465. Andrew’s Disgrace, Newsnight, and a Centrist Win in the Netherlands (Question Time)

How much transparency should we demand from the monarchy? Do the latest Dutch results show that populism is fracturing, or simply mutating? And, did Xi embarrass Trump? __________ Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. Get more from The Rest Is Politics with TRIP+. Enjoy bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access, live show ticket priority, our members’ newsletter, and private Discord community – plus exclusive mini-series like The Rise and Fall of Rupert Murdoch. Start your 7-day free trial today at therestispolitics.com The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away free TRIP Plus membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP Plus gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ To save your company time and money, open a Revolut Business account today via https://get.revolut.com/z4lF/therestispolitics, and add money to your account by 31st of December 2025 to get a £200 welcome bonus or equivalent in your local currency. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Senior Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:56Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest Is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 3:00Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, by popular demand, it is imperative that you give us your considered views on the former Prince Andrew and the implications for the monarchy.

• 3:13Alastair Campbell?

  We had a lot of feedback on your Newsnight interview, both ways. But fair to say you struck a controversial note in seeming to defend the establishment very, very closely. So Lesley B, what does Alistair think about Rory saying on Newsnight that there are more important things to focus on than Prince Andrew's activities? Does Alistair agree that there should be more transparency in the financial arrangements of the royal family, given that they're taxpayer funded? Well, of course, the royal family's finances are very, very complicated. They're not quite straightforward. They do get money from the from the sovereign grant, and that's us taxpayers, the government, paying that. But they also have pretty vast personal wealth and they have lots of investments and the Crown estates run all that. Your Newsnight interview, Rory, I I don't know, I got the feeling you were in a really bad mood.

• 3:57Rory Stewart?

  I wasn't a bad mood.

• 3:58Alastair Campbell?

  Why were you in such a bad mood?

• 3:59Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's a bad mood because they'd invited me on to talk about my book. So I was gonna, I was supposed to be talking about middle land and local democracy and citizens assemblies. And I turn up and it turns out that what they wanted to do was talk to me about Prince Andrew. And I developed a very, very strong frustration. Now, on the record.

• 4:23Rory Stewart?

  It is horrifying what happened to Virginia Jeffrey.

• 4:28Alastair Campbell?

  And others.

• 4:28Rory Stewart?

  And many, many others. And I think the more we learn about what Jeffrey Epstein is doing and people who associated with him, the more horrifying it is. And these are vulnerable women who are horribly abused, trafficked from very vulnerable backgrounds. And Virginia Jeffrey's just killed herself. So it's a horrible story. And it is unbelievable that Prince Andrew would continue to associate himself. It's unbelievable that Peter Mandelson continued to stay with him after he'd been convicted. I agree with all of that. But I suppose I also sit there thinking, okay, I'm on Newsnight. And firstly, I'm irritated about my book,

• 5:10Rory Stewart?

  but there's a bigger point, which is the world's blowing up. And I'm very conscious. There is Trump, there is C, there is the British economy, there's the debt getting out of control. And I sort of felt that I'd been taken back 25 years, that we were back in a kind of world of British newspapers wanting for their entire headlines for two weeks to talk about what happened 25 years ago. And I wanted to say, it was awful, it's terrible, I guess it. But surely, and this is maybe why I'm getting too wound up and too kind of psychological about it. I genuinely worry, it's avoidance that we don't want to think about the really big difficult issues. We don't actually want to hold really powerful

• 5:53Rory Stewart?

  people accountable. We don't want to hold them accountable for really big things they do. It's more convenient to find somebody who is, I don't know what he is, eighth in line to the throne, hasn't had a public office for 15 years, isn't received of public money for something he did 25 years ago, and which he hasn't been convicted of. And this whole thing takes all the oxygen that can be told. And I think it's repeated. I felt actually, it's a very different thing because she's not accused of doing anything remotely similar. But I also was frustrated by how much time was spent on Rachel Reeves and her licensing. I was frustrated by how much time was spent on Angela Rayner and stuff. I just think the British press love the idea. We're holding powerful people to account. And this becomes the big story for weeks and weeks. And we're not really holding.

• 6:36Rory Stewart?

  Really powerful people to account for the really big things that matter to us today.

• 6:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, I can see where you're coming from. I didn't watch it live, but I got so many messages from people saying, what's your mate Rory up to on news that I that I I had a look and I could tell you were absolutely frustrated and pissed off to be there.

• 6:53Rory Stewart?

  And I didn't actually want to talk about it. I was sitting there and she she dragged me in. I was trying to sit on my tongue.

• 6:58Alastair Campbell?

  We've all been there. We've all been in those situations where we've we've got it and sort of thought, what the fuck am I doing here? But anyway.

• 7:04Rory Stewart?

  You you actually told me not to go on the show.

• 7:06Alastair Campbell?

  I did.

• 7:06Rory Stewart?

  Your advice was don't talk about Prince Andrew. Now you're making me talk about Prince Andrew.

• 7:09Alastair Campbell?

  No, my advice was don't go on to it because you'd been asked on one basis and then we're going to spin you into another one.

• 7:16Rory Stewart?

  Would you would you Would your professional advice be that I should be talking about Prince Andrew?

• 7:20Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I've been reluctant to talk about it because in general, I think one of our problems culturally is we focus far too much on things that don't matter and not enough on things that really do. That's why we want to talk about the climate. And Zidane yesterday, because I feel that very, very strongly. On this, however, I think that we're not just talking about something that happened a long time ago. We're talking about the conduct of people, powerful people in public life ever since. So I think the reason this Prince Andrew story, former Prince Andrew story, just refused to go away is because at so many different stages, he and others have completely mishandled it. And even though I thought King Charles got very fulsome praise for the statement where he finally stripped her of the titles and said that the thoughts should be with the victims and

• 8:06Alastair Campbell?

  the palace brief that Camilla was appalled because of the work she does protecting young women and and violence against women and girls and so forth. I think that right along the way, they've just not handled it well. And I think this feeds into this idea that there is a sort of for the for those who already have power, you can get away with a lot more than those who don't. So when the damber what you were there on the day that the dam around Andrew was bursting. And I think that therefore it is important. I think it's about the establishment, it's about and the transparency point is interesting. They never used to be there. They're way more transparent than they were. But there still is a feeling that they are very much above proper public scrutiny.

• 8:45Rory Stewart?

  I agree with you that there is a really strong sense in Britain. That there is a powerful elite who gets away with things and ordinary people are abused. And I can see completely why Prince Andrew became a kind of big symbol for that idea. But I also think that it tells us something about our culture, that this is a very fundamental trope that we focus on, and we often don't focus enough on structural issues. We like a villain, we like going after a particular individual rather than looking at the kind of big, knotty, deep issues that really affect.

• 9:19Alastair Campbell?

  Big structure issues.

• 9:20Rory Stewart?

  And we're also really hypocritical. So you and I interviewed George Mitchell. George Mitchell is accused by Virginia Jeffrey of doing exactly the same thing. Senator George Mitchell, Senator George Mitchell is right there with Prince Andrew accused of doing exactly the same thing by the same woman as part of the Epstein thing. Why didn't we discuss that? Why is the British media not talking about this?

• 9:42Alastair Campbell?

  I didn't, I didn't know that.

• 9:43Rory Stewart?

  But nobody talks about this. He gets an honorary degree. We all celebrate him on leading. And for some reason, in America, they don't talk about this. Prince Andrew is one of a category of people, along with a Harvard lawyer, a former prime ministers and others who have been accused by Virginia Jeffrey of exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.

• 10:02Alastair Campbell?

  But Rory, I say on that that the Americans are wrong.

• 10:04Rory Stewart?

  We should emphasise that, of course, Prince Andrew and George Mitchell categorically deny these allegations, but that obviously isn't the general tenor of the public. I just want us to say, yes, absolutely, that whole thing is horrible. The abuse of vulnerable women by men is horrible, but let me take it to another stage. I suspect that a very large number of not elite people, ordinary people, using or abusing women in the sex industry in Britain are abusing women who are vulnerable, trafficked. And we never hear about them. This is not just something which we can project and we all feel good about ourselves. And here's this evil prince and it's only the elite that does it and they're not accountable.

• 10:46Rory Stewart?

  How about the presumably hundreds of thousands of men in this country who pay for sex, who I'm sure are absolutely embroiled in vulnerable trafficked women who get to feel good about themselves getting cross with somebody else?

• 11:01Alastair Campbell?

  I said the other week that there is something very interesting about the fact that the three people. Who it seems to me are most identified with the the kind of the the public ritual punishment in relation to Epstein are Ghislaine Maxwell, Peter Mandelson and and former Prince Andrew, all Brits. So is there something about American culture that says we care less about this? I don't know. I think the fact that Trump is going to such extraordinary lengths, it seems to me, to keep this thing under under wraps. Maybe there is more to come out. And I also don't think we yet know the full story about Epstein and how he got his money. I don't know whether I can bear to read Virginia Frey's book, because I read a review

• 11:44Alastair Campbell?

  of it in a German newspaper when I was in Germany last week, which was truly horrific. And I think, to be honest, Rory, I think we did underplay it a bit. And I think that the monarchy has been hit damaged by it because it's just not been gripped from the word go. And I think too many of them, this is what happens when scandal hits, is that too many people have been willing to believe somebody who I think we have to accept now has told a lot of lies over a long period of time.

• 12:11Rory Stewart?

  Which is true, an exact description of Peter Mandelson. When scandal hit, too many people were prepared to believe a lot of lies from Peter Mandelson.

• 12:18Alastair Campbell?

  Hold on, Peter got sacked twice.

• 12:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, three times, actually.

• 12:22Alastair Campbell?

  I sensed you were looking at me there.

• 12:24Rory Stewart?

  No, I wasn't looking at you. No, I was looking. I was looking at, I think, Kier Sauer. It's the same thing. He assured them of stuff that turned out not to be true. And too many people are prepared to believe it. But I also think there's another interesting question which we could get on to on another occasion, which is a very, very difficult thing, which is when we judge public figures of any sort, which is why I actually don't like going after public figures in general. Do we look at ourselves enough? Do we ask ourselves, would I have been tempted to get round my stamp duty on my house? We're very, very quick to condemn. And we're a culture that is ferocious about condemnation. And I don't know, I don't like it. I mean, I'm more comfortable speaking about what's happening at a geopolitical level than I am.

• 13:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I completely agree with you about the Rachel Reeves thing. I think that's just a classic example of, you know, trying to create a scandal where there isn't really one. But I, I, I think on the, on the Andrew Mountbatten Windsor situation, I, I, I think it's, I think it's been a pretty, a pretty rum do for a long time. Right, Roy, let's move off the British royal family to the Dutch elections. John Mark Van Damme from Gloucestershire. Do Rory and Alistair take solace from the Dutch election results? Does it show a possible approach to counter the rise of right wing populists?

• 13:39Rory Stewart?

  Well, go on. Tell us a little bit about what, what you felt about the Dutch election. Shall I give you the rough?

• 13:44Alastair Campbell?

  I was happy. I was quite happy.

• 13:45Rory Stewart?

  Rough figures as I see it. So D66, which is the equivalent of the Lib Dems, got 26 seats. A PVV, which is Het Wilders, this is far right party, 26 seats. VVD, which is the sort of right liberals, yeah, Tories, got 22. Green Labour, which is France Timmons, who we interviewed on leading, who I really liked, got 20 seats and now Timmons has resigned. Christian Democrats, 18. And then these two other far right parties, one run by Eustace Edmonds, nine, and this particularly sinister party run by Thierry Baudet, seven seats. So there's an interesting question, which is actually, if you combine back to 2023, when we covered this last,

• 14:23Rory Stewart?

  the far right got 41 seats. This time they've got 42. But what's happened is there's been a big drop in Het Wilders and there's been a rise in the other far right parties.

• 14:31Alastair Campbell?

  And, and look, what often happens with the, historically, what has often happened with the far right is that when they get anywhere near power, they tend to fail with power. And we're seeing that actually with some of the Reform councils here. You know, some of these councils, the reform are running are just, you know, they're becoming a bit of a national joke. But I think what's really interesting about this, you know, when he says to give us solace, the guy who's won, he's kind of come out of nowhere. He's 38. It's called Rob Yetton. He's been around for a while. He's been actually a deputy prime minister before. But he's sort of come from nowhere. I think they were fifth last time around. And it's going to be very, very hard though to, to build a coalition. So this is, and this is, we're back to this point about the.

• 15:14Alastair Campbell?

  So he he is on record as saying, I think it's the first time he thinks where you'd be expected to put together together a government when you're the leader of a party with fewer than thirty seats. So you've got several parties now that are

• 15:26Rory Stewart?

  Unbelievable.

• 15:27Alastair Campbell?

  Um, around the same space.

• 15:28Rory Stewart?

  Well, I ju- I just named seven parties.

• 15:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Rory Stewart?

  I mean, what a weird system that is.

• 15:31Alastair Campbell?

  So he and he came straight out and said, you know, the probably the most obvious party to start to build a coalition with was the the Timmermans, but Timmermans has stepped down, but the the Labour Green Alliance. But then he's going to have to go maybe further left or maybe a bit further right. He might actually end up having to do deal with the the Conservatives, the Mark Rutte party, that has been absolutely hopeless.

• 15:55Rory Stewart?

  And has gone further to the right.

• 15:56Alastair Campbell?

  And has moved further to the right to sort of play around with with Wilders.

• 15:59Rory Stewart?

  And and has refused to work with the Green Labour Party.

• 16:01Alastair Campbell?

  And Wilders himself, um, it was a big blow to them because I think they felt if they could win, as they did last time, become part of the government, even though he wasn't in the government, and then the other parties be seen to try to make it not work, that that would benefit them politically. What seems to have happened is that people have thought, hold on a minute, this Wilders guy, is he really the real deal? Or is he actually ever going to be able to do anything? So I think he paid the biggest price. And and and Rob Yeton has has been the beneficiary.

• 16:35Rory Stewart?

  Just finally on this, uh, Timmermans, quite interesting. So we we both liked him very much. And he was somebody who was, I think, quite popular and celebrated uh when he was at the European Union. And despite being a sort of seen in Dutch politics initially as a kind of very mature, grown up, highly experienced politician, it didn't quite work. You get the impression the Dutch didn't really take to him.

• 16:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and maybe it is, we're back to this thing about, you know, needing new approach, new style, the sort of whole Mandani thing. Um, Rob Yeton, very young, very charismatic, very handsome young guy. Um. So people are looking for something different. I'll tell you one thing on the policy front that's really interesting. I think I read this right. He's talking about building ten new cities.

• 17:16Rory Stewart?

  Well.

• 17:17Alastair Campbell?

  So I think Labour are talking about, what, four new towns?

• 17:19Rory Stewart?

  Wow.

• 17:20Alastair Campbell?

  And he's about ten new cities, which would be.

• 17:23Rory Stewart?

  Wow. And it's and it's already, I think, the most densely populated country on earth.

• 17:27Alastair Campbell?

  It's pretty densely populated. And that's what they did to build out.

• 17:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Alastair Campbell?

  So if I'm wrong on that, if there are any sort of our Netherlands listeners who think I'm wrong on that, I'd I'd love it if they could could let me know. But I think this point about the fragmentation of political systems of of what's happened in our politics. Because, you know, we're seeing a little bit of that here. You know, the Tories, I was actually at an event the other day where it's a very strong view that Tories might literally disappear as a party. No, I don't think they will. But that sense that the right is now fractured, the left is fractured, and and yet we still have a voting system that is founded on the idea that one of the big two will always.

• 18:04Rory Stewart?

  We're saying, as I think you've pointed out in the past, we've gone from what was for a couple of hundred years, a two party system, even though there was a kind of the Tories remain, and then it was a slip from Liberal to Labour, that's the second party, to what effectively now a five party system at least, isn't it?

• 18:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, if you're in Scotland or Wales, it's even more. Yeah. Right. Shall we take a break?

• 18:24Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Then back from the break, we'll talk a little bit about Trump and Xi, and then maybe some more cheerful questions.

• 18:29Alastair Campbell?

  Why not?

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  Finally, we find out why this plot is still remembered now, 400 years later. Listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts. And as a special treat for listeners, we've got an extract from that series at the end of this episode.

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• 20:30Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Press for a Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 20:33Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 20:35Alastair Campbell?

  Katie, what did you make of Trump calling his meeting with President Xi amazing and rating it at 12 out of 10?

• 20:45Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's a good show that he watches Spinal Tap. Do you remember they've got a volume 11 on their speakers when they're playing? I think that's where he got it from.

• 20:53Alastair Campbell?

  What? But he said 12.

• 20:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but it's the same joke, isn't it?

• 20:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I don't think one of those is a joke. I think it's funny. I just think it's part of Trump's inability to say anything without it being untruthful, exaggerated and hyperbolic.

• 21:07Rory Stewart?

  Completely mad, yeah.

• 21:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And also, it wasn't 12 out of 10. I think sometimes with Trump, the more he overstates.

• 21:16Alastair Campbell?

  There's some little whirring thing inside him saying that didn't go very well. And my sense of watching the meeting between Trump and Xi, that Xi went home happier.

• 21:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, it's still staggering. I mean, what what you in the headlines, people are like, Trump cut the the tariff from twenty percent to ten percent. And everyone's might think on the basis of that, that China now faces tariffs like the UK, which has got a ten percent tariff for the US. What actually he did was just cut the fentanyl tariff from twenty to ten percent, which means the average tariff on China has gone down from fifty seven percent to forty seven percent. So basically, if you, you know, I don't know, you buy a hundred dollar good from China, you're spending fifty dollars tariff on top of that. I mean, it's unbelievable, given that most of the clothing, toys, et cetera, and in and US supermarkets, Walmart, wherever, is coming in from China.

• 22:12Rory Stewart?

  And the effect on the cost of living, particularly on people on lower incomes, who are buying Chinese goods is is staggering.

• 22:19Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. But what and what do you make of the way that Xi used the whole rare earth debate? Because it seemed to me that he played that card very, very hard. I'm not really clear what Xi Jinping gave up.

• 22:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I I he he didn't. He he he, in a sense, won. But I think it's important, I think, that unlike Europe, who didn't really see Trump coming, China saw this from twenty sixteen onwards. So they spent ten years preparing a playbook to be ready for what happens when America puts up tariffs against them. Because there was all this talk, even under Biden, of de-risking, deleveraging. So they had a whole playbook ready. And right at the heart of it is that they took control of between eighty five and ninety percent of all the critical minerals and rare earths required for technology and the green revolution. They control eighty five, ninety percent of the world's processing of copper,

• 23:15Rory Stewart?

  nickel, lithium, cobalt, and the rare earths. And the result is that by cutting them off, which is what he did. He essentially shuts the world down. And now Scott Besant is saying that was very stupid of him.

• 23:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Rory Stewart?

  He played his hand, you know, and now we know. And so we're gonna, we're gonna process our own critical minerals and rare earths and they won't get us again next time in three, four years' time. And they're saying the same thing about semiconductor chips. But actually, the reason why China processes all this stuff is even with the latest technology, it is unbelievably polluting environment and landscape destroying. And nobody in the United States and Europe wants to process these things from large scale. And we've lost the technological capacity to do this because we've had China doing it for us for the last ten, twenty years.

• 24:04Alastair Campbell?

  I was really interested about that Scott Besant thing because I, I don't know. I got the feeling he kind of phoned up the Financial Times. Did you, did you read that?

• 24:13Rory Stewart?

  Yes, I did. I read the FT, yeah.

• 24:14Alastair Campbell?

  And I think if the FT had got a big interview with Scott Besant, they'd kind of project it in a quite a big way. It'd be kind of launched with the FT or it'd be Front of Life and Arts, whatever. It was quite a small story. The, I just got this, says that Scott Besant, if any of the FT is listening, please let us know. But I got the feeling it was Scott Besant's people phoning up saying, we'd like to drop a story about what we think about the Chinese rare earth strategy.

• 24:39Rory Stewart?

  You're complete right, because what was weird about it is on that page, you were essentially reading that China had overplayed its hands and screwed up. And then the next page with two stories saying how brilliantly China had handled the negotiation and see it had emerged as victory. Xi Jinping still holding his cards quite close to his chest. You know, I was talking to a, a Dutch official recently, and they're right at the heart of the European Union now, trying to think about the threats posed particularly by Russia and China. So looking at Chinese intelligence, you know, that Chinese balloon that flew across the US, the Russian drones. And I slightly cheekily was saying, when are you going to acknowledge that the country that's done the most damage to the European Union? Over the last nine months is not actually China or Russia, it's the United States.

• 25:22Rory Stewart?

  You actually look on the impact on European economies, sense of European security and defence. It's the US that's the major challenge and it's the US that's much more likely to take Greenland off Denmark than anyone else.

• 25:35Alastair Campbell?

  You know, I mentioned in the in the main episode that I've been at this speaking at this dinner in Dublin and it is the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, about 1,200 people there. So I it was a nice, large sample for me to do my my current survey obsession, which is America v China power. The numbers on which is the greater threat to global stability were quite extraordinary. Eighty percent said America.

• 26:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's absolutely unbelievable because this is the week where Ontario put up an ad with Reagan talking about how tariffs and protectionism were bad for the economy. And Trump was so angry about a single advertisement in Canada that he's just put the tariffs in Canada up by a further 10%.

• 26:21Alastair Campbell?

  It's called a tantrum.

• 26:22Rory Stewart?

  This is now existential for the Canadian economy. I mean, Canadian economy, much more than the British, European or Chinese economy, is basically a North American economy. Eighty percent, I think, of Canadian exports go into the US. So that our friend Mark Carney is now dealing with tariff levels in Canada, which are almost identical to the tariff levels in China. So I think 37% at the moment. And he was, of course, elected to stand up to Trump, but also to get a deal.

• 26:48Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 26:49Rory Stewart?

  And this sense that Trump is punishing what should be his closest allies in the world.

• 26:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And it's also why at the ASEAN, Mark Carney was being very, very warm and positive about some of the Southeast Asian leaders that he was he was meeting there. Let's bring it back home, Laurie. Door knocking. This is from Cat Jade. Are door knocking and leafleting still an effective campaign strategy? Is social media more effective?

• 27:16Rory Stewart?

  Well, look, I'd love to hear your take on this. I found even 2010, 2015, 2017 elections when I was running, that door knocking and leafleting was a very, very strange activity because in the Conservative Party, certainly where I was, the number of volunteers who actually knocked and leafleted with you would end up being 10 or 15 of your association members for the whole constituency. So you've got, let's say you're knocking on 40,000 doors and you've got a team of eight people. So even when you've got five weeks of campaigning, you're walking slowly down the street and of course, 80% of the doors you knock on, nobody's in. The next door you knock on, they say, "I'm never voting Tory in my life." There was a really depressing moment where I realised things had gone wrong in the 2015 election,

• 28:00Rory Stewart?

  where I realised that this in the Lake District, any window I looked through, where there were lots of books in the library, were definitely not going to be voting Conservative. They were going to be voting Lib Dem. Then you had this amazing attempt to use data. So the Tory Party had bought very complicated data, I think from supermarkets, which told you something like, if you bought edamame beans, you were more likely to vote Lib Dem. I mean, I could have told them that.

• 28:24Rory Stewart?

  And on the basis of this, we were told this was going to be a Tory door, a Labour door. But half the Tory doors on my sheet would have a big Labour poster on their window. So anyway, so I began to think, how much difference does this really make? But equally, right, I saw Mike Ignatieff, who we interviewed on Lean, former leader of Liberal Party in Canada, and he said that what's working in Hungary for Magyar, who's the guy that may take down all about the populace, is that he's out there leafleting and he's doing little village halls, starting with village halls of 20, 30 people, relentlessly talking to crowds of 10, and that that's what politics is about.

• 29:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but he's probably putting out some really sassy, well-produced social media content alongside it. I can't pretend I'm the greatest door knocker in the world, but I'd say I've done my share of it. It's always struck me as a, it's not a very effective use of time. The trouble is you sometimes end up spending, well, I do, half an hour standing there arguing with somebody that you know is never going to vote Labour. And I think, whereas you've got, what you've got to be good at is straight away working out, is it worth your time?

• 29:36Rory Stewart?

  It's a good sign for you though, because actually, somebody said this to me about Margaret Thatcher, that she would always spend half an hour arguing on the doorstep with a single Labour voter. And the canvassers kept saying, come on, move on, move on, move on. But I think both with you and Thatcher, that's quite a good sign because it shows you're actually up for the persuasion and the argument. It's really soul destroying to just see yourself as a postman where you literally don't waste your time discussing at all. If you're literally just like someone putting through a pizza, one of those shiny pizza leaflets through a door. Uh, you really wonder, particularly when I was a cabinet minister, I was like, really?

• 30:12Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Theresa May, Theresa May loved, the, the, the thing about Theresa May, who always struck me as somebody who wasn't really a people person in, on, on one level, but she loves going around knocking on doors at the weekend.

• 30:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, she'd done it all her life, didn't she? But also how the world's changed. When my mother was um a member of the Conservative Party, uh, there were, I think, two million members of the Tory Party when she first joined and she was a teenager. And there were so many that you were given a street. So she had a street in Wimbledon as I'd think a fifteen year old. But every other street in London was covered.

• 30:43Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 30:43Rory Stewart?

  So it was incredibly easy to get the leaflets out. All you had to do was make sure your central party office had the leaflets.

• 30:49Alastair Campbell?

  I think you have to do all, I said, I don't know if you had time, Rua, I sent you Peter Hyman's latest sub.

• 30:53Rory Stewart?

  Oh, it's brilliant.

• 30:54Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, this is.

• 30:54Rory Stewart?

  He's, he's suddenly really come into his own, hasn't he?

• 30:57Alastair Campbell?

  How to make Keir Starmer a social media star.

• 31:00Rory Stewart?

  And he had this lovely vision of him saying, it's doing a five side chat where he's like, you'll never believe what I just heard from Trump on the phone. But can you see, can you see Starmer doing that?

• 31:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, let's go through, he's got five ideas. One, surrounded Keir Starmer against fifty, twenty five Reform leaning voters. That's what we used to call the masochism strategy and I would definitely do that. Okay.

• 31:19Rory Stewart?

  I, I.

• 31:19Alastair Campbell?

  And he's got, he shows a video, Pete Buttigieg doing it.

• 31:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I, I, I absolutely loved it and it's slightly what I did in a minor way, both with the leadership and Lana Merrill. Get out, do the town halls. Kemi Badenoch should have been doing it too.

• 31:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:32Rory Stewart?

  They should all be taking the risk.

• 31:33Alastair Campbell?

  His second idea was Keir unfiltered, my day, this is where he gets back, you'll get back, kicks his shoes off. And says into camera, you'll never believe what Donald Trump told me today. Or you know what, I've had to go to the Home Office myself, sit down with the team and demand better answers on boats. Um, number three, the Keir Starmer podcast.

• 31:48Rory Stewart?

  The second one doesn't sound completely convincing.

• 31:51Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know. I think you just go in at the end of the day, thirty seconds, two minutes on the phone, you just say something. I think that could work.

• 31:57Rory Stewart?

  But could, but how would Starmer do it? I mean, I can agree someone could do it. I just can't quite see Starmer doing it.

• 32:02Alastair Campbell?

  Depends what he says.

• 32:03Rory Stewart?

  He doesn't really kick back, does he? He wouldn't actually be like, you'll never guess what Donald Trump said to me on the stage. He'd be like, I had fish fingers for dinner tonight.

• 32:12Alastair Campbell?

  No, he won't say that. He won't. No, you'd be far too negative about the Prime Minister's communication skills. Keir Starmer podcast. Well, I've been banging on about it for a while. Number four, behind the speaker's chair, show the preparation for PMQs. Would you go for that?

• 32:27Rory Stewart?

  Nah, come on. It will reveal that PMQs is people like you spending six hours prepping them. So all their great off the cuff one liners, you'll discover by watching this.

• 32:38Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe.

• 32:39Rory Stewart?

  Have been written by their team.

• 32:40Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe. And then he's got this one, Keir banging on. So you do the things where you're banging on about something. I like, I mean, I were banging on.

• 32:49Rory Stewart?

  You like banging on, don't you?

• 32:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bang on about Brexit.

• 32:51Rory Stewart?

  What would Keir bang on about?

• 32:53Alastair Campbell?

  What did he bang on about?

• 32:55Rory Stewart?

  I mean, he bangs on about his dad's job.

• 32:57Alastair Campbell?

  Toolmaker?

• 32:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 32:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Rory Stewart?

  What else does he bang on about?

• 33:00Alastair Campbell?

  No, he bangs on, he bangs on about, I think he could bang on about enemies, bang on about, he could bang on about Farage, he could bang on about civil service, you could bang on about, I don't know, bang on about Arsenal.

• 33:09Rory Stewart?

  Bang on about Arsenal, I could do that, yeah.

• 33:11Alastair Campbell?

  Bernie at the weekend, or you probably saw that. Anyway, I thought that was very, very interesting. Right, last question, Rory, Nick Fennick.

• 33:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 33:17Alastair Campbell?

  This is one, I don't know if I know the answer to this. What do you think the voter demographic of Trip Plus subscribers is? Can you run a sample poll to see how accurate your guesses are? We should do that.

• 33:27Rory Stewart?

  We should indeed do that. Look, what we do know, one thing, which is that we're very, very heavily slanted in general Trip listeners towards people under thirty.

• 33:36Alastair Campbell?

  Really?

• 33:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And actually, a surprising number.

• 33:38Alastair Campbell?

  Is that why you've got so much blowback on?

• 33:40Rory Stewart?

  Eighteen, nineteen.

• 33:40Alastair Campbell?

  Andrew Manvatt and Windsor.

• 33:42Rory Stewart?

  Could be, could be. I don't know. That'd be interesting to see whether people under thirty feel differently to people over sixty.

• 33:46Alastair Campbell?

  I've had a lot of people this week come up and say, well, I'm a Trip Plus subscriber, Trip Plus member. What have they been mainly? I'd say, I don't know whether he's right, I'd say probably more male than female.

• 33:57Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 33:58Alastair Campbell?

  Quite a youngish men, thirties.

• 34:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. We just interviewed Gareth Southgate. I was quite moved by the fact that he was listening so carefully to our analysis of the Czech elections.

• 34:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. I think the, I think the disagreeing agreeably thing fits with his character. Yeah, so we should do that, though. And maybe as we're going on tour, starting in Bournemouth on Sunday, we should maybe ask them and do surveys on them.

• 34:22Rory Stewart?

  Here's a figure I thought was interesting. I, I believe. Uh, only just over half of our listeners are British, but we have a very large number now in Ireland, Australia, uh, quite a lot in the US.

• 34:36Alastair Campbell?

  Germany, France, New Zealand, yeah.

• 34:38Rory Stewart?

  Netherlands, surprising. I'm always surprised when I can know. So I said, we, we, when I did that event in Netherlands, there were, whatever it was, I can't remember, six, seven hundred people.

• 34:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 34:47Rory Stewart?

  Turning up, most of whom were listening, which is why.

• 34:50Alastair Campbell?

  The best feedback I had from last week's episode was me reading your dad's Last Will and Testament.

• 34:55Rory Stewart?

  From Middleland. That was very kind of you. You were very, I also got some lovely feedback on how generous you were.

• 34:59Alastair Campbell?

  Look, if we're going to plug, I plugged your book last week.

• 35:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Alastair Campbell?

  I, I got gifted this book.

• 35:04Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 35:04Alastair Campbell?

  Right. It's called The Bagpipes, A Cultural History, honestly. And it is absolutely brilliant. Honestly, I think any, you don't, you have, you probably have to be interested in music.

• 35:14Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 35:14Alastair Campbell?

  You might have to be interested a little bit in Scotland, but actually what you have to be interested in is the cultural significance of a musical instrument and how it develops over history is an absolutely brilliant book. And it's one of the best research books of a long time.

• 35:28Rory Stewart?

  I absolutely promised to read it. Two small plugs from me. Um, least you said finest hotel in Kabul.

• 35:33Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:33Rory Stewart?

  Really cool. So she looks at the Intercontinental, which is this kind of nineteen seventies legendary hotel on the hill above Kabul. And she just follows, um, people connected with a hotel over time and tells the story of Afghanistan through, you know, for example, a waiter. And another book that I really loved, which I'm not sure would appeal to you so much, but I'm going to sell for a certain demographic of our listener, Notebooks of a Wandering Monk by Mathieu Ricard, who becomes a Tibetan monk, a Frenchman.

• 36:00Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, I like, is he in French or is he in English?

• 36:02Rory Stewart?

  Uh, he wrote it in French and he's written in English. So you might enjoy it in French, but it is the most incredible portrait of a man who spent fifty years, uh, as a Tibetan monk and his love of his teachers and his three year retreats and his times in Bhutan. And I found it incredibly calming and it's short chapters. Yeah.

• 36:25Alastair Campbell?

  Good. Lovely. Albrecht Duras Engraving of a Peasant Piper in fifteen fourteen, one of the earliest representations of the bagpipes in a secular context.

• 36:34Rory Stewart?

  Well, there we go. That is a bit of good news and optimism and something you would never hear on any other podcast in the United Kingdom. So thank you, Britain's most famous bagpiper, and see you next week.

• 36:45Alastair Campbell?

  Bye bye.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Hi there, it's David Oleshoga from Journey Through Time. And here's that extract from our Gunpowder Plot series that I mentioned earlier.

• 37:02Speaker 03

  The person who's not rejoicing is Guy Fawkes in the Tower. King James himself came to the Tower to question Fawkes. That's quite an astonishing fact, that Fawkes and the King looked into each other's eyes at that moment.

• 37:17Speaker 04

  And of course, interrogations at this time, and when we say interrogations as if they're just being questioned, but interrogations are brutal, violent events.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's going to get much, much more violent. Fawkes stands up to the King in a way that actually even impresses the King. He's open that they planned to blow up Parliament. He said that the aim had been to blow King James and the other Scots back to their Scottish mountains. He says that to the King.

• 37:40Speaker 04

  It takes guts, but it's also not the most diplomatic thing to say to the person you've just tried to murder, and your fate is in his hands.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I think Fawkes knows what's going to happen. I mean, the King was impressed by his obstinacy, that he would not reveal the names of his co-conspirators, that he was willing to insult the King to his face. And you have to say about Guy Fawkes, a man who'd been a soldier for 10 years, my God, he had guts. I mean, he is a bad man. He is a religious fanatic. He's not somebody I admire, but my God, he was brave. You can be brave and wrong. You can be brave and involved in things that are evil at the same time. And he was, he was all of those things. But this willingness to stand up to the King, that this is before the torture.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  If you want to hear more about Gunpowder, treason and plot, listen to Journey Through Time wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:35Speaker 07

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 39:11Speaker 08

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 39:14Speaker 09

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 39:16Speaker 08

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