75. Trump vs. DeSantis, Sunak on the world stage, and Iran

Join Rory and Alastair as they discuss the midterm results from the US, Rupert Murdoch's apparent pivot from Donald Trump to Ron DeSantis, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping's meeting, Rishi Sunak's performance on the world stage, Thursday's Autumn Statement, problems with the NHS, the situation in Iran, David Nott, and much, much more. TRIP Christmas Live Show - Royal Albert Hall - Tuesday 13th December - Ticket Information: TRIP Plus Member Presale - Thursday 17th November 9am - sign up at therestispolitics.com. General sale - Friday 18th November 9am - the ticket link will be tweeted from @RestIsPolitics at 9am on Friday. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] The New European: theneweuropean.co.uk/trip Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport 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. 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/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:13Alastair Campbell?

  Hello. Welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:17Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:18Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, we have some moderately exciting news. And that's another live show because when we released our Palladium Show tickets.

• 1:28Rory Stewart?

  I thought it was going to be something about your bicycle again.

• 1:30Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, let me do the marketing and advertising of our big event.

• 1:35Rory Stewart?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 1:37Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'm not gonna, I might bring my bike to the live event, or I might bring something else beginning with B. Who knows?

• 1:45Rory Stewart?

  Who knows?

• 1:45Alastair Campbell?

  So when we released the Palladium Show tickets last month, they sold out, two live shows sold out in seven minutes. And I did say to them, we should have been playing Wembley, but no, did they listen? Did they help? Anyway, when we, somebody told me that they clicked on the link and there was an online queue of over three and a half thousand people. So how do we try to give access to those people? Lo and behold, in comes a phone call from the Royal Albert Hall saying, would we like to do a live show on Tuesday, December the 13th?

• 2:24Alastair Campbell?

  So listen, people, we have just over a month for you to help us fill, big ask, help us fill the Albert Hall on the evening of Tuesday, December the 13th. And before you start thinking you're going to have to get a mortgage, tickets start at £22 and they go up a bit, but you know, there'll be a lot for 22 quid.

• 2:45Rory Stewart?

  And, and I think, am I right in saying some pretty famous people have played the Royal Albert Hall? The Beatles and people?

• 2:51Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, Cheeky Chappie, has Cheeky Chappie ever been there?

• 2:54Rory Stewart?

  Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein?

• 2:56Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:57Rory Stewart?

  Exhibition bout by Muhammad Ali?

• 2:58Alastair Campbell?

  The Queen has been there every single year of her reign for the, um, the November the 11th, I imagine, the King Charles did his first, uh, last week. So we're going to do our usual thing of a pre-sale for members of The Rest Is Politics Plus, that will be at nine AM on Thursday. That's nine AM, Thursday, 17th of November. Members of The Rest Is Politics Plus will get early access to the ticket link. And if you want to take advantage of that opportunity, you can sign up at therestispolitics.com. And then general sale the following day, that's this Friday, 18th of November at nine AM. We'll put the ticket link in the podcast description.

• 3:38Alastair Campbell?

  We'll tweet it from The Rest Is Politics Twitter account at Bang On 9am Friday. So it'll be lovely to see you if you can get along to the Royal Albert Hall on the evening of Tuesday, December 13th.

• 3:52Rory Stewart?

  It's going to be sort of like Alistair and my Christmas panto. And for those of you who haven't seen us, seen us in the, uh, in the Winter Garden at Blackpool or, uh, what we did in Leicester Square, we'll try to make it a little bit fun, bit of a Christmas theme. And as Alistair says, he'll try to bring along one of his two Bs with him.

• 4:08Alastair Campbell?

  And we may, we may, but why don't we also, Roy, why don't we sort of say that we'll maybe just for a minute, we'll agree, we'll disagree disagreeably. Shall we try, should we aim for that or should, do you want to stay with the agreeable?

• 4:19Rory Stewart?

  We're definitely, we're definitely able to do that. We're definitely able to do that. Particularly if you start setting me up against your bicycle again. Anyway, now on, on with the show. Um, what have you been thinking about this week?

• 4:31Alastair Campbell?

  Thinking ahead to Thursday and the, is it budget, economic statement, fiscal event? I don't know what they call it these days. But why don't we kick off with the United States? Because I think that the midterms, you were saying a couple of weeks ago, these polls are all over the place, nobody seems to know. There's been quite a lot of coverage in the States of the extent to which polls are being used, almost like campaign vehicles. And this whole thing about the red wave, and of course, it's confusing because in Britain, Labour are red, Tories are blue. In America, the Democrats are blue and the Republicans are red. But the so-called red wave simply has not materialized despite the polls, many of the polls pointing in that direction.

• 5:15Alastair Campbell?

  And I've got to say, Rory, I have thoroughly enjoyed seeing Joe Biden with a huge spring in his step, not least as he arrived to meet President Xi at the G20 in Indonesia, but also seeing Donald Trump, even Donald Trump, looking a little bit deflated, and even Donald Trump perhaps confronting the reality that an awful lot of Americans feel like most Brits, namely that the less we see of him in the future, the better.

• 5:43Rory Stewart?

  Really amazing, isn't it? It's an incredible turnaround. I mean, there's so much stuff to unpick here. One of the things that maybe to touch on very briefly is we talk a lot about the way in which in modern politics, media affects it. And you talk a lot about the influence, the right-wing media in Britain. But of course, in the United States, the big equivalent of that is of course Fox News and the way in which Fox News essentially created and fostered Trump. And the very strong signs now that Fox News are now turning away from Trump towards dissenters.

• 6:14Alastair Campbell?

  Which sort of underlines my point and one of the reasons I so object to the way that the Murdoch media operate. I think it's possible to make the case that without Murdoch, without Twitter, without Breitbart, without these kind of very right-wing media organisations, that Trump would never have been there in the first place. So Trump is held accountable, he gets kicked out of office. And yet Murdoch feels he can just sort of say, oh, well, I backed him, but now he's gone. Now I back somebody else. And I hope American people will kind of wake up to that.

• 6:43Rory Stewart?

  Well, one of the weird things about this, which, which I'd love to sort of, your, your reaction on as somebody who's both been at the other side in media and also somebody who's worked in the central government, is the odd dance that these companies do because on the one hand, they're steering the conversation. On the other hand, they're following because they're desperately trying to hold on to readers, desperately trying to shore up their position. So the truth is that I think that Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, began to turn against Trump in about 2020. But his son Lachlan, who was running things, who's to his right, kept strong Trump support. And they then had a panic after January 6th, when they began losing viewers to new right wing, much of it online media in the United States.

• 7:28Rory Stewart?

  And Fox deliberately decided to move further to the right, further pro-Trump, to kill their competition from the right. And it's only now that they've killed their competition on the right that they're comfortable moving back away from Trump, back towards dissenters. So it's a sort of odd dance, isn't it? On the one hand, these editors and owners set the agenda. On the other hand, they're terrified about losing their, their viewers or their listeners, their readers. And they keep pitching around, chasing the competition.

• 7:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I, what, what I kind of object to is, is the way that they, the rest of the media kind of project them almost like they're independent spectator slash players within the political debate. But you call it a dance, and I'm afraid it is a dance because, you know, if you, you go back to my, my diaries, and I talked recently about Bruce Grokot, who was at Tony's parliamentary private secretary. He was really against us going to Australia, to that conference we did in opposition with all Murdoch's editors. And it was part of a dance. We were basically, we were trying to neutralize them. We were trying, I remember Tony saying, you know, if you've got, if you've got a rabid dog in the corner of the room, you want to keep it in the corner of the room.

• 8:35Alastair Campbell?

  And I think what's happened with Trump, and you know, I think to us and to a lot of British people, I think we look at Trump and even having had the experience of Johnson, we look at Trump and just think, well, he revolts and repels most British people, I think. And so we can't quite understand why there are so many people who who still kind of believe and fall on every word that he says. But I think that what Murdoch is doing, and I think you're right about the relationship between father and son, I mean Rupert Murdoch is getting on, Lachlan, it seems to me, has, you know, won the succession battle against his siblings. He is probably even to the right of Rupert Murdoch. And the relationships that get built up, you know, I don't think they're real relationships, they're they

• 9:20Alastair Campbell?

  tend to be transactional, political, professional relationships. But you end up with a real worry that you're losing your own credibility because you're attaching yourself to somebody, a political figure whose credibility is clearly on the wane. I think Trump, people talked a lot about the economy, they talked a lot about abortion. I think Trump was a big driver of the democratic vote in this in these midterms, particularly, I get the sense amongst the young. People just assumed that all these young people voted because of abortion. I think a lot of it was, you know, Biden was giving them the message, if you really want to save the future of this democracy, we've basically got to expel Trump from our politics.

• 9:57Rory Stewart?

  So this media democracy dance, I felt it even during the Brexit debate. You'd find that newspapers would, for example, endorse Theresa May's Brexit policy and then a few months later ditch it and go very aggressively, this is right wing media, very aggressively pro ERG and start attacking her policies. And I think this is part of this odd thing that I'm sort of trying to get at, which is that the editors are more insecure than you would have thought, that it's not necessarily that they have a clear idea what it is they believe and are pushing for. It's more that they're desperately trying to sense what their readers want, what their competition wants, and what they're supposed to be saying about these things.

• 10:39Alastair Campbell?

  Well, because because when Neil Kinnock lost to John Major and The Sun had run that famous front page with the last person to leave the country, please put the light out, they fed themselves this narrative, I think. That they decide who wins and loses elections. I don't think that's the case. I think in 1997, Murdoch ordered the Sun to back us because they'd worked out that we were going to win. We were going to win whatever they threw at us. And I'll tell you something I really like about Joe Biden. And I'm seeing something a little bit similar in Keir Starmer. I don't get the sense, I remember, if you remember over the whole beer gate thing, Keir Starmer photographed through a window, having a pint of beer in a place in Durham during lockdown.

• 11:22Alastair Campbell?

  And the Mail ran something like thirteen, fourteen front pages about that story, having kind of completely ignored, you know, a lot of the crimes and misdemeanors under Johnson. And although I know, because I talked to him at the time, Keir was incredibly frustrated and annoyed and angered by it. He didn't allow it inside his head in terms of the way that he was projecting himself in public. And I've noticed that about Biden. I think I've said to you before, I think Biden's great strength against Trump was he didn't let Trump inside his head. And I think for a politician who's going up against a vehement, powerful opponent like Trump, these lies, like Johnson, like the British tabloid press and the way they influence the broadcasters as well, if you allow that inside your head,

• 12:05Alastair Campbell?

  you start to make the wrong decisions. You have to stick to your own frame, your own strategic framework. And I think what I love about Biden is that, I mean, he's been written off so much. And, you know, we both sort of said, you know, I hope he doesn't stand in the next election. But I'm starting to think, you know what, he's got, he's got something very, very special which few politicians have. And it is this extraordinary resilience and an ability, when everybody's writing you off, to get up off the floor and just keep going. And I thought when I saw him with Xi in Indonesia, he just kind of looked the part, sounded the part, on top of stuff. So I thought it was fantastic to hold on to the Senate and even, I mean, I think they're going to lose the House of Representatives, but for it to be as close as it is, is a really remarkable success for Biden.

• 12:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So just quickly again, for listeners who haven't been following it necessarily in so much detail. So pretty miraculous in the Senate. If they manage to win Georgia, they've actually improved their position in the Senate, which is very remarkable and means that they're not as held hostage in the Senate by people like Joe Manchin. In other words, more right wing leaning Democrat senators, which is, which is very powerful. And it makes a lot of difference, of course, for things like Supreme Court nominations. But if they've lost the House of Representatives. His legislative agenda is in real trouble, very difficult to get stuff through through both houses. So we're going to be looking at new castes of characters emerging. Nancy Pelosi probably stepping down. New leader going to emerge Republican.

• 13:32Alastair Campbell?

  McCarthy, yeah.

• 13:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, McCarthy seems to be an interesting figure. I mean, he's got many, many very right wing Republican views, predictable views, everything from immigration through to LGBT. But he did call out Trump on January 6th, blame him for the insurrection against Capitol, which I suppose is a positive move. So he's not on the full on, full on crazy edge of the Republican Party.

• 13:53Alastair Campbell?

  There are 125 people, not just in the Congress, but also governors and so forth, 125 so far who won elections last week, who are nonetheless election deniers, people who say that election, that Trump won the election and they continue to say that. So they're still, they're still around and there's still quite a lot of them in powerful positions.

• 14:09Rory Stewart?

  Which, which then brings us to this character Ron DeSantis. So Ron DeSantis, very young, 44 years old.

• 14:16Alastair Campbell?

  Lovely family.

• 14:17Rory Stewart?

  Italian American family and, and a sort of, I mean, he's, he's part of this kind of extraordinary kind of, almost as though it's the sort of Manchurian candidate, Americans writing the script are the perfect candidate. So comes from immigrant background, goes to his Catholic high school, gets into Yale, becomes a baseball star. He captains the Yale baseball team, then joins the US Navy, having been to Harvard Law School, serves in Iraq, gets a Bronze Star in Iraq, although he's, he's actually a naval, naval lawyer, comes back and starts running in Florida. And the story is, is pretty dramatic. I mean, he, first time he ran for governor of Florida, it was a very, very close election

• 15:00Rory Stewart?

  that was only won on a recount on about 30,000 votes. But this time around, he's just secured a 14 point victory, the largest victory in Florida for 40 years and seems to be now somebody we're probably going to be talking about a great deal over the next two years because he's probably now the strongest Republican candidate for president.

• 15:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and he, talking of getting inside heads, he is definitely the one who has got inside Trump's head. I see, Trump has given him a nickname. He's now going to be, he's, he's known as Ron De Sanctimonious. I don't think it quite works as well as some of Trump's previous nicknames, but that's what we now call him apparently. He was also, I think he was slightly down, although, yes, he got a bronze medal, but he, he was in the special forces, he was in the SEAL.

• 15:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's right. He was with SEAL Team A or something.

• 15:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so SEAL Team One, yeah. And he was, and he was part, he was part of that, that surge in Fallujah. But, so he was, he was a legal advisor. So, but at the same time, I mean, I'm sure that if, if Trump is up against him, he'll say, well, if I had been there, I'd have got a gold medal, not a bronze medal. I did think, Trump, one of my favorite, well, say favorite, there's nothing comes out of Trump's mouth that I like, but he, when he said, it sort of just captured his character so well. His interview just before the elections, when he said, well, if it goes well, I deserve all the credit, and if it goes badly, I deserve none of the blame, which of course is exactly how he operates. But what's interesting, not just Murdoch, I think a lot of politicians, and of course,

• 16:30Alastair Campbell?

  DeSantis, he, he was, this is why Trump hates him so much now. He, he benefited at one stage from Trump's endorsement, and he actively sought it, and now clearly sees himself as the main guy.

• 16:40Rory Stewart?

  He's seen as, by many people in the States, as much more dangerous than Trump, because he has many of the same right wing views, does a lot of very outrageous things. You know, he campaigned with his kids in MAGA shirts. He said that he was going to be, you know, that they were learning how to build the wall. He, I think we talked about this in the show a few weeks ago, but he, he managed to persuade a friend of his to put a whole series of Latin American immigrants onto a plane from the Mexican-Texas border, and flew them to Martha's Vineyard, which is the kind of super sheeshy, privileged home of the Democratic elite, and unloaded these immigrants in the middle of this, this place. I guess it would be a bit like, if you could imagine, sort of a very luxurious

• 17:25Rory Stewart?

  version of Islington floating off the British coast. And actually, the, the residents of Martha's Vineyard, I think, have responded relatively warmly and generously to this unexpected arrival, and they're trying to sue people. But it's this kind of very, very expensive thing, it cost nearly a million dollars to pull off this stunt. And most famously, he refused to lock down at all over Covid. In fact, he went further than that. He passed laws saying that any cruise ships or restaurants or anyone who tried to ask for vaccination were not allowed to ask for vaccination. And initially, this was very unpopular and later it became very popular. And he seems to have a very peculiar form of political genius. And I was, I was thinking, we keep thinking about people to interview, but I'm very interested in the guy that he ran against, who's called

• 18:05Rory Stewart?

  Charlie Crist. So Charlie Crist is, is a man who was the Republican governor of Florida, and then essentially was won over by Obama and decided the Republican Party was racist, joined the Democratic Party, won a very Republican Congress seat in Florida for the Democrats. So he seemed like the perfect candidate. He'd been Republican governor, very, very popular Republican governor of Florida. I think he got 63% approval ratings across party. So it seemed like he was the perfect person to take on Ron DeSantis because he had the Republican credibility, the Democrats would vote for him, he'd get moderate Republicans, he'd be Nancy Trump. And he was entirely crushed, I mean crushed by, you know, say 14, 15 points this election. So if we want to understand DeSantis, maybe we should have

• 18:50Rory Stewart?

  a chat with, with Charlie Crist someday.

• 18:52Alastair Campbell?

  Let's bear that in mind. And the other thing, of course, I mean, there's been a lot of debates about the extent to which the Roe Wade abortion judgment and Biden's very, very strong stance on that. DeSantis has changed the law in his own state to, he brought in a bill that bans elective abortions after 15 weeks, down from 24. He's also on education. He voted against some of the federal education programs that George Bush was trying to, to bring in. So he's, he's, he's way out on the right. There's no doubt about that. And I think a little bit like here, Sunak is benefiting from not being Johnson and not being trust. But actually, when you look at Sunak at heart, there's

• 19:34Alastair Campbell?

  something, I think, very right wing and quite dangerous there. Likewise with DeSantis, in terms of the way that we talk about him, and a lot of Americans talk about him, he benefits from not being Trump. But actually, is, you know, a lot of, I think a lot of Americans I talked to would say that Trump was less dangerous in a way because he was kind of so off the reservation. Whereas DeSantis is somebody who, you know, really believes what he believes. He's got an A star rating from the National Rifle Association. You don't get those, you don't get those without loving your guns.

• 20:04Rory Stewart?

  But there's a lot that's very, very interesting about his victory. So normally you'd expect the vote for a Republican candidate, a bit like votes for conservatives in Britain, to be more towards the elder end of the spectrum and more towards whiter voters. And it's true, you know, he gets a lot of men aged 65 and up, but he also gets a very, you know, gets 61% of men aged 18 to 29 in that vote. And most striking, he managed to perform very, very well with Latino voters, 56 to 43% of Latino voters. So this is a, this is a big thing and it's all to do with a seat called Miami Dade County. But it's, it's a very interesting indication of the way in which DeSantis is going to

• 20:47Rory Stewart?

  be trying to reshape Republican politics and the way in which the assumptions that the Democratic Party's had, which traditionally, of course, been that minority ethnic voters will vote for them, may not be true anymore.

• 20:57Alastair Campbell?

  And talking of ratings, so you've got A plus from the National Rifle Association and he's got a zero rating from the Human Rights Campaign. And that's related to his voting, his voting record on LGBTQ issues. So anyway, you're right, we are going to be talking about him a lot. Shall we talk a little bit about President Biden meeting President Xi Jinping for the first time as leaders? They know each other, they've met each other before. And interestingly, the mood music and the body language, and I know that's often all we have to go on at these big events where they sit and talk for three hours and then they come out and read a few talking points. But I've read a very interesting, and we talked recently about Kevin Rudd, and Kevin Rudd, former Australian Prime Minister, who's somebody who I think genuinely understands

• 21:42Alastair Campbell?

  China and is, I think, quite knows Xi Jinping quite well. And his analysis that I read this morning was that Through all the the warm body language that actually Xi Jinping's red lines were still very, very clear and Taiwan was still very much one of them. So although they said all the right things and, you know, I'd be very alarmed if they said we did want a nuclear war as opposed to we don't. It was a really interesting meeting, but I think what what I love about these really big international summits is that you don't really find out what's gone on.

• 22:14Rory Stewart?

  I noticed that the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, had been selling it as a meeting that he hoped would last almost two hours. And I think it lasted more than three in the end.

• 22:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Rory Stewart?

  Which is very, very positive. And there was some interesting bits of sort of stage management. Apparently, the fact that Xi Jinping put Biden on his other side in the position of host rather than guest was considered a real compliment.

• 22:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it was, by the it was, by the way, I told you about when we did the Hong Kong handover. Oh, my God, did they make sure that we were in the that we were not in the host position. Yeah.

• 22:45Rory Stewart?

  So Kevin Rudd's written a very, very good long piece, which is the lead article in Foreign Affairs this month on Xi Jinping, which is, and so, I mean, unusual because he's an Australian Prime Minister who speaks fluent Mandarin.

• 22:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. And also his successor, Albanese, there's there's massive coverage in Australia for his planned meeting with Xi Jinping, because of course, you know, that relationship, we talked a little bit with Julia Gillis about this, the Australia-China relationship is has been pretty tense and is incredibly important to that part of the world. So, I mean, is and I thought that his, again, Xi Jinping on Ukraine and on Putin, he wasn't exactly putting himself in the Putin camp. He wasn't necessarily saying the things that we might want him to, but he was definitely, I think Biden will have gone away from that thinking Putin will have been a bit alarmed by it.

• 23:38Rory Stewart?

  So there's something very interesting in these meetings, which I'd love to get you think about, because you saw them at so many different senior levels. My experience often going as a minister to, I guess I was going to G seven, G eight, G twenty meetings, but at the level of a minister, not at the level of a head of state, is that they were very, very scripted in advance and it was very difficult. To really get change. I remember trying to push very hard to move the G seven on Ebola and get more money. And there were these big meetings in Paris and we turned up, we'd be there for two days and we'd all sit around. And I'd get my speaking points and I'd push very hard on Ebola, but you're largely having a kind of dialogue of the deaf.

• 24:19Rory Stewart?

  Because all the other ministers have got their own speaking points, they've got their own civil servants around them, they've already decided what their line to take is. And the chance of my winning over six strangers around a table to put another hundred million dollars each into Ebola, if they haven't already decided to do it before they come to meeting, is pretty minimal. Nevertheless, I guess sometimes things change. I'd love some thoughts on whether you've ever seen these meetings really produce something fresh and unexpected.

• 24:42Alastair Campbell?

  I think they, I definitely have, and I think they, I think they change mainly at the bilateral level. So when you were saying that, I was, the one that popped into my head, in fact, several that popped into my head. When we were looking specifically for Bill Clinton to engage in relation to Northern Ireland. And get him to do things that were really politically quite risky and quite bold. Which had we not been there physically in person with him, it would have been much harder to do. Because you'd have been going through the usual layers. So, you know, and you, you have these summits. So like at the moment, G twenty, but, and okay, they all sit around the table and they'll all read their talking points. There'll be some engagement there.

• 25:26Alastair Campbell?

  But then the bilaterals and the trilaterals, that bilateral where it's just two guys head to head, trilateral, you get three of them. I'll give you another example, the, the summit, the European summit that led to Wim Deussenberg being appointed head of the, of the European Central Bank. That was a meeting at which I don't think that was a certain outcome when we arrived. And that came through some really brutal discussions involving Tony, Shirak, Cole, Wim Koch. I think the Dutch were, were the hosts and Wim Koch, I remember getting very, very angry about the way that Shirak was behaving. But so, and then, and then there are other things where I can remember during Kosovo conflict, I think the Germans were in the chair.

• 26:10Alastair Campbell?

  Of the European Council and Schroder was therefore in a position where I think we felt and the others felt we could move a bit more and I think he did move a bit more. So I think stuff, you know, lots of stuff gets done. Um, and I, you know, we said before, I wouldn't underestimate the importance of these personal relationships. If I'm, if I was Rishi Sunak at this event, I really do think it matters that he gets to know in a kind of more than superficial way in all the limited time that they've got, but really tries to get a sense of the character of the people that he's dealing with. And, and so it's, it's impossible to quantify, but I, I, I wouldn't underestimate the, the, the stuff that can get done.

• 26:46Rory Stewart?

  Reputation matters, doesn't it? I mean, I was talking to senior Americans who were very, very dismissive of Liz, Liz Truss and a bit terrified of her. And you got the impression that if she picked up the phone, they would have treated what she said with enormous skepticism.

• 27:00Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think they weren't terrified, they weren't terrified, Roy. I think they.

• 27:03Rory Stewart?

  Well, sorry, I don't terrified. I don't terrified in the sense she's going to explode the world, but terrified in the sense that they didn't think she was a rational, stable, sensible interlocutor. I mean, everything they'd seen of her when she was Foreign Secretary had worried them. They hadn't liked the, the tone of those interactions at all.

• 27:18Alastair Campbell?

  I think Sunak's problem at these, because there is something, they're obviously, look, they're, they're all fascinated with each other. That's the other thing you have to remember about this. So when there is a, when there is a new person on the block, they all want to suss them out. They want to work out whether they like them, whether they feel for them, what they're really like. And I thought it was like, for example, I, I got a very funny message from somebody at the Foreign Office who, he, he WhatsApp me a picture of Sunak's first family photo at one of his outings and there he was right, put away at the back row at the top. Um, kind of, you know, almost like the junior position. And this guy in the Foreign Office texted me and said, just said, wouldn't have happened in your day, question mark, question mark, question mark.

• 27:59Alastair Campbell?

  And so you do, you know, part of the job of statesmanship and diplomacy is to get noticed in the way that you want to get noticed. Now, maybe he wants to get noticed as being, you know, quiet, unassuming, not shouting too much. I mean, he, he had a real go at Lavrov today, but that's a kind of fairly, that's an easy hit in that audience. Um, I saw a picture of him with Modi and again, the, you know, the body language is why. You know, when you see Joe Biden, he always has this ability, whether it's the hand on the back or the grabbing of the hand, he has this ability to look like he's the main guy, even with Xi Jinping, I thought. Whereas Sunak's got us sort of, he does look

• 28:40Alastair Campbell?

  very, I don't know, there's something sort of very flat about him. And I think that, you know, it doesn't matter in the long term, but it matters in the short term.

• 28:49Rory Stewart?

  It's also true, though, that we've seen a lot of photographs of him with his arm around Macron, with him engaging with Fumio Kishida, the Japanese premier, and with Justin Trudeau. And you get a sense that there's a very warm smile from Trudeau in that picture. I think he seems much more, he seems to be being welcomed much more into those gatherings than either Boris Johnson or Liz Truss.

• 29:14Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, by a mile. I mean, I think the thing about, look, Johnson was viewed initially as quite interesting and quite colourful. But it's like Macron said, once somebody has blatantly lied to your face, it's very, very hard to get them back and deal with them a straight way. And Truss, I think, was just seen as this sort of comic absurdity. And just as we couldn't understand how on earth has Liz Truss become Prime Minister, nor could they. And it said something very weird about Britain and British politics. And, you know, what Sunak has managed to do is at least, you know, not make us feel that it's utterly ridiculous that he's there. So shall we take a break and then talk about Thursday's big event?

• 29:53Rory Stewart?

  Very good. See you in a sec.

• 30:35Speaker 02

  The Great Game, Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 30:40Speaker 02

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

• 30:49Speaker 04

  A FRAGO that says to kill the president of Russia?

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:56Speaker 04

  New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 31:00Speaker 05

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  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

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  We have two tight friendly key.

• 31:15Speaker 04

  Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it Duffy!

• 31:23Speaker 04

  Bear Hunt.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

• 31:44Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 31:46Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 31:48Alastair Campbell?

  And this week's podcast, again, I'm glad to say, is sponsored by my favourite newspaper, the one for which I write a diary every week, The New European. And you love it, don't you Rory?

• 31:58Rory Stewart?

  I do. I think it's a really, it's a lovely thing. It's a really lovely thing. It's a great addition. And that's one of the things that I really like about it, I think, is particularly their cultural pages and the way in which they investigate European culture, European sport, and of course, gives space to you to write your fine columns. What's your recent column about?

• 32:14Alastair Campbell?

  This week's, I've written about getting a new passport. I have to say, fair play, it was pretty painless as a process, but very painful to look at this. It's not even blue, by the way, it's black.

• 32:28Rory Stewart?

  Read the wonderful, wonderful article by Alistair in The New European. Do, do look at it. It's extraordinary. Don't always agree with everything in it, but it provokes me, keeps me alert, keeps me awake, and it's definitely essential reading every week.

• 32:41Alastair Campbell?

  Genuinely, the reason I love it is because so much of our media drips with this kind of nationalistic poison. And I think that what the slogan is thinking without frontiers. And I think that's what it does. It deserves your support. And if you want to do something positive about the state of our media, then support the New European with a subscription. Special offer just for the Rest is Politics listeners, best value out there, just one pound a week. You get full access to their website. That includes the digital edition of the paper each week. And if you're old fashioned like I am, and you want the actual feel of a newspaper in your hands, you get that for just an extra one pounds a week. So go to www.the new european.co.uk forward slash T R I P.

• 33:25Alastair Campbell?

  Sign up today and you will not regret it. Talking of regrets, let's talk about 12 years of conservative economic mismanagement, Rory.

• 33:34Rory Stewart?

  Yes, very good, very good, very good. Hey, I was looking at this, actually, I was, I was trying to get my head around this because I was looking at the amazing performance, actually, relative performance under the Labour government, 13 years, when British relative growth was very high. And the story actually goes back, of course, to Mrs Thatcher. Very, very dramatic change, continued under Blair and Brown, but started with, with Margaret Thatcher.

• 33:57Alastair Campbell?

  A blip with Black Wednesday.

• 33:58Rory Stewart?

  But Britain for more than 100 years, from, from 1870 to 1980, year on year collapsed in relation to Europe, Germany and France. So in, in 1870, the average person in Britain was 25% wealthier than the average person in the United States. And by 1980, the average person in the United States was almost 50% wealthier than the average person in Britain. And that was only really turned around through the eighties and nineties into the 2000s. And we then went into a very, very unusual period where for the first time in 110 years, through Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown,

• 34:39Rory Stewart?

  suddenly we were in a situation in which our GDP per capita growth, so the individual output, was rising faster than any of our competitors, Japan, United States, Germany, France. And actually, our productivity was second, our productivity gains year on year was second only to the United States. And our employment performance, particularly under, under you, under Labour, was very, very strong. So by the time 2008 happened, Britain had been through a pretty remarkable period from, from, from 1980 through, almost 30 years of extraordinary transformation economically.

• 35:13Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I don't think anybody would argue that we've had that in the last decade or so. And I'll tell you why, my feeling, looking ahead to Thursday, it's obvious to me what Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak are going to try to do. They're going to try essentially to present the past as a foreign country, and that there's a new start with the new government. But I think it's very hard for Hunt to do that, particularly at a time when the nurses are going on strike, we're talking about going on strike. Our economic problems did not start with Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng. Now, I do think that there is a brilliant question, which, you know, we've got lots of questions about Liz Truss, but there was a brilliant question saying, you know, how much money does an individual have to lose as in order for there to be

• 35:54Alastair Campbell?

  charges of misconduct in public office? So 30 billion. I mean, there's, when I saw the seven prime ministers at the Senat standing there, Major, as you say, you know, whatever, whether you're Tory or Labour, you look at John Major, you think, mm, serious guy, Tony Blair, serious guy, you think, you know, Gordon Brown, really serious guy in the economy. Cameron, again, say what you like, but he kind of looked and sounded the part. Theresa May, as you say, dignity, duty, hard work. And then you see Johnson and Truss at the end of that line, and you think the damage that they have done to the country. But I think this, this problem with the health, I mean, I've been really thinking a lot about the health service in recent days, not least because of some of the people I've been meeting. And, you know, they cannot get away with this trick, that they're now having, you

• 36:38Alastair Campbell?

  know, had austerity, where public services got, you know, I'm not going to say cut to the bone, but the so-called fat taken out, and now Hunt comes along, his government having made so many mistakes, Brexit going so badly wrong, but austerity, I'm afraid, Rory, austerity is a big part of this story. And the idea that we now can have more austerity, and they talk the talk about we're going to look after the poor, we're going to look after the vulnerable. They, they can't, how, how, where are they going to target these cuts? Where are they going to find the fat? And I'm, I am, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, Rory, but I am absolutely moving to the view, particularly when I saw Peter Thiel's Palantir in the frame for this NHS England data contract, I really am moving to the

• 37:22Alastair Campbell?

  view that maybe there is a part of the conservative right that thinks that National Health Service has always been a terrible socialist experiment. The only way we're going to get rid of it is actually to run it into the ground because it feels like that's what's happening.

• 37:33Rory Stewart?

  No, I didn't. Well, I think that's a bit over the top. I don't think it's a conspiracy.

• 37:37Alastair Campbell?

  Well, come back. Okay, come back on it, though. What has happened to the health service did not start to happen with trust.

• 37:43Rory Stewart?

  So the fundamental driving of it is that as we get older and as drugs get more expensive and as our demands on the health service go up, we've had years where demand on the health service, and this started from 2010 onwards, was rising by 10% a year. So even though NHS funding was protected through most of that period in real terms and actually received big injections of cash under Theresa May and under Boris Johnson, who spotted this issue, it's never been enough to keep up with the costs. Now, there's another thing we very strongly agree on, you and I, which is that the decision to leave the European Union

• 38:25Rory Stewart?

  has made it even more difficult to bring in doctors and nurses, which has created a massive labour shortage. And then the NHS was hit very, very hard and very painfully by Covid.

• 38:36Alastair Campbell?

  And the other big factor, though, Rory, is social care. You've now got so many of the beds being filled by people who are fit to leave but have nowhere to go.

• 38:46Rory Stewart?

  Huge problem of bed blocking. And of course, one of the issues is that we've got a shortage of beds in Britain compared to places like Germany and France. So there are huge structural issues, but I'm afraid that my pushback would be to say that Keir Starmer and Labour don't have an obvious policy alternative because the people who... The best case against austerity that was made in 2010 was that it was cheap to borrow money. So the answer is, people should have borrowed because interest rates were very low and therefore we could borrow and spend and there wasn't much consequence. But that's no longer true. We're now in a world of much higher global interest rates. The markets are much

• 39:27Rory Stewart?

  less comfortable with more borrowing and spending. Britain's debt is at a very high level, whether that is mismanagement or Covid or whatever's driven it, it's at a very high level. And therefore, the room for manoeuvre is very limited. And, you know... With Keir Starmer 20 points ahead at some point to get to our agree and disagreeability and balance out some of the criticisms, I'm going to have to ask, what is he going to do? Because it's not, it's not going to be easy for him.

• 39:52Alastair Campbell?

  No, it won't. And I mean, I see today, I've not read it, but I just saw on one of the news websites that he's talking today about targeting some of the multinationals and dividends and, you know, wealth tax and all this sort of air. Listen, I agree with you, that debate has to happen. But where we are this week, see, I, I think we have to go back to, you talk about Margaret Thatcher. I think one of the most effective pieces of political communication, but actually in policy terms, one of the worst pieces of political communication, was when Margaret Thatcher started to compare the economy to a household budget. And then along comes David Cameron, along comes George Osborne, and they, they then moved to a different analogy, which is that we, you know, I think their phrase is we've maxed out on the credit card. And now we're into the fiscal black

• 40:37Alastair Campbell?

  hole. And that's the new kind of way of them describing this fiscal black hole. And all it is, is the gap between forecasts on debt, and of course, the O B, the Office of Budget Responsibility have finally, this was trust and quartings, one of their many big mistakes, they kept them out, brought into it. But it's the gap between the forecast national debt and what they would like it to be. Now, borrowing is one means by which that can be filled. But the other means by which you can do it, actually, this is where trust did have a point, is where is the strategy, and I agree, this can go across both the main parties, where is a kind of proper imaginative, forward looking strategy for growth? So

• 41:18Alastair Campbell?

  I would say the black hole, the fiscal black hole, is the latest version of the same political choice that Hunt was part of when he was that in, in the Osborne Cameron cabinet doing austerity mark one.

• 41:29Rory Stewart?

  We should talk a lot, a lot more about growth, maybe in a future program. But I would point out, just in case listeners get the completely opposite point of view, the idea of Balancing your budget is not a daft idea. And remember Gordon Brown had famously a golden rule that he set, which was basically a rule of fiscal austerity. He set a rule and put it in legislation that he was going to attempt to eliminate the current deficit over a cycle and balance the budget.

• 41:57Alastair Campbell?

  And that borrowing had to be of investment, which is a sensible approach.

• 42:01Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. So he was not actually going down the full extent of people who think there's no reason to think about balancing your budget. You can just keep borrowing and just keep pretending you can get growth the other end. So there is, there's a balance in all of these things. And I think that's why these things are much more a question of judgment than some pure bit of economic science. Iran, let's, let's just on, on closing, you, you've been thinking a bit about Iran. And I think one of the things has been the first death sentence passed against the protesters.

• 42:29Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, it's worse than that, isn't it? I mean, I, I, I saw today, there was, I can't remember where I saw it, but sort of a kind of graphic, a picture, tiny, tiny headshots of young, of teenagers who have been disappeared, have been locked up, have been arrested. And so you've got, yeah, you've got the first death sentence linked to the protests. And, you know, I think what's, what's interesting about this is when it started, so here we are, we're going into the World Cup, England are playing Iran. It's in Qatar, there's been massive focus on the politics and geopolitics of Qatar. And I think it's a bit unfair that these footballers and football managers are sort of expected to be diplomats and politicians. But in the, one of England's, you know, in England's group, there's Iran.

• 43:14Alastair Campbell?

  You know, what's, I, look, I could be wrong about this, but I, I have no sense of a British foreign policy position on Iran. Now, I, I know they'll have one and I know that they'll be, you know, making their case in, in certain fora, but I have no real sense of it because I don't really get the feeling that it's kind of top of the list of priorities.

• 43:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's a problem, isn't it? So James Cleverly has put out a statement saying that together with partners, with European partners, he's sending a message, so.

• 43:42Alastair Campbell?

  And the European Union have put more sanctions on them.

• 43:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and, and as has the UK. So the UK has announced its own round of fresh sanctions against, you know, the communications minister and the cyber police chief and people. It is, though, very, very disturbing what's going on. And of course, it's been going on now for about eight weeks. It's spread to about 140 cities. Very difficult to predict. I'm afraid I tend to be on the gloomy side in Iran. I've lived through too many situations for 30 years where people say the regime is finished and a revolution is coming. And I'm afraid I still remain pretty gloomy. I mean, the other place which is almost entirely unreported and is horrifying is Afghanistan. Well, Afghanistan, I was actually about to say, sorry, so many of these places, is ongoing protests in Myanmar against luxury hunters. So there you have people

• 44:29Rory Stewart?

  3D printing guns to take on police in the streets, thousands of protesters. One of the big human rights activists has just been killed, been executed by the government. And it's not stopping. My friends in Myanmar are out on the streets, day in, day out. People are going, begin to take refuge up in tribal areas, in the hills. And the police and army are just worn down by daily string of protests. Whether they can continue, I don't know. But it's this very, very odd echoes.

• 44:59Alastair Campbell?

  The courage of these people, the courage of these young people in Iran as well. I'll tell you, I was at a dinner last night, and I met this extraordinary guy called David Nott. Have you heard of David Nott? He's a war surgeon.

• 45:11Rory Stewart?

  Yes, yeah, he's a wonderful man, very famous man. Yeah. Tell listeners a bit about him, just in case they haven't.

• 45:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I met him at a kind of social event. And he was literally yesterday, just back from his fourth trip to Ukraine. And so he's a surgeon, but he's a surgeon who has specialised in war zones. And he flies out to these places. But now what he's doing in Ukraine, he's training Ukrainian doctors in war surgery. And it was extraordinary to listen to him. But the most interesting observation that he made, I think he became very well known through the work that he did in Syria. He's written a book, he's founded a foundation, which his wife runs, which is the David Nott Foundation. They raise all the money to send out doctors. He goes out.

• 45:59Alastair Campbell?

  But he made the point about the difference between the work that he was doing in Syria and the work that he's now doing in Ukraine. And he said what he found extraordinary about being in Ukraine up to yesterday was the, he described it as the extraordinary optimism that is there, which really kind of hit me in the eyes of how, how do you stay optimistic with all that's going on? And he said that the, one of the reasons, and this was which he contrasted with when he was in Aleppo and places like that, was that in Ukraine, they really do feel the support from outside. They really do feel that there are countries and people and peoples and governments that are absolutely supporting them, whereas he felt in Syria, people felt deserted, abandoned,

• 46:44Alastair Campbell?

  left behind, and as a result their morale collapsed far more quickly. But honestly, extraordinary guy. And I, I just think, you know, whatever we think we do that's useful with our lives and you hear something like that, that he puts himself to going out to these places and training Ukrainian doctors to, to do things that until recently, they never imagined they would have to do.

• 47:04Rory Stewart?

  Amazing. So one, one lovely little story about him is that he had, he had lunch with the Queen, the late Queen in, in, I guess, eight years ago. And he was finding it very difficult to speak about his experience, I think he'd just been in Aleppo. And so she told him to take 20 minutes to sit with the corgis and feed them biscuits, which she's always remembered her very fondly about.

• 47:24Alastair Campbell?

  Which is, she's not wrong about the comfort of, of our Canaan friends.

• 47:29Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, I think on, on the comfort corgis and the amazing service of David Nott, time to bring it to an end. Thank you.

• 47:36Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.