106. Sunak’s Windsor win, Labour’s path to victory, and Beijing’s view of Moscow

Has Rishi Sunak pulled off the biggest victory of his premiership? How does China view the Russian invasion of Ukraine? And what does Alastair make of Keir Starmer’s big policy 'missions'? TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] 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 Creef. 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.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  When you think about Crocs, you think the classic clog. But did you know there's also a canvas clog? A vegan suede clog, a coastal-inspired style. A style with studs, straps, and lots of sass. Honestly, I could keep going with the surprises. You've got to see them for yourself because there is literally a style for every kind of girl. So do your thing and head to crocs.com or a store near you now.

• 1:41Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:44Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart. And we're on our way to Harrogate.

• 1:48Alastair Campbell?

  We are indeed. We've sold out the Palladium in March. We've done Blackpool. We did the Albert Hall. But we've got to go to the county of my birth. And I promise, Rory, both you and I both get a lot of grief about not having done one yet in Scotland. That will happen. But Yorkshire is the next spot. We're finally bringing the podcast there.

• 2:12Alastair Campbell?

  To Harrogate. So Rory, when are we doing that?

• 2:14Rory Stewart?

  So we're going to be doing that on the 16th of May, Tuesday, the 16th of May. We're going to be performing at the amazing Harrogate Royal Hall. And I think it's going to go very nicely, actually, with the launch of your book, Alistair. Would you like to tell the listeners a little bit about your book?

• 2:29Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, for God's sake, Rory, I can't just keep plugging my book. Oh, okay. It's called But What Can I Do? The publication date is May the 11th. As you say, we're in Harrogate on May the 16th. And the book will be available there. And you can also get it ahead of time, discounted when you buy your tickets online. You don't have to buy the book to come, but you know, you'd be even more welcome if you did. And you'd be able to collect your copy in the foyer at the venue in Harrogate on the night. And if you're very, very nice to me, I might even sort of sign a few.

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  That's very good. You will definitely be signing the books, Alistair, and you're going to be able to get out of that. So as usual, we're going to be doing a pre-sale for people who'd like to come and hear us in Harrogate. And that's not just Yorkshire listeners, but people from all over the world just sitting on Harrogate. So pre-sale for members of The Rest is Politics Plus. Going to start 9am, Thursday, the 2nd of March. We will email members their pre-sale ticket link this evening and tomorrow morning. So if you want to take advantage of that opportunity to buy early tickets, just sign up at therestispolitics.com. And just a warning, the last couple of times we've done this, which was the Palladium, the Albert Hall, these tickets have sold out, I think, in a few minutes. So.

• 3:41Alastair Campbell?

  General sale then goes open to the public the following day. That's this Friday, March the 3rd at 9am. We'll put the ticket link in the podcast description and we'll tweet it from the Rest is Politics Twitter account at exactly 9am on Friday.

• 3:56Rory Stewart?

  So that's brilliant. So we're going to see many of you there as possible. So Alistair, what is it that we've got coming up on today's pod?

• 4:02Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we're going to kick off with the situation in Northern Ireland, Rishi Sunak. Sir Laois von der Leyen and the agreement they reached yesterday to replace the protocol, destroy the protocol bill and hopefully along with it Boris Johnson's career. We're going to talk about Keir Starmer and what he set out last week as his five missions and also about the signs that business is coming back to Labour, not least in the form of some pretty major donors. And then I think both you and I have got a special interest in Ukraine through the lens of China and the China Russia relationships. We're

• 4:44Alastair Campbell?

  going to talk about that. And then also, I think we should we should touch on the Nigerian elections where the election has taken place. A lot of difficulty attached to it in terms of the practicalities and the logistics. A sort of clear winner emerging, but I think there's a long way to run yet.

• 5:03Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Let's start with Northern. So to remind listeners, just a little bit on the background of this, which we've done in the last couple of weeks. At the heart of the problems of Brexit were this question around how you deal with the borders in and around Ireland. Because when we were part of the European Union, there were in effect no borders. We were part of the same single market, part of the same customs union. And that meant that people in Northern Ireland who really felt that they wanted to be part of the Republic didn't face any border. They could very much feel they were part of the Republic of Ireland. And British citizens in Northern Ireland who felt that Northern Ireland was very much part of the United Kingdom, obviously, there were no borders in the Irish Sea between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But as soon as Britain

• 5:46Rory Stewart?

  left the European Union and started trying to develop its own independent trade policies, in particular as Boris Johnson pushed ahead with a much, much harder Brexit, Theresa May had tried to deal with this by effectively leaving Britain in the customs union. That was the thing called the backstop. So under her plan, Great Britain would have remained in the customs union and there wouldn't have been much need for much borders between any of these countries. But Boris Johnson wanted a harder Brexit. He wanted a harder Brexit because he wanted to do independent trade deals. As soon as Britain did independent trade deals. There was a problem, and that problem was if Britain, for example, started buying cheap Australian lamb, or I don't know, cheap cars from China, Europe needed to protect

• 6:30Rory Stewart?

  its own producers by having a border somewhere. And because of the Good Friday Agreement, the consensus was the border couldn't be between Northern Ireland and the Republic. And instead Boris Johnson settled on a border in the Irish Sea. And he did this in his hurried oven-ready deal in 2019. And since then, there has been a big, big problem. And the biggest problem, of course, has come from people in Northern Ireland who very much feel they are part of the United Kingdom and hate the idea of this border in the Irish Sea, and they've been struggling with everything.

• 7:02Alastair Campbell?

  Not all of them, Rory.

• 7:03Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, but the people who feel that, absolutely. And obviously, by definition, it's it's only just over half the people, or at least people who feel much more strongly on the unionist side, who feel that Northern Ireland should be part of the United Kingdom. And there are many people in Northern Ireland who very much feel that Ireland should be united. Anyway, the people who've been particularly upset about this have been the DUP and the unionist movement, and they have pointed to the fact that there's been any number of problems ranging from sending packages to Northern Ireland, sending sausages to Northern Ireland, bringing pets to Northern Ireland, VAT rates and all that. And all this comes

• 7:43Rory Stewart?

  down to one basic fact, which was the way the deal was done by Boris Johnson, left Northern Ireland in the single market in the customs union, which meant that it had to be controlled by European regulations, respond to the European Court of Justice, when Great Britain wasn't governed by those rules. Anyway, that that was the problem before. And let's now jump back to you, because you've been recently in Ireland, haven't you? You've spent a lot of the last few days in Ireland. You've seen Bertie O'Han, you've been Sharing meetings on the Good Friday Agreement, you've been talking to Irish businesses. What was your sense of all of that?

• 8:17Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I was in Dublin, not Belfast. The Irish actually are feeling pretty confident about their position at the moment. Pretty, you know, the Irish economy is picking up again. There is a sense of Ireland being in quite a good place. And I think they've been, you know, I think they felt very bolstered by the fact that through this whole wretched process, that the European Union has very much been standing up for Ireland in a very, very significant way. I think they felt that because, not least because of the geography of Ireland being, you know, literally sort of left out there on its own now in the European Union context, that they might actually get a bit isolated. That hasn't happened. Bertie Hearn and I launched this report for IBEC, which is the Irish equivalent of the CBI.

• 8:59Alastair Campbell?

  And it's called Peace and Prosperity. And it was about explaining both to Irish business, which is obviously IBEC, but also to the Irish public. IBEC's head, Danny McCoy, is sort of worried that the Irish people have kind of taken the Good Friday Agreement for granted. And it was really revisiting what it was, why it had to happen and why it's so important to the, to the Irish economy, never mind UK.

• 9:23Rory Stewart?

  You mentioned this to me when we were chatting recently, and I was surprised to hear that many people in Ireland, not just in, in Great Britain, didn't fully understand the Good Friday Agreement. I guess one question is, do you think that something's changed in Irish politics over the last 20, 30 years? Has the issue of Northern Ireland and reunification become less central and salient as a political issue compared to where it was 30, 40 years ago for many voters in the Republic of Ireland?

• 9:49Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's just different. We're now heading to a situation where it's not impossible, it's even probable that Sinn Féin are going to be in power, north and south. Now Sinn Féin, it goes without saying, are absolutely committed to a united Ireland or a new Ireland, as Bertie Hearn likes to call it. But interestingly, when I was talking to Bertie, who of course was the Irish Taoiseach at the time of the Good Friday Agreement, and he and I were doing this event, and, and he said both privately, and then he also said publicly that in his view, If Sinn Féin do form the government or lead the government in Ireland after the next election, then obviously they will have a commitment to a border poll, a referendum on creating a united Ireland.

• 10:34Alastair Campbell?

  The commitment will be there, but then they will have to go through all the detailed work and address some of the questions and it will sort of get pushed back. Now, there was a Sinn Féin Member of Parliament who came up to me afterwards and says, listen, that was Bertie saying what he wants to believe, we're going to go for this, et cetera. But I do think the rise of Sinn Féin in a strange sort of way has made others take the prospect of the united Ireland more seriously. And I think there has been a bit of a recalibration. So I don't think, even if Sinn Féin get to power, I'm not convinced that the dial on it is going to move that quickly. Yeah. The most telling impression that was made upon me in the few days I was there was at this dinner that Bertie and I did, and there was a woman there, Deirdre Heenan, who's

• 11:19Alastair Campbell?

  a well-known academic from the North. And she was listening to me and Bertie talk about the protocol, talk about what Sunak was up to, what he was trying to get, green lanes, red lanes, all the rest of it. And she just came out with this incredibly powerful emotional reaction and she said, I'll tell you about the people in the North, we are sick and tired of being collateral damage in a never-ending Tory party civil war. And she said, the idea that these people are motivated by our best interests is wrong. And also, she made the point that this whole thing that Sunak is getting all this credit for sorting out now, it's all driven by Brexit.

• 12:03Alastair Campbell?

  And now what we've seen in the last 24 hours is that the deal, the oven-ready deal on which every single one of those MPs who was in Parliament yesterday was elected, they're now asking us to celebrate the fact that they've finally woken up to the fact that it was absolute bullshit from start to finish. And Sunak, to his credit, has gone and fixed it, but let's not run away from the fact that this has been a A mess that they they're trying to clear up, but it's a mess entirely, 100% of their making. And they were warned that these this was going to be the implication for Northern Ireland at the time.

• 12:39Rory Stewart?

  Let's move on then to a couple of things. One is the, you're absolutely right that in skipping from the Republic to Great Britain, one of the central questions is around this fracture in the Conservative Party, which, as we've pointed out, was left by Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, not really as a single party, but as a weird fractured mosaic of six or seven different parties. And central to this was this group, the hard Brexit group called the ERG, arranged around people like Marc Francois. We were talking about him a couple of days ago, and you're reluctant for me, given that your views on Marc Francois to plug his book, but I wanted to very-

• 13:21Alastair Campbell?

  No, I thought it was interesting. I thought it was, no, go ahead. I thought it was interesting what you said.

• 13:24Rory Stewart?

  It's a book called Spartan Revolt or Spartan Rebellion, and he is writing about his childhood, growing up in a pretty difficult situation, the East End of London. He's talking about his father, who'd been a veteran during the landings on D-Day, and who died young, and his Italian mother. But somewhere at the heart of the whole thing, you get a sense that this Conservative politician, who was a very important part of bringing down Theresa May's deal, which in a sense would have avoided many of the problems that Rishi Sunak's been struggling with, was motivated not really by detailed thoughts around the

• 14:03Rory Stewart?

  deal, much more driven by his time as a Territorial Army soldier, his sense of his father's fight against Nazi Germany, his own emotional journey is right there. And if you want to understand, as it were, the psychopathology, the kind of psychological roots.

• 14:23Rory Stewart?

  Of one of the big drivers of hard Brexit, it may be worth looking at the book. The reason this is important, though, is that this is what Rishi Sunak has been struggling with. Because this group, the ERG, were the absolute kind of elite leaders of Boris Johnson's campaign. And it was they who crippled Theresa May's deal, brought in Boris Johnson, and they're trying to repeat it. And they and the DUP set these conditions, which they published over the last few weeks, which basically were trying to say, we're not going to have a border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Let's put the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. And they they fudge it in different ways. They talked about invisible borders, technological borders.

• 15:06Rory Stewart?

  But essentially, they were saying, if there's going to be a border anywhere, let's put it between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

• 15:11Alastair Campbell?

  They were basically willing the problem away. Because I mean, this thing about invisible border is utter fantasies and it's a total nonsense from start to finish.

• 15:19Rory Stewart?

  100%, complete nonsense from start to finish. Not something that's technologically ever been achieved, not something that would ever be acceptable to the EU negotiators. But that was their push, that was their fantasy. And they had this bill that was going through the House of Commons and the House of Lords, which was going to unilaterally break international law and essentially give Britain the freedom to just suspend all the agreements that they'd signed with the European Union around Traber, Northern Ireland. And so there was a situation Rishi Sunak inherited. And he was dealing with, I guess, three big things. Could he keep the Conservative Party together? In particular, how does he deal with this horrible ghoul Boris Johnson,

• 15:59Rory Stewart?

  who was floating around causing trouble and trying to get back in as Prime Minister and use this to become Prime Minister again? How would he deal with the DUP? Because Ireland at the moment, Northern Ireland, has a completely frozen political situation. Its assembly isn't functioning because the DUP won't participate. And the reason they won't participate, they say, is all about this deal. And finally, how would he deal with the European Union? And to his credit, I think, he's actually stuck to his guns and come up with an incredibly detailed, thoughtful deal with the European Union. He's taken a lot of risk. With the hard ERG people in his own party, he's taken them directly on, he hasn't

• 16:39Rory Stewart?

  accepted the DUP's red lines and he's produced a deal largely, I think, through thoughtful negotiation with the EU. Is that your sense of it?

• 16:47Alastair Campbell?

  I think the low bar is now so low on our political leaders that Rishi Sunak, standing up yesterday and being serious and paying attention to detail and showing that hard work can pay off and being respectful of other people was somehow seen as a sort of great revolution in political leadership. It's the basis of what political leadership should be and in a way it's it's advantaged him with the fact that he's followed the wretched Boris Johnson and the utterly useless Liz Truss. So I'm not getting too carried away about how marvelous this was because I think it was it was an obvious thing that had to be done. I accept that he's put the work in and that's a good thing. I agree

• 17:30Alastair Campbell?

  with you that he's not been phased by these people yet. The DUP still to opine fully, but I think that the mood music is quite positive. The Marc Francois that you mentioned was, I thought, a little bit threatening in his tone in the in the Commons yesterday. By the way, if you're looking for another couple of pieces of psychopathology, as you put it, and that's what we've been dealing with. And it's interesting, Roy, that when you listed the one, two, three, the first was holding the Tory party together. I'm afraid that is what's been driving this nonsense for the last two decades. But what I thought was interesting was the two things. The first was Marc Francois doing an interview at the weekend with Sophie Ridge on Sky where he was basically saying, you know, we're

• 18:14Alastair Campbell?

  not thick, you know, which seemed a little bit sort of defensive. But anyway, he said that, you know, the idea that they wouldn't have read the deal that they'd done, but every single one of those MPs voted for that deal that they're now saying was absolutely terrible. And that is, that for me is quite a hard thing to get over.

• 18:30Rory Stewart?

  Oh, it's absolutely terrible because essentially it's the fundamental dishonesty of the whole project and the dishonesty of what Boris Johnson did. There was a kind of really knotted dishonesty in this because Boris Johnson basically promised the DUP that would be no border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland in order to get them to destroy Theresa May's deal and so he could become Prime Minister. He then betrayed the DUP and promised the EU that there would be a border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Then he tried to betray the EU again and go back to breaking the international rule that he'd made with the-

• 19:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but Roy, the people that he was lying to knew that they were being lied to. So why did the Tory party get caught up in this kind of, you know, collective lie? Why did the DUP not stand up to it more firmly than they did? Why did they want to believe this guy?

• 19:19Rory Stewart?

  It's a complete mystery. I was in the middle of all of this, obviously, and I got thrown out of the Conservative Party centrally around this whole issue. And it was a very, very odd period of two and a half years because some of my colleagues simply didn't understand the details. I mean, remember, the withdrawal agreement was a sort of 500-page document. And although Mark Francois and his allies were walking around with little stickers in the document underlying bits, I'm not quite sure how many people had read it. I'm certain there were some ministers who, the night before the Customs Union vote, were still asking me what the Customs Union was. And I found the ignorance on the Labour side just as startling as it was on the Conservative side. I think we're-

• 19:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, not with Keir Starmer, because I know-

• 20:00Rory Stewart?

  Not with Keir Starmer. No, no, no. There was, there was sort of 20 people in the House of Commons, of which Keir Starmer was one, Oliver Letman was another, Steve Baker was another, John Redwood was another, on both sides, on the Remain side and on the Brexit side, who'd actually mastered this document. But the vast majority of MPs hadn't bothered to read it. And it's part of the whole culture of the House of Commons and modern-

• 20:22Alastair Campbell?

  Right. My second point, my second psychopathology point relates to somebody you just mentioned, Steve Baker. He did an interview yesterday, I think it was on Newsnight. As a mental health campaigner, I'm absolutely always in favour of people in public life talking about their mental health. But he did an interview in which he talked about his mental health, which made my blood boil. Because it struck me as a piece of absolute narcissism, almost Johnsonian, about the emotional rollercoaster that he'd been through because of Brexit. And now they'd finally pulled off this incredible deal that was going to deliver. And he actually said that the Northern Ireland could now get the best of both worlds, be both in the UK single market and have access to the European single

• 21:06Alastair Campbell?

  market, which of course we all used to have until the, you know, hard man Brexit and his team came along. And I think, and this, this is what I can't get over, Roy, and it's, it's, you know, Betty Boothroyd died this week, as you know. And one of the reasons I love Betty, that I spoke to her a couple of weeks ago. She phoned me up and so this was literally, you know, a couple of weeks ago now. And she didn't sound that bad. But she said to me that, you know, she was furious at Rees-Mogg, talking absolute nonsense, furious at that Claire Fox woman, talking absolute nonsense. Keep sticking it up them, keep sticking it up them. And she said, I'll never ever rest until we get back in. Because this whole thing has been a pack of lies from start to finish. She was still as fired up about it as ever.

• 21:50Alastair Campbell?

  And that's why I am absolutely willing to give Rishi Sunak credit for putting in the hours and the hard work and being serious and negotiating, absolutely. But what I will not do is overlook the fact that this is the latest chapter of a story of decline and catastrophe. And the other thing I'd say, it's like someone said to me yesterday, you know, the way they were behaving yesterday, it's like you've been away for the weekend, you come home and your kids have smashed up your entire house. And then you go out and discuss, and when you come back, they want a bit of credit because they've tidied up the hall. The rest of the house is still in bits.

• 22:28Rory Stewart?

  I get where you're coming from and I agree. Let me finish then, before we go on to Labour, to say that I think what's striking about Rishi Sunak's achievement, and I think it's really impressive and really serious, is that it is a reminder of why individuals matter in politics and why relationships matter in politics. Because at the heart of what he's managed to get from the European Union, which is completely different from anything that Boris Johnson or Liz Truss was able to extract, seems to be the fact that genuinely the European Union negotiators trusted him, likes him, and there's a lot of good faith in this deal. If anybody wants to look at the details of it, Steve Pearce, who's the Professor of

• 23:09Rory Stewart?

  EU Law and Human Rights at Essex University, has got a great thread on his Twitter account going through all the details, it's incredibly complex, you know, 16 different documents, references to a whole lot of other EU tax law. But at the heart of it is a sense of of trust and good faith all the way through to the Storm on Break, which is about the ways in which the Northern Ireland Assembly could act if they felt that the agreement currently in place was somehow threatening political stability in Northern Ireland. So anyway, a small bit of good news.

• 23:42Alastair Campbell?

  I think we should briefly, given we both despise them as much as we do, pause to perhaps say a little prayer for Boris Johnson's ambitions and narcissism right now, because that was the other good thing that came out of yesterday. I think this absolutely puts an end to Johnson.

• 23:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, because he made this central and he totally failed to crack it. He created this problem, he failed to solve it. I think we we may be ready for a short break and then back on Labour.

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• 26:25Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 26:28Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 26:30Rory Stewart?

  And Alistair, part of your balance of my exuberant praise and my new love affair with Rishi Sunak, you've been quite impressed by Keir Starmer this week. So go on, tell us about Keir and what he's been up to.

• 26:39Alastair Campbell?

  So Keir made a big speech up in Manchester last week and it was very interesting to get the most of the reaction of most of the media was, oh, this is all waffle. There's no real new detail. And I actually thought it was a, it was one of his most interesting speeches yet. And I thought, as you know, I'm utterly obsessed with strategy. And I've been sort of screaming at Labour to be much more strategic in their approach. And I thought what he was doing last week, he set out what he called these five missions. And he produced a document which actually, you know, starts what is a mission driven government? This is trying to say there's a different way of doing it. So basically the missions we're setting out, I'll just very briefly tell you what they are.

• 27:24Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not 100% convinced by all of them, but I think that the idea is interesting. One, secure the highest sustained growth in the G7. Two, make Britain a clean energy superpower. Three, build an NHS fit for the future. Four, make Britain's streets safe. Five, break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage. So these are very deliberately vague and well, not vague, but they're kind of big picture. They're strategic flags in the ground really. What he then, I think, is trying to do is saying, okay, we take those, that gives direction to the Labour Party as a campaign vehicle. You now know what you're meant to be fighting about. Go out and fight on those five things.

• 27:59Rory Stewart?

  And so can I just, can I just come in on you as a kind of comms specialist? Because I think if you were being critical, one of the problems is that it hasn't really landed. It's not really caught fire. You know, even the BBC and its reporting said that it was light on policy details. What would be your instinct as a kind of specialist in political communications? What should he have done to make this land harder, make people more aware of it?

• 28:22Alastair Campbell?

  You see, too many politicians define their reality according to what's happening in those, in that day's newspapers and on that day's media. And it's not the way to think of it. So actually, I think your question misunderstands what I'm trying to say about what I think he is trying to do. So did he want to lead the news with his five missions from Manchester on the day? Yeah, he probably did. In fact, I think it did lead the news most of the day and he did do most of the main programmes, et cetera. But this is much more about putting down strategic markers. And it's then about how you follow it through. So for example, on Monday, when we had the Sunak-Von der Leyen deal, and that was big news, on that day, probably would have been big news had it not been for that, but Keir

• 29:07Alastair Campbell?

  Starmer had put together a round table aimed at debating and taking forward that number one of those five missions. And he has some very impressive people there. Mark Carney was there, ex-Governor of the Bank of England. The Chairman of Tesco was there. Had it not been for the Sunak thing, and these things happen, there's no point complaining about that, you would probably have said, oh, that was quite impressive that there was a big thing on the BBC that Mark Carney was at a Labour Party event. That probably would have made news. So I would say to him, don't worry too much about the headlines, because that will come. What this is doing is about laying the ground for the, for the issues on which they're going to fight the next election. And in a funny sort of way, I think they're doing a reverse of what Sunak's done. Sunak has come out with his five pledges,

• 29:52Alastair Campbell?

  which are actually quite Micro in a way, some of them overlap, you know, growing the economy, et cetera. And everybody wants to grow the economy, that's a kind of given, but you know, stopping the boats, whatever it might be. Whereas what I think Keir's doing is setting out the big picture flags in the ground and then the policy detail flows from that. And, and what he's doing is giving himself a process.

• 30:13Rory Stewart?

  And, and can we expect, I mean, it's the next stage, can we expect more memorable phrases, more edgy policies, things that, you know, famously you guys had your tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime, which we still remember, kind of thirty years later. Should he now be looking to produce stuff which people in thirty years' time would still be able to parrot back?

• 30:34Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, absolutely. But then don't underestimate Rory, how much people remember that because of the fact that we won and then we kept winning. And, I mean, at the time, yeah, I think people, I think they did land, and I agree with you. I think there is a problem that Labour aren't landing in that sort of, you know, big picture way. But for example, if you take what Keir did a couple of weeks ago in relation to antisemitism, the public do know that Keir Starmer took on antisemitism, okay? They may, if you follow it reasonably closely, you probably do, may remember that he had a phrase right from the word go, I'm going to cut antisemitism out from the roots, right?

• 31:17Alastair Campbell?

  He, he said that, that was quite memorable, and then he did it. And now he's done it, and hopefully can move on to things that connect much more with people in relation to health and education and, and crime and so forth. So I agree with you that the language could be, you know, could be more memorable and so forth. But I thought, I saw Andrew Neil wrote a piece saying that if Alastair Campbell had been in charge, he'd never let Tony Blair get away with this kind of waffle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I actually did think, as a strategic exercise, what Keir did was, was very, very effective, provided it now is built upon consistently and relentlessly. And I'll tell you something else I've noticed, which I've, I found. Really interesting is that I go out and do quite a lot of different events with

• 32:00Alastair Campbell?

  different sectors in business. I did one the other day with the logistics industry, who were absolutely raging about planning and saying that year after year, the government has said to them, we're going to deal with the planning process, et cetera. And several of these people said to me, none of this had been in the media, by the way, I hadn't seen any of these meetings in the media. Several of these people who were at this event I was doing came up and said, oh, I was at a dinner with Rachel Reeves last week. Oh, I was at a thing with Pat McFadden. Oh, I was at a thing with Keir Starmer. It's really interesting, they said, how they are genuinely listening to what we're trying to say to them. And then I saw the same thing at the National Farmers Union. I thought it was very interesting that both Therese Coffey and Mark Spencer absolutely got the

• 32:41Alastair Campbell?

  bird. And Keir went down pretty well. So I think it's, I think you've got to differentiate between what the media are saying day to day and what is actually going through as part of a strategy that's been laid out over time.

• 32:57Rory Stewart?

  Okay. So then, I mean, you've talked a bit about business backing, you've talked about Mark Carney and Tesco's and Sainsbury's coming behind. And I guess that's vital, right? Getting the money and it's going to be vital for a campaign. You need, as you've pointed out, British politics, big national campaigns, you need those millions of pounds coming in. So they'll be pretty grateful that Sainsbury's, it's a big Labour donor in the past, is coming in again.

• 33:18Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's David Sainsbury, isn't it, who I think he stopped donating, I think it was because of Corbyn and possibly the antisemitism issue, I don't know. But certainly a lot of, a lot of the old donors are coming back. Look, I think you and I agree, we, we had a chat yesterday with Bernie Sanders, which we'll be, we'll be putting out in the next week or two. And he was talking about how proud he was that he'd sort of, you know, his campaign was run on small donations. That would be great. Okay, that would be great. If you could do that. And certainly Labour should be trying to get smaller donations. But in a politics where the country is not going to fund political parties, this is not going to happen with politics as it's viewed at the moment, parties do have to raise money.

• 34:00Rory Stewart?

  Although, as Bernie pointed out, everything's impossible until it happens?

• 34:03Alastair Campbell?

  No, he didn't. That was Nelson Mandela. He quoted Nelson Mandela.

• 34:08Rory Stewart?

  Okay, I think I'm going to, next time we chat, I'm going to push you a little bit more on Andrew Neil's point and whether, if you'd been in charge, whether you wouldn't produce something a bit sharper.

• 34:17Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, Roy, Roy, let me just answer that now. Look, would the discussions that Tony Blair and I had had, and Gordon Brown and all the rest of us that had, have led to something that really kind of landed? Possibly. But my point is that, I'll give you, I'll give you an example. Back in 1997, if I look back, one of the most important parts of the process we did, I bet you don't remember this, but I'm telling you, it was one of the most important things we did, was a process we had called the Road to the Manifesto. And it was a series of events, and it was a series of debates, and it was a series of consultations. And it was just something that gave us energy and direction and momentum.

• 34:57Alastair Campbell?

  And I hope what's going to happen with these five missions is that they now do the sort of Mark Carney equivalent, around the one on health, around the one on crime, and they're just bringing in more and more people and building that sense that this is a government in waiting, because that's going to be very important.

• 35:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, to jump to the other end of the world, we are in the middle of the count on the Nigerian elections. So we're now two and a half days in. Results are beginning to come in from different states. And we were slightly challenged by some listeners who didn't feel that they were fully on top of Nigeria. So I'm going to give a little sort of tiny little sort of introduction to Nigeria. So first thing to understand about Nigeria is its size. Nearly a million square miles, 225 million people, something like 250 different ethnic groups, 500 independent recognised languages. It's a country which has an enormous GDP, and yet has some of the most extreme poverty

• 35:56Rory Stewart?

  in the world, and poverty that actually sadly has been getting worse. And very, very quick posited history, independent from Britain, 1960.

• 36:06Rory Stewart?

  Went through a horrible civil war. Older listeners will remember Biafra, Biafran War, which was basically an attempt by Eastern Nigeria to break away. And it's a reminder of the politics that time because France and Israel were funding Biafra and the Soviet Union and Britain were funding Nigeria against them. So a real sign of the strange time. Then a series of military coups that took you through the seventies into the eighties. And then finally, in 1999, first democratic elections, which actually brought back a man called Obasanjo, who'd been the military dictator in the late seventies and had been educated in British officer training schools, American officer training schools, commanded in the Biafra war.

• 36:51Rory Stewart?

  And then we're back again with a situation where for the last two terms, another one of these generals, who again had been in power, was again elected as a civilian president, did two terms. That's Mohamedu Buhari. And he came in on an anti-corruption ticket, but he's presided over the most kind of lamentable lack of economic growth, expansion in poverty and unemployment. And we're now going into an election with three candidates, of which, over to you.

• 37:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there are 18 candidates, but there's only three that have remotely got a chance. And I think the more the results come in, it looks like Peter Obi, who was the third party challenger from the Labour Party, it looks like that's not happening. But I think the main candidates, there's the ruling APC, the All Progressive Congress Party, is a guy called Bola Tinubu. It looks like he's in the lead. Main opposition party, the People's Democratic Party, is a guy called Atiku Abubakar. And then Peter Obi is this much younger, he's 61, he's a lot younger than Peter Obi. And he's been...

• 37:57Alastair Campbell?

  You know, getting a lot of support amongst young people and also in areas maybe that didn't vote that much before. I mean, the real problem is that there's been an awful lot of issues attached to the conduct of the election, terribly long delays when voting was happened, failure of the equipment, breaking it, breaking down the whole time, some reports of votes being suppressed, some violence in parts of the country, including in Lagos. And it's sad really, because, you know, what this, this is, as you say, a huge country, and incredibly important country, it's going to be one of the biggest countries in the world in in coming years. And if they get their act together, it's going to be

• 38:37Alastair Campbell?

  one of the richest as well. And with, you know, almost 100 million people entitled to vote, and a lot of them now saying that they couldn't vote, or that when they did vote, they weren't sure that the vote was being properly counted, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not impossible. I was actually looking up, I mean, it's quite a confusing electoral system. And they, there is the capacity for a rerun if there is enough evidence of malpractice, or if things just not function as they should. So the election was on Saturday, and we still don't really know. It looks like Bola Tanubu is in the lead. But just to tell you, just to give you a little flavour of the system, as well

• 39:18Alastair Campbell?

  as having a, as a simple majority, the winner has got to have at least 25% of the votes cast in at least 24 of the 36 states that make up the country.

• 39:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Alastair Campbell?

  So you've got to have, which if you think about it, is not a bad thing. It means you've got to have kind of very broad support.

• 39:36Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Yes. You've, you've put your finger on it. So it was designed to try to deal with the fact that from the Biafran War, and even before, there have been these incredible geographical splits.

• 39:47Alastair Campbell?

  And religious as well.

• 39:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So the three major, major ethnic groups, which are the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Igbo, are pretty much split north, west, east. And this system is designed to try to make sure that those divisions, and the divisions between Muslims and Christians, equal numbers of Muslims and Christians in Nigeria, playing through in these very, very striking continual conflicts that have been going on now for many, many years between... Muslim herders who live a semi-nomadic lifestyle and Christian agricultural pastoralists, which are happening up and down. This electoral system is trying to find ways of making sure that whoever becomes president has a pretty broad base of support around the country so you don't end up just with

• 40:32Rory Stewart?

  a northern president or a southern president.

• 40:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it could lead to a runoff because if no candidate meets those criteria I described, you have to have a runoff within three weeks with only two candidates allowed to participate. And then it's the one with the highest number of votes and the candidate who gets the required 25% votes in more states than any other candidate.

• 40:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 40:54Alastair Campbell?

  So it's a complicated system, but I just have a little fear that the mess that seems to be emerging as a consequence of the technology not quite being up to scratch and not having the personnel and so forth, that is quite...

• 41:09Rory Stewart?

  It's terrifying, isn't it? Because hundreds of millions were spent on this election and yet it seems to have been very poorly administered. The other thing is, you know, I often say that I don't envy whoever becomes the next Prime Minister of Britain with the problems that we're facing here, but that's even more true becoming president in Nigeria. And one of the things, I guess, is that corruption is very central to the way that people think about Nigeria. I mean, the two main candidates here have been associated with the most flamboyantly extreme corruption scandals.

• 41:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Rory Stewart?

  And the front runner at the moment was known as the godfather of Lagos. I mean, he really ran Lagos like a sort of old-style, kind of 1920s American Chicago machine politician. So these are real kind of old political veterans from the hearts of the Nigerian corruption of the 80s and 90s. But the problem is that Mohamed Baharu, who came in, was not corrupt and actually came in on an anti-corruption ticket. And the hope was, because we have two terms of a president from a military background who wasn't corrupt, that would be the thing that turned around the Nigerian economy because everyone thought corruption was at the heart of the problem. The truth is that he hasn't been particularly corrupt and yet his performance has been

• 42:22Rory Stewart?

  much, much worse than his more corrupt predecessors. Economic growth has collapsed, youth unemployment is insane, and this is a country where, as I think we said before... One in ten children born in the world will be born in Nigeria by 2050.

• 42:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, let's let's close off with a bit of Ukraine. I'm losing count of the number of times I've read China's position on the political settlement of the Ukraine crisis statement, which you can find on the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China. I thought this was really quite interesting. Whether it's significant or not, I don't know, but I really did think it was interesting because China, which tends to just sort of sit quietly and observe and do all the dirty stuff under the radar. But I thought it was interesting that it took such a it set out this position in quite a lot of detail. I talked about meeting Bertie Ahern. Bertie Ahern's got a podcast, by the way.

• 43:20Alastair Campbell?

  He's interviewed all the main players in the in the Good Friday Agreement talks. And I helped him launch it the other day. And Pat Kenny, the Irish broadcaster, was comparing it. And he said that Bertie was often described as the master of constructive ambiguity. But this piece, I think the reason I'm fascinated by this statement by the Chinese government is that it is absolutely riddled with constructive or destructive ambiguity. They list these 12 points, and I won't go into the detail of the law, I'll just give you the headlines. One, respect the sovereignty of all countries. Two, abandon the Cold War mentality. Three, cease hostilities. Four, resume peace talks. Five, resolve the humanitarian crisis. Six, protect civilians and POWs, prisoners of war.

• 44:04Alastair Campbell?

  Seven, keep nuclear power plants safe. Eight, reduce strategic risks. Nine, facilitate grain export. 10, stop unilateral sanctions. I think that's the big one for them. 11, keep industrial and supply chain stable. 12, promote post-conflict reconstruction. Now, you read that and you think, well, who could disagree with any of that?

• 44:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and sorry, just quickly on that, I think there are three fundamentals there. What seems to be happening is they're saying, respect territorial integrity. And we can talk a bit about what they mean there, but presumably the only way you can read that is Russia should be getting out of Ukraine.

• 44:39Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, you're wrong. What they're saying, what they could be saying is that Ukraine was always Russian.

• 44:47Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's true that they've held off calling it an invasion, but I think the outlines of their peace agreement and the reason why Russia hasn't embraced it. Sounds like it's saying that what Russia should get out of this is security guarantees. So some backing off of NATO, that Ukraine should recover some of its territory and that sanctions should cease seem to be the three main bits.

• 45:14Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think they're saying that. I listen, Russia, I think Russia has embraced it. Russia has basically embraced what it wants. This is what this is what I mean about constructive ambiguity. Russia is basically saying this is China accepting the Russian case on Ukraine. And it's the and this is what's so unsubtly subtle about it. And it's like, you know, abandoning the Cold War mentality. Well, who what do they mean by that? Who's the Cold War mentality when you've got Putin out making big speeches saying that NATO started this war, something which the Chinese have not disputed or pushed back on. So I think I don't think you're right about that.

• 45:47Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's it's an interesting. I mean, I think the so Ukraine has said that the position paper is a good sign. And Zelensky's tried to make the most of saying that at least it mentions territorial integrity very strongly at the beginning of it. And Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor, said that he would have stopped there, stopped on the issue of territorial integrity and not gone any further. But I think the the bigger story probably isn't actually that China expects Russia or Ukraine or anybody to accept this paper. It's more about positioning China as a particular type of global power.

• 46:20Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 46:20Rory Stewart?

  It's a big, big move for China to say, we're reaching into the world. And, you know, I think you raised as well that this week has been week where there's been a major mining conference in South Africa, which has been very much a standoff between the big Chinese and big US firms on getting hold of African minerals. The amount of lithium required in the world, which is stuff that goes into a lot of batteries, is supposed to increase forty twofold between now and 2040, because half the cars in the world are meant to be electric cars within the next seven years. And China at the moment has a complete stranglehold on processing most of the things required for batteries, for phones, for technology.

• 46:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But if you look at if you look at point 10 of their 12, stopping unilateral sanctions, and you take it out of the Ukrainian context, if I take out the reference to Ukraine. It reads unilateral sanctions and maximum pressure cannot solve the issue. They only create new problems. China opposes unilateral sanctions unauthorized by the United Nations Security Council. Relevant countries should stop abusing unilateral sanctions and long armed jurisdiction against other countries. Now, I think that's them talking about China, not about Russia.

• 47:30Rory Stewart?

  One hundred percent, yeah. The Chinese are very much committed to saying that they want to stop America creating a new Cold War. And they see what's happening in Russia as just a symbol of something that they feel very strongly in relation to China, which is that they've gone from a world in which David Cameron, George Osborne, the European Union, and even President Obama were very much trying to embrace China, do detentes with China. And of course, you know, we brought China into the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, which transformed its economic growth. And they've, they're struggling to adjust to the incredible change really driven since

• 48:11Rory Stewart?

  Donald Trump came in in 2016 of America more and more explicitly saying China is its major strategic adversary. We need to stop our dependence on Chinese supply chains. We need to make our own semiconductor chips. We need to get our own rare earths and minerals. And very belatedly, the US trying to get back into competition with China and Russia in Africa, which has been completely neglected and has become a playground for them both.

• 48:37Alastair Campbell?

  So this week I've been spending a bit of time with my old oppo from Clinton, Madeleine Albright days, Jamie Rubin, who has rejoined the American government and he's now the, in charge of something called the Global Engagement Centre. And this is basically using some of the, admittedly much more, in a much more complicated, modernized era, but some of the stuff that we did way back when, particularly during the Kosovo conflict, of countering the disinformation of Russia and China in particular. I mean, I didn't know this until the other day, but so for example, just to give you

• 49:19Alastair Campbell?

  an example of something, one of the things that China does, they, like around the world, lots of media organizations really struggling to survive. So they give them cheap, even possibly free access to the Chinese news agency.

• 49:36Alastair Campbell?

  But part of the condition that they do for lots of these media outlets is to say, if you take ours, you can't take any of the others.

• 49:43Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 49:44Alastair Campbell?

  And that just means that lots of media outlets around the place get a very, very, very Chinese view of the world. And the other thing that I think is important to understand, going back to, you know, where China is standing on in relation to the Ukraine war, the Russians feel, and the the assessment of these guys who are working in this new outfit is that China essentially ventilates and broadcasts Russia's main talking points on the war all the time, around the world, around the clock. So countering that, and we, and let's be honest, Russia and China have been so far ahead of the game in occupying

• 50:24Alastair Campbell?

  this information warfare space. And I think Jamie's appointment is about trying to maybe

• 50:30Rory Stewart?

  And it's heartbreaking, isn't it? Because traditionally, if you go back to the 90s and 2000s, the assumption was that the soft power very much rested with the United States and Britain and its allies, and that we occupy the most trusted

• 50:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 50:47Rory Stewart?

  model around the world. And it's extraordinary. And it's extraordinary that Russia, whose actions in Africa are, you know, about mercenaries in the Central African Republic and nuclear sales and weird extraction of gold without paying taxes, is managing to get any any credit at all out of this whole thing. People studying Africa may be interested. There's a a sub stack which may be worth following for people by somebody called Joshua Knott, who's from Schmidt Futures, and who produces a really good weekly Africa Brief. Also maybe worth looking at Voice of America, which has done some good recent stuff. Maybe that is influenced by your friend Jamie Rubin, who I guess will be correcting that on Africa

• 51:29Rory Stewart?

  and China. And and finally, Alastair, you were going to tell us a little about Charles Kennedy, your good friend and some of his music.

• 51:37Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's not his music, although he was from a very musical family. His dad was a fiddler. Basically, Rory, this is a two very pretty good young folk bands. One's called Valtos and one called Project Smock. And they've made this wonderful new tune. But if you listen, right, I won't play you the whole thing, but I'll play it to the first point at which Charles, anyway, you'll hear, you'll hear that the backing vocals is a Charles Kennedy speech. And this is what I call legacy, Rory. You will know you've made it, or your kids will know you've made it, when you're dead, and some rock star as yet unborn comes along and puts your speech about hedgehogs. So just have a listen

• 52:22Alastair Campbell?

  to this.

• 52:50Alastair Campbell?

  Now, how beautiful is that, Rory?

• 52:51Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary. And am I hearing a bodron drum in the background there?

• 52:55Alastair Campbell?

  There's a bit, there's, there's kind of everything. You've got, I think there's Irish pipes, there's, there's fiddle, there's flute, there's a bodron, yeah, there's all in there. So Charles lives on in music. Betty Boothroyd will live on in music. Somebody will write Betty Boothroyd the musical at some point.

• 53:12Rory Stewart?

  It's wonderful. Well, Alistair, thank you very much for that. And let's share that with our listeners. Bye bye for me.

• 53:18Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

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