225. George Galloway returns, 'omnishambles' budgets, and the plight of Sudan

How did George Galloway use Gaza to win in Rochdale? What is the impact of compulsory voting on Australian politics? What is happening in Sudan? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in 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.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:13Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:17Alastair Campbell?

  And with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:19Rory Stewart?

  And Alistair, it's a bizarre thing. It's morning where you are in Australia and it's evening where I am in America.

• 1:25Alastair Campbell?

  I know. And yet you sound like you're next door. I've just been swimming in this amazing open air seawater pool on Bondi Beach, which is just such a great start to the day.

• 1:38Rory Stewart?

  Very jealous. I've been teaching students and doing office hours. So I'm not as glamorous. I wish I had been.

• 1:45Alastair Campbell?

  And we're going to, we'll talk a little bit about what's going on here in Australia and also the war in Sudan in the second half of the programme. But I think in the first half, we're going to talk about kind of more domestic. Got the budget coming up. We had that rather bizarre Downey Street address by Rishi Sunak on the back of the Rochdale by-election, won by the repellent George Galloway. And so shall we start with that?

• 2:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and then just to encourage our international listeners, quite a lot of Sudan and Australia in the second half. But yeah, let's start with the quick look on the Rochdale election and this character, George Galloway. I mean, it's it's almost impossible to describe him in any very straightforward way. George Galloway has, I believe, I've tried to count, stood 15 times for elected office. So he was a Labour MP from 1987 to 2005. Then he was in Glasgow, Hillhead and Glasgow, Kelvin. Then from 2005, 2010, he was an MP in Bethel, Green and Bow. Then 2011, it lost its seat, 2010, 2011 stood in Scotland and lost.

• 2:53Rory Stewart?

  2012 stood in Bradford West for the Respect Party and won his seat there, which he lost again in 2015. Then he entered a very, very bleak moment for the last nine years. I mean, the the figures were catastrophic. He stood for London Mayor in 2016, came seventh with 1.4% of the vote. To put that in context, when I was running to be London Mayor as an independent, I think we were up to sort of 13, 14%. He then ran 2017 Manchester Gordon, got 5.7%. Ran 2019 West Bromwich East, came sixth with only 489 votes. That's not many votes, right, less than 500 votes. So in Scotland in 2021, got 0.9% of the vote and sort of battling in Spennan, came third with 21%.

• 3:34Rory Stewart?

  And then, after nine years of not getting anywhere, came in again in Rochdale with a whopping 40% of the vote, overturning a Labour majority of 9,668. So tell us, when did you first encounter George Galloway?

• 3:48Alastair Campbell?

  I first encountered George Galloway face to face in Dundee, where he was very active. Dundee, Twin Town, Nablus, so there's a sort of history of.

• 3:57Rory Stewart?

  And where he's where he's born. He he was, he claims he grew up in an Irish attic tenement in Dundee and made his name first in Dundee City Council as a very young man.

• 4:07Alastair Campbell?

  And I think I think fair to say that whenever you're talking about Galloway claims and alleges is probably the best way to deal with it. And the reason I met him there was because I was doing an investigation for the Daily Mirror about War on Want, a charity with which he was very, very closely associated. And

• 4:24Rory Stewart?

  He was the head, he was at least the London head.

• 4:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he had a senior position at War on Want, a great charity. And essentially, the story was of sort of financial misgoings on at the charity. And it was quite interesting because that was my first encounter. And of course, I'd set it up on the basis of wanting to interview him about this, that and the other. Didn't really explain what it was all about. And then when it came to it, you know, put some very, very tough questions with plenty of evidence of invoices and expenses, claims and all sorts of things. At which point he turned, you know, as I think a lot of journalists have experienced since, quite sort of nasty and aggressive. Anyway, the paper ran the story, that was all fine. My next major encounter with him was in court.

• 5:09Alastair Campbell?

  And, you know, I've got to be careful what I say here because this was a court of law, where of course people can say whatever they want. And I was being sued by this Tory MP, Rupert Allison, over a story that I hadn't even written. It was completely bizarre. It was amazing it ever even got to court because it was a story that another journalist had written. But Rupert Allison was determined to sue me personally for malicious falsehood. In other words, it wasn't just that the story was wrong. It was that I deliberately made it wrong in order to do him damage. And given I hadn't even written the damn story and given it was a tiny little piddling story at the bottom of page two that didn't really matter to anybody. It was bizarre that it got to court, but of course, once it did get to court, he had to build a case. Rupert Allison defended himself.

• 5:52Alastair Campbell?

  His only witness, so far as I can recall, was George Galloway.

• 5:56Rory Stewart?

  And I had to sit there. And listen to George Galloway, but let's just take a step back a second. So George Galloway, for a start, is quite small, isn't he? But he was known as Gorgeous George. He's got a moustache. He wears a fedora. He's not a physically large man, is he? But he's quite a confident man.

• 6:11Alastair Campbell?

  He's got, listen, he's a great, I can remember Donald Jewer, who was, you know, wonderful politician and a fabulous man, Scotland's first first minister. And I can remember when George Galloway was running in Glasgow Hillhead. And because I had these stories of my previous encounters, it's fair to say that I wasn't particularly fond of him. And just finishing the court case though, Rory, I had to sit there and watch George Galloway describe. Scenes involving me, which, given it was about me, I'm, to my certain knowledge, I know never took place. It was a very, very bizarre situation. And I can remember John Dower saying, you know, saying Galloway is an absolutely thoroughly horrible human being, but he is

• 6:55Alastair Campbell?

  never to be underestimated. He is a great speaker. He's a terrific orator. And the thing is, you listed there some of the places that he's been. I mean, I'd love to know what the people of Bradford think George Galloway's lasting contribution to the people of Bradford is. I suspect it won't be very much. And likewise now, so he uses these places, he latches upon them. It's now Rochdale. I was in an event in Adelaide the other day and I was, I was being interviewed by Bob Carr, the former Premier of New South Wales, who, who mentioned the by-election and said that, you know, this guy had come along and, and he'd, he'd won this by-election by speaking up for the people of Gaza. And of course, there was a round of applause, you know, for the people. Oh, great. Speak up for the people of Gaza. When, of course, I explained the background, the fact that this had happened

• 7:37Alastair Campbell?

  because, you know, the Labour candidate wasn't being backed by the Labour Party, that the guy who came second was an independent, told a little bit about the broader story. I think that they maybe understood better what was, what was going on, you know, and it's the same here. I was up at Sydney University yesterday and plastered on all the bus stops on the way up to the event that I was doing, where all these posters, Albanese, you're supporting genocide, you know, very much sort of the same sort of perspective as the protests that had been against the government and against the Labour Party in the UK. So this issue is kind of going to the heart of our politics. But I was cheered by your introduction there because every time Galloway has gone and won, he's lost pretty much soon afterwards. And I think that will happen again this time. Labour will get a decent candidate.

• 8:22Rory Stewart?

  So a bit of a, bit of a sense of this guy and this phenomenon of Galloway. So he grew up, working class, poor family in Dundee, became the leader of the Scottish Labour Party at a very, very young age, or the chairman of Scottish Labour, anyway. As you said, did war on one, got into Parliament in 1987, and quite quickly was associated with a particular faction of the left. I mean, you can help us understand this. So he, he said that he was really against the Trotskyites, but he really thought the Labour Party should amalgamate with the Communist Party of Great Britain. And he referred to Tony Benn as Kerensky. Can he bring us, tell us about Labour Party in the late 80s?

• 9:00Alastair Campbell?

  No, Rory, I'm not reliving all this. Absolutely. Of the historical sectology and factionalism that kept the Labour Party out of power for so long. I mean, this is why I think the Labour Party has been right to sort of, you know, try to stay in a place where most people live their political lives. But he was a very, I think there is an element of opportunism about him. In fact, there's a very big element of opportunism about him. But what his strengths are, if you're trying to be objective about it, he is a very good speaker. I actually once was on Question Time with him in Burnley, as it happens. And it was quite interesting because, needless to say, they put his right

• 9:40Alastair Campbell?

  together on the panel. And, you know, I told myself on the way, I am not going to lose my rag. I'm not going to get fired up by this guy. And of course, he sort of basically goes straight into this kind of absolutely, even I was quite impressed, you know, I thought if this was him talking about somebody else, I could really enjoy this, as he sort of talked about, you know, I'm sitting here next to a man who's with blood dripping from every, out every inch of his skin and all this sort of stuff. And so he's a formidable sort of rabble rouser. But the truth is Gaza has been difficult for the Labour Party, you know, but Galloway was unbelievably lucky in the way that the cards fell within this by-election. There's no doubt about that.

• 10:23Alastair Campbell?

  What I found very, very strange about the reaction to it, I honestly can't believe that Rishi Sunak went out in Downey Street and almost like, it was almost like George Galloway's won a by-election, I have to try and say something. It was, I thought the whole thing was absurd.

• 10:39Rory Stewart?

  I couldn't agree more with that. I mean, if you look at the history of it, George Galloway is always winning by-elections. I mean, he won Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005, he won Bradford West in 2012, and he's generally winning them in the same way, isn't he? In 2005, I guess he was taking position on the Iraq war, but 2012, it was Gaza again, wasn't it?

• 10:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Rory Stewart?

  And he's particularly made his name, I guess, although his party is now called the Workers' Party of Britain.

• 11:04Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, just unbelievable.

• 11:05Rory Stewart?

  He's really made his, but he's made his name really on international affairs. So he was very, very firmly pro Palestine, one state solution for Palestinians. He was very firmly pro Sinn Fein in Ireland. He was notoriously went to see Saddam Hussein and praised him for his, I think, resilience.

• 11:27Alastair Campbell?

  Indefatigability.

• 11:28Rory Stewart?

  Indefatigability.

• 11:29Alastair Campbell?

  Sir, I salute your courage and your indefatigability.

• 11:33Rory Stewart?

  Well, went to Syria, praised Syria for being the fortress of the Arab world. So he makes pro Russian comments, quite pro Corbyn.

• 11:40Alastair Campbell?

  Anti Kosovo. I mean, he's, he's very, although I see that, I was just talking to Fiona before we started, she was telling me that Jeremy Corbyn and somebody else were going to introduce him into the Commons, but in the end they didn't. And Peter Bottomley had to do it.

• 11:53Rory Stewart?

  It's a brilliantly funny piece in The Guardian by John Crace, giving a long spiel of Corbyn claiming, oh dear, really? Did I say 2.30 on Monday? I'm so sorry. I must have made a darian.

• 12:05Alastair Campbell?

  No, I, I, I think he's, the point though is that, like a lot of modern political figures, it's really all about attention. And that's part of what politics is. That's not, that's not wholly a criticism, but he'll go into a place, he'll work out the best way to maximize what people know of him. And he does have a long history of, you know, pro Palestine, anti Israel, and I mean anti Israel and pro Palestine. And so he goes in there and he'll work out the numbers, he'll work out how many people he, you know, he probably needs to get across the line. There was a clip that emerged on social media of him in a private conversation. I don't think he realized he was being filmed with a voter in Rochdale who was giving him a bit of a hard time. And, and Galloway

• 12:45Alastair Campbell?

  very quickly turned very, very nasty on this guy. I mean, he is, I think he's a deeply unpleasant piece of works, but as Donald Jewell said, not to be underestimated. Now, I think he's going to overreach himself, but the Labour Party, I think, needs to be very, very conscious of this, this is something not to be ignored, but at the same time, unlike Sunak the other night, Labour shouldn't change their core strategy on this. But I do think there's a message in here for Labour politicians that ever since October the 7th, because they got locked in very, very quickly to a position of, you know, close to the American position, close to the government position, pro the right of Israel to exist and to defend itself. I think there has been a feeling of a, of a lack of kind of basic empathy on the issue. And that's what allows something like Galloway to come in and totally misrepresent

• 13:29Alastair Campbell?

  Labour's position on the issue. So Labour does have to kind of respond to this. But I thought I thought Sunak's response was ridiculously over the top.

• 13:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's just do that for a second. So again, to set the scene, he did something very unusual, which is he called a statement on the steps of Downing Street on a podium.

• 13:46Alastair Campbell?

  First time since he's been Prime Minister.

• 13:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and these things are normally used for really, really big announcements. People expect this to be, you know, you're calling a general election or you're making a statement on nine eleven or something. So people really thought, gosh, this is going to be a really big deal. Let's hold the six o'clock news. This is going to be a big statement. And in the end, what he did was give a speech, apparently inspired by George Galloway's victory, warning against extremism.

• 14:13Alastair Campbell?

  Right and left.

• 14:14Rory Stewart?

  Right and left. And he tried to say essentially that this was, you know, one of the most profound crises facing Britain. So there was a very hyperbolic or kind of exaggerated context in this whole thing, because the whole podium set it up as though this was going to be some incredible revelation. Anyway, what was your sense of the whole thing?

• 14:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I got a sort of rash, you know how you get a rash of text messages and people, what's Sunak talking, what's this about? Of course, I didn't have a clue. But I thought, well, this is going to be big. So you sort of tune in and you watch it. And at the end of it, I thought, what on earth was that about? So he was basically saying that democracy is under threat from a combination of far right and Islamist fundamentalists who sort of, you know, feel so strongly about Gaza. And Suella Braverman started this whole thing about anybody who goes on this march is somehow a sort of, you know, a hater. And I think it was playing into the hands of the people that he seemed to be calling out. He succeeded in getting all of the right wing papers the next day to sort of give him front page treatment of, you know, the speech that we've been longing to hear and all this sort of stuff. But I just thought it was nonsense.

• 15:16Rory Stewart?

  And are they are they sincere in that? Just just that for a second, because that reminds me a little bit of when Cameron came back from vetoing the EU budget and he briefly got

• 15:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 15:25Rory Stewart?

  front page coverage in the Telegraph and the Mail saying, you know, well done him. But you sense that they're not really on Rishi Sunak's side.

• 15:33Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 15:33Rory Stewart?

  And it wasn't really the speech. They were desperate to hear. And I'd love to get your sense of his communication style, because it was set up as though it was going to be some sort of great Kennedy style state of the nation address. But to give people a sense of the the culmination of it in his rhetorical style, he goes, when they tell lies, we will tell the truth. When they try and sap our confidence, we will redouble our efforts.

• 15:57Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, it's like, it's like a really bad chat G P T. Sort of, you know, O level speech. I've got to write a speech for an O level paper. Can you sort of give me one? And the other thing, when he talks about lies and talks about undermining democracy, I just think it's a bit rich.

• 16:12Rory Stewart?

  That presumably irritates you because that strikes you as enormously hypocritical. But before we get on to hypocrisy, can I just, I just, when they try and sap our confidence, we will redouble our efforts is not one of the great rhetorical lines all time.

• 16:24Alastair Campbell?

  We're not, there are not, there's going to be no analysis of that in a century's time.

• 16:28Rory Stewart?

  And then finish with, so let us go forward together, confident in our values and in our future. I do sort of wonder whether it was a mistake of him to try to choose because maybe his personality or his speaking style doesn't really suit this kind of stuff anyway.

• 16:42Alastair Campbell?

  I think if the moment had merited something like this, it would have been fine. And then people know that he's not, you know, he's not Ronald Reagan, he's not Martin Luther King. But the moment didn't merit it. If you think about it, it really is all flowing from this whole sort of Lee Anderson, Islamophobia, Braverman, it was all yet again, sort of playing into Tory politics. And on the hypocrisy, Rory, let me just have a couple of minutes on the hypocrisy.

• 17:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, if we're talking about undermining democracy and lying, I think Brexit and the way that it was won and the way that it was delivered undermined democracy. I think supporting newspapers to talk about enemies of the people and saboteurs was undermined democracy. Prog in Parliament, voter ID, corruption on COVID, free ports and special economic zones.

• 17:32Rory Stewart?

  Suella Bravman as Home Secretary.

• 17:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, exactly. Within days of being, of being sacked for breaking the code, breaking, doubling the limits on funding raised for the election without any sort of debate, undermining the electoral commission. And on, I had a really, I sent it to you, Rory, I don't know if you saw it, but a friend of mine who works in this area, that that is the area of digital communications and the new forms of advertising, which I don't think you and I really understand. And but let me just read you what he said, because I think it's fascinating this. He said, I may be giving the Tories too much credit. I'm not sure they really have much control over Braverman, Anderson, et cetera. But I do think they have a strategy of social division. They're building us against them on cultural, racial, religious lines rather than policies.

• 18:17Alastair Campbell?

  An objective is to define and build an active base to mobilise later in the year. So a short term tactic will be to do things which generate lots of data related to defining and building an active base. So that's the comments made by Anderson, Braverman, Sunak, Shapps, et cetera. They build followers, they generate reactions online. You then use psychometric profiling to understand these people better. You then pump millions, brackets, which is why they've upped the amount people can donate, into different social media platforms and you feed them stuff to maintain their fears and anger. In the medium term, you soften your tone publicly so as to appear electable to the centre ground. But you keep feeding that database of people really hateful stuff directly online out of the public gaze. To me, that's what's going on.

• 18:59Alastair Campbell?

  They take a short term centre ground hit to get data on people who will form their own angry mob. Medium term, they soften. Then further down the line, you make it difficult for young people to vote. You hold the election in the run up to the Christmas when lots of middle England are distracted. And you dominate the election with your angry mob, Trump style.

• 19:16Rory Stewart?

  So some of that, I think, is stretching. Some of it, I think, is plausible. So there's no doubt at all they will have a very, very clear digital campaign. There's no doubt at all that they will be trying to exploit cultural cleavages. There seems to have been a leaked email from Tory headquarters, which Katie Bulls reports on in The Guardian, saying that the blame for the election of George Galloway lies for Keir Starmer. And this is Starmer's failure to fix antisemitism and that Starmer's weak and unable to take positions.

• 19:44Alastair Campbell?

  So. By the way, just on that, Roy, that's because they're desperate to keep trying to link Keir Starmer to having sat and wanted Jeremy Corbyn to be Prime Minister. I think that was bad.

• 19:54Rory Stewart?

  So they're going to keep hammering that and I think they're going to build that up. I think though this idea that they're temporarily shifting towards a moderate, soft position and some sort of cunning three stage thing, I think, is beyond them. I think what is plausible is that they're. Hoping to go into the election using data and digital targeting to try to mobilise their 2019 Red Wall coalition and that's why he won't break properly and come out and fully condemn Lee Anderson in the way that he should. And that's probably, I think, the reason why we haven't seen the moves that both of us would have liked to see the real confrontation with the right, the Conservative Party.

• 20:28Alastair Campbell?

  And talking of Lee Anderson, what do you think of Lee Anderson and Liz Truss turning up together at a Tory MP's fundraiser?

• 20:37Rory Stewart?

  I mean, it's shocking. It's really, really shocking because I think people are forgetting what Lee Anderson said. Lee Anderson essentially is selling a very dangerous divisive conspiracy theory, a sort of completely unfounded, wacky conspiracy theory that Sadiq Khan is controlled by Islamists and that there are these kind of whole no-go areas in London, all this kind of stuff. And the fact that a sitting Conservative MP is prepared to host someone like that, and apparently he got a standing ovation when he turned up, when he's been suspended from the party, is really, really bad. And, you know, again, I don't know whether it would work in party leadership terms, but one would be tempted to suspend that MP too for hosting him.

• 21:22Alastair Campbell?

  And also, you know, Liz Truss is clearly delighting in just being the centre of attention wherever she goes. And she's worked out the way to become the centre of attention is to say and do things that are deliberately undermining Rishi Sunak. So any attempt that Sunak tries to make to kind of appease or to bring these factions together, it seems to me is doomed to fail. I'm not sure what I would do if I were him, but I wouldn't have done that speech on Friday. I really wouldn't. I thought it was beneath the office. I thought it was, it just didn't merit that moment, that level of kind of drama of the lecton going up and him coming out.

• 22:01Rory Stewart?

  I think that's the bigger point, isn't it? Because I think, as we said last week, one thing that is important is to keep things in context and in proportion. And this is playing into the narrative that we're facing some existential threat in our society,

• 22:16Alastair Campbell?

  Which we're not.

• 22:17Rory Stewart?

  Which we're not. There are many bigger problems than our society. And I think it's, in a way, you're increasing the polarisation by, maybe inadvertently, but by talking about it in that way, you're heightening this sense.

• 22:30Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's advertent because you know that you're doing it. You've talked, rightly, you've talked a lot about Friends that you know, Jewish people, people in the Jewish community who are going around the place and being abused and being spat at and all this sort of stuff. Well, there's plenty of stuff you can see on local and social media at the moment of the same sort of thing happening to people who happen to, quote, look like Muslims, close quotes, because of the stuff that Anderson has been pumping out. And by playing to it rather than condemning it, I think Sunak adds to that momentum and that sense of polarisation.

• 23:03Rory Stewart?

  He would say that he is condemning it, isn't he? He would say that in his speech, he was attacking the far right.

• 23:07Alastair Campbell?

  And he was through the whip. He was through the whip. Yeah, I agree. We talked last week about this whole nonsense. Well, you know, what he said was wrong and inappropriate, but they can't bring themselves to say what was wrong about it.

• 23:18Rory Stewart?

  Just on that, we had a really good discussion with this with Sajid Javid, who's this, for people who don't know, it's a very senior Conservative MP who was really strong, I thought, and interesting on the subject of what he calls anti-Muslim hatred, which I think is coming out just now, right, for listeners to listen to?

• 23:33Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, yeah. No, and funnily enough, I was, an event I spoke at last night, somebody, an Australian person who'd listened to it, came out and said, you know, she said, I never really liked the cut of that Javid guy's jib, but he came over, he came over quite well. So there is, you, you've got this theory that people, when they're in active frontline cabinet service, they can't really be open and frank, and they can be a bit more open and a bit franker when they're out. And also, as you know, Rory, when we first sat down with Sajid Javid, we didn't think we were going to have to split it into two parts because we talked for so long about it so much, but that's what we've done.

• 24:06Rory Stewart?

  Part one Monday, part two Friday.

• 24:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Do you think the, the, the budget, so we're recording Monday, UK time, and I think it's Tuesday here. Do you think the budget, this, so this will go out, the budget will be very live, and some people are listening to this after the budget, so we won't waste our time predicting what's in the budget. But do you think that this is their last shot? And, and do you think that if they do go very heavily down this, let's get all the money from under the, under the sofa and try and sort of give some sort of big tax cut? Do you think that actually is potentially a game changer in the right way for them? Or could it actually make things worse?

• 24:38Rory Stewart?

  I think it could make things worse. So fundamental position, the economy is not in a great state. Growth is flatlining or actually technically going into recession and because our population is growing, in fact GDP per capita, so the wealth per person has actually been declining. So yes, theoretically are a few billions that are there to, as it were, play with. But a few things to point out. One is that you need a bit of insurance room. If the economy moves in the wrong direction, you want a bit of money. Secondly, public services are under a lot of pressure and you want some money to put into public services. And thirdly, there are things like fuel duty, which they're always trying to deal with, which costs them a few billion anyway. So last time round, in the Autumn

• 25:21Rory Stewart?

  Statement, in fact Jeremy Hunt avoided the temptation to come up with big catchy tax cuts. Instead, he made a pretty technocratic decision on allowing businesses to lay off some of their investment in capital equipment against tax, which I think was a smart move. And I came out with some respect for Jeremy Hunt from that because I thought it's not a very popular move, but it's a good thing to do for the economy. So I'm going into this budget with my fingers and toes crossed and hoping that Jeremy Hunt holds his nerve and thinks about his legacy because I don't think he honestly can believe any more than you and I that the Conservatives are going to win the next election. So let's see them

• 26:03Rory Stewart?

  at least play it cautiously and responsibly, rather than do something showy which isn't going to do them any good electorally anyway.

• 26:11Alastair Campbell?

  I saw a poll the other day saying that he's quite vulnerable in his own seat and that if there was a lot of tactical voting, I think it would be in favour of the Liberal Democrats there, that he'd be in a lot of trouble. But I think we're back to the point that we've talked about a lot, that this is all driven by these pressures within the Conservative Party as opposed to the genuine national economic interest. And of course, the other thing I think we've talked about before is that the costs of interest on borrowing have gone up so substantially since he was talking about having all this sort of unexpected headroom. So I think it'll be, it feels like it could be a bit desperate, but I don't think he will hold out against it. I think he will try to go for something.

• 26:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, part of the problem, as we talked about in the first, is there's a media management problem, isn't there? Because they have raised expectations about tax cuts and that slightly traps them. I don't know whether they've managed to talk their way out of it. Is your sense going into it a day and a half out that? They've sort of hinted that there are going to be tax cuts. There's going to be huge disappointment when they're not, or if they manage to avoid that?

• 27:09Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, I think they're trying to wind it down a little bit. I'm just shocked at the way, I mean, Jeremy Hunt was doing lots of interviews over the weekend and, I mean, all the sort of traditional pre-budget rules seem to have completely broken down. I'd be very surprised if they don't find some way of having a couple of quite surprising tax cutting measures. But I fear that if they've really had to struggle to find out where the money is coming from, that they, they could, there's the potential for unravelling very, very quickly. So you could end up with one of those classic situations where on the day itself, all the Tories are out there saying, and this is fantastic, the Tory papers all saying this is fantastic. And then within 24 hours or so, people start to look at the detail and it unravels. The people, the people to watch out for, I think, on, on Budget Day are the OBR, the Office of Budget Responsibility, the ones

• 27:54Alastair Campbell?

  that Liz Truss tried to cut out the equation, Paul Johnson from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, and Torsten Bell at the Resolution Foundation. I think when, I look for the judgement of outsiders on this, because I think, I think they do go through the numbers very, very quickly and come up with something that's sort of.

• 28:09Rory Stewart?

  It's, I, I went through this three times, in fact, being in Budget. So as a, as a, an MP, you, you, you turn up very loyally for Budget. You, you stand there, you hear your Chancellor, in this case, if you were a Conservative MP, it'd be Jeremy Hunt, speaking. And there's lots of little giveaways. So, you know, I would hear in my constituency, there's a bit of money for the A66 Road or our train station. And there'd be nice talk about apprenticeships. And you'd leave with a kind of warm, buzzy feeling. And then, as you say, within about six hours, somebody like Paul Johnson starts biting into the details of the whole thing. And the whole thing then, on three occasions at least, in the nearly 10 years I was in, the budget kind collapsed around our ears. George Osborne actually famously had a budget that did that, where it came unstuck. I mean, I think different ones came unstuck in different ones, but one of

• 28:53Rory Stewart?

  them famously came unstuck around a pasty tax.

• 28:56Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, that was, that was, that was, yeah, I remember the pasty tax. There was, which was the Omni Shambles? There was an Omni Shambles budget as well, wasn't there?

• 29:02Rory Stewart?

  That's right. I think, I think that's 2012, somebody.

• 29:06Alastair Campbell?

  Here's my little, I mean, it's pointless predicting. I remember once at the Daily Mirror once, I wrote a speculative piece about the budget. I didn't say this is going to happen. This might, I was all this sort of couched in very kind of speculative language. But I remember Richard Stock, the editor, called me and he said, have you seen the budget? I said, no, of course I haven't. He said, well, why are you writing all this crap then? But now all we get is crap about, you know, what might be, what might not be. The other thing I've been a little bit surprised by, even with this lot, is the extent to which so much of the briefing around the budget is about laying traps for Labour. I think they might do something on the non-dom thing. I think he might sort of play away with that, not necessarily get rid of the whole thing, but sort of, you know, make changes to it so as you can say, we're, we're actually taking money from the very wealthy as well.

• 29:49Alastair Campbell?

  But also because Labour are, you know, talking about funding all sorts of things by scaling back the non-dom tax status. So I, that's my little completely ill-informed prediction of what might happen. Very good. Thank you, Alex. Let's see if we're right. Time for a break.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  We assess, uh, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 30:32Speaker 05

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 30:35Speaker 02

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

• 30:48Speaker 06

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 30:50Speaker 02

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

• 30:59Speaker 04

  A frago that says to kill the president of Russia.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

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• 31:33Speaker 04

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• 31:52Rory Stewart?

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

• 31:55Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, I've got breaking news.

• 31:59Rory Stewart?

  Oh yes, go on then.

• 32:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the first two venues of our tour, what we hope and think will be an election tour, to sell out, Glasgow and Brighton.

• 32:09Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 32:10Alastair Campbell?

  Amazingly, the people who know about these things say that as they track the sales of O2 tickets, that it's heading in the same direction. And I don't, I hope you were very, very excited the other day Rory, when you joined me for Rest Is Politics Australia special. Australia, by the way, has now overtaken Ireland as the country with our most listeners after the UK.

• 32:32Rory Stewart?

  After Tubaloo dropped off the list.

• 32:34Alastair Campbell?

  Tubaloo fell, Tubaloo went off the list. And I don't know if you know that the venue that we were, where I was physically and you were beamed in, that the Beatles played there in the 60s. So that, I mean, that was so exciting. Without Ringo Starr, Jimmy Nichol stood in for Ringo Starr.

• 32:51Rory Stewart?

  Given that you're a Swiftie, I've got someone working on seeing if we can persuade Taylor Swift to come on the show if you're up for that.

• 32:58Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, Taylor Swift coming on the show would be, I'd be almost as excited as if we've got Angela Merkel. How about that? Taylor Swift, by the way, she's all.

• 33:07Rory Stewart?

  Get them both at the same time. Yeah.

• 33:08Alastair Campbell?

  She's all over the media here at the moment because the Australians are hosting the ASEAN nations, we're going to talk about that. And the ASEAN leaders are all a bit pissed off with Singapore because Singapore has been paying very substantial sums of money to Taylor Swift to appear in Singapore. But the money seems to be in return for her not going to all the other nations in the region. So she's doing.

• 33:32Rory Stewart?

  Oh goodness.

• 33:32Alastair Campbell?

  On her world tour, she's doing a whole load of performances in Singapore, but she's not going elsewhere. So thereby underlining, just as she's got a bit of political clout in America. So in this region as well. But yeah, Taylor Swift is absolutely.

• 33:45Rory Stewart?

  Taylor Swift thing. Anyway, that was just my O two thought because we did have this boast that we sold out the Albert Hall quicker than Taylor Swift, but I think she showed.

• 33:52Alastair Campbell?

  No, it wasn't. It was the Foo Fighters. It was the Foo Fighters.

• 33:55Rory Stewart?

  Foo Fighters, the Foo Fighters.

• 33:58Alastair Campbell?

  So anyway, if people, if people want those tickets that are left, you just go to the rest is politics.com. You see all the dates there and you can sign up.

• 34:06Rory Stewart?

  Well, can I, from our own correspondent, dump you in it and say you're in Australia and you love Australia. Actually, I get a sense that it's one of those places along with Ireland that you have a huge affection for. So tell us a bit of a sense of what impression you're getting of Australian politics and of how Australian politics looks at the world.

• 34:25Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I do like Australia. I've never not had a really good time here. I think it's got so much of the, the best of what people like about Britain, but I do think it's less stuffy. I think they have less of a kind of class structure. Look, I think there are really, there are some big problems and I still think that, you know, I do think it was really sad that the voice referendum was defeated. I think there are still massive challenges related to the lives and the treatment of the indigenous population. But there's something incredibly vibrant about Australia and about Australian people. And I, I think on the politics, it's, it's really interesting at the moment because you've got, they have these ridiculous three year terms. So even though Anthony Albanese is, you know, his, his election wasn't that long ago, but they're already into the kind of period of the next pre-election phase.

• 35:08Alastair Campbell?

  Interestingly, last night, Rory, I had a pretty big event and I, we did the thing that we all, that you and I often do about who's going to be the next Labour Prime Minister. And it was a hundred percent Starmer. Who's going to be the next American president? And it was two to one Trump. And when it came to who's going to be the next Australian Prime Minister after the next election, it was very, very, very strongly Albanese. So I think there is a sense they're doing pretty well. There was a by-election last weekend, which the Liberals, which is their Tory party, which they thought they were going to win and they didn't. Albanese held on. I'll tell you what has been very interesting in here. As I say, they're hosting the ASEAN leaders, which are all the sort of 10 leaders of big countries in this, in Southeast Asia, you know, Singapore and Indonesia, probably the two most significant in a way.

• 35:49Alastair Campbell?

  And the front pages of the papers today are full of Albanese announcing more money to invest in Southeast Asian interests. And I think they do see their future very much, as it were, in this region. But I went to the Adelaide Festival that I was speaking at, I went to a. A couple of panels on the whole AUKUS, this is the the defence alliance between Australia, the United States.

• 36:10Rory Stewart?

  Just quickly remind people that this was the deal where France was due to build submarines with Australia. It was a huge deal for France, going to make a lot of difference to French defence industry. And then to the complete fury of France, the US and Britain seemed to cut them out of the equation, leaving the French, I mean, almost withdrawing their ambassadors, mounting formal political protests, et cetera. Anyway, yes, fast forward then on how that's all going.

• 36:34Alastair Campbell?

  It's really interesting because, of course, it's a very long term thing. And it sort of depends where you are and who you're talking to. So when I was in South Australia and I met the the premier there who introduced us at the event that we did, Peter Malanovskas, and he was basically saying it's great because the submarines, you know, that's where a lot of the the jobs that come from this are going to be based there. So they were very much in favour. You go to other places and it feels very kind of, they're very unsure about it. And so last night, somebody was pointing out that this was a deal that was put together by Biden, Johnson and Morrison. Well, Morrison and Johnson are gone. Biden, if he is replaced by Trump, I think the feeling is here that Trump is just not going to give a damn about,

• 37:15Alastair Campbell?

  you know, America funding Australian submarine projects when he's got a sort of America first policy. And I think there's a feeling that people aren't sure about what the plan B is. And there's been a surprise, this was very much Morrison's project, but Albanese has taken it over. But I got the feeling, talking to lots of people, both in politics and so there were a few defence experts at this event, there's a sort of sense that this thing might not happen in the end, that the timescale is so long, that the cost is so long. And there is definitely a real sort of fear of Trump returning, that if he does return, that Australia just kind of won't be on his map in the way that it is with Joe Biden. And I'll tell you the really depressing thing, Rory. One panel with four experts on this subject, the panel was about AUKUS and the future of AUKUS.

• 37:59Alastair Campbell?

  And I promise you, the UK bit was not even mentioned. It was really kind of, I felt, I just thought, God, I mean, I was thinking, imagine if this had been put together by Thatcher and Reagan or by Clinton and Blair, the British element would feel to be a big part of it. It just didn't feel like it was part of it.

• 38:16Rory Stewart?

  And how much do you think the UK is still kind of culturally part of the Australian debate? Or is UK politics?

• 38:22Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, no.

• 38:23Rory Stewart?

  So people are still conscious of UK politics, conscious of the thing. It's just the August is much less relevant.

• 38:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, no, there's, look, there's no doubt. When, when you're going around the place, I mean, people follow, not everybody, but people really know what's going on in, in British politics. There's a lot of, there's a hell of a lot of interest in British politics. And I think there's a lot of sadness at what Britain has become. I mean, I felt for you, Rory, because I know you, you, you, you love the Teals and I, I, I met some of the Teals.

• 38:50Rory Stewart?

  Wait, wait, I hope you've gotten to agree to be interviewed. These, these amazing women.

• 38:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, of course, Rory. Yes, of course. Unlike you, I pin people down and I get them to, I mean, at some point we'll be doing, you know, very senior politicians from this country and indeed from other countries who are present at ASEAN. But they do follow it very, very closely. But the Teals were, they were fascinating.

• 39:10Rory Stewart?

  Can I just sort of remind people, they're called Teals because they are environmentally green, but fiscally conservative, hence blue-green. And they're independents, many of them women, some of them doctors.

• 39:21Alastair Campbell?

  All of them women.

• 39:22Rory Stewart?

  And took these key seats, quite prosperous seats, in a surprise victory, which really was about, we always saw it as one of the optimistic sense of a return to the centre ground.

• 39:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The other thing is that if you come into Australia, Rory, and you want to, if you're making a speech and you feel you're flagging at any point, just do a big thing about how amazing you think compulsory voting is, because they're unbelievably proud of that. And I, and I completely agree. It's like, I just think compulsory voting.

• 39:48Rory Stewart?

  I couldn't agree more. My, my friend John in Canberra thinks I'm mad, but I think his only argument against it is that he doesn't really trust voters. And I think our democracy has to be based on the assumption that we trust everybody. Everybody should vote, everybody should be equal citizens and everyone should have a say.

• 40:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think one of the reasons why the debate feels more informed, partly, I mean, look, their, their papers are very influenced by Murdoch and they're not great. But I do feel people are generally more informed. And I think one of the reasons is that actually they they understand that at some stage they're all going to have to vote. And I think it helps the debate. I think what the politicians say about compulsory voting is that it makes it much harder for the extremists to get a real grip. Now, there is a hard right problem here. There's a probably not as advanced as it is in Europe, but it exists. But I think compulsory voting has been a great thing for them. And, you know, I really, really wish that we would we'd go down the same road. And the other thing that's happening, Rory, is there's a lot of movement on, I know this is something

• 40:45Alastair Campbell?

  you feel strongly about, political funding. So the guy, the premier in South Australia, Peter Manalaskas, he's bringing forward a bill to ban all political donations and to have state funding of parties.

• 40:56Rory Stewart?

  Fantastic. That's what I like.

• 40:57Alastair Campbell?

  And at the federal level, at the federal level, they're also talking about not quite going that far, but they are going to a place of having very, very kind of pretty low limits on what people can spend. So there's just that sort of sense of, I think, greater vibrancy.

• 41:12Rory Stewart?

  If people are really interested in the geekiness of this, these are great subjects to get into some days. I mean, the argument against people like me who favor state funding is they see it as a challenge to freedom. And it sounds kind of quite authoritarian, and maybe it's difficult for new parties to break in and stuff. But I think you've got to weigh lesser evils. And I think state funding is a much lesser evil than allowing wealthy business people to fund the Tories or wealthy unions to fund Labour and all that that means for the mad policies that that generates.

• 41:43Alastair Campbell?

  The argument that is being used against the South Australian premier and his plans to ban all political donations is freedom, that they're using the freedom of speech argument. And that's probably going to end up in the courts. But I really, really hope he wins. So there is definitely, there's no doubt. I mean, your friend King Charles is due to be coming here in the not too distant future. And so I was asking, I was with quite a lot of young people at the university yesterday, I was saying, do people care much? And they're saying, oh, not really. But then I was talking to some of the older people, and they were saying, yeah, well, they might say that, but you watch, when he comes here, there'll still be quite a turnout. One of them did say, you won't be happy with this, Rory, but one of them did say, I said, yeah, I mean, there won't be much of the

• 42:26Alastair Campbell?

  King Camilla, but I'll tell you, if Harry and Meghan came, there'd be crowds.

• 42:31Rory Stewart?

  Right, well, go, go. Now, let's move on to the serious subject of Sudan. So you really wanted us to focus on Sudan today, and I think that's really important because it's probably the most dramatic, extreme and horrifying thing happening in the world at the moment, and almost nobody is talking about it. We've covered it a bit. We've done a few episodes, but not enough. I was stopped by a woman in Streets One, who's actually my local councillor, local Conservative councillor, who's Sudanese-British, who really said, why are you not doing more on Sudan? And the statistics are absolutely horrifying. So effectively, there's a civil war between two sides, and we can explain that a little bit in a second. But eight or 10 million people have been displaced

• 43:16Rory Stewart?

  from their homes, out of a population of about 40 million, so about a quarter of the population.

• 43:20Alastair Campbell?

  Over 3 million children.

• 43:22Rory Stewart?

  The healthcare facility's almost entirely collapsed. A lot of the city is lying in ruins, and these horrifying, basically militia groups, I mean, some of them technically from the Rapid Reaction Force, some of them who call themselves the Sudanese Army, but increasingly, the distinction between these armed groups is becoming pretty blurred. You had the Sudanese Army walking down the street, carrying the decapitated heads of students that they thought were connected to the RRF. Anyway, over to you, and maybe we can get a bit into the background of it in a second.

• 43:52Alastair Campbell?

  The numbers are staggering, and of course, you accept that Ukraine, massive international story, Israel, Gaza, massive international story. But the sort of, the kind of emotions that are being inspired by the suffering of both of the attacks on October the 7th, but also the horrors of what are happening in Gaza now, I mean, it's obvious to understand why people feel so strongly about it. And yet, as you say, this is something, because it doesn't get much attention, there's no similar Outpouring for what is in certainly numerical terms greater suffering. And also with, you know, there's so much going on here between the these two sides of the Sudanese armed forces and the rapid support forces who were, they were at war in Darfur sort of

• 44:37Alastair Campbell?

  two decades ago. But what's I think different now is that there's, there's a far greater international element to this. And a lot of this has to do with, with gold. You know, Egypt is getting gold from the areas under the army control and the gold and from the rapid support forces is heading particularly to the United Arab Emirates. And without them sort of wanting to be part of a, of a solution, it seems to me the problem doesn't, doesn't get resolved. And, you know, we've talked a lot in recent weeks about just how big Biden's kind of in tray of challenges is. But again, he's expected to play a role in this. He's appointed a special envoy now, a guy called Tom Periello, who did a similar job in the DRC for, for Obama.

• 45:21Alastair Campbell?

  The UN have just put in a new peacekeeping envoy. But these proxies, you've got the UAE, you've got Egypt, you've got the Wagner Group, you've got Iran who are supplying arms to one side. And so people are, are talking about, you know, the need for a ceasefire, the need for humanitarian aid access. But with all this bigger play politics going on around it, it's very, very difficult.

• 45:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So again, just, just set up the geography for people. So Sudan is a country which is on the east side of Africa, along the edge of the Red Sea. So it's, it's right there below Egypt, just sits below Egypt. It's got a port called Port Sudan, which is right opposite Saudi Arabia. But on its west hand side and its left hand side, it stretches right into the Libyan desert and connects with the Sahel, with this whole chain of countries which are on the edge of the Sahara, which have seen military coups and the collapse of democratic governments, right the way from the east coast of Africa to the west coast of Africa that we've been discussing. Two main fighting groups. On the one hand, as you say, the Sudanese army led by General Al Burhan.

• 46:23Rory Stewart?

  And they're mostly traditionally in the east of the country, along the Nile River, in what traditionally was the kind of more settled. A richer, more fertile territory and they tend to have more of the support, I guess, of the urban population, the intelligentsia, the business elite. And they are backed by Egypt and Iran. And against them is this man, Hametti, with the Rapid Reaction Force. And Hametti, as we've discussed before on the programme, grew up in a camel herding background. He comes from the West, from these much more Arab semi-nomadic backgrounds. And he's got these recruits who are, again, mostly from the drier areas of Sahel.

• 47:05Rory Stewart?

  They're backed by the UAE and in fact were used by the UAE as mercenaries in Yemen. He's got businesses in UAE. And there's been some amazing reporting that, again, we discussed briefly, if people want to really get into the geekery of this, which the New York Times got into, where they used satellite images to show that the UAE had set up a hospital in Chad, so on the western side of Sudan, which was basically being used to take in cargo planes which were delivering rockets, drones from the Emirates to Hametti and the Rapid Reaction Force. And this is another example of somewhere where we're losing faith in peace. But actually, peace in Sudan isn't impossible. I mean, it's somewhere where if the international community concentrated properly, you would

• 47:50Rory Stewart?

  be able to get there with more confidence, I think, than you might be able to in Russia, Ukraine or Israel, Gaza. And the sad truth is, you're right that the US has now appointed a president, but for a long time, they didn't. The State Department was digging its heels in, insisting that the Africa Bureau could do it. The Africa Bureau simply didn't have the contacts that it needed with Saudi, UAE and other key players to really get this stuff sorted.

• 48:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. There is also a Ukraine element to this, I think, because Hamdeti, who is a premium, I mean, you know, I don't suppose he would come on leading, but he's a very, I mean, you know, he became powerful and wealthy because he was very close to the former head of state, Omar al-Bashir. And that's when he got started to get access to a lot of the gold resources. He then turned on his master, as it were, helped to get rid of him. Joined a transitional government for a short period of time, then took part in another coup. And within the Russian context, though, he has, it's been reported pretty widely that he's helped Russia access billions worth of Sudanese gold, sort of laundered in various

• 48:57Alastair Campbell?

  complicated ways I don't understand. Our own parliament, the Foreign Affairs Committee, did a report last summer, I think it was, reckoning that the Wagner Group was earning more than a billion dollars through this gold smuggling, which was absolutely essential for helping Russia to carry on the Ukraine effort with it, despite all the sanctions.

• 49:17Rory Stewart?

  You talked about the Ukraine angle, but it really matters for the Red Sea, I mean, Sudan matters for the Red Sea, it matters for the Sahel, it matters for North Africa, matters for the Horn of Africa.

• 49:29Alastair Campbell?

  It also matters for Israel Gaza, because of course, America needs all of these different countries, Egypt, UAE, the Saudis, to help out on that as well. So, you know, we've talked a lot about that David Miliband line about, you know, the age of impunity. I mean, you're looking to people who, on the one hand, you're saying, please stop doing this nefarious stuff that's helping this war in this part of the world. And meanwhile, we'd like you to help us do this, to try to bring peace in this other war in a different part of the world.

• 49:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. The ICG, the International Crisis Group, we've done a great interview, which people may want to listen to again, with Comfort Iro, who's the head of Crisis Group. And Crisis Group's produced a really good paper showing how peace could happen. And what they basically argue is that you've got to be prepared to negotiate with these armed people without conditions. And that the problem is that the US has been saying, we won't talk to Hometi, we need these conditions. Saudi's been saying, we can't have UAE involved in the discussions. Basically, you need to bring them to talks with no preconditions, you need an unconditional ceasefire, you need to get Cairo, Egypt and UAE on side. And you need to be very flexible. I mean, there's so many egos now involved, because

• 50:43Rory Stewart?

  there's a Saudi process, it's an Egyptian process, this Ethiopian process. But it is exactly where the US used to be able to come in and coordinate these sort of things and lean on people. And I'm afraid an example of something we talk about, which is that as the US has slightly withdrawn, and Biden, this hasn't taken a particular personal interest in Sudan, it's not that the world stabilises, it's that you end up with half a dozen other players getting involved.

• 51:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I hope the next time you meet your local councillor that she thinks at least we've tried to give it a go and explain it. But it is absolutely horrifying what's happening there and not easy at this stage to see how or where it ends.

• 51:23Rory Stewart?

  Well, a slightly depressing end, but I'm going to finish just with that final thought again, which is just to say, we must keep believing in peace and keep believing it can be done and it has been done and it can totally be done in Sudan if people believe and commit to it. It's also true that in the end, we can get to peace even with Israel, Gaza, if people believe in it and commit to it, however gloomy the world seems at the moment.

• 51:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, Rory, if we want to end on a happier note, why don't we, we're going to do this in question time, why don't we reveal that the answer to the question that we posed at the end of last week's question time?

• 51:57Rory Stewart?

  On 29th of February, the leap year question.

• 52:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, when Lucinda Borg asked us to propose to her boyfriend on her behalf, he said yes.

• 52:07Rory Stewart?

  Oh, how lovely.

• 52:10Alastair Campbell?

  Isn't that a nicer ending?

• 52:11Rory Stewart?

  That's really nice and very good ending. Piece of human happiness. Thank you.

• 52:15Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 52:15Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.