137. Government taking itself to court, avoiding war with China, and Polish protests

Should the government be taking itself to court over the covid inquiry? Rory and Alastair disagree (just about) agreeably on this one. Also, how is the USA's attempt to create a bloc against China causing tension? And what do the latest protests in Kosovo and Poland mean? Listen this week to find out. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

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• 1:33Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:36Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart. And Alistair, I can share with the world, is wearing a very fetching blue shirt. Royal blue shirt.

• 1:44Alastair Campbell?

  Royal blue, ah, yes. I wonder whether that's because I dressed in the dark this morning before I went for my very early swim. Now, we're going to talk about the COVID inquiry, which I think is becoming very, very interesting in its early stages, even as it sets out, as Baroness Hallett sets out what she wants to do with it. We're going to talk about China, and particularly China relations with the United States. And I think if we've got time, we want to talk about Kosovo, what's happening there at the moment, which is alarming, but I will argue not as alarming as maybe some people are trying to suggest. And also Poland, where... We're recording on Monday and yesterday, half a million people, it seems, turned out to protest against a plan, what is being perceived as a plan by the government to

• 2:28Alastair Campbell?

  stop Donald Tusk from being a candidate in the upcoming election. So does that sound okay?

• 2:37Rory Stewart?

  It sounds very good. Well, let's start start off maybe with Covid inquiry and what's been interesting you and troubling you around this. Very quick explainer for people on this, Baroness Hallett, retired appeal court judge. Wonderful desert island discs to listen to if people want to learn more about Baroness Hallett. Her father started as a beat cop and then rose up to be a very senior policeman. But over to you on on what she's doing with the Covid inquiry.

• 3:02Alastair Campbell?

  Well, she says that she's going to, as it were, cliche time, leave no stone unturned. And it would seem from the approach that she's taking thus far that that's going to be the case. So she's got several different investigations going on, and she's calling them modules. So the first one is about pandemic preparedness and resilience. The second is about core political administrative decision making in the UK and the devolved administrations. And the third is the impact of the pandemic on healthcare systems. And looking at the questions that we what was interesting about, I do recommend that people take a look at the inquiry website, because they seem to be adopting the approach of as they develop

• 3:45Alastair Campbell?

  ideas, as they develop their thinking, they're putting quite a lot of a lot of stuff out there. And we'll come on to the whole sort of row about WhatsApp messages and so forth. But in terms of what has ended up already in court and this ridiculous situation of the government taking the government to court over its own inquiry, she's clear that she wants to see all unredacted messages sent and received by Johnson between the 1st of January 2020 and 24th of February 2022.

• 4:16Alastair Campbell?

  Johnson's Unredacted Diaries. Unredacted, there are 24 notebooks apparently that he was using at the time that she also wants to see. She's also named a few advisers and also Rishi Sunak, Matt Hancock, Les Truss, Professor Chris Witty, the Chief Medical Officer, Patrick Vallance, Dominic Cummings. She's asked for witness statements, as you'd expect. And when you look at some of the questions that she's, we're already seeing some of the key questions as she sees it for Boris Johnson. And if I were him, I would be having quite a sphincter twitch, I think. This one, for example, notwithstanding that the Department for Health and Social Care was the lead government department.

• 4:58Alastair Campbell?

  Why did you not attend any Cobra meetings in relation to COVID-19 prior to March 2, 2020, given the seriousness of the emergency? Were you advised or requested to attend any previous meetings on 24 January, 29 January, 4 February, 12 February, 18 February? What effect, if any, do you consider your non-attendance at those meetings had on the extent to which COVID-19 was viewed as a serious threat? And then this one. Why did you attend a personal social meeting on the evening of March 19 after you had called on the UK on March 16 to stop all non-essential contact with others? And it turns out that this meeting was with the Evening Standard proprietor Evgeny Lebedev,

• 5:42Alastair Campbell?

  whose father is currently under sanctions from several countries, but not the UK. So that's all quite interesting. She asked him specifically about alleged breaches of social restriction and lockdown rules by ministers and what effect they might have had on the confidence of the public. She asked about the role of special advisers. She asked about the relations with the chief medical adviser. She asks about the relations with cabinet ministers. She asked about preparedness. And she also asked him some very pointed questions about when he learnt certain things. Anyway, and of course, there's the whole sort of devolution and relations with Scotland, et cetera.

• 6:18Rory Stewart?

  So it can be very interesting. A couple of things that strike me. One of them is these inquiries in general and what makes for a good inquiry, useful inquiry, and what doesn't. So I guess the two that were relevant to you were the Butler inquiry and the Chilcot inquiry in relation to Iraq, I guess, were the two that you engaged with in most of it.

• 6:37Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the Hutton inquiry was probably more personal, yeah.

• 6:41Rory Stewart?

  And what's your sense of what made for, when you were on the receiving end of this? What made for a good inquiry, what made for a bad inquiry, what it takes for an inquiry to have public confidence or not?

• 6:52Alastair Campbell?

  I, I mean, the Butler inquiry was a little bit different because, I mean, I think, because, you know, because he was very much a creature of government, having been the Cabinet Secretary and so forth. But Lord Hutton and Chilcot, although he had also been a civil servant, his inquiry was, I think, was the official Iraq inquiry, much bigger, much wider reaching. I think what makes them is an absolute determination to get to the facts on everything. And that does mean being very, very rigorous. And I think that I quite like the fact that Baroness Haller seems to be so determined to get to the bottom of all these different

• 7:35Alastair Campbell?

  messages. Because I'll tell you what I think is interesting, the government's case is that they shouldn't be expected to hand over lots of messages unless they're unambiguously relevant to COVID. But I think her point would be, and I had to endure this in relation to my diaries in the Hutton inquiry, I was not allowed to decide what was unambiguously relevant. A lawyer had to do that.

• 7:59Rory Stewart?

  And I think, sorry, to comment on this, I think the same is true in this case. It's the government lawyers who are deciding what's relevant and what's not. It's not the individual in possession of the diary.

• 8:07Alastair Campbell?

  Which is fine up to a point, but I think that for the judge, particularly as what happened back in the, you know, when we were in government, even though texting existed and so forth, there does seem to have been this sort of, this move towards government by WhatsApp, where these groups are set up and that, it seems, is how decisions are being made. Now, I think she's perfectly entitled to say, for example, let's just imagine a situation, those questions that she asked about why Johnson didn't attend certain Cobra meetings, okay? I think she's entitled, given that he seems to spend most of his life on an insecure phone, she is entitled to see to whom he is talking about what. If, for example, it emerges

• 8:50Alastair Campbell?

  that a third of his messages around that time were actually about this mysterious book deal that he was doing to write a book about Shakespeare, I think that would be relevant, even though it's got nothing to do with Covid. The relevance is the fact it shows the priorities.

• 9:02Rory Stewart?

  So I guess the, I guess that the point is this, that you didn't hand over fully unredacted stuff, did you? You, a lawyer decided what was relevant and what wasn't.

• 9:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Rory Stewart?

  So the, the big story here is that she's asking for something completely unprecedented. She's asking for something that goes well beyond what the Hutton Report, the Butler Report, the Chilcot Inquiry was doing. And so the government is, for better or for worse, and I'd probably argue for better, trying to get a clear legal ruling, because the precedent set around this is incredibly important for the way that you do government. And they're trying to, I think, defend an important principle, which is that governments need to be able to correspond with each other without fearing that every single thing they say, every off-color joke, every reference to football is going to find its way into the public domain. Otherwise, basically, you, you don't have any government. I mean, if, if every single meeting and every

• 9:57Rory Stewart?

  conversation you have is happening in public, you kill a lot of what makes, unfortunately, I mean, I can try to illustrate this, but you'll know this from your own life. I mean, conversations have to be able to take place in private. And if every conversation you're having is taking place in the blaze of a media spotlight, it's very, very difficult to admit uncertainty, say that you're wrong, express any humility, ask stupid questions, or do any of the things you need to do.

• 10:25Alastair Campbell?

  But all that is possible, all that, all that was possible at any time. What I think, I sense she may be trying to establish here, I don't know. Is that the nature of the means by which we were being governed at the time was not serious government. Now, I don't know that. But for example, what you what you've just said there now, I mean, I looked up the guidance on government communications. And this is this has been updated because of new systems of communications such as WhatsApp. Government communications belong to the Crown and must be handled lawfully. If you hold such communications, you do so on behalf of your department. Now, of course, you can

• 11:07Alastair Campbell?

  have the idea that this judge is going to sort of take as an exchange between Boris Johnson and his wife about their kids or something like that, and put that into the public domain, I think is absurd. Every single person who is working at senior level on the inquiry is cleared to a pretty high security level.

• 11:24Rory Stewart?

  But, Alissa, let me let me challenge here. Let's go back to your own experience with the Iraq inquiries. You didn't simply say, we trust these inquiries and we're handing everything over to them unredacted. You had lawyers go through and decide what was relevant or not before it was handed over.

• 11:39Alastair Campbell?

  And they and they and wait a minute, no, wait a minute. And they had discussions with the inquiry as to what was relevant.

• 11:46Rory Stewart?

  The same is true here.

• 11:47Alastair Campbell?

  Right, and that can happen now.

• 11:49Rory Stewart?

  But the reason that government's seeking judicial review is she's requesting something that goes well beyond what's ever happened in any inquiry in the past. She's essentially saying she's not going to get into a conversation about what's relevant or what isn't. She wants to see everything.

• 12:04Alastair Campbell?

  She's basically saying that at the height of a national crisis, everything that the senior people who are meant to be in charge of that crisis do and say may be relevant to her inquiry.

• 12:15Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. And that's what's being and that's that's what's being challenged. So that's exactly what's being challenged. So they could have said the same to you over Iraq. They could have said to you over Iraq, every single thing you did on any policy area, anything to do with your personal life, was relevant to the Iraq inquiry and you needed to hand it all over. But that wasn't what happened. The tradition in British government is that the lawyers discuss with the inquiry and then they go through and decide what's relevant and what isn't. It's a hugely different situation if you say they have a right to see everything and they will decide what's relevant and what isn't.

• 12:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I just think that you have to wonder about the motivation. If that had happened, if that had happened with me, I would have felt two things. One, I would have felt that's a bit over the top, but I'd have had to go along with it, just as I had to go along with the process that I did.

• 12:59Rory Stewart?

  You wouldn't have had to go along with it. Your lawyers, the Cabinet Office lawyers, would have resisted.

• 13:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they might.

• 13:04Rory Stewart?

  No, they would have. I might. My suspicion is that the government would have said at the time, you are setting a very dangerous precedent for freedom of information doing this, and we're going to take this to judicial review.

• 13:16Alastair Campbell?

  No, on the contrary, on the contrary, well, let me speak from the exact experience that will happen. On the contrary, Jeremy Hayward, senior civil servant, said, look, the Prime Minister has set this inquiry up. He's set it up under an Act of Parliament, which compels us to hand over anything that we're asked to give. And that is what we have to do. And I wasn't terribly happy about it. Tony wasn't happy, but that's what we did. And what's more, because of the nature of the discussions with the inquiry, I was reasonably confident that had I had to give far more, such as, you know, Rory got told off at school, or, you know, Grace threw a tantrum, or Callum, you know, told me to bug her off, whatever, that that would not in any way be deemed relevant. I would have

• 13:58Alastair Campbell?

  had the trust for that. So I think the optics of this are terrible for the government, not because of a principled position on this, I think, but because actually, they probably do have an awful lot that they want to hide. Because I suspect what she's on to here is that serious government, because we didn't have a serious Prime Minister, broke down. As to why it's Rishi Sunak that is pushing the hardest on this, if you were to believe some of the briefing that's going on against him, a lot of it, I suspect, from people around Boris Johnson, it may relate to some of the things that he was pushing, in particular, eat out to help out, and whether that was going against scientific advice, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I think they've got themselves into a complete mess, and it's probably down to the way that Johnson was operating.

• 14:40Rory Stewart?

  I think that the right way to resolve this issue is what the government's doing, which is to go to judicial review and let an independent judiciary determine what's relevant, what's fair in this case or not. And I think that's an important principle. I don't think, I don't think you can, in any legal situation, say, we're entitled to everything, and we'll decide what's relevant or not.

• 15:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I, maybe that, maybe what's happened here, then, is that there's been a breakdown in trust in the institutions of government. I think that when we were subject to those inquiries, even though I think by all of them, Chilcock, Butler, and there's also the Intelligence Services Committee as well that I went to, and Hutton, I think we were put through our paces very, very rigorously. And I think there was a sort of sense of, well, okay, this isn't very pleasant, but at least we sort of feel there's a kind of institutional, a sense of institutional trust here. But I think what may have happened is that what we've already seen, what has already been in the public domain, gives you cause for alarm about their honesty, about their transparency.

• 15:44Alastair Campbell?

  And before, and, and, and the other thing I, I strongly recommend, because of course it's easy to put this in the context of lawyers and, and so forth, and process. I was, just happened to be in the car the other day, listening to Any Answers. And I strongly recommend, you can go on iPlayer or whatever it's called, and you go to 20 minutes, 43 seconds on this weekend just gone, Any Answers, where a woman called Philippa Bateman from Worcestershire is absolutely broken. And she tells the story of how her daughter was distressed. They were told by the police, they couldn't go to see her because it was not deemed to be essential, the police would go to see that she was okay.

• 16:29Alastair Campbell?

  The police took their time, they chased the police, eventually the police went, and they found that their daughter had killed herself. And this woman was in tears, talking about how she couldn't go to see her daughter, they couldn't comfort her, and then only three of them could go to the funeral. And they were told by the police that on that very same day, because of various things that were going on, they also had to clear her flat. And she said she got back home and saw Boris Johnson smirking and lots of Tory MPs saying, oh, it's only a piece of cake, and it's only this, and it's only that. And I honestly, anybody who listens to it, and I strongly recommend people listen to it. There is no trust with this guy. There is no honesty with this guy. And even now, even now, it is all playing games.

• 17:14Alastair Campbell?

  He says he's handing over all the WhatsApps, but it turns out that there was a phone that he couldn't hand over because it was taken away from him because it represented a security breach. And then you've got the security services, MI5, MI6, GCHQ, saying it's absolute nonsense what he's saying. It's easy to find the phone and to open it securely and to see what's on there. So even now, we're not getting the truth on this stuff.

• 17:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, I don't think we've got any disagreement about Boris Johnson.

• 17:40Alastair Campbell?

  No, but I think that's why you're, I think your assessment of what the government is trying to do. You're being, may I say, too fair.

• 17:46Rory Stewart?

  I, I guess what I'm hoping for from this inquiry, though, is something much more than pointing out that Boris Johnson's an incompetent liar.

• 17:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, of course, that's why, that's why the three modules that she set out are the right, the right approach.

• 17:59Rory Stewart?

  I think that if we look at the difference between Chilcot, Hutton and Butler, these different inquiries are very different in form. And Chilcot was a really, really good inquiry. Really detailed, really full, because what it got into in the end wasn't really the personalities of he said, she said, but the structural problems, the British state. So I think we had an unusually bad prime minister. But there were many problems that went well beyond Boris Johnson being terrible. And what I really want to see this inquiry do is lessons for the future. It would be terrible if the conclusion that we drew from this is Boris Johnson's a fool and therefore we'll be fine next time round because we just won't get him.

• 18:38Alastair Campbell?

  Right, but that's, that's, that's absolutely, I'm not disagreeing with that at all. And I think if you read her introduction and the way she set things out and the way she's splitting into these different investigations, that is exactly what she's going to do. But I, what I'm saying to you is I think you're judging the current government actions on the basis of this being a normal, rational, grown up government. Whereas in fact, I think we will find that because of the rot at the top. That the systems of government simply weren't up to it. But we'll see, but I just, I just feel that the approach he's taking is the right one. I think the approach the government is taking is the wrong one, because I think I have no doubt at all this could have been resolved without going to court. I just don't believe it couldn't have been resolved.

• 19:23Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that the combination of government that's worried about what's going to emerge because of all this sort of WhatsAppery, which seems to have taken over sensible government, and Johnson playing his games, I suspect is what's driving her to be as rigorous and thorough as she is.

• 19:37Rory Stewart?

  I definitely think the WhatsApp is a huge problem, and I think that's something that's changed a lot under Rishi Sunak. I mean, WhatsApp, I think, had just begun at the beginning of Covid and was completely out of control. You're totally right. They were running, it seems, when Boris Johnson was Prime Minister, almost everything seemed to be happening on WhatsApp.

• 19:54Alastair Campbell?

  Let's see if Rishi Sunak was as grown up as everybody tells us. It does seem quite interesting that he seems so determined on this one.

• 20:03Rory Stewart?

  Alastair, I, I think if you had been in government, you would feel much more sympathetic towards the idea that there has to be a limit and that it makes sense for lawyers to determine what's relevant to an inquiry and what isn't.

• 20:14Alastair Campbell?

  I've explained to you, I was working for the government when exactly that thing happened.

• 20:18Rory Stewart?

  And exactly what happened, Alastair, just to body down, is that lawyers determined what was relevant and what wasn't. You operated under the old system. You were not asked to hand over everything unredacted.

• 20:29Alastair Campbell?

  Everything unredacted was seen by somebody in that process.

• 20:32Rory Stewart?

  Correct, and the same is true here. It's all seen by the lawyers. It's exactly the same, Alastair. It's exactly the same as what happened with you. The difference is, is that the judge in this case is asking for something that neither Hutton, Chilcot or Butler ever asked for.

• 20:46Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we're not going to agree on this. Let's just, let's just move on.

• 20:48Rory Stewart?

  Okay. So I think one of the biggest issues that we should be looking at this week is US-China. We've just come out of the G7. Fumio Kishida, the Japanese Prime Minister, has now announced that he's going to increase defence spending to 2% of Japanese GDP. And Japan is now the third largest economy in the world, and that will mean that it will end up with the third largest military in the world. It's going to be a very, very substantial force. And this is essentially about the US trying to create a very, very strong coalition, of which the cornerstone is Japan, South Korea, potentially the Philippines.

• 21:25Rory Stewart?

  And then other factors, Australia, Britain and others, as a counterbalance against China. And it's getting very, very tense because you're beginning to see rhetoric coming out of the US, which sounds very much like you're with us or you're against us. And most countries in the world do not want to be forced to choose between the US and China. It's true of countries like Singapore. It's true even of India, which is playing a very complicated game in relation to the US-China relationship. In many ways, it's tending towards the US, but remember over Ukraine, it's buying oil from Russia, it's continuing to get arms from Russia. And this has become, I think, for US foreign policy, their number one driving objective.

• 22:09Rory Stewart?

  It's building up with some of the same momentum that you saw the neocons building with their Middle East policy in the early 1990s. China is now presented by both Republicans and Democrats, their number one adversary. And the screws are now going on. We saw this with our Hillary Clinton interview on leading and her very dismissive references to Macron. We can see it with huge anxieties from the US over the EU. So I guess one question that we need to get to is, is it too late for the US? Are they trying to form the sort of alliance they formed against Saddam Hussein or that they tried to form against the Soviet Union, but in a completely different situation? Because they're dealing with a country that is such a huge percentage of global GDP that it's too late to pull it off?

• 22:53Alastair Campbell?

  You mentioned Singapore there, and of course, I think right now, I think it's still going on. I don't know if you've been in the past to the Shangri-La Conference. I was at it a few years ago, and it's one of the big international defence gatherings. And yesterday, General Li Shangfu, who's the Chinese Defence Minister, he made a pretty significant speech. And if you were to really to sort of boil down the headline, he was essentially saying, mind your own business. And also was very interesting is that he was saying that he's met, I think, 11

• 23:30Alastair Campbell?

  Defence ministers or leaders of the defence infrastructure in 11 other countries whilst he's been at this Shangri-La summit. But he would turn down a request to meet Lloyd Austin, who is essentially his opposite number from the United States, which they apparently had a sort of brief handshake. But that was pretty much about it, literally just sort of meeting in a corridor. And Lloyd Austin's speech focused, as did the Canadian Defence Minister. Their speech is focused on these kind of what they call these incursions and what they call dangerous incidents that are taking place of in the air over the South China Sea.

• 24:13Alastair Campbell?

  And meanwhile, the General Shang Fu, the Chinese Defence Minister, he was focusing on a situation where an American ship, he says, was in a place that it shouldn't have been and the Chinese ship cut in front of it. So that's the sort of evidence of things going very, very badly. Meanwhile, though, the Director of the CIA, Bill Burns, has apparently just a month ago been in Beijing. Don't know who he saw, but was there on a mission sent by Biden to try to get things onto a better footing. So I think it's very hard to read. I think on the one hand, you write the politics of this look to be going in one direction.

• 24:57Alastair Campbell?

  But in terms of what the two governments may or may not be trying to do, I think it's unclear.

• 25:04Rory Stewart?

  There's a great book that I've just been reading by Kevin Rudd, the former Australian Prime Minister, who you knew, right?

• 25:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 25:11Rory Stewart?

  And you read about in your diaries.

• 25:13Alastair Campbell?

  He is something of an expert on China.

• 25:16Rory Stewart?

  And he has written this book, which is looking at US views of China and China's views of the US. And I think he's fascinated by this idea that we're getting into a Thucydides trap. The Thucydides trap is that the Spartans felt that the Athenians were growing and they have to go to war. So there's an article in The Atlantic by Graham Allison, a Harvard professor, saying that if you look at the pattern of past great power rise, in almost every situation, it ends in war. And probably the only exception to this is when the US began to rise at the expense of the UK. And the explanation for that is that the UK may be shared enough in common with the US to not feel totally threatened by its rise.

• 25:56Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 25:57Rory Stewart?

  But I think what Rudd is very good at is the culture clash between these two countries, that they see each other in totally, totally different ways, that China sees the US in terms of betraying them, giving their territory to Japan after the First World War, not helping them against the Japanese during the Second World War, playing silly games, balancing them against the Soviet Union for US interests in the seventies, and basically think that America is entirely cynical. They don't believe America's statements about democracy and human rights and free trade. They think that America is just out for its own national self-interest.

• 26:33Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Well, no, the mutual suspicion is clearly intense. And you also have this sense that, just as the Americans often would say, that they can't reward the Chinese by the sort of diplomatic status that they would normally take for granted. I think now you see the Chinese doing something similar. I mean, I think it's pretty remarkable that that Shang Fu says, no, I don't want to have a meeting with Lloyd Austin, when they're both literally in the same hotel building with all this sort of stuff going on.

• 27:03Rory Stewart?

  And the US ambassador, Nick Burns, in Beijing is really struggling to get meetings.

• 27:07Alastair Campbell?

  Whereas, there was a huge piece in the FT at the weekend about Elon Musk and Jamie Dimon, the banker, who were both in Beijing last week. As I think as the FT reported, that the Tesla and Twitter boss had more top-level Chinese meetings than most of the Biden administration officials have in recent months. Although Jake Sullivan recently met his opposite number, and again, it wasn't advertised, it sort of emerged after the event. So I guess it's these things that are going on at various levels. But what you were suggesting from Kevin Rudd's analysis is there's a danger you end up on a kind of automatic.

• 27:45Alastair Campbell?

  Journey towards conflict.

• 27:46Rory Stewart?

  And I've just just come from engagements with people who are very close to the Biden administration over the last three, four days.

• 27:54Alastair Campbell?

  Did you get a bid in for leading with Joe?

• 27:56Rory Stewart?

  I did not actually get a bid for Joe.

• 27:58Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, I'll keep plugging away on that one.

• 28:01Rory Stewart?

  Keep plugging away, you'll probably get to do that. But what was, I think, really, you know, I gently suggested that America's position in the world is more tricky than it was in the 1990s.

• 28:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 28:13Rory Stewart?

  And I cannot tell you what an incredibly visceral reaction I got from these senior Americans, how much they wanted to say, that's bullshit. Everybody prefers American values. Look at our friends in Asia, they're with us, they're against China. And then very much got on to being brutal on Europe, saying, you know, Macron's got to step up, Schultz has got to step up, the EU's better decide which side they're on. And they were getting into the details of what exactly Macron had said in his Politico interview, where he'd seemed to be pretty ambivalent about defending Taiwan. I mean, so I do feel that somewhere within Biden, Jake Sullivan, Tony Blinken, and indeed the broader Washington world, is a very, very, very strong sense

• 28:57Rory Stewart?

  that they now have to build a whole coalition against China. And it's a very difficult time to do it because in many ways, obviously, Europe is distracted, deeply involved in the whole question of Ukraine.

• 29:09Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm hmm. The other thing I noticed this week was was a report on US-China trade. And it said that China's going to account for less than half of America's low-cost imports from Asia. These companies are going to other places like, I know, Vietnam, Indonesia.

• 29:29Rory Stewart?

  And that's that's reduced from?

• 29:32Alastair Campbell?

  Way over half. Yeah, absolutely. You know, there's a there's a there's a graph that shows Mexico on the rise and as a share of US goods imports and China, you know, quite a significant fall, which I guess is, I don't know, is related to the politics, I guess. And yeah, when he was at the G7 in Hiroshima, the one thing that Biden did say, he said he was expecting an imminent thaw in relations. Now, whether that was just because he wanted to say that, or whether he was hoping that the the the Bill Burns trip, which by then had happened, was going to lead somewhere. But I have to say, if you read. General Shang Fu's speech in Singapore, then there wasn't much sign of it.

• 30:13Rory Stewart?

  I didn't as much thought. I think two, two, two final things. Within the EU, there seems to have been this move from talking about decoupling from the Chinese economy to realising they can't do that because 50% of the profits of European automobile and luxury goods manufacturers are made in China.

• 30:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 30:31Rory Stewart?

  Towards now talking about de-risking instead of decoupling, that they're just too integrated into the Chinese economy to imagine decoupling.

• 30:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 30:40Rory Stewart?

  And then within Britain, we have this very weird thing happening within the Conservative Party, which is you've got Liz Truss flying to Taiwan, making these incredibly aggressive speeches, saying, you know, even if we have to give up on Chinese cooperation on climate, we've got to accept that, you know, we have to confront China. Ian Duncan Smith attacking Rishi Sunak for not being critical enough of China in the national security strategy. And I guess a real difficulty for any government in Britain, which is Britain's economy is not in great shape. Trade with China is going to be increasingly important. And working out how you position yourself to China is going to be really important for Britain's economy.

• 31:17Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. I wonder if Rishi Sunak tried to stop Liz Truss making that visit. Looking at Bill Burns' previous special missions on behalf of Biden, it's not the most encouraging track record if we think that he's there trying to get better relations with Beijing, because he was the guy, if you remember, who was sent to Moscow in conditions of secrecy to try to persuade the Russian officials against invading Ukraine. And then the other job he had was to try and persuade Nancy Pelosi not to go to Taiwan. So.

• 31:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, so final thing, just before we go to the break then. So I think my sort of summary of this is that the US, as it tries to make allies, is in a difficult position. I think a lot of Africa now is not going to come down on the US's side against China. I think the Middle East, Saudi in particular, is signalling a much warmer relationship with China. Latin America, most of the more leftist governments in Latin America are likely to be more on the Chinese side. And in any case, China owns $200 billion worth of Latin American debt at the moment. And with the rest of Asia, I think it's far from clear that people want to be forced to choose. So I think the US may find this a very, very difficult coalition to sustain.

• 32:34Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Okay. Well, let's take a break.

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• 34:45Rory Stewart?

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

• 34:49Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 34:50Rory Stewart?

  And you've just done a brilliant interview on leading, which anybody can search typing Mary McAleese leading into into your podcast. Tell us a bit about that interview.

• 35:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, she was she was absolutely wonderful and there's a lot of love for her in some of the responses we've had. I mean, I knew a bit about her, but I didn't quite know that her life story was so kind of dramatic. I mean, I knew that she was a Catholic, growing up in a Protestant area in the Ardoine in Northern Ireland. I knew that she had personal experience of the troubles. But when she told the story of the attacks on her house and this terrible bombing that reduced her father literally to years of catatonic depression in which he didn't even speak. And then, and yet she's just got this humour and vivacity and but to go from that to become Irish president,

• 35:45Alastair Campbell?

  you know, from dirt poverty, I mean, the sound of her childhood was really quite extraordinary. Very funny stuff about her grandfather who refused to have electricity. He just, he said, this electricity thing is never going to catch on. And her first, her first official opening was when she went down to head to switch on his only, his only light bulb that he finally agreed, agreed to have. But also, you know, to maybe to bring it up to to modern times to today. I mean, honestly, she was, she talked about what the damage Johnson and Trust have done to Britain's standing, but also Brexit. She describes Brexit as a flesh eating disease.

• 36:28Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, I strongly recommend people listen to it really, really. And actually, we might have a back and do it together at one point because I think she's just absolutely brilliant. And on the Brexit thing, let's just briefly talk about Labour and Keir Starmer had an article last week in the Daily Express. And listen, I've got no problem with writing in the Daily Express, just as we had, you know, we got criticised for travelling around the world to see Murdoch, et cetera. But it was a piece about Brexit and I just felt it was, it was almost on a par with the Brexiteers who say, we've just got to believe in this more. He's still talking about making Brexit work. He's going through the things, the areas where Brexit is not working, but I just don't understand the politics of this right now, I'm afraid.

• 37:12Alastair Campbell?

  The mood on Brexit is moving to a very different place, I believe. And so he's obviously thinking, well, I've got to keep these people happy who voted for Brexit. I'm not going to tell them they're stupid. I'm going to tell them that they did the right thing and understand why they did it. But it's doing so much damage to the country at the moment. I don't understand why he's in that position.

• 37:30Rory Stewart?

  Can we just sort of get into this? Because it is the sort of $60,000 question, isn't it? You are increasingly convinced that if Labour came out clearly and said, we're in favour of, I don't know, single market customs union Brexit, actually, they'd be fine, they'd still win the election, that wouldn't lose in the election, that'd be a good thing to do.

• 37:49Alastair Campbell?

  I don't even think they need to go that far. I don't think they need to go that far, because that does bring you back to free movement and all that sort of stuff. I just think saying in a very clear way, it's not working, it's going badly, we're not reversing it, but we have to revisit the arrangements. I think that's all he needs to say. And he's sort of said that, but it was in a sort of, hidden in all this kind of, you know, there's no question of this and there's no question of that, and I understand why you voted for it and all this sort of stuff. And I just think it's in the wrong place.

• 38:15Rory Stewart?

  Is he not going to, presumably he's going to lose quite a lot of people who were passionate about the European Union and were hoping that he was going to change the Tory Brexit policy?

• 38:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, look, I've had, I had people, including somebody that I persuaded to join the Labour Party not long ago, who sent me a message saying, I've, I've left because I can't see, I can't see, and it's not even the fact of seeing Brexit, wanting to see Brexit fixed, which I think is the line to, rather than make Brexit work, I think he should be saying, we're going to fix this Brexit deal. I think it's also this sense of the, the positioning, all being about the kind of leaning into the right as opposed to what the Labour Party really, really stands for. And also, I have a little bit of a concern. I know you were interested in this situation up in the North East with the Jamie Driscoll, who's the mayor up in the North, Metro Mayor up in the North East.

• 39:08Rory Stewart?

  And, and just, just to explain to listeners, Jamie Driscoll, Metro Mayor, but the local Labour Party has decided he cannot Stand in the forthcoming bigger mayoral elections. And this is something that's caused real ructions, including Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester, writing in and defends.

• 39:23Alastair Campbell?

  And Steve Rotherham Liverpool.

• 39:25Rory Stewart?

  Steve Rotherham Liverpool. And also, actually, the one of Liz Truss's big allies, Simon Clarke, saying he found him a really good mayor who had the interest, the region at his heart, who wasn't particularly political or ideological. And he thought, so he's got conservative defenders too. It's a very strange. I mean, he's been a popular bipartisan figure.

• 39:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think that what's going on here is that one of the things that the Labour Party under Keir Starmer is determined to show is that it's moved on from the Corbyn era, rooting out antisemitism, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So far as I can work out, the the sin that has been committed has been to share a platform with Ken Loach, the film director. Now, Ken Loach is, you know, he's a brilliant filmmaker, including he's made some brilliant films set up in the North East, which I think was one of the reasons why they did this event together. But he does have something of a track record on the whole, you know, zealously pro Corbyn, antisemitism, et cetera, all that, all that space. But I think it's the fact of sharing

• 40:28Alastair Campbell?

  a platform with somebody, unless Jamie Driscoll has himself said or done something.

• 40:36Rory Stewart?

  I think it's bizarre. I mean, it's one thing sharing a platform with, you know, somebody who's themselves a terrorist, but sharing a platform with a film director who has, I mean, you know, you're then going to get in a very, very weird world. Ken Loach was a big endorser of my Iraq book. You will be not very astonished to hear. So he's all over my book.

• 40:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm sure.

• 40:55Rory Stewart?

  I'm a big, big fan of Ken Loach as a result.

• 40:58Alastair Campbell?

  I'm sure that Ken Loach would be, you know, would see me as being in the sort of war criminal category. But I see Ken Loach as somebody who is a brilliant filmmaker, who has a lot to say about the state of the world, whose views of politics and a lot of what's gone on in the Labour Party in recent years, I profoundly disagree with. But I would happily share a platform with Ken Loach.

• 41:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:23Alastair Campbell?

  And I wouldn't be expect to be expelled from the Labour Party, of which I'm not currently a member. But where I remember.

• 41:30Rory Stewart?

  Expelled.

• 41:31Alastair Campbell?

  I would not expect to be expelled just for, you know, if we were, let's say we were to get him here on leading. I mean, does that, I don't know, where do you draw the line on this sort of stuff?

• 41:40Rory Stewart?

  Well, no, we got Gerry Adams on leading.

• 41:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and as you know, Rory, I had met Gerry Adams many dozens of times prior to that, including when there was a vague suspicion that he might have been involved in terrorism.

• 41:53Rory Stewart?

  Can they reverse this decision? Is it too late?

• 41:55Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know what the processes are, but it does seem a bit odd.

• 42:00Rory Stewart?

  It's very interesting that he's had such a, because Andy Burnham's not from the Corbyn left. And as I say, Conservative MPs in the area also rate him. So it seems a very unfair thing.

• 42:12Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know him well, but I mean, look, I think he's definitely on the Corbynista wing of the Labour Party. And I know there's sort of, you know, the kind of people like John McDonnell have been out defending him, which is fine.

• 42:23Rory Stewart?

  And he's been going on picket lines. He thinks he may be in trouble because he appeared on a picket line. But again, that's a bit weird to start not allowing a Labour mayor to appear on a picket line.

• 42:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And also, if we're serious about devolution, we're going to have different characters and different people. So, no, I think, as you know, Rory, I'm not, I desperately want Keir Starmer to win. I really want Labour to win the next election. But these, this was two things in a week that I was not terribly impressed by.

• 42:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, I'd like to pay tribute to you for being non-tribal and

• 42:57Alastair Campbell?

  Unlike you, unlike you on the Covid inquiry.

• 42:59Rory Stewart?

  My massive tribal defence of the government's position on the Covid inquiry.

• 43:04Alastair Campbell?

  Now, shall we go to another, shall we go to another place that I'm deeply concerned about?

• 43:08Rory Stewart?

  In which I think we can see the two of us, you playing the role of Alexander Vukic and me playing the role of Albin Corti. So we've, so here we are in Kosovo. And this is actually something we covered in quite a lot of detail. Actually, I think thanks to you, you made us do this a few, few months ago.

• 43:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:26Rory Stewart?

  And we talked through the fact that we thought there were very, very serious risks in northern Kosovo. And indeed, they have been revealed.

• 43:34Rory Stewart?

  In very dramatic form. And this goes to big, big questions of peace, of Serbia's continuing relationships with Russia, of whether or not these countries can join the European Union and whether by joining the European Union, you might be able to resolve some of these tensions. But the immediate tension at this moment is that the majority of the population in these particular districts in northern Kosovo are ethnic Serbians rather than ethnic Albanians. They boycotted the local elections and people with a few hundred votes who were voted for only by the minority Albanians were then imposed as mayors. And this has then caused this violence and NATO has had to deploy troops.

• 44:16Rory Stewart?

  And the general sense, I think, which we talked about a few months ago, is that Albin Kurti

• 44:22Alastair Campbell?

  The Prime Minister.

• 44:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Prime Minister of Kosovo is somebody who was welcomed because he was seen as less corrupt, more idealistic, cleaner than his predecessor, but has turned out unfortunately, along with that idealism, to be very, very unbending and quite absolutist. And this pushing to get these mayors installed seems to have been a very, very provocative, unwise, dark act.

• 44:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that is a view that the Americans have expressed. It's a view that the European Union has expressed. And also, my friend Eddie Rama, I don't know if you saw, he did a long interview on the BBC about this the other day, and he was, he was saying actually that this is not as serious as it looks, provided that both Kosovo and Serbia get back to the deal that they did back in, I think it was March, where essentially, and this was quite a big, this was quite a big breakthrough, I think, when Josep Barel, the European Foreign Policy Chief, he spent 12 hours in talks between Vukic, the president, who looks nothing like me, by the way.

• 45:34Rory Stewart?

  He was, however, he was, however, previously a minister of information.

• 45:39Alastair Campbell?

  That's true.

• 45:40Rory Stewart?

  That's why I was drawing the taste of this comparison, yeah.

• 45:42Alastair Campbell?

  But he's also very tall. He's one of the few world leaders who's significantly taller than I am. So he and Kuwati, the Kosovo Prime Minister, were in these talks and essentially they came out and Kosovo had agreed to set up something which the Serb majority in these northern districts had been asking for, which is an association of Serb majority municipalities. And Serbia had said it would, quote, "not object", it wasn't exactly saying it was support, "it would not object" to Kosovo's membership of an international organisation. Of course Kosovo's dream is to be properly recognised at the United Nations. They're currently on 99 countries

• 46:24Alastair Campbell?

  that reckon, out of the 193 that recognise them. That includes us, it includes the US, it includes 22 out of the European Union countries, Cyprus, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Spain are the ones who continue not to recognise them. So that was where it was heading.

• 46:41Rory Stewart?

  And also, just to add to that, there was also this vote April, which brought Kosovo into the Council of Europe.

• 46:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Rory Stewart?

  Which was another big bit of progress.

• 46:50Alastair Campbell?

  Big step, yeah. And then, so then with these elections, so the Serb, the reason for the Serb boycott was they felt that there had been not enough progress made on promises already made about giving them some sort of and it's not devolved power, but some sort of authority that they could say, "we're being treated as a bit special", so they were protesting at that. And then when the elections happened, and as you say, the turnout was less than 4%. Because although, if you look at Kosovo as a whole, 1.8 million people, 92% are Albanian and only 6% are Serb, but a lot of that 6%, they do live up in this northern

• 47:31Alastair Campbell?

  patch. And so they didn't take part and you then literally did have sort of dozens of police officers who were escorting these four mayors, one of whom had had literally, I think it was in, you know, fewer than 100 votes. And that kicked off, there was then violence. Kuwati is insistent that some of that violence is from criminal gangs, some of it is being provoked by, endorsed and supported by Russia.

• 47:58Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 47:58Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, the bigger picture here is about, this is why the Americans and the Europeans are so involved in this, the bigger picture is how to Prevent Serbia from being too locked into the kind of Russian orbit.

• 48:12Rory Stewart?

  And on that, Vucic has been quite smart. I mean, people were very worried because he'd been associated with Milosevic in the past and was seen as a Serbian nationalist, that he would been drawn into Russia's orbit completely. But he's been quite canny on that. He has retained good relations with Russia. And I was talking to a Russian yesterday, whose family's moved to Serbia, because it's one of the few places that they can go without visas.

• 48:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 48:36Rory Stewart?

  But he's also kept sufficient distance, not really to become a kind of Putin tool. And one of the things, when he began making these agreements with the EU and Kosovo, he then faced protests from the far right of people wearing sort of pro Putin t-shirts and symbols. So it's a sort of reminder with all these politicians that often, you know, when they try to take a moderate course, they end up with extremists on their own side.

• 49:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But the Americans, the Americans have been pretty firm on this. They actually withdrew the right of Kosovo to take part in a military exercise that was being planned. And then, of course, you have this Novak Djokovic. You know who Novak Djokovic is, Rory?

• 49:18Rory Stewart?

  He's a tennis player.

• 49:19Alastair Campbell?

  Tennis player. He inserted himself rather unhelpfully at the Paris, the French Open in Paris. You know how they have this thing of getting marker pens and they sign their signature on a camera as they finish a match? And he went on and scribbled Kosovo is the heart of Serbia, which of course is, it was, you know, not the, not the most helpful thing that he, that he could have done. And just to go back to our previous discussion, to remind people that one of the, the big things that was, that triggers all this is the refusal of Serbs living in that area to use, some of them, not all of them, to use a Kosovo number plates. They have Serb plates on their cars.

• 49:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Alastair Campbell?

  But anyway, bottom line is tense, difficult, terrible that soldiers got and police officers got injured, some of them very seriously. 700 more troops have had to be sent there. But there is still a deal to be done and we should focus on that. March 17th in North Macedonia. Both sides should go back to that.

• 50:19Rory Stewart?

  Which I think brings us on to the final thing, which is Poland. So, big demonstrations in Poland. And there, just to remind people, the Law and Justice Party came in and has been ruling in a very, very unpleasant populist nationalist style. Poland being obviously the sort of mirror image of Hungary, of what Viktor Orban's doing in Hungary. A government, people want to read more about it, there's a great book by Anne Applebaum called Twilight of Democracy. She's married to a Polish politician, but she talks about the domination of incredible conspiracy theories, the fact that the government's state-owned media, its sort of BBC equivalent, whipped up so much mad hatred against the mayor of Gdansk that he was actually eventually

• 51:01Rory Stewart?

  stabbed to death on stage, with no apologies from the government. Deep fights with the European Union because they've been refusing to accept the judges which are proposed by Parliament or by Judicial Commission, stuffing their own people into judiciary as well as state media.

• 51:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 51:16Rory Stewart?

  So, big test, I guess, for rule of law in Europe, the standards of the European Union against Poland, and now these protests. Over to you.

• 51:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, half a million people is what the mayor of Warsaw was putting it at. And of course, and two of the the big names who were there. One was Lake Valenta, of course, was the leader of the Solidarity Movement in the 80s, became president. And the other was Donald Tusk, who, well-known to us through the Brexit debate, with his role at the European Union, but he's now the leader of the of the main opposition party, the civic platform. And the tipping point that seems to have taken this into a different level, really, is this new law that they brought in. It's called the Anti-Russia Commission, which is going to have the power to ban people from public office who it is deemed have

• 52:05Alastair Campbell?

  been too helpful to the Russians in the past. And it's been called Lex, the law has been called Lex Tusk, Tusk Law, because essentially, people think this is a sort of back door, well, pretty front doorway, to stop him from competing.

• 52:20Rory Stewart?

  To disqualify Tusk from running in elections.

• 52:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. They'll say, basically, he allowed Poland to become too dependent on Russian energy.

• 52:27Rory Stewart?

  We see this more and more, don't we? Because, of course, this is the Erdogan stuff. Disqualifying popular candidates from running in elections. And I think it's something that we don't talk about enough when we talk about the laws around democracy. We often talk about free and fair elections, but I think really holding to the principle, which I think we've got in Britain, which is that anyone can run for election. And that we don't get into the business of governments deciding who are not suitable candidates. I mean, we do end up with some rogues, but.

• 52:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we certainly do. We should maybe end on this because there's another situation. In fact, we had a couple of questions about it in Senegal where exactly this is happening right now. The social media messaging platforms have been blocked. There's been violence and unrest, and it's all because the opposition leader, Ousmane Sonko, has been sentenced for two years for immoral behaviour. And people are essentially saying that this is simply a kind of fake thing to prevent him from contesting the election.

• 53:29Rory Stewart?

  Well, and famously in Malaysia, the most impressive Malaysian politician was put in jail for accused of sodomy. I mean, it's very, very disturbing. And I think this whole theme that we're talking about with this new world order and whether the American world order is going to be able to survive and whether the Chinese world order is challenging it is partly about, doesn't matter whether we're talking about Malaysia or Senegal or Poland, those three continents, this erosion of democracy that we're seeing and the erosion of civil society and the pattern of the way that they're learning from each other. So one of the things that's very striking in Applebaum's book is you can see American Republican think tanks turning up in Hungary and in Poland.

• 54:12Rory Stewart?

  And then the same think tanks who are putting Maloney on stage then end up involved in this National Conservatism Conference in London. And there's a sort of playbook, which Steve Bannon used to be very, very explicit about, and which will become much, much worse with two things. If Trump gets back in the States and if Le Pen wins the French presidency. We're going to see a much, much worse version of this.

• 54:35Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. And by the way, I have to thank your constant plugging of Al Jazeera. I didn't know about this Senegal situation until I was watching Al Jazeera. As of the last, last night, when I was watching it, 15 people have been killed in the violence.

• 54:48Rory Stewart?

  Can I, speaking of plugging, remind people that But What Can I Do is currently out and selling. But take, take, take opportunity from that to plug the fact that I will be launching my book, if anybody would like to come.

• 55:00Alastair Campbell?

  Before you go, before you go on, before you go on, it's called Politics on the Edge.

• 55:06Rory Stewart?

  That's beautiful. I love the way you do that. It's like, it's beautiful. So second and third September in Manchester and London, if anybody would like to come along. And details on the website is something called Fane, F A N E.

• 55:18Alastair Campbell?

  Is it, what is it? Old Trafford and Wembley?

• 55:21Rory Stewart?

  It's, I wish Old Trafford and Wembley. It's called the Lowry in Manchester and the Barbican in Barbican.

• 55:26Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, that's pretty cool. The Lowry's cool.

• 55:28Rory Stewart?

  That's got a music, music venue in it. Yeah, that's right. Cool.

• 55:33Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent.

• 55:34Rory Stewart?

  Thank you very much. Thank you, Alastair. Beautiful shirt, very envious of it.

• 55:37Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you.

• 55:38Rory Stewart?

  And look forward to speaking soon.

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