444. Question Time: Can Labour Reinvent Itself?

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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 Crete 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.

• 0:43Alastair 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/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 2:40Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:44Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Anister Campbell. Hillary Coates, first question Rory. What are your thoughts on Keir Starmer's mini reshuffle? Will fresh faces bring some hope or just more inconsistency and chaos? I'm guessing Hillary's not very impressed by the government thus far.

• 3:00Rory Stewart?

  No, I think more inconsistency and chaos doesn't sound great, does it? We both watched this amazing short social media clip that Number 10 have brought together of Starmer announcing his mini reshuffle. And it was a pretty peculiar piece of communication, quite sort of Starmer-like. He says, at least as far as I remember, "I'm delighted to announce we're now entering phase two of the government and we've brought in a new team." And there were sort of pictures of him at his desk and then he's walking up the stairs in Number 10 and then he's elected.

• 3:27Alastair Campbell?

  And none of the civil servants' faces were shown.

• 3:30Rory Stewart?

  And at no point did I discover what phase two was about. I kept thinking, we're going to hear now in phase two, we're going to do something. This is the vision, this is the direction. Instead of which, it seemed to be largely about the fact that he was reshuffling. But I didn't see reshuffling to do what?

• 3:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The only thing is, is it even a reshuffle? Because people normally associate reshuffles with cabinet ministers being moved. Now, one cabinet minister was moved, Darren Jones.

• 3:53Rory Stewart?

  But just sort of moved sideways.

• 3:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he's been moved. I actually, I'm a bit of a fan of Darren Jones, who was the Chief Secretary of the Treasury. He's now got this new job that never existed before, Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister.

• 4:03Rory Stewart?

  Can I, Anister, just sort of quickly on that? I mean, what is this job? What sort of roles in the bare administration do you think were covered by this? I can't really work out in the Cameron government or the May government what it was.

• 4:14Alastair Campbell?

  I think what it is, is that Keir Starmer has come back from the summer. The domestic debate, I mean, I resent the way that the BBC yesterday said that, you know, reform and flags and hotels has been the story of the summer, given we've had stuff going on in Ukraine, Gaza, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But certainly Nigel Farage and Reform have commanded an awful lot of airspace over the summer. Keir Starmer's come back and basically said, I've got to change things to try to get more of a grip. Um, and on delivery, I think he sees Darren Jones's job as his driving delivery. So there wouldn't be, I guess the nearest equivalent might be in our time, Michael Barber, who was head of the delivery unit.

• 4:56Rory Stewart?

  Or Jonathan Powell as the Chief of Staff.

• 4:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but then he's got a Chief of Staff, which is Morgan McSweeney, who's the, the sort of strategy guy.

• 5:03Rory Stewart?

  And it slightly worries me because the way that Theresa May did it is she brought in Gavin Barwell, who'd been a minister and an MP as the Chief of Staff, but he'd left Parliament.

• 5:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 5:14Rory Stewart?

  So he was full time.

• 5:15Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's a tricky thing is because the, the other thing about politicians, once they become politicians, they, they are seen differently internally. Um, but I, listen, I think Darren Jones, I, I really like him. I think he's a very good communicator. I think he's a detailed guy. But I, I, what I worry about of this setup is even that we're talking about it because, you know, Keir Starmer did an interview on the BBC yesterday. Here I am, I'm back, uh, I'm dealing with the small boats and I'm shaking up the team. That's not a message for, the message I want to hear from the government is what are we doing for the country, medium and long term? And the other change yesterday was Tim Allen, who was my deputy in opposition. And then briefly, he, he stayed around for a few months, but then went off into business.

• 6:00Alastair Campbell?

  Very successful PR company that I'm still associated with, declaration of interest, Portland. And he's now coming back into the kind of public service sphere. And what I'm hoping from that is that the, the sort of, the strategic messaging becomes clear. Because that's the bit to me that I think has been lacking.

• 6:18Rory Stewart?

  Um, final analogy, I guess, um, if we're going real inside baseball. When Dominic Cummings left the Boris Johnson setup, Steve Barclay, who was a Conservative MP from Cambridgeshire and had been in the cabinet. And I must have came in to do this sort of role, which may be a sort of comparable. He was the sort of Chief of Staff.

• 6:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Rory Stewart?

  For Boris. I mean, I always worried about it at the time because. I was very, very conscious as a member of parliament that you're balancing having to be quite rightly with your constituents and do your the only person who gets a pass on that basically is the Prime Minister, the rest of us really have to be in our constituency a lot. The whips are driving us to vote in parliament. And I think these jobs are best done by somebody who isn't a member of parliament because I think it should be a real fourteen hour a day, seven day a week job. And that's very difficult to do for an elected representative.

• 7:12Alastair Campbell?

  I think the other thing that may be part of the thinking is that Pat McFadden over in the Cabinet Office has been doing a lot of the sort of communications troubleshooting when things are a bit tricky and the piece total safe pair of hands. And I think Darren Jones is similar in that. So, look, thi- this is a new-

• 7:27Rory Stewart?

  Wait a second, now it sounds difficult, right? It sounds to me as though there's a potential issue.

• 7:31Alastair Campbell?

  No, my point is that I think-

• 7:33Rory Stewart?

  Morgan McSweeney, Pat McFadden and Darren Jones. There's going to be some ambiguity amongst the servants on who's actually driving this, right?

• 7:39Alastair Campbell?

  No, the point I was making about Pat is then that frees Pat to do more of the kind of governing strategy and the political strategy, which he did very effectively in opposition with Morgan McSweeney. But, look, thi- this, my worry about this is this is sort of the third or fourth kind of shake up of the communications team, right? And ultimately, the communications has to be driven by a very clear, compelling medium and long term strategy, which you then turn into a communications strategy.

• 8:09Rory Stewart?

  Right. And, and what it wasn't, it was not a reshuffle in the sense that Rachel Reeves has been replaced or Bridget Philips has been replaced. In fact, on the economic side, to add to the complexity, they've brought in Manu Shafik. Now, Manu Shafik is a chief economics adviser, is that right?

• 8:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Now, tha- tha- which, which to me, as a journalist going back in Thatcher time, because one of the reasons for the ultimate sort of crumbling of the Thatcher government was the fact they had this long running battle between her and Nigel Lawson over her independent economics adviser, a guy called Alan Walters. Now, I don't know whether Manu Shafik is of that sort, who's going to cause that sort of trouble.

• 8:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, I'd be interested to know what you think Manu Shafik is there to do. Is she there to say, actually, we need a very, very radical, clear economic programme that everybody can identify, we're going to take risk, this is the big idea? Or is she supposed to be a sort of competence?

• 9:09Rory Stewart?

  Senior civil servant figure who's going to smooth things out. What have you been looking for? I mean, Manoush Shafik is born in Alexandria. She's from a quite a prominent Egyptian family. She grew up in the States. I first came across her because she was the Director General in DIFID and then the Permanent Secretary of DIFID for a few years in the early Cameron government. She then went on to run the LSE. She then went to Columbia University in New York where she was earning well over a million dollars a year, but got caught up in the Palestine Gaza protests and barely lasted a year and managed somehow in the course of that to end up being attacked very, very strongly by the pro Palestinian side who blamed her for bringing in the police to clear protesters.

• 9:53Alastair Campbell?

  So when was she at the Bank of England? Because she's also been Deputy Governor of the Bank of England.

• 9:56Rory Stewart?

  Between those, between the LSE and DIFID.

• 9:59Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 9:59Rory Stewart?

  So, I mean, she's incredibly charming. She's very, very smart. It must have been very bruising in Columbia because she didn't quite work out how to handle that politics. But what do you think he is doing? I mean, is he bringing in a sort of very senior, well-known figure to reassure people? Is he grooming her to be the next governor of the Bank of England? I mean, what's this role about?

• 10:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think what Star has been thinking is that his operation has been better on the foreign policy side of things than on the domestic policy side of things. And I think some of that and a considerable amount of that is down to Jonathan Powell being a complete grown up, not an ego, just gets on and does the job really, really, really well and is completely loyal. And that he hasn't necessarily had that same sense on the domestic. And of course, the single most important part of the domestic agenda is the economy. And I think there that maybe within number ten, there was, there's been a feeling that the number ten in the treasury, the two most important buildings in government.

• 11:10Alastair Campbell?

  And that he's very much left things to Rachel Reeves, which is fine. And he's totally supportive of Rachel Reeves. I actually saw him not long ago and was really struck by how absolutely supportive he was of her and not listening to the people who were saying she was this, she was that, the other.

• 11:25Rory Stewart?

  Not not listening to the Rory Stewart view.

• 11:27Alastair Campbell?

  Correct, not listening to to you Rory. However, I think maybe understanding that no matter how close you are to the to the Chancellor, you also do have to have your own mind on the economy and your own thinking in the economy. And I think that's probably what he's looking for. I don't know though, I don't know this, I've I've never met Moos, you've you've met her. So, but I think generally, if I make a general point about this. Interestingly, Peter Hyman, who used to work as part of our team, in fact, he and Tim Allen, back in opposition, worked really closely together. And and Peter Hyman has written this very interesting Substack piece today, where he's analysed a note that Tony Blair sent to us by fax sometime around two thousand. He's just got four paragraphs.

• 12:12Alastair Campbell?

  But it what it shows, we'll put it in the newsletter, because what it shows is that our operation was driven all the time by relentless, never ending conversation, iterative conversation about strategy. And then at the weekend, Tony would kind of formulate his and our thinking and set it out on paper.

• 12:32Rory Stewart?

  So so this famous safer government stuff is presumably a description of you, Jonathan Powell, Angie Mandelson and others sitting around, sitting around talking.

• 12:45Alastair Campbell?

  And it's Gordon and it's the politicians, but it's and it's people outside. It's a never ending iterative conversation.

• 12:51Rory Stewart?

  He enjoyed debate ideas, he'd get you in and he wants and he'd play and argue with you. And then at the end of every week, he'd say, this is what we're now doing.

• 12:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Sunday evening, the fax would, this fax machines were still around. And well, I know they're still around and apparently the National Health Service is remains the biggest purchaser of fax machines in Europe. Stop getting fax machines NHS and it would were in and it would essentially be, we've got our morning meeting to start the week tomorrow. This is what I want to talk about.

• 13:19Rory Stewart?

  And do you think that was helped by having Jonathan Powell or Gus O'Donnell or someone draft this thing or bring it all together?

• 13:25Alastair Campbell?

  No, Tony wrote this.

• 13:26Rory Stewart?

  He did it himself.

• 13:27Alastair Campbell?

  Tony wrote it.

• 13:28Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 13:28Alastair Campbell?

  At Chequers usually or wherever he was at the weekend. He wrote it himself. And and sometimes it would be, it would say things like Russia underlined, then it would just say, speak to me. In other words, I still want to talk a bit more about this. So but it was a guide.

• 13:45Rory Stewart?

  This, this is him also calling you over the weekend and playing his guitar to you and this kind of stuff.

• 13:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, this is the, and he's calling other people and he's just, and and he's, and he's talking to Gordon and he's talking to Robin Cook when he was Foreign Secretary, wherever it might be. But then he would sit down and I think this is the point. The strategy at the top has to be driven from the top and understood by everybody. And the only way to have people, everybody understand it is for them to be part of that discussion. And I think that's the bit that I, I hope Tim Allen, because he of course was, you know, part of that team, particularly in opposition. I hope that is what he tries maybe to impose upon this. I often hear from ministers, for example, that there isn't, it's not a kind of think in ink, political operation. Uh, there, there's not this sort of relentless kind of iteration. Now, they may think it's a waste of time. I don't know.

• 14:34Alastair Campbell?

  But I would argue that a year in, are they in the place where they want to be? I don't think any of them are saying yes. And that means there's got to be a reset. Uh, uh, and it may be in the end that you do need to have a kind of change of economic course and some of the, the big decisions that have been made. But, but at least I think here has a sense of the problem. This is about trying to address that problem. But ultimately, my message would be, strategy has to come from the top.

• 15:02Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Well, next question, Gary Harvey, who's a Trip Plus member from Chelmsford. In light of the Reform leader of Nottinghamshire County Council banning local journalists from speaking to him or members of his party, do you worry like me that with the expected increase in Reform local and national politicians, that it's the start of the slide to Trumpism? Given Farage's friendship with Trump, just a little bit of background on this for listeners. The council banned. The Nottingham Post, its website Nottingham Live and the BBC funded local democracy reporters from access to councillors, press releases and events. Absolutely extraordinary. I mean, my, my, one of the things that healthiest about local democracy are what remains of our local newspapers.

• 15:45Rory Stewart?

  My whole time as an MP was a lot about the Cumberland and Westmoreland Herald, for whom I wrote a weekly or bi-weekly column, but also the Westmoreland Gazette, the Cumberland News, BBC Cumbria. I mean, these things are really what holds you to account, the way the national newspapers come. I mean, there's an online thing called Cumbria Crack, but basically that's what told voters day in, day out, what was actually happening on a Tuesday.

• 16:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and one of, one of the worst consequences of the whole social media revolution and, you know, the, the kind of gradual takeover of, of local media has been the, the, the sort of death of local newspapers and local media organisations. So the question about whether this is Trumpism, yes, it is. Richard Tice, the Dubai based MP for wherever he's the MP for.

• 16:32Rory Stewart?

  Not for Dubai.

• 16:33Alastair Campbell?

  And he's not the MP for Dubai, no, but, but he's, he, he's basically saying that they have the right to decide who they talk to, which of course is totally Trumpian. That Caroline Leave it, brilliant profile of her in the new world, by the way, this week. It, she's, she's constantly basically picking and choosing who can be in the White House room and what have you. Now, I, and I, and what gets my goat about this one, though. One, as you say, is that local people who vote for local politicians, whatever the view of the papers covering them, have a right to know what they're doing in their name and local media is important for that. But secondly, I imagine if they're listening to the BBC, Nigel Farage's most loathed media

• 17:15Alastair Campbell?

  organisation, which nonetheless gives him the easiest ride, they will doubtless be covering the fact that Nigel Farage is on his way to America. Why is he on his way to America? He's going to give evidence to a Republican controlled congressional inquiry about the threat to free speech in Britain. He's going to talk about what a tragedy it is that Lucy Connolly, this sort of Mother Teresa figure, was locked up for suggesting that immigrants should be set on fire. He's probably going to talk about the way that the media is completely controlled by the government, a government which, by the way, gets, you know, probably the worst treatment by the press than, you know, even Neil Kinnock and Michael Foot did. So. The hypocrisy of this is what gets me.

• 17:56Rory Stewart?

  Um, can I though, just, there's something that's, that's always worrying me. Often when we talk about Farage, you quite rightly point out that he gets a lot of media coverage and you quite rightly point out that he's managed to skip

• 18:11Rory Stewart?

  accountability for Brexit. And of course, most of our left-leaning listeners very much love this because then the story is basically Farage is just a product of a stacked media system. But presumably there is another part of this, which is he's also talented. He's also playing the system well. And it'd be lovely to get you to reflect a little bit on a couple of things that he does well, because I think it's dangerous to get in the mindset of, you know, as the Lib Dems tend to at the moment, we're not doing anything wrong. We're making all the right speeches, doing the right things, just nobody will ever cover it. Or the Labour government, we're a terrifically successful government, it's just the press survives against it.

• 18:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I agree with that. Look, if I were to make a, an analysis of, of Nigel Farage, he's a very, very good communicator.

• 18:59Rory Stewart?

  And what makes him good? What makes, what sort of things do he do well?

• 19:02Alastair Campbell?

  Remember Nicola Sturgeon, when we interviewed her recently? And she said that a lot of the Labour ministers, when they come on the television, they speak and then after they've gone, you don't quite know what they've said. Nigel Farage is very clear about what he wants to say. Both on the micro, here I am, I've got a 30 second clip, this is the message I'm going to land. And on the macro, his big points, you know. Uh, now I disagree with a lot of them, but you, you know what he stands for. He doesn't like Europe. Um, he's very fond of Trump. Uh, he thinks the health service is a bit dodgy and should be kind of, you know, revamped. He doesn't like to talk about that too much, but you know where he comes from.

• 19:39Alastair Campbell?

  And the other thing he has, I mean, I've noticed this whenever, you know, I mean, as you know, I've been trying to get him to come on the podcast for some time. He sort of says yes, but then it never quite commits.

• 19:49Rory Stewart?

  I, I managed to interview him on one of my BBC programmes, but that's part of the general.

• 19:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So for example, when he had an LBC show, I used to go on it regularly. Because I quite like engaging with people whose views I fundamentally disagree with. But the other thing I would say, he's very cha-, he can be very charming. If I turn up, I might sort of, you know, wanna go straight in pilot and say, well, this bullshit you're talking at the congressional inquiry. He'll probably say to me, oh, God, you lot were very unlucky at Old Trafford the other night. He'll always remind me that he's a Crystal Palace supporter. Love to know if Crystal Palace fans have ever seen him there recently, but anyway. But he's charming and he can be funny. Um, and the other thing I would say about him, he really studies this stuff.

• 20:33Rory Stewart?

  And, and he's relentless. I think another thing that I've observed about politics, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about Liz Truss.

• 20:40Alastair Campbell?

  It's what Jeremy Hunt said, how much do you want it?

• 20:41Rory Stewart?

  Jenrick or Farage, I mean, famously, he failed to get elected to Parliament, I think, is it four times?

• 20:47Alastair Campbell?

  No, more than that, eight, wasn't it?

• 20:48Rory Stewart?

  And then finally makes it, right?

• 20:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:50Rory Stewart?

  And just keeps plugging away.

• 20:51Alastair Campbell?

  Resilience.

• 20:52Rory Stewart?

  And he will shut down parties, found new ones. He survives every type of scandal, strange funding patterns coming in from his mates. Failing to disclose this day, but he just doesn't stop and for thirty years and.

• 21:06Alastair Campbell?

  But it's Trumpian, it is Trumpian. And, but, but the thing about studying it, so this is what such, again, underlines the hypocrisy about this Nottingham press thing. Nigel Farage told me he still reads every single national newspaper every day. Now, I think that's a waste of politicians' time. That takes a lot of time to do that. Now, he's not reading every word, but he's flicking through and he's. And, and, and, and he says what he's doing is trying to work out trends. And he's also working out, who should I talk to? Who's pushing the buttons that I want to push? So, for example, he's got an interview in the Daily Express and the front page headline is Farage to Starmer, I'll take your job. Right? Now, it's not much of a message in terms of, you know, policy or any of that stuff. It's a message in terms of, I'm playing the game better than they are.

• 21:50Alastair Campbell?

  So I think it's a combination of those things.

• 21:52Rory Stewart?

  So he thinks a lot about the media. So one of my.

• 21:53Alastair Campbell?

  He thinks obsessively about the media.

• 21:54Rory Stewart?

  He's reading the newspapers, he's circling headlines, he's underlying people he might speak to, he's putting a question mark, should we be tacking this way? Oh, that's quite an interesting angle.

• 22:03Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, absolutely. Which is, which is kind of different to what I would see as, as a good strategy, which is kind of, you know, being clear. And then you dip in and out of that, but he's obsessed with the media. Um, he is a creature of media. When you meet it, when you meet him. And when you bump into him, just have a chat and stuff, he he will mainly talk about media. He won't really talk about policy.

• 22:23Rory Stewart?

  The thing that struck me about him is how strange his life has become because he basically said to me last time I saw him that it's very difficult for him to walk through the streets. He's gets a lot of abuse, very angry with him. I think he has security guards with him. He can't walk, he has to travel in vehicles. So there's a sort of odd dynamic going on. On the one hand, he's a populist politician who's about having a pint of beer in the pub. And on the other hand, actually, he's increasingly having to live a life which is quite kind of distant.

• 22:56Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure. I think I think the I think the security thing is a bit status driven. I'm not saying he doesn't get death threats and all that stuff, but you know, lots of us do. Um, but so I think it's partly a sort of status thing. It's making him look more kind of I'm important. Um, and and and actually, I think he does still go into pubs and, you know, you hear stories of him sort of just wandering in. And so he look, he's got a way of talking and communicating that is quite Trumpian. It's sort of, you know, he's it's conversational, it's flowing, it's often funny.

• 23:27Rory Stewart?

  And the interpubs thing is, I also think is almost necessary now in the modern world. It doesn't matter whether you're Zorin Mamdani in in New York or whether you are Joe Kowee, who did it a lot in Indonesia. That ability to be seen with people, to be open to people, to be out on the ground. Not quite seeing enough of that from Starmer, and it's a pity because actually he's quite natural with people one on one.

• 23:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think, look, I think the other thing though is that it's like I saw a video they put out, Labour Party social media put out of him playing football. Well, we know he plays football, that's fine. But I think when you're, you know, that that's a part of it.

• 24:06Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 24:07Alastair Campbell?

  Um, I think for Farage, this is why I do relate it to the way that the media treats him. The fact that he can do that stupid video he did last week that we talked about with the white fur coat and pretending he's a rapper. What he would say, and he said, this is a phrase he uses a lot of the time, is just a bit of fun. Okay, well, it's not just a bit of fun when as a consequence of your policy and a consequence of your relentless messaging about immigrants and immigration, we are back to a place where as happened in, I think, with the northeast of England the other day, the P word is now being daubed on bus shelters.

• 24:41Rory Stewart?

  And where he's talking about full Trumpian six hundred thousand people.

• 24:45Alastair Campbell?

  Six hundred thousand deportations, driven there, by the way, by the fact that Rupert Lowe, this is the other thing about Farage, Farage is not a team player, Farage can't keep a team together.

• 24:53Rory Stewart?

  No, they keep collapsing, but it doesn't, but it doesn't seem to affect him.

• 24:56Alastair Campbell?

  No, it doesn't seem to affect him because ultimately it's about him. And actually, he quite likes having somebody to the right because he can say, oh, I'm not as bad as Tommy Robinson, I'm not as bad as Rupert Lowe. But the consequence of him and also the media, you know, the right wing media, look, I saw a thing on social media the day, this crowd of people, it looked like, you know, you see it with football fans when they're sort of charging through railway stations, but this was just a group of people basically shouting racist, chanting racist abuse. Okay. Another thing I saw yesterday, kids with one of their parents in front of them filming, saying, go on then. And they started this chant about what do we want? We want them out. When do we want them out? We want it out now. Talking about immigrants, all waving flags and all this nonsense. And so I think

• 25:40Alastair Campbell?

  he knows what he's doing. And he does it, but then he slightly pulls back.

• 25:45Rory Stewart?

  Good exchange on Twitter between Paul Hilda and Douglas Carswell, who was this, who was this Tory MP then became a reformer, I guess it was a, those days, a Brexit Party MP, who's now moved to the States. And Hilda's pointing out that when he was with Carswell in 2014, he saw a sort of right wing figure that he could still quite respect, who was prepared to call out racism, who was prepared to talk about the genuine contribution made by immigrants to British society. And now. Carswell's gone well off and is saying, you know, we don't want to eat Abduls in Britain, I think was the phrase, right? And and so Hilda is saying, what happened to you?

• 26:30Rory Stewart?

  What's happened over the last 10, 12 years? And Carswell's like, I'm not going to get into your gotcha stuff. I'm not. But fundamentally, what we're talking about is somehow what once looked as though there was a sort of respectable, right wing, kind of, you know, maybe sort of sub Jacob Rees-Mogg covered, uh, you know, we're worried about immigration, but we're respectful towards immigrants. We're not racist is now becoming with people like Carswell, something much, much more troubling.

• 26:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but in this, don't, don't underestimate the impact of Trump on that. Trump, Trump and and the kind of white supremacists in in the States are, they're out and proud now. They they don't feel that they have to sort of trim their views. And I think, look, I do think Brexit was a turning point in this. I think that made people who really don't like having too many foreigners in the country feel emboldened to say so.

• 27:21Rory Stewart?

  On this subject, because it's it's kind of mesmerizing the different type of politicians. And we're talking about this kind of populist style. But I loved the leading interview that we've just done, which is available now to everybody with Jonas Gustor, who's the Norwegian Prime Minister. Fantastic. He's the serving Norwegian Prime Minister. But my goodness, he's a very, very different sort, hugely thoughtful, brave, but in some ways a kind of, uh, sort of old style, quite good looking, distinguished, establishment politician. A quite, quite different feeling from Raj. Did you enjoy that?

• 27:52Alastair Campbell?

  Very much so, yeah. Yeah, well, I've known Jonas for a long time. I think he's a great guy and and and a really impressive politician. Of course, Norway was in the news here this week because they bought this British frigate, biggest ever frigate order from the UK, beat off France, Germany and the United States. I loved, I also loved, what did you, what did you think he was saying about the Nobel Peace Prize?

• 28:16Rory Stewart?

  I think he's definitely, definitely signaling that he's, he's not going to deliver it for Trump. Seemed to be the thing, and because he can't, because he doesn't control it. I just thought he was such a wonderful man. And and, you know, sometimes I I think, you know, maybe people won't have heard of the Prime Minister in Norway, but. It's amazing hearing a head of government speaking so fluently and interestingly about the world. Here's one for you then. Online Safety Act, we've got so many questions on this. Just to explain, from 25th of July, the Online Safety Act came to force, which means that social media and other internet platforms are required to implement safety measures protecting children or face large fines. So you have to upload a photo ID or a selfie which gets analysed to check if it's an adult trying to access the site. So here's Laura Harrison's answer.

• 29:00Rory Stewart?

  "I can't stand Farage almost as much as Alistair can't stand him." And that's saying something. "But even a stopped clock is right twice a day. His concerns about the overreach of the Online Safety Act do make me wonder. While the theory sounds fine, is the implementation veering into dangerous territory? Could this be a slippery slope to censorship, data privacy breaches? If so, how worried should we be?" So this is a big thing. I mean, this goes back to us interviewing Peter Manoloskus, the Premier of South Australia. It actually connects to what we did yesterday on Southeast Asia. Singapore's got pretty ferocious acts about controlling online traffic. And on the one hand, you and I feel, my goodness, social media has contributed so much to polarisation,

• 29:42Rory Stewart?

  undermining democracy, and in the case of online safety, pornography, self-harm, we need to control access to it.

• 29:49Alastair Campbell?

  That's where I am.

• 29:50Rory Stewart?

  On the other hand, of course, people point out that when governments get control of this, the line between what is or is not legitimate to say gets a bit blurred. So in Singapore, it seemed as soon as sites started questioning the Singaporean government's foreign policy position on Ukraine, they were pretty quick to shut those things down.

• 30:08Alastair Campbell?

  Were they?

• 30:09Rory Stewart?

  Well, on this side, I've got two great sources, Ploy, who runs Digital Reach, and Ben, who runs the Medica Centre, who look at Southeast Asian social media and point out that this act in Singapore, which is called the Protecting Agents Online Falshood and Manipulation Act, begins being used by governments like this to make sure that you control discussion.

• 30:30Alastair Campbell?

  Look, this online safety thing is a massive debate that's gone through Parliament. I know Peter Picard ended up being criticised for, quote, "being too close to the tech giants, etc." As you know, I'm a bit of a technophobe, so I can't pretend remotely to be an expert on this. I do nonetheless... Think that whether we like it or not, we have entered a world where we are constantly giving our data away. Um, and because it's giving us things that we want, we don't necessarily want to think too carefully through the consequences of that. If I can just underline the hypocrisy point, though, Farage and Tyson, these guys coming out against this, I think one of the reasons is that they rely on misinformation, they're

• 31:12Alastair Campbell?

  licking their lips at the way that AI is going to change campaigning. They didn't mind remotely that the whole Cambridge Analytica thing allowed them to sort of be more better, more effective as campaigning in um in Brexit. Uh, and so I actually think that where they're coming from on this is these are tools that we can use and I just don't buy the line that they're worried about, you know, somebody having their data nicked by some tech giant.

• 31:39Rory Stewart?

  Well, there's an extraordinary fact, just to finish, which people will will be aware of, um, who follow this stuff closely, which is that one of the biggest payers into the British economy last year is a new site called OnlyFans, which is, for younger listeners, what we call an adult content site, paid a hundred and forty eight million pounds in corporation tax last year. It's it's a, we talk about innovation in Britain, productivity in Britain. This is one of the big British economic success stories, but it's a deeply, deeply disturbing site.

• 32:09Alastair Campbell?

  What does it say about our country, Roy? What does, what does that say? I mean, um, um, part of me thinks, yeah, innovation, bladdy blah. Um, and, you know, it's sort of tapping into the tech revolution and at least they're paying tax, unlike Google, da, da, da, da, da. I get that, but what does it say about our country?

• 32:27Rory Stewart?

  It's terrifying. It's terrifying and and and adults.

• 32:29Alastair Campbell?

  Am I being a grumpy old man now?

• 32:31Rory Stewart?

  And adults may wish to look in more detail at what exactly this site does. It's the most peculiar business model you've ever seen in your life.

• 32:36Alastair Campbell?

  There we are. What a bloody world. Just to say to listeners and viewers, we're going to come back in the second half with a quite somber discussion about journalism in Gaza.

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• 34:49Alastair Campbell?

  Husam Al-Mazri. Maryam Abu Dagah. Mohamed Salama.

• 34:54Rory Stewart?

  Ahmed Abu Aziz. Muaz Abu Ta. These are Palestinian journalists killed by Israel in Gaza just last week.

• 35:04Alastair Campbell?

  Israeli strike on NASA Hospital took their lives alongside at least 15 other Palestinians.

• 35:11Rory Stewart?

  And there are so many more. Over the last 22 months, more than 200 journalists have been killed in Gaza by the Israeli army. At the rate that journalists are being killed in Gaza, there will be soon very few people able to report on the conflict at all.

• 35:29Alastair Campbell?

  Maryam Abu Dagah, one of the people we just mentioned, was just 33, a freelancer for the Associated Press. She'd written her will at 33. Her only wish was to see her 13-year-old son again after 18 months apart, and she never got that chance. For 22 months of war, she reported fearlessly from some of Gaza's most dangerous places, and her images of death and devastation sparked global outcry.

• 35:57Rory Stewart?

  This has become now the deadliest period for journalists in contemporary history. More than 70% of journalists killed since October 2023 have been killed in Gaza.

• 36:10Alastair Campbell?

  A generation of accountability is being wiped out to make way for impunity. And without journalists, without their eyes and voices, we cannot know what is truly happening.

• 36:22Rory Stewart?

  And the most recent attack, this hospital strike, what seems to have happened is the Israeli military hit the hospital, then waited for the journalists and medical workers to come in to report on the strike, and then once they were in the building, hit it a second time.

• 36:39Alastair Campbell?

  All being filmed. And of course, what they say all the time is that they were taking out a Hamas operative, but we never quite get to see the name or the face of the Hamas operative. For all these reasons, the Restless Polities is supporting the Media Blackout Campaign, standing in solidarity with Reporters Without Borders and AVAS, working to protect journalists in Gaza.

• 36:59Rory Stewart?

  We join with more than 250 other media outlets across the world to condemn these killings. We call on the Israeli authorities to allow independent access for the international press in the Gaza Strip.

• 37:14Alastair Campbell?

  Right Rory, this is definitely one for you. Gillian Andrews. Do you both use AI software in your day to day lives? Well, you do a lot. And specifically Rory, do you let your young children use it? I'm concerned by studies coming out which show that ChatGPT could be making us dumber. Should I let my children use it? This is from a worried mother in Exeter.

• 37:39Rory Stewart?

  I mean, this is something that I began to notice in my own life. And when I talk to American scientists and AI specialists about it, they tended to poo poo me. I had an extraordinary debate with a very, very well known American scientist about this two, three months ago, where I said, I was beginning to feel that actually my brain capacity was being affected. Because if my, you know, if one of my children, for example, said, could we make iron at home? In the past, I would have thought about it, scratched my head, got all the neural networks going, trying to work out how you'd make iron. And increasingly, I was just going ChatGPT to one and asked ChatGPT, right?

• 38:15Alastair Campbell?

  What, did he want to sort of start blast furnace in the kitchen?

• 38:17Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 38:18Alastair Campbell?

  For him, innovation.

• 38:20Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. So I was beginning to think, actually, this was a little bit like, instead of walking up the stairs, getting in the lift, and, you know, I could begin to feel that my brain was getting less smart. I talked to this American scientist, and he was like, no, I did a ridiculous story. And I, what are you worrying about anyway? And, and I had this extraordinary debate with a leading AI entrepreneur who said to me, the wonderful thing about AI is that I can now write poetry, and suddenly we can all be poets. I was thinking, have you gone mad? If the AI is writing the poem for you, you're not a poet. That's like saying, you can bench press three tons because you own a forklift. I mean, the whole thing is kind of completely mad, right? So, anyway, what's happened now is that MIT has done

• 39:02Rory Stewart?

  a study which has compared people using ChatGPT, using Google search, or just using your brain, and then run ECG brain networks. And they found that.

• 39:17Rory Stewart?

  Using the AI is genuinely leading to a situation where your cognitive ability is being impaired with some weeks of effect. And basically, I, I think in the end, they, they haven't fully produced their theory and we can share the MIT research. But my best guess is that basically the brain, like our muscles, requires work. And if you subcontract all the work, as increasingly everybody's doing, I mean, they're just sort of developing next stage. Most of my friends who are now teaching universities and teaching at schools are completely open about the fact that they simply cannot distinguish a AI-written essay from a normal essay written by their students. Almost impossible for them, even with AI, they can't distinguish.

• 39:57Rory Stewart?

  They're having to discover new ways on doing examinations, including making people sit either without computers or talking. The Chinese government has done some very radical things of shutting down AI models using the, the digital great wall during the exam period. So people can't do this. But I, I noticed that my son, I mean, he, he, um. He was asked to write a story for school during the summer holidays. He claims that every single one of his 10-year-old fellow students are just using ChatGPT to write the story, which it can do in three seconds.

• 40:28Alastair Campbell?

  So, so this is possible that within the education system, we end up going back much more to sort of pen and paper system where you have all sort of modern tools taken away and you have to show that you're capable of critical thinking on the spot.

• 40:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Alastair Campbell?

  Bring it on, says the technophobe.

• 40:44Rory Stewart?

  I don't know whether you find this, we're just to sort of finish on this, but if I do research on AI and it's very, very good at doing research, you know, I, I could give a 17 questions, draw weird links and it could generate stuff. But do I remember two, three weeks later? What it said in the same way as I would? Absolutely not compared to actually reading books, taking notes, using my hand.

• 41:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there's a great link to the next, I think it'll be our final question from Nancy Wallbank, who's a TripPlus member from Lancaster. As the new academic year starts, what policy changes would Rory and Alistair like to see to accompany the National Year of Reading? What changes could be made to reverse the decline in children reading for pleasure? And what past policies may have led to the erosion of encouraging children to read just for the love of a good story. And there were some, there were some figures about this recently, weren't there, showing a decline in.

• 41:38Rory Stewart?

  Terrifying. I think it's gone from thirty percent of people reading down to sixteen percent. I actually thought even thirty percent was surprisingly high. Um, but yes, reading is declining in the US, it's declining in the UK. Oddly, that doesn't affect um bookshops, which are still getting pretty good sales.

• 41:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, they do really well, yeah. Is that because those who read are reading more?

• 41:57Rory Stewart?

  Those who read seem to be buying more books, whether they're reading more, maybe they're like me, they're buying lots of books and just skimming them. I don't know what's going on. But were all your kids great readers? All three of them? Or did one of them read better than others?

• 42:07Alastair Campbell?

  No, they, I think because the, the technological revolution was kind of happening by the time they're at school, I think there is a sort of, a kind of tendency to think that laptop and phone is where you, where you go. They do read, uh, not as much as Fiona and I read. Um, I think the, in answer to, to um Nancy's question, I, I think giving children books um is a really good use of public money. Um, you know, you, you I know do this and, and so do I. Publishers have so many books. Now, some of them do give them away, right? They have so many books that never get read, never get sold. Give them to kids, pump them into schools. I've got this great guy, I'll give him a shout out, he's a wonderful guy,

• 42:49Alastair Campbell?

  um, very wealthy, successful business guy called Joe Hermione. He, and I'm not just saying this because he buys loads of my books, but he does. Every time I bring a book out, he buys loads of them and sends them to, to schools and libraries. Um, that is proper philanthropy to me.

• 43:05Rory Stewart?

  But let, let me add another dimension to this, which is I think the real key, I imagine, for getting kids to read is to make sure that the books they first pick up are genuinely enjoyable and ones that they've chosen themselves. I think the way to get addicted to reading, and I, I feel this because one of my children is, was a very, very early, very active, extreme reader. You know, he can read a four hundred and fifty page book in a day at ten. The, the, my other child is slower to get into reading and.

• 43:36Rory Stewart?

  The real thing is learning as a parent that what I shouldn't be doing is making him read what I think he ought to read, but making sure it's something that's funny, amusing. For people with mild dyslexia or more serious dyslexia, there are wonderful dyslexia friendly books, which has slightly different vocabories, different storylines, lovely audiobooks can be great. There's been a huge audiobook revolution and one way to encourage children to read is to read along with an audiobook if they're slightly slow readers. Graphic, graphic novels are fun as a way of getting people going.

• 44:07Alastair Campbell?

  I think a lot of this all is about, is about parenting. I mean, I agree with you. You don't want to be saying, read this, it's good for you. But to be surrounded by books, I think is, is a good way to get kids into books. I think one of the reasons I became a journalist was because, I can't remember what age I was, but I remember my dad reading the Sunday Post, which is a sort of Scottish, very traditionalist Scottish newspaper that we used to get sent down to England. And I can remember my dad reading it and really reading it and thinking, that's really interesting. Why is he doing that? And then after he'd finished it, I started reading it and really being captivated by it. And then I can remember some of the first books that I, you know, that feeling you get about eight, 10, 15 pages

• 44:49Alastair Campbell?

  in where you think, I'm really going to enjoy this book. I think it's one of the best feelings in the world still. And unlike Fiona, who, if she starts a book, she still feels she has to finish it. I don't mind giving up books because I love that feeling of, of getting into it. I've actually had two this week that I've really got into. One is a, an author in, I'd never, this is tragic because when I looked at him, I realised he's a really famous writer, Mrs. Selimovic, Bosnian born, right, written in Serbian. And he wrote this amazing novel called The Fortress, which actually a guy sent to me saying, you really would enjoy this novel. And I did, it was written some time ago. Brilliant. And then the other one I'm reading, we got together on the podcast. I'm reading Meloni, Georgia

• 45:31Alastair Campbell?

  Maloney's biography in German, because I saw it at Frankfurt Airport and I just picked it up. And it is, it's a compelling read. It really is. I mean, halfway through and you can, but that feeling I got in her introduction, almost from the first line, actually. Almost from the first line of the book, I thought this is going to be good. And that's, that's a feeling that's, you know, all kids should get that.

• 45:53Rory Stewart?

  Well, little, little, little shout out from me for, for a couple of books that I've been reading over the summer, which I've really loved. On the more serious side, I've been in Orkney and really loving an amazing book on Neolithic Orkney, written by an American professor from York University. But on a more jolly note, Nick Harkaway, who I think is John Le Carre's son.

• 46:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:13Rory Stewart?

  Has written these extraordinary novels that I've just begun to discover. Titanium Noir, which is an amazing detective story set in a future dominated by semi immortal tech giants. Which really would play into a lot of your dystopian fears about Elon Musk and the shape of the world. And the second one, which is Tiger Man, about a former British colony in the Indian Ocean. Which is basically about to be blown up because there's been a chemical spill with a British sergeant trying to follow a crime through it. They're just wonderful and, and wonderful on relationships, this relationship with a boy he's trying to adopt.

• 46:57Rory Stewart?

  With a woman he's falling in love with, with patriotism with the military. So, I mean, a real extraordinary sort of heir to his father. It's very unusual actually to have, I think, two generations of great, great writers. Alexandre Dumas, maybe.

• 47:11Alastair Campbell?

  Et bien sûr, Paris fils.

• 47:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but otherwise not, not that common.

• 47:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 47:14Rory Stewart?

  Oh, because the other. Kingsey Martin, Aimee Smith.

• 47:17Alastair Campbell?

  Of course, the other Orkney novel that was recently made into a very, very successful film starring Saoirse Ronan. Is The Outrun, the story of an. Were people talking about that when you were there?

• 47:28Rory Stewart?

  No, a lot of, a lot of talk about George Mackay Brown still.

• 47:31Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 47:32Rory Stewart?

  Extraordinary SAS poet.

• 47:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because The Outrun, I got a sense from some people that they felt it sort of portrayed Orkney in not a great way, but it's a brilliant novel and it's a brilliant film. So there we are, I think a publisher should get onto the government and say, look, why don't we find a way of giving books? To children, not books that they read and then leave in the school, but books that are their books, because it's terrifying how many kids live up in home, growing up in homes actually without books and without reading.

• 48:04Rory Stewart?

  On the subject of immortal tech giants and billionaires, there is of course now available for members, which people can subscribe to, we've released a mini series put together by Anthony Scaramucci and Caddy Kay, following on with from our J D Vance mini series, the new one is on Elon Musk, which people may enjoy, and then we've got more of our own content to follow.

• 48:24Alastair Campbell?

  So for that, you just head to the rest is politics dot com. Okay, Rory, all good. See you next week.

• 48:28Rory Stewart?

  Looking forward to it. See you next week.