Jenrick's side all along. Anyway.

• 29:22Alastair Campbell?

  Has he, has he denied this?

• 29:23Rory Stewart?

  He's been in touch. He's sent me a list of WhatsApp messages and in those WhatsApp messages, he's clearly encouraging MPs to stick with James Cleverly.

• 29:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, we might have another account under a different name. I mean, he's got several labels. You could have several accounts. You could have several campaigns running.

• 29:39Rory Stewart?

  I, I, I.

• 29:40Alastair Campbell?

  You take him at his word, just like you take all Tory, like you took Matt Hancock at his word when he said he was, wanted a meeting to get behind you. You took Michael Gove at his word just before he absolutely shafted you by telling the times that you throw the towel in.

• 29:53Rory Stewart?

  That's right. Yeah.

• 29:54Alastair Campbell?

  Lovely. It must be lovely to be so trusting of these Tory colleagues. So who do you think is going to win out of Jenrick and Badenoch?

• 30:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think.

• 30:00Alastair Campbell?

  Tory members, you know, the Tory members better than I do.

• 30:02Rory Stewart?

  It's very difficult. Um, I think there are advantages and disadvantages on both sides. So I think Kemi Badenoch has the strongest right wing credentials. She was a Brexiteer early. She's made many more provocative statements about issues that a lot of the Tory base care about. On the other hand, for some voters, not, not all of them, I, I don't think the Tory party is all like this, but there will be some people who don't want a black woman, to be honest. So there'll be an element of a racist sexist vote amongst some of the some of the members. There'll be some people who think Robert Jenrick is a central casting 1980s.

• 30:39Alastair Campbell?

  And bestard.

• 30:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Tory MP type. And there will be other people on the right of the party who will say he's a fake and actually he's from the centre and he's tacking back. And the more right wing he gets, the more they're like, oh yeah, but someone from the centre would say that, wouldn't they? There was a huge assault from Matthew Paris on Robert Jenrick this morning, which was interesting.

• 30:58Alastair Campbell?

  I can't imagine he's a big fan of Badenoch. Although I think I suspect that your friend Michael Go is seems to me to be getting the Times quite firmly behind Badenoch.

• 31:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:08Alastair Campbell?

  So he's probably, as we speak, having lunch with Robert Jenrick to eat up a few hours of his time.

• 31:13Rory Stewart?

  The Matthew Paris thing was interesting because Matthew, you would have thought would be a natural supporter of Jenrick if Jenrick could be on the left because Matthew's very much from my One Nation part of the party.

• 31:21Alastair Campbell?

  He sees him as a fraud.

• 31:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, passionately, yeah, passionately remain. And he's, yeah, he praised Badenoch because he said at least she seemed original and sincere.

• 31:29Alastair Campbell?

  The most ludicrous thing I saw on social media this morning was Robert Jenrick with a birthday cake with a Union flag, an icing, Union flag on the top, celebrating what would have been Margaret Thatcher's 99th birthday.

• 31:44Rory Stewart?

  Brilliant. And he's appointed Jacob Rees-Mogg as his party chair.

• 31:47Alastair Campbell?

  He said Jacob Rees-Mogg will be the party chair. So I think we know what the game is. But have you ever celebrated a 99th birthday of somebody who's dead?

• 31:55Rory Stewart?

  No, my, my.

• 31:56Alastair Campbell?

  Do you mind you wait for a hundred?

• 31:57Rory Stewart?

  I think my father.

• 31:57Alastair Campbell?

  That might be more appropriate.

• 31:58Rory Stewart?

  My father's 102nd birthday just passed. But no, I think there are some cultures in Asia which celebrate death days in that way.

• 32:07Alastair Campbell?

  Right. Which is amazing because what are we going to be talking about after the break already?

• 32:14Rory Stewart?

  Good. Okay. Well, thank you for that. And I think maybe, maybe you're hinting that we should go into the break and after the break, pick up on Japan and Viktor Orban.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  Chronic migraine is 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine before they start. It's not for those with 14 or fewer headache days a month. It prevents, on average, eight to nine headache days a month versus six to seven for placebo.

• 32:41Speaker 04

  Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away. As difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis, or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

• 33:24Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back-to-school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now, made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love, and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.

• 33:52Speaker 06

  When you think about Crocs, you think the classic clog. But did you know there's also a canvas clog? A vegan suede clog. A coastal-inspired style. A style with studs, straps, and lots of sass. Honestly, I could keep going with the surprises. You've got to see them for yourself because there is literally a style for every kind of girl. So do your thing and head to crocs.com or a store near you now.

• 34:25Rory Stewart?

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

• 34:27Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 34:28Rory Stewart?

  So in a really amazing new turnout for what has been probably the most interesting democratic year in world history.

• 34:35Alastair Campbell?

  We've got an unexpected one.

• 34:36Rory Stewart?

  We have an unexpected new election. So we thought, beginning of the year, as we were schlepping through, we had India, we had Russia, ha ha, we had US and UK. Your friend Emmanuel Macron threw an unexpected election in France, and now Japan has thrown an unexpected election to add to all the incredible elections which have brought more than half the world's population. So a lot of the big G7 powers now going through their electoral cycles. And this follows the resignation from a man that we've talked about on the podcast, Fumio Kishida, and the appointment of Shigeru Ishiba. And Ishiba has now dissolved parliament, which is a pretty risky thing to do, as we discovered with Emmanuel Macron.

• 35:18Alastair Campbell?

  He did it, was it eight or 10 days after being appointed prime minister?

• 35:21Rory Stewart?

  And it can work, or it can go wrong.

• 35:23Alastair Campbell?

  Kishida did the same. He dissolved the parliament after snap elections, and he got a huge victory.

• 35:28Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's always, doesn't always work, and didn't work for Heath, I think. I mean, these things often...

• 35:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. It's strange, isn't it, how we don't often talk about Japanese politics. The British media barely cover it, but it's fascinating. Their politics is very, very factional. You have this party, the LDP, the Liberal Democratic Party, which is, by the way, not very liberal, not very democratic, it's a very, it's a quite right-wing party. And they have been in power just with two little gaps since they were founded, I think, in 1955. And they came out of two other parties which merged to take on what was then the Japan Socialist Party, which they saw as a bunch of comics.

• 36:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, if I can allow a bit of, tiny bit of Rest Is History. It's a fascinating story because it connects to a lot of the stuff we talk about in the podcast. Basically, the Socialist Party went through the movement that Labour Party went through with Tony Benn, or the Conservative Party is going through in Britain at the moment by attacking to the far right, which is a socialist party in Japan, broke into three factions and decided that anything that was popular with the voters was no good. At all.

• 36:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 36:31Rory Stewart?

  And they needed to.

• 36:32Alastair Campbell?

  Must be no compromise.

• 36:33Rory Stewart?

  Needed to tack to the far left. Exactly, that's right, yeah. And this provided an incredible opportunity for a man called Ikeda, who came in and such an encouraging figure in a world of polarization because he took over from a man called Kishi, who was a big egotist, pretty right wing, and Ikeda tacked hard over and was all about compromise, bipartisanship. He dropped some of the radical reforms, he went out of his way to give very moving funeral orations at the funerals of socialist MPs, and then he did something which would seem insane and would be lovely if Keir Starmer was able to do. He said, I'm gonna double your income in six years, I'm gonna double the size of the Japanese economy in six years.

• 37:15Rory Stewart?

  Put in context, the current UK levels of growth, average levels of growth since 2008, it would take us 60 years to do that, right? And he did it in six years.

• 37:24Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 37:25Rory Stewart?

  So between 1960 and 1966, the Japanese economy doubled in size, and by the late 60s, and purchasing power parity terms was pushing ahead of the United Kingdom in economic size. Anyway, back to you.

• 37:35Alastair Campbell?

  More recently, a less happy story on the economy, which is why they keep churning through leaders. But what was really interesting about this is that Ishiba, who has won this election, this is fifth leadership attempt.

• 37:46Rory Stewart?

  It's like Biden, isn't he?

• 37:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and he's, and he's, he's not very popular with his MPs, he's much more popular with his, he played the cleverly trick, but he won. Their, the electoral system for the leader is partly MPs, partly members.

• 37:58Rory Stewart?

  And they have many more members, so they have many.

• 38:00Alastair Campbell?

  More members.

• 38:01Rory Stewart?

  So unlike the Tories, got about 100,000 members, there, there are over 3 million members, the LDP, so it's a much more representative of the general population.

• 38:09Alastair Campbell?

  But he was not expected to win at any stage until he won. The first round was led by a woman called Sanai Takachi, who is much more conservative. I think damaged herself by being very, very hard over on some of the stuff that China and the Koreans don't like. She talked about, she would happily visit this shrine that they really feel shouldn't be visited by leaders because it sort of celebrates people among the more criminals. The early frontrunner was this young charismatic guy who's. Father had been a prime minister Shinjiro Koizumi. And his campaign was hit by a very, very large blow when his father did an interview saying he didn't think he was ready to be prime minister.

• 38:50Alastair Campbell?

  And then he had a second blow when he said that he'd be more than happy to meet with Kim Jong Un. Which again, did not go down very well with members or MPs. So he was out. Then this, this lady won. She won the first round, then all the others drop out.

• 39:04Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 39:04Alastair Campbell?

  And this is when the other guy came in.

• 39:06Rory Stewart?

  She was very, very close to Abe and very much seen as being part of the Abe faction. And had all the heavyweights, the party behind her. So she was, I don't know quite what the equivalent would be, but certainly within a Tory leadership race. She was the dominant one who the party was behind.

• 39:21Alastair Campbell?

  She was, she was the bad enough figure in a way that people thought was going to win. And of course, Abe, the other thing to say and throw into this mix, of course Abe, who was assassinated two or three years ago. And there was all this stuff came out about the links between the LDP and the, and the unification church, the Moonies. And that has reared its head again because the new prime minister's new justice minister. Has they suddenly discovered that he was still very active within the unification church? He's now had to sever all links with the unification church. So he's not having the greatest start, but when Kishida stepped down, have a guess at what his disapproval rating was? This, this'll, this'll give Keir Starmer a.

• 39:58Rory Stewart?

  Great. What was his disapproval?

• 39:59Alastair Campbell?

  His disapproval rating was seventy nine percent.

• 40:01Rory Stewart?

  That's going some because people got pretty depressed when you're down at sort of thirty five percent disapproval, but seventy five percent, that's not.

• 40:08Alastair Campbell?

  He was on seventy nine percent. And of course, this came after the, these scandals involving slush funds. Within the factions, because there are factions within the party. The LDP has been so dominant as a party of government that it's, it's almost, it's formalized these factions. They've now sort of tried to get rid of those. His faction got disbanded. His faction was called Kokikai. So how was slush fund stuff going on? Lots and lots of division within the party, but once you get those figures, you've got to go. So he's gone. New guy comes in and says straight away, I'm having an election.

• 40:39Rory Stewart?

  So at, at the bottom of this, as you said, is this question around the amazing Japanese economy? And one of the, the facts that I'm fascinated with is that Japan grew so quickly from that period in the sixties. That by 1989, it was the second largest economy in the world and was on track to overtake the US. So people talked about Japan in the way they talked about China a few years ago. My colleague at Yale, Professor Paul Kennedy, wrote this book called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which basically seemed to suggest, a bit unfair to Paul, but basically that the world had been dominated by Spain and then by France and then by Britain and then by the US, and then it's going to be dominated by Japan. It was a big bestseller in Japan.

• 41:19Alastair Campbell?

  Good for morale.

• 41:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, again, famously, the Royal Palace in Tokyo was worth more than the whole of Manhattan, and Japanese companies were buying the big American television studios, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The Japanese economy in 1989 was eight times larger than the Chinese economy. So at the period where, you know, you were already working, Japan was this sort of economic superpower that didn't really need to worry.

• 41:45Alastair Campbell?

  Well, most of our meetings with them, apart from when we went to Japan, were around the G7 and the G8 because they were big, big players alongside the US.

• 41:54Rory Stewart?

  Huge, huge domino. And then, of course, they ran into a wall. And it was the strangest thing that's almost happened to any economy on record. And although people say it's because they were getting older and begin coming up with answers around that technology, the answer is the economists don't really understand fully either how it happened or what they should have done to get out to it. But essentially, the whole thing ground to a halt. In nominal GDP terms, between 1991 and 2012, the US economy grew by 160%. The UK economy grew by a similar amount, went from about 600 million to about 1.5 billion. The Japanese economy in that period didn't grow at all. In nominal terms, zero growth. If you'd put

• 42:39Rory Stewart?

  100,000 yen in your fridge in 1995, I stole this from a guy called David Pilling, by 2012, it would have been, in purchasing terms, be worth 112,000 yen. If you put it in the stock market, it would have halved in value, down to 50,000 yen. As I think I mentioned when I got back from Japan, I'd been talking to a lady whose house outside Tokyo was worth 70% less than when she bought it 25 years ago. So that's the bad story. But oddly, you can also tell a good story because strangely, because their economy is flatlining at the same time as their population is decreasing, and actually many things are getting more affordable, in per capita GDP terms, often it doesn't actually feel that painful.

• 43:20Rory Stewart?

  For the average Japanese and and one of the most sort of positive times was the time of Koizumi, who was the man who was the prime minister for a lot of the period when you were in office.

• 43:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:29Rory Stewart?

  And who's just torpedoed his son's electoral chances.

• 43:32Alastair Campbell?

  He certainly didn't help it.

• 43:33Rory Stewart?

  Who who briefly looked as though.

• 43:35Alastair Campbell?

  He was a big dude at the time.

• 43:37Rory Stewart?

  In the early 2000s, he was going to turn it all around and he dissolved the parliament, won a snap election, incredibly successful, everybody was very excited. And again, it was the same with Shinzo Abe. You remember there was abenomics and again, Japan has been struggling, you know, is the answer to go the sort of full Cameron austerity or is the answer to print money? It doesn't seem to matter what they do, nothing they do is turning this around.

• 44:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's that's the economics, but on the politics, apart from a brief period in the early 90s and then the consequence of the crash, 2009 to 2012, the LDP has been in power through that entire period since it was formed in the 50s. I mean, you talk about the Conservatives being the greatest party of government, this law, by a mile.

• 44:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, also just to, I mean, you you're often mocking me for the idea that the kind of British class system rules something. So many of these Japanese prime ministers, including the current one, and the current one, his father was a cabinet minister, his mother's father was the governor of a province and was one of the big rulers of occupied Singapore during the Second World War. Shinzo Abe's grandfather.

• 44:43Alastair Campbell?

  They're into the elite.

• 44:44Rory Stewart?

  But also, there wasn't really a proper denazification.

• 44:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 44:48Rory Stewart?

  So Shinzo Abe's grandfather had basically been the dictator of Manchuria during the 1930s.

• 44:53Alastair Campbell?

  If this was any other country in the world that I can think of, the party of government would be getting booted out the whole time, wouldn't they?

• 44:59Rory Stewart?

  Well, very, very low turnout because everybody's so depressed. The opposition totally.

• 45:05Alastair Campbell?

  Hopeless.

• 45:06Rory Stewart?

  Hopeless. And yes, I suppose you end up with a weird world, but these things can collapse because remember the Liberal Party in Canada from Trudeau?

• 45:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Rory Stewart?

  Almost to Michael Ignatia, felt like it was the natural party of government. And all that mattered were tiny moves within the Liberal Party. And then it suddenly sort of blew itself up overnight.

• 45:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 45:22Rory Stewart?

  And went to one of its worst defeats ever.

• 45:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Roy, we've been banging on for a long time. Briefly on Hungary, Orban. So the European Union has this strange system where there's a rotating presidency, where a different country takes on the presidency every six months. And part of the duty of the president is that they go and have to sort of make a speech to the European Parliament. And Ursula von der Leyen responds, and then people join in the debate. So Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary.

• 45:47Rory Stewart?

  Is the president.

• 45:48Alastair Campbell?

  He's the current president, goes and makes a speech. And von der Leyen, who was criticised in the past.

• 45:52Rory Stewart?

  And again, I mean, most of this is a podcast, remember, but he is basically the most strong example of a populist, strong man in Europe. And he's the guy that's really pushing for a sort of Trump, Xi Jinping, Putin, strong man vision of the world. Yeah, sorry, back to you.

• 46:06Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. So he goes on and does his thing and basically sort of makes lots of criticisms of the European Union. Von der Leyen really puts the boot into him for the first time in those terms. Reminds him of some of the sort of historic European debates that have led to wars. And essentially says to him, which side would you have been on? Which side would you have been on when the Czechs were under attack? Which side have you been on in the past with the Hungarians?

• 46:28Rory Stewart?

  With the Hungarians, yeah. So when the Soviet Union comes running in Hungary in the 1950s, where would you have been?

• 46:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So my favourite line in Ursula von der Leyen's speech, she said, there are still some looking across at Orban who blame this war not on the invader, but on the invaded. Not on Putin's lust for power, but on Ukraine's thirst for freedom. And the only person who came to his defence was this German hard right guy. But then the other thing they did, they invited the opposition politician, Peter Magyar, who's also an AAP, so they invited him to make a speech. And it was good theatre because Magyar goes straight up to Orban. Totally took Orban by surprise by offering to shake his hand. He sort of reluctantly took his hand and Maggie then went up to the podium and really laid it into him. And he said to him,

• 47:14Alastair Campbell?

  asked him if he was proud that he's created the poorest and most corrupt country in the European.

• 47:20Rory Stewart?

  Which of course Orban supporters would not recognise at all because of course he convinces them. They're just doing really well. And I mean, this is the odd thing about the alternative reality. I mean, when you say the poorest and most corrupt country in Europe, they really wouldn't recognise that. But the truth is, of course, that actually the Hungarian population, like the Japanese population is going in the wrong direction.

• 47:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but they don't because Orban has done what a lot of these kind of populist hard right leaders do, you know, suppress the media, no real freedom of speech, rule of law, get hold of the institutions, weaken the opposition. So this guy is worth watching his speech, but in von der Leyen's speech as well. And there's also a French politician called Valerie Haye, who I think I sent it to you and it's subtitled For the Heart of Frenching. But she did it absolutely. And she didn't stop looking him in the eye. And he kept looking away. He kept pretending he's been taking notes the whole time, like he was, you know, at a lecture or something. But it was very, very interesting. And I suspect he loved, look, he defended himself and he said that all this stuff was kind of, you know, leftist lies about what's happening.

• 48:21Rory Stewart?

  He was given a chance to respond, wasn't he?

• 48:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And he was very, very dismissive of the whole thing. And of course, a lot of these speeches attacking Orban were essentially about Ukraine, basically saying that you are Putin's man. You're not Europe's man. You're Putin's man. And it was, you know, he sat there and took it, but that was a bad, bad day at the office of Mr. Orban.

• 48:40Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 48:40Alastair Campbell?

  This was the same event where famously when Tony Blair, when we had the president, I don't know if you remember Tony Blair, absolutely, if you want to see somebody taking down Nigel Farage, it was one of the best moments of Nigel Farage's career.

• 48:56Rory Stewart?

  Right, final little stat on Japan, which I'm actually getting because I'm obsessed with Japan. As you know, the Japanese population is falling really fast as it gets older. And it's interesting because South Korea is on the same trajectory, Russia's on the same trajectory, and most European countries would be on the same trajectory if it wasn't for immigration. The Scottish population, for example, is well below replacement rates if you set aside immigration. In fact, the Scottish population was pretty much at the same size it is now in about 1950. But anyway, Japan is going to drop to 100 million in 2050 by 25 million, down 43 million by the end of the century, which will be about the level that was at in 1910. Rory, thank you for bringing us back to Japan to end this podcast, and we will see you soon. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

• 49:53Speaker 07

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 50:01Speaker 08

  We assess Prime Minister with high confidence it was Russian.

• 50:07Speaker 09

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 50:09Speaker 10

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 50:12Speaker 07

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

• 50:25Speaker 09

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 50:27Speaker 07

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

• 50:36Speaker 11

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 50:41Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 50:43Speaker 11

  New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 50:48Speaker 12

  You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom MacDuff, Duffy!

• 50:52Speaker 11

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 50:54Speaker 12

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 50:57Speaker 11

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

• 51:01Speaker 09

  We have two times friendly key.

• 51:02Speaker 11

  Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe.

• 51:07Speaker 12

  Don't do it, Duffy!

• 51:10Speaker 11

  Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.