42. Working for Truss, Blackpool with Clinton, and Sewage

Why is raw sewage being pumped into UK rivers? How easy is it to stand up to Liz Truss when she's your boss? And which former US president walked for 2 miles with Alastair in search of a McDonald's? Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Blackpool tickets - Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:48Alastair Campbell?

  And we've got a lot to get through. We've got sewage, we've got strikes.

• 1:54Alastair Campbell?

  Rory and I also want to talk about T Gray, which is getting next to no coverage when it should be. We've got some brilliant questions from you again this week that we'll get to in tomorrow's The Rest Is Politics question time. And if you can't wait till tomorrow to hear that particular episode, you can get it right now by heading to therestispolitics.com. You sign up to Trip Plus and that will also help you listen to every episode ad free, should you want to do that as well as supporting the podcast.

• 2:23Rory Stewart?

  Well, coming up in today's show, dying embers, the Tory leadership race, horrible state of Britain's rivers. But let's get started. How are you, Alistair?

• 2:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's funny about you talk about the rivers because Fiona and I have just been for an extraordinary swim in an alpine lake beyond Alpe d'Oz. I thought Alpe d'Oz, which is one of the famous Tour de France climbs, I thought that was it. You get to the top and that's the end of the world. But no, you go on and there are these extraordinary lakes. And so we were swimming there. And do you know what, Rory? It was possible to swim without anybody telling you. You should keep your mouth closed at all times, which is what the advice is now if you swim in parts of the sea off of the United Kingdom coast.

• 3:05Rory Stewart?

  If I can tempt you up to the Lake District, I think you could probably swim in one of our lakes up there without having to keep your mouth closed. You were right up on the top of on the edge of Mont Blanc, weren't you?

• 3:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just absolutely beautiful. And the water is so fresh. It was just so nice. But I think we should probably start, should we start with the this whole sewage thing? Because it does seem extraordinary that in Britain 2022, this is happening.

• 3:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, let's well, let's start with maybe a bit of definition of the problem. I'd love to also talk a little bit about the strangeness of my encounter with it when I was the Environment Minister under Liz Truss, in fact, and how we discussed this stuff back in 2016 and where we've got to. But yeah, starting with that, basically, we're dealing with a situation in which a lot of sewage is now being released into our rivers and onto our beaches. And much more than was the case in the past. And people are pretty disgusted, right?

• 3:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you mentioned there that you worked for Liz Truss. And I see that Pippa Creera, who's moved from The Mirror to The Guardian, The Mirror, where she did the Partygate story. She's got a very important story, I think, in The Guardian where she's detailing, and maybe you were part of this Rory, you may have to fess up here, she was detailing the cuts that Liz Truss made in the budget for tackling water pollution between 2014 and 2016, when she cut Environment Agency funding by £235 million, including £24 million, which was for environmental protection, including the surveillance of water companies in the prevention of dumping raw sewage. So Labour is running the line that Liz Truss

• 4:40Alastair Campbell?

  has sewage on her hands. Is the sewage on your hands as well Rory?

• 4:44Rory Stewart?

  You're absolutely right. The sewage on Liz Truss's hands is also the sewage on my hands. And I've been really interested in the story. So as you've said, we're in a situation where I think 335,000, I don't know, is it 335,000 tonnes or hours? But anyway, 335,000 something's going on with our sewage. I think 375,000 times, raw sewage has been discharged into English rivers in the last year.

• 5:08Alastair Campbell?

  You can't have hours of sewage. Surely that's not a metric we lead Rory?

• 5:14Rory Stewart?

  It is disgusting. And people are reporting that they're going swimming off beaches and they're having to leave the water because pieces of human turd come floating past them while they're going for their swim. People are obviously getting waterborne diseases. So how do we end up in this situation? I think, so I'm now going to play the role of trying to explain what it's like being a minister, dealing with these situations and how we got ourselves in the poo, as it were, or my memory of how we got ourselves in the poo. So first thing to understand is that the British system basically has our sewage and our water flowing in the same pipes. And in a sensible modern system, you don't do that. You put your rainwater in a different pipe to your sewage. If you put your sewage

• 5:56Rory Stewart?

  and water in the same pipe and you get a lot of rainfall, you get the sewage potentially overflowing out of that pipe. And you can overflow it in one of two places. You can either overflow it close to the location, so close to people's houses, schools, and that sometimes happens. I remember as an MP in Cumbria, the loss of sewage on the edge of people's houses in Penrith, or you put it into rivers.

• 6:19Rory Stewart?

  Which was traditionally, of course, what we always did in Britain. The cost of actually changing, or this is what we were told, and it was true, but the cost of actually changing to a system where the water drainage and sewage was separate, we were told was between three hundred and fifty and six hundred billion pounds.

• 6:37Alastair Campbell?

  Billion.

• 6:38Rory Stewart?

  And that probably would have, billion pounds, and that would have landed on people's bills. So that would have meant for the last thirty, next thirty years, you'd be paying six hundred to a thousand pounds more on your water bill to try to sort it out. At the same time, we were told, and I think this is true, that the actually water quality had been improving in Britain, whereas when you came into office, I think only a third of our beaches were clean. By sort of twenty nineteen, two thirds of the beaches were considered excellent.

• 7:08Alastair Campbell?

  And partly because we were following directives and guidelines set by the European Union.

• 7:15Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely, who were pushing for very, very high water quality. And then we come to the weird thing of priorities, which is, at the same time as people were asking for more investment in sewage and water, we were dealing with a situation when I came in where the first thing I heard when I arrived at my desk was that, I think, sixty three thousand people a year were dying prematurely of air pollution in the country. And I was trying to work out how we could get hold of a few hundred million to deal with air pollution, and then the flooding kicked off. And I think a lot of this problem is resources were diverted to try to deal with the flooding, particularly because of what happened in fifteen, sixteen.

• 7:51Alastair Campbell?

  But how much of the problem, Rory, is this sort of a trend that we're now seeing with Liz Truss? Is that she is, for whatever reason, an ideological cutter. She believes in the small state. And, you know, you've talked before about how when you did work for her, she sort of kept telling you, one, not to be interesting, and, two, could you keep finding things to cut? Now, if that becomes an ideology, is this what we end up with?

• 8:16Rory Stewart?

  It's definitely an example of the risk here. So I think the Environment Agency budget, if I remember, was up at about sort of two and a half billion pounds a year. And so I think when they cut, whatever it was, two hundred million, the argument was that that was less than ten percent of the budget and they could find the savings. And what happened in this case is they... We moved to a situation in which the water companies were supposed to regulate themselves, and that was a very, very bad idea. I think privatisation in water had some successes, kept the bills at about a pound a day per person, but it only works when you have really tough regulation. This kind of privatisation only works if you have tough regulation. In this case, the regulation was watered down so that you didn't have the monitoring enough what these companies were doing.

• 9:02Alastair Campbell?

  Very interesting piece by Camilla Cavendish, who worked in David Cameron's policy unit, and I think a genuinely insightful and bright Conservative, if I can say that. I think she's still a Conservative. But she had a piece in the, I think it was in the FT this week, essentially saying her view, water privatisation has to go down as a failure. And I just wondered what you thought of that. I don't know if you saw it, I think we had more questions this week on this sewage issue than anything else, bar none. It was overwhelming. And one of them was very much directed, you having last week, this is from Peter Collis,

• 9:45Alastair Campbell?

  following Rory Stewart's very Tory-like condemnation of energy company excess profits. What does he make of the water company's behaviour?

• 9:54Rory Stewart?

  So I was a defender of water privatisation. I know it's very unpopular, actually. I think overwhelming majority of the population would like to renationalise water. But as a little bit, it was true with British Rail, we forget just how filthy our beaches were when it was nationalised. And the problem, of course, with water when it was nationalised is the investment in water was competing with investment in health, pensions and everything else we needed to spend money on. So there was huge amounts of leakage, huge amounts of filth. During 30 years of privatisation, leakage went down by about a third, and the beaches went from about a third being excellent to two thirds being excellent. And it was achieved with costs to the consumer remaining the same. Basically, they didn't move in 20 years in real terms.

• 10:39Rory Stewart?

  So, looking at 2016, I concluded that it had been a success, but my lesson now is if you're going to do it... But you have to regulate the hell out of it, that privatised companies only work if you really regulate them hard.

• 10:52Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, I was looking up vaguely remembering that Scottish Water was publicly owned still. So I was checking out Scottish Water to see just, you know, what the status was. But before I even got into that, you know how obsessed I am about the three Ps, populism, polarisation and post-truth.

• 11:08Rory Stewart?

  Got you. Yes. Yeah.

• 11:09Alastair Campbell?

  When you go into the Scottish Water website, they have their own three Ps rule. The Scottish Water three Ps rule is you must only put paper, pee and poo in the toilet.

• 11:21Rory Stewart?

  I've got a septic tank at home and I spent eight and a half hours of my life that I will never get back in the middle of a sewage pipe, pulling bits of sort of baby wipe out of it. And by the end of it, I had to felt I had to throw away my Wellington boots every strip of clothing I was wearing. But no, I developed, I developed a really strong view about people who put baby wipes down.

• 11:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, if you go into the Scottish Water website, you will find that the lead item is nature calls, bin the wipes. And they are, they are leading a campaign to get plastic, all plastics taken out of wipes. Apparently it's the plastic and the wipes.

• 11:56Rory Stewart?

  I think, and I'd also encourage, if we want to really achieve this campaign, I do think that spending seven, eight hours trying to clean this stuff out of a septic tank is a good training not to put a wipe down the loose.

• 12:07Alastair Campbell?

  I think every MP should spend at least seven hours in a septic tank. You, you very nobly admitted that there is sewage on your hands and sewage on Liz Truss's hands, but there's also sewage on the hands of all these Tory MPs who voted against the Labour Amendment, the Environment Bill in the Commons last year. And I, and I do think this is, I'm going to try not just to be the sort of party political hack here, but I do think this is important. So Labour table an amendment, the Environment Bill, that would have given a legally binding end date for sewage discharges and targets along the way. And some Tories voted for it. But it was defeated. And it was defeated in part because this is just politics, this is what the governments and WIPs officers do. The government promised their own amendment,

• 12:52Alastair Campbell?

  and which they said to their kind of would be rebels on the Tory side, that it was going to do the same thing. But when that amendment finally appeared in the House of Lords, it committed water companies to a totally unspecified reduction with no targets and no deadline. And that meant that just reducing your sewage discharge by, you know, half a litre in five years, that would still be lawful. And that's what Tories voted for. And I think this is why it is cutting through to the extent that it is. And I mean, some of the comments we've got, so heaven knows what the MPs themselves are getting, but we've had this on our Twitter feed and on email, is people really angry at these Tory MPs, who are saying how outrageous

• 13:35Alastair Campbell?

  it is that the water companies are doing this, when they couldn't do it unless it was lawful, and it's the Tory MPs that have made it lawful.

• 13:43Rory Stewart?

  So I think there are two different things. I think some of these water companies are breaking the law. So Southern Water just got fined nearly a hundred million pounds for breaking the law. So some cases, the regulators have found them out, and these people are actually doing things illegal. The bigger question, I guess, is getting into a conversation, which I don't have all the details on, on what the cost of that Labour amendment would have been. So as I say, to actually sort out the entire sewage system of Britain is many hundreds of billions of pounds.

• 14:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Rory Stewart?

  It would be good to try to really get into, are we talking about a hundred and fifty billion pound proposal, or a ten billion pound proposal? Because my guess is the government's resistance was treasury driven.

• 14:23Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, hmm. Yeah, I guess that may be right. Just by the way, just shout out for Southern Water that you mentioned there. Because as you know, Roy, I regularly, mainly to try and show you up, I put out these pictures of the extraordinary research I do, ahead of our discussions. And Southern Water, somebody who works with Southern Water spotted that I had a long list out of sewage. A fair play to them. They sent me a rebuttal which says we are investing two billion pounds between twenty twenty and twenty twenty five, and also made the point, which again, I must admit, I didn't know. Because this is a point that gets made the whole time. All they do is pay dividends to shareholders rather than invest. We've paid no dividends to shareholders since 2016,

• 15:08Alastair Campbell?

  2017. So at least they're trying to get in there.

• 15:11Rory Stewart?

  That's very smart. You mean he spotted it on your desk? You put out your tweets and he was reading the handwriting on your desk well enough.

• 15:17Alastair Campbell?

  There was somehow reading my absolutely appalling, that's true, log had, and it was just a lot of stats about sewage.

• 15:24Rory Stewart?

  I want to give credit to the, the, the energy and innovation of that, that employee in Southern Water who should be promoted immediately.

• 15:31Alastair Campbell?

  I think it may have been a freelance, but anyway. Just while you talk about energy, Rory, I'm going to give you some names of some politicians. Okay.

• 15:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Alastair Campbell?

  And I want to ask you whether you can tell me what they all have in common. Okay?

• 15:44Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Yep.

• 15:45Alastair Campbell?

  Peter Carrington, Lord Carrington.

• 15:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Alastair Campbell?

  Eric Varley.

• 15:48Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 15:49Alastair Campbell?

  Tony Benn.

• 15:50Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 15:51Alastair Campbell?

  Nigel Lawson.

• 15:52Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 15:54Alastair Campbell?

  Peter Walker, Cecil Parkinson, John Wakem.

• 15:57Rory Stewart?

  No idea.

• 15:58Alastair Campbell?

  They're all big names. Would you say they're all quite big names?

• 16:01Rory Stewart?

  They're all big names, but I'm really struggling. I was, I was sort of going on resignation with Carrington.

• 16:06Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 16:06Rory Stewart?

  Then when you got on to Benn, I thought it was some public school thing you were doing.

• 16:10Alastair Campbell?

  I'll tell you what it is. Okay. Well, I'll tell you. Listen, this is a very difficult question. You should not feel bad about not knowing this. The answer is they were all Secretaries of State for energy. And until 1992, energy was a cabinet seat job. It was abolished by John Major. He made it part of the DTI. That stayed the same throughout the entirety of the time that New Labour was in power, until Gordon Brown in 2008 created the Department of Energy and Climate Change, and that was Ed Miliband, Chris Hune, Ed Davey and Amber Rudd. She was the last one. And then Theresa May, she transferred it to BAEs.

• 16:52Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 16:52Alastair Campbell?

  But I just think that's extraordinary. If you think that was clearly seen back in the days when I was a journalist, that's when I thought of this. Energy was like a huge job.

• 17:01Rory Stewart?

  Is that not partly because of the fact that we needed to keep the lights on? I mean, it's partly because it was incredibly difficult for 20, 30 years to actually make sure that we were burning enough coal, keeping the lights on, et cetera.

• 17:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but isn't that where we're heading now?

• 17:14Rory Stewart?

  Well, we definitely, I mean, I think the, the logic of tying it to climate change makes a lot of sense. You've been looking at German energy policy too, haven't you?

• 17:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think what's happening in Germany is fascinating. And Germany's actually got far bigger reserves of gas than we have. And yet, they have just announced, the Economy Minister, Robert Harbeck, has announced that offices are going to have to keep their temperatures at or below nineteen degrees Celsius, sixty six degrees Fahrenheit. Buildings, monuments and adverts will no longer be illuminated at night as part of the energy-saving measures. Hanover has cut off hot water in public buildings, swimming pools, sports halls and gyms.

• 17:53Rory Stewart?

  God, Hanover is pretty cold in the winter. You go to the swimming pool in the winter, get a cold shower. That's pretty tough. That's tough stuff.

• 17:59Alastair Campbell?

  But this is back to Russia and Ukraine and their dependence. But so Russia has got this new little game going. I don't know if you've followed this, but basically, they've reduced supplies from Nord Stream One. Now, because Nord Stream Two has now been, you know, put on ice because of Ukraine and sanctions, et cetera, Moscow has now announced that they've had to lower the gas flows because they had a turbine that had to be repaired. It was repaired in Canada, and now that they've said they can't get it up and running properly because of the Western sanctions against them. So it's a classic sort of Putin game. But what it means is that the gas flows, which were already operating at forty percent of capacity,

• 18:43Alastair Campbell?

  and that have now fallen to twenty percent, and that's why the Germans are having to bring in these really dramatic measures. And I think there's a danger that we will end up there if we're not careful. And the point I was making about the Secretary of State, I mean, here's one for you. Who is the current Energy Minister?

• 19:00Rory Stewart?

  Blimey, is it something in Kwasi Kwarteng's responsibility?

• 19:02Alastair Campbell?

  It is. Apparently, it's Anne-Marie Trevellian.

• 19:06Rory Stewart?

  Ah, yes.

• 19:08Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I didn't know that until I looked it up, so I'm not criticizing you for that one either.

• 19:14Rory Stewart?

  We're coming to the sort of dying embers of this Tory leadership race, aren't we? And it looks almost certain as though Liz Truss is going to come through. I mean, the latest figures, unless she has some incredible gaffe, which oddly, in this new world of politics, gaffes don't seem to undo you, do they? I mean, I was always hoping this with Boris Johnson, that he'd say something so daft that he'd blow up before he made it through. So she's probably going to be Prime Minister, isn't she? And we've already got a sense, I think, of what her cabinet's going to be. And there was a very interesting Bloomberg article, I don't know how accurate it is, but... They were suggesting Chancellor Kwasi Korting, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly, Home Secretary Suella Braverman, Education Secretary Kemi Badenoch, Environment Secretary Ranil Jayawardene.

• 19:59Alastair Campbell?

  And Jacob Rees-Mogg, Secretary of State for levelling up. I mean, that's what made me think the whole thing was a spoof. I mean, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Secretary of State for levelling up. And Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, that one. So we've had an Attorney General who thinks it's okay to break the law, so she gets put in charge of law and order. Is that where we're heading?

• 20:21Rory Stewart?

  It's pretty amazing, isn't it? But just a couple of things about that. I mean, the first thing I guess is that that is very, obviously, it's a much, much more diverse cabinet than we've ever seen before, if that happened. Very interesting, five very senior jobs. Secondly, it's a very young cabinet. We're going to be looking at a situation in which almost all of them are going to be in their late 30s, early 40s. And I was thinking about the way in which Brexit has created a total break with the past. It's effectively meant that any of the people who were in Theresa May's cabinet, or David Cameron's cabinet, let alone the sort of Conservative governments before that, have been pushed

• 21:03Rory Stewart?

  aside. And the party's now being dominated by people who came in in 2015.

• 21:07Alastair Campbell?

  No, I mean, it's a new party. You know, the Tory party's become the Brexit party, and now it's become the post-Brexit party, and it's even more right wing. Just on this diversity point, though, I was at an event recently where Fiona was chairing an event, and I was in the audience, and Simon Woolley, you know Lord Woolley? Simon Woolley who started Operation Black Vote. And he and I were chatting afterwards. And it was at a time when one of the narratives was going, isn't it amazing that you've got all these non-white faces in the Tory leadership? And he made the point that they may be non-white, but what he did say was he'd never felt that these were people. Who really felt that they were part of the struggle to try to get better rights and

• 21:48Alastair Campbell?

  representation for ethnic minorities. And I thought that was a fair point. And and the other thing, you know, I know Rory and I was desperate to try and get through the whole programme without mentioning it. But Kwasi Kwarteng, isn't he another one who went to your bloody school?

• 22:02Rory Stewart?

  He he definitely went to Eton. But actually, a lot of the others came from much more straightforward backgrounds. So it's it's not, it's it's a very different. I mean, it's not a not a Tory cabinet that I would like. I think it's becoming much, much more right wing.

• 22:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think Kemi Baden, I think Kemi Badenoch, some of her ideas are so far to the right, they they terrify me. And I think the idea of her in charge of education just horrifies me.

• 22:25Rory Stewart?

  But it is very interesting that if we ended up with a cabinet like that, it would be much more diverse than the Labour shared cabinet.

• 22:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. And and that and that that becomes a problem for Labour, for sure. But I think it was, you know, you and I, we should, should we, should we let our readers, our listeners in on a secret that we did a joint interview yesterday for Spiegel magazine, Der Spiegel in Germany. And you you said something that I'd not heard you say before about Les Truss, that I found fascinating. You said that she sits in meetings and tests people on their mental arithmetic. What's all that about?

• 22:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, she's, she's, it's very interesting. So she's somebody who I think her father was a maths professor. So it must represent some sort of childhood trauma. I imagine that's what her dad did to her when she was at the breakfast table. But no, there's a real sense that she, yeah, she she loves testing mental arithmetic. I think it's that she's very, she was very interested in economics. She reads economics. She reads books about economics. She's obviously thinks about departments very much in terms of budgets and cuts. And I think that's very much part of her style. It's it's much less about focusing on the the particular nature of the department. So I never felt that in Defra, she had a particular deep affection for rural affairs or landscape. She she sees it very much.

• 23:43Rory Stewart?

  I think it's sort of kind of IBM Business Management, the 1980s.

• 23:46Alastair Campbell?

  Is that, was that your sense of her, I mean, because you, you'd said on one of the earlier podcasts that when you were both backbench MPs and she said to you, she couldn't understand why you were remotely interested in foreign affairs, she couldn't think of anything more boring. And then of course, now she sort of parades as the, as the Foreign Secretary. I mean, do you, do you think she's, Matthew Paris had a brutal piece about her at the weekend where he said that the one thing she's got is this sort of overweening ambition. I mean, do you think that's all there is? Or do you think there's more to it?

• 24:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's a fascinating piece. I mean, Matthew is, is, you know, a very loyal Tory. He's always trying his best to make excuses for the Conservative Party. But his big, um, his big insight, which I think is a really good one, is what you see is what you get. And he made that point about Boris Johnson as well, that it's tempting, presented with a slightly eccentric person like Boris Johnson on this trust, to imagine that there are hidden depths that you're not seeing. But generally, the truth is that what you see is what you get. There isn't a whole dimension of hidden depths, that, that they are as they appear. It's very, if nobody's seen it, do look up Matthew Paris on this trust.

• 24:49Alastair Campbell?

  No, it was, it was, I mean, the headline was something like, you know, there really is no more to her than meets the eye. And, and the thing about, so, so what was she, what was she like then? What, people who are going to work for her now, you, you having done that, what was, what was actually, what, what was your feeling towards her as a, as a, as a junior minister when she was the Secretary of State? Did you get any sense of?

• 25:10Rory Stewart?

  I, I found it quite traumatizing. I mean, it may be my, my, um, my personality type. I always felt that I was sort of rushing from pillar to post. She'd stop me in the lift. She'd say, where's the 25 year environment plan? And I'd rush off and I'd try to write the 25 year environment plan. And then it would turn out she'd asked three different people in the department to write it as well. So we were writing these plans in parallel. And she's quite a sort of, um, one of my great moments was I was sitting again with the 25 year environment plan. She'd rejected, I think, the fourth draft of it and said, this is absolutely, you know, this is not at all what I want. Go and rewrite it. And finally I plucked up the courage to say, Secretary of State, what is it that you don't like about it? Is it A, is it B, is it C, to help us redraft it? So she said, Rory, I think everyone else around this table knows what I don't like

• 25:55Rory Stewart?

  about the plan. And all the other civil servants kind of nod like this. And when she leaves the room, I turn to them, I say, what is it? And they go, oh, I'm really sorry. I was just, just a bit scared there. Sorry not to back you up.

• 26:04Alastair Campbell?

  Do you, do you think she tries to, does she operate a little bit by fear?

• 26:08Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's, it's a sort of, it's very difficult to know because she also has this sort of big smile. So you're never quite sure whether the whole thing's a joke. But she certainly likes provoking and teasing. That's very much her, her style of leadership.

• 26:20Alastair Campbell?

  All right, Rory, let's go to a break.

• 26:22Speaker 03

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• 26:53Speaker 04

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 27:03Speaker 05

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

• 27:09Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped moving? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 27:17Speaker 06

  I'm not the first then.

• 27:18Speaker 05

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not admitted without parent.

• 27:23Speaker 07

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 27:25Speaker 08

  It's me, the.

• 27:26Speaker 07

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 27:28Speaker 08

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 27:30Speaker 07

  What about a third time?

• 27:31Speaker 08

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights and rental cars.

• 27:38Speaker 07

  Seems like they just started.

• 27:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app.

• 27:44Speaker 07

  Time to read the timeline.

• 27:46Speaker 08

  Fine. No one deals more deals than.

• 27:48Speaker 07

  Priceline.

• 27:49Speaker 08

  Please stop.

• 27:50Speaker 07

  Priceline.

• 27:51Speaker 08

  Touche.

• 27:51Speaker 07

  Priceline.

• 27:52Speaker 08

  Priceline.

• 27:54Speaker 09

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• 28:25Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics. Me Rory Stewart.

• 28:27Alastair Campbell?

  Me Alastair Campbell.

• 28:29Rory Stewart?

  So we should mention our upcoming live show in Blackpool. So Alistair and I will be there on Saturday, the 8th October, in the classic venue of the Winter Gardens. Tickets selling very fast. Please search Rest is Politics Blackpool if you want to get involved. And we'd love to see you because we're very keen to, people have criticised us in the past, not doing enough in the North, so come and see us in Blackpool, please. And Alistair, you must have some tales about Blackpool.

• 28:52Alastair Campbell?

  I have a lot of tales about Blackpool. A lot of our best and worst party conferences were there. I've got to say Rory, just before we leave the Winter Gardens, you were criticised last week by one of our listeners, or I was asked to pull you up on the fact that you don't even mention the podcast in your Twitter biography. And it still doesn't mention it. So I'm taking an executive decision here Rory.

• 29:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Alastair Campbell?

  I want you to change your pinned tweet, which was on the 14th of the 7th, all about plugging some BBC Radio 4 programme you did. I think you need to change your pinned tweet to have a link to the Winter Gardens Blackpool, October the 8th.

• 29:32Rory Stewart?

  That's good. Okay, I will do that. I'll make a little note and I'll make sure I do that as soon as we're done with the show. Now tell us about Blackpool.

• 29:39Alastair Campbell?

  Right, Blackpool. So I guess my favourite story about Blackpool, that was where we did the Clause 4, the famous, when Tony Blair announced the review of the Constitution. And that was one of the hardest things to keep secret until the moment. We wanted to keep it an absolute secret until he actually announced it on stage and we managed somehow to do it. And that was a very, very, very big moment. But the one night in Blackpool that I will literally never, ever forget, was when Bill Clinton was the international guest. And Bill Clinton flew in on a, this is post being president, flew in on a private jet. He'd been in Africa with Kevin Spacey before Kevin Spacey got into all the trouble.

• 30:20Rory Stewart?

  Oh, hello. Yeah.

• 30:21Alastair Campbell?

  And Bill Clinton, I don't know if you know this, but he's got, not now because he's had a few health problems. But he used to be a terrible junk food eater.

• 30:30Rory Stewart?

  Quite a tummy on him, didn't he? He's quite a bit of a tummy.

• 30:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, he's just, he's just a big guy anyway, but he, he just ate a lot. So anyway, Tony was having to do the rounds of all these fringe meetings and and Clinton suddenly says, he says, you know what? I'd love a McDonald's. I just want to get a McDonald's. Is there a McDonald's there? And I said, there's McDonald's everywhere at Blackpool, you know, we can get a McDonald's, no problem. And so I thought he meant get it sent in. Right. But he didn't. He meant that he wanted to go to McDonald's. So we went out with all the secret service guys and we, we're walking down, we're walking down the seafront. We walked past this, this, I don't know if it's still there, but there's this huge amusement arcade. And it says across the front, the world's greatest amusement arcade. And Bill Clinton, this kind of, you know, master of communication, who knows everything there is to know about, you know,

• 31:18Alastair Campbell?

  don't take everything at face value. He's, hey, guys, it's the greatest amusement arcade in the whole world. We gotta go. So and I'm saying, no, it probably won't be, it probably won't be. Eventually, the other thing was we passed, we passed KFC, we passed Burger King, we passed all the kind of, you know, but he insisted it had to be McDonald's. We must have walked for about, I don't know, two miles.

• 31:40Rory Stewart?

  And, and this is with all his security guys walking behind.

• 31:42Alastair Campbell?

  Security guys are around and they're all, and it's raining. And, you know, it's dark, so there weren't that many people kind of spotting him until we got to McDonald's. And, and Clinton had this guy called Doug Band, who was like his kind of main bag carrier. And he said to Doug, Doug, just go and order everything. There's only about six of us, plus the coppers, right? And he, he ordered, I don't know, you know, 10 buckets of nuggets and 40 Bigbacks and all the chips. And then what happened was, of course, people spotted him arriving. And that was a kind of big enough shock. The staff spotted him arriving. That was a big enough shock. The word then went round and honestly, the thing about the Bush Telegraph, it was extraordinary.

• 32:23Alastair Campbell?

  By the time we left, I reckon there were about a hundred Blackpool landladies outside. Waiting for Bill Clinton to come out and he was absolutely brilliant with them. But he was so that that that was definitely a memory I'll never forget.

• 32:37Rory Stewart?

  Give us Kevin Spacey though, just quickly, how did he participate in this whole story?

• 32:41Alastair Campbell?

  He was, well, Kevin Spacey was a very, very good friend of Clinton's and actually is one of the best impersonators of Clinton I've ever seen. And they had been on a trip to Africa. I can't remember what they were doing, but they'd been on a trip to Africa. And so they were, you know, just friends, I think.

• 32:55Rory Stewart?

  Well, so I've got a little Kevin Spacey story on my end. So I met Kevin Spacey after a performance at, I think it was.

• 33:02Alastair Campbell?

  It was at the Olvik.

• 33:02Rory Stewart?

  Olvik, thank you. Olvik, thank you very much. Olvik, well done. Thank you. We then had dinner together at, this is my name drop of the century, at Mayor Bloomberg's house. So I'm sitting there with Kevin Spacey and I'm really flattered. He's taking a sort of unusual interest in me. And after the, after the event, I get a little text from, from Kevin saying.

• 33:21Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, let me just say there's a, there's a live court case going on. Just be careful where this is going.

• 33:25Rory Stewart?

  Saying, Rory, how are you? Really lovely to meet you. And I'm like, oh, this is great. And I say to Shashana, this is, this is extraordinary. I didn't know this kind of Hollywood celebrity. And then I get another text, sort of about 45 minutes later. So it's now, I think, getting towards midnight, saying, Rory, I'm just going out to a club and I just wonder whether you'd like to, to join me. And I'm like, oh, thank you, Kevin, but I don't think this is really.

• 33:48Alastair Campbell?

  Lord.

• 33:49Rory Stewart?

  So anyway, so anyway, after a couple more texts, I had concluded maybe Kevin Spacey was not as interested in my brain as I had believed.

• 33:57Alastair Campbell?

  Right. Okay. Well, I, I don't know whether we've yet had to send any of the podcast material to a lawyer before it's being used. But so let's, let's talk about, having talked about Bill Clinton wanting to have a good time. I've been fascinated by the reaction to Sanna Marin, Prime Minister of Finland.

• 34:18Rory Stewart?

  Quick, quick introduction of Sanna Marin before you give us a story, just for listeners who've not been concentrating on Sanna Marin. So Sanna Marin is the third youngest. World leader in the world.

• 34:28Alastair Campbell?

  She was the youngest when she was elected, wasn't she?

• 34:30Rory Stewart?

  That's right, but Gabriel Boric, who is the Chilean kind of student revolutionary that we've talked about on the show a few weeks ago, is younger than her. And there's been a changeover government to Montenegro. We've now got a younger president of Montenegro.

• 34:43Alastair Campbell?

  With a lot of, with a lot of skullduggery in that one, which we probably don't have time for today.

• 34:47Rory Stewart?

  Lot of skullduggerys, but anyway, so she's in her mid thirties. Twelve out of nineteen of her cabinet are women, but she has had a series of different types of scandals over the years, and the latest one is to do with partying.

• 35:01Alastair Campbell?

  I know, but when you even say it like that, it's like when you compare it with what we've got used to with Johnson and the criminal elements at number ten and all the parties there. From what I can gather, she was at a party with some friends, quite celeb. There was a singer, there was a YouTube influencer, there was all this sort of, and she was kind of, she didn't look at all drunk to me.

• 35:27Alastair Campbell?

  She was singing and, but it's caused an absolute sort of stir, not just in, not just, not just at home, but around the world. And then she volunteered for a drugs test.

• 35:38Rory Stewart?

  So I think there's a bit of history here. So I think there's a bit of, there's a bit of sexism going on. So she, she's a very, she's a very beautiful woman and there was a lot of stories about the fact that she'd been photographed with a blazer without wearing any clothes underneath her blazer. There was a lot of reporting on her partying during Covid. When one of her ministers got Covid, she went out clubbing that night and there was disputes about whether she checked herself. There was also scandals about her spending eight hundred and forty five euros a month on food when she was in the presidential, prime ministerial residence. So she's now paying for her own breakfast. But I think somewhere underlying all this reporting is a sense that people are still struggling to come to terms with the fact that they have this very glamorous young woman as their leader.

• 36:22Rory Stewart?

  And I think the partying is being used as a bit of a proxy to get at her.

• 36:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but you'd, you'd, you'd, because you'd think, wouldn't you, that, you know, a country that's one of the smaller countries in the world, uh, got a pretty good reputation. But actually, having somebody like her as prime minister, I think would be, ought to be seen as a kind of net positive. And plus you, all the stuff you said there about very, very diverse cabinet and so forth. Um, so I think there is a lot of misogyny going on, but I can't, and maybe, look, we don't, we don't, we don't live there. We don't know these people as well as obviously the Finnish media do. And so maybe they're reflecting a deeper story. Maybe it's a bit like with Johnson, that, you know, there's something more going on that we don't know about. But I do think that when you compare it to the whole sort of Partygate thing, it just strikes me as a kind of, a bit of a non, a non-story.

• 37:09Rory Stewart?

  I, I also think it's interesting because she's part of this trend that I'm obsessed with because I'm about to be 50 in January with everybody getting younger and younger and younger. I was just saying.

• 37:18Alastair Campbell?

  Hollywood stars are just not even going to look at you twice.

• 37:21Rory Stewart?

  You don't come and say she's not going to send me a text anymore.

• 37:24Alastair Campbell?

  I've got to say, I'm, I'm 65, Rory, and I still, I still get a little bit of, you know.

• 37:29Rory Stewart?

  I'm sure you do. You're a much, much better looking man than me. Um, so coming back to the youth of politicians, I mean, I was pointing out that almost whoever becomes the prime minister now in Britain, we will have had three of the youngest prime ministers in 200 years out of the last sort of four or five.

• 37:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 37:44Rory Stewart?

  And this is happening all around the world. But what's interesting about Sanna Marin is that I always thought that this is a bit like the Gabriel Boric phenomenon in Chile, which is that it's because we're living in a populist age and people are looking for more anti-establishment revolutionary figures. But Sanna Marin has actually the person who's done the rather brave and difficult task of pushing through Finland's application to join NATO.

• 38:08Alastair Campbell?

  Hasn't she also with Estonia, she, she's taken the lead as well in, um, in not issuing visas to Russians who might want to travel there at the moment as well.

• 38:17Rory Stewart?

  Right. I didn't know that. She's also pushed very hard on reducing 90% reliance on, on Russian gas. So I think she, she's a really interesting figure. Someone entered politics, I think, at the age of 20, um, kind of classic professional politician. But on the big strategic calls, I think seems to be doing the right thing. But anyway, who are we to talk about Finnish politics?

• 38:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, just on the British, on the, on the party gate thing, I, I, I noticed yesterday that on whichever number holiday Johnson's on at the moment, there was a picture from where he was out for dinner or lunch or something. And in the picture, right next to him was somebody that you may know, a guy called Henry Newman, friend of Carrie, was special advisor, I think to GOV or I can't remember.

• 39:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:03Alastair Campbell?

  And, but then somebody pointed out that the way that Johnson got out of the being done for the so-called ABBA themed party was that he was there interviewing Henry Newman for a job.

• 39:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's, that's completely outrageous because he knows Henry Newman incredibly well. Henry Newman is one of the best friends, I think, of Carrie Simmons and always has been. There's never been any secret about that. So very odd that the police bought that line.

• 39:28Alastair Campbell?

  So, so I really, really, really do think, I mean, watching the Daily Mail and Nadine Dorries and these people try to stop this Privileges Committee investigation into whether Johnson misled, AKA lied to Parliament, is frankly one of the most pathetic and demeaning things I've seen. And I really think it is absolutely vital that Johnson, Carrie Simmons, Newman, the lot of them are asked on oath about what Johnson said, what Johnson knew and what he said to Parliament about what he knew.

• 40:02Rory Stewart?

  And to be clear on this, the, I don't think the bad guy in this is Henry Newman. I don't think, any reason to think the bad guy is Henry Newman. I think the bad guy here is Boris Johnson, if what he's trying to claim is that he didn't know who Henry Newman was and was somehow interviewing him for a job. No, Henry's a very well-known figure in the Conservative Party and a very close friend of Carrie's. Now, you wanted to talk to us a little bit about Ethiopia. Give us a bit on Ethiopia.

• 40:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, first of all, before I do that, Rory, I thought, let's just, more broadly on Africa, we got, I think we should be pleased about this. Don't take this badly, okay?

• 40:31Rory Stewart?

  Oh, God, here we go.

• 40:32Alastair Campbell?

  No, no fewer than two Kdorsay diplomats.

• 40:38Alastair Campbell?

  That's the French Foreign Office got in touch to say that they thought you in particular were a little bit harsh on the French in regard to Mali.

• 40:48Rory Stewart?

  Oh, go on, tell us what they say. Can I argue back against them?

• 40:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, then you can argue back. Well, one of them, one of, so basically their basic argument is that the French used several thousand troops and it succeeded in preventing Mali from falling into the hands of jihadists and which which could have led to the destabilization of the entirety of West Africa. That if they hadn't intervened nine years ago, Mali would be a caliphate allied to the Islamic State by now, and other governments could have been toppled or destabilized. And the reason France withdrew is because there had been not one, but two overthrows of government. The first one was by a military hunter and they, the French were not at all happy, but thought, well, we've got to stay for the long term. The second time,

• 41:34Alastair Campbell?

  even worse, and they decided, and then they got their ambassador was kicked out, the Malians brought in the Russians.

• 41:39Rory Stewart?

  You've just, you've just put your finger on what the problem is here. So, so on the one hand, the whole thing is a great success. And on the other hand, they're saying we had to leave because there are two military coups, our ambassador was kicked out, the Russians have taken over, and the Wagner Group is swaggering around, shooting up civilians. So.

• 41:55Alastair Campbell?

  You were, you were talking about their withdrawal and as it was, as if they were turning their back on it. You, I, I think the point they're making is up to the point where it became a government they could no longer work with, the French are arguing that it was a success. And they have support, they have support in this, Rory, from an independent voice. This is somebody I met last week.

• 42:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 42:15Alastair Campbell?

  Sophie Pedder, she is the Paris bureau chief of The Economist. She's also a keen listener to the podcast, like the Kdorsay. And she said the same. She said she felt you were very, very harsh and that you maybe should have just been a bit more rounded in your assessment.

• 42:30Rory Stewart?

  Lovely. Well, let's, so on Mali, let's try to frame this. So it's definitely true that their intervention prevented an Islamic caliphate takeover. Almost certainly, had they not been there, an ISIS affiliated group would have swept in and taken the capital. But the idea that nearly a decade after their intervention, anyone would have thought it was a good result for France essentially to be forced out of the country with its ambassador expelled, with two military coups, with an incredibly unstable, corrupt government left behind, with the Russians effectively having taken over the security infrastructure of the country, and the country at such an extremity of instability

• 43:12Rory Stewart?

  that it's perfectly plausible that the capital city could fall to an insurgent group again within the next few months. I think if anyone had said that 10 years ago, I think the French might have been a bit more hesitant about going in. I mean, we're really dropping our standards very far if we're saying the only thing we're going to count this intervention on is preventing the caliphate takeover and it's fine that you end up with a horrible military coup, a Russian-backed government and...

• 43:36Alastair Campbell?

  We could maybe, maybe this is just a, you know, K. Dorsey, Rory Stewart, weekly argument about Mali.

• 43:42Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's, let's, let's now get you to irritate the Ethiopian government because I understand that you're about to suggest that the Ethiopian government may not have been conducting itself properly in Tigray.

• 43:52Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'm about to make a slightly different point, which may, may come on to that. No, I was just very struck by something that the World Health Organization Director General, Tedros Gibrasios, Gebreyses, I can never get his name right, but you know the guy, I mean, T A G is his initials. And he has said that in his view, a really poisonous form of racism is behind the lack of international attention being paid to the plight of civilians in Tigray. He is defined as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. Six million people are unable to access basic services. And he basically said, you know, why is that this getting nothing,

• 44:34Alastair Campbell?

  not even a fraction of the attention that Ukraine does. And I think there is something in this because I can remember back in the... Was it the eighties, the Ethiopian famine? I covered that for the Daily Mirror and that was Michael Burke, BBC, did that extraordinary report from a famine refugee station, a famine station in Ethiopia, and it literally mobilised the world. And I just wonder whether this is a sort of, whether we're really here talking about compassion fatigue and also about the fact that the Ethiopian, because the Ethiopian government did try to consolidate their power in a way that they wanted to essentially bring lots of the different parties together, turn them into one party. And the Tigray People's Liberation Front, which is a very,

• 45:18Alastair Campbell?

  been a very powerful entity in, in the history of Ethiopian, modern Ethiopian politics, they refused. They, the Ethiopian Prime Minister then decided because of Covid there would be no elections. The Tigrayans went ahead with their own and the Ethiopian government reacted against that. And there's now this terrible civil war and very little international attention.

• 45:39Rory Stewart?

  It's very, very sad. So Ethiopia was one of the great success stories of Africa, having gone in the 1980s, as you say, from having been one of the very poorest countries on earth, under a crazy left wing government with huge ethnic bias that was deliberately starving their population in the north. It then recovered and had almost, you know, decades of nearly eight percent economic growth. It was one of the few countries along with Rwanda and possibly Botswana that people were really pointing to in Africa as an incredible development success. And when I was at DIFID, we were putting in hundreds of millions of pounds into Ethiopia and really talking about it as a model for the world. And in 2019, the Ethiopian Prime Minister,

• 46:21Rory Stewart?

  who I know a little bit, Prime Minister Abi, got the Nobel Peace Prize. So it was the real success story. And then in the last 21 months, everything has gone upside down. And that is this incredible fight between Tigray and Abi's forces. And interestingly, that Tedros comment, so Tedros is from Tigray. So he was part of the kind of ruling ethnic elite and that's how, and he was one of the ministers in the Ethiopian government before he became WHO chief.

• 46:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Rory Stewart?

  He's been attacked by the Ethiopians. So he was trying, I think, largely to say to the international community, you're putting all this money into Ukraine and you're ignoring people in Tigray because of their skin colour. The Ethiopian government has gone completely furious and demanded that he resign because they think what he's saying is that they're accusing them of perpetrating a genocide against the Tigrayans.

• 47:10Alastair Campbell?

  And even though he didn't say that, others have been saying that.

• 47:13Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. And it's also an example of, you know, we talk a lot about the difficulty of reporting. If you were to go online at the moment and try to get up to date on Tigray and look at BBC, look at New York Times, look at Al Jazeera, you would really struggle to keep up to date on what is happening in the civil war in Ethiopia, or indeed in the civil war in South Sudan, or any of these places. And there's a real desperate need, someone, someone listening to this show, some dynamic young person of the sort about whom you're writing a book, should be setting up some easily accessible thing on the internet where one can get a really good, accurate weekly briefing on what's going on in countries like Ethiopia and South Sudan.

• 47:52Alastair Campbell?

  It's so hard to do in situations like this. I, as a journalist, the other kind of connection I had with that part of the world at the time was I, I went to Eritrea when that, the EPLF, because you've got the TPLF.

• 48:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:06Alastair Campbell?

  Tigrayian People's Liberation Front, you had the EPLF, Eritrean People's Liberation Front, and of course, they were, as it were, liberated, they got their independence. And the other element in this situation that's quite interesting is that the Eritrean then freedom fighter, who was like a kind of Che Guevara type figure.

• 48:24Rory Stewart?

  Isaiah, yeah.

• 48:25Alastair Campbell?

  Isaiah Saphaworki, who has now become this, one of the world's most strong men dictators.

• 48:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 48:32Alastair Campbell?

  He, according to Tigrayans, he has been responsible, his troops have been responsible, presumably on behalf of the Ethiopians, for some of the massacres that have been taking place. Now, as you say, it's very, very hard to know whether that is true, it's very hard to have that verified. And when, when I was kind of digging into this in the last few days, you, you do tend to have to rely on both sides saying what they want you to hear, and then you have to kind of try and apply some judgment.

• 49:03Rory Stewart?

  And two big themes which are common in many of the conflicts, firstly, the theme that you've got there, which is that Isaiah goes from being the darling of the international community towards being an autocratic ruler. And in a sense, actually, that was the journey that we went on with Mugabe in Zimbabwe. But secondly, the proxy war nature of all of this, that Uganda, the Ugandan president's son's been taking side and tweeting out on favor of the Degreans, and then the Sudanese have been getting involved from the other side. So many of these conflicts seem as though domestic, but very, very quickly get fueled by neighbors trying to get involved. I think we are, this has been quite a, quite an intense series. I think we've gone from sewage to Ethiopia. With a small digression around the Finnish Prime Minister partying, but even that wasn't very jolly. Do you have anything jolly to finish this on?

• 49:48Rory Stewart?

  You're sitting in the beauty of France, you've been swimming in clean rivers. When I talked to you on this interview yesterday, there seemed to be sunshine, grass. Tell us, give us something happy to finish this podcast on, because this has been one of our grim ones.

• 50:01Alastair Campbell?

  I can't believe you're asking me to be jolly. This has never been my constitutional function. Oh, I'll tell you what, no, that's not even, that's not very jolly.

• 50:09Rory Stewart?

  Go on, tell us about your swim then.

• 50:10Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, it wasn't like the fairy pools in the sky, which we went there last year and it was so busy, it was ridiculous. But no, there were three or four people wandering by. No, I knew, we knew we were going to go and swim, so Fiona took a swimming costume, I took my trunks, and we went in swimming with the dog.

• 50:24Rory Stewart?

  Beautiful.

• 50:25Alastair Campbell?

  And all I will say, I'll tell you, this is a nice jolly thing, it felt, in the Alpine air, it, and the water was so fresh and so cool, it felt like pre-global warming world, but then I looked across at where the glaciers normally are dominant, and they didn't look quite so dominant.

• 50:45Rory Stewart?

  And we're willing to hear more about the dog next time. Look forward to talking to you all tomorrow.