33. Blue on blue, famine in Africa, and David Trimble

Join Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart as they discuss the Tory leadership race, the life and legacy of David Trimble, Mario Draghi's resignation, charter cities, famine in Africa, populism, and Marilyn Monroe's poetry. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Show notes: The Irish Diaries (1994–2003) - Alastair Campbell David Trimble Channel 4 Clip (Twitter) Italy’s loss of Mario Draghi is a warning to progressives across Europe – and to the EU - Lorenzo Marsili (The Guardian) The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age - James Dale Davidson + William Rees-Mogg Would-be Tory leaders aren’t facing up to dire state of the NHS - Polly Toynbee (The Guardian) Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:49Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, we've got a lot to get through. We've got the Tory leadership debate where I was absolutely loving your Twitter feed because I wasn't able to watch it, thank God, but I did watch it later. We also got a lot of feedback last week from our interview with Keir Starmer. So both the main parties, we're going to have to talk about them. I know you want to talk about famine. I want to talk about Mario Draghi. But also, I think we should probably start by reflecting on the life and times of David Trimble.

• 2:19Rory Stewart?

  Hmm.

• 2:19Alastair Campbell?

  Um, I've actually been felt a bit guilty today because I've been really, really busy. I've had loads of bids to talk about David Trimble and I've not really had time to do much. But I do think that David Trimble was a very difficult, very challenging, very mercurial sort of character. But the historical fact is that without him, I don't think the Northern Ireland peace process would have worked and we wouldn't have got the Good Friday Agreement.

• 2:46Rory Stewart?

  So Anna, so just tell us a little bit about the mercurial, because obviously there have been this, all the testimonies that everybody's seen in public have been giant of a man, Nobel Peace Prize. But nobody's talked at all about the other side of his personality. Can you tell us a bit about that?

• 3:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think he was, I, I do think that he was genuinely motivated by his political beliefs, his principles, his community, the unionist community that he was so proud of. But he, he was in a very, very difficult position all the time. I remember John Holmes, who was Tony Blair's main foreign policy advisor and the main point man on Northern Ireland. When we first took office in nineteen ninety seven, I remember John saying, the thing you've got to remember about Trimble is he brings his enemies to the meeting with him.

• 3:29Alastair Campbell?

  He was surrounded by people who were, they would literally sit there and Tony and Trimble would be in discussions and they would start to sort of, you know, they would say, oh, David, I'm not so sure about David. Are you quite sure you should have said that? And it was, it could be very, very difficult. And he had a very, his face reflected his emotions, his face would change colour. He could sometimes get very, very angry. He sometimes disappeared. He was a huge opera fan and I can remember one of the really difficult moments when, you know, Tony was like, you know, get Trimble on the phone. If we found out he was in Australia watching an opera.

• 4:04Alastair Campbell?

  But he also had a very difficult relationship with Mo Molam. Mo was a wonderful woman in lots of different ways, but I think it's fair to say she was sometimes not terribly sensitive to unionist sensibilities. And she would, I remember saying in my diaries, you know, sometimes she would just belch in the middle of a meeting, which, you know, I think, oh, yes, she'd belch, she'd take her wig off sometimes. There's a, there's a picture in my diary of me wearing her wig after she slapped it on my head. This was when she was getting treated for cancer. And I think David found this quite difficult at times. And the other thing about all of the main players in the peace process, David amongst them, they enjoyed the fact that they had this direct access to Tony Blair. And sometimes that could really get up Mo's nose. And I remember once we were

• 4:48Alastair Campbell?

  in a meeting, I think in David Trimble's house, actually, on his farm, and we were sitting there talking, and David was like, every time David spoke, he would whisper, because he just wanted Tony Blair to hear. He was sort of cutting out Mo.

• 5:01Rory Stewart?

  Just to sort of think that through a little bit. So the frustration from Mo Molam's point of view is that she was hoping to be central to the negotiation. But they sort of had, as it were, the equivalent of Tony Blair's direct mobile number, although maybe in those days he didn't give out his mobile number. But

• 5:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Tony, Tony, actually, interesting fact here, Rory, Tony Blair never had a mobile while he was Prime Minister. And there are, as you will know, there are very sound security reasons for that, which Boris Johnson, with all his Russian connections, should have maybe made it maybe paid heed to. No, I think it was more that Mo, she was the Secretary for Northern Ireland, she was a, she was a key figure. But the truth is that when push came to shove, as we led up to the Good Friday Agreement, it was being driven by Tony Blair and Bertie Hearn, with Bill Clinton and George Mitchell kind of, you know, there or thereabouts whenever, whenever needed.

• 5:49Rory Stewart?

  And Alice, could you, could you remind us just what, from Trimble's point of view, what the big concessions that he was struggling to make were? What, what were the things that were the real sticking points for the unionist community in those days?

• 6:00Alastair Campbell?

  The really difficult one was allowing Sinn Fein into the process when they hadn't really fully committed to peaceful means. And then later down the track, it was about, you know, decommissioning became an absolute nightmare to deal with. And, and so did prisoner release. It depended. I mean, at one point, this has just popped into my head while we're talking, right at the end of the whole process, when we honestly thought we were home and

• 6:29Alastair Campbell?

  David Trimble came in and had a absolute go at Tony Blair over this Ulster language, Ulens. And this, this suddenly became, we were like, where the hell has this come from? Suddenly, we've sort of sorted prisons, we've sorted decommissioning.

• 6:44Rory Stewart?

  And, and, and tell us a little bit about the Ulster language. Ulster language is a, is a dialect of English, is it?

• 6:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but well, well, oh God, that was part of the discussion, Rory, is about what, how you actually define these languages. And I made the terrible mistake of saying, well, can't we just sort of wrap it all up together in kind of Celtic, non-English language? Ah, but this is where you're wrong. This is where you don't have the understanding of the situation, blah, blah, blah.

• 7:06Rory Stewart?

  Because, because it wasn't a Celtic language. It's a dialect of English.

• 7:09Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, exactly. So this, this, but this became like, you know, and, and of course, language is such a big thing for the nationalist community, still is. And suddenly, they were wanting parity on these languages where we, honestly, we, this had never been part of the equation. And we were thinking, where's this coming from? But then suddenly, and I said that, I, I saw a clip from Trimble last night where he said that the day the Good Friday Agreement came together was the greatest day of his life. And you can understand that because it was an incredible achievement for everybody concerned. But, but he was really central. And I feel the same about that. I feel it was one of the great, I, I said in the introduction to my diaries, it was the, it was bar none, the best day of all the days I had with Tony Blair.

• 7:51Rory Stewart?

  Probably the most extraordinary achievement of that government, wasn't it?

• 7:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it was right up there. And it's why, you know, you and I have talked about this many, many times. It's why I get so angry at the cavalier way that this government is, is dealing with it. And I saw in your, of your many tweets that I was enjoying while watching, while you were watching the TV debate on Monday, I saw you saying, and I felt, you feel exactly, I felt exactly the same when I watched it back later, is that they, they're not even talking about this. Then it's not even on the agenda of who our next prime minister is.

• 8:23Rory Stewart?

  It's completely extraordinary, isn't it? Um, listen, one thing that I, I was struck by was Trimble's early life and the, the parallel with Edgar Graham. These were both leading Ulster Unionist politicians who were law professors at Queen's University Belfast and in nineteen eighty three Trimble was in his office as a as a don as a professor. And he heard a shot and Edgar Graham, who was his colleague, another law professor, another young austrianist politician, probably the future leader of the party. Had just been shot dead outside the library. Um. And IRA gunman walked up and shot him and nobody was ever prosecuted for it.

• 9:02Rory Stewart?

  And it's still, I think it's a good reminder of how disturbing and strange things were, how difficult it is still for people in Britain to comprehend. I mean, it's it's still difficult to quite understand why Edgar Graham was killed. I mean, you know, he was an active unionist politician, but in no way, as far as I can see, is there any suggestion he was involved in armed struggle at all. And he was a law professor shot outside his library.

• 9:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you know, the the the academics at a certain point were viewed as, you know, according to their views as legitimate targets at a certain point. It's like interesting, my my daughter Grace, who, you know, she's grown up in this household, she knows she's been aware that I spent an awful lot of my time sort of. You know, flitting backwards and forwards between Belfast and London and Dublin and London as this thing went on. But when I mentioned, said last night, you know, it's really sad David Trimble's died and and, you know, I had to remind Grace who he was. And I think there is a, even within Northern Ireland, it's why I think Kenneth Branagh's film was actually really timely. I I think that if things, people just forget, and and that's why this this government's wretched approach to this, people forget

• 10:08Alastair Campbell?

  just how hard it was. And if you if you, you should check it out, Roy, if you look at the clip that I'm talking about where Trimble just, he was very emotional, it was quite near the end of his life, I think, he didn't look very well. I think it was at the unveiling of a portrait of him. And he just said, you know, it was the greatest day of my life and it would never get better than that.

• 10:26Rory Stewart?

  What's the, what's the Kenneth Branagh film?

• 10:29Alastair Campbell?

  Belfast, Kenneth Branagh made a film based on his own childhood, growing up in the troubles. And it's a great film, it really is. And but I do think that sometimes with these with these things, you have you just have to keep reminding people what the facts are.

• 10:46Rory Stewart?

  Sylvia Herman, who was an MP with me, I remember saying that she was there on the day when Edgar Graham was shot, and when David Trimble was there in the university at the same time, they were all there in the university on the same day. And the thing that completely chilled her was that the student union cheered when the news came through that their professor had been executed outside the library. And she said she'd never stepped foot in the student union again. And it was, I mean, that too, just sort of brought home to me, I suppose, something about human nature, something about the way in which these conflicts develop, this sort of lack of empathy that students could have cheered at that moment. And also, a reason a reason not to get too sentimental about the young, that's another one of my obsessions, the idea that young people are always on the right side of things.

• 11:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But I think I remember, no, I was flicking through my, because I actually wrote a book on the peace process that was based on my diaries, which is only being published, only available in Ireland. And Trimble's actually with Tony and Clinton and Seamus Mallon, the picture on the front cover. And I was flicking through it last night, and I can remember a meeting that Trimble was where Trimble was with McGinnis. And I can remember, we were asking them to kind of move on issues that Sinn Féin were wanting sort of a bit of progress on. And, you know, I remember McGinnis saying, listen, you don't understand what it's like to sit down in a room with people that you know have tried to kill you. And that is the fact. And David Trimble, you know, these guys were living with the fear of a bullet in their head the whole time. And the other thing about David

• 12:15Alastair Campbell?

  Trimble, you know, it's why when I look at Jeffrey Donaldson now, I mean, I remember the trouble that Jeffrey Donaldson used to give Trimble a lot of the time. He was under massive pressure, he had Ian Paisley at the, we had literally had Ian Paisley at the gates. And David Trimble was not a kind of, he wasn't that classic, you know, fire and brimstone politician. I remember Tony actually once saying that for a politician, David had, you know, some of the worst political skills of any politician he'd ever Met, but he delivered and ultimately, you know, his family in their grief at the moment, they can take an awful lot of pride in a genuine legacy. Not many politicians have that.

• 12:48Rory Stewart?

  Am I right in saying, I may have misunderstood this, that actually, like many great politicians who did very brave things, he effectively destroyed his party in the process, a bit like LBJ, who took through civil rights in the US and wiped out the Democratic Party in the Southern United States from then onwards.

• 13:06Alastair Campbell?

  I think, I think he, he, he took huge risk. It paid off in terms of getting the Good Friday Agreement and, and getting it passed in a referendum, North and South. But ultimately, I think, I think he would probably recognise that that was the beginning of, of his demise as a, he was the first, he was the first minister. But slowly, the more, if you like, they would define themselves as the more radical elements of unionism, took over. But I think at the same time, I think he would have, you know, when Ian Paisley, I actually think the, the, the most extraordinary moment of them all, I remember I was, I was actually no longer working in the government at the time and I was in Dublin and I can remember

• 13:49Alastair Campbell?

  seeing a billboard and it was a picture of McGinnis and, and Martin McGinnis and Ian Paisley. It was when they were christened the Chuckle Brothers. Chuckle Brothers unite, unite in peace. And I, I just remember looking at that and thinking, oh my God. And, you know, David Trimble was out by then, no longer the first minister, Ian Paisley was in, but David Trimble was a big part of that process.

• 14:12Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's, thank you for that. And I thought that was really, really, really interesting. And I think there's very, I, I haven't seen much on the different sides of him. And, you know, I'd be interested at some point, maybe not now, but to come back to why you think he was such an enthusiastic Brexiteer.

• 14:29Alastair Campbell?

  Unlike Sylvia Herman.

• 14:30Rory Stewart?

  Unlike Sylvia Herman, who, unlike Sylvia Herman, I'm very fond of Sylvia Herman.

• 14:34Alastair Campbell?

  She's great. She's terrific.

• 14:35Rory Stewart?

  Can I, can I get you on to Mario Draghi, who you wanted to talk about? So just to remind listeners before we let Alastair in, Mario Draghi is the kind of quintessential grand technocrat of our age, President of the European Central Bank. Works, I think, for Goldman Sachs or definitely one of the big banks. And like all these sort of titans of international finance move very smoothly between the European Commission and making a fortune as a banker and then back the ECB. And then apparently just as smoothly moved back to be the Prime Minister of Italy until he has now just resigned. So tell us a bit about this.

• 15:11Alastair Campbell?

  I think this is a fascinating situation and actually really quite a worrying one. And I think it's another victory for our old enemy populism. Essentially what happened, and if you think about it, it's only a month ago that Draghi was with Macron and Schulz and the Ionis of Romania in Kiev as the big kind of European contingent, sitting down with Zelensky. He'd been a massive player in getting the economic sanctions put through because of all his connections with, you know, money and finance and so forth. And then suddenly this populist, rather ailing populist part of his coalition, the Five Star Movement, decide they don't support his cost of living approach.

• 15:52Alastair Campbell?

  And then the right, the Liga, the far right and the Forza Italia, which essentially is Berlusconi's mob, they spot an opportunity to bring him down and they take it. And it's interesting, what it made me think, you know, the reason why I think it's so interesting is that I think whatever government replaces him will not be as firm on Russia, Ukraine. Italy has got, I think during the Cold War, Italy had the biggest communist party in Europe. There is still an extreme left and there is a very powerful extreme right. And the money, the current betting is all on this Georgia Maloney woman, who is the leader of the Brothers of Italy, which, I mean, they, I don't know what this means, but they get defined as post fascist.

• 16:34Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 16:35Alastair Campbell?

  Now, post fascist.

• 16:37Rory Stewart?

  It's a bit worrying when you put the P in front.

• 16:40Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, anything where you feel that you have to have the F word in your, in your title. And the thing is, she's sort of moved, she's become the darling of the hard right, rather supplanting Salvini, because of course Salvini has been damaged by being part of the coalition.

• 16:53Rory Stewart?

  So one of the, one of the questions, I guess, which will be raised, and I, I tend to believe for these guys, because remember there was a guy called Mario Monti, who was the great technocrat who was brought in after the financial crisis before and also didn't really manage to last. Is whether, this goes back to the thing we keep talking about, is whether, yes, of course, our sympathies are with the technocrats, they're smart, they're often pursuing what seem to be the logical right policies, but they fail. And I wonder whether it isn't partly their fault, whether actually in this case, if Draghi had been a bit more nimble politically, a little bit better communicator, prepared to make a few compromises to his coalition, whether he wouldn't have been able to keep it together.

• 17:34Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, I think that's a tough one. I mean, I think he'd done some pretty extraordinary things. I mean, he just, for example, on, he'd just signed this new deal with Algeria, Algeria was going to take over from Russia as the main gas supplier. He, you know, one of the problems with this situation now is that he'd established this huge Covid rescue package through the European Union, which is now at risk because they don't have a government able to pass a budget. And the foreign, the foreign minister Luigi Di Maio, he said that the Russians are now celebrating having made yet another Western government fall. I don't think we can now, we will now be able to send any more arms to Ukraine. Now, I don't know if that's right or wrong, but that's quite a

• 18:15Alastair Campbell?

  big statement to make. So this is yet another sort of populism. Remember Salvini, who

• 18:22Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 18:22Alastair Campbell?

  posed in, posed in Red Square with the Putin T-shirt.

• 18:25Rory Stewart?

  And Salvini, of course, again, for listeners who've not been keeping up that much, one of the real masters of social media, Guy Famacy, who had an enormous social media team and was famous in Rome for every time there was an incident, he would sort of hear about it and be at the ticker tape, standing there whenever there was a crime, standing with the police, throwing out the tweets to keep it all going.

• 18:47Alastair Campbell?

  His populism, Roy, he's a populist and Maloney is a populist. She's actually, she's actually being slightly less pro Putin. She's had, she's had a similar makeover to Marine Le Pen in terms of not talking about the overtly fascist stuff.

• 19:03Rory Stewart?

  Hence the Post.

• 19:05Alastair Campbell?

  Hence the Post.

• 19:06Rory Stewart?

  Anyone listening, interesting, interested in another side of this, Lorenzo Marsili's written quite a good piece in The Guardian, trying to talk about the failure of progressive forces in Italy. And maybe we should take a little break and come back for the Tory leadership.

• 19:20Alastair Campbell?

  Why not? I mean, it's such a thrill. You loved it so much, Roy.

• 19:24Rory Stewart?

  I could tell.

• 19:25Alastair Campbell?

  Keep the listeners tuning in. We can't be too gloomy. My favourite tweet of the night, you got something like 30,000 likes.

• 19:33Alastair Campbell?

  For saying, for pointing out to Liz Truss, who kept banging on about how terrible upbringing in Leeds and Paisley and the terrible schools she went to. You pointed out that this was entirely during the period of Margaret Thatcher in office. And there she was pretending to be.

• 19:49Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary. She kept saying to the audience, I, I went through the horrors of basically not quite quoting, but the implication was I went through the horrors of the eighties and nineties. I, I, I know what it's like. I understand leveling up. I was in those communities that got left behind. I experienced the economic recession. I experienced the inflation, et cetera. And you're thinking, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold a sec. You're meant to be sending yourself as the heir of Margaret Thatcher. And anyway, more on that after the break.

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• 22:23Rory Stewart?

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

• 22:27Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 22:29Rory Stewart?

  Alastair, when you got off your flight from France and stopped presumably grumbling about Brexit's effect on how long it took you to get through the airport, you managed to have a look at this debate. What was your sense of it?

• 22:39Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you had set me up because I'd been flicking through Twitter and you were absolutely on fire. I was very proud of Paul War, well-known journalist and Twitterer, saying that I've trained you well Rory. He felt you were really putting the boot in quite well to both of them.

• 22:58Alastair Campbell?

  But I was, I was pretty appalled by the whole thing. I mean, the staging of it was weird. The whole thing at the start where they literally looked like cardboard cutouts. And I thought they were cardboard cutouts until eventually Rishi Sunak blinked.

• 23:09Rory Stewart?

  Anyone who, anyone who didn't watch it, it was really odd. And a real example of why, I mean, I watch all the US debates and never seen anyone in the US screw it up like this. I mean, essentially it began with what looked like two cardboard cutouts of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. And the camera sat for, I think, probably two seconds on these unmoving cardboard cutouts. And then suddenly, very disturbingly, the Rishi Sunak cardboard cutout stopped smiling and its lips came down. And you realise that actually they were two living human beings who'd been forced to hold these rictus grins while the cameras were running and rolling. And I just, it's something, I think it's amusing for directors. They do it in documentaries because they

• 23:51Rory Stewart?

  can get these sort of odd facial features. Obviously, if you're forced to hold a photograph smile for three seconds, you end up looking, and maybe it was longer. I mean, it's felt like a very, very, very long time. And I'm very humiliating for them, I think.

• 24:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, to Rory, the reason I've come back from France, having had a nightmare journey out, I have to tell you, a nightmare through Dover. But the reason I've come back is to do, we're doing the final tomorrow of the Make Me Prime Minister, tomorrow, Wednesday, the Make Me Prime Minister programme I've been working on. And I promise you, I guarantee you, the quality of debate will be better between these three members of the public. I promise you it will be better.

• 24:27Rory Stewart?

  Are you, are you going to begin with making them look like cardboard cutouts?

• 24:30Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 24:30Rory Stewart?

  Because the question for you, if you're in that situation, I'm often in that situation, is do you actually just step aside and call out the BBC and say, you're making me look like a tit? What are you doing?

• 24:39Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, we, all those, you, you, you have to negotiate that stuff. I mean, and the other problem, Rory, is because there's so little by way of substance being debated, we end up talking about this crap. And the other crap that we end, I was genuinely shocked that they even raised that ridiculous nonsense from the Dean Dorries about earrings and shoes and suits. And the other thing, I mean, look, the BBC don't make it easy to keep defending them, as I try to do. But how, you can't say things like, yes, public sector strikes, yes or no?

• 25:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Alastair Campbell?

  And the other thing, the other moment for me, Rory, literally, literally 30 seconds after they had both said, you're going to get honesty from me, I'll always tell you the truth, says Rishi, I'll always be honest with you, says Liz Truss. They get a question, have the queues at Dover got anything to do with Brexit? And they raced a lie. They both rate, they're in a, no, no.

• 25:32Rory Stewart?

  Let's, let's just go back to the beginning of the debate then for a second. So the really interesting thing at the beginning of the debate.

• 25:37Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, did you have your tie on or off while you were watching the debate, by the way?

• 25:40Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Obviously, I always watch, wear my tie when I'm hearing BBC. I like to show respect to the newscaster. So, beginning of the, I, I think it was the first time we've actually had a chance in one of these debates, going back probably 10 years, to see a really clear economic disagreement. And it was a very, very interesting one, actually. Fundamentally, Rishi Sunak is trying to balance the books, that's his big push.

• 26:06Rory Stewart?

  And in order to do it, he's prepared to raise national insurance, raise corporation tax. And Liz Truss is making a very different argument. She's saying that that will choke off growth. She wants to lower taxes. She's not so worried about balancing the books. She wants to generate the economic growth and that she'll get the deficit and debt under control later. And it's a really interesting standoff because it goes to the heart of two contradictory conservative instincts and conservative viewers watching it, me thinking now as a ex-conservative MP, have a real head-heart situation. In their head, they think, okay, we've got to balance the budget because that was something that, right at the very heart of the way that Mrs Thatcher communicated was her, she

• 26:49Rory Stewart?

  always described the national economy as a sort of household budget.

• 26:52Alastair Campbell?

  Which is stupid, which is one of the worst of her legacies because, you know, households can't print money, households can't raise taxes, households can't borrow to the extent that governments can. I mean, the whole thing is a nonsense.

• 27:04Rory Stewart?

  It goes all the way back to actually the great Liberal Prime, Mr Gladstone, who I think also was very, very concerned with this idea of balancing budgets and not going to debt. So that's what Rishi was selling and he was, I suppose, channeling Mrs Thatcher because he was actually saying when he worked in his mother's pharmacy, he had to balance the books all the time. Whereas Liz Truss is actually saying, she was praising the economic approach of the United States and Canada, which in case anyone has noticed, are not actually conservative governments, right? They're governments that are much more comfortable with larger deficits and larger debts. So that would worry the Conservatives, but she's saying she's going to cut taxes, which is the heart thing. People are thinking, oh, great, taxes are going to come down.

• 27:47Rory Stewart?

  And she's selling this story, which is increasingly popular with Conservative voters, but was never part of Margaret Thatcher or Nigel Lawson's orthodoxy, which is the idea that if you cut taxes... You can stimulate so much growth that you get more revenue than you were getting from the taxes in the first place. In fact, Nigel Lawson's actually made a public statement saying he never believed that.

• 28:07Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, this is a question that I'm channeling from Fiona, who, she said, can you ask Rory whether a lot of these Tory party members are just a bit thick?

• 28:18Rory Stewart?

  I don't think they're particularly thick, no.

• 28:19Alastair Campbell?

  But Rory, why, she's talking economically, she's talking absolute nonsense. And Mrs Thatcher would have condemned it as nonsense. They're claiming, as you say, they're claiming the bits of Thatcherism they want.

• 28:30Rory Stewart?

  No, very much not what Mrs Thatcher wanted to do. She would have been probably closer to the Rishi Sunak side on this. She wouldn't have believed that you, at a time when inflation is taking off and your deficit and debt is ballooning, she wouldn't have seen that as the moment to be doing the kind of things that Liz Truss is talking about. But I think the way in which populists of all sorts, and what we're looking at is a kind of muted form of populism, the way they always get away with it is, of course, there's something in what they say which is true. So it is true, of course, that raising corporation tax may, in fact, stifle the economic recovery. And it's probably also true, as she says,

• 29:10Rory Stewart?

  that we can endure more deficit and more debt than Rishi Sunak thinks we can. But it's not a very conservative thing to say, in fact, it's more of a Labour thing to say, to say you don't have to be tight on the debt and deficit. But it's an argument that will have got through to people. They're not very amused by the basic austerity message, which is you've got to cut the debt and deficit and balance the books. So she will have been able to get people thinking, well, maybe Rishi was wrong to raise corporation tax and national insurance. Of course, she's right, we've got to stimulate growth. She's probably right. People will think that we don't need to cut the debt as sharply as she says. So.

• 29:49Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think there is a single economist who was watching that debate with anything other than head in hands?

• 29:56Rory Stewart?

  I think they were most economists will have been much more closely on Rishi Sunak's side. And that's very clear. I mean, she, Liz Truss has tried to get economists to endorse, so the only person she's really managed to get.

• 30:06Alastair Campbell?

  Patrick Minford.

• 30:07Rory Stewart?

  Yes, Patrick Minford, who is amazing. I mean, I know Patrick Minford, and I took testimony from him on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. And I remember saying to him, what the hard Brexit that he was suggesting with hard borders with Europe, I said, it's going to destroy the British car industry. And he looked me in the eye and he said, yeah. Yeah, well, it's about time the British car industry was destroyed because, you know, we need to get more efficient and it's not efficient for us to produce our own cars. And I tried to take this clip and show it to people and say, you know, this is the number one pro Brexit economist here. Are you really prepared to destroy the whole Midlands, destroy our entire automobile industry? But nobody would ever take seriously what he actually says and believes.

• 30:44Alastair Campbell?

  And he's the one economist who appears to be endorsing Liz Truss. The other thing I find strange about Rishi Sunak is that I think he is actually, deep down, much more right wing than Liz Truss. I mean, Liz Truss is obviously, you know, former Remainer, former Lib Dem. She just sort of goes with the wind. And the wind at the moment in the Tory party is very much with the kind of European Research Group. I think Sunak is very right wing. And I'll tell you one thing that I haven't heard discussed in any of the debates. There's barely any coverage of it in the media. But then now, the next kind of arms race between them is about who loves these enterprise zones and charter cities the most. And Sunak, his father-in-law, of whom he's very proud and keeps saying, I think he's quite a mover

• 31:28Alastair Campbell?

  in this. This whole charter cities thing, I really think people need to, it's one of the many things people need to wake up about. Because charter cities, they've been tried in Honduras and thankfully failed.

• 31:38Rory Stewart?

  Tell us what a charter city is, basically.

• 31:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, a charter city essentially is that if I explain to you the Charter Cities Institute, these right-wing organisations, they always have wonderful neutral titles like Taxpayers Alliance. So the Charter Cities Institute, they want what they call deep regulatory and administrative reforms. And they essentially want to be able to govern charter cities inside the jurisdiction of a sovereign state, but the charter city will be responsible for its own governance. And that is where Sunak wants to go. And that means you can have lower tax than the rest of the country, you can have different judicial system, you can have different labour market laws.

• 32:17Rory Stewart?

  And it can be, in the theory, very, very extreme. I don't think Rishi Sunak wants to go this far, but I remember when I was in-

• 32:22Alastair Campbell?

  I think he does.

• 32:23Rory Stewart?

  Well, when I was international development minister, I remember seeing the chief economist of the World Bank in those days, who wanted to make one of these things in Libya. And he described it, he wanted to tear off a corner of the- Libyan coast, create this international city. He talked about making a mini Hong Kong. And essentially, it was a sort of colony he was creating. There were going to be no labour regulations, were going to be no planning regulations, which was true, of course, in Hong Kong in the early days. New Territory had these horrible, dangerous, high-rise buildings went up, very, very low wages, basically no social security, trying to create this sort of raw capitalist vision on an experimental basis.

• 32:58Alastair Campbell?

  But listen, you talked about Patrick Minford. Johnson was never a sort of ideological Brexiteer. Liz Truss is not an ideological Brexiteer. Sunak was an ideological Brexiteer. And that is because I believe he is absolutely part of this, what I call this sovereign individual approach, sovereign individual, which I, we can put in the show notes, a very, very, very long piece I wrote about this. It's a book written by Jacob Rees-Mogg's dad, William Rees-Mogg, back in 1998, which is one of the most terrifying books I've ever read because it, reading it today is him foretelling lots of the stuff that's happening now. And this whole charter city movement is about basically getting rich people

• 33:41Alastair Campbell?

  out of the control of democratic government. That's what it's about.

• 33:45Rory Stewart?

  Let me push back for a second. So the guy that dreamt it up is this chief economist of World Bank, as I said, I know, Paul Roma.

• 33:51Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not denying, he dreamt up charter cities, but they are now being used for something very, very different to what he envisaged.

• 33:59Rory Stewart?

  The way in which they're talking about them now is a sort of exaggerated free port, isn't it? And, and the, and the problem with it is that instead of making the correct decisions to create a good business environment right the way across the country, you're basically creating these little pockets. So my, my big argument against it is that it's going to create all kinds of distortions and inequalities. I'm not a believer in this sort of free port approach. If you're worried that there are. We've got the wrong kind of regulations, or we don't have the right type of property rights, or our planning is wrong. Why not push it out nationally across the country, give everybody a chance to have a good enabling environment, rather than trying to create a little pocket for it?

• 34:37Alastair Campbell?

  Because that's not what it's about. That's not what it's about. And I don't think, I think Sunak understands it, unless trust doesn't. She was sort of talking about enterprise zones with knobs on, or, you know, booster rockets or something. I think it's part of this very, very right wing vision. And what's extraordinary, when you look at the people who are, that Charter Cities Institute website that I mentioned, they, they talk about that the purpose, as they see it, is to provide a fresh approach to tackle humanity's most pressing challenges: global poverty, climate change, and rapid urbanisation. And then when you look at the people who are funding the damn thing, it's the usual suspects. It's Robert Mercer, it's the Koch brothers, who, you know, frankly, for whom there should be a special place in hell for their work against climate, in climate denial. So these

• 35:21Alastair Campbell?

  are the same people. And who are their supporters in the UK, Rory? Fifty-five Tufton Street, the Taxpayers' Alliance, the Institute of Economic Affairs. So I think that this is why it's so weird that Sunak is pretending to be to the left of trust.

• 35:35Rory Stewart?

  Another thing that, that, just before we move on from this, on to the, to Africa.

• 35:39Alastair Campbell?

  I could talk about this all day, Rory.

• 35:41Rory Stewart?

  Very keen to do. But it's part of another pattern within right wing parties in, across Europe, of picking up on arguments from the United States and then importing, importing them across. You know, hence, you saw Oliver Dowden going off to talk about statues, pulling down statues in Washington and going out to think tanks there. You, you can see this come back forth. Can I, can I bring us to something that's really, I think we agree on strongly, but maybe hasn't been spelt out enough in the media? The Treasury has now just said that effectively, all the money that was meant to be spent on overseas development has been spent on Ukraine, and there's no money left. And it looks as though the Chief

• 36:25Rory Stewart?

  Secretary said, stop all non-essential aid projects, whatever on earth non-essential means. And this is extraordinary, because we're starting from an incredibly low base. I was in an African country recently, where, when I was the Secretary of State for International Development, we were spending a hundred million a year, we're now spending 20 million a year. In Yemen, where we were putting 280 million a year in, we're now struggling to put in 80, despite an enormous famine, real need in Yemen. And now we're facing in Kenya, Somalia and in Ethiopia, one of the worst drought conditions for 70 years. Seven million people on the edge of starvation Somalia, probably three million on the edge of starvation now in Kenya, the highest level of starvation.

• 37:10Rory Stewart?

  Total inability of the UN to raise any money to meet this. And Britain is cutting from that low base. So I suppose what I was leading up to is that all those figures were before this announcement. In other words, we'd already hacked really hard and people didn't understand this because the government said, oh, they just dropped spending from 0.7% of GNI to 0.5%, which didn't sound like very much. What they didn't explain is that so much of the money was already pre-committed that they took out almost all the flexible money that was there for doing programmes in individual countries. This will be, if it's followed through, basically the end of British aid in Africa.

• 37:47Alastair Campbell?

  This is why, watching this clown Johnson, you know, playing his games, playing at being a Ukrainian soldier, playing at being a fighter jet pilot. His legacy is Brexit, disaster in my view. And I think, I'm amazed, Rory, you're not angry than you are about this whole development thing, because Britain has been one of the great countries historically on development, including during Tory governments, by the way. I would argue we were really good under New Labour, but I think that I would recognise, I remember, I can remember Linda Chalka, when Linda Chalka was overseas aid minister, she was taken seriously around the world as somebody who really cared about aid.

• 38:30Alastair Campbell?

  I think people said the same about you and Andrew Mitchell as well. And now, there's one of the questions we got, we had over a thousand questions again this week, and one of the questions was somebody who said, I haven't got it in front of me, so I can't remember his name, but he said, what policies, if you look at Tory policies today... Do you think they are closer to the Tory party of 20 years ago or the National Front and British National Party of 20 years ago? And if you think about, we have basically said, let's stop helping the poorest people of the world. That's what we've done. And that's what you've just described, and you've described it in facts and figures, which will have a direct consequence of people dying and of us basically saying, we don't give a shit.

• 39:15Rory Stewart?

  And the tragedy of it is that Africa is probably in the worst position it's now been in in four decades. It's going to get much, much worse. 60% of its wheat comes out of Russia and Ukraine.

• 39:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Rory Stewart?

  The economies are stagnating. The global recession will hit Africa worse than anywhere. And so the need has never been greater and the lack of generosity from Britain has never been more striking.

• 39:39Alastair Campbell?

  But also to take it back to the leadership debate. So there's Les Truss, she's the Foreign Secretary. The development part, if you remember that DIFID was absorbed into the Foreign Office, the development part has barely figured in her agenda. I don't think it's been, I don't think, I've not heard her asked about it once during this whole leadership thing. And that's what happens when you have a populist government and a pliant media that just goes along with the absolute bullshit that they talk all day long.

• 40:10Rory Stewart?

  All right. So ballots go out fifth of August, pretty soon. An announcement fifth of September.

• 40:15Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, it's ridiculous. General elections don't last as long as this.

• 40:20Rory Stewart?

  But it's also slightly disturbing because it means that within five or six weeks, we're going to be looking at these people coming in. And the problems that I'm worried about, like you, are what kind of promises are people going to feel forced to make over the next five, six weeks to try to win over that right of the party? I mean, everybody is trying to pitch towards the right of the Conservative Party. And I feel this with the China rhetoric. You know, China is obviously our number one importer, as Faisal Islam tried to point out in that debate. He was a BBC economics advisor. And there was this sort of weird Muppets show thing going on for people who didn't watch it, where these two guys, Chris Mason and Faisal Islam, were sitting there like the guys in the peanut gallery in The Muppets Show.

• 41:02Alastair Campbell?

  You're not saying they're Muppets, are you? You're not calling them Muppets?

• 41:04Rory Stewart?

  I'm definitely not saying they're Muppets.

• 41:06Alastair Campbell?

  I thought they were more impressive than the two candidates, I have to say.

• 41:10Rory Stewart?

  I'm expecting you now to compare me to Miss Piggy. I'm trying to avoid that if I can.

• 41:16Rory Stewart?

  But the problems they are going to be confronting are unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. Inflation is completely out of control. Nobody has an answer, really, not the Labour Party, not the Conservatives, on actually what we're going to do about wages. Because obviously, people are really hurting. Obviously, people want their wages to go up with inflation. But equally, the Treasury will be saying, if the government awards pay rises in line with inflation, it's going to drive inflation even more, which was experienced in the 1970s, wasn't it?

• 41:48Alastair Campbell?

  Here's one for you, Roy. It's pretty obvious, watching them, that they don't like each other. And it's even more obvious, watching the sort of really quite unpleasant kind of backstabbing and briefing that's going on behind the scenes. And I think it has damaged both of them. But I've often wondered, because David Cameron forbade the Remain campaign for doing what he called blue on blue. I wonder, actually, if he had not done that. Clearly, Truss and Sunak have decided that blue on blue is fine.

• 42:17Rory Stewart?

  I think blue on blue is fine. I think people will have the fantastic opportunity next week to listen to the last in my episode on argument. But which is going to be next Tuesday morning at nine o'clock on BBC Radio.

• 42:26Alastair Campbell?

  Nine o'clock, light air, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:28Rory Stewart?

  But in that, I'm trying to argue that argument is really helpful. Whatever I'm troubled about in this leadership debate, it's not that they're arguing with each other. I really want them to argue with each other. I think it's so important, and it's fascinating how difficult it is, even when they do argue with each other, to expose lies, really show where the dividing lines are, really leave anyone the wiser.

• 42:51Alastair Campbell?

  And I do think that part of that is the way that the media now conducts itself in relation to debate.

• 42:56Rory Stewart?

  Here are a couple of things which weren't said to the candidates, which maybe if you and I get the chance to quiz them, we could try.

• 43:03Alastair Campbell?

  The invitation remains open. Maybe soon, do you think soon I might do it? Let's trust wouldn't come near it, but do you think soon I might?

• 43:09Rory Stewart?

  Well, we could, we could try.

• 43:11Alastair Campbell?

  Could you ask him?

• 43:11Rory Stewart?

  We could give him a go. The problem is I'm slightly, I mean, with all my reservations.

• 43:15Alastair Campbell?

  You used to sit, you used to sit in the library with him, you told me that.

• 43:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, my, my reservation, with all my reservations, I'm slightly more on his side and I'm slightly worried that coming on our show is kind of going to be damaging for the brand.

• 43:25Alastair Campbell?

  Which brand? You or him?

• 43:26Rory Stewart?

  No, him, him. We're all going to be mean to him.

• 43:28Alastair Campbell?

  We don't care about him. Rory, we can get ruthless for God's sake, honestly.

• 43:33Rory Stewart?

  Now, listen, here's a couple of things you want to ask him. One of them obviously is monkeypox, right? Which is a very, very serious thing, which nobody is talking about and where we need to bring in immediately very, very clear processes on education, people going to quarantine. Here's another thing, NHS, we have a shortage, I believe, at the moment, I can't really believe it, but apparently we've got a shortage of 105,000 doctors and nurses.

• 43:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:59Rory Stewart?

  And we need to recruit 475,000 clinicians and 475,000 care workers in the next decade. And that Germany has 48% more doctors per capita than we do. I'm stealing this from Polly Toynbee. But it's a pretty staggering statistics and I don't really see how anyone can solve those problems. Wes Streeting's talking about training, but that is a much, much longer term thing and we're facing a short term crisis, which is beyond imagining.

• 44:25Alastair Campbell?

  Well, one of, one of, one of our neighbours here is Chris Hobson, who's been all over the media during the pandemic as boss of NHS providers, but he's now, he's moved to a different role. But when you talk to people who are kind of at the front end of actually NHS management, the numbers are terrifying. I hadn't heard those, I hadn't heard those numbers that you've just read out, but it fits with other stuff that I, that I've seen. And look, Rory, let's just be again honest about this. A lot of that shortage has been caused by people who were previously allowed and entitled and welcome to work here, those members, citizens from the

• 45:07Alastair Campbell?

  European Union, who've gone back to somewhere where they're more valued and more welcome. And I think the other thing is, is we're back to this whole populist thing. They talk about the National Health Service. They talk about their commitment to it. But I'm afraid when I hear Sunak talk about it, I can't see beyond some of these meetings that he keeps flitting off to have with his libertarian friends in the United States.

• 45:29Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's, let's, let's finish back with where we began, which is David Trimble and his, his push for Ullens, the, the Ulster language sort of version of Lowland Scots. And it, it brings me to another thing that I read in the newspaper this morning, which I thought you'd quite enjoy, which was Jenny Colgan, who is just rediscovering her love of Scottish Gaelic. 1980s, 80% of people in the Western, Western Isles, like, like your father, spoke Scottish Gaelic, now down to 40%. But she has a lovely point about language. And, and I'd, I'd like you to think about this. Maybe this is right, maybe it's wrong. You know more about this stuff than me. She says that the word leath in Scottish Gaelic means both blue and grey, because it's a way of describing the sky in Western

• 46:12Rory Stewart?

  Scotland. And the word gorum means blue, but it also is the colour of grass. So it seems to mean blue and green at the same time. Any, any other examples of that with us to finish on?

• 46:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that means, Rory, that if we were to go down the route at any point of a teal, teal approach, we, we would call it gorum.

• 46:31Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 46:32Alastair Campbell?

  Which is slightly better than your previous political party, Monica Slup, the Scottish Liberal Uyghurist Party. Now, listen, we haven't had time. We should do it in the Q and A, maybe. We should talk about some of the questions that we got on our interview with Keir Starmer, because there were a lot of them. And lots of others. Honestly, some of these questions, I, unlike you, because you're very, very, very busy, and I'm only just partially busy, I literally do spend hours just going through these questions, because they gave me so many ideas for other stuff to do and to write about.

• 47:00Rory Stewart?

  Somebody looking at it was slightly worried about your health. He saw these sort of thousands of questions laid out on bits of paper on the steering. Anyway.

• 47:09Alastair Campbell?

  Can I, can I, can I, can I, can we end with one of my favourite poems?

• 47:12Rory Stewart?

  Gone.

• 47:12Alastair Campbell?

  I'm only, I'm only going to give you the title, not the whole poem. The reason I do that, Rory, is because of a wonderful poem by a lady you may have heard of called Marilyn Monroe. And she wrote a poem once called Think in Ink.

• 47:24Rory Stewart?

  Think in Ink.

• 47:25Alastair Campbell?

  And that's what I do.

• 47:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, we, we'd like that poem someday. Thank you very much, guys, and look forward to seeing you again on the show soon.

• 47:32Alastair Campbell?

  Bye bye.

• 47:36Speaker 04

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• 47:39Speaker 05

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