553. Farage in Meltdown and The Killing of Ann Widdecombe

Has Nigel Farage finally hit his tipping point, and could Count Binface deliver the ultimate humiliation in Clacton? Why are police warning against speculation over the killing of Ann Widdecombe, and is Reform trying to weaponise her death? Was Rory Stewart aware of any of this during his twelve day silent retreat? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Gabriel Zucman by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics. It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Kieron Leslie Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter 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.

• 0:01Alastair Campbell?

  So much has happened in the world of politics in recent days, sometimes frightening, sometimes farcical, often deeply infuriating. But my co-host on the podcast, Mr Rory Stewart, has witnessed absolutely none of it. Because Rory has spent 10 days, cut off from the outside world, on a silent meditation retreat. When he emerged on Sunday, having seen no media at all, I had the absolute pleasure of briefing him on some of the stories that he's missed. So you're about to see Rory's first reaction to, for example, the ceasefire collapse in Iran, to the court judgments for Marine Le Pen, and indeed Prince Harry, Nigel Farage's implausible

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  battle with Count Binface, and Donald Trump's overturning of a red card. I'm slightly worried that Rory's going to think I've made the last two up. I'm intrigued to know what he makes of it all, because of course, it says so much about just how combustible our politics has been in recent times. So much can change so quickly. Then, in the second part of today's episode, which we recorded on Tuesday later in the week, we'll each give our response to the awful, awful death of Anne Whittaker, and take a further look at Nigel Farage's travails in the upcoming Clacton by-election.

• 1:17Rory Stewart?

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• 1:20Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:30Rory Stewart?

  What I love is the simplicity of it. If you refer a friend, one of those few people who haven't heard about Fuse from us every week, and they switch both their gas and electricity, you each get £50 towards your next bill.

• 1:41Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:51Rory Stewart?

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• 2:04Alastair Campbell?

  So don't just listen to another price cap story. Switch to Fuse, save up to £200 and get a trip plus free with code POLITICS at fuseenergy.com/politics.

• 2:20Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 2:22Alastair 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.

• 2:34Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, and of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN, and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying, if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 2:58Alastair Campbell?

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

• 3:05Rory 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.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  A BetterHelp ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day, every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com/restpolitics.

• 4:00Alastair Campbell?

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

• 4:04Rory Stewart?

  And me Rory Stewart.

• 4:05Alastair Campbell?

  And we are welcoming Rory back from his silent retreat. And Rory has literally, the first thing he's done, because he's missed us so much, the first thing he's done before he knows anything that has happened is in his absence, is to get in touch to find out when we're recording this week. We're recording on Tuesday, but today's Sunday. And Rory, I thought it'd be good if I just filled you in a little bit on some of the really quite surprising news events that have happened in your absence.

• 4:33Rory Stewart?

  Thank you. It's really a weird, because the retreat claims to be 10 days, but in effect, it's 12 days.

• 4:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 4:40Rory Stewart?

  And every day is like every other day. I mean, you wake up four in the morning, you go to sleep 10 at night, and you're meditating all day, and mostly in the dark. And you can't really tell one day from another. You don't know whether it's Tuesday or Thursday, but on, the only thing I did notice is on the Saturday night, because I'm in the States, I heard fireworks. And I thought it might have been 4th of July. Anyway, that's all I know.

• 5:04Alastair Campbell?

  That's all you know about what's happened. Well, certainly, we had the 250th anniversary of the American independence. Well, first of all, let's just kick off with something that's sort of not that political. England are still in the World Cup.

• 5:17Rory Stewart?

  Brilliant. And this is pretty cool, right? Because we're getting towards closing stages. What stage are we at now?

• 5:22Alastair Campbell?

  They're in the semi-final.

• 5:23Rory Stewart?

  Oh, wow. Semi-final?

• 5:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yes.

• 5:27Rory Stewart?

  So the last four?

• 5:28Alastair Campbell?

  That's what it means. They've won every game since you went away, which I think is three. They have been drawn against Argentina in the semi-final, and the other semi-final is France against Spain. Okay?

• 5:40Rory Stewart?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 5:41Alastair Campbell?

  So that's the first thing.

• 5:42Rory Stewart?

  So only, so sorry, am I right? Three more matches to go in the World Cup?

• 5:45Alastair Campbell?

  Two, semi-final and the final.

• 5:47Rory Stewart?

  But the other team is also going through a semi-final?

• 5:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, three total. Yeah, yeah.

• 5:50Rory Stewart?

  Three total. And they've really pulled together as a team. You're feeling optimistic about them? That they're playing well?

• 5:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, as you know Rory, I'm a Scotland fan. They have been playing, they had an extraordinary win in Mexico, one of the most extraordinary games in the history of the World Cup, actually. They won their quarter-final against Norway. The highlight for me, as a communications guy, was the manager, Thomas Tuchel, basically telling them all that they weren't good enough at the end of the game. That was really, really interesting.

• 6:19Rory Stewart?

  Telling the England team they weren't?

• 6:20Alastair Campbell?

  He basically said that we just weren't good enough. We were lucky. We didn't really deserve to win. We made so many mistakes, et cetera. Yeah, very interesting.

• 6:27Rory Stewart?

  And sorry, final thing on this, because this is, is this, so we interviewed Gareth Southgate. Is this very much a team that was largely built by him? 80% of the players are sort of Southgate squad?

• 6:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of them are, the core of the team is pretty much his. But the absolute stars have been, well, Jude Bellingham has been an absolute star. Harry Kane has been pretty extraordinary. Yeah, but they've done, they've done well. They've done well. I still think France have been, France and Spain, I think, will very hard to beat, well, one of them has to lose their semi-final, but it's going to be hard to beat those in the final. So that's the, that's the sports news. The Iran ceasefire is over. You're not surprised about that?

• 7:07Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 7:08Alastair Campbell?

  Trump is bombing again. The Straits of Hormuz are back. Not quite as bad as it was, but pretty good. And world leaders are very alarmed. That being said, the NATO summit passed off relatively calmly, given that Trump was on the rampage.

• 7:23Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so that's genuinely interesting for me, because, because of the way the news works, I guess anybody following the news over the last four months will have been straight open, straight closed, straight open, straight closed, ceasefire, broken ceasefire.

• 7:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 7:37Rory Stewart?

  And of course, the oil price were dipping up and down crazily, and the global economy was going into a real crisis.

• 7:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Rory Stewart?

  And people decided finally the whole thing was going to settle down. So I suppose, couple of questions. What was the trigger? I mean, how did that go wrong? And what are the consequences? Are the oil prices still going up and down? Are people really worried now again about the global economy and jet fuel? Or somehow, has it just happened so much that people have just become completely indifferent to it?

• 8:03Alastair Campbell?

  It's not that they're indifferent. Everybody, I think, is very worried about it. The NATO summit, there were obviously the world leaders were trying to sort of, you know, get him into a better place. But it's really interesting how it hasn't been, in some places, it wasn't even leading the news. It's almost like it's just sort of priced in that this is going to be a bit crazy. And then the other thing that was happening alongside it, that finally, the Ayatollah's funeral took place. And that was, you would have just been mesmerized by it. It went on for days. Millions and millions and millions of people turned out. The son, the new Ayatollah, did not appear. So he's clearly, there's something really deep going on there. But the very, very, very interesting thing is that there were protests against,

• 8:48Alastair Campbell?

  including senior people in the regime, with people shouting at them, death to the appeasers. They don't think they're hardline enough. So there's obviously a pressure within Iran to, you know, keep this war going. So I'd say the economic situation, not great. People very worried about it, but it's not been kind of quite as cataclysmic as the first time around. Another big news.

• 9:09Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 9:10Alastair Campbell?

  This one, I don't think you'll be too surprised by this one. The case against Marine Le Pen in France was upheld by the appeal court, but

• 9:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Alastair Campbell?

  she will be able to stand as she takes it to the next stage of the process. And an opinion poll, the first opinion poll, had her quite substantially ahead of Edouard Philippe, were he to be the mainstream contender. So that was

• 9:34Rory Stewart?

  So that means she's genuinely cleared Iran, and she's got a decent chance of being the next president of France?

• 9:39Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's up to her whether she, basically what he said is that where they left things is that the case, you know, she is guilty, the case has been upheld. However, they sort of found a way that would be, I got the sense the judge didn't want to say, I am blocking you from standing for the candidate. It's kind of up to you if you think you can do that in these circumstances.

• 9:58Rory Stewart?

  So the end of the Trump presidency could potentially have Georgia Maloney in Italy, Marine Le Pen in France, and then who knows what else happening with AFD, certainly in regional elections. This could be a big populism inflection point.

• 10:13Alastair Campbell?

  It could be. It could be. It could be. I still think Edouard Philippe, if it is going to be him, will, I think he's got a chance of coming back, but we'll see. Totally not surprising, but quite big news. Andy Burnham was formally nominated. By more than 300 MPs for the Labour Party leadership, no other candidates have come forward. He will be our Prime Minister next week.

• 10:33Rory Stewart?

  Next week?

• 10:34Alastair Campbell?

  Sorry, no, week on Monday, week on Monday, he'll be the Prime Minister, yeah, yeah, yeah. He also, very interestingly, released a social media post distancing himself from the Labour Government's handling of Gaza. And he used another social media post to announce he's going to be touring the UK over the summer.

• 10:51Rory Stewart?

  The Gaza thing was the sense that he was going to be more on the Palestinian side, and he thought that they'd been unsympathetic towards Palestinians, right?

• 10:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much.

• 11:00Rory Stewart?

  It feels as though the policy is going more pro-Palestinian under, under anybody.

• 11:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I would say so, I would say so. We're now going to get into some, I, I think you'll be shocked, I think you'll be shocked. So the Nigel Farage finances drama has been rumbling on. Had that begun before you left?

• 11:17Rory Stewart?

  Yes, and, and you had begun by saying, I guess, a few weeks ago, why isn't everyone covering it enough? And then people began to get a bit of steam. And we had this amazing sequence of him saying, I've taken five million and I'm using it for security.

• 11:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Rory Stewart?

  And then he decided he could maybe buy a Ferrari with it if he wanted. And, and that's where we were, yeah.

• 11:37Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, thankfully, many years late, given that a lot of these stories have been around for a long time, the media did start to sort of kick into gear. Somebody by the name of George Cotrell, aka Posh George, he was put right into the centre of the thing, not least because his mother, Fiona Cotrell, who is described by Richard Tice as a very successful aristocrat.

• 12:06Rory Stewart?

  A very successful aristocrat.

• 12:08Alastair Campbell?

  I'll come on to why that's important. The police are involved in that, so we have to be a little bit careful.

• 12:14Rory Stewart?

  Sorry, just a quick thing, because it always sort of slightly annoys me when the public are trying to get to the bottom of what malfeasance is going on. Because we had a lot of this going on with Peter Morell and the allegations around, you know, Nicola Sturgeon's husband and the SNP, of everybody saying, well, you know, we can't really talk about this because the police is investigating.

• 12:32Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, yeah.

• 12:33Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I can sort of see that sometimes, but sometimes it seems to me a bit mealy mouthed, that presumably there's quite a lot of things one can say about stuff.

• 12:42Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, okay. I've not been mealy mouthed. I just think because of other things I'm going to tell you shortly, maybe, maybe just be a little bit careful for now.

• 12:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Alastair Campbell?

  What, what, a very unmealy mouthed thing to tell you. I don't like to promote the books of people who, for whom I have no respect, but George Cotrell wrote a book called How to Launder Money. I think he might be regretting that. I think he might be regretting that title. So, we have the five million pound donation, which keeps going and going and going. And Farage keeps being asked about it, and he can't get away from it. We then have Post George comes in, and all sorts of stories that people like Carol Codwallader were shouting about years ago, suddenly are being written about by the papers that back then said she was a, what was the word? She was like one of those single cat ladies, whatever that insult was that people used to throw about.

• 13:35Rory Stewart?

  I hope some listeners have been listening to our mini series on the funding of Reform, which is now presumably ever more relevant, because it's giving a lot of the background to that stuff.

• 13:44Alastair Campbell?

  Totally, totally, totally. It's given a lot of the background. And so, so that's all been going on. Farage is getting more and more agitated, more and more agitated. Like all good patriots, he and Rupert Lowe, who we'll come on to in a moment, they both went separately to America to celebrate the British King giving away the United States to the Americans, because they're such take back control patriots. On his return, quizzed by a reporter from Sky News, he completely and totally lost his shit. The next morning, the world of media and politics was abuzz because Nigel Farage put out a statement saying, I will be making a statement about my future in public life at whatever time

• 14:29Alastair Campbell?

  it was. Okay. So we all sat around waiting for the statement. As a result of the statement, Rory, I can now tell you Nigel Farage has resigned his seat as the MP for Clacton. He has announced, however, that he will be standing in the by-election that he is causing, and he is billing it as Nigel Farage against the establishment. Because this whole thing is the establishment trying to take him down. It gets better. The parties, very smart. And I was recording, if you know, we brought Mehdi Hassan off the bench to stand in for you. We, we were recording our main episode when this happened. I actually

• 15:12Alastair Campbell?

  suggested, as we were talking, well, maybe we should do what we did with Martin Bell in 1997. Get all the parties to pull out and just put up a kind of serious credible figure that everybody likes and so forth.

• 15:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 15:25Alastair Campbell?

  Instead of which, all of the main parties basically said, this is a pathetic stunt by a desperate man. None of us are taking part. So the main contest that is being covered in the last few days, which is getting coverage all over the world, is that Nigel Farage's big challenger in Clacton is Count Binface.

• 15:49Rory Stewart?

  Oh, oh my goodness. It's his, it's what he's been leading up to all his life.

• 15:53Alastair Campbell?

  His whole life.

• 15:54Rory Stewart?

  Count Binface, he's, he's been preparing for this whole thing. Oh, he's, how brilliant. I'm so pleased for him. He's finally found his moment. Farage is literally, has nothing to do except campaign against a man with a, a dustbin on his head.

• 16:09Alastair Campbell?

  And Count Binface has been getting a lot of expressions of support from a lot of different people.

• 16:14Rory Stewart?

  What a brilliant move, because a lot of people vote for Count Binface. I mean, they obviously can't defeat Farage, but that will be an amazing insult to Farage. Instead of actually the establishment being against him, it will be people really sticking up two fingers to him, I think.

• 16:26Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing, and I've got the full list somewhere, there are about eight independents, including Jeremy Corbyn's brother and Lawrence Fox. You'll get all sorts of, you know, misfits and attention seekers. But Count Binface has caught the imagination of the world. I mean, he's been all over the television in America and Australia and New Zealand. So Farage is looking utterly ridiculous.

• 16:46Rory Stewart?

  The, the politics on this, I don't know, you probably covered this for many, but did all these parties convene? They must have. What do you think happened? It's very clever to coordinate and end up with just Count Binface. I mean, that really is smart.

• 16:58Alastair Campbell?

  They might have convened, but the, I think the first, the first one out of the traps, I think, was Kemi, and then Keir, and then even Rupert Lowe, and I'm going to come on to him in a moment, because he's been making news as well. So anyway, when I said to you Nigel Farage resigned his seat, what did you think I was going to go on to say?

• 17:14Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I, I thought he was, he was over. I thought he was leaving and we weren't going to have a, he wasn't going to be leader. And then I had a whole pompous phrase about how Justice Le Pen might take over in France, populism had collapsed, and Britain, I had a...

• 17:26Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. I think he's in a very, he's in a very, very bad place, and he looks terrible.

• 17:30Rory Stewart?

  I cannot, so wonderful to say, I'm standing against the establishment, and the establishment turns out to be a dustbin with a black cloak.

• 17:38Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, especially, especially as, and Richard Tice, by the way, he did an interview at this from his car, which looked suspiciously to me like a Bentley. And he's in his car doing an interview with Times Radio. This is where he said that this is the smearing of a very successful aristocrat. So it's not only a day for the, the little people against the establishment, but they're standing up for very successful aristocrats who are being, who are being investigated by the police because of Post George, who is, who by the way, apparently calls Nigel Farage daddy. So it's all been very, very weird.

• 18:13Rory Stewart?

  How wonderful. And I love the idea of being a very successful aristocrat. I mean, you could write a whole essay on what it would take to be a very successful aristocrat. But it's presumably about how you handle the, the great luck of your inheritance in some way. Anyway, back to you.

• 18:27Alastair Campbell?

  So Rupert Lowe, who, for our international listeners who maybe don't know who Rupert Lowe is, but they might know a little bit better now because of something he's done this week. He is the former Reform UK MP who was elected alongside Nigel Farage. They fell out, and he's now set up Restore Britain. Rupert Lowe became this week, Rory, the first British politician to go on the Joe Rogan podcast, the biggest podcast, I think, in the world.

• 18:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:53Alastair Campbell?

  And I think he may have been very badly affected by what we commonly know as hubris combined with utter stupidity. Because he made headlines that I'm, I'm, I'm absolutely sure he would not have wanted other than when appealing to MAGA gun fanatics. Because he described the Dunblane massacre of 16 children and one teacher as one murder, and said that his father, who liked to shoot things, had all his handguns taken away from him because of one murder. Cue outrage everywhere, apart from in Magaland, who couldn't quite understand what the fuss was about. So what that says to me, so basically you

• 19:33Alastair Campbell?

  have a sense of Farage imploding, and then Rupert Lowe, probably carried away by the fact that he was, he was apparently going to be meeting Elon Musk, his new benefactor. He was on Joe Rogan, probably fixed by Elon Musk, I don't know. And he just got carried away. And, and, and, and by the way, maybe when we talk on Tuesday, we can talk about the other mistakes he made, but he made several.

• 19:55Rory Stewart?

  But, but there's a classic one, isn't there, which you must see again and again, and be trying to warn politicians against. Firstly, doing an interview abroad with another media and thinking it's not going to get back home.

• 20:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:06Rory Stewart?

  Secondly, thinking you can flatter an international audience by sort of sounding like you're down with them and agreeing with them, because you think Joe Rogan's listeners want to hear you be pro-gun lobby, you know, pro the National Rifle Association. And then the strangeness about actually whatever Lowe represents, whatever the British far right might be, anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, it's not the same as Trump's MAGA. And, and that's something that's actually all these guys are navigating, isn't it? And it's something that Le Pen has to worry about, the F D has to worry about. But it's tempting, isn't it? Because I, I think other people have got in trouble doing this over the years.

• 20:41Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 20:42Rory Stewart?

  I mean, let's say you went and gave an interview with Al Jazeera, or Jeremy Corbyn, I think, got, got in trouble for doing this sometimes. He would, you know, do, I think in North Africa, he went to a, a, a, I don't know, event connected to Hamas or something, and said something which might have, he might have felt goes down well with the crowd at the time. And yeah.

• 21:01Alastair Campbell?

  But, and also he was slightly led into it by Joe Rogan. And the other thing, of course, this, this grooming gangs where they've sort of, you know, this absurd figure that they've calculated 250,000 rapes, et cetera. And Joe Rogan just sort of got him to kind of be, he kept saying, you know, quarter of a million? And then Lowe's saying, oh, probably more. And then, then he, then he came up with this other one, that if you're an immigrant, if you're an illegal immigrant, you come into Britain. You get dental care ahead of British people. And so Joe Reagan say, what are you saying? These illegal immigrants come in and they get NHS care before the British people do? Yes, that's right, Joe. I mean, it was, he exposed himself for what, you know, for what we know here. So that was, that was him. He's not made as much, he's made massive news in Scotland. He was big, big, big. When you go back to Scotland, you'll find it was big news.

• 21:46Alastair Campbell?

  People really upset, or, you know, lots of families of children who were killed coming out, et cetera. Very significant political death in the United States was the death of the US Senator Lindsey Graham, aged 71, who two days ago was with President Zelensky in Kiev. So the conspiracy theories there are saying this is the Russians. And again, without evidence, but, but he's, you know, he, he was in Kiev. He saw Zelensky a couple of days ago and he's back in the United States now and he is dead.

• 22:16Rory Stewart?

  That's very big news because Senator Graham was, of course, a big Iran hawk, a big champion of what Trump was doing there. And in many ways, kind of an important figure on as a Republican outright, wasn't he? For that kind of foreign policy.

• 22:27Alastair Campbell?

  He was, however, somebody who was pushing for more and more sanctions on Russia. Zelensky put out a very, very, very warm tribute to him. And then sticking briefly in America, somebody we've talked about on the podcast several times, Graham Plathner in Maine, he has had to withdraw his candidacy.

• 22:45Rory Stewart?

  Oh, Lord.

• 22:46Alastair Campbell?

  Because of these sexual offenses allegations that were being made against him.

• 22:51Rory Stewart?

  So that finally got too much. I mean, so Plathner, the tattoos, which is the New York Times said, looked like Nazi tattoos, the allegations of sexual abuse, all this sort of stuff. Finally got too much in Plathner. I mean, a bit, and it's an interesting point. What, when do you reach a stage in a political career? Because people must be thinking all the time, if you're Farage or Plathner, well, you know, Trump can just man it out.

• 23:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:14Rory Stewart?

  Trump just takes scandal after scandal after scandal. He doesn't step down. He doesn't apologize. He doesn't go anywhere. And in the end, people forget. So in that style of politics, which Trump and Plathner are other, different extremes are, which is, yeah, I'm a pretty, you know, I've got a lot of strange stuff in my life, but my voters don't care. When the moment comes when you have to give up.

• 23:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, just on your point on Trump, the other big news that emerged while you were away, Trump added $2.2 billion to his personal wealth in the first year of his presidency.

• 23:40Rory Stewart?

  Wow.

• 23:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Rory Stewart?

  Wow.

• 23:42Alastair Campbell?

  1.4, 1.4 billion of which was crypto.

• 23:45Rory Stewart?

  And that's all those weird investments in crypto where people get to buy crypto and they get to have dinners. And people seem to get pardons when they invest in certain funds.

• 23:54Alastair Campbell?

  I've done one leading in your absence, by the way. I interviewed Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who have written this book, Regime Change.

• 24:01Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes.

• 24:02Alastair Campbell?

  Lots of talk about Trump and corruption in that. Very big news in Jersey. We don't say that very often. Their parliament has been the first part of our great islands to have passed assisted dying legislation. That's happened. The buyer tapestry, et arrivé.

• 24:18Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 24:19Alastair Campbell?

  That's here.

• 24:19Rory Stewart?

  I've booked my tickets.

• 24:20Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. Prince Harry lost his case against the Mail. Prince Harry may or may not have met his father. I can't quite work it out. We've had, I don't know if you can see that I'm sweating, we've had another unbelievable heatwave. Spain has had deadly forest fires. And I told you about the World Cup, but the other big, big, big news that dominated the news for a couple of days. Do you remember, I think this was the last episode we did before you went away. I said, I was really surprised that Donald Trump had basically been keeping out of the World Cup.

• 24:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Alastair Campbell?

  The next day, he intervened by phoning the FIFA president, Gianni Infantino, to ask or to suggest that a red card that had been given against an American player should be lifted.

• 25:09Rory Stewart?

  That's brilliant.

• 25:10Alastair Campbell?

  And guess what?

• 25:10Rory Stewart?

  Wait, no, you're not going to tell me Infantino agreed.

• 25:12Alastair Campbell?

  It was suspended for a year, but said Infantino, that was the work of the independent committee that looks at these things.

• 25:21Rory Stewart?

  Is this actually going to affect the cup? Is this an important player who's going to have a decisive impact on what happens?

• 25:25Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he did. I think it did affect what happened because America were doing very, very well. And this guy, Baligan, who is actually, and this is the best irony of the law. He is only playing for America. If you hear him, it sounds like you're talking to a kid from South London. Okay? Yeah, I played all right. It was all right. Yeah, the game was all right. We did all right. Yeah. Because he was born in New York, because his mother was very, very pregnant on holiday and they wouldn't let her on the plane. So he was a birthright citizen.

• 25:55Rory Stewart?

  Oh, brilliant.

• 25:56Alastair Campbell?

  He is exactly the sort of person that Donald Trump wants to put on the first plane out. But he'd been their best player. So Donald Trump does this, literally in the Oval Office. First of all, he says, I mean, it's really unfair. He's our best player. We can't take our best player out. What if I took Messi out? What if I took Harry Kane out from England, he said? Oh, he, he also, he also revealed that he's played golf with Harry Kane. And Harry Kane confirmed that this is true some time ago. So this was a massive, massive, massive story around the world. The, the real football aficionado, people like Jürgen Klopp and Gary Neville and Wayne Rooney, they were all saying, this is the end of football if this is allowed to stand, but it did stand. He played, but the best thing is Belgium absolutely destroyed them 4-1.

• 26:41Alastair Campbell?

  So the Americans are out.

• 26:43Rory Stewart?

  But how wonderful that Infantino has reached the final stage of literally taking a call from the president to lift the red card. Oh, this is so wonderful. The rule of law, football, for how the rules of the game, oh, it's wonderful.

• 26:58Alastair Campbell?

  I know, I know.

• 26:58Rory Stewart?

  That's the greatest story of all. No, I wasn't expecting the punchline of actually the red card being suspended. That's really, that's really impressive.

• 27:06Alastair Campbell?

  For a year. So if he commits another offence in the next year, they're going to take that one into account. And then of course, in the, in the, in England's game, the next game England played in the day after this, they got a red card and the guy got a too much ban. So there's all this stuff around here is, you know, who's going to phone Trump? Who's going to get it lifted, et cetera? So there we are. That's, I think I've covered most of the big things, sort of home and abroad.

• 27:31Rory Stewart?

  It's, no, it's, no, that's, that's, that's, thank you, Alistair. And that's an amazing kind of reminder. My general sense is nothing really much happens. You go away, you come back, you open the newspaper and nothing seems to have changed. I think that's true. I think I missed a lot. So thank you very much. So Alistair, I think on that, let's, let's take a break.

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• 29:26Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 29:29Alastair Campbell?

  And with me, Alastair Campbell. And as I said at the top, if you saw the first half, we recorded on Sunday. So if we're looking like we're in different places, wearing different clothes, we are. It's now Tuesday that we're recording. And we're going to talk a little bit more about Farage and about Clacton. So Rory, I think there's a lot to separate here. Let's, there's the by-election caused by Farage's hissy fit when he wasn't enjoying scrutiny over his finances and now trying to frame everything against him and the establishment. There's the comedy value of Count Binface, who's making headlines right around the world at the moment. And of course, because she was a reform politician, Anne Whittaker's murder is in some cases being lumped in as part of one big story about reform. So it is hard to separate.

• 30:13Alastair Campbell?

  But I think we should try to stay focused on the by-election for now. What we think about that, why he's doing it, whether actually Count Binface has any chance of winning. And then, and also just some of the politics around it and then maybe go into Anne Whittaker a bit later.

• 30:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, I think that the thing that struck me most coming back and getting into the reading around this is how fundamental, in the end, the money was to the collapse of Farage and the triggering this by-election. Looking into the story of George Cotrell, Posh George, becomes more and more mesmerizing. And I think we should pay tribute to some of the journalists who've been covering this story over the last few years. I mean, there's been extraordinary articles, actually in The Spectator, Sunday Times Insight Team with Gabriel Poggrun. There was a great series of Guardian articles about this. But what's interesting, when you read back over these stories, which have been coming for years and years and years, is how difficult it was for any of this stuff to break through, given how mad the story is.

• 31:12Rory Stewart?

  What I hadn't quite taken on board is this guy, George Cotrell, had grown up on the island of Mustique, been to Moreton School, doesn't go to university and drifts into Nigel Farage's orbit when he's barely 20, 21. He takes Farage to the States on his great visit to meet Trump. And he's with Farage when he's detained at the airport by IRS agents who bring 20 charges against him and eventually put him in jail. He does a plea bargain where he agrees to explain how he does his stuff. And in return, he only gets eight months in a federal penitentiary. This guy, you would have thought, that's it, right? And the Posh George is not going to reappear then in the life of Nigel Farage.

• 31:54Rory Stewart?

  He then goes on to become this amazing sort of, well, it's like something out of London Falling. You remember that book, London Falling, you enjoyed it, right? A young man who is living the most extraordinary fantasy life, who's claiming he's inherited £200 million of the trust fund, which his mother says is total nonsense. And he's actually inherited nothing from them. Who's telling Tatler magazine that he's just lost £56 million at a poker table, £23 million at another poker, so he's clearly very, very into gambling. And somehow rebuilds off the back of gambling through some very strange relations with Tether, which is Chris Harborn set up. A whole life in Montenegro, which involves private jets and planes. And then you see Farage

• 32:37Rory Stewart?

  is reappearing. He's turning up in Montenegro. He's becoming part of this life. And in the end, as these rather brilliant journalists have established, you end up with these incredible transactions, including one of which I still haven't seen properly reported, which is that Nick Candy, the treasurer of Reform, gives an eight million pound house in downtown London to George Cotrell, for which George Cotrell doesn't pay. You can see in the land registry, it's zero, zero. Later, he claims that Cotrell has bought shares in an offshore company in Guernsey, but they refused to divulge the amounts compared. Meanwhile, the security, the social media team that's built Farage, the transport, all of this stuff appears to be coming from Cotrell. And then that for my mother, for example, is the thing that's already stuck,

• 33:22Rory Stewart?

  not Farage, not the media. She's had it because of the money. She can't believe the money stuff.

• 33:27Alastair Campbell?

  The thing that I think is taking the sometimes in these situations, you need a tipping point. So with Boris Johnson, who you and I knew as being a complete charlatan, but people liked him, thought he was funny and what have you. And there was all sorts of things that you and I, lots of people like us would have said, this guy's not fit to be Prime Minister. He should be gone by now. I would say his management of COVID, even before Partygate. The tipping point was his defence of Pinter, the guy who was accused of sex offences. With Farage, I think the sense of the tipping point, maybe we're not fully at the tipping point, but the beginning of the tipping point is him defending himself over something that is utterly indefensible. Because you mentioned Christopher Harborn. Christopher Harborn has given five million pounds to Nigel Farage. And if Nigel

• 34:10Alastair Campbell?

  Farage expects us to believe that it's just a gift, it's no strings attached, doesn't want anything from it, then we hear that it's his free security. And we'll talk about security when we get on to Anne Whittaker. But as I've said recently, I think that was unbelievable, not believable. Then it was because he campaigned for Brexit. But the more you read about Cotrell and about Tether, which is becoming, you talk sometimes about these trillion dollar companies with AI, they're going to have 10 employees. It is massively wealthy, not really putting much back, I would argue. So you then start to think, and then you think, well, George Cotrell, I think he will be regretting, whatever the motivation or whatever the book, because I've

• 34:49Alastair Campbell?

  not read the book, writing a book called How to Launder Money. Because this feels like a group of people using very opaque systems and national borders and technological advance to do things that most decent people would think you shouldn't be doing that when you're a politician.

• 35:08Rory Stewart?

  Just on that, I had a lot of money, because I've slightly got into that. So the reason, of course, he's written the book is that he was sent to jail in the United States for laundering money.

• 35:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, for wire fraud. It was for wire fraud.

• 35:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Part of the plea bargain was that he would explain to the federal agents how he had laundered money. And therefore, the book conceit is, I was a former criminal, and now I'm going to explain to the world.

• 35:30Alastair Campbell?

  How it's done.

• 35:30Rory Stewart?

  Um, how I did it, so that law enforcement agencies can get on it. But what's so odd about it is that what he's gone on to do since his conviction seems to be, and this to create sock puppets. So a lot of the business seems to be about buying up gambling accounts of ordinary people, so that professional gambling syndicates with enormous compute and money can bet on ordinary people's accounts, which they wouldn't normally be allowed to do. So huge amount of what he's doing is trying to get around the terms and conditions of UK gambling companies, or enabling people to place bets they wouldn't normally be allowed to do. And this is what

• 36:13Rory Stewart?

  this whole Montenegrin universe seems to be about. And some of the crypto. So in other words, it may not be exactly the type of stuff that he did when he literally sat down with federal agents, who he believed to be drug dealers and agreed to launder a million of their money. But it's certainly a world which you would have thought any politician who wasn't greedy, and this is the other thing. I mean, Farage comes across as unbelievably greedy. Why did he take 50,000 to go to Davos? When we were in Davos, that whole trip cost 50,000, paid for by somebody else, not declared. If he's already received five million pounds from Chris Harborn, and he's already getting all his security covered by Cotrell, and there's already free

• 36:55Rory Stewart?

  accommodation in London. I mean, is there any limit to how much money Farage wants?

• 36:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there's two points that you made. There's that one. I'll come back to that. You made the point earlier, why does Farage keep somebody who's not just, you know, controversial and colourful, but has actually been to an American jail for committing quite serious financial offences? I think there can only be two reasons. And bear in mind, they are genuinely close, otherwise it would be very, very, well, it's weird anyway, that George Cotrell calls him daddy. So there's that. There's the personal relationship. He's clearly, Farage sees him as somebody who is very, very useful to it. So he's kept him for that reason. But I think the main reason is that Farage actually, and this is where I'm critical of our media, Farage actually has been able to get away for too long with things that, a bit like Trump, that

• 37:42Alastair Campbell?

  most politicians wouldn't get away with. And that's because he's very cleverly and very successfully created this shtick as a kind of cheeky, chappy commentator, as opposed to somebody who even dreams one day of being Prime Minister. So the drawing towards the tipping point has come from the fact that people have started to think, I wonder if he could be Prime Minister. You know, Labour aren't doing very well in the polls. They've been ahead in the polls for so long. They've now got loads of money coming in. And of course, when it was starting, they were, do you remember, he actually did an advert, Reform, the only party in Britain that welcomes cryptocurrencies. In a way, they've been hiding in plain sight and all this stuff. Then the other thing that happens, if you think you can get away with stuff for long,

• 38:26Alastair Campbell?

  once the scrutiny does start to become a bit more difficult to handle, and then he did this thing, he went on a Reform podcast, because of course, a bit like Trump, again, they've got their own media infrastructure. They've got papers like the Express and the Telegraph will just pump out, although they're all turning a bit, but they'll pump out his stuff, you know, whatever he says. They've got their own podcast. He goes on one of Reform's sort of favourite podcasts, and he says, quote, "I'm being treated like a war criminal." Well, I know what it's like to be occasionally treated like a war criminal and called one every day of my life.

• 38:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Alastair Campbell?

  He's being treated at last with some scrutiny. And the scrutiny is showing up very, very quickly. One, that he's not very good at standing up to it. Two, that he regularly does things which anybody with serious intent upon being Prime Minister would never, ever do. Five million pounds is one of them. Some of the others, advertising gold bullion, even the stuff like doing the cameos for peanuts. What does that say if he's not greed? Why does he need 100 quid to say up the rah to somebody? Why does he need 100 quid to wish somebody well on their birthday? If you like somebody, you want to wish them well, you do it for nothing. If you're a nice person, lots of precious money.

• 39:40Rory Stewart?

  Presumably, if I'm Chris Harborn seeing all this, I'm like, what the actual fuck? I gave you five million pounds so that you weren't going to have to worry about any of this.

• 39:52Alastair Campbell?

  Plus 10 or more to the party.

• 39:54Rory Stewart?

  I've given 10 to the party, and I've given five to you. And why did I give it to you, Nigel? I gave it to you so that you could focus on becoming Prime Minister. You wouldn't need to get up to any of your dirty financial dealings. You wouldn't have to do embarrassing little endorsements on videos anymore. You wouldn't have to take strange loans from people running gambling syndicates out of Montenegro. You can just get on with stuff because I've given you five million pounds, and that should be enough for you to live on comfortably with your MP salary. And he hasn't done it. I mean, if I'm Harborn, I'm just thinking, this is insane. I mean, the only possible justification of writing a blank cheque is to save Farage from all this monkey business. And Farage just kept getting deeper in it.

• 40:34Alastair Campbell?

  Right. And he gets deeper in it. And then, how is he trying to frame this by-election that he has triggered? It's me against the establishment, right? As if, one, he's not the establishment. Richard Tice, who talks about a very successful aristocratic family, I think he we can put down as the establishment. Zia Yousaf, very much the establishment. I mean, the whole thing is utterly absurd. But this is what he's trying to do, is to frame now anything the police do as they investigate Reform and the Cotrell family that they're doing, as they investigate Jenrick and some of his funding. They are now trying to put in the public mind the idea that the police cannot be trusted. That, we'll come back to

• 41:14Alastair Campbell?

  that when we get to the way that they've reacted to the Anne Whittaker murder, which I have real, real concerns about, the way that they've reacted to this. So I think what you're seeing now with Clacton, I mean, look, you Rory, I think you thought it was wishful thinking. When I said at the turn of the year, I wouldn't be surprised if Farage is not leader of the Reform Party by the end of the year. I think he's peaked and I think he's on the way down. He's still got a Trumpian appeal. I was talking to Steve Rotherham this morning, the Liverpool mayor, friend of Andy Burnham. We were talking about reform and he said, look, you know, they're definitely, I think they've peaked, but he's kind of in that space that Trump thought he was. I could shoot somebody in Fifth Avenue and my supporters are still going to love me. I just don't think, this is my hope, Britain

• 41:54Alastair Campbell?

  is not America. Britain in the end, I think, has enough basic core decency to say, hmm, you know what, I'm not sure a politician should take £5 million off anybody. I don't think they should take £50,000 off anybody.

• 42:06Rory Stewart?

  I also think that Trump's brand in the end was different. I mean, Trump from the very beginning factored in was this sense of this rickety, debt ridden, multiple bankrupt billionaire with loose money flowing in and out in every direction. That wasn't actually Farage's brand. Farage's brand was supposed to be a bloke in the pub with a pint. And Trump has more control of more media than Farage does. He is in a much more powerful position as an incumbent. I mean, I think what we've seen with Farage and what I think we saw with Graham Plathner, the insurgent in Maine, who was supposed to be taking on Susan Collins and who's also collapsed, is that it's very, very difficult actually

• 42:47Rory Stewart?

  for anybody really to do the full shameless Trump unless you baked in that whole Trump story over 40 years.

• 42:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, look, maybe we should turn to Anne Widdicombe and perhaps do this in two parts. First of all, just talk about what happened, what's happened and maybe talk a little bit about her career. But then to what I see as this sort of attempt to politicise it in a way that is deeply unhelpful to the police and that also I think is just again plain wrong.

• 43:13Rory Stewart?

  Let me just do a quick, quick explainer on Anne Widdicombe and you, I'm sure knew her much better than I did. But I was just reviewing her life and it's rather extraordinary. So she, what wasn't that old actually, in comparative terms, born in the late 40s, came into Conservative politics in the 70s in what would have been a pretty classic Tory route. So she'd studied PPE at Oxford, hadn't studied Latin before. She then became an assistant to Michael Ankrum, who was Senator Tory MP. She became a local councillor. She then went through the tried and tested route of running in no hope seats in 79, 83, finally gets into

• 43:54Rory Stewart?

  the past Parliament, the late Thatcher era, and then becomes quite quickly a star really in a way, in the terms of it. Within a couple of years, she's a junior minister. Relatively quickly, she's a minister of state. She ends up, and one of the things I've always resonated was she became, she had my job, she was the minister of state for prisons. In the last two years, the major government spent, and she did this thing which David Hanson did, which is to attempt to visit every prison in the United Kingdom, and she managed it. It's a hell of an achievement, actually. You have to, I mean, because there's some pretty remote things and you've got the whips and all this going, you're going around well over 100 prisons. And she did that. And after the loss in 97, she was in a pretty powerful

• 44:39Rory Stewart?

  position. She'd become the shadow Home Secretary under William Hague. So she was quite a kind of cornerstone of the Tory party. She was already beginning to develop pretty independent views. So she, on the one hand, was much more Catholic. So she was very anti-abortion. She was somebody who never talked about her own personal life. She had a house with her mother till her mother died at 97 in the late 2000s. Doesn't seem to have had romantic relationships. But as well as being very, very conservative on socialist issues, she also agreed with you on things. She was very anti-fox hunting, for example, which would have been unusual for a Tory MP at the time. She fell out with Michael Howard. She was the one who produced this great line. He had something of the night about him.

• 45:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 45:25Rory Stewart?

  When David Cameron becomes leader, he's very much, from her point of view, a young whippersnapper who's hardly been in the House of Commons and hasn't been into anything since she has. And she's a little bit derogatory about him. And then after, she decides to step down, but she leaves Parliament pretty young. So she's only barely 60 when she steps down, when she could have had her. Just as the Conservatives are coming into power for 13 years. So instead of what she would have expected, which is to be at the absolute summit of her career, being a minister in various Conservative governments over 13 years, she goes off and becomes really one of the first politician celebrities of every different sort. She has agony aunt columns in The Guardian. She has a BBC and ITV programmes

• 46:07Rory Stewart?

  where she's being an agony aunt. She's going out to being an MP, challenging vandals. She's going on Celebrity Big Brother. She's going on Strictly Come Dancing. One of the first real MPs to do all this kind of stuff. And then she becomes increasingly pro Brexit, increasingly close to reform, and becomes from the point of view of the Cameroon wing of the Conservative Party, no longer fully one of them. But anyway, give us the sense for, did you know her well? Did you appear on any of these shows with her?

• 46:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I would never do the reality TV shows, as you know Rory, but I did regularly sort of joust with her on television, but also in private as well. I'm trying to remember what role she had in the 97 election. She was certainly one of their big hitters. And as you say, she had a succession of serious jobs. And that, something of the night about Michael Howard, that showed you her ability to really cut through in a way that, that phrase, I'm afraid when Michael Howard dies, that's going to be part of his obituary because it just, it really damaged him. It really damaged him. Look, her and my politics were a long, long, long way apart. But she was one of those people you could really have

• 47:20Alastair Campbell?

  interesting discussions about. You said about, you're right, when she was prisons minister, she was obsessed with this idea. You have to go and see every prison inside. You have to get a real feel for it. She also was really interested in homelessness. And I don't know whether that was something that was always with her or whether that was something that she got through seeing, you know, the link between prison and homelessness. But she was, so there were lots of things that she was passionate about that I would have been passionate about as well. And I think she, I think you're right about the judgment of Cameron. I think she felt she was more of a real Tory than him, even though he had the, you know, the Eaton background and all the rest of it. I think what made her cut through in the way that she did was because at a time where maybe politics was becoming

• 48:03Alastair Campbell?

  much more about conventional looking, sounding politicians, she was just very, very, she was different. There was nobody else looked like her, sounded like her. And I'll tell you the other thing, my son, my Rory was, was on the day that I left government in 2003, so this is 22 years ago now. And we had, you know, dozens of cameras outside the house all day. I'm sorry Nigel, it's happened to a lot of people before you. And, you know, they're all out there waiting for Fiona Remy to come back. The boys are downstairs watching the television all day where it's wall to wall on Sky and News 24 and all that stuff. So I came back in, came through the crowd of cameras and then sat down, had a cup of tea and talking to the kids. And I said to Rory, did anybody say anything particularly interesting? He goes, no, not really. They all said what you expected. You know, he

• 48:48Alastair Campbell?

  said this, he said that. So the only one that was really in it was Anne Widdicombe. I said, oh, what did she say? She said, well, she thought that my impact upon political life was not wholly positive. She thought that my conduct during the war was not as she would have liked it to be. She felt I was far too tribal in politics. But she said, his biggest service to life and the nation was to show that you could do a very difficult job with a, with a mental health condition. And she was the only one who said that. And so, and I think, so that actually sort of, I don't know, whenever I bumped into her thereafter, because I don't know whether there was anything in her life that made her particularly interested

• 49:32Alastair Campbell?

  in mental health, but I know that she was. Again, it might have been through the, through the prisons experience. So I think it was, I was genuinely shocked when I heard that she was dead and sad. But then, since then, and this, this whole murder thing, and it's like, it's just become one of those stories that has cut through to everybody, every, you know, every go at them. People say, what is this Anne Widdicombe thing all about? So you were in your retreat, wake up one morning and on the news, Anne Widdicombe has died. She's 78. So we think, oh, didn't know she wasn't well. But that's sad. And then people start to pay tribute. And then through the day, it emerges that police have launched a murder investigation. And then the police, Devon and Call, and this is where I start to feel sorry for

• 50:15Alastair Campbell?

  the police, because straight away, people are saying, is there a terrorist political motivation? They say, we are not aware of a terrorist motivation. This becomes blanket, please rule out. I read the words very, very carefully, they didn't rule it out. So what's happened now, a few days later, Shabana Mahmood, the Home Secretary, announces in the House of Commons, this is now being handled by counter-terrorism. Cue lots of people on the Reform Farage supporting side of things, basically, oh, I told you, they're covering it up.

• 50:48Rory Stewart?

  Sorry, for international listeners, though, just to explain what we mean by terrorism. We don't know exactly what they mean, but there's no reason to believe that by terrorism, what they mean is some jihadi Islamist group putting together a coordinated group

• 51:02Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's political.

• 51:03Rory Stewart?

  in order to bring down the government. At the moment, the suspect appears to be a young white man who was arrested in Yorkshire, and the police have found material in his home. So the statement seems to be that he may have killed her because of her political beliefs, but it's not terrorism in the sense in which one talked about terrorism twenty, thirty years ago, which is people blowing things up in order, like the IRA.

• 51:28Alastair Campbell?

  And the definition, because there has been such an increased threat towards people in public life, it's about the use of terror and intimidation tactics to intimidate and terrorise people, prevent them from doing their work, or, you know, and in this case, literally end somebody's life. So the police come out and they say, it is not helpful to speculate. Nigel Farage, meanwhile, gets on, I think it was a helicopter, paid for, don't know by who, flies down to Devon, where this murder was taking place, is advised that, no, we don't want you anywhere near it, this is a murder scene. So stages this kind of walk with a wreath, laser wreath in front, in this field, and then does this great tribute to Anne Whittaker.

• 52:10Alastair Campbell?

  Now, okay, you could, you could just about say that's justifiable. Then says, I think this was a premeditated murder, but I don't think it, I don't think it helps anybody to speculate. So I'm going to speculate and then say it's not helpful to speculate. Zia Youssef, with the police then saying, this speculation is really unhelpful. Zia Youssef says, don't speculate, in quotes, means shut up and accept the establishment narrative. In other words, we don't believe you if you're the police. This is all so Trumpian, this is populism. What it actually means, and we should put in the newsletter, a very interesting thread, I think I sent it to you, but you may still have been in the retreat, by a lawyer called Dennis Noel Cavanagh. And he explains in this thing how, he says he's done a lot of murder cases as a lawyer,

• 52:55Alastair Campbell?

  and how this sort of speculation can have a direct impact upon cases if and when they reach court, and that defence lawyers are very skilled these days of looking for the kind of material that amid the speculation could help them get their guy off.

• 53:14Rory Stewart?

  I would have thought presumably actually that the main reason that one's trying to control speculation is that it's politically explosive. I mean, with the Southport murders, with the killing that was, was reported recently, I mean, we're in a politics in which large numbers of very, very angry men are mobilising into the streets and families, to mobilising the streets of Britain and attacking the police. And in the end, she was a Reform spokesman and very close to Farage, and she's been murdered. So the real thing that everybody's bracing for in Britain is whether this is weaponised and politicised and turned into something that releases mobs onto the streets. And again, there will have been total sort of, I mean, and it's the other thing that's

• 53:58Rory Stewart?

  so sad at the moment. Every time anything happens, if there's a stabbing in Edinburgh, a politician is killed, everybody is sort of keeping their fingers crossed that it hasn't been a Muslim or an immigrant who's done it. So it's a sort of almost a sigh of relief, oh, that was done by a white person, because then we're not likely to have huge demonstrations in Edinburgh against the stabbing, we're not going to have huge demonstrations against the killing of Anne Whittaker. But exactly the same crime committed by an immigrant is now explosive in a way that a crime committed by a white person is not.

• 54:28Alastair Campbell?

  I still think this is going to be very explosive, or potentially very explosive, but I think the main reason the police have this no speculation. Well, when I was, funny enough, not far from where this murder had happened, Fiona and I were training as journalists in Devon, on local newspapers in Devon. We were trained in, there's a book which everybody had to read and sort of know inside out called Essential Law for Journalists. And it seems to me a lot of that stuff is broken down. But just to give you one example of this guy, Dennis Cavanagh, that he, that he made this point, so there's something called the Criminal Evidence Act nineteen eighty-four, okay? Under which lawyers can submit in criminal proceedings that evidence should be excluded if it's thought to be unfair.

• 55:10Alastair Campbell?

  And he then sets out for you an example, and I won't apply this to Anne Whittaker, because I don't know if this is relevant at all, but just, let's imagine there's a crime that takes place, a serious crime, and there is CCTV in existence of a suspect arriving at the scene of the crime, okay? Now, if that were the case now, you would have Zia Youssef saying, why can't we see the CCTV? Okay? Well, what if, the police might say, they are pursuing a case against a suspect which relies upon an eyewitness account from a real person who saw them, okay? A defence lawyer will get up and say, no, no, no, you were, you were influenced by the CCTV that you saw on the television, weren't you?

• 55:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, how do you know you weren't influenced by that? You say that that's the person that you saw, but what, can you remember what they were wearing and, you know, and so it goes on. And then, and the other thing he said, there are operational reasons why you might not want to release evidence. So for example, you mentioned this, the suspect that they're talking to now is up in Yorkshire. Once it's, let's just imagine that there's, there was a group of them involved in this, and that they're all in Yorkshire, and they did this together. Let's just imagine that. They hear that the police in Yorkshire have arrested this guy, they think, shit, they're on to us, flight risk, away they go. And then the other thing is that there are resource issues. The police these days, we saw it, as you say, in Southampton, in Belfast, they're having

• 56:39Alastair Campbell?

  to deal all the time with rumour and conspiracy theory driven by people who say, well, this is what happens if you don't tell us what's going on. There are good reasons sometimes we are, why we are not told what's going on. And to see Youssef saying, don't speculate is, don't say anything against the establishment. I mean, these people, they're, they're just, and this is why I think they're panicking, by the way, because I think more and more, Fiona said this morning, more and more people are seeing them for what they are. The idea that they're for the establishment against the people, the idea that they believe in being tough on crime, if you're tough in crime, you support the police when there's a murder, nothing else.

• 57:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 57:19Alastair Campbell?

  Nothing else.

• 57:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm with you.

• 57:21Alastair Campbell?

  I think though, maybe just on the, you know, where it is now, I think there are two big issues that we maybe need to talk about. One is security of MPs, but the other is this, this notion of the politicisation of police investigations. I was very struck by something Penny Morden said on the radio the other day, she was interviewed, I think it was on Times Radio, and she was talking about Farage. And she said, the death threats that Farage gets are not exceptional, exceptional to him. They apply to a lot of MPs. It does not mean he shouldn't be subject to scrutiny on donations. She said, just because we face threats does not excuse us from facing accountability for political donations that are made to us. And I do feel that what's happening at the moment is that Reform, Jen Rick was on the

• 58:06Alastair Campbell?

  radio this morning, I mean, to be fair to Nick Robinson, he really, you know, put him through the wringer on it, but this seems to me, him, Youssef, lots of the social media influencers, they're trying to shift the narrative very firmly away from Farage is a bad guy who takes dodgy money, to Farage is only accused of this because he's against the establishment, and he's the victim in all this.

• 58:28Rory Stewart?

  And then there's the censorship thing, isn't there? Which is that you can see in the States after Charlie Kirk's assassination, which is, you can't go around criticising us, because if you go around criticising some mad person,

• 58:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 58:41Rory Stewart?

  is going to take it hard and try to assassinate someone.

• 58:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Rory Stewart?

  And, you know, you, you've had people in the Israeli government making the same statement, you can't criticise the Israeli government, because if you do, some crazy terrorist might use that as a reason to mount an antisemitic attack. It is absolutely necessary for us to be able to criticise people and hold them to account. And I'm afraid it isn't fair to say that calling out people for their views, for their donations, for their conduct, has to be suppressed for fear that some mad person might use that as a pretext to, to do something horrible.

• 59:14Alastair Campbell?

  I also think that, you know, I mean, Nigel Farage is a very high-profile political figure, no doubt about that. But it was Joe Cox who was murdered during the Brexit referendum, it was David Amos who was murdered, it was Stephen Timms who was attacked by a guy in his surgery. I don't hear Stephen Timms going around saying, I demand more and better protection than everybody else who's been in my circumstances. I see Stephen Timms and Kim Ledbetter, Joe's sister, who's now doing the same job, I see them thinking, we have institutions, they, they assess threats, we have to trust them. And what's happening here, Jen Rick was doing this this morning, it was basically saying, it now emerges that Nigel Farage was offered the same level of state protection as, as Kemi Badenoch gets.

• 59:59Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Kemi Badenoch, as, she's the leader of the opposition, it's an official government function, okay? And of course, now that we've got so many former prime ministers, so many former foreign secretaries, so many former Home Secretaries, there's so many people at the moment who might think that they need protecting. And, you know, look, Fiona reminded me last night, I'd completely forgotten about this, but five years ago. I had to give evidence in a case where a former soldier was threatening me with quotes, putting a bullet in the back of your skull and also threatening my family. Now, I certainly didn't publicise it, but I did take it to the police. There are so many incidents when I haven't gone to the police. We've had attacks on the house, which thankfully, from the old days when I vaguely mattered

• 1:00:44Alastair Campbell?

  in public life, we have reinforced windows, where we had bricks being thrown at the windows. We had huge graffiti, war criminal graffiti at the top of the road. I've had my fair share of verbal, physical altercations in public. But the bullet in the skull threat, and particularly the reference to my kids, was one of the very, very few times I went to the police. I think the police have got a lot on. I also think it would be terrible for democracy if all MPs had to have protection. It would be incredibly expensive. And I just don't think it benefits anyone to have public figures constantly demanding more and more security. I'm afraid you do sometimes have to trust other people to make judgements.

• 1:01:25Rory Stewart?

  And so I think we've had so much news to cover, as you say, this week. And I think we may need to leave some of this stuff for question time. But can I just sort of finish with a little bit of a, yeah, I suppose a gentle tribute to Anne Whittaker, who is a very, very, I think, when I think back to a very distinctively British figure.

• 1:01:44Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:45Rory Stewart?

  A very wonderful kind of combination of old fashioned conservatism, outrageous views, views that provoke people like you and me. She became a Roman Catholic because she was so appalled by the ordination of women in the Church of England, which again, a very strange thing for somebody who in some ways was a feminist role model.

• 1:02:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07Rory Stewart?

  But who also, as you say, had a sort of, I think there was a wonderful authenticity. And I think I do wish, in a way, whatever we think of their views, we were more comfortable with politicians having unusual views. The fact that, you know, again, I disagreed with her about fox hunting when you agree with her. Just that sense of the oddness of her deep compassion for certain issues, her willingness to live in housing estates, spend time in prisons, work on homelessness, take unpopular positions, and also do these, yeah, do these things to engage with the public. And so I thought she's a rather splendid, splendid figure and a real loss.

• 1:02:49Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know if you heard Thought for Today this morning on the Today programme, Rory, but we were honourably mentioned in Thought for Today because they were, the speaker, I didn't catch the name at the start of it, she was making the point that there is so much toxicity in our politics and we all need to disagree more agreeably, as Rory Sturges and Alastair Campbell say on The Rest Is Politics. So, yeah, no, I agree. She was without doubt a very, very, very big character. I mean, it's horrible when anybody dies, but the circumstances of this death are particularly gruesome. I'm also not sure that she would have welcomed the Charlie Kirk-isation around it. I don't know, but I just think we should. My message to Zia Yousaf and Jen Rick and the rest of them, shut up, let the police

• 1:03:34Alastair Campbell?

  do their job and they'll have a better chance of doing it if they don't have endless political commentary alongside it. Okay, Rory, so great to have you back and we've got question time tomorrow. We are going to talk lots about Andy Burnham, soon to be our Prime Minister. We're going to talk about Iran, ceasefire over. We're going to talk about the climate and the heatwaves and all the craziness that's been going on on that front. We're going to talk about the campaigning for Count Binface. We're going to talk about your meditative retreat and whether it's made you any calmer than when you sat down with Gabriel Zucman at Paris. See you then.

• 1:04:15Rory Stewart?

  See you then. Bye bye.

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