359. Starmer vs. Musk: Why the richest man in the world turned against the Prime Minister

What's behind Musk's spiral into the far right? Is Robert Jenrick veering into Enoch Powell territory? Is Austria on the precipice of a new form of fascism? 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 England, Scotland & Wales. Use referral code POLITICS after sign up for a chance to win a TRIP merch bundle. Learn more at getfuse.com/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] Assistant Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Video Editor: Vasco Andrade 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

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• 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 Creve and of course the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN and 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 already 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/rusthispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 2:14Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:17Alastair Campbell?

  And with me Alastair Campbell. And loads and loads to talk about Rory. I mean, I'm sick to death of hearing and talking about Elon Musk, but I think we have to, not least because of what's happened with him and Keir Starmer, him and Jess Phillips, him and Nigel Farage and the ups and downs and all that. And the grooming gang story, which Elon Musk frankly has driven to the top of the political agenda. And it's him, it's not anybody else, it's him that's done that. I would like to talk a lot about Canada. Justin Trudeau, who I think you, going back to just before Christmas, you labelled as one of your worst politicians of the year. And both of us have been saying for some time, he's got to go. Well, he's now gone. And we'll talk about what's going to happen in in Canada.

• 3:01Alastair Campbell?

  And Austria is the other country I'd like to talk about, where the far-right leader Kinkel has finally been asked by the president, who really doesn't like him, to try to form a government because the other parties have failed to put together a coalition. So where do you want to start on the whole Musk thing?

• 3:19Rory Stewart?

  The story essentially is that Elon Musk is now increasingly using Twitter, which of course he bought, as a platform for promoting various right-wing and increasingly far-right views. And if you look through his Twitter thread, he is to be found retweeting stuff from Kinkel's party in Austria, which we're going to get on to in a bit, which is the far-right, basically neo-Nazi origin party in Austria. The AFD in Germany. So he retweeted a picture of two people doing what's politely called a Roman salute, in other words, a straight-armed Nazi-style salute over some blonde children.

• 4:01Rory Stewart?

  And in Britain, he has become increasingly a champion of Tommy Robinson. Stephen Yaxley Lennon. Stephen Yaxley Lennon, who we'll talk about a little bit because he's again, thanks to Musk, is increasingly prominent in the British media, now in prison for contempt of court, far-right, anti-Muslim campaigner, set up the English Defence League with links into hooligan movement and the Luton Football Club. And bound up with all of this is a whole series of obsessions that Musk shares with the far-right about Muslims, and in particular, the strong line they're trying to sell that Muslims are raping white women.

• 4:44Rory Stewart?

  And the centre of all of this is a focus on a series of horrible cases that happened between 1997 and 2013. So we're talking about going back 10, 20 years is what's being focused on here, where a group of almost entirely British Asian and Asian men in Rotherham and Rochdale were involved in grooming, in other words, meeting girls generally between 13 and 16, disproportionately in care, making friends with them in parks and then paying them for sex and then passing them around between each other and then moving them between towns.

• 5:27Rory Stewart?

  The numbers are absolutely staggering. It looks like potentially in Rotherham, 1,400 children were abused. In Rochdale, 230 children. And it's a story of many things. It is, of course, for the far-right predominantly, an opportunity to suggest that this shows that Muslims themselves are dangerous. So something like 94 individuals were accused, many of those maybe multiple names, 45 have been imprisoned, but they're being used as a big, big symbol by the far-right of abuse. But it's also a big story about the failure of the state. It's about the failure of the police to take the girls seriously, the failure of authorities

• 6:12Rory Stewart?

  to listen to social services when they drew attention to them and were worried about what was happening, and a real failure of the prosecution service also, who believed that these girls were not credible witnesses. So all of this going on in the background. Over to you. So this, as you say, is a story that's been going on for well over a

• 6:31Alastair Campbell?

  A couple of decades now, and there has been a lot of coverage of it. There has been an official report by somebody called Professor Alexis Jay. There have been recommendations that were made to the last government, which weren't brought in, which the current government is now beginning to. But the reason that this has been driven to the top of the political agenda is because Elon Musk went on one of his kind of Twitter rampages about it. And stories which have been around in the British media and British politics for a while were suddenly felt to be newsworthy again because of that fact. And then you had other newspapers, particularly on the right, and GP News and others, right, this is the issue for the

• 7:14Alastair Campbell?

  new year, which was kind of inconvenient, to say the least, for Keir Starmer, because he wanted to come back in the new year and start off with a big thing about the National Health Service. Funny enough, for yesterday, Keir Starmer did his press conference on the Health Service. At the end of it, I had to rewrite my new European column, because I'd written a column saying, Keir Starmer cannot ignore these attacks from Elon Musk eddy Logga, because he's too big a figure and he's made himself too big an enemy. And Keir Starmer has to, and the government has to fight back on this. And I actually thought that, I don't know if you saw Keir Starmer's press conference yesterday, but I thought he handled it incredibly well, because if I texted Tony Blair beforehand, I said, if

• 7:58Alastair Campbell?

  you were here today, how would you handle questions about Musk? And Tony just said, be clear, be calm. And I, by the way, before you say, no, I didn't pass that on. But that being said, he was very clear and very calm, but he was also very steely. And I think a lot of people sense that, one, he defended his record as DPP, because that's come under attack. He also explained why he didn't think it was the right thing to have a new national inquiry into this, because of the inquiries that have already happened.

• 8:27Rory Stewart?

  Can I just come in on that speech? Because I did watch it. And I thought it was interesting because it's the first time we're really beginning to see Starmer communicating effectively. As you say, he acknowledged the horror of the abuse. That was the first thing he did, which is absolutely right.

• 8:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:45Rory Stewart?

  Didn't try to cover up the fact that this was predominantly the abuse of white girls by British Asian men, didn't cover up how horrendous it had been, but then moved on to talk clearly about what he'd done as Director of Public Prosecutions, to reopen investigations which had been closed, and then moved on, as you say, to defend Just Phillips, and did it without name checking Musk too much, but making it very clear.

• 9:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Rory Stewart?

  That at the heart of this is something authoritarian. I mean, essentially Musk is trying to get rid of anybody who disagrees with him in any way. He's got no interest in democratic process.

• 9:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we saw that as well with, in relation to Nigel Farage. I mean, so Nigel Farage, to my surprise frankly, was the main interview, or the first big interview on Laura Koonsberg's programme. I don't know whether the Prime Minister or the opposition had said they didn't want to do it, but certainly usually that programme is a kind of platform for the, one of the main party leaders to sort of set out their stall for the new year. Farage was the interviewee. It was done not in the studio, where minor party leaders might normally be expected to do it, but he was sort of given the status of it being, let's do it out on location. At one of his rallies, where it was set up with a succession of interviews

• 10:05Alastair Campbell?

  with supporters of his saying why, effectively why he should be Prime Minister, it was literally like a party political broadcast that bit. And then the questions were really just giving him the platform that he wanted. Now, it backfired for him because he talked about Elon Musk being a hero, he'd brought free speech back on to Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. But because he didn't echo Elon Musk's support for Tommy Robinson, about whom I suspect Elon Musk had not heard of until a couple of weeks ago, Elon Musk turned on Farage, out of the blue. He just did a tweet saying Nigel Farage doesn't have what it takes, he should be replaced as leader of the, of Reform. Now, that is exactly to your point.

• 10:48Alastair Campbell?

  If you are somebody in his orbit who is not echoing what he says, echoing what he does, supporting what he does, he's going to use his platform to get a megaphone turned against you. And it was very interesting how many, lots of support for Nigel Farage on the right, but also lots of people saying, yeah, he's right. And of course, so we've said before that the battle on the right, this is why I think the Conservatives are making a terrible mistake, if they think that that's the ground on which they have to compete. Let Farage fight out that space with the likes of Tommy Robinson. I actually think Farage is doing the right thing in not echoing Elon Musk on this, but he's obviously paid that price. But this says to me that Elon Musk has become, he is a narcissist, he is a megalomaniac,

• 11:32Alastair Campbell?

  he thinks that because he's, quotes, the richest man in the world, he should not be held to account by anybody. Now, what's been interesting to me in this, Rory, is how quiet Donald Trump has been. I was listening to the Mooch. Now, we have to bear in mind, the Mooch was wrong about Trump never going to win the election. And I'm beginning to wonder if he's wrong about the idea that Elon Musk has already been ostracized. Because when you look to the pictures around New Year, they were like a couple. They were literally like, you know, dressed identically, dancing together. But I wonder whether the reason why Trump has gone a little bit quiet in the last few days is either because he

• 12:10Alastair Campbell?

  genuinely is now busy preparing for the inauguration, or he's just, maybe he's giving Musk a bit more rope and he's just letting him do this stuff. But he's been very, very quiet about all this stuff. And I suspect he's reaching that point of thinking, this guy is not doing me any good.

• 12:28Rory Stewart?

  Well, just to take it right back to the beginning. One of the strange things, and I, as you say, I got a bit of abuse online for saying this, is that Twitter is not actually a particularly large platform. If you were trying to take over the platform which most voters respond to, you wouldn't really be going for Twitter. And what Musk has proved is the power of something that was often underestimated. The reason it's, Twitter has often been underestimated is that Facebook has three billion users, YouTube, two and a half billion, WhatsApp, two billion, Instagram, two billion, TikTok, 1.5 billion.

• 13:06Rory Stewart?

  Twitter's 600 million.

• 13:07Alastair Campbell?

  Including virtually every journalist and politician on the planet.

• 13:10Rory Stewart?

  Correct. So that was the interesting thing. So when we were beginning to get into digital campaigning as when I was an MP and people like Jim Messina, who'd run Obama's big digital campaign, came over to talk to us. The story from him and from Linton Crosby was, don't focus on Twitter. Twitter's only really read, they said, by journalists. And actually, if you want to reach voters, they're much more likely to be on Facebook. And if you look at the way that the Labour Party spent their money campaigning, it will have been on Facebook and TikTok ads, not on Twitter. So when Musk bought Twitter for a very large amount of money,

• 13:51Rory Stewart?

  people underestimated the extent to which it was going to have a massive political impact, partly because of this story that it's about a quarter of the size or a fifth of the size of these other platforms and its demographics are not skewed towards voters. But my goodness, he's made it count. And as you say, that's partly because the politicians and the journalists are on it. Just another reminder quickly for people, because it's so bewildering what he's doing. He's now calling for Nigel Farage to step down.

• 14:22Alastair Campbell?

  And he's calling for Keir Starmer and Jess Phillips to go to jail.

• 14:25Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. So this started with him saying that Keir Starmer should step down. And that's where you really get a sense. I've called him a fascist, maybe an authoritarian is another way of looking at it. He is prepared to say the king needs to dissolve Parliament and, you know, get rid of Keir Starmer. Now, obviously, that's not because he's a monarchist. I mean, Elon Musk presumably doesn't have any particular affection for the king. And if the king ever said anything that he disagreed with, he'd be attacking the king tomorrow. It's simply, it's his way or the highway and everybody must get behind his vision of the world. And final one for you, which was my question when I keep reading his tweets. What do you think's going on? Where's he getting all this stuff? You can never have heard of Jess Phillips.

• 15:09Rory Stewart?

  There must be somebody in Reform, some British ally of his, who's feeding him this stuff and who's turning him against Starmer, Phillips, now turning him against Farage and getting all this stuff going.

• 15:21Alastair Campbell?

  No, there's no doubt there is somebody. I don't know whether it's true. There was talk at a certain point that Dominic Cummings was the person, then there was somebody else talking about it was Michael Gove. I've got no idea. I've got no idea. But actually, what I think is interesting is that people who know him, I've never met Musk, but I know people who do know him. And, you know, and I hate talking about this stuff because I think, you know, you've got to be very, very careful sitting here talking about something you don't know and analysing them psychologically, as it were. But I think if you look at the the kind of obsessiveness with which he's trolling somebody like Keir Starmer, and you look at the way that he is responding to even the mildest, vaguest criticism, that

• 16:03Alastair Campbell?

  there's something psychologically really unhinged going on. He's like a toddler who's got this new toy, and the toy is the closeness to power. He's got this thing going on with Trump. That's what seems to have taken him from being this person that, you know, we've both talked to people who've known Musk in the past, who say this version of Elon Musk is a totally different human being. So he's had some kind of weird personality change. A lot of the people who know him say it was all about this child, this trans child, that he has a trans child, that he cannot accept that he's got a child who is in his mind not normal. And this is where he started the whole thing about the woke mind virus, and that's what's taking over the world. That's what's radicalised him towards the

• 16:48Alastair Campbell?

  right. But I think the thing with Keir Starmer, is it about the online safety bill? Is it about the fact that he thinks that Britain has got some sort of, you know, appetite to control social media? But if that were the case, why isn't he going after the Australians in the same way? They're actually legislating on social media.

• 17:08Rory Stewart?

  Elon Musk is obsessed with the fact that the birth rates in places like the United States and Europe are declining. And he doesn't think that the solution to that is to bring in migrants from places like Latin America to fill the declining birth rates. And some of the language around this and some of the concepts around this are not a million miles away from the great replacement theory, which again is an obsession with the idea that the birth rates in Europe and the US are plummeting and we're all being replaced by immigrants. And he certainly has some of that going on in his head, even if he doesn't subscribe to the whole theory. It was actually originally developed by a far-right French intellectual thinker who

• 17:53Rory Stewart?

  almost nobody's heard about and has then been taken up by many others. So there is now in Germany, this identitarian movement, which again is on the edge of what Musk is doing, where essentially at the heart of it is a very, very profound racist view, which they dress up in a word they call ethno-pluralism. And ethno-pluralism basically says people should live in their own countries where they're naturally from.

• 18:22Alastair Campbell?

  Like South Africa.

• 18:23Rory Stewart?

  Like South Africa. And actually, it's quite interesting. You've just put your finger on something quite interesting there. I mean, Musk comes from South Africa, comes from, grew up in an apartheid state. The other person who's been a big proponent of this stuff is Michel Welbeck, who again grew up in French Algeria, which was a semi-apartheid state. And all these people also have these words, and you'll see them when you go on Twitter, because a lot of their followers are now echoing it. So they talk a lot about civil war, how Britain is collapsing into civil war, France is collapsing into civil war, America's collapsing into civil war. They've got this phrase, remigration, which is very, very popular with Tommy Robinson,

• 19:04Rory Stewart?

  but is also used by the AfD in Germany and is used by Kike on the far right in Austria, which is the idea that you're going to send people back to the countries that they came from.

• 19:15Rory Stewart?

  They're obsessed with rape, so they have this idea that Muslims are inherently rapists, and they connect this to statements about the Quran, statements about terrorism, statements about medieval views on women. But at the heart of it all, and this connects back to stories that were thrown against the Jews in the 19th century and early 20th century, is this idea that they are a risk to our, in inverted commas, white women. And what's happening is you can see Musk accelerating the drag to the far right. So suddenly Farage, partly because Farage won't support Tommy Robinson and Farage doesn't support the idea of remigration,

• 19:58Rory Stewart?

  is now seen as too soft. So you'll suddenly now see an eruption in Farage's Twitter feed of people further to the right saying, I've had enough now, I'm leaving Reform, how dare you betray Tommy Robinson, you've sold out to the globalist liberal elite. And then there are people from the Conservative Party trying to outflank Farage by sounding more like Tommy Robinson. And the big example of this is now Robert Jenrick. Robert Jenrick, who we talked about, who was the leadership candidate defeated by Kamy Badenoch to become the leader of the Conservative Party, a man who started right in the David Cameron centre of the party and has been on what could politely be called a journey, and is now putting out

• 20:38Rory Stewart?

  tweets saying, on the basis of what happened 10, 15, 20 years ago in Rotherham and Rochdale, that this shows that immigration to Britain was a mistake. And he says hundreds of thousands of people were brought in in a disastrous experiment with medieval attitudes from an alien culture, and we need to start sending foreign national offenders back. So this is basically a story that is getting very, very close now to the rhetoric of the AfD and KICOL, but it's coming from my own party. Literally since, I'm afraid since Enoch Powell, we haven't had leading Conservative MPs trying to start on this kind of language.

• 21:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this was the other thing that on the politics, the UK politics of this that Keir Starmer did yesterday, he actually avoided a couple of questions about Musk. He didn't want to name Musk, he didn't want to make it about Musk. He actually said towards the end, this is about the modern Conservative Party. And in relation to Jess Phillips... He was basically saying that five, 10, 15, 20 years ago, if any foreigner or anybody had said about a British politician that they were a rape, what was the rape genocide apologist, a white witch, all this stuff that Musk was saying about Jess Phillips, Keir Starmer made the point that any politician would have condemned that. Whereas what Badalock

• 22:00Alastair Campbell?

  and Jenrick have done is repeated this call for a national inquiry. Now, two points on that. The first is neither Reform nor the Conservatives had any reference to the need for a further national inquiry into this in their manifestos in an election that was fought a few months ago. If this was the big deal, they now say it was, why wasn't it the big deal then? It's a big deal for them because they're jumping on Elon Musk bandwagon and they're being driven by the Elon Musk bandwagon. The other point you made earlier about ITV and the King, Musk says King must dissolve Parliament. If that was deemed a story, which I don't think it is, the headline should have been Musk Reveals

• 22:40Alastair Campbell?

  Unbelievable Ignorance About UK Constitution. And the media has a massive role to play in this. Listen, I'm not saying Musk isn't an important figure. He's the richest man in the world. He's very close to the incoming president. He's very clever. He's very smart and he's decided to get engaged in politics. However, the fact that he says something does not of itself become news because he has said it. And what shouldn't happen is that when, this is the other point Keir Starmer made, this is a guy who talks about being a free speech absolutist. One, he is not a free speech absolutist when it comes to attacks upon himself on his own platform. And secondly, he is not entitled, whatever the rules of

• 23:21Alastair Campbell?

  free speech, to spread lies and misinformation about issues about which he knows next to nothing, other than what, as you say, is being fed to him by somebody who's trying to crank him up within this. Interestingly, the mooch having said on the rest of his policies to US the other day, he said he didn't think the European leaders should get involved in this. Keir did yesterday, but interestingly, I don't think there was any collusion or any sort of cooperation here. Both Macron in France and my friend Jonas Garstore in Norway, both came out and said similar things yesterday. Essentially, what I think they do is, look, the guy's just a sort of tech billionaire. He's close to Trump, let's ignore him for a while, but it's reached the point where he can't be ignored.

• 24:03Alastair Campbell?

  It has to be challenged, and I hope this is just the start in terms of actually tackling, beginning to tackle the poison of the far right as it is amplified through what has become a very personal megaphone for a megalomaniac.

• 24:17Rory Stewart?

  Maybe I'm getting overly wound up here because it's the party that I was a member of, but I don't think people have paid enough attention to what's happening in the Conservative Party again. So, Jenrick's post says, "This appalling affair," i.e. this affair between 1997 and 2013. So, he's talking about something that happened more than 12 years ago. "Is the final nail in the coffin for liberals who still cling to the argument that Britain is an integration success story. This scandal started with the onset of mass migration, importing, says Jenrick, hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures who possess medieval attitudes towards women.

• 25:02Rory Stewart?

  And after 30 years of this disastrous experiment, we've now entrenched sectarian voting blocs that make it electoral suicide for some MPs to confront this. The foreign nationals must be deported, no ifs, no buts. And the officials that covered up must be sent to jail for their appalling cowardice." Now, I know Robert Jenrick, I liked Robert Jenrick. I think he has now gone well, well beyond the pale. I think he is now stepping into the edge of Enoch Powell territory, that there is a huge tradition that was important within the Conservative Party of senior politicians, and this is a man who is the Shadow Secretary of State for Justice,

• 25:45Rory Stewart?

  watching their language carefully and suggesting that hundreds of thousands of British citizens are from alien cultures with medieval attitudes towards women and that they are somehow all complicit. In what was done by some people, but we're talking about tens of people, not hundreds of thousands of people, is unbelievably dangerous. And it's much more dangerous, I think, than people will understand when they just read the tweet quickly. Because many of those words are deliberately hitting the hot button jargon issues of the Tommy Robinson far right. Because this is exactly what Tommy Robinson has been trying to say for nearly 20 years, which is,

• 26:27Rory Stewart?

  Muslims are inherently medieval and barbaric. They rape our women and they need to be sent home.

• 26:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And a few things to make points to make about Jenrick. The first is, it overlooks the fact that not just that his party was in power for the last 14 years, but also that he was a minister in the department that could have done some of the things that he's now saying should be done. Let's have the first mention of Brexit of 2025. The sort of people that he clearly despises who live in our country, there are now more of them coming to the country because of Brexit. All the European Union people who left, who are now being replaced from people from places like India, Pakistan, et cetera, that we talked about at the end of the year. And the other thing I'd say about Robert Jenrick,

• 27:15Alastair Campbell?

  and this is why I think Kirsten was right, to try to make this less about Elon Musk and more about what British politics is becoming. And I think this is a bit of a test for Kemi Badenoch now as well. Because she's got to make the judgment about whether she is going to just fight for that sort of space with Farage and now with Tommy Robinson on the hard right. And by the way, I don't know if you've noticed this Rory, Andrew Tate has launched a political party called BRUV, B R U V, British Restoration of Underlying Values. So that is where this this sort of politics is going to go on. I think she would

• 27:55Alastair Campbell?

  be doing herself a lot of good if actually she distanced herself from that. But she appears to me not to be able yet to decide which which way she wants to go. Just on your great replacement guy, by the way, the Frenchman, it was a guy called Camus. Now, there's Albert Camus that everybody knows about. This guy called René Camus. And he was actually, I don't even remember this, Rory, he was a candidate in the presidential election. You know, the French presidential election, there was all these candidates, you get about 0.5% of the vote. He was a candidate. In 2012 and his platform was repatriation of all foreign born criminals,

• 28:34Alastair Campbell?

  right to silence, abolition of all wind farms, banning advertising on road sides, making sanctuaries of remaining unspoiled places and stopping the production of cars that can go faster than the speed limit. He also wanted to recognise Israel, Palestine and the Greater Lebanon. So this is, but this is the guy who, most of the people now who sort of perpetuate the Great Replacement Theory probably don't even know that this is this French former socialist who's sort of, you know, driving them.

• 29:07Rory Stewart?

  Maybe this is the thing to finish on as we go to the break and we'll come back to this when we talk about Austria. But it's easy to go down a rabbit hole looking at the dozens of bizarre different views that people on the far right have. And, you know, they will disagree about road signs and they'll disagree about silence and they'll disagree about tariffs and trade. The one thing they all agree on is their hatred of Muslims. And this movement has become over the last 30 years essentially about Muslims. It's a racist movement and it's about evicting Muslims from European countries. And that's the one thing that binds them all together with all these weird differences that seem to emerge.

• 29:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Just very briefly, before we go to the break, did you, what did you make of what Keir Starmer was saying about the NHS?

• 29:54Rory Stewart?

  So I think a couple of things. I mean, I think it's, it's good that he's being practical in terms of the use of the private sector. I, I think the risk with what he's doing is that his focus particularly on waiting lists is likely to make it almost impossible to bring through the long-term reforms. So I think he, he has decided understandably politically that the thing that really matters is to achieve something visible on waiting lists, but that will make it impossible to achieve the bigger thing, which is moving resources from hospitals closer to the frontline. And he talks about that still, and he was talking about that still in the speech, but the resources can't flow so long as he holds on to his waiting list target.

• 30:36Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, let's take a break and we'll come back. We'll talk about Austria and Canada.

• 30:42Speaker 03

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

• 30:45Speaker 04

  On October 2nd.

• 30:47Speaker 03

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

• 30:51Speaker 04

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

• 30:59Speaker 05

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

• 31:03Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 31:06Speaker 05

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• 32:19Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. Now Rory, I must tell you something. Ben Wallace, as you know, my partner Fiona Miller. Yes. I don't know if you've seen this woman on Instagram called Davina Comedy, who does these impersonations of you and me. They're quite funny. She's got your voice, but she hasn't quite got my voice, but she has got this thing about, I'm always mentioning referring to, so I was talking to Fiona and it's usually, I was watching the telly with Fiona and this Tory cable and we threw things at the telly and we all hate Tories and blah, blah, blah. But Fiona came from her walking the dog yesterday and said, God, Ben Wallace was really good. So there you are. That's praise indeed.

• 33:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I encourage people to listen to it on leading. I mean, we've had a series, I think, of terrific recent interviews. I hope people have managed to catch up with our amazing interview, I thought, with the Georgian president right at the moment, where demonstrations were breaking out in the streets, where she had three days left in office, where a Putin-backed party was about to take it, and we managed to get an interview with her. But I also thought Ben Wallace was brilliant because he was a sort of reminder that you don't have to always be a kind of politician out of central casting. There's a certain kind of good humour, straightforwardness about him, which I think is quite refreshing.

• 33:36Alastair Campbell?

  Also, we should say that this was the first interview we've done, that I know a lot of people listen to our interviews, but this one, you can also, the one we did with Ben Wallace, you can watch with our sort of multi-camera Spotify studio setup on Spotify and YouTube. Let's talk about Austria.

• 33:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so the big story here, Alice, which I want to put you on, is this. So the far-right in Austria, under their leader Kinkel, who, as I pointed out, you know, was leading a campaign with direct references to the Reich, you know, he had posters up saying, "Thy will be done", and in German, you know, "Thy Reich will come", right, got 28.8% of the vote in the election, more than anyone else. But the hope was, from many Europeans, yes, yes, yes, he's got that, but he's never going to be able to actually be chancellor. And it was the same, remember, with the far-right in Germany, when the AfD performed well in Turing and Saxony, and the

• 34:36Rory Stewart?

  same when Het Wilders, who's another one of these big anti-Muslim far-right campaigners, got most votes in the Netherlands. Everybody says, well, we've got these very complicated proportional representation systems. Thank goodness for them, because we can always make a moderate coalition that excludes these people.

• 34:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Rory Stewart?

  So why did that not work in Austria? What's going on? And because now it looks like he's going to be chancellor, and that is a big problem.

• 34:58Alastair Campbell?

  So, as you say, the FPÖ, the Freedom Party of Austria, became top. Then the traditional Conservative Party, which was the governing party with the chancellor Nehammer, came second. Social Democrats had their... They dropped a third for the first time in their history, even though their vote share didn't drop, but they came third. This Liberal Party, Neos, came fourth. So their thought was, the Social Democrats, the Conservatives and this Liberal Party, former coalition, Neos dropped out first. They felt that they couldn't work. They didn't like, I think that they had criticisms of both sides. And then, even if the Conservatives and the Social Democrats had managed to come to an agreement, they would have had a majority

• 35:41Alastair Campbell?

  of one. So not very, very stable. And they fell out over competition, over tax. But I think if Kiechel does become Chancellor, and as you say, it's now looking likely, because the President of Austria, Alexander Van der Bellen, he's a Green, and he is somebody who absolutely despises Kiechel. So does the new interim leader of the Conservative Party, a guy called Stocker. He is on record as saying, I think he actually said in the Parliament, "Nobody wants you in this Parliament, and nobody really wants you in this country." But they may end up having to work together. So this is going to be now, he is now got

• 36:24Alastair Campbell?

  to sit down and have talks with Kiechel. And this is somebody who, in the Parliament, I'm going to do a bit of simultaneous translation here, Ori. He said, "It's not just that nobody wants you in this House, in this Parliament, it's also that nobody in this Republic needs you." And he also, he made some very, very heavy statements against him. And just as the President had to kind of eat humble pie and call him in and say, "Can you kindly go off and try and form a coalition?" Now this guy is going to have to sit down and try to see whether they can work together. I think that's going to be very, very difficult for both of them. If Kiechel becomes Chancellor, and it could be, you know, they might end up with a Wilders-type situation, where Wilders won the election but wasn't allowed

• 37:08Alastair Campbell?

  to be in the coalition. But Kiechel is, I think, in too strong a position for that. So you're now going to have, you've got Austria, we've got Hungary. And of course, the big news in Hungary this week was the European Commission punishing Hungary for some of their kind of standing out against the principles of the European Union. And they've withdrawn a billion euros to support the Hungarians respecting. And of course, we've got this guy, Robert Fieso, in Slovakia, who's, and people should check out this really weird story about him. Disappearing to Vietnam, having spent a bit of time with Vladimir Putin, it's really very odd going on there. Austria is going to be very, very interesting to watch now, and it could take quite a long time for this thing to be put together. It's not out of the question that they won't be able to work together. There's a lot of mutual hatred

• 37:51Alastair Campbell?

  going on there, but the fact is, the votes that were put up, this is the result that they've delivered. It may lead to a new election, and if it leads to a new election, Kinkel is actually higher in the polls than he was at the election.

• 38:04Rory Stewart?

  This is where you're beginning to get people saying, oh, give him a chance, he's not too bad. So you can hear Austrian businessmen saying that, just as you can hear American businessmen saying, give Trump a chance, he's not too bad. And I've met some people in Scotland who said to me, Elon Musk is a, you know, great businessman and terrific that he's going to cut two trillion from the economy and stop beating up on him. And, you know, we should take seriously the fact that many business people support Musk and Trump. And I said, but many business people supported Hitler. You know, Henry Ford famously was an anti Semite, he supported Hitler. To which this man said, when I met him in Scotland, he said, well, you know, Hitler did some pretty good stuff on the economy,

• 38:45Rory Stewart?

  you know, really. So what's happening now is the normalization. And these are people who were in Britain increasingly very, very keen on Farage and very keen on the idea that Musk was going to give 100 million to Farage so that Reform could win. But now maybe tending further right still. But the really dangerous group, I think, amongst voters are what I would call the kind of useful idiots, who are the sort of people right of centre who think these guys like Kinkel can't be quite as bad as they say. And you'll see in Austria, people say, well, you know, he's just like Yorkeider. So Yorkeider was the leader of this party, obviously, in the 80s, early 90s. And Yorkeider was

• 39:28Rory Stewart?

  kind of all over the place. He would go pro NATO, he made friends with Gaddafi, he made friends with Saddam Hussein, he'd flip around, change his views on Austria joining the EU and change his views on Turkey joining the EU. Kinkel's not like that. Kinkel, to come back to our conversation before the break, is absolute central casting, far right. His views echo very, very strongly this man called Martin Selmer, who's an Austrian identitarian far right theorist, who's a big, great replacement theory man. And right at the heart of Kiechel's campaign, like the AfD's campaign, is this idea of remigration, pushing people.

• 40:07Alastair Campbell?

  Including Austrian citizens.

• 40:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, because Martin Selner and these think tanks have done calculations where they've decided, for example, in Germany, it's completely bizarre, they've put numbers on it, I think they've decided that Germany should have 800 Afghans, but unfortunately it's got 800,000. Why 800? Because they've sort of got a weird mathematical formula where they've sort of decided that Germany, you know, with tens of millions of people, can have a total of 27,000 people from foreign backgrounds, of whom 800 can be Afghans, right? And the rest need to leave. Now, the problem here is that you can only do this if you challenge the constitutional courts, the whole framework of the Council of Europe, the European Court on Human Rights, the European Union itself, because all the system that we've set up since the Second

• 40:54Rory Stewart?

  World War has been about equal dignity of citizens. It's completely opposed to the idea of saying there are superior people, there are inferior people, and the superior people, in this case, white Christian Austrians, should be able to just push out Muslim non-white Austrians. So if Kiechel is serious about this, he is on his course for a massive collision with the central institutions of Europe, and it's worse than Orban.

• 41:19Alastair Campbell?

  And I wonder whether the European institutions, as you say, they surely, we talked to Guy Hofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister, about this on leading a few months ago, they must have learnt from the way that they allowed Orban to use those institutions, to cement himself, to cement his positions within Hungary, but also, much more broadly, he's a far bigger figure than just being the prime minister of Hungary, and particularly on the right. So I wonder whether they will learn those lessons, will have learned those lessons. But this is a guy who, this is democracy, isn't it? This is what the numbers have shown, he did win the election. The reason, I think, why he's gone up in the polls since is because of this feeling,

• 42:03Alastair Campbell?

  even of people who didn't support him, that the establishment came together to try and stop him, the president should have asked him to try to form a coalition first. And maybe tactically, that might have been the right thing to do. Let him have a go. Let him show then that it couldn't be done and then let the other parties take over. And I think history, if this guy does become chancellor, history is not going to be kind on these three parties that couldn't bring, get themselves to bring a deal together.

• 42:28Rory Stewart?

  Um. Can I ask just, just on this, because I think this is part of the dangerous logic. If Kiechol can't get things done, in other words, he tries to expel non-white Austrian citizens and is stopped by doing so by the constitutional courts or by the European Union. Is there not a really big danger then of a new form of fascism that says, I'm trying to implement the will of the people by expelling these non-whites from my country and I'm being stopped by a liberal global elite, including the European Union and human rights lawyers and judges, and therefore we need to brush those people aside?

• 43:06Alastair Campbell?

  There may well be, in which case he'd have to leave the European Union. But it's very interesting that Viktor Orban, for all that he rails against it, has never once suggested that because his economy wouldn't survive without them.

• 43:18Rory Stewart?

  Or Kiechol could simply totally ignore the European Union and challenge them to expel him, which would be much like leaving the European Union without him having to do it formally.

• 43:28Alastair Campbell?

  Possibly.

• 43:29Rory Stewart?

  And that would put the European Union in a very difficult situation.

• 43:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Rory Stewart?

  Because they'd be reluctant to expel Austria, wouldn't they? The other thing, of course, that is unbelievably bad timing about this is if Kiechol becomes Chancellor of Austria at the moment at which Germany is going to the polls, this can give a new flush of confidence to the AFD, who are running a very similar set of policies and a very similar set of ideas.

• 43:55Alastair Campbell?

  Backed by Mr. Musk.

• 43:56Rory Stewart?

  Backed by Mr. Musk, echoing Trump. And of course, what's happening all the time, and this is why it feels to me so much more dangerous than people acknowledge, why we are beginning to see now elements of the twenties and thirties coming through.

• 44:09Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 44:09Rory Stewart?

  Is that they all give space to each other. There's this horrible phrase, the Overton window of what's kind of acceptable to say or think. They're shifting it. Suddenly, as we said before the break, Robert Jenrick is saying things that no Conservative Cabinet Minister under Theresa May or David Cameron would ever consider saying becomes acceptable. And as that shifts, then you get more and more slightly dopey people, voters on the right, beginning to think, well, you know, is it such a bad thing? And maybe we can just expel these people peacefully. We don't need to actually, you know, round them up. And of course, people forget what's going on here, which is that

• 44:51Rory Stewart?

  the early ideologues for the war in the Balkans initially talked about peaceful separation between Bosnians and Serbs, not very long ago, in Europe, you know, during our working lives, that Eichmann was working for Hitler to peaceably resettle Jews out of Austria. The idea initially was not to kill them. The idea was just to push them out, I think, to Madagascar initially. The fact that people are not processing that liberalism isn't just, and this is another thing I want to rant at you about, there's been a flurry of articles in Unheard from Trevor Phillips, for example, writing this, articles in The Times saying liberalism's dead, the centre's dead, the energy's now on the right. But liberalism

• 45:33Rory Stewart?

  isn't just Alistair and Rory with sort of mushy ideas and being too optimistic about Kamala Harris. It is moral. It's the idea that humans are equal in dignity and the lesson of the Second World War, which is that if you give up on the idea that humans are equal and you start saying there are better people, white Austrians and less good people, Muslim Austrians, so many things follow from that. The collapse of your democracy and ultimately war.

• 46:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, the other thing to put into that, which I think relates to a lot of what we've seen happening in America, is that I would argue that the rule of law is an essential part of the liberal order, but that was kind of universally accepted across right and left and centre, rule of law. But rule of law does not carry the weight that it did. The fact that we saw this week the peaceful acceptance of the presidential election result and the people arriving at Congress and, you know, taking their place and being sworn in and so forth, and contrast that with what happened four years ago. That means that those people that pursued what I would argue was an offence against

• 46:44Alastair Campbell?

  the rule of law and democratic institutions, they've won again. That undermines the liberal order that we're talking about. By the way, though, Rory, I think although I agree with you that it's not just you and me talking about kind of mushy idealistic values, I still do think that one of the challenges for all non-extreme parties, this includes extreme left and extreme right, is how we do build a sense of excitement and optimism about the things that we believe. This might be a good moment to switch to Canada because I was watching, we'll talk about what's happened with Justin Trudeau and some of the people that might replace him in a minute, but even before Trudeau went, because I kind of felt

• 47:24Alastair Campbell?

  he was going to go, it was, and I thought I need to get to know this guy Pierre Poilievre a bit better. And he's the guy who's the leader of the Conservative Party. We've talked about him a bit before. I've been watching some of his speeches and interviews over the last few days. And he is definitely not to be underestimated because he's, he actually, he looks like the actor Martin Freeman. He's got a, he's a quite a good looking guy. He dresses kind of casually, wears vests and jackets and he looks cool. I think he might have had a bit of the mooch done to his, pretty wrinkle free for somebody who lives a stressful life. And he's not somebody who's bringing forward big positive policy solutions.

• 48:09Alastair Campbell?

  But what he's doing all the time is speaking a language that is rooted in people's real lives and real existence. And he does it in a way that's very eloquent, very articulate. He's not to be underestimated. And of course, he's 20 odd points ahead in the polls. But what they all do, in a sense, is they, they all talk about a past that was better than the present. Politics used to be about politicians saying, there is a much better future that we can have. Now, he, he is a better version, I would argue, of somebody like Farage, because he's rooting it in people's lives. He's not hysterical. He does sort of go over the

• 48:50Alastair Campbell?

  top a bit about the woke utopia and this kind of thing. But he's, you know, I, I, I recommend you kind of take a good look at him because he's, he's interesting.

• 48:58Rory Stewart?

  You're right that, you said this about Austria, that people are going to be pretty unkind to the opponents of Kikla, how useless they were at coming together.

• 49:08Rory Stewart?

  This is basically a story now of useless liberal response. And I'm afraid, you know, Britain is part of this. The Conservative Party is being completely hopeless in working out how to frame its response to Farage and Musk and Tommy Robinson. The Labour Party has not been doing very well, in my opinion, over the last few months. And the net popularity ratings of Trudeau, Starmer, Schultz, Macron are catastrophic. What the hell is wrong with the Liberal Centre? Why is it not able to realise how high the stakes are? Is it just that we've got complacent? Is it that we've lost language? I mean, what's going on?

• 49:52Rory Stewart?

  Why, when the stakes are so high and literally you have a far-right guy becoming the Chancellor of Austria? I mean, it's the first proper far-right ruler we've had since the Second World War. Are people not upping their game?

• 50:04Alastair Campbell?

  You know, when we were talking at the end of the year, at the end of 2024, I referred to a speech that I watched Justin Trudeau make to a party audience. And I was saying he was, you know, this rolling applause. And it was a great speech for that audience. And it reminded me of some of the speeches that Kamala Harris made during the campaign, which you and I both enjoyed as oratorical events. But looking back, it's clear that, this hopefully answers your question, that both of those pieces of rhetoric were actually speaking directly to, we talk a lot about Trump talks to the base, they were talking to the base.

• 50:44Alastair Campbell?

  What they weren't doing was speaking directly to the concerns that have really been driving people in their thinking about, about their lives and about, about politics. So if you have somebody like in Canada, Poli Ebra comes along and it does make you feel there is an elite there and it's out to get you and they don't understand you and they don't understand your life. And that's why I'm travelling around the country and I'm talking to you and I'm saying this and I'm, I'm feeling your pain and I'm hearing it and here's what I'm saying. Justin Trudeau, impressive guy, he won three elections, that's not easy in the modern age, he's won three terms, but I think you use the word complacent, I think it's they got stuck, they got stuck in thinking that the way of politics that helped them

• 51:26Alastair Campbell?

  win the first time around, they've not adapted to the other stuff that's been happening under the radar, that the others, the right in particular, have exploited very, very, very well. And so, you know, when they say, when somebody like Poli Evers says that, you know, Trudeau's just giving you this unhinged woke utopia the whole time, it kind of chimes in a way that it wouldn't have done 10 years ago. And therefore, I think that what the progressives have not done is take seriously the reasons for the advance that the right has made. What's going on with, in Canada now, because this guy Poli Evers, he's about 20 points ahead. So whoever comes in, it's going to be a very, very, very, very tough

• 52:07Alastair Campbell?

  fight. I was chatting last night to Mark Carney, who, you know, we should maybe, given he's now going to be in this race, we should maybe repost our interview with him on, on leading. Of course, their system, Rory, if, they haven't yet announced, I don't think, how it's going to work. If it was just the caucus, if they could only choose between the MPs, then Mark Carney can't run. But if it's an open contest, outsiders can run, and Mark Carney is going to put his hat in the ring. And I think, I, you know, you and I both like him and know him and think he's a, you know, very, very smart guy. Whoever goes in is going to be very, very, very difficult. But I think if you're looking for a serious

• 52:47Alastair Campbell?

  grown up to take, and don't forget, we talk, we talk a lot about Trump, Canada, the arrival of Trump is like, this is a guy who's saying Canada should become an American state. This is the guy who's saying there's going to be 25% tariffs. And the reason why Trudeau eventually fell apart was because his, um, his chancellor and deputy, Chrystia Freeland, who is also going to be in the running, I suspect. She and he had different views about how to deal with Trump and they just, they fell apart. So what's your feeling about, one about why Trudeau's gone, whether it's too late for whoever comes in?

• 53:24Rory Stewart?

  I think it probably unfortunately is too late. I mean, never say never, but Poliev has been plugging away, building up this lead. Trudeau may well slightly have done a Biden, which is as usual, these people cling on too long, which means that their successors don't really have the time to establish themselves properly. These Canadian races are amazing things. I mean, they're like one of those ludicrous horse races with seventeen horses jumping over things. And my friend Chris Alexander, who was the immigration minister, ran in one of these leadership things where I can't remember, well over a dozen people leading. We also did an interview on leading with Michael Ignatieff,

• 54:03Rory Stewart?

  who was a Harvard professor who came in and managed to become the leader of the Liberal Party through one of these things. Very, very, you know, big name internationally as an intellectual and thinker, but took the Liberal Party to a catastrophic defeat, which Trudeau then turned everything around from. Mark Carney will be doing his best to say he's not a Michael Ignatieff figure, but people opposing him will say, well, he's not been in politics enough. He's been governor of the Bank of England, which doesn't sound very Canadian.

• 54:35Alastair Campbell?

  He's been the governor of the Bank of Canada.

• 54:38Rory Stewart?

  But I think he is, he's taken seriously. I think he's got a decent chance. Many of the people I know who were members of Trudeau's cabinet or are MPs reckon Carney's a good player and has what it takes. But my goodness, I don't know how you turn around a 20-point lead and I don't know how you re-energize. I mean, who's really managed to do this? I mean, Gordon Brown, I guess, struggled to do it. Theresa May struggled to do it. The only person who's really recently managed to do it, I guess, is Boris Johnson, coming in to a fading administration, then getting a big majority.

• 55:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think the, the reason why Mark Carney might be a good choice for them, one is he's, he's very, very experienced. He's serious. He's got a pretty good network. He's somebody that would immediately be taken seriously. Could you imagine that guy as Prime Minister? 100%. And he's not. You know, he's not of the Trudeau camp. I think one of the problems that Chrystia Freeland, even though they fell out at the end, you know, she has been the finance minister, has overseen comparatively against America, economic performance that hasn't been that that great. Just to give you a couple of this wonderful names of the the the other potential runners. There's François Philippe Champagne.

• 55:50Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 55:51Alastair Campbell?

  He's the industry minister. Whether he's going to run, I don't know, but people say he's like coming. So Melanie Joly, the foreign minister.

• 55:59Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 55:59Alastair Campbell?

  Who has actually been a little bit quiet of late. So whether she's going to sit this out, I don't know. And another one, they've all got great names, Dominic LeBlanc. So all of these, in fact, this is the other thing would maybe help Mark Carney stand out. Mark Carney doesn't sound as French as LeBlanc, Champagne or Joly. But I think it's also we've got the Jolly's the, she's currently the Minister of Foreign Affairs. And then there's another person, a former Premier of British Columbia called Christie Clark. And there's talk about her going for it as well. I think Mark Carney's in with a shout to win it. The question then is how does he fight a campaign against Polievra? And there I think it is about a classic, you know, do you

• 56:41Alastair Campbell?

  want a serious leader? Or do you want a kind of populist opportunist? But as I said, from having watched his interviews, Polievra, not to be underestimated. But in a campaign, he's got to be challenged to come up with a genuine policy prospectus to govern a country over a term. Because at the moment, what he's very good at is the kind of vibe and the mood music. It's kind of reversal of the Harris thing.

• 57:05Rory Stewart?

  Can I finish then just on this? I mean, so remember again, Canada really matters. Canada is a huge economy, you know, one of the big G seven economies, big player in international aid, one of the five I countries, the intelligence relationship with the US. So it does matter where we end up there. Just, just give me a sense of what Carney's strategy should be. What are his ideas? What do you think he should do if he wanted to win this election?

• 57:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think the first thing he can do, which incumbents who are part of the government can't do. Isn't knowledge more than Justin Trudeau and his team have been doing that times are really hard for Canada and for Canadians. Cost of living, housing, wages. I think the other thing he needs to do is to make more of the fact that, like you say, Canada matters, but it's being made to feel small by the way that Trump has been related to it. So I think he does need to be seen to take on Trump in some of these big things. In particular, this nonsense about the 51st state, but also in relation to tariffs. I could imagine you building a campaign right now. Who do you want to sit down and run with Trump and actually

• 58:12Alastair Campbell?

  talk about the detail of what the effect would be, not just on Canada, but on the United States as well? Who could you actually imagine turning some of these challenges into opportunities? So I think he can be the guy that says, we're not ignoring problems on immigration. They're real and here's how I'm going to fix it. We're not saying that government spending hasn't got out of control. Here's how we're going to fix it. We are going to take on the housing challenge. One of the most impressive bits of this Poli Ebra interview was when he was talking about housing. He was basically saying, you know, how much land do we need? How much land have we got? Why can't we build houses? I mean, you can see in Britain, where we talk about, you know, changing the planet, you can see why it's so hard. Canada is saying, you know, why can't we do this? And I think that I could

• 58:57Alastair Campbell?

  see whoever wins, and you know, you and I both know and like Mark Carney. We don't know the other people. Let's say it's Mark Carney. I think it'd be good if he did. I actually, by the way, disagree with you about the way they'll attack. I think they'll attack him as kind of globalism, Davos man. That's all part of the kind of populist rhetoric as well. He's got to take that, own that, and push that out as part of his kind of experience message. But I could see Mark Carney putting together a good campaign. He's very, very smart. But the thing that I'd say about Poli Ebra is that of all these kind of populist leaders, he's got a, you should look at these speeches and interviews he's done. He's got a style about him that isn't sort of, he didn't have me gnashing my teeth.

• 59:38Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 59:38Alastair Campbell?

  He had me thinking, whoa, this guy's quite interesting. I wouldn't like to take him on. But I'd like to see somebody Canadian who's really, really smart take him on.

• 59:46Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, thank you, Alison. And look forward to talking to you soon.

• 59:49Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye.

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