311. Question Time: Should Labour ban smoking?

Is Brazil right to suspend X? Why have the press been calling our Deputy PM ‘Angela Raver’? And what is the history of No. 10’s Larry the Cat? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy, a green electricity supplier powering homes across the UK. Use referral code POLITICS after sign up for a chance to win tickets to the TRIP O2 Arena show in October. Learn more at getfuse.com/politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ 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] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen and Fiona Douglas 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 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.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Hey, Bose here. On your next track, listen for the decisions. Distortion on the bass, the vocal right up front. Every choice deliberate. With Bose, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bose.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love, and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks. Now made with no artificial dyes.

• 1:56Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest is Podcast Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:59Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart. And Alistair, where are you first before we get to the details of Question Time?

• 2:03Alastair Campbell?

  I'm in London and I can see that you're in Scotland.

• 2:06Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 2:06Alastair Campbell?

  I was in Scotland last week and I did an amazing event with 300 secondary school kids from Glasgow. And nine of them came up as volunteers without notes, without preparation to make speeches about things they cared about. And they were absolutely brilliant.

• 2:26Rory Stewart?

  And what was the gap between what they were talking about and what you feel politics in general is talking about? Did you have a little moment of thinking, oh, maybe Keir Starmer should be talking more about those kinds of things? What sort of things were really on people's minds?

• 2:39Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, interesting. Well, I'll tell you exactly what they talked about. So the first one was we should be nicer to refugees.

• 2:45Alastair Campbell?

  There was one guy called Kai who came up and said the richest 5% should pay a lot more tax. There was one about compulsory voting, there was one about housing, there was one about private education, bad thing. There was one about how working class people are better than upper class people.

• 3:06Rory Stewart?

  What, do you mind expanding on that? What does that mean? Why one class better than another class?

• 3:11Alastair Campbell?

  Because the point that this guy is called Dom and the point that he made was that the the upper class have always kind of held on to power and part of their power is to keep the kind of working class in their place. But actually, working class people, because they have to struggle more, they're better, they're cleverer. It was just good old fashioned class war and I absolutely loved it Rory.

• 3:37Rory Stewart?

  You were doing your best to stir it up and encourage it in every direction.

• 3:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he also, he also, he was the only one who swore, he actually used the F word. And I turned to his teacher at the end and I said, will he get punished for swearing like that? And he said, given how much we know you swear, I suspect he won't. Anyway, it was great fun. And interesting point you made because not a single one mentioned independence. I found that quite interesting. I think what I'd say, you may have asked about whether the things they were talking about that Keir Starmer wasn't. I'd say what the general message was. They'd like the government to be a lot more radical, but maybe that's just a young person's thing. But my point is they were really good.

• 4:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, this is quite a serious, interesting, important point coming on from your Glasgow thing, which Paul Johnson from the IFS keeps banging on about. There is a sort of narrative that under Labour, things were one way and under the Conservatives, you know, older people did better, pensioners did better, home ownership became less affordable and the rich paid less tax. Paul Johnson actually says that if you look at the figures, the reverse is true, that under the Tories from 2010 onwards, and of course, nobody talks about it, it's not in the Labour's interest to talk about it, it's not in the Tories' interest to talk about this, but that in fact, high runners were hammered under the Tories, that the percentage of tax paid by the top taxpayers went up under the Tories,

• 4:57Rory Stewart?

  the number of people in the top tax brackets almost doubled under the Tories. And in fact, home ownership statistics were less bad under the Tories than they were under Labour. And in fact, the gap between older and younger people was worse leading up to 2012, but it's actually narrowed since, as has inequality. Over to you.

• 5:14Alastair Campbell?

  Very good. Well, we've managed to get through the first third of question time without a question, just by blathering on. So shall we have some questions?

• 5:22Rory Stewart?

  Go on, no questions.

• 5:23Alastair Campbell?

  I'll kick off. Thiago, I would like a nuanced, balanced opinion on the freedom of speech debate. The developments in the UK and Brazil as examples seem concerning if you listen to certain sides. I'm right-leaning but would appreciate a balanced opinion from you on this. We've got a lot of questions this week about the Brazilian Supreme Court suspending Twitter X in Brazil. Another one, Ru, I know you wanted to take on. Carl, why do governments keep attacking end-to-end encryption? It's a fundamental safety feature that creates privacy and security. I agree it can be used by criminals, but so can cars. And most people don't want everyone to stop driving just because some people use them

• 6:02Alastair Campbell?

  for criminal acts. I guess that relates more to the Telegram guy who's currently in trouble in France. But what do you make of the Musk thing in Brazil?

• 6:12Rory Stewart?

  Well, firstly, to begin on this. So there's been an amazing feud between the Supreme Court Justice Of Brazil, Alexandra de Moraes and Elon Musk, which began in April. And Musk essentially has been supported very strongly by people who were supporters of the right wing populist leader Bolsonaro, who claimed the election was stolen from him. And Musk, certainly from the point of view of the left, has been whipping up far right populist conspiracy theories, claiming that the Brazilian Supreme Court is complicit in denying the election to Bolsonaro. And the result is that X has now been shut down in Brazil. So, you know, we complain

• 6:54Rory Stewart?

  in Britain of Musk leaning into weird unsubstantiated right wing websites, spreading false information on immigrants. But in Brazil, it's much, much more extreme. And it's one of the largest markets for Twitter.

• 7:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it will presumably hit him where it hurts, but it also allows him to carry on with this sort of freedom of speech crusade. There's a lot of debate in in Brazil about whether this Supreme Court guy is just somebody who loves the limelight and maybe fancies himself as a politician down the line and so forth. But I think these social media companies do have to be far more responsible. He was actually again yesterday with some absurd conspiracy theory that was being pummeled out. I can't remember even what the story was now, but, you know, and he was out there. Is this really happening in Soviet Britain? He's decided to go for Labour at the moment, go for Keir Starmer. Everything about Harris is bad. Everything about Trump is good. He's become a kind of, you know, caricature of himself. But because of the reach

• 7:54Alastair Campbell?

  of Twitter, he does have enormous influence. So I think actually having, be it a judge or be it politicians who call this guy out, I think is a is a good thing rather than the bad thing. I don't buy this this idea that he does not have freedom of speech and that other people do not have freedom of speech. The real attacks on freedom of speech are coming in. Dictatorships and they're coming in countries where there is no real media freedom. The idea that we are subject to the same sort of freedom of speech limitations is absolutely absurd.

• 8:25Rory Stewart?

  It is interesting though, because it's, I guess in Britain, we wouldn't consider shutting down X, certainly at the moment. But it really is bringing into light this question of whether these social media platforms are beginning to have such a kind of profound impact on our democracies and polarisation, that governments need to control and regulate. The only way of getting into it at the moment would be to use a virtual private network like NordVPN, if you're in Brazil, would allow you to access X, but otherwise wouldn't be able to.

• 8:56Alastair Campbell?

  Is that true? Was that a free advert for one of our sponsors?

• 8:59Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, free advert for one of our sponsors.

• 9:02Alastair Campbell?

  So you've got a case going through the court at the moment where the wife of a Tory councillor has been told she's going to go to jail because she used social media to say that, you know, fed up with these immigrants, somebody should go and attack their hotels, et cetera, et cetera. And the judge indicated she's going to go down for, you know, some time. I guess the point that Carl was making about the cars, if the platform is knowingly allowing the platform to be used for crime, there's a difference between, you know, Carl says that, you know, we're not going to ban cars just because criminals use cars. But if we knew that a car was being used for criminal purposes, the police have

• 9:45Alastair Campbell?

  the right to intervene in some way. If Musk pushes this any further, if Musk had done the tweet that this woman had done, then are we talking about criminal behaviour? Where does the barrier between platform and voice lie? That's what I think the legislators are struggling with.

• 10:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So for geeky people on this, Damien Collins, who I often praise on the podcast as Chair of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport Committee in the Parliament, UK Parliament, did some quite good work on this. But you're right, the first big difference is between after the event. So that's traditionally what we've done. If something bad goes out on social media, you complain to the company and they then take it down after the event. The move to proactive, which is to say, putting a duty of responsibility on the companies. From the beginning, to change their algorithms to make it much less likely that extremist stuff is spread, and it can be done. I think we talked about the fact that before the last election, Meta, Facebook chose to direct people more towards reputable

• 10:49Rory Stewart?

  news outlets as opposed to towards just kind of community group chats. And then your final one, I think there, which is generally, these companies have at least been polite and pretended to comply with governments, even if they don't practise. What happens if somebody like Musk simply digs his heels in and absolutely refuses? And that's where Brazil has decided that's the point at which you actually ban. And that could happen in the UK. I mean, ultimately, you could simply shut down the platform. I think we've never considered that kind of nuclear option with an ex Twitter or Facebook. There was also questions, let me just get the question up, where I was challenged particularly, I noticed, by executives from Facebook, WhatsApp and Meta about my statements about Telegram.

• 11:33Rory Stewart?

  So the employees of WhatsApp are very keen to say that WhatsApp are default end-to-end encrypted messages, and that no one can read your WhatsApp messages without having access to your phone, and they can't be read from Meta servers or intercepted remotely. Whereas Telegram, which is this other similar service with more weird emojis and also more large group chats, are not end-to-end encrypted by default. So you can on Telegram choose to encrypt your private messages, but they're not encrypted by default. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, because of course, Meta will be very, very angry with this, but it simply is a fact that there are many people out there who find it difficult to

• 12:13Rory Stewart?

  believe that Facebook paid a huge amount of money for WhatsApp, and that they're not getting any data out of the WhatsApp messages that are going back and forth, and they're not accessing it through their servers because there's no advertising on WhatsApp. So what on earth is the point of Facebook owning this thing if they're not in some way gathering data and information, which is why? Many people write the wrongly-used telegram and also why Facebook are very defensive about this and keen to say that their messages are more secure. And then if we were going to get into this, there's another messaging service which maybe you use, Alice, certainly I use quite a lot when corresponding with friends in more difficult regimes, which is Signal, which has very, very strong encryption mechanisms.

• 12:57Rory Stewart?

  And somewhere at the heart of all of this is this question of who are you protecting against? Are you encrypting in order to protect yourself against criminals? Are you encrypting to protect yourself against governments? What are the rights you have to protect your freedom of speech against governments? And what are the points at which national security trump this and governments can get into this information?

• 13:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, let's see if that satisfies all those people who complained about. I thought you were very, very, very good assessment last week, Roy. But anyway, as you know, I'm not quite on top of the tech detail in a way that you are. So I'm glad it was you that got it wrong, not me. Now, what about this one? Labour EU youth mobility. We've got a lot of questions on this. Sharon H. Why are Labour against a youth mobility scheme with the EU? I do not understand Keir Starmer's red lines. Alec. Why won't the Prime Minister sign up to free movement for under 30-year-olds? Most immigration will be temporary, could fill vital areas such as health and service, allow students like me to explore culture and work abroad. Is it only because of Farage? And on and on and on it goes. Eric.

• 14:05Alastair Campbell?

  What can I do to change Labour Party's position on Europe? How can this be achieved inside? I joined January this year after reading your book, I think that's mine, or outside? Well, look, Eric, you have to keep arguing for what you believe in. And I remember when this was first proposed, this came out as a proposal from the European Union side.

• 14:26Rory Stewart?

  And well done them. I mean, I think good on them.

• 14:28Alastair Campbell?

  Didn't have to do it.

• 14:29Rory Stewart?

  No, Europe didn't have to make this proposal. And my goodness, the difference it would make. Just sort of quickly before we get into the details. But I mean, a lot of what we've lost in Britain are young people chopping vegetables in restaurants or helping, up here in Scotland, helping the Lockerbie bungee jump.

• 14:47Rory Stewart?

  School and these are often things that young Spanish French people would have done in their twenties and then often return to their own country and it's mad when we've got a labour shortage to turn our back on a huge number of very, very keen energetic young people. We used to, I think, am I right in saying we used to do it for people from Australia and New Zealand? At least that was always the impression I got in Earl's Court.

• 15:09Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I think the, the, the point about it is, is that, and I was really disappointed when this proposal did first emerge, um, that the, the labour response immediately, this was when they were still in opposition, but they're now in government, they can, you know, they can make decisions now, was to say, we're not doing this because it's like freedom of movement by the back door, but it's not, because what this would do would allow, uh, people aged eighteen to thirty, or in fact, you could go up to thirty-four because it would start at thirty if that's when you first moved, to travel for study, for volunteering, for work, for travel, for leisure, for up to four years on condition

• 15:53Alastair Campbell?

  that you've got a passport, you've got insurance and you can support yourselves. Now, that is not freedom of movement, that is applying conditions and what's more, that would go both ways. And I just think that one of the things that we've, we've lost, well, one of the big things that we've lost is the ability of a, a generation to grow up knowing what it's like to be able to travel, to be able to work in different places, to be able to experience different cultures. And that is something which I think a Labour government should be addressing. So I hope we can get rid of this nonsense that it is freedom of movement, it is not freedom of movement.

• 16:27Rory Stewart?

  It's completely mysterious because I was talking to somebody who'd voted Brexit purely because they were angry about immigration and they said they were really strongly in favour of this EU proposal. They couldn't understand for a moment why Labour wouldn't accept that. I mean, their complaint was huge numbers of people settling permanently in Britain with large families. They had no problem at all with the idea of what they would call people coming over for three, four years to work and going back again. So if that's true of anti-immigration Brexit voters, why are they taking such a strong line on this? I mean, I, I haven't even seen Farage or the Conservatives come out strongly against this. So what, what's Labour doing?

• 17:07Alastair Campbell?

  I think Labour, having said this is freedom of movement by the back door, was a way of preempting what they assumed would be an attack from the right. But I think we've moved on, they're in government now. And I think, yes, I can see why, you know, you've come through the riots and immigration is still a big issue and so forth. But I think if if Labour start turning their their nose up at what seems to me quite a serious proposal that is a mutual benefit, both to us and to the European Union. I guess the only thing I could say by way of possibility is that Keir Starmer went off last week. He saw Scholz in Germany, he saw Macron in France, and he talked about a reset of relations and so forth, and defence treaties and all this stuff, stuff that's going to happen.

• 17:49Alastair Campbell?

  So maybe as the discussions develop, this is one of the things that you sort of keep there as a part of an ongoing negotiation. But I just think at the moment, one of the things that's being said about Labour at the moment is they're not giving people enough kind of reasons to feel, yeah, that's the change that we voted for, yeah, that's a different approach and we like it. We talked about Ofsted, we've talked about some of the other changes they've made. But I think this would signal to a younger generation, you know, they get what I've been saying, they're they're starting to listen. And so I really, really, really hope that they reconsider this.

• 18:20Rory Stewart?

  I'm absolutely with you. The nice thing about it is that it's a positive, optimistic, it's about freedom, it's about opportunity, it's about movement, it's about travel. And actually would be a sort of good counterbalance to the accusation that the thing that they're most known for last week was the ban on smoking in pub gardens, which whatever you think about, isn't about, you know, opportunity, freedom. It's about something going that direction. That's John McIntyre's question, was Labour trading a potential smoking ban in pub gardens and open spaces a comms mistake? Any view at all on how that was communicated or used?

• 18:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think it spilled out, didn't it? It was in an internal document, it got leaked, and then Keir Starmer, I think in Paris actually, confirmed it. I'm broadly supportive of pretty tough action against smoking. And a lot of the arguments that we've had are absolute mirror reflections of the arguments we had when we first brought in the the bigger smoking ban, as it were, in workplaces, including pubs and restaurants. But, you know, so I think it spilled out, it wasn't that it was a comms error. I think that it spilled out at a time when they weren't expecting to have to have to discuss it. But I do I do think one of the things I I'm picking up from from ministers, from MPs is that, you know, and obviously with Parliament back now, there's a legislative programme that they can start to sort of set out change.

• 19:38Alastair Campbell?

  But it just this need to feel that there's a positive, there's a positive message, there's hope. There's a future that people can sign up to and believe in. And, you know, for me, I will keep banging on about this. I think that does mean, Jenny, when we talk about fixing the fundamentals, fixing the foundations, one of those is the damage that we've done to our relations with the European Union, the damage we've done economically in Brexit. And that is going to require, you know, taking on some things that, yes, there's some of the Tories and the Farage people are not going to like, but, you know, that's what you're in government for, to do these things.

• 20:10Rory Stewart?

  And just quickly, Alastair, memories of the 2007 smoking ban? Have you got any, do you have any particular memories of that and how that worked and how that was handled?

• 20:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, to be absolutely frank, the biggest, most powerful memory is the fact that we waited for the Irish to do it first to see how it went. And it went well. And so then we thought, I think that, you know, it's a classic example of our small country can do something and then the rest of the world kind of follows.

• 20:34Rory Stewart?

  I had a great example on that, which was the plastic bag tax. So I introduced the plastic bag tax into England as the Environment Minister. But my ability to do that was a lot to do with the fact that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland had already done it and the world hadn't come to an end, contrary to the predictions of the Daily Mail. And so it's, it's one of the nice things about devolution. And actually, it's one of the strengths of the federal system in the US that smaller units can experiment with ideas, which, you know, larger national governments are sometimes reluctant to do.

• 21:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. I saw, was it one of the papers, had this headline, you know, pubs predict violence in gardens as over smoking ban. Well, we had all this stuff back then and so I'm not, I'm not terribly wound up about it.

• 21:17Rory Stewart?

  Well, Alastair, I think let's take a quick break and then after the break, we're going to have to tackle the huge number of questions that are coming about Larry the Downing Street Cat.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Hey, Bose here. On your next track, listen for the decisions. Distortion on the bass, the vocal right up front. Every choice deliberate. With Bose, you'll hear it all. Your music deserves Bose.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.

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• 22:43Rory Stewart?

  Right, Alistair, this is an obvious one, which I think I can predict your response to. But this is the story which people would have picked up, that Keir Starmer has decided to move a portrait of Margaret Thatcher, which was commissioned by Gordon Brown in number 10. And so here are the questions. Miranda Fay, why did Gordon Brown commission that Thatcher portrait in the first place? Seems an odd decision for Labour PM. And Joanna, why do journalists seem to focus on silly stories like Angela Rayner at a disco or the Prime Minister moving a picture? Poor and lazy journalism, if it can be called that, all the gossip. And then Sisu, whose portrait would you hang in your study? Anyway, over to you.

• 23:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's funny, I was at, I mentioned the thing I did in Scotland with the schools. That evening, I did an event with Tom Baldwin, Keir Starmer's biographer. And it was at that event where Tom told this story. And I have to say, the several hundred Glaswegians in the audience, nobody patted an eyelid. It was like, oh, he's had a picture of Thatcher and now it's not there anymore. It was like, not a big deal. But it became, it was one of those stories where the right-wing papers and the Tories, they dug into the cliche factory and found the word outrage. So people were outraged. I think it would be a bit weird for Keir Starmer to work with a picture of Margaret Thatcher looking at him.

• 24:03Alastair Campbell?

  I think that would just be very, very odd.

• 24:05Rory Stewart?

  Very odd. The normal story would be, you know, David Cameron moves a picture of Margaret Thatcher, which would be used as a sort of way of suggesting, you know, fights in the Tory party or he wasn't quite right-wing enough. But for a Labour Prime Minister, given that Margaret Thatcher was a particularly controversial... Conservative Prime Minister not to want to have a big picture of her. Moving a picture of Churchill maybe is different, isn't it? Because he's seen a sort of unifying war leader. But I can't really understand. I didn't get it at all. I literally couldn't get it.

• 24:34Alastair Campbell?

  No, and also the other point is that there is an official portrait of every Prime Minister on the staircase, as you know, and that includes ridiculous ones like Johnson and Trust. So Thatcher is there. The question from Miranda, why did Gordon Brown commission it in the first place? I suspect that at the time Gordon was, you know, trying to sort of lean into, I'm not tribal, I'm not totally Labour, you know, I understand.

• 24:55Rory Stewart?

  Nothing tribal about Gordon Brown at all.

• 24:58Alastair Campbell?

  Nothing at all, nothing at all. So he called it the Thatcher Room. It was actually, the room, the room in question is where I used to hold my nine thirty morning meetings. Was it nine thirty or eight thirty? I can't remember, with the, the heads of other government media departments. And I think I would have objected to having a picture of Margaret Thatcher there. The other thing to say about the, in fact, funny enough, yesterday I was walking down, just down from Trafalgar Square. I hadn't realised that the new business department has moved. And I see it's next to the, contained within the same building is the government art collection. Now, the government does own a very, very, very substantial art collection. And it's just part of the thing that the paintings change from time to time. Things get moved about.

• 25:42Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's one of the fun things about being a minister. I mean, I, I'm embarrassed to say that every time I became a minister in a different department, I got a lovely conversation with the government art department about what paintings I wanted. And it is incredible. They've got these huge vaults where you can go. And the government's been quite clever about collecting paintings over the years. Many of the best ones go to the embassy. So I had two beautiful pictures, 18th century pictures of geezers in Iceland, which went off quite understandably from my office to the embassy in Iceland, which I think was more deserving of them. I had a terrific picture that I was really pleased of, from the late 1500s, of a really grim looking man in a white ruff and a black doublet with a white beard that I put up to show my commitment to kind of modernisation and progress on the wall. I had a huge portrait.

• 26:28Rory Stewart?

  I mean, almost sort of, I suppose, sort of 15 feet high of Charles the First to show that I was really kind of

• 26:34Alastair Campbell?

  Oh.

• 26:35Rory Stewart?

  Going the right

• 26:35Alastair Campbell?

  15 feet?

• 26:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, because as you can imagine, the government sort of inherited all these portraits of monarchs.

• 26:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, these huge things. Yeah, yeah.

• 26:43Rory Stewart?

  Enormous portraits of monarchs, which particularly, I think, at times when these things were very cheap in auction, the government's quite canny about buying them.

• 26:49Alastair Campbell?

  You're not sounding at all out of touch here, Rory.

• 26:51Rory Stewart?

  No, not at all.

• 26:52Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, the minister goes in.

• 26:53Rory Stewart?

  As you can imagine, Liz Truss and everybody else were going for really cool bits of abstract art and everyone trying to show how incredibly cutting out she was. So I got the first pick of all the really old pictures that nobody wanted. Anyway, I'm just getting to the point that I think Kier Sama absolutely is within his rights to move pictures around on the wall.

• 27:10Alastair Campbell?

  And what about Angela Rayner at the disco? Did you see that one?

• 27:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, this is completely absurd, given that the major thing that Boris Johnson, Priti Patel, Michael Gove and all these other people were perpetually guessing were stories about them dancing at discos.

• 27:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. What we're seeing here is, so Joanna says, why do journalists seem to focus on silly stories like Angela Rayner at a disco and a prime minister moving a picture? It's more that, and I did warn that this would happen, that the right wing media, which still has an overly, an exaggerated influence on the rest of the media, there are massive double standards at play here. So when Boris Johnson was dancing at his wedding or Michael Gove was dancing, it was all a bit of fun. And now it's like, you know, how dare Angela Rayner, like a human being. At least she can dance a bit. She has some decent moves, I thought, Rory.

• 27:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. Better dancer than me, anyway, that's for sure. A great leading interview. Anyone who's not listened to Angela Rayner on leading, I know I keep selling leading, but I've occasionally come across people who don't realise we have this leading feed. So I think our interview with Angela Rayner is one of the most astonishing interviews and a real reminder that how difficult it is knowing in advance when you're interviewing someone, how incredible, I suppose we maybe could have guessed with Angela Rayner, but it was tremendous.

• 28:19Alastair Campbell?

  No, but it's interesting, she's done lots of interviews, but it's interesting how many people still mention that interview, including, as I said last week, including in Chicago, I had quite a few Americans said, you know, God, that Angela woman in the Labour Government sounds pretty amazing. So, yeah, it was, it really is worth listening to. Listen Rory, here's one that we've talked about a bit before, but I think it's worth revisiting. Jaclyn, "There has been very little in the media on the increasing suppression of women in Afghanistan. Why is this and why is there so little condemnation from the rest of the world?" Now, on the back, we got a lot of questions about this again this week, and on the back of that, I went off and read the new directives. And Rory, if you ever want to get an example of amazing spin by a government body, the headline in

• 29:04Alastair Campbell?

  Tolo News, is Tolo News related to the Afghan government?

• 29:08Rory Stewart?

  No, Tolo News is an independent media company, but it does sometimes take press releases from the government. But actually, they've been quite brave sometimes in criticizing the Taliban.

• 29:15Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, their headline is "Vice Virtue Ministry Announces Major Strides in Women's Rights." Now, that is quite a tough one, that is quite a tough one. And their argument was that they had 10,000 registered complaints and that 5,000 of them have been effectively addressed. "Key achievements were highlighted, including securing women's access to inheritance, preventing violence against women, halting the sale of women, destroying musical instruments and arresting sorcerers." But the new rules are absolutely horrific. Women are not allowed to sing, they're not allowed to speak loudly because the voice can be a source of temptation for men. They're not allowed to look at another

• 29:58Alastair Campbell?

  man unless in the presence of a member of the, a male member of their family. I mean, this is pretty hardcore stuff, isn't it?

• 30:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it is. So, obviously, it's the second time the Taliban's back in and people remember that when they were in their 90s, they had the most repressive regime towards women anywhere in the world. This is to do with very, very, it's not really Islam, it's very conservative cultural values, particularly from southern Afghanistan. The truth is that it, on the ground, and as you know, I was in Afghanistan a couple of weeks ago and travelled a bit around the country. That in Kabul, in the centre and the north of the country, these decrees have been in place for two or three years, many of them. But it doesn't quite look like the late nineties.

• 30:48Rory Stewart?

  You know, I was at Bandi Amir, which is a series of lakes in central Afghanistan. And there had been a ban on families going. But when I was there, there were many women out with their children, families, and they were not wearing face coverings. So there's a sort of complicated question about the laws that are put out by these very conservative clerics in Kandahar and southern Afghanistan and what's in practice is happening. But the basic story is right. The basic story is that the condition of women is terrible and it's horrifying for women and it's also for many, many men. One of the things that makes them most ashamed and depressed because your wife, your daughter,

• 31:32Rory Stewart?

  your female friends are facing these very repressive situations. And some of it just doesn't make any sense. I mean, you know, we're supporting female clinics in Afghanistan through Turquoise Mountain and that and female doctors and nurses can work in those clinics, but they're not allowing the next generation of female doctors to train. So how you keep those things going is not clear to.

• 31:57Alastair Campbell?

  I think I actually understated how awful it is. I said that women couldn't look at men unless accompanied by a blood relative. It's actually says it's forbidden for women to look at men they are not related to by blood or marriage and vice versa. And also the other point about men, this one would affect you, Roy. Article 22, forming friendships with or aiding non-believers and seeking to resemble them are considered prohibitions. So you can't form friendships with non-believers.

• 32:25Rory Stewart?

  It's unbelievably conservative, but the truth is that when I was walking through rural Afghanistan 20 years ago, so I spent, you know, I walked for about 600 miles and I stayed in, I guess, 35 village houses along the way. That was basically what it was like even before the Taliban government in rural areas, that no woman would ever look at me. I would generally turn up in a village and not see any women because they would be hidden by the men in the community before I even arrived. People are very, very conservative. They wouldn't be comfortable necessarily making friends with somebody who wasn't a Muslim, et cetera. So what the Taliban have done is they've taken the most conservative, extreme practices in rural areas and tried to turn it into national law at a time when there's been 20 years of development,

• 33:10Rory Stewart?

  education, people in cities and living in a completely different world. It's a totally different context, but sometimes I think there are sort of resonances with some of the bits, the factions of Trump America, where again, very conservative views from bits of the rural south are sort of pushing their way through into

• 33:34Rory Stewart?

  policy platforms. I mean, these are culture wars. I mean, these are very unpleasant culture wars. These aren't discussions really about what, you know, you and I in the 90s or 2000s thought politics was about, which is discussions about the economy. These are purely conversations about men and women and how they treat each other and religion.

• 33:53Alastair Campbell?

  The other issue, well, there's a change is in enforcement. It's now anybody in society who is, quote, capable, whatever that means, if you have two, quote, trustworthy individuals who make a complaint, that is enough now to bring a prosecution. And the other big change relates to media. So the new media laws that are part of this as well, there can be no un-Islamic content. And there can be no publication of images of living beings. Well, how do you, how do you run a media operation if you can't produce images of living beings? I guess that might be another one that will be less observed than than the strict edict.

• 34:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but this goes back to the late 90s. I remember the Taliban hanging televisions on trees. They were so against. I mean, this is the way to understand it. One way to understand is the most extreme kind of Puritans in Britain in the 1600s, who actually would have agreed with an enormous amount of this stuff, banning images, et cetera, religion taking the place of everything.

• 34:53Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, my last question is very much directed at you, and it's from Fraser Logan. He's taking his mum to Creef, and he wants some good ideas about what to do in Creef. That is definitely one for you.

• 35:02Rory Stewart?

  So I'm in Creef at the moment. It's my local town in Scotland. Get up, go for a walk around the Glen Turret reservoir, really beautiful up in Ben Conzie. Depends how fit your mum is, you could get higher up into the mountains and bagger Monroe and get Drummond Castle Gardens, really stunningly beautiful formal gardens next to this ancient castle of the Drummond family. Go to Creef High Street, New Museum in Creef. There's the Creef Food Company for amazing food and coffee. Creef is feeling, I don't know when you were, you were last in Creef for my party, weren't you? But I think Creef's looking up. There's an optimistic feeling to Creef.

• 35:39Alastair Campbell?

  A change of government, Labour government, Creef's doing well?

• 35:41Rory Stewart?

  Oh, it's a, well, you know, it's the SNP's complaining the cuts from the new austerity Labour.

• 35:46Alastair Campbell?

  I know. I have to see the SNP conference looked a bit of a sad affair. The reports I saw had a lot of empty, empty purple chairs at the EICC, I noticed.

• 35:58Rory Stewart?

  My last question for you, Alistair, is from somebody called Dulled Dulles, presumably not his real name. We know that Rory had the great pleasure of working in government while Larry the Cat was there. What do you think about the celebrity status of Larry and other Downing Street cats? Over to you on cats in Downing Street, Alistair.

• 36:15Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I guess it is a celebrity state, isn't it? Because Larry has his own social media pages. He is regularly featured on the news. He always knows. He always seems to know when the cameras are about. Because quite often you will never see the cat, but as soon as there's a big sort of event in the street, Larry is out there. And Larry's a sort of interesting prism through which to, to which to look at the comings and goings, you know, some things come, some things go and the cat stays the same. We had a very, very troubled relationship with our equivalent of Larry. What was his name? Was it Humphrey? And Alan Clark, the Conservative

• 36:56Alastair Campbell?

  MP that you least admire, but who was quite a good friend of mine, he decided purely out of mischief, because he knew that I've got a bit of an allergy to cats. I'm not a cat person, I'm a dog person. Cats do make me sort of wheeze and cough and all that, so I avoid cats. So he decided to invent a story that Cherie Blair and I had got together and decided we were getting rid of the Downey Street cat.

• 37:22Rory Stewart?

  What a great, great, great friend he was. This is why he's such a respectful individual.

• 37:29Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, exactly. So it's why I so like him. And he ended up, I think, putting down an early day motion, this house demands to know what has happened to the Downey Street cat since Labour won. And is there any truth in the suggestion that Alastair Campbell and Cherie Blair have forced this cat to move to different pastures? And he just did it out of mischief. And you thought, well, that's a bit of fun, et cetera. I found myself having to deal with this story seriously. It ended up, I remember Mike Brunson, who was the ITM political editor, did a big package on, on News at TED about, you know, nobody has seen the Downey Street cat since Labour got into power. Alan Clark being interviewed saying, this is a terrible, da, da, da. Now, what had happened was actually the cat was

• 38:13Alastair Campbell?

  not very well. Nothing to do with me, nothing to do with Cherie, no poisoning going on. And she'd gone, the cat had been taken to be looked after by a civil servant at home, pending veterinary treatment. And we ended up getting a photographer to go and take a picture of the cat sitting, it was like an old spy movie, sitting on that day's newspapers. Okay. And we released that and thereby, so Alan Clark absolutely loved the whole, the whole thing.

• 38:43Rory Stewart?

  Quickly on this, your cat was called Humphrey. And Humphrey had come in in 1988. So Humphrey lived nearly 20 years, but was was also justified because previously there had been a professional pest controller in Downing Street, 1987, 1988. And one of your predecessors, presumably Bernard Ingham, got a fantastic press story about how the Conservative government at the time, it was Thatcher, had saved £4,000, which was the annual salary of the pest controller who'd never caught a mouse, and replaced it with Humphrey, who was apparently a heroic mouse-er who'd been found as a stray and who cost less than £100 for Humphrey's food. So it was seen as one of the great kind of cost-cutting austerity measures, which got a whole

• 39:24Rory Stewart?

  series of terrific stories. Moving forward, he succeeded a cat called Wilberforce and gave him a sybil. So clearly it's not new, this idea of spinning stories out of cats.

• 39:35Alastair Campbell?

  No. Well, we were forced to spin the story out of the cat because of Alan Clark's mischief-making. I'll send you a picture of a, one of the, I wish I'd kept more cartoons, but one of the cartoons I have kept is of of me and Peter Mandelson with some heavies with this poor little photographer taking his picture of the cat. He said, right, you've got your photo now, go. And I think it's the one where I've got bolts through my neck and very, very unflattering picture. So that was Alan Clark and cats. I see from the press that Keir Starmer's children have got a new cat, but Keir Starmer's saying that they can't put in a new cat flat because it's a grade one listed building. So, I mean, isn't it even interesting? We're talking about cats, but American presidents, they

• 40:19Alastair Campbell?

  kind of, it's all about dogs. They don't have dogs. I mean, Trump didn't have a dog because he's a weird person. But so we're a cat country and they're a dog country. Maybe that's right.

• 40:28Rory Stewart?

  Can I just find the on? Because you were a journalist. I just want to get to the bottom of this. So Humphrey was accused on the 7th of June, 1994, of having killed four robin chicks, which were nesting in a window box outside John Major's office.

• 40:40Alastair Campbell?

  Wow. Well, that was before our time. We were elected in 1997.

• 40:42Rory Stewart?

  But he was cleared in March 2006, when journalist George Jones, the Daily Telegraph, admitted that his piece in the paper's diary column had been no more than journalistic licence printed with no supporting evidence. I mean,

• 40:57Alastair Campbell?

  Oh my lord.

• 40:57Rory Stewart?

  Am I right in saying that George Jones, the Daily Telegraph, literally couldn't think of anything to put in the diary and decided to actually completely invent that Humphrey had killed these Robin chicks? Is that what I'm supposed to?

• 41:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I don't know. I don't know, but I would say that George Jones, unlike a lot of modern day journalists at the Daily Telegraph, who seem to me write any old crap, was somebody who took facts very, very seriously. Um, so maybe, I'll tell you the other, the other story I remember about it, Kaz. You mentioned Bernard Ingham is that my Fiona, when she was working in the lobby, she wrote a story about the cat, probably was Humphrey. I can't remember what the story was. And she asked Bernard about it and Bernard gave her a comment. And then she said, a Downey Street spokesman said, and she quoted him. And Bernard went mad because, of course, these were the days when you weren't allowed to say that the Downey Street spokesman existed.

• 41:50Alastair Campbell?

  So we, we, we have been, we've been a strange country for a very, very long time. Um, but there we are. Humphrey the cat, R I P.

• 41:59Rory Stewart?

  All right. Thank you. Thank you. Much, much love. See you soon. Bye bye.

• 42:03Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye bye.

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