295. Question Time: Israel vs. Hezbollah, legalising cannabis, and Kamala Harris' Middle East strategy

Will the attack on the Golan Heights push Israel and Hezbollah into war? How does Harris’ approach to the Middle East differ from Trump's? How do Rory and Alastair square their beliefs with what people want to hear? And, was Starmer right to suspend seven MPs over the two child benefit cap? TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, 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, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Podcast Editor: India Dunkley Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter 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 Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Alastair Campbell?

  Hi there. It's Alastair here. And in these fast-moving times, I just wanted to preface this week's Q and A by saying that though we focus in large part on the Middle East, and in particular, the death of 12 young people in the Golan Heights, hit by rocket fire from Lebanon, two huge, dramatic events have taken place since we recorded on Monday. First, Israel announced it had killed a top Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, in an airstrike on a southern suburb of the Lebanese capital Beirut. And second, even more dramatically, in a strike in Tehran, the capital of Iran, Hamas leader Ismail Hinae has also been killed. We've talked about him on the podcast before. He has been right at the top of the list of people Israel wanted to take out

• 1:49Alastair Campbell?

  as part of their efforts to destroy Hamas following the October 7 attacks. As to the consequences, that remains unclear. But it all goes to underline something we are going to discuss here, just how hard it will be for the US and its allies to achieve their stated goal of preventing the Israel-Gaza war from spreading.

• 2:09Alastair Campbell?

  So so much for this being the so called silly season where nothing much is supposed to happen. And of course, closer to home, the horrifying murderous knife assault in Southport and the disgusting exploitation of it to stoke hate, violence and attacks on the police. Doubtless, we'll talk about that and more next week. But for now, here's this week's Q and A. Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:40Rory Stewart?

  And me Rory Stewart.

• 2:42Alastair Campbell?

  And we said in the main episode Rory, that we would take a look at events in the Middle East in the Question Time. So let's start with this one from Mark. Will the attack on the Golan Heights push Israel and Hezbollah into war? Well, they've already been to some extent, fighting for a long, long time. I guess what Mark means is whether the attack the other night, the drone strike on the football field in which 12 mainly children were killed, whether that pushes this into a much more dangerous place.

• 3:09Rory Stewart?

  Let's do a little background on this. So the Golan Heights were originally part of Syria, and they were a part of Syria, which Israel took in the 1967 war. They're just next to the Sea of Galilee. They're an area actually that I was visiting just last year. And you can see still the Syrian trenches and encampments, and then the military Israeli military positions laid over the top. It's a commanding position.

• 3:33Alastair Campbell?

  You can see Damascus when you get to the top.

• 3:35Rory Stewart?

  And you can see why it's incredibly tactically vital, because when Syria controlled it, Israeli settlements on the edge of the Sea of Galilee were very vulnerable to it. And of course, when Israel controls it, Syrian settlements are very vulnerable to it. And under international law, of course, this is a part that still belongs to Syria. It's under Israeli occupation. Hezbollah, we've described before as a group, very powerful group, more powerful than Hamas, located in Lebanon, where they effectively control a lot of the Lebanese government and are supported and financed by Iran. They have to some extent held back from getting fully involved in the conflict after October, after the October Hamas attacks. But their rockets led

• 4:18Rory Stewart?

  To the Israelis having to relocate over a hundred thousand people who were up near the Syrian border. And people had been killed already, and that was already a big problem in Israeli politics, which is the sense of huge numbers of refugees and people being killed. But as you say, it's this latest event where a Hezbollah rocket attack has killed a dozen people that has really upped the ante, particularly given, as we were saying two weeks ago, that parts of the Israeli government and Israeli society have been pushing for an attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon for a long time.

• 4:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there was somebody called Sarah Kopsi, who are the Druze. So these were part of the Druze, which is an Arab sect essentially of around about a million people who mainly live between Israel, Lebanon and Syria. There are about twenty thousand of them living in the Golan Heights and they are, although some of them serve in the Israeli military, as I understand it, they have Israeli residency cards but are not necessarily viewed as full Israeli citizens.

• 5:16Rory Stewart?

  The Druze became very relevant during the Lebanese civil war. So as Lebanon disintegrated from nineteen eighty, which is why the local block in Kref, my hometown, was traditionally known as Beirut. Because when people were, when there was violence in it in the early nineteen eighties, Beirut was the great symbol of violence.

• 5:33Alastair Campbell?

  Sorry, sorry Rory, you completely lost me here. Kref, Beirut, I've lost the link.

• 5:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm trying to point to the fact that in the early nineteen eighties, Lebanon and Beirut were such a symbol of civil war and violence that the slightly rough housing block built on the edge of Kref in the early nineteen eighties, when things were getting a bit dicey around there, that it was then named Beirut because this was seen as the kind of the great symbol, I suppose, at the time of Hamas.

• 5:59Alastair Campbell?

  Named by whom? All the posh people out of their estates?

• 6:01Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, I didn't think the posh people. No, I think that was a joke from within Kref.

• 6:05Alastair Campbell?

  From within, from within.

• 6:06Rory Stewart?

  The housing estates of Kref itself. So in the civil war, Lebanon, which is very, very religiously complicated, has a big Shia community, which is where Hezbollah is drawn from, a big Sunni community, a big Alawite community and a big Druze community and two different Christian communities. So an Orthodox Christian community and a Catholic Christian community. Found itself dragged into civil war. And as Israel intervened in and out of Lebanon in the 1980s. Many of the Druze found themselves on sides backed by Israel. And that's why some of these Druze ended up in Israel itself. And these are, there's a wonderful book by Gerard Russell, who we've talked about on the show before. Who's written a book on the minority religions of the Middle East.

• 6:50Rory Stewart?

  They are completely fascinating. The Druze, the Alawite, the Yazidis, the Samaritans. These are religious groups which have roots back almost into the Old Testament. And some of them describe themselves as Muslims. Some of them describe themselves as Christians. Some of them don't really describe themselves as either. And many of their beliefs are esoteric. In other words, they don't reveal to the outside world what exactly their practices and beliefs are.

• 7:15Alastair Campbell?

  I really, really hope I don't get any facts wrong because Gerard, I remember when he worked for me in Downey Street is an absolute stickler. But I think I'm right in saying that the Druze don't allow marriage to people outside the Druze. And they don't allow converts. Is that right?

• 7:29Rory Stewart?

  I think that probably would be right. A lot of these groups are very, very hermetically sealed. But it's of course not that uncommon. I mean, if you're a Muslim getting married, you'd expect your partner to convert to Islam.

• 7:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I understand with the Druze, you can't even do that. The other thing that was interesting was because this was such a big deal. Netanyahu cut short his visit to America. A number of ministers went to the seat, including Smotrich, who is the hard right part of Netanyahu's very fragile coalition. And was given a very, very hard time by the people at the funeral of these children. Essentially saying, you never showed up when we've had problems before. What's all this about? So I think on the point about what you see from the diplomacy led by the United States. Antony Blinken was out there straight away. I saw David Lammy saying similar things, the French were saying similar things, European Union saying similar things. Essentially pleading with both sides not to allow this to escalate.

• 8:24Alastair Campbell?

  Because I think I'm right, that Hezbollah has the biggest army in the world that is not run by a state.

• 8:29Rory Stewart?

  Well over 25,000 trained people and very, very many veterans because they were dominant in the Syria war. They are of all these Iranian proxies, much more powerful than Houthi, Hamas, or the militia groups in Iraq and Syria. Hezbollah is a very significant group. And I think the fear there was that along with deep feeling of compassion towards these innocent people killed by the rockets.

• 8:54Rory Stewart?

  Was this fear that Israel has been building up a justification for an attack on Lebanon for a long time. And so for Blinken and others, the fear was that this event would become the trigger that was used to justify that invasion.

• 9:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Another question here from Mark Lewis. Is there a difference between the Middle East strategy of Joe Biden and Vice President Harris? Did you see, Rory, we're going to have to get an agreement on how to pronounce her first name. Either we call her Vice President Harris all the time, or we have to agree. Because I got, I got lots of messages saying that you pronounce it correctly, but I pronounce it incorrectly. But I thought I was pronouncing it the same way as you, which was Kamala.

• 9:31Rory Stewart?

  So this is the great thing that's tripping up all the Brits. And I keep talking to my wife about it, who calls American. So what all the explainer says is that you have to pronounce it like comma.

• 9:40Alastair Campbell?

  Kamala.

• 9:41Rory Stewart?

  These are Americans.

• 9:43Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. That's, they, they say Kaba.

• 9:45Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. So it's, Shashana's conclusion is it's somewhere between an O and an A. Then that also interesting, because of course, it's, it's a Hindi name that she was given by her mother. So again, there'll be a question of how it would have been pronounced by her mother, which I imagine would be different again.

• 10:00Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think there's something a bit sexist in the fact that we have this urge to call her by her first name, rather than Harris, or Biden, or Trump, or Sulek. But then we, and with Hillary, we did the same with Hillary.

• 10:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think we should return to.

• 10:13Alastair Campbell?

  Vice President Harris. Okay, okay. Until she comes on the podcast, we will say, please welcome Vice President Kamala, or President by then, hopefully. So anyway, the question was whether there's a difference in the strategy. I thought her comments in the wake of her meeting with Netanyahu. So people will know Netanyahu went to Washington. He spoke to both houses of Congress. I think it's the fourth time that he's done it. Fair number of Democrats didn't turn up, including Nancy Pelosi, who just felt that he shouldn't have been given the invitation. But she did seem to me to have gone from a, from yes, and. How I would put it is that Joe Biden was yes, and, and Vice President Harris seems to me to be more yes, but.

• 10:50Rory Stewart?

  I think that's possible. She's so difficult to read still, though. And there's been fascinating reporting on the fact that compared to Obama, who by this stage in the electoral cycle, in other words, the July before his 2008 election, was doing. Three events a day. She still seems to be sticking to President Biden's pre-planned schedule, which was pretty modest because of his age. We haven't seen her out and about that much. She's still the incredible rise, you know, and she's now seems to be level pegging with Donald Trump and she's put 10 points on in her popularity is still largely a social media driven thing. And I'm seeing bits of this because Shoshana was invited by her friends at university to join a Zoom call, which I think broke the internet. I think they got

• 11:35Rory Stewart?

  two and a half million women on this Zoom call in favor of Vice President Harris. So there's something quite remarkable going on, but she herself, Vice President Harris, remains a bit of a mystery. We're still not fully seeing what she believes in and where she's going.

• 11:50Alastair Campbell?

  But I did think on that, there was an emphasis from her on the need to help Palestinians who'd been very, very badly hit by this war. I felt that she moved away in rhetoric, if not in substance, a little bit from the Biden position. And I wonder whether one of the things that they've been reading is the fact that one of the reasons Joe Biden's popularity had fallen somewhat was actually because they felt he was just far too close to Israel. And Netanyahu, for all that he's a survivor, you know, we talk a lot about leaders' ratings. I mean, he's a he's a right down there right now. And I suspect that will be with a lot of Americans as well as with Israelis.

• 12:28Rory Stewart?

  Well, she may also be looking at the polls, which suggests that she's doing much better than Joe Biden was doing with younger voters and Hispanic voters. And she's doing worse than Joe Biden with older voters and white voters. So and the younger voters tend to be more progressive. So we may see her leaning into that base a bit. Final thing on this, just to be wary of when we talk about Vice President Harris, is that we've got to remember that at this stage, going into the elections, a Dukakis was running against George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush, sorry. He was 18 points ahead at this stage, and he still managed to lose the election dramatically.

• 13:09Alastair Campbell?

  He had one of those absolute horror moments in a TV debate, didn't he? When he was, he was talked about being against the death penalty and he was asked what he would do if, I think the question was somebody raped and murdered his wife. It was one of those awful sort of really shit you between the eyes. And he just went into a kind of sort of very technocratic explanation. And people just thought, wait a minute, this guy's really not got it. He was just complete lacking in empathy.

• 13:32Rory Stewart?

  It connects with the Alistair Great Theory, which is never to overly believe the polls. Cause the fact that you can have an 18 point lead in July and then lose the election. It's a real reminder that whatever the polls are showing now, things can change it a lot.

• 13:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. Now Rory, here's one that I wanted to come back to Nancy Hillingdon. A week on from the just stop oil sentences, what are your thoughts now? And this is a really interesting example. So we get thousands of questions, okay? And we sometimes have a little chat beforehand, but quite often we don't because we don't have time and we haven't read them and the producer produced loads and we pick them. And you said to me last week, what's your instinctive reaction to these just stop oil protesters being sent down for five years and four years? And I said, my instinctive reaction was that I thought it sounded very, very harsh. And particularly at a time when we rightly are thinking that our prisons are a complete state and overcrowding, et cetera. And then a couple of barristers posted something, I think they were trying to be helpful. They said, look, you might want to read the judgment.

• 14:26Alastair Campbell?

  So I went off and read the judgment and I have to say it did change my mind.

• 14:30Rory Stewart?

  What did you think reading the judgment?

• 14:32Alastair Campbell?

  What I felt from reading the judgment is I hadn't quite realised just how big the operations were that they were engaged in and planning. I hadn't realised the record of some of them. I hadn't realised their behaviour in court where the judge was clearly not having them at all. And I guess I hadn't realised the extent to which they basically thought that it didn't kind of matter. You know, they've gone from being, well, the judge, how the judge put it, they'd gone from being legitimate protesters to absolute fanatics who could not accept that anybody else might have a reasonable opinion. When he listed all of the different people who had been affected, people getting to hospital, people visiting their elderly parents dying, all this sort of stuff that, you know, you just don't necessarily think about.

• 15:17Alastair Campbell?

  Now then I thought, well, hold on a minute, am I being sort of, am I being played here? Should I now go off and read every judgment that this judge has ever made? To see whether he kind of doesn't like the planet. But he did make a point of saying that he believed in. Manmade climate change and that it was a genuine crisis. But anyway, I can't remember the name of the barrister who sent it to me, but I'm grateful that he did.

• 15:37Rory Stewart?

  And it was fascinating how exercised a group of people got. The very interesting example of, and I'm always reminded this on Twitter, because it happens to politicians all the time, and what happened to me in nine years in politics all the time. Suddenly, there is a flurry of, I guess there were maybe half a dozen people attacking what we'd said about the judgment. I instantly still think it was too harsh.

• 15:59Alastair Campbell?

  I still think that, but I think it was right they went to jail.

• 16:02Rory Stewart?

  Just to put it in context, right, four year sentences is being given to people conducting some pretty horrible nasty robberies that involve crapping in people's houses, threatening them. I mean, and the judge has more latitude. I mean, the barristers were running, he had no choice under the law. That's simply not true. Judges still, in almost every case, have much more latitude. However, that said, I suspect if we were to do a poll of our listeners, most of our listeners would still think that a four year sentence for threatening to disrupt a motorway is too long.

• 16:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I still think on balance, the sentence was too harsh, but I definitely was moved from a place of this is over the top to I completely get why they, why they went to jail. Now, Rory, Patrick wants to know this. I've asked this question a few times now. Please can you discuss the further legalization of cannabis in the UK? I've been a medical cannabis patient since 2023, as I have an acquired brain injury, and it is a fantastic life-changing service. Medical cannabis is currently legal in the UK just, but the system is flawed and unreliable. There are many legal loopholes which cause stock issues, medication delays, other issues. On top of this, patients have to pay high prices when in some cases no other medication works. Now, again, at the risk of being completely ignorant, I am broadly in favor of Patrick having access to cannabis for medical treatment.

• 17:24Rory Stewart?

  Well, my sense is he's expressed the situation very well, which is, it's something we see again and again in politics, which is it's all very well changing the law. But the problem is the devil's in the detail and how it's implemented. And those things he's talking about, stock issues, pricing issues, quality issues, supply issues, become very, very relevant. And this is true with so many of the things. I mean, it's a kind of perpetual world, and I think the Labour Government will find this again and again. They will be lobbied to change a law, they'll bring in a new law, they'll hope that they've fixed the problem, and then, not very long afterwards, people will come back and say, well, you think you fixed the problem. But there's all these other things which aren't anything to do with the law, which are beginning to get in the way of us actually getting our, getting, in this case, our medicine.

• 18:09Alastair Campbell?

  So it was reclassified in 2018. Doctors are allowed to prescribe it under certain controls, but it's actually not being prescribed very widely at all. Clinical trial's not been funded. So it's still a narcotic, and it has to be regulated as a medicine. So I think you're right, I think it's one of those issues where you think, yeah, that seems pretty sensible, but there are all sorts of tricky issues that flow from it. So Patrick, I'm with you, and I think from the sound of it, Rory's half with you.

• 18:34Rory Stewart?

  The other thing he's got me going on is this question of what people choose to research and what they don't, and where the focus is. I'm really interested in this because I hadn't realised, for example, that children's medicine is often not a big priority for pharmaceutical firms and the manufacturers of medical equipment. It's apparently, particularly in the US, it's not where you make your money. So there haven't been as many advances in paediatric stuff as you would have thought, and paediatric doctors in the US continue to be strangely underpaid. You would have thought people would be absolutely desperate when their children were ill. Actually, it's one of the only cases where US doctors are almost earning the same as British doctors. Then there were two other things I've come across.

• 19:16Rory Stewart?

  One of them, I'm a migraine sufferer, and I'm now getting very, very regular, very unpleasant migraines. And although there's been a breakthrough with a class of drugs called tryptans, and there's a lot of people with migraines, in the UK, probably one and a half million people, again, for some reason, the pharmaceutical companies have never quite decided, nor has the NHS. That this is a number one priority. Some people say that this is gendered, that traditionally it's quite chauvinistic. Traditionally, migraine is seen as something that women suffer from because it's a headache and it doesn't kill you. There are doctors who are like, it's not that serious and you don't need to worry about it. So my life is pretty blighted by this and other people much worse. They can be knocked out for, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 days, months with blinding headaches and auras and unable to function in dark room.

• 20:01Rory Stewart?

  Final one, just in case some billionaire is listening to the show and wants to do something to really change the world. My father was very deaf and the advances in hearing aids are nothing like what you would expect in a world of technological revolution. What you'll find if you begin losing your hearing is that there are hearing aid companies selling these things for six, seven thousand pounds. And they're always claiming that this is the latest generation, it's much better. My father spent a fortune getting these things and now my father in law is being made to spend thousands of dollars getting these things. And they're always told that they're smarter than they've ever been and you go into labs. But the reality is we still have not fixed how to deal with it. And consequently, older people end up in a very, very lonely situation where

• 20:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Rory Stewart?

  they don't hear what people say, they ask people to repeat themselves, people get angry with them, they go to cocktail parties, they've got no idea what's happening there with their families, they've got no idea, it's very isolating. So some billionaires listening, put the money behind technology for hearing aids because it'll make a difference to, you know, literally billions of people around the world. But it's just not, it's not sexy.

• 21:02Alastair Campbell?

  I'd love to know how many billionaires listen. I suspect Elon Musk isn't one of them after I said last week that he was a much bigger dick than Nick Clay. But he's shown that several times again since. Some of his reposting of his own stuff on X is absurd. They must be horrible. I've had headaches, I've seen you when you've had a migraine, but I find it quite useful because whenever you lose your rag with our guests on leading, I always say afterwards, oh, he had a bit of a migraine, he's fine.

• 21:27Alastair Campbell?

  I find the Jamie Rubin, Jonathan Powell, David Davis upcoming. People can look forward to that one. Very enjoyable, very enjoyable.

• 21:35Rory Stewart?

  I'm beginning to notice a pattern. They're usually friends of yours who are winding me up as far as I can see. Generally, I think they're your old mates. I'm now beginning to wonder whether the thing isn't because they're friends of yours, you're letting me do the aggressive challenging, which you're not doing.

• 21:48Alastair Campbell?

  No. Let's have a quick break.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  There we are getting a statement from Number Ten on that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 22:18Speaker 05

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 22:20Speaker 06

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 22:23Speaker 03

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 22:36Speaker 05

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

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  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 22:52Speaker 03

  Yes.

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• 23:40Rory Stewart?

  Here we are, Jyotendakant. In the light of seven Labour MPs being suspended for voting against the two-child benefit cap, what does this mean in practice? Does that mean their constituents are no longer represented? Do the weekly surgeries still go ahead? If a constituent's issue needs to be brought up in Parliament, is that recourse not available for the duration of suspension? So, quickly on that, none of that's true. You still remain a Member of Parliament.

• 24:02Rory Stewart?

  Parliament, you can't be thrown out of Parliament. But if the party takes the whip away and there's an election, you can't run as the candidate. So this happened to me. I was suspended by Boris Johnson for voting to try to block a hard Brexit along with 20 other colleagues. And he then triggered an election in which unless we were prepared to apologize, change our position, appear publicly endorsing Boris Johnson, we weren't allowed to run in the election. And this is effectively what happened to Jeremy Corbyn. So he was lost the whip because of the controversies around antisemitism of the Labour Party, a real antisemitism of Labour Party, but I think questions about the extent to which Jeremy Corbyn himself was antisemitic

• 24:44Rory Stewart?

  or whether there was just antisemitism happening in the Labour Party he was presiding over and somehow had created an environment fault. So he was suspended and he then ran, of course, as an independent and has been elected into Parliament, along with some very interesting other independents that we should talk about at some point. But now that group is now up to nearly 14 people and as Jeremy Corbyn says, by the time you're 14 people in the House of Commons, you can begin creating quite a lot of trouble. That's nearly three times as many as there are Reform Party MPs.

• 25:12Alastair Campbell?

  What was your take on the suspension? This was an SNP amendment to the King's Speech and Labour made clear in advance that if people voted with the SNP on this amendment, they would lose the whip.

• 25:25Rory Stewart?

  I think this is pretty brutal because this is part of a pattern of Keir Starmer asserting his authority in a pretty authoritarian way. He's got quite a small court around him. It's very much his way or the highway. This was not normal in Parliament before. So when I was in, there were many, many occasions on which MPs in the Conservative Party voted against three-line whips.

• 25:48Alastair Campbell?

  Including on the King's Speech?

• 25:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, there was, there was a rebellion, for example, famously around VAT on pasties, which came off the back of the King's Speech and the Finance Bill.

• 25:56Alastair Campbell?

  That was the Finance Bill though. I can't recall rebellions on the King's Speech itself. And also there's the other issue, it being an Opposition Day amendment.

• 26:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but basically until Boris Johnson started doing it over hard Brexit, the things for which you lost the whip tended to be corruption or sexual misbehaviour.

• 26:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Rory Stewart?

  The assumption was that MPs were able to vote against the government, and that's quite important because British government is an elective dictatorship. It's not like the Senate where you're on this sort of fifty fifty balance. Effectively, the whips run the whole thing, the Prime Minister runs the whole thing. So you can't have a situation in which I think people are regularly threatened and bullied for voting against the government. But but, Alison, can I just come to you on this? Because I'm obviously talking constitutional theory. There must have been many, many members of Labour Party who felt passionately that the two child benefit cap is a bad thing because it's leading to a lot of poverty. And it was Labour Party policy only a year ago to get rid of this two child benefit

• 26:54Rory Stewart?

  cap. So just tell me what this means. I'm not saying this is a mortal blow to Keir Starmer. In many ways, he seems to be stronger than he's ever been and is popular as strong as ever been. But there must be some discontent within the Labour Party about this.

• 27:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, the fact that seven people rebelled. And I think Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, I mean, their rebellions against us when we were in power went well into three figures. Corbyn and McDonnell were the most rebellious MPs that we had. I did quite enjoy John McDonnell's comment where he said he was doing what Keir Starmer said they should, which is put the country before the party. John McDonnell was the runner up in the competition for the biggest rebel against the Blair Brown government, and it was Jeremy Corbyn who rebelled four hundred and twenty eight times.

• 27:35Rory Stewart?

  And yet, you never removed the whip from them.

• 27:38Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, never, never.

• 27:39Rory Stewart?

  You never removed the whip from them. And I think you were right. I mean, I know you had authoritarian tendencies, but I think Keir Starmer is proving to be a more authoritarian Labour leader actually than Tony Blair, and certainly a much more authoritarian leader than David Cameron or Theresa May.

• 27:54Alastair Campbell?

  Four hundred and twenty eight, that's a pretty impressive record, isn't it? And now he's a independent. I mean, he's probably missing rebellion because every vote he can, you know, he's his own chief whip now. I think withdrawing the whip has got to be very much a kind of a last resort. What I think this is about is saying that, you know, and we talked in the main podcast about the Rachel Reeves stuff, I think they're signalling seriousness of intent about having to do some pretty difficult things as time goes on. They and also they had. Been clear in the campaign and had paid a bit of a political price probably that they were not going to get rid of this cap until they could afford to. They indicated they wanted to do it sometime in the future, but they were not going to be able to do it immediately.

• 28:37Alastair Campbell?

  This is, I think, the thinking behind it is that, you know, we say we're going to be a serious government. We say we're going to do the things that we're going to get elected on. You all got elected on exactly the same ticket. And if you're going to step out of line on things like that, you're going to pay a price. Now, I think as time goes on and as you have more and more very difficult situations where MPs come under massive pressure from their constituents and so forth. Then you've got to be careful about just setting a bar for rebellion that is so low that you end up. People say, well, sue me, why haven't you taken the whip off him? Why haven't you taken the whip off her? So I get the thinking behind it, but I, I think it's, it's something that needs very careful party management.

• 29:17Rory Stewart?

  And presumably in addition to the seven who rebelled, there must have been a hundred MPs who sympathised with them and would have liked to rebel. And think that actually the government's doing the wrong thing.

• 29:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, there was interesting how many of the new MPs I saw actually saying, I'd love to have voted for that. I'd love it if we could do it, but given that the economy at the moment won't allow it, I voted against it. And I think there is something as well, you, you must have seen this loads of time in Parliament because, and we used to do it when we were in opposition. Is that you use these opposition day, these opposition moments, opposition amendments to try to cause the government as much internal friction as you can get going. And I think the other thinking behind the very tough line the whip's took was if people are going to play games with the opposition, we're going to call it out.

• 29:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and, and what it will do is that these things are what created this thing called the voting record. So when I'm attacked on Twitter, the classic thing is you think Rory's a nice Tory, but have you looked at his voting record? And the voting record will say, you know, Rory voted to, for the two child cap on benefits. Or Rory voted for austerity, or Rory voted in favour of killing small children in Syria. And these will be generally opposition day debates where a motion is put up saying, you know, the opposition calls on the government to. You know, not kill small children in Syria. I mean, you'll try to frame it in whatever way you will. And the whips will then come in and say, we're not accepting that framing, we're whipping people against it.

• 30:43Rory Stewart?

  And then that provides the perfect thing, which is now going to be on the records of all these Labour MPs. When the left of the Labour Party gets going, you know.

• 30:50Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 30:51Rory Stewart?

  Young MP seems to be nice, but have you looked at their voting record? They voted for the two child benefit camps.

• 30:57Alastair Campbell?

  Right, last question, your choice.

• 30:59Rory Stewart?

  Authenticity Rufus, how do you square what you believe and what your audience wants to hear? And I think if I can frame that for you in terms of political comms. So I found when I was running for leadership, when I was running for Mayor of London, very strong pressure from campaign teams and pollsters saying things like, the number one issue in London is crime. And so you've just got to talk about nothing except, you know, make London safe again. And I believed that actually in some ways, London was safer than people acknowledged and that there were other priorities in London that mattered more. So I wanted to talk more about trees or air quality. So what would be your advice on how a politician finds the way of harnessing

• 31:43Rory Stewart?

  who they are and what they believe, while also saying what the audience wants to hear, which I guess is a way of saying, saying things that are relevant to the audience that win elections?

• 31:53Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, this, this slightly relates to the previous question. One of the things I think the public really hate about politics is the sort of, what I call the robotics of campaign communications, you know, where they've, they're given lines to take and, you know, I used to give politicians lines to take all the time. And, you know, the line is this, Labour MPs at the moment will have a line, essentially saying that the Tories misled us about the state of the public finances. And this means we have to make even more difficult decisions, whatever it might be. And if you use the same words again and again and again, it becomes very, very grating for people. When you speak, give people advice, look at the ones who do it quite well. Back in our day, we had Jack Cunningham, John Reed, Margaret Beckett. They possessed the lines to take, okay?

• 32:35Alastair Campbell?

  But they, they could communicate them in a way that turned them into their own by expressing themselves in a way that was, that was authentic to them. So for John Reid, it might just be some sort of, you know, witticism with Jack Cunningham. It would be his tone. There was a sort of tone that people got used to. And when there was an interesting how you took the question, when I saw the question, I thought they were directing that question at us today, whether the things that we think that they think maybe we trim, that I don't necessarily want to say nice things about Tories or American Republicans, or, you know, that I want to be more supportive of people on the left than people on the right. I think we're in the blessed position of being able to say what we think. But I think politicians have more capacity to do that without rocking the boat as much

• 33:19Alastair Campbell?

  as they think they rock the boat if they don't just deliver the straight line to take. It's about sounding authentic.

• 33:25Rory Stewart?

  And also taking the risk occasionally. I remember once on Question Time being asked, so question time again for listeners who don't understand it, when in my case a kind of backbench MP is put on Question Time, this is a big deal and you're being sent out by the government and you're briefed, so you're given three, four hours of practice, Question Time briefing, and it's something that they tell you is really going to make your career. If you perform well on Question Time as a backbencher, you could be promoted soon. So it's a lot of pressure. And I'm there and somebody in the audience says, I've just discovered that to ring the benefits helpline, if you're unemployed and you've got problems in benefits and you're living in poverty, costs you 55 pence a minute and you're made to hang on for 10 or 20 minutes

• 34:09Rory Stewart?

  on the phone. Can you possibly justify this? And I took a deep breath and said, no, that seems outrageous. It seems like a ridiculous thing and something that we need to sort out.

• 34:21Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, well, shall I say what you should have said? I'm going to predict that somebody phoned you up either from the Whip's office or Central Office and gave you a bollocking. I think what you should have said was, no, that's not something that I've heard. I get every sort of case comes into my constituency. I've not heard that. What I will do is, is go back and explore that. And perhaps after the programme, Fiona, if you can allow me, if I can spend a bit of time with the audience and get the lady's name and address and I'll sort that out for her. That's what you should have done, Rory.

• 34:48Rory Stewart?

  Very good. And if they then turn around, Alastair, and say, okay, and I'll say, and if you find out it is indeed true that they're spending 55p a minute, would you agree that that is an outrage?

• 34:58Alastair Campbell?

  I completely agree with, I totally understand why she's so concerned about it, which is why I wanted to meet her after this and discuss it and take it back to government. And by next week, Fiona, you'll be talking lots of different things.

• 35:09Rory Stewart?

  You're very, very good at this. Actually, there was a happy ending to this. What happened, in fact, is that the government changed its position on it within a week, and I found that I was, I was okay.

• 35:19Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, so there you are. Imagine, just imagine, Rory, this just shows you, you've got so much to learn. Imagine if you'd have done it my way and then got that change. It would have been, dot, dot, dot, thanks to Rory Stewart. They'd probably have had a question about it in the next week. I would have been on the panel, and I'd have said, we need more MPs like Rory Stewart who go out and reach the public. Never mind.

• 35:42Rory Stewart?

  Alastair, Alastair, guys, God, we can see why you're so successful. Anyway, thank you very, very much, and look forward to talking soon.

• 35:49Alastair Campbell?

  See you next week. Bye bye.

• 35:51Rory Stewart?

  See you next week. Bye bye.