198. King Charles on the world stage, Argentina's Brexit, and the real Henry Kissinger

How did King Charles perform at COP? Is Milei more Reagan than Trump? Who was the real Henry Kissinger? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all this and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. 📱Protect your tech valuables with our exclusive 20% off discount at http://uk.mous.co/TRIP🎒 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:58Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:00Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:01Alastair Campbell?

  Lots to talk about, COP28, not least King Charles' Choice of Thai, Resolution Foundation, very, very interesting report on the economic situation in the UK. We're going to talk about Argentina and whether the new President Millet is planning to have his Brexit moment, pulling out of South America's common market, Mercosur. And we want to talk about Henry Kissinger, the good and the bad, I guess. And I think if I can just very briefly, Rory, start with a couple of other tributes, that's to two very good friends of mine who've died in the last few days. It was a bit of a horrible week. Two calls of that horrible got bad news. First, Alistair Darling, which was a genuine shock, and then Gleneys Kinnock, which was less of a shock because she's been ill with Alzheimer's for six years and had

• 2:46Alastair Campbell?

  been ailing in recent weeks. But both the sort of political figures Rory, I think that any reader of your book would think we need more of.

• 2:56Rory Stewart?

  And give us a little bit of a sense of what they were both like, what the similarities were between them, the differences. Did they come from different parts of the Labour Party? Did they have slightly different trajectories?

• 3:06Alastair Campbell?

  Alistair Darling was the ultimate team player. I can never, ever remember him asking for anything in terms of why aren't I doing this? Or why aren't I being promoted when so and so is? He was one of three people who was in the Cabinet from start to finish, 97 to 2010, the other two being Gordon Brown and Jack Straw.

• 3:26Rory Stewart?

  And everybody else was perpetually asking, why haven't I got promoted?

• 3:29Alastair Campbell?

  Not perpetually, no, but I think you always had a sense with most politicians, as you well know, that they're sort of thinking, where do I fit into all this? I can never remember him asking, shouldn't I be doing this? Shouldn't I be doing that? Why did they do? I never, ever recall any situation like that.

• 3:44Rory Stewart?

  I know, because I never asked for any of that stuff when I was in Australia.

• 3:48Alastair Campbell?

  You wrote creepy letters to David Cameron, you've admitted it.

• 3:51Rory Stewart?

  That's certainly true, but I never contacted the communications director asking for this, that or the other.

• 3:56Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think he asked anybody. And even when, obviously, he's best known for his time as Chancellor during the crash. And that was very, very difficult for everybody. But even then, I don't recall him complaining, I don't recall him grumbling. In fact, there's one very funny moment. After I'd left Number Ten and he was Chancellor, he called me in advance of a budget. And as you know, budgets are pretty sacrosanct and I was technically an outsider. He said, I know I can trust you, but please you mustn't tell people that I've shown you the budget. And anyway, helped him with his speech and so forth. And then meanwhile, there was lots of kind of bad, he was clearly being briefed against from some quarters.

• 4:32Rory Stewart?

  Within the Labour Party?

• 4:33Alastair Campbell?

  Within the Labour Party. And anyway, the next meeting I went to, there was somebody was burbling away and he passed this cutting across to me. And he was in Korean and so I don't speak Korean. And I said, what's this? And he scribbled in English, he says, South Korean press, North Korean finance minister has been executed for missing targets.

• 4:56Alastair Campbell?

  And then said, so we shouldn't really grumble, should we? And he was a very shouldn't grumble kind of person. Glennis was obviously, first came to prominence as the wife of, as it were, Labour leader Neill Kinney. But then went on to be a pretty formidable politician herself as an MEP and then as a minister in Gordon's government. And she was one of our closest friends, absolutely wonderful woman. And again, I think people forget just how hard it was for Neill and Glennis. Not least because if people think our press is bad today, it was even worse back then. And Glennis just bore it all with incredible sort of dignity. And she was somebody who was utterly passionate, committed all her life to progressive socialist causes.

• 5:39Alastair Campbell?

  But of course, in a sense, lived in his shadow, then emerged from his shadow. And I think the other thing I'd say about Glennis is I don't think I've ever met a couple quite as close as those two. And it's going to be very, very hard to imagine Neill without her, to be honest.

• 5:52Rory Stewart?

  And just very quickly on dementia, do you have many friends who've been through it? What are your reflections on it?

• 5:57Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's really horrible. I think the worst thing is this sense that you're losing people while they're still with you. I think Glennis is probably the first that we've seen, as it were, quite close up like that. I've got lots of friends who've lost parents and so forth. And interesting, when we saw Neil and Rachel and Steve, their two kids, on the day, Stephen Kinnock, who's now an MP, as you know, he made a really interesting observation. He said, the one thing that the death has done, he said, it's the first time I've started to be able to remember her, what she was like before, because the last six years has just been this sort of steady decline. And the first few years, she was, you could tell it was still all Glenys. She was jolly, she was chivvying people along,

• 6:41Alastair Campbell?

  she used to sing all the time. And then just latterly, becoming very anxious, very scared, not recognizing people. And in a way, although it's horrible that she's died, the one sort of blessing, in a way, I think Neil was desperate that she wouldn't go into a home. And I think they were getting very, very close to feeling it was unmanageable. So, no, it's a horrible, horrible, horrible disease. Anyway, shall we-

• 7:04Rory Stewart?

  Gosh, on we go, yes.

• 7:05Alastair Campbell?

  Cheer ourselves up with-

• 7:07Rory Stewart?

  Yes, well-

• 7:07Alastair Campbell?

  King Charles' tie.

• 7:08Rory Stewart?

  Before we get on the tie, let me, I'll let you get on to the tie in a second. But I think the first thing is, real shouts out to the King here, he made the big opening statement at the COP summit, which is a huge honour. And I was talking to somebody who's very close to some of the key climate negotiators, who were just saying, thank goodness, there was somebody who was actually standing up saying-

• 7:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Al Gore said the same.

• 7:30Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. That we're in real trouble. And exactly as Al Gore recognised, the desperate need of somebody to say, we're not on track, this is going horribly wrong, and we need a sense of urgency, because there was a loss of sort of complacency around the edge.

• 7:43Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think, serious question, had the Queen been in her heart as committed to the cause as King Charles is and has been for a long time, could you ever have imagined her making that sort of speech?

• 7:56Rory Stewart?

  No, no, I don't-

• 7:57Alastair Campbell?

  So something has changed?

• 7:58Rory Stewart?

  I think something's absolutely changed. I mean, I think part of the key of the speech is you can see his voice again and again, and the words, the language. But it's also, I think you must feel this a lot, that it's very difficult to make a speech unless you are both emotionally committed, but also quite intellectually involved. I mean, the speech only has life, because he spends a lot of time thinking about this, reading about this, caring about this, which allows him to speak with a certain kind of fluency. I mean, unless you're an extraordinary actor. And no, I don't think it would have been the same with the Queen. It's also an amazing coming together of two things, isn't it? This is something he's cared about for forty, fifty years. And has kept pushing away on. And now he's king and he's really able to lean into it.

• 8:37Rory Stewart?

  And a real blessing, I think, also, because it's something which isn't, despite the best attempts of bits the populist far right to make it political. It's basically not political. It's something that the monarch can really lean into public policy. He's also been doing a huge amount about food waste. He's very interested in how terrible Britain's recycling rates are. These, I think, are things that he can make a real difference to people's lives without being accused of playing party politics.

• 9:01Alastair Campbell?

  And yet, on it not being political, what is extraordinary about the central role that he took is it's only a year since Rishi Sunak essentially said, no, you can't go, which I thought was a pretty extraordinary thing to do. And I wonder whether part of the strident nature, and I don't mean strident, I'm talking that neutral there, not negative or positive. Part of the nature of the speech that he made was perhaps just a little response to, well, I've always gone on about this and I'm not going to stop going about it, even if occasionally somebody tries to stop me.

• 9:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a small technical detail on last year, which is that there was also advice from government lawyers about whether he could make a visit before he'd made his first state visit. Something to do with foreign trips for first state visits. I also think, just to step back into the bigger COP subject, we've got this fantastic interview with Cristiano Figueres. And Al Gore very kindly now agreed to do an interview with us once COP is through, which we're looking forward to a lot. But the figures are pretty stark. China has emitted more in the last eight years than entire UK emissions since seventeen fifty. China is now responsible for thirty percent of global emissions. India is growing six to eight percent a year, which means its economy will double every ten years. These are going to be. Huge challenges for the world.

• 10:17Alastair Campbell?

  And the third big emitter is still the United States, I think. So we're still talking about the three, the big, big countries of the world are still pumping it out there.

• 10:26Rory Stewart?

  And there's fundamentally still a point, and we've looked at polling around this. The public says that they care about climate, but they also are very keen to keep energy prices down and to dig in the North Sea. And fundamentally, it feels as though people still don't want to pay. We still want to live beyond our means and it's going to be impossible to try to keep climate change at even two degrees if people are not prepared to take the financial steps, which is going to cost ultimately governments a lot of money. And at the moment, unfortunately, it's costing the poor a lot of money because the burden of pushing change and climate is falling on the poor.

• 11:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think the interesting polling, we should perhaps put it in the newsletter. Stan Greenberg, who used to do lots with me when we were in the Labour Party, when we were in government.

• 11:10Rory Stewart?

  Who I saw last week.

• 11:11Alastair Campbell?

  Indeed, and whose, whose wife is an American politician. And he's been doing a lot of polling in different parts of the world on climate. And he actually showed me the polling that he's been doing in the UK. And I was surprised actually in the, after all this debate about Ule's and Sunak kind of, you know, seeming to sort of soften his approach and so forth, that there is still a growing number of people who, who do want real and urgent action to deal with this. So a third of the population are less convinced. And he asked a specific question about whether this whole thing about woke, whether it was woke for companies to take a climate into account in their investment decisions. And very resoundly, no, it's not, including and even more so in the red wall.

• 11:55Alastair Campbell?

  So I thought it was, it was interesting that you're right that there's still support for oil and gas exploration. But on the big picture, I would say that the public is ready and able and willing to hear a message that says, we are going to have to make change. Now, it's true that they probably don't want to have to make the change themselves in their own lives, although lots of people are fine with that as well.

• 12:15Rory Stewart?

  There's a lovely profile of a woman called Frederica Otto, who teaches at Imperial. And she is part of a new generation of climate scientists who are really beginning to spell. The real world day to day consequences. So she points out that the horrible floods in Libya were fifty times more likely because of climate change and had fifty percent more impact than they would have had, that the heat waves in Southern Europe and the US this year were virtually impossible without climate change. And that the only way we're going to get on top of this is by stopping the burning of fossil fuels, which is, I suppose, the other controversy, because you saw that the president of COP

• 12:52Alastair Campbell?

  Olajawa.

• 12:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, who we talked about in the Christiana Figueres interview, has been recorded saying he can't see any way of getting off fossil fuels without driving people back to the Stone Age.

• 13:02Alastair Campbell?

  It's interesting to watch him because he, day one, he was up there sort of saying, this summit's already been a great triumph. And we've got the loss and damage fund that, again, we talked about with Christiana. But then, this is what happens at these things. You've got so many journalists there, so many lobbyists. And so somebody found this tape of him saying, or it was spun as him saying that there wasn't the science to show that fossil fuels should be phased out. So yesterday, he spent the whole day really on the back foot trying to deal with that. I, on the other hand, have felt that the sort of top line messaging that they seem to be putting out is that he wants to be seen as quite radical on this issue. But these, you know, one of the most interesting parts of the conversation with Christiana, I thought, was this thing of just what these events are like,

• 13:45Alastair Campbell?

  and how ridiculous it is that we have these people flying in from all over the world, going without sleep, they always run out of food, they always run out of water. And, and then somehow, at the end, come together and give us something that hopefully will move it in the right direction. But the people should listen to Christiana Figueres, because for those who don't know, she was in charge of the process at Paris, which I think is basically seen as the most successful COP that we've ever had, really. And that was 2015.

• 14:12Rory Stewart?

  And she, I think, for people interested in politics, it was wonderful, because she talks about the mechanics, how you bring something together from a catastrophic COP in Copenhagen, how you use rules, negotiations, it's the how of politics, I thought, was so interesting.

• 14:25Alastair Campbell?

  And talking there about Glennis and families that get drawn into politics and so forth. She was the daughter of a three times Costa Rican president and she talks very movingly about how difficult that was at times that she felt she was being shared with three million other people.

• 14:41Rory Stewart?

  It was terrifying, yeah, just as I thought that was the most striking thing of all, that so she's a six year old, she's standing behind her father's chair when he's being interviewed and the interviewer says, how many children have you got, Mr. President? And he says, three and a half million, and she says it felt like a dagger to the heart. She was expecting him to say six. And I feel this because I've got a six year old and they're very, very literal minded. You can imagine how traumatizing it is and it's a theme beginning to emerge in a lot of our interviews. We had it with Arnold Schwarzenegger, we've had it with Christian Figueres, we've had it with Seb Coe, which is

• 15:09Alastair Campbell?

  Coming soon.

• 15:10Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. In each case, they had these pretty tough fathers who they defend to the hilt. It's very interesting. There's no blaming of their fathers, but in each case you think, whoa.

• 15:21Alastair Campbell?

  That must have been tricky. Now, we've managed to go through a fair part of this podcast, Rory, without getting to the tie. Now, can I tell you about my dream last night? I think it's fair to say I dreamt about you last night for the first time.

• 15:33Rory Stewart?

  Oh, my goodness. Right.

• 15:35Alastair Campbell?

  And it was quite a dream, I've got to say. I was rummaging through, in the dream, my brother Donald's cupboards.

• 15:42Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 15:43Alastair Campbell?

  And finding lots of old stuff, including a bow tie.

• 15:47Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 15:48Alastair Campbell?

  In the pattern of the tie that King Charles wore at COP, the one with the Greek flag.

• 15:54Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 15:55Alastair Campbell?

  And on the back of this tie on the clip, it said my name, Alastair Campbell. And I thought, this is weird. Why was Donald, did Donald have a Greek flag tie? We were staying in a hotel.

• 16:05Rory Stewart?

  You and me.

• 16:06Alastair Campbell?

  You and I, in a hotel, because we were doing something the next day. And I went and knocked on your door.

• 16:13Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 16:14Alastair Campbell?

  And said, I thought we were interviewing the king.

• 16:17Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 16:18Alastair Campbell?

  And I showed you the tie and I said, do you think I should wear the tie or give it to him as a gift? And you said, I don't think you should wear it.

• 16:26Rory Stewart?

  That was it? Oh, well, that's, that's okay. I was quite scared when you said I was going to appear in a dream. So I don't think, I don't think all the psychiatrists listening can make much of that.

• 16:35Alastair Campbell?

  I think my psychiatrist, when I tell him, will make quite a lot of.

• 16:39Rory Stewart?

  Go on, give us a stab then.

• 16:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Donald is a recurring dream. His possessions are a recurring dream.

• 16:44Rory Stewart?

  Remind us a little bit about Donald?

• 16:45Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he was, he was a.

• 16:47Rory Stewart?

  Is he the piper?

• 16:47Alastair Campbell?

  He's the piper, aged sixty two, and a bit of a hoarder.

• 16:50Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 16:51Alastair Campbell?

  So when he died, we found endless kilts and sporrens and backpipe wreaths and all this sort of stuff. But the tie is clearly, because I'm thinking about Charles at the cop.

• 17:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So just for listeners, King Charles was photographed at the cop, meeting Rishi Sunak with a Greek tie. And the reason it hit the front pages is this was just after Rishi Sunak had refused to meet Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who's the, the Greek prime minister, on his visit to the UK because this fight about the Elgin marbles. And so a lot of people interpreted this as a sign of King Charles showing solidarity towards Greece.

• 17:27Alastair Campbell?

  Were you among that lot of people?

• 17:28Rory Stewart?

  I actually knew nothing about this. And I.

• 17:30Alastair Campbell?

  That is not the question I asked. Were you among the lot of people who thought that this was a political signal?

• 17:35Rory Stewart?

  Genuinely, I'm completely puzzled. I, I don't understand the background to that or what's going on. What's your sense of what's going on there?

• 17:41Alastair Campbell?

  Look, King Charles has a lot of ties.

• 17:44Rory Stewart?

  He does have a lot of ties, more, more even probably than your brother.

• 17:46Alastair Campbell?

  He's, he's not short of ties. And it wasn't just that it just happened. We were in the middle of the, in fact, we were talking about it that day on the podcast and he pops up with a tie that is essentially the Greek flag. Now, it's hard for me to think that's anything other.

• 18:03Rory Stewart?

  Than a show of solidarity with him.

• 18:05Alastair Campbell?

  With his father's country.

• 18:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 18:06Alastair Campbell?

  Which it might have been that.

• 18:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe he had his dad in mind. I don't know.

• 18:10Rory Stewart?

  How did the Greek press interpret it?

• 18:11Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, absolutely brilliant. Well, the Greek press, the best front page in Greece during the Elgin marbles row. Was, I don't know if you saw this, but you know how the Greek letters are all different to ours. They had a very Anglo-Saxon front page. It said, fuck you bastard, with a big picture of Rishi Sunak. But the, the, the coverage of the tie was enormous.

• 18:31Rory Stewart?

  Wait, wait, wait. That's absolutely extraordinary. I mean, what type of British newspaper would run, fuck you bastard.

• 18:36Alastair Campbell?

  Up yours to law.

• 18:37Rory Stewart?

  Right. It's the equivalent of up yours to law.

• 18:40Alastair Campbell?

  Slightly stronger. I mean, fuck you bastard is really quite. So that was, that was one of the big tabloid headlines. But I'd say that Charles is, I don't know if the, if the Greek polling companies poll on the popularity of our royal family, but Charles rocketed in Greece. Although I was talking, interestingly, to somebody the other day who's not a monarchist, not a royalist by any manner of means, I don't think, but who was saying actually they, on the one hand, thought it was nice to see Rishi Sunak looking like he was getting two fingers from the king. But on the other hand, said to me, you wouldn't have liked that if he'd done something similar to Tony Blair or if he were Prime Minister to Keir Starmer.

• 19:18Rory Stewart?

  That's true. That is true.

• 19:19Alastair Campbell?

  There is a bit of a constitutional point.

• 19:21Rory Stewart?

  Sure, you definitely would not have liked that. Now, the thing that I want to credit you for is bring my attention to an amazing report. We move on to a more serious subject, the Resolution Foundation.

• 19:30Alastair Campbell?

  I think, I think the King's dress is quite serious.

• 19:33Rory Stewart?

  So Resolution Foundation has brought together a stellar cast of economists to provide a really thorough study of the UK economy, including interviews up and down the country, including people like Danny Rodrick from Harvard Kennedy School, involved Manu Shafik chairing it, Torsten Bell very much at the heart of this. And they have produced an analysis of what's gone wrong with the British economy over the last 30 years and what to do about it. And a small thing before I just hand back to you on the content. Anybody who is interested in these kind of things, I highly recommend a trick on your Kindle. If you find a PDF like this, you don't want to read a 270-page document on your phone. If you send it to your Kindle email address and you put convert in the

• 20:15Rory Stewart?

  subject line, it will appear as a normal book in your Kindle. And you then can read it on your Kindle like a normal book and note and annotate it.

• 20:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm old fashioned enough that when I saw it and read the executive summary and thought, I'd quite like to read the whole of this. I read that on my phone. I actually did the old fashioned thing of.

• 20:31Rory Stewart?

  Printing it.

• 20:32Alastair Campbell?

  No, going and getting a copy.

• 20:34Rory Stewart?

  Okay, and getting a copy. Someone else that printed it.

• 20:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but it is, I'm glad you found it interesting. I, I thought it was, you used the word stellar. I thought the analysis was really, really powerful. And quite hard to refute. And in fact, yesterday, when they launched it, Jeremy Hunt was there in the morning and Keir Starmer in the afternoon. And although it's pretty scathing about the way our economy has developed in recent years, Jeremy Hunt found it very, very hard to push back on much of it at all. And just to go through, I guess, the big line is that they kept using this phrase, we've got the toxic combination of low growth and high inequality. And when you look at, you know, we're so used to ministers coming on the television saying we're better than France at this and better at Germany than this. And the figures, when you go through them, as they've been analysed in this way,

• 21:20Alastair Campbell?

  there's no doubt we are poorer than we were, and we are poorer than our closest neighbours and competitors. And but what they do, I think, is they've got this, if people don't want to read the whole thing, but I do honestly think it's worth reading the whole thing. If you don't, they've got this stagnation nation in 10 key facts, and then they've got how do we end stagnation in 10 key steps. And, you know, this is about how we develop our services, how we promote our cities outside London, how we try to improve the the working conditions. They're very interesting, for example, on decline of trade unions as a bad thing, the need actually for more work of representation on boards. And by the way, Resolution Foundation is not some kind of, you know, Marxist conspiracy group. It's

• 22:02Alastair Campbell?

  a pretty sensible mainstream organisation. And I just think it's, if we're serious about how we get ourselves out of this slump, then we've got to take this stuff seriously. And to be, and to be credit, I thought Jeremy Hunt was. And it has this line about we've got to resist the twin threats of what they call boosterism and fatalism. Now, we've had boosterism.

• 22:27Rory Stewart?

  It's absolutely wonderful that. I mean, it's really radical what they're saying, and I think it's very important and a real opportunity for an incoming government to really grip this and make this central. But what they're saying there is that you've got to avoid the twin traps of nostalgia for an invented British past, or fantasies about some weird, high-tech British future. It's incredibly pragmatic. What they're basically saying is what you need is a better Britain, not turning Britain into Sweden or Germany or the US. They're also quite restrained, but reading between the lines, they're very, very skeptical about the idea that green growth is a magic answer, also pretty skeptical about the idea that manufacturing is the answer.

• 23:08Rory Stewart?

  It's very, very actually unfashionable because both the major parties, Labour and Conservatives, are very inclined to either be very nostalgic about a sort of great industrial manufacturing past to Britain, or project forward for some hitherto unseen world. On the part of Labour, that might be, we're going to transform it all with green growth. On the part of the Tories, it might be talking about AI and electric batteries. But they're saying, be serious about the country we are. Our great strength is services, this very unfashionable, untangible thing. And as they point out, that's not just about bankers or the city, that's about

• 23:46Alastair Campbell?

  Music, arts.

• 23:47Rory Stewart?

  Music, arts, also things like hospitality.

• 23:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:51Rory Stewart?

  And thinking about how you lean into that, and also, of course, how you lean into our second cities. I mean, the other thing that they're not saying, which governments attempted to do, they're not talking about levelling up the whole country, they're basically saying, you've got to sort out Birmingham and Manchester, and that will be unbelievably expensive. You need billions of pounds of investment into infrastructure in Birmingham and Manchester, and you need to, again, focus them particularly on services.

• 24:17Alastair Campbell?

  And they were saying, for example, in relation to France, which has got its own challenges, but on these metrics is doing better than us, that the gap in productivity and wages between Paris and Lyon and Toulouse is way lower, the gap, than the gap between London, Birmingham and Manchester. And if we close that gap, we'd be helping the economy as a whole, and we'd be helping those places because of that.

• 24:41Rory Stewart?

  And part of the economic argument here, which is one that actually George Osborne was always very sympathetic to, but I think never fully managed to make work, is that in the modern world, cities are vital, because it's when you get a critical mass of people, couple of million people, well-connected by infrastructure, that you really get the virtuous cycle of people meeting, innovating, setting up businesses together. And that, of course, we've got in London, the South East. And that's why the connection between Leeds and Manchester. Could be so exciting because it could create a sort of super city Manchester leads.

• 25:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Rory Stewart?

  They also point out though that Birmingham and Manchester are going to have to start building either outwards or upwards to try to create.

• 25:20Alastair Campbell?

  Which they kind of are doing, they are doing. We talked to both Andy Burnham and Andy Street, the respective mayors, and my son Callum was in Manchester at the weekend and said, you really felt the building because he went to university there and you felt the sort of development, the change. But they're saying it has to be on a scale that we haven't even thought about. But if you look at the one thing that really leapt out to me, so real wages grew by an average of thirty three percent a decade from nineteen seventy to two thousand and seven, fell back to below zero in the twenty teens. In mid twenty twenties, wages back where they were during the financial crisis. Fifteen years of lost wage growth has cost the average worker ten thousand seven hundred pounds a year. And almost nine million younger Brits have never worked in

• 26:04Alastair Campbell?

  an economy that has sustained rising average wages.

• 26:07Rory Stewart?

  It is amazing. And there's a lot of really interesting stuff, also uncomfortable stuff. I mean, if, for example, it makes the Brexit story more complicated, it points out that the impact of Brexit, they say, hasn't been seen in a particular proportional drop of exports to the EU.

• 26:22Alastair Campbell?

  Or foreign direct investment.

• 26:24Rory Stewart?

  Or foreign direct investment. Instead, it's a general lowering of competitiveness and productivity.

• 26:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 26:30Rory Stewart?

  Because actually we're performing badly on our exports to the US and elsewhere. Lot of push on saying future trade deals have to be focused on services and getting service deals with Australia and Singapore, right? And there were also institutional suggestions, which were exciting. So they have the idea that you could set up a growth board. David Gorka, she's got a similar idea, which is you could set up a thing like the Office of Budget Responsibility, an independent body to look at investment decisions and return on investment. Because you really need something. They point out that investment in the UK spikes up, goes down, spikes up, goes down, there's no predictability. They'd like almost a law passed to say three percent of GDP should go into investment each year and then have independent bodies

• 27:13Rory Stewart?

  that provide some kind of validation. Otherwise, industrial strategy goes wrong. The reason industrial strategy goes wrong is that. It's always too tempting for politicians to put the investment where it happens to meet their short term votes. Maybe put them in a constituency which isn't a marginal which you want to win. Or some businessman manages to charm a minister at a table with a particular story about some fancy industry. The problem with industrial strategy is it's too vulnerable to politicians making flaky decisions. So creating an independent thing that could look at that more objectively.

• 27:42Alastair Campbell?

  Because I guess the other thing that comes through it, which is an easy thing to say, but it's true. Is that there has been no focus on the long term. And even when Sunak keeps talking about long term decisions for a brighter future, he's not being long termist. We've seen this yesterday with the new immigration thing. It's clearly a direct response to something that happened last week. And it's already unraveling because this thing about, you know, raising the salary you have to be on to come here to thirty eight thousand. One, you're cutting out vast swathes of the sectors that are really struggling for labour. And two, this is where I think it's going to unravel. You're basically saying you can't bring your family here, which is impossible for a lot of people on that level of of income. But let me just read this section, which I think gets right to the heart of it.

• 28:27Alastair Campbell?

  Some of the ingredients of a more comprehensive approach are visible from the UK government focus on closing economic gaps between places to the Labour Party's green investment plans or the Welsh government's prioritization of social partnership. But the test for a broader economic strategy is that it combines goal orientation, being clear about the problem a strategy is trying to solve, we don't have that, clarity about context, understanding the type of country.

• 28:52Rory Stewart?

  I think that this is so exciting, but just quickly on goal orientation. So one test there will be, what are you trying to do? And they're saying, what you should be trying to do is produce high quality, high paid jobs.

• 29:04Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 29:05Rory Stewart?

  And that you can get confused by saying what we're trying to do is, for example, transform the environment. You need to work out what your real key goal is and then tie the other things in.

• 29:14Alastair Campbell?

  Or it could be growth.

• 29:15Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 29:16Alastair Campbell?

  But then, as you keep saying, Labour keeps saying it's growth, but what are the elements of the strategy? And I think if you focus on this way, this is the goal.

• 29:23Rory Stewart?

  But this is where, I mean, look, we're very, very supportive of environmental policy. But I think what they would say is that if you say green growth, you're already confusing it. You've already got two different objectives, right? You've got to work out which you're driving at.

• 29:35Alastair Campbell?

  Then they say clarity about context, understanding the type of country we are. Well, that's not possible if you keep saying that we're the best country in the world. And the opportunities and constraints this bring without nostalgia or wishful thinking about the future. Next, and we don't have this either because of the Brexit debate, realism about trade-offs, recognising the tensions that always exist, policies of sufficient scale to move the dial.

• 29:57Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so realism about trade-offs, though, I mean, that's, that's the one where I would wish that somebody will take this report and lay out the really blunt, brutal political implications of this. So there are bits of this that are implying higher taxes, certainly wealth taxes, certainly money being taken away from London and the South East, put into Birmingham and Manchester, very difficult decisions on bits of British manufacturing being prioritised against services, difficult decisions on environmental investment. So what I'd really like to see, I think this is brilliant, but Labour, Conservatives need to actually, politicians need to be faced with, okay, but if you want to do this, these are the seven unbelievably tough conversations you need to have with voters.

• 30:39Alastair Campbell?

  And you'd also like the final point, because you bang on about it all the time, staying power, because change takes time and short-termism has been a key UK weakness. And I think I've joined your campaign to try to persuade Keir Starmer at some point to say, if a minister's in, they're in for some considerable time before I bother to move them on, and it would take death or illness or scandal to move them on. I watched Jeremy Hunt yesterday, and he performed perfectly well, but where I find he's very, very weak is when he tries to pretend that this constant churn of ministers and strategies has not had a detrimental effect on the, and it's, I think it's had an effect on, you and I both talked in recent weeks to people who say that they, they view the idea of investing

• 31:23Alastair Campbell?

  in the UK a little askance at the moment because they don't know what the long-term strategy is, and they're essentially waiting for a change of government.

• 31:29Rory Stewart?

  This is just quickly a quote on Birmingham. So, closing productivity gaps in London, those are the entrees, but honesty, they keep coming back to honesty, honesty about the scale of change required is essential. So for Manchester and Birmingham, you would need to increase each city's business capital stock by 15 to 20%, over 160,000 additional high-skilled workers in each city, city spend is expanding up or out, and billions of central government investment to expand transport networks. So it's the honesty bit that's so exciting.

• 31:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, let's have it. This is the stuff that's been missing from our politics in a way. These big think tanks that come along and really think. And that's always good about yesterday was the fact that I watched Jeremy Hunt on Sky and Kirsten Palmer live on the BBC, being interviewed by the editor of The Economist, and they stuck with it the whole way through because I think they realised there's something substantial going on here. And it wasn't just this trivia about who's up and who's down and all the nonsense that we get most of the time. And that's why I felt sort of rather depressed that by the end of the day it'd been blown out by yet another Rwanda plan that probably won't work and that was just costing us more money. And I just think we've got to get back to serious politics. So hats off to the Resolution Foundation.

• 32:40Alastair Campbell?

  I thought it was an excellent report and it will help, I hope, the pre-election debate. Very good. Let's take a break.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Payday bars have a bone to pick with the other candy bars. Enough with the toppings and layers and stuff, kay? Payday bars are just salty crunchy peanuts and sweet caramel. Delicious. Payday Peanut Caramel Bar.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still ad. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 33:32Speaker 05

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. If y'all keep the blame on me.

• 33:41Speaker 06

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

• 33:49Speaker 07

  What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 33:53Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 33:56Speaker 07

  I'm not the first then.

• 33:57Speaker 06

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

• 34:08Rory Stewart?

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

• 34:11Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 34:13Rory Stewart?

  And we were going to start by talking a little bit about Argentina and Millet, which remains very, very interesting. And we can share, I think, in the notes, some of the different views on this, coming from different sides. So if you want to see a really radical view, and people are interested in American podcasts, there's a guy called Ben Shapiro, who I know a little bit, who's a very sort of radical, generally right wing commentator, who's put out quite a punchy piece defending Millet and mocking the mainstream media for their depiction of him as a right wing populist. There's also a podcast from the Cato Institute, which is another right wing libertarian American, this won't be the call to our listeners, general podcasting, if you want to hear the case for Millet. One of the things that, central case

• 34:58Rory Stewart?

  they're making though, is that whatever his hairstyle is and whatever his style of conversation, his economic policies are very non-Trump. He is really a throwback to the most extreme neoliberal economics. Trump is much more protectionist. In some ways, Trump's more kind of paranoidist. He's all about, you know, America first, make America great stuff. Millet actually wants to not just dollarize, he wants to open up his entire economy to international trade with no protection at all and no reciprocal agreements. He's basically saying you can come in customs tariff free to Argentina without getting anything in return.

• 35:34Alastair Campbell?

  Does this explain why he's saying that he might pull out of Mercosur?

• 35:38Rory Stewart?

  He would have to. So Mercosur, exactly as you say, is this very large thing dominated by Brazil and Argentina, which is a sort of customs union within Latin America.

• 35:48Alastair Campbell?

  Although it's bigger than that, you can, you can go and live there and work there. It's like the single market, it's close to the single market.

• 35:53Rory Stewart?

  Single market, then the customs union.

• 35:55Alastair Campbell?

  There's Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Uruguay. It's not quite clear, but he's certainly threatening to pull out of it.

• 36:03Rory Stewart?

  And he wouldn't be able to do what he's saying whilst staying in Mercosur. Because by definition, they have protections, barriers around themselves, and they try to do trade deals. They're in the middle actually of a complicated trade deal with the European Union, which looks like it's not going to go through. It was going to be very exciting. It was going to bring 700 million people into a massive trading bloc. But Lula has been pushing back hard against it. That's the left-wing populist leader of Brazil has been pushing back hard against it. Now Macron has come out and says that he thinks that it's completely unfair to Europeans to have things imported on lower environmental standards from Latin America undercutting the European markets. Meanwhile, Milei is saying he wants to go to absolutely radical free trade, which will mean that he can't be part of this at all.

• 36:48Alastair Campbell?

  So rather than calling him a populist, maybe anarcho-capitalist is a better way to look at it.

• 36:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, the dollarization thing is interesting. I mean, a number of Latin American countries, but none of the size of Argentina, have dollarized. In Panama, there's no legal tender and effectively everybody uses the dollar anyway. There are huge advantages, of course, in a country where the currency is perpetually devaluing. But the fundamental thing, I think, if we're going to give a bit of credit to Milei, which is a controversial thing to say, given how bizarre he is, you know, we've talked about his views on the Pope, we've talked about his extraordinary antics. But to give him credit, there is no doubt that the Argentinian state is spending far, far too much money. It cannot afford its expenditure. And what it's doing to try to cover its expenditure is to borrow money if it can persuade any

• 37:36Rory Stewart?

  foreign creditor to lend it money or devalue its currency. And it's been stuck in a cycle, which many Latin American countries were stuck in, of overspending. And so something needs to be done to cut the expenditure of the Argentinian state. And the victory that he won was unbelievable. You know, he came in many percentage points ahead of his successor. He took all but, I think, four states in Argentina, including almost taking Buenos Aires, which is the big sort of bastion of the left. But he faces a big problem, of course, which is familiar to people following US politics, but even more extreme in his case, which is he doesn't have the seats in Congress or the Senate. He's got very few seats in Senate or Congress. The courts are already coming out against him.

• 38:20Alastair Campbell?

  You can do quite a lot as an underwritten president by executive decree, I think. But whether you can do the things he wants to do, I don't know.

• 38:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, and also a lot will depend on whether he can keep this alliance. And one of the reasons he made it through in the second round, and probably quite useful for him to not win in the first round. First round, he was all alone. Second round, he had to make a sort of coalition with the centre-right, which is what carried him through. So if he can make that into more of a formal coalition, then he's got a much more working power base.

• 38:43Alastair Campbell?

  Very interesting list of, when you look at their trading partners. So Brazil is the biggest by a long way. Of the big international players, China, 8.64%, India 6.1%, United States 6.6%, we're very, very, very, very low. In fact, we're lower than the Netherlands, lower than Spain, lower than Germany, lower than Switzerland, lower than Italy, lower than Russia. We're on a par with Poland at 1.16. So this doesn't suggest to me that Latin America is forming a big part of the global Britain strategy, unless we've dropped the global Britain strategy.

• 39:18Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, it's very interesting, isn't it? Well, of course, traditionally, most of our trade with Argentina, we were very, very dominant late 1930, 20th century, it was about importing beef particularly. But that, of course, all stopped with European Union, where we don't import large agricultural products. The question of an Argentinian trade deal then, if we needed to make one, because it sounds like with this guy, you wouldn't even need to make one, you'd be able to export it.

• 39:41Alastair Campbell?

  You just do what you want.

• 39:42Rory Stewart?

  You do it, and you don't have to import his things in return. He is bringing in a guy called Luis Caputo, who is his finance minister, who is, you know, the Lionel Messi of finance. He's this great Argentinian superstar in the...

• 39:57Alastair Campbell?

  Just explain that one to me.

• 39:58Rory Stewart?

  Well, the idea is that he has been, well, you could do him better at the football analogy, but he is the most famous Argentinian in international finance and has had this sort of stellar career, particularly in places like New York, these big banks. So you're bringing in somebody who has a lot of admiration in international financial circles as your finance minister. There is a question always when you bring in a banker into that job, do they really understand the real economy? Or are they just...

• 40:24Alastair Campbell?

  And so do they understand politics?

• 40:25Rory Stewart?

  And do they understand politics?

• 40:26Alastair Campbell?

  That's going to be a very exposed, brutal position as things go right or wrong. Another rather more worrying and troubling appointment, I thought. Rodolfo Barra is the new Attorney General, and on his CV, he was rather senior membership of a neo-Nazi group called the Taquara Nationalist Movement. So he's the Attorney General, that doesn't bode too well, does it? Do you know the other thing that I thought was interesting? Because remember we said last week that Elon Musk had come out as a big defender of Milley, and I thought that was just, well, they're a couple of anarcho-capitalists. Together, but it seems that a lot of this is about lithium, because Argentina has twenty one percent of the world's lithium reserves and is producing just six percent

• 41:06Alastair Campbell?

  of of supply, and lithium prices are frankly tanking. So Musk, who needs a lot of lithium for his

• 41:14Rory Stewart?

  Electric batteries.

• 41:15Alastair Campbell?

  Electric vehicle batteries, is trying to get closer and closer to Millet.

• 41:19Rory Stewart?

  We'll see more and more of this, won't we? Because this is critical with everybody producing cobalt, lithium, rare earths. So it matters for Argentina, it matters for Indonesia, it matters for Chile, it matters for the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And you can see the US leaning into this. One of the challenges, actually, I was talking to some of the big mining companies recently, and they're under a lot of pressure from the US to open

• 41:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Rory Stewart?

  new mines in Africa. But operating in eastern Congo, which is where the Chinese have a lot of their mines, is not something that most of the major Western companies want to do, because they will be accused very, very quickly, they feel, of human rights abuses, of corruption, of poor environmental practices. So these are not markets that, you know, eastern Congo, over two hundred insurgencies, very, very dangerous, insecure, poor central government. And it raises this question, which a lot of companies in Africa keep raising, which is, the West cannot both be saying, we want to be making money in Africa, we want to be mining in Africa, we want to be extracting minerals from Africa,

• 42:23Rory Stewart?

  and also holding the companies to governance standards, which effectively means that they have no incentive whatsoever to operate there. Don't get me wrong, I think it is unbelievably important to insist that companies hold to proper standards in terms of human rights and labour. I also think there are many, many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa where you can run decent, good businesses. But there are extreme places like eastern Congo, where we have to be realistic, that it's going to be very difficult to compete with China in those environments and hold the kind of standards that people are pushing for.

• 42:58Alastair Campbell?

  My final point, I can't remember the last Argentinean president who didn't at some point do a bit of jingoistic flag-waving about Las Malvinas.

• 43:09Alastair Campbell?

  The Falkland Islands.

• 43:10Rory Stewart?

  And you've seen this again with Millet.

• 43:11Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I wonder whether at some point, I mean, it's always a good way to kind of get the Argentinian populist erogenous zones going, as whether at some point he might just look at the state of Britain's armed forces and think, is that worth a pop?

• 43:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's definitely true that if he were to try, it would be the understatement of the century to say Britain would have a very, very, very, very difficult time defending the Falkland Islands now. I mean, it was a stretch for us, even in the early 1980s, when our military was much larger and I think would be very, very tough today. I mean, we are largely relying on an international rules-based order, which, as we've pointed out, crime in Ukraine, elsewhere, is beginning to erode, yeah.

• 43:52Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, so talking of world order and the like, shall we talk about, can we say your friend Henry Kissinger? Would we say friend?

• 44:01Rory Stewart?

  No, we'd say my friend Henry Kissinger.

• 44:03Alastair Campbell?

  I'm fascinated by your very first meeting with him because we had that wonderful interview with Simon Sabag Montefiore, where, given he came from Harrow, he got an interview with Margaret Thatcher in Downey Street as a child, and you, who went to an even superior school to that, you got an interview with Kissinger.

• 44:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, so it was very weird. So I was, I guess, 15, and Henry Kissinger came to speak at Eton. Now, why on earth he would choose to come and speak at this school, I cannot, cannot imagine. But anyway, he did.

• 44:36Alastair Campbell?

  Friends of friends.

• 44:36Rory Stewart?

  And I, as a little 15-year-old.

• 44:38Alastair Campbell?

  Wheels in wheels.

• 44:38Rory Stewart?

  I, little 15-year-old, stuck my hand up and said, um, "Mr. Kissinger," I don't know whether my voice had broken or not.

• 44:45Alastair Campbell?

  I hope so.

• 44:46Rory Stewart?

  "How can you justify the illegal bombing of Cambodia?"

• 44:49Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, this is your lefty phase.

• 44:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, this is lovely. And, and to my absolute astonishment, he sort of erupted in rage at me. He's really, really angry. And he started, you know, shouting at me about the importance of the geostrategic, I can't even remember what he was saying. All I remember, because I actually, I was so nervous asking the question, I wasn't really listening to his answer. All I got was this extremely angry man ranting at the 15-year-old.

• 45:12Alastair Campbell?

  Was he expecting for you just to sort of bow down and say, what is it like to be the most extraordinary diplomat?

• 45:17Rory Stewart?

  I don't know. I don't know what's going through their head. Maybe, maybe in his head, you think, oh, my goodness, why did I agree to do this? I'm pretty busy. I've dragged myself out to the school late at night. It was like, he was speaking at sort of nine at night. And then I have to put up with this little shit attacking me from the.

• 45:32Speaker 08

  And next meeting.

• 45:33Rory Stewart?

  So then I saw him again, I think a number of times, probably every five years, over thirty five years. I, uh, one, one thing I was very struck by in the two thousands was that I kept seeing him give funeral eulogies.

• 45:48Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 45:48Rory Stewart?

  He was incredibly good at funeral eulogies because, as you know, he had this sort of amazingly sort of.

• 45:52Speaker 08

  The voice.

• 45:52Rory Stewart?

  Bavarian accent. And he was extraordinary in the compliments that he was capable of paying. So he would give eulogies. I, I went to two very close succession. He would make everybody sound like a sort of, as though he was giving a eulogy for, um, what's, there's a lovely one, um, when Eric Bristow wins the, uh, the, the darts and, and the commentator says, Alexander the Great wept because he had no more worlds to conquer and he was only thirty three and Eric Bristow's only twenty seven. And it was a bit like that.

• 46:23Speaker 08

  So were you watching the darts? I cannot imagine you were watching Eric Bristow. What was his nickname?

• 46:28Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely no idea what Eric Bristow's.

• 46:30Speaker 08

  He was the crafty Cockney.

• 46:31Rory Stewart?

  So anyway, these huge compliments. And then I saw him again, I suppose about a year and a half ago in his house in Kent, Connecticut, where he just died. And went with Shashana and we sat with Henry Kissinger and I was very struck, I suppose, firstly, by the energy of that man, the fact that, you know, here was a guy who was ninety nine years old. He was totally sharp. He really wanted to know the details of what was happening at Yale. He wanted to discuss China. He wanted to discuss Afghanistan. He wanted to hear from Shashana what the Taliban were up to. So that was really impressive. And he kept interrupting our talk though, every ten minutes to march up and down the passage. He could have been told by his doctor he needed to lose weight and march. So this tiny sort of German man would then set off and you'd see him sort of very slowly

• 47:15Rory Stewart?

  marching up and down the passage right in front. And then he'd come and sit down again, this very chintzy room with more proper. More seriously though, I think, and I, I maybe can put in the newsletter, I, I wrote a piece which I'm quite proud of trying to engage with. His foreign policy and I think in the end he was a bloviator, he was a bluffer. His book, The Global Order, is an extraordinary string of sort of cliches, you know. The Middle East is, you know, faiths emerging from the desert, China is centuries of ancient civilization. America is Puritan and there's no moral core to it. And he was, he basically encouraged Putin's takeover of Crimea in 2014. Because he had no real principles to hold.

• 48:00Alastair Campbell?

  It was very interesting to read some of the, the obituaries and even though there's always a little bit of hypocrisy in these obituaries. Because people come out who've not normally said nice things and they say slightly nice things. But it was quite interesting how the scale of judgment sort of went from the world's best ever diplomat to out and out war criminal. And there was very little kind of in between. But Bloviator, I, I, I only met him a couple of times, both times with Tony Blair. Tony liked him, but I think in part because Tony liked picking brains that had got a lot of experience. I always felt about him as well, that he was, he was more of a kind of brand and a business than he was.

• 48:40Alastair Campbell?

  A sort of an active diplomat and he's one of those people who managed to establish himself as a brand. I mean, you say Kissinger in the world and people know who and what you're talking about. I also, Rory, I'm very grateful. I can't believe you sent it to me because it's so reminiscent of an interview that you did recently. This wonderful interview with an Italian journalist called Oriana Falaci. Who clearly did to him what Elizabeth Day did to you and fluttered the eye, the eyelashes. And before he gets you, he was diving into all sorts of traps.

• 49:09Rory Stewart?

  So this is, this is the early 1970s, it's in the middle of the Vietnam War. He's in a very sensitive situation and then he sits down with him. What happens, Alistair?

• 49:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, basically he flatters him and sort of starts comparing him to great chess grandmasters.

• 49:24Alastair Campbell?

  And then Henry Fonda, a man unarmed and ready to fight with his fists for honest ideals, alone, courageous. And Kissinger interjects at this point, not necessarily courageous. In fact, this coy cowboy doesn't have to be courageous. All he needs is to be alone, to show others that he rides into the town and does everything by himself. This amazing romantic character suits me precisely because to be alone has always been part of my style, or if you like, my technique. It goes on like this. Some people think I carefully plan, wanted to be the consequences for the public of any of my initiatives or efforts. They think this preoccupation is always on my mind. And on and on, I don't ask for popularity.

• 50:06Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not looking for popularity. I care nothing about popularity. I'm not afraid of losing the public. It goes on and on. And Nixon was livid.

• 50:13Rory Stewart?

  Just help us understand. So this is Kissinger by now fifty, at the absolute height of his power and status.

• 50:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 50:21Rory Stewart?

  Apparently.

• 50:22Alastair Campbell?

  Didn't give many interviews.

• 50:23Rory Stewart?

  Didn't give, apparently very, very experienced guy. And then he gets an interview, during which thing, he actually refers to Vietnam War as a useless war. That's a pretty, pretty big thing. And this is the central thing in US foreign policy. How often do you find this, that a good journalist can play on the vanity of politicians to get some astonishing story or scoop like this? Is Kissinger unusual?

• 50:45Alastair Campbell?

  I think a good politician would spot when it was coming. But I think it is, I think you do get probably suckered into saying more than you would if the, if you think the person's being genuinely nice. But this led to perhaps his biggest ever riff with Nixon, because Nixon read it and thought that the cowboy comparison was both insulting, stupid, offensive.

• 51:09Rory Stewart?

  Which also implies that Kissinger's doing it on his own.

• 51:12Alastair Campbell?

  He's doing it on his own. I don't have a president. I'm just out there, sort of, you know, presumably because my president's not really up to this. And Nixon didn't speak to him for several weeks.

• 51:20Rory Stewart?

  Which is a big problem, because he's the national security advisor.

• 51:23Alastair Campbell?

  He's his main man. And Kissinger, desperate, feeling totally sort of on his own, he drove up on his own to Nixon's residence.

• 51:33Alastair Campbell?

  He was stopped by the Secret Service at the gates and they wouldn't let him in. So they clearly told him, you can't let him in. And Kissinger, in a more sort of reflective period of his life, said it was the single most disastrous conversation I've ever had.

• 51:47Rory Stewart?

  Was there ever any examples you can think of from either Labour or Conservative parties of careers being wrecked with an interview?

• 51:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we talked about Alistair Darling at the start of the podcast. I think Gordon was not happy with Alistair when he did an interview at the start of the global financial crisis, saying we're heading for the worst recession that any of us can imagine, because he'd done an interview and it was a sort of magazine profile-y thing that had been going on for some time. I think they're the ones you've got to watch, where you're giving access to people over a bit of time.

• 52:15Rory Stewart?

  This is, I always feel this. I got totally screwed by The New Yorker, where they were following me around for three, four weeks and it was absolutely terrible at the end.

• 52:23Alastair Campbell?

  What happened in the end?

• 52:24Rory Stewart?

  I thought, you know, this is, we have got this wonderful friendship, we're spending three, four weeks ago, he interviewed all my friends, he came up to my constituents and in the end, clearly all the time, this guy and Parker had been thinking I was a real dick and had just been smiling and being charming and produced this extraordinary. I mean, one of the things that comes out of this is they produce these sort of 15,000 word profiles, where their contempt for you is so much that you wonder why they bothered writing the profile in the first place.

• 52:47Alastair Campbell?

  Because of that. And suckering you.

• 52:49Rory Stewart?

  So how would you deal with something where you have to spend 10, 15 hours with someone? How do you control the narrative in that situation?

• 52:57Alastair Campbell?

  It's hard. I think you've got to work out what you want the narrative to be.

• 53:00Rory Stewart?

  Would you just refuse to actually let someone spend 10, 15 hours with you?

• 53:03Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think you can, I think, because the thing about modern journalism is most of it is so sort of short-term, trivial, get a quote. We saw the thing with Keir Starmer at the weekend, where he did an article, writes an article for the Sunday Telegraph.

• 53:17Rory Stewart?

  In which he praises Mrs Thatcher.

• 53:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that was the headline.

• 53:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 53:20Alastair Campbell?

  But if you read it, he basically is saying that if he becomes Prime Minister, he wants to make big lasting radical change, like Thatcher, like Blair, like Atlee.

• 53:29Rory Stewart?

  Presumably though, he knew exactly what he was doing and he got exactly what he wanted. He chose the Sunday Telegraph, he chose to put in the word Thatcher. He must, he must have been intending to do that, right?

• 53:38Alastair Campbell?

  I think so, but then I think it probably went a bit too far.

• 53:41Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 53:42Alastair Campbell?

  So I think if, if people had known, this was, this was in relation to the Resolution Foundation report that we talked about. So he's putting this in the paper the Sunday before this thing comes out. And yeah, look, if you put the word Thatcher in there, but by the way, this happened to Gordon Brown, it happened to Tony Blair, Ed Miliband, they all at some point said, whatever you think about it, you have to acknowledge Thatcher was a great reforming prime minister, radical, et cetera. So I think it just probably just, I think it just got slightly overcooked and then it played into this reaction against him. So I think on that, though, you've got to be absolutely clear about what you want to come out of it. And the thing is, you've got, you've just got to remember, I always say that when, because I've done a few of these kind of long form things where they dip in and out of your life and they always want more.

• 54:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 54:27Alastair Campbell?

  You know, can we just spend a bit more time with Fiona? Could we maybe go and see the kids and, and they're just looking for more and more and more. So keep control of what you want to keep control of and never assume that they're your friends.

• 54:38Rory Stewart?

  Well, I also would never do one again. I mean, I think

• 54:40Alastair Campbell?

  Really? That bad?

• 54:42Rory Stewart?

  I can't see the point of these long things where they spend hours with you.

• 54:45Alastair Campbell?

  The only thing about them is that I think they do last in the public mind a lot longer than most of the stuff that gets written about politicians. If it's a really good, so here we are, we're talking about an interview that was in nineteen seventies. Okay. Why? Because it was better than most of the interviews Kissinger ever did. Are people going to

• 55:05Rory Stewart?

  Not, not better for Kissinger?

• 55:07Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 55:07Rory Stewart?

  So my advice would be to any, it may be fine for the journalists, but anyone thinking of being interviewed.

• 55:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, that's because he made a very basic error. He, look, he was

• 55:16Rory Stewart?

  And I also think the longer they spend with you, if they're spending weeks with you, it's more and more difficult. I think in an hour or two hours, you can remain focused on the message.

• 55:22Alastair Campbell?

  But I think you have to say at some point, and to be fair to you, in the Janice Turner context, you did this, you basically, for whatever reason, said, okay, Janice, I'm out of time, I'm off. And she took that amiss. But I think you've got to be very clear at the start, everybody knows this is like a, there's a trade going on here. You have access, but you've just got to keep, keep control of what it is that you want to say and what you want to get out of it.

• 55:46Rory Stewart?

  Final thing, just to reflect on as we, we finish. Um, one of the things that I, I always thought was saddest in a way about Kissinger, I mean, there are many sad things, when you, you know, put on record clearly that he was involved, to come back to where we began, this bombing of Cambodia, which led to well Over fifty thousand deaths and perpetrated a war in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, which brought nothing but horror. I mean, what succeeded that American intervention was brutal regimes from which those countries are only just recovering. But the other thing that I remember about him is him saying to David Petraeus, the American general, what matters is remaining relevant, to always be relevant. And he pushed himself through his eighties and nineties to always be relevant.

• 56:28Rory Stewart?

  Just wrote a book on AI with Eric Schmidt, went out of his way to make sure that he met Donald Trump, always meeting with Joe Biden, every US president. And I began to feel a bit, I don't know whether pity's the word, but I certainly felt, is this actually a good life? Here you are in your eighties and nineties and this obsession with remaining relevant. Yes, it may be prolonging his life, but there was a sort of, you could imagine a bit of more stillness and reflection coming in older age, which never really came there.

• 56:58Speaker 08

  I have a bit of a relevance thing.

• 56:59Rory Stewart?

  You're still going to be going at ninety nine, I'm sure.

• 57:02Speaker 08

  I think I'll live to live my chest carries on the way it is at the moment.

• 57:05Rory Stewart?

  Some antibiotics, steroids.

• 57:07Speaker 08

  Steroids, steroids are always better than antibiotics, I find.

• 57:09Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, on that advert for the steroid industry, we will, we will conclude.

• 57:14Speaker 08

  Sure, Arnold Schwarzenegger would approve.

• 57:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 08

  See you next week.

• 57:17Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 57:23Speaker 05

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

• 57:34Speaker 06

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

• 57:40Speaker 07

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 57:44Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 57:47Speaker 07

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 57:48Speaker 06

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October second, rated R, under seventeen, not a minute without parent.