212. Why Trump's return wasn't inevitable

How much do you know about the Russian propaganda forced on the population in occupied Ukraine? Where did it all go so wrong for Ron DeSantis? What on earth is going on in Germany with the far-right? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:57Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:00Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 2:02Alastair Campbell?

  Now Rory, I think we're going to do a lot abroad today. As we speak on Tuesday afternoon, Rishi Sunak is standing up in the Commons, talking about the latest US/UK strikes against the Houthis rebels. We want to talk in the main, in the first part, about Ukraine, which I think, both with what's going on in the Red Sea and what's going on in Israel-Gaza, risks being pushed off the agenda. I think Ukraine should link us to what's happening in America. By the time the podcast comes out, we'll have a fair idea who's won in New Hampshire, between Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis having dropped out. I think we should take a little look at the domestic situation, possibly through the lens of what the hell is going on now in Rwanda. And also Rory, I hope you're part of this new

• 2:45Alastair Campbell?

  pop con, Popular Conservatism, being launched by Liz Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

• 2:50Rory Stewart?

  Oh my lord, that sounds like a very unpopular type of conservatism from my point of view.

• 2:54Alastair Campbell?

  It certainly does. And then I also want to talk about what's going on in Germany, a pretty amazing weekend of protests and demonstrations against the hard right. So shall we start with Ukraine, which, as I say, I think does risk falling off the agenda a bit?

• 3:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I mean, I think the first thing, just to bring people up to date, is that we are now approaching the second anniversary. It's been almost two years since in February 2022 Putin announced this invasion of Ukraine. And it was obviously a shattering moment. He had been in Covid lockdown, basically, for almost two years, barely seeing anybody, during which time it now seems that he had his head buried in history books. And this extraordinary narratives about Russian history,

• 3:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 3:39Rory Stewart?

  which people used to think were just part of a propaganda machine, increasingly feels as though he actually believes, and I think maybe one way into it for a British audience, is that it would be as though, and I think there are people on the Brexit side who are like this, as though an obsession with the Second World War and imperial history had completely dominated every part of Russian political life. And we both I think a couple of weeks ago, a woman called Jade McGlynn, who's written rather a good book called Memory Makers, about the way that this all took off. But essentially, she says that it's become a strange hotchpotch of celebrating Russia's victory in the Second World War against Hitler and Nazism.

• 4:20Rory Stewart?

  Bits of imperial history, bits of history from a thousand years ago, the creation of Kiev and Rus, all blended together with an idea that Russia is a unique and special nation with a spiritual destiny to save the world. And this, along with trying to shore up his political base, is one of the things that drove him to invade Ukraine. Over to you.

• 4:39Alastair Campbell?

  Well, yeah, it is a fascinating book that Jade McGlynn's written. She's a Brit who's lived a long time in Russia. I think she's back in Britain now, but she she lived in Russia. And it's quite academic in the way that it's presented. But I think the means by which he has managed to use history, and it's not just sort of the Great Patriotic War, as they call it, the Second World War, which for them began in 1941 rather than 1939. It goes, you know, back to the Battle of Moscow, it goes back to Napoleon. And by the way, my eyes popped out when I got to the page where she does actually mention Marc Francois in the context that you've just said about, you know, we do this to some extent within the Brexit debate, when Francois was saying that, you know, my dad stood up to the Germans

• 5:24Alastair Campbell?

  and I'm not going to get pushed around by the Germans, et cetera. What is remarkable is about how successful this has been as a political strategy, as well as a communication strategy. Now, of course, it helps when you throw journalists in jail, when you control the media and so forth. But as you said before, we shouldn't kid ourselves that Putin is is not a popular figure with an awful lot of Russians. And what it what seems to be happening in Ukraine at the moment is almost as if you've got this very bizarre situation where on the one hand, it's it's almost like the First World War with two armies on the front line, they're dug in, they're sort of, you know, taking pop shots at each other. Meanwhile, you've got this high-tech war going on above them.

• 6:04Alastair Campbell?

  And it seems a bit stuck in the stalemate, but the truth is that Russia feel that they're on the up at the moment. And that they think that they have been able to intensify attacks on the front line. They've made some territorial gains. And so Ukraine feels very, very defensive at the moment. I watched an interview that President Zelensky did on Channel Four with Matt Fry. And it was a very good interview. And, you know, Zelensky is an incredibly impressive communicator and leader. But I felt for the first time that he was, I don't know, he just looked very, quite stressed. Didn't seem at ease. And there's no doubt that there's an elephant in the room there, which is the American elections. It is clearly, I would say, playing on his mind that Donald Trump comes in and is, to use Trump's words, he sorts this war out in 24 hours.

• 6:48Alastair Campbell?

  But the history, the way that Putin uses history and projects himself, I mean, you know, Yeltsin and Gorbachev essentially have been written out of history. It's kind of Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and Putin. I mean, you know, Vladimir the Great is how he intends to end up. And it demands that he carries on trying to take Ukraine.

• 7:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so quick potted history of what's been going on for the last couple of years militarily. February 2022, end of February, Russia invades very, very suddenly. It had done two fake massings on the border at the end of 21, which maybe made people a little complacent, including some of the Ukrainian leadership that thought it might be a Russian bluff again. And came in with armour, with air support and with Russian tank troops with three days of rations, believing that they were going to be able to get to Kiev in three days and the whole thing would be over. An extraordinary defence by the Ukrainian people. And within a few months, it looked as though Putin had completely failed in all his objectives. Instead of taking Kiev, he failed to take Kiev.

• 7:51Rory Stewart?

  Instead of building Russian sympathy, he actually managed to solidify the Ukrainian nation against Russia. Instead of weakening NATO, he seemed to strengthen NATO because people got behind it pretty quickly. It turned out that we were less dependent on gas supplies than maybe we thought. And so by, I guess, the late spring of 2022, people really thought, actually, this is an amazing resurgence of the West and an incredible achievement by Ukraine. The autumn of that year, there were then this very surprising and impressive Ukraine. Advances which we discussed on the podcast where they made a lot of progress. There was the bloody fighting around Bakmut, which people remember who listen to podcasts because that's what Prigozhin was involved in.

• 8:31Rory Stewart?

  And then as we came into the beginning of last year, 2023, the real push was for the counteroffensive. Because in that initial push, Russia had managed to expand their territory. They'd taken Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, they'd taken the eastern bits of the Donbass, but they'd pushed ahead and they'd captured more territory. And the idea was Ukraine was going to drive back. And people will remember that a lot of last year was dominated by Zelensky travelling around the world, President Zelensky travelling around the world, asking for various sort of big weapons.

• 9:00Alastair Campbell?

  And eventually in the main getting them.

• 9:01Rory Stewart?

  And eventually getting them, exactly. So the pattern was he would say, I want particular types of HIMARS, which is a precision guided shell. And eventually he'd get it, he'd say, I want tanks and eventually they'd turn up. And then it's been F16s and the US has agreed that F16s can be lent by other nations and they'll provide training.

• 9:17Alastair Campbell?

  Just jump in, you mentioned Crimea there, and I think there's something really interesting about the way that he's now operating within those parts of Ukraine that the Russians are occupying. So if you think of the the four Oblasts, as they're called, the four areas that we, you know, that were constantly on people's lips, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson in the south. And there was a time when we were talking about them the whole time. And they seem to have gone off a little bit in terms of the sort of global media and global politics off the map. And there's the military stuff going on. But the other reason why this book is is an interesting read in the context of Ukraine is because lots of other stuff is going on, which is, if you like, is at the cultural level, at the history level. You've had sham elections, you've now got Russian officials, you've got these army of of technocrats and bureaucrats

• 10:00Alastair Campbell?

  who are trying to align the laws and tax and banking systems with Russia. You've got a, what they're calling a transition period to what they now call the new regions. And the cultural and educational change is incredible. Teachers who are now having to teach that this was not an invasion, this was a special military operation. They're having to teach about the Nazis who have been the so-called Nazis who've been in charge in in Ukraine. And then the other thing they're doing, they're forcing, lots of people have fled and they're being allowed to leave, the people have been allowed to leave. But of those who've stayed in these areas, roughly about three million, nine out of 10 of them apparently now have Russian passports.

• 10:42Alastair Campbell?

  And if you don't have the passport, you can't get a bank account, you can't get benefits.

• 10:46Rory Stewart?

  So effectively Putin is is really making these things part of Russia. And and I guess that relates a little bit to the story we were just talking about, which was the fact that the counteroffensive last year didn't work. And that that relates, I guess, to what you were saying at the beginning about the fact that it feels like the First World War, but the First World War with amazing bits of modern surveillance kit.

• 11:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:07Rory Stewart?

  Drones flying above, incredible precision missiles. In order to break through, and I I think we discussed this quite a lot last year, I was a bit gloomy. But there were people out there who were still optimistic, people who thought it was really going to work. But actually, what the Ukrainians were being asked to do, which is this enormous combined arms operations across these minefields against these heavily defended Russian positions with hundreds of thousands of troops without air cover, is something that the Americans and the British haven't really done since the First World War. I mean, a lot of our drive through after Normandy is when we had control of the air. In addition to that, I think, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a a British retired general.

• 11:46Rory Stewart?

  He was reminding me that even the British Army doesn't really train on these huge conventional warfare combined operations. We we talked a little bit about this, that you you would need to to make it work, that counteroffensive. You have to coordinate most carefully of all, of course, that your artillery barrage has to land and then lift at exactly the moment that your soldiers go forward. But you've also got to move your logistics up, you've got to get your electronic warfare coordinated. So it's a huge amount of technical stuff happening at an army level. Britain hasn't really been doing that for decades because we've been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, as has the US. So we've been focused much more on platoon scale training. And of course, Ukraine is an army that really had never had the resources or the opportunity to train in this kind of warfare. And what turned out by the end of last year is they just couldn't do it.

• 12:31Rory Stewart?

  They'd roll their tanks forward into these minefields. And that would then give time for Russian surveillance. So it turns out that Russian electronic warfare and surveillance is very good to then bring artillery fire down. And the tanks would be stranded in the middle of the minefields and then then taken out. So it now feels very, very unlikely that there's going to be any breakthrough this year. Now, the story for 2024 is is holding these defensive lines, Ukrainians holding the lines.

• 12:56Alastair Campbell?

  That's I mean, they're even talking, they're talking about, you know, being defensive and holding the territory that they've got. But in the meantime, just briefly back on this this whole sort of cultural front, even though in the kind of memory makers book Lenin is not necessarily Putin doesn't put him up there with the Peter the Greats and the Catherine the Greats and the Vladimir Putins, but there there was a period when the many, many, many hundreds, possibly thousands of statues of Lenin that were in Ukraine were all knocked down in round about, you know, in the mid 2010s, 2015. And lots of them are going up in Mariupol.

• 13:33Rory Stewart?

  They're being put up again.

• 13:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And in Mariupol, Freedom Square apparently is now called Lenin Square. Kids in the schools are having to sing the Russian National Anthem. I mean culturally, it must be absolutely mind warping to be there while this is going on. And of course, meantime, the other sorts of things that Putin did, bringing back the Victory Day Parade, as you said earlier, showing to the Russian people that Russia is a very, very special country and using the history and these great events in history, many of them kind of, you know, rewritten to suit the narrative, but using them as a present day tool. And I sent you a photograph of a page this morning that that I thought particularly stood out to me. This is embedded, this cultural and historical reframing is embedded in their

• 14:18Alastair Campbell?

  military strategy. The information strategy is part of their military strategy and it's embedded in that. So I think this is something that we haven't necessarily caught on to in the way that we should have done. I actually felt, I know we're going to talk about Narendra Modi in the Q and A because we've got some questions on that. But I felt a little bit of the same thing with Modi yesterday when he was opening this Hindu temple, which again, we'll talk about that in more detail in the Q and A. But this this use of the past to shape a present and then signal a future and it's not that far removed from the way that the right wing populists try to use history as well.

• 14:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, so Owen Matthews, who's written this book called Overreach, which is probably the most accessible introduction to Ukraine and the conflict, asked this question. He says, how did this strange ethno nationalist historical thing, which was on the fringe of Russian society, become so central that Putin and his inner circle seem to completely believe it? And it now drives these wars. And I think that is a warning because of course you can ask the same question around India. You know, what is it that's made what was a pretty fringe form of Hindu ethno nationalism become so central? Of course, it runs against all the kind of ideas that we had in the 90s that the world was going to become more liberal, more secular, where we imagined that ethno nationalism was a thing of the past, that

• 15:36Rory Stewart?

  people were going to become more global, more progressive. A little shout out to Shashank Joshi, who's the Economist's Defence Editor, and who's been doing some very good stuff. And again, I was chatting to him yesterday. He's been really good on looking if people are interested in the details of the weapons and what's working and what isn't, and the kind of weapons that they need. He's also pointed out, I think, two quick things for listeners. One is you mentioned Crimea. Crimea has become very much the centre of the Ukrainian focus. That's where they've inflicted most damage recently. So they're able to take out a lot of Russian ships. They've driven Russian helicopters back. They've mounted big attacks which have killed Russian generals. And the second thing connected to that is

• 16:16Rory Stewart?

  Britain's support. So, you know, we don't often have much time to praise the Conservative Party for its foreign policy, but I think on Ukraine, they actually can hold their heads high and have a pretty good record. And unfortunately, this is also true of Boris Johnson, who I'm usually slagging off, but he is incredibly popular in Ukraine, whatever you and I think of him. They named streets after him. He's celebrated because he was seen as getting early on the ground when it was still pretty dangerous in Kiev before the missile defences were there. And Rishi Sunak's been the first Western leader to visit this year. 2.4 billion pounds committed, which is more than Britain committed last year, focused particularly on things like naval operations and drones around Crimea.

• 17:00Rory Stewart?

  So I think it is example of one place where I think Britain is demonstrating some kind of foreign policy energy. And of course, it's vital it does it because it's that 50 billion which is frozen in the US, which is terrifying everybody.

• 17:14Alastair Campbell?

  I accept the sort of broad premise of that. The only thing I'd say about what I thought of Boris Johnson during the period was I did feel there was a kind of correlation between whenever he felt he was getting into difficulties internally or over partygate, he'd sort of

• 17:27Rory Stewart?

  Set off to Kiev.

• 17:28Alastair Campbell?

  Lift to go and see Zelensky. And the other thing I think is worth saying is that this is happening. So that, as I said earlier, Rishi Sunak's standing up in Parliament as we speak, he's making a statement about Britain supporting the American strikes on the Houthis and Kierstham are very supportive and so forth. But I think if you talk to anybody within the defence establishment, I think there's a real worry about the state of UK defences. I mean, I used to be recently, you could say you could fit the entire army into Manchester United's ground, Old Trafford, which is 72,000, I think.

• 18:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 18:04Alastair Campbell?

  Within a couple of years, we're going to be down to Manchester City.

• 18:06Rory Stewart?

  And how about Burnley?

• 18:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think then we really will be struggling because we're about a third of that. But you know, and also, for example, the Royal Navy at the moment are really struggling to recruit. We've missed recruitment targets year after year after year. And there's another kind of private sector. I know you love these procurement stories. Capita is the outsourcing company which oversees the recruitment programme, and they've been awarded contracts worth over a billion. And yet we've been missing recruitment targets year after year after year. So I think on the one hand, I agree with you, we have been very supportive in relation to Ukraine. But bear in mind, just last week, Grant Shapps made his first sort of big foreign defence policy speech. And he was essentially warning us that, you know, before long, we could be

• 18:52Alastair Campbell?

  involved in wars with China, Iran, North Korea. You know, he was essentially saying the world is becoming more dangerous, which I think we would accept that it is. But then I think you have to back that up with defence investment that really does meet the scale of that challenge, particularly, and maybe this is where we can flip to America, particularly given that Donald Trump will be so unpredictable in relation to the future of NATO should he become president.

• 19:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's fascinating. I mean, I was the Chair of the Defence Committee when we got the commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defence. And that was considered quite a big achievement. But we now spend 2% on GDP on defence. We spend £45 billion a year. And as you say, it's clearly not delivering the results. So now the government's commitment's up to 2.5%. Russia, of course, spends nearly 40% of its budget on defence.

• 19:42Alastair Campbell?

  Forty?

• 19:43Rory Stewart?

  Forty, four zero.

• 19:44Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 19:45Rory Stewart?

  It's basically a war economy. Yeah. Yeah, I believe it's four zero. But the thing that comes out of this, I think, is partly that nobody wants to join the military anymore. And one of the reasons why we've had to get rid of amphibious assault ships from the Marines is just to find the sailors to go on to our new frigates.

• 20:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:04Rory Stewart?

  And the Type forty twos, and again, maintenance seems to be a huge problem. We've got these incredibly fancy new Type forty twos, of which I think only one is currently in the water. Three of them are in maintenance. And it has to be resupplied by an American resupply ship. So one of the questions is, can we afford these navies? And that's before we get on to our aircraft carriers. And one of the things we're learning in Crimea is how vulnerable these things are. I mean, there's a reason why there isn't a UK aircraft carrier sitting in the Black Sea, a number of reasons. But one of them is that, as the Russians have discovered, in a world of drone attacks, it's very, very difficult to defend these things. These are hugely expensive floating kits now. So if you were, you know, in the army, you might well argue that we should be putting more resources into our army and not endlessly chasing this naval stuff where there's no end to it.

• 20:49Rory Stewart?

  You know, every bit of kit you buy, you need other bits of kit to support it.

• 20:52Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. We, I think, like to consider ourselves to be a, what's called a tier one military power. And I guess technically, given that we do have nuclear capability, we do have an army, a navy, an air force. We can take part in pretty serious, complicated military action. But there was a report, I think it was in the Times the other day, which quoted, which said that an American general had said to Ben Wallace, when he was the Defence Secretary, that at the moment, UK was barely tier two. Now, doubtless, he was saying that as a way to kind, you know, get us properly engaged, whether that was in Ukraine, whether it was in the current action. But I think we've got to be very, very careful that we don't allow this gap to grow between how we talk about the threats that we face and the the levels of readiness to meet them.

• 21:36Rory Stewart?

  And at some point, we may have to make some very, very brutal choices. So we spend three point two billion pounds at the moment every year on our nuclear deterrent. And and that's a choice we're making, right? Out of that forty billion, three point two billion spend on nuclear deterrent. At some point, we need to work out what kind of military we want, that the risk is that we are trying to be a military like the US without having the resources to do it. So we end up spread very, very thin with very few, very expensive objects, very few soldiers. And partly turning around recruitment has got to be increasing salaries.

• 22:07Alastair Campbell?

  Now, let's talk about Iowa and New Hampshire and the likelihood that Donald Trump is, I mean, the way things are going, he could be kind of, you know, out on his own fairly soon. We're speaking before the vote in in New Hampshire, but bearing in mind in our Iowa, he lost back in the first time he ran. He didn't win in Iowa, and here he is getting over 50% and pushing DeSantis into second place. And then DeSantis deciding, you know what, the game's up. So hard to imagine how Trump's going to be stopped, even with these dozens of court cases against him and even with all the scandals attached to him. It looks like he's going to run.

• 22:44Rory Stewart?

  Just quickly to remind people, so what's happening at the moment is that the primaries, which is the selection of the Republican candidate to run for president. And Iowa goes first, then New Hampshire, and then we're going to move on to South Carolina. But the thing that's interesting about them is that these are small states and they're determined by a very small number of voters. So the turnout in Iowa, which, as you say, was 51% Trump, Ron DeSantis 21%, Nikki Haley 19%, was only 110,000 people. It's amazing. So the whole narrative of US politics is defined by that. New Hampshire, which will be going to the polls Tuesday night, the night we're recording, and results will start coming out when people are listening to this. If they're lucky, they'll get about 300,000 people voting.

• 23:27Rory Stewart?

  The state's only got 900,000 voters. This is in a country of 300 million people.

• 23:32Alastair Campbell?

  It's, I mean, it is, it is, we complained a lot about our political system and how the electoral system hasn't kind of adapted. But, I mean, this is an entire political system that is sort of geared to a time when there wasn't telecommunications, there weren't planes, and people had to travel vast distances between votes and so forth. I mean, you really, it is a weird system. And Iowa and New Hampshire, they have this disproportionate role within it. I worked, somebody worked out that the money that Ron DeSantis spent on Iowa, where he travels, as he constantly told us, to all 99 counties, it worked out that he spent $6,000 per vote that he got.

• 24:15Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely.

• 24:15Alastair Campbell?

  Which is a pretty high margin for a low, a low outcome.

• 24:18Rory Stewart?

  I think we take it for red today that Trump was inevitable, but it didn't feel like that a year ago.

• 24:25Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 24:25Rory Stewart?

  Just over a year ago, DeSantis was having polling numbers often on the head to head, well ahead of Trump. We discussed it on the podcast. He was showing some polling numbers, which put him in the same category as people like Obama or Reagan. So he really looked very, very popular. And coming into the end of last year, he had a huge amount of momentum, particularly after the midterms. So one of the things that cheered people like us up who are very worried about Trump is that the midterms in November 2022 were really disappointing. And it looked like Trump had really screwed up and his candidates, his MAGA candidates hadn't performed. So that gave DeSantis a bit of wind. But by the spring, DeSantis delayed his announcement really to May, and he made this extraordinary

• 25:09Rory Stewart?

  announcement where he tried to go on X on Twitter with Elon Musk for his launch, which went catastrophically wrong. Sort of 25 minutes of silence, then he came blundering on.

• 25:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, his exit wasn't very elegant either, Rory, because he, his big moment in his speech saying he was pulling out was what he billed as a Winston Churchill quote, "Success is not final. Failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts." Two, two things about that. One, he wasn't continuing. And two, Winston Churchill never said it. But apart from that, it was absolutely brilliant.

• 25:41Rory Stewart?

  And to add to the humiliation, he then immediately bent the knee and endorsed Trump when Trump has just completely humiliated him. I mean, just sort of humiliated his footwear, humiliated his clothing. I mean, it's just pathetic.

• 25:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Anyway, Budweiser will have sold a few cans on the back of the faux Churchill quote, because apparently it's something from one of their ads.

• 26:01Rory Stewart?

  That's what we like.

• 26:03Alastair Campbell?

  So anyway, and I'll tell you what's interesting. I mean, of course, he's still a governor and all that, but it's amazing how in these very, very high, globally high profile political events, how quickly somebody like DeSantis will probably just recede from the scene now for us.

• 26:18Rory Stewart?

  Unlike Marco Rubio, who you remember was one of the big candidates in 2016 that everyone's talking about. I mean, and for me, because I spend a lot of time. In the States, I was at a big event with a lot of key Republicans in the summer of last year, where they were all saying, ah, it's not, you know, not inevitable that Trump will come through. And they were talking up Tim Scott and they were talking up DeSantis. And they weren't particularly talking up actually Haley at that point. And their story, and I think it's a really important story if we're looking before we go on to Germany and things, is that the way to defeat Trump needed to be to do what the Republicans failed to do in 2016. So their theory was that in 2016, the old conservative split between the kind of right wing, for the British market, the kind of loose trust types, Ted Cruz, who was the kind of tax cutter.

• 27:02Rory Stewart?

  And then for the British market, the kind of one nation types, who were more sort of Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, who were more kind of America is a global policeman, free trade, relatively soft on immigration. And Trump came plowing through the middle. And the inability of these two sides, the kind of fiscally conservative side and the more liberal side of the Republicans to ally, allowed him to come crashing through with a message that was offensive to all of them. Because of course, Trump is, you know, protectionist, anti-free trade, anti-immigration, anti-America's rotas, a global policeman, et cetera.

• 27:31Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe before we go to the break, just a quick word on the, on the current president, Joe Biden, and what's going on in the Middle East. I do think it's, you don't get the sense that Biden is talking to Netanyahu very much. When they had a phone call the other day, it sort of felt like that was quite a rare exchange. And what was interesting was that Netanyahu essentially pushed back on Biden. Biden was emphasizing there's got to be a two-state solution. Netanyahu was pretty dismissive of that. And meanwhile, so we're speaking on the morning after 21 Israeli soldiers have died. Netanyahu said it's been the, you know, terrible moment during the war. The figures of Gazans who've been killed is now, according to the Health Ministry, over 25,000, majority women and children.

• 28:16Alastair Campbell?

  So the level, the horror is going on, not much sign of American influence being brought to bear that we can see. And meanwhile, a pretty

• 28:26Alastair Campbell?

  Big division opening up at the top of the Netanyahu government where he's got this strange war cabinet where he's got three kind of full members, as it were, and then a couple of observers. And one of the observers is this guy Eisenkot, who did a, I only watched it with with subtitles, but a pretty amazing interview. He basically essentially was saying he didn't trust Netanyahu. And he was also saying that the Israel's got to get to the polls pretty quickly as well. Now, the one person who is in the war cabinet as a full member and who might well fancy his chances of running against Netanyahu is Benny Gantz. But it's interesting that there's clearly a divide now there that is that has perhaps come out more into the open than it's been thus far. And I think at the heart will be

• 29:08Alastair Campbell?

  this feeling that there is, I still for the life of me cannot see where the clarity of strategy is. I see what they're saying, but I don't then see how that is relating to the actions that they're taking.

• 29:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think we were sort of lying to ourselves. I mean, I remember as a, I think I've talked about this before, but as the DIFID minister responsible for the Middle East and Asia, I was sent to Palestine and Israel to meet Israeli officials. I actually met the woman who's now the Israeli ambassador in Britain, was then the deputy foreign minister. And I remember being completely shocked by the gap between the briefing I was receiving from officials, which implied that the Israeli government was completely on side with a two-state solution. And the reality of what I met, and it's becoming clear now, if you hear the Israeli ambassador in Britain, she is absolutely, she totally openly rejects the idea of a two-state solution. And of course, Netanyahu has also openly rejected

• 29:58Rory Stewart?

  it. It's very odd that we've sort of been pretending, or at least it felt to me as though the British government was kind of pretending to itself that it was all on side and was supporting Israel and close to Likud and everybody agreed on a two-state solution and holding back the settlements, when the evidence was absolutely blatantly in front of our eyes, that a lot of Likud didn't. And that's before you get on to people like Smotrich and Ben Gavir.

• 30:22Alastair Campbell?

  And Ben Gavir. And of course, that's, that's possibly why Netanyahu is even more hardline in his public statements than he was when he was maybe playing along with American and Western opinion that, yeah, of course, we believe in a two-state solution, but it's very hard when they're trying to kill you. I think the other thing that's happening there, though, is he's coming under, I think, increasing pressure from the families of hostages who don't necessarily see what the strategy to get them out is. But it's, you know, within the con- and again, it's another one where, I mean, just imagine what, I don't even know what Trump does think about what's happening there, but whether you're in Israel, Gaza, whether you're in Ukraine, whether you're Iran, whether you're, and did you see him last night? Here we have a situation

• 31:05Alastair Campbell?

  where North Korea, I think their foreign minister's just been in Russia, they're providing them with lots of kind of weaponry for Ukraine. And meanwhile, there's Trump last night at one of these kind of events, talking about how he had this great love affair with Kim Jong Un and, you know, how they really got on and he sent me sweet letters and, oh God, it just doesn't bear thinking about.

• 31:24Rory Stewart?

  Well, some of the letters, I think, are part of the things that he got in trouble with when the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago mansion because he was keeping some of the sort of North Korean correspondence at home. Just quickly, I mean, I'd love you just for a second on this question of communications and whether there was a path to beat Trump for the Republicans. Because they had this paradox, which is that the donors, most of the big money Republican donors, didn't want to give money to Trump. They didn't want Trump to come back. A lot of the traditional conservatives, as I say, because they believe in free trade and Trump doesn't, they believe in America's role in the world and Trump doesn't, they believe in free markets and he doesn't really, were against him. And they put a lot of effort since Biden won and since the midterms on trying to get

• 32:07Rory Stewart?

  an alternative candidate. And they have been completely defeated. I mean, their last hope now is Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley, again, for British listeners, she's very interesting. She's from a Punjabi Sikh background. Nikki is a Punjabi word for small. She was a sort of local politician in South Carolina, a bit like a local councillor, I guess, almost, a bit bigger than that. But, you know, she was in their assembly, you only paid $10,000 a year. She was a chairman of a women's business group and then very rapidly became governor very young and was plucked by Trump to become his rep at the UN, resigned from that. That nobody quite knows why and now presents herself as the sort of moderate voice.

• 32:51Rory Stewart?

  But of course, in a British terms, she wouldn't be a moderate voice. British terms, she seems pretty indistinguishable from Priti Patel or Suella Braverman. Or, you know, some of the comments of people like Ian Duncan Smith. I mean, she's a, she's somebody who has been pretty tough on immigration, pretty tough on abortion. Now, I guess she probably thinks she needs to be those things in order to try to keep a Republican base and have a chance of coming through.

• 33:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I, I, you ask whether there was a path through. I mean, obviously, particularly in the American system, it depends so much on people's personality, their ability to connect through television, social media and all that stuff. And, you know, whatever people think of Trump, he's very, very good at kind of dominating the, the media narrative. But I think Ron DeSantis' big mistake was to think that he had to be more like Trump than he actually was. I think all of them should have been far more challenging.

• 33:45Rory Stewart?

  Trying to sort of out-Trump Trump.

• 33:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he was sort of, and I don't think people, I think when people see Trump and they see the way he behaves and the positions he outlines, they think, well, it's coming from a kind of authentic place. It may be horrible, it may be narcissistic, but it's kind of Trump. Whereas I felt with DeSantis that he was trying to be something he wasn't. And look, you and I met quite a few Republican congressmen and women quite recently. And, you know, hard to say that they were fans of Trump. There was one who really was a fan of Trump, but in the main, it was like, we don't quite know how to deal with this guy, but oh God, I wish he wasn't around. And that was the sort of, the vibe that they give.

• 34:25Rory Stewart?

  I mean, one of them said to me, it's very off the record, so not quoting who it was, but one of them said, listen, honestly, you know, 85% of my voters support Trump, so I don't really have any choice. And then I think another one again said to you basically that they were against Trump, but they just couldn't say it publicly.

• 34:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, because they're, they're worried about their base. But I, I, I just think that where they all missed a trick, in my view, was after the January the 6th insurrection, the way that the, the kind of Republican establishment sort of dithered around for a bit and then thought, oh, we'll, we'll sort of say it's not quite as bad as it looks. That was the moment when I think they had to absolutely bury him politically. And I think they could have done. But they didn't. And then that's just added to the polarization. And it's given him the narrative of saying this, this thing's just a sort of Democrat Biden witch hunt. So I, I think the only chance they had was to bury him there.

• 35:17Rory Stewart?

  So the political theory of DeSantis was apparently he believed there were three groups. There were the Republicans who'd never vote for Trump. There were the people who'd always vote for Trump. And then there was the third group who liked Trump's policies, but might want a younger, more dynamic person who wasn't facing endless criminal charges to lead it. So their gamble was they could pick up that third group and then in the runoff, pick up the never Trump group and come through, I guess, in the inside.

• 35:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, we're going to be talking soon to a guy I worked with once, a guy called Tucker Escu, who has worked for several Republican leaders and he worked with me during the Iraq war and he, we're going to get him on because he's a, he's in the kind of never Trump, still a Republican, very much in part of this sort of Christian movement. But I think it'd be very interesting to get his explanation as to what on earth has happened to the Republican Party. So we'll have him on soon.

• 36:10Rory Stewart?

  Great. Time for a break.

• 36:12Speaker 03

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• 36:28Speaker 04

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• 36:57Speaker 05

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 37:14Speaker 07

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

• 37:18Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 37:21Speaker 07

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 37:23Speaker 06

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a middle without parent.

• 37:33Rory Stewart?

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

• 37:36Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 37:38Rory Stewart?

  And many congratulations, Alastair, on getting Bill Gates on, which I thought was really interesting. And I think it's got a huge, huge response. What was your sense of it?

• 37:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so he's our latest interview on Leading. We spoke to him about his family, about his upbringing, the whole Microsoft story, political leaders he respects, Tony Blair, and the future of AI and other challenges. Anyway, there's a little clip. And if you want to hear the whole episode, it's available wherever you listen to podcasts.

• 38:09Alastair Campbell?

  How do you feel when you become part of this all kind of conspiracy theory stuff going on?

• 38:14Speaker 08

  That was completely unexpected. You almost have to laugh that, you know, lady, why would I want to know where you are? I mean, really, is that how I spend my time, is tracking you? In my overall situation, I have nothing to complain about. You know, somebody coming up to me on the street, which is happen sometimes, and saying that I've chipped them and I'm following them around, you know, like saying that I profit from vaccines or that vaccines, instead of saving millions of lives, actually are bad for children. You know, that's a total reversal. So I have people who track it and we often think, which of these things should you respond to?

• 38:59Speaker 08

  You know, if they get broad enough, then you want to respond. If they're just in the truly crazy niche, probably you don't want to amplify it.

• 39:11Rory Stewart?

  I thought, Alastair, that was a lovely question to get him on to conspiracy theories. I mean, he's quite guarded, isn't he? As we talked, I guess he's so focused on running this massive international development programme that he has to be a little bit careful what he said. But I thought he really opened up there. By the way, also, I really encourage people listening, do look at Leading, subscribe to it. I'm getting quite a lot of people saying, I didn't know you'd interview Bill Gates and stuff. So remember, there are two separate podcast channels. There's The Rest Is Politics and then there's Leading, which gives you access to that, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders.

• 39:46Alastair Campbell?

  And lots of British people as well, Rory.

• 39:50Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, I do recommend people listen to it. He is, you know, he's quite difficult to interview. He doesn't give much in terms of, you know, he's not naturally warm, but he, when you kind of dissect the answers, there's an awful lot in there. He kind of says what he wants to say and then he doesn't, he doesn't, he didn't like you pushing him on, you know, my charity's better than your charity.

• 40:13Rory Stewart?

  No, and I can see from your expression, you didn't wish me to continue on that particular fight, but I definitely could have kept going on that.

• 40:18Alastair Campbell?

  I felt we were slightly going down. There was a risk of going down a bit of a dead end and slightly losing the warmth that was growing in the room.

• 40:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 40:27Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, very good interview and I'm glad that we did it.

• 40:30Rory Stewart?

  Good.

• 40:31Alastair Campbell?

  So listen, Rory, you're famed on this podcast for your explainers. What the hell is going on with Rwanda now? I mean, I just, every time it comes on the television now, I just, I'm lost as to what's actually happening. So they've been defeated in the House of Lords over something that isn't the Rwanda bill. It's to do with the treaty, which I thought was already a done deal. And then the Rwanda bill's coming back into committee and it just feels like it's going nowhere.

• 40:56Rory Stewart?

  It is, and I'm afraid that, you know, in a way, this problem goes all the way back to the basics, which is that it was a policy initiated by Boris Johnson and continued by Liz Truss. It's a classic example of a stupid policy that should have been abandoned immediately when Rishi Sunak came in. We talked a bit about, you know, what the Republican strategy should have been to take on Trump. I think you've also been vindicated in what Rishi Sunak's strategy should have been when he came in, which is to distance himself dramatically more from the fringes of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and show that he was going to clean up politics and get rid of nonsense like this. It then became worse because he made stopping the boats one of his pledges and he's then tied this Rwanda action to his boat pledges.

• 41:41Rory Stewart?

  And it's turning out to be incredibly complicated, incredibly expensive and is very likely not ready to move anybody to Rwanda before he's out. But one of the problems that we've got is, is the number of judges that they're going to have to use to try to process things.

• 41:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that felt like just, you know, literally making this up as you go along. Suddenly, when we have a criminal justice system that's in a state of collapse, when you have people waiting years for their cases to come to court, when you've had a barrister strike because of the whole austerity stuff and everything else, and suddenly he can magic up 150 judges to fast track the people who are coming over in the boats, as if that is the criminal justice priority right now.

• 42:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and there's a really good article. I mean, I pay tribute to Dominic Lawson, actually. I mean, he does produce some really thoughtful, good stuff, and he's produced a great article in Sunday Times we can link to on this. But he pointed out that actually a lot of the problems here go back to the beginning of David Cameron's government, closing of 150 out of 530 courts in England and Wales. Real term spending on courts declined by 23.4% between 2010 and 2017. I mean, I remember coming in to the Ministry of Justice, because when I was Prisons Minister, I was right in the middle of this. I wasn't responsible for courts, but it was my colleague was doing courts. And a lot of it was to do with ludicrous optimism about the way in which technology and digital settings would transform everything.

• 43:09Rory Stewart?

  I mean, you can imagine the kind of mindset that governments get in. Somebody thinks, oh, yeah, if only we can get everybody video linked and we won't have to move, we won't need all these courts and technology can fix it. And then that then gets combined with swingeing cuts, because of course the justification to the Treasury is always, yeah, we'll invest in technology and then we'll cut things massively because of all these savings we get. The savings never materialize. Covid adds to problems and you end up with this horrible, horrible backlog of cases, which just makes somehow training and appointing 150 new judges feels like it's just rubbing salt in the wounds.

• 43:43Alastair Campbell?

  Also, there's Su Carr, who's the new Chief Justice, she made the not unreasonable point. The as part of the separation of powers between government, parliament and the judiciary, how judges are appointed is a matter for the judiciary. So it should not be the government that says this is what judges have to do. But your friend Alex Chalk, he said the new judges will be appointed, trained and start sitting from this summer. Hundred and fifty, where are they going to get them from? And also, lots of people I know who work in the law, I think you have, there's a sort of pattern, isn't there? The people work as, you know, as young lawyers and they move up, maybe become Queen's Council, King's Council, lots of them make reasonably good money and then they can afford to retire reasonably early and they sit as judges, where the salary is, you know, a lot less

• 44:28Alastair Campbell?

  than they were getting as top KCs. But are they really going to get a hundred and fifty people who are going to be, allow themselves to be used in this way in, as part of a political strategy related to a set of laws that essentially is saying, we, the government, should be allowed to ignore the law when it suits us?

• 44:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and I think, looking back on it, it was profoundly unconservative, what the Cameron government started to do, which, I mean, I think conservatives could have made a really good argument, I should have done when I was there, I came in in 2010. We should have been saying, the rule of law in Britain is one of the few things that we're deeply, deeply proud of. And one of the reasons why a lot of people hear cases in Britain is that they trust our legal system, it's the complete foundation of our economy, our international reputation. The one thing that we as conservatives should have been getting behind is trying to defend our courts and our justice system. We should have been much, much slower, much more cautious with these reforms. These are kind of real, kind of radical libertarian 25% cuts reforms, which is foolish but also

• 45:33Rory Stewart?

  unconservative.

• 45:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm glad that you've come round to my view on austerity, Rory.

• 45:37Rory Stewart?

  I, we're not going to, we're not going to talk about this whole thing all over again.

• 45:41Alastair Campbell?

  That's what it was about, that's what it was about. But, you know, here's a question for you. What is the percentage of current Crown Court cases that are delayed by at least a year, by more than a year?

• 45:51Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I think it must be staggering because some cases delayed five years now, aren't they?

• 45:56Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's 28, it's 28% and 10% are delayed. By more than two years and you know partly it's the cuts as you say but it's also the fact that we've had the the strikes that has no doubt contributed to it but meanwhile I don't know if it was the same piece that you're talking about from Dominic Lawson but you know the point was being made in the press at the weekend that because of the slowness of our justice system there have been people in the post office scandal who've died without knowing that they were going to be exonerated you've had rape victims who are frankly dropping their case because of the the long waits between the alleged defence and the possible

• 46:37Alastair Campbell?

  trial that they are dreading anyway in terms of having to relive the whole thing but then it's just this is sort of stretched out so lots and lots of them 150 planned trials for rape last year were just abandoned.

• 46:49Rory Stewart?

  And and I I think this is also part of the problem when you get a creaking state that is struggling with its tax burden that it's always things like the courts and prisons that get cut because they're just not enough of a central retail political interest politicians on all sides are not bringing them alive I mean you really would hope that Keir Starmer will make this absolutely dear to his heart because this was his whole life this was his you know he got his knighthood as director of public prosecutions he understands this stuff really well but I'm not I'm not hearing it quite yet.

• 47:20Alastair Campbell?

  No I was pleased though yesterday to see him make a speech and it's ridiculous that you have to start quotes stand up for the national trust and stand up for the Royal National Lifeboats Institution I thought that speech about the importance of civic society and he said you know he said that he thought that David Cameron's big society idea as an idea was actually a very good idea it just didn't happen not least because of of all the cuts that we've seen and so forth but I do think there's something very odd about the modern Conservative Party or PopCon as Liz Truss now decides we have to call her have you heard this break so popular conservatism and it's been launched by her Jacob Rees-Mogg Simon Clarke and somebody else whose name I've forgotten but they've said that they're

• 48:04Alastair Campbell?

  going to be called PopCon for short.

• 48:08Rory Stewart?

  Can you imagine anyone more pop than Jacob Rees-Mogg?

• 48:10Alastair Campbell?

  Can you imagine anybody less popular than Liz Truss? Actually, that polling presentation that you and I saw from John Curtis, the one thing that really brought home to me is the more that Liz Truss and Boris Johnson are across the airwaves in the run up to the election, the better that is for Labour. You know, for her to call herself pop com, popular conservatives is absolutely mind bending.

• 48:33Rory Stewart?

  They are, of course, fascinated by US politics and they're endlessly trying to work out how they can learn from Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, a lot of these tropes and things that they're pushing ahead with.

• 48:45Alastair Campbell?

  It's why they love GB News, because they see it as a sort of

• 48:49Rory Stewart?

  Sort of Fox News.

• 48:50Alastair Campbell?

  Fox News in the making. Yeah. That was the other thing, Roy. That was the other thing worth noting this week was, I mean, did you see Lucy Fraser's morning media round yesterday?

• 48:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that was sad. Lucy Fraser, in fact, was in charge of courts when I was the prisons minister. But she was trying to suggest there was bias in the BBC and then they said, what's the evidence? And then she slightly struggled to produce one. Yeah.

• 49:12Alastair Campbell?

  There's a perception. And then we had Hugh Merriman today, whose evidence, he had to back her up because they're in the same government. Can't slag off a colleague. His evidence, he was in the car and he listened to 10 minutes of the news quiz and it was all very anti Tory. And Kay Burley, Kay Burley on Sky pointed out that the news quiz is not a news programme, it's satire.

• 49:33Rory Stewart?

  Oh, no, I think the BBC still, for some of its faults, still does an incredible job.

• 49:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Rory Stewart?

  And I'd love to see a government come in, put more investment into the BBC, put more investment into the World Service. I think it's an amazing institution.

• 49:48Alastair Campbell?

  And also, there's not a political party in the world that wouldn't take its hand off to have its respect and trust ratings.

• 49:55Rory Stewart?

  I think the conservative ideology, if I was going to rebuild the Conservative Party, is partly about institutions like the BBC and actually like some of those charities that you've mentioned, that our vision of society needs to be not just about central government. It needs to be about universities, media, charities, community groups. Trade unions, there we are. Exactly. Yeah.

• 50:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 50:19Rory Stewart?

  It's all part of our rich texture. So there we are. We're going to be first conservative advocating for trade unions.

• 50:24Alastair Campbell?

  There you go. Shall we close off with Deutschland?

• 50:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, go on, tell us about this. So can I just quickly tell you what my understanding is and then you can bring us up to date where you are. So AFD's created not very long ago, so I guess sort of 2015 ish, enters Parliament 2017 for the first time. Looks like it's dropped a bit in the 2020 elections where it dropped down to 10%. Then found itself under surveillance for extremist activity in March 21. Performed well in Thuringia, which I think we discussed on the podcast, and is now looking like it's at 25% across Germany. My sense is because Germany's a fractured political landscape, that's pretty good. That puts it neck and neck with the ruling party.

• 51:07Rory Stewart?

  And it's on 30% in the east, which means it's actually leading any other party in the east. Is that roughly right or am I missing something?

• 51:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, they're they're actually well ahead of the ruling party. The social democrats are really, really struggling, and I suspect that's one of the reasons why the AFD have risen as they have. What's happened in the last few days is that this research organisation called Correctiv, and they've actually they've translated into lots of different languages now. So we'll put the English version in the newsletter. And they discovered a meeting that took place in a hotel near Potsdam a few weeks ago. And it was a meeting between very wealthy right wing people, some quite leading AFD figures, including an advisor to the the current leader, Alice Vidal, some kind of identitarian characters.

• 51:58Alastair Campbell?

  So just sort of, you know, various groupings and characters from the the sort of far right German ecosystem. Now, I don't quite know how the stories come about that. I see the AFD have accused the the journalists and researchers of operating with Stasi-like tactics to get this story. But they clearly have an absolutely, you know, bang on account of the whole thing. And the thing is to provoke these massive demonstrations all over Germany at the week. Hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets is the fact that what they were discussing was this kind of master plan based on what they called remigration. And this is the forced depatriation of people of, you know, foreigners who are in Germany,

• 52:43Alastair Campbell?

  including in certain categories, people who are already German citizens. And this has just provoked an absolute kind of, you know, outpouring of protest. I'd love to know what would have to happen in British politics for this kind of thing to happen. I don't know if you saw the pictures, I sent you some pictures of the protest. Somebody filmed it from the parliament in Berlin. I mean, it was as far as the eye could see, people protesting, hundreds of thousands.

• 53:06Rory Stewart?

  Hundreds of thousands, yeah.

• 53:07Alastair Campbell?

  I can see there'd be a temptation for the mainstream parties to think, this is great. This shows that the country is uniting against the threat of extremism. But then they have to ask themselves, why, why have the AFD risen in the way that they have in the first place? And why haven't they been better, better challenged, both at the political level and on the policy level?

• 53:29Alastair Campbell?

  And, you know, I, I think that Schultz has, um, hard, hard to say he's been seen as a, as a success as chancellor. And there's a lot of kind of doubt about whether the coalition can hold together. This gives them an opportunity to reset, I think. They need to ride this wave somehow.

• 53:44Rory Stewart?

  It, it, it is a, I mean, this story around populism is the kind of big story of this year, isn't it? And it's what we were talking about with Trump at the beginning of the programme. Because basically, Trump and the AFD and many others have found a gaping hole. They've found a lot of people who feel that the old politics wasn't delivering for them. They don't really believe in open, free markets. They don't believe in the liberal global order. In fact, they're very suspicious of those things. They're very worried about migration. They're sceptical about climate change. They're sceptical about getting involved in Ukraine. And they want policies that make more sense for what in America would be called the middle

• 54:27Rory Stewart?

  class, or I guess in Britain, kind of working class voters. And it's, I mean, it's really great in a way that Britain isn't still caught in the middle of that. And that Boris Johnson's attempts to try to create a sort of Trump coalition and the red wall, trying to get North Eastern voters, getting behind a kind of anti-immigration thing didn't really pan out. But it's, it's a problem right, right across Europe. And it's a problem that none of the mainstream parties are rising to meet.

• 54:54Alastair Campbell?

  No, and rising to meet is the point, and I think it does have to be about more leadership, and it has to be about challenging some of these myths that have taken hold, challenging some of the lies that are told about the state of the world, challenging this hard-right agenda, because it is rooted in a populism that has never worked anywhere. Show me a government that's run on this populist agenda and that's run a good country.

• 55:16Rory Stewart?

  And in Germany, of course, it is deeply traumatic for people and particularly chilling. I mean, the fact that some of these leading AFD figures are saying, oh, I don't know why we have to spend all our time apologising for the Second World War, we shouldn't go around feeling ashamed of ourselves all the time. I mean, it's really, really troubling. And it's really troubling that they're going to listen to these alt-right figures who make no secret of the fact that they basically admire the Nazis.

• 55:42Alastair Campbell?

  What this article also showed is that they understand, just as the right-wing networks in America and Britain do, you need money and you need media backing. And a lot of the discussion was about that. I must give a shout-out, Roy, to, I'm sure you'll know straight away who this guy is, Christian Streich. I'm sure you know who he is.

• 56:01Rory Stewart?

  No, go on. Christian Streich, tell us about Christian Streich.

• 56:03Alastair Campbell?

  He's the manager of Freiburg Football Club, and he did an absolutely brilliant, and even for people who don't speak German, I recommend they look up Christian Streich's press conference last week, where he basically said, it's time for this country to wake up and stand up and understand, if you know your history, you don't have to work too hard to work where this is going. And it's about time we all stood up and stopped. And then another manager, the manager of Leipzig, came out. So it was pleasing that he wasn't met by the message that Gary Lineker and Gary Neville and all those guys get every time they speak about politics, stick to football. He was actually hailed as speaking rather more effectively than a lot of politicians have been doing.

• 56:44Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, thank you, Alison. That's been a really intense session, but I'm very pleased that we got on to the AFD and I think, look forward to talking tomorrow.

• 56:52Alastair Campbell?

  Speak to you soon. Bye.

• 56:57Speaker 05

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

• 57:00Speaker 06

  On October 2nd.

• 57:01Speaker 05

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

• 57:06Speaker 06

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

• 57:13Speaker 07

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

• 57:17Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 57:21Speaker 07

  I'm not the first then.

• 57:22Speaker 06

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.