321. Question Time: Why do politicians leak to the press?

Was the recent election in Brandenburg really a “huge success” for the far-right AfD? Why are MPs allowed to be on their phones in the House of Commons? And what are Rory and Alastair’s go-to karaoke songs? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. 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 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! ✅ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Video Editor: Jake Liascos 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 Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

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• 1:58Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:02Alastair Campbell?

  And with me Alastair Campbell. So where do you want to start Rory?

• 2:05Rory Stewart?

  So Alistair, yes, lots of things to talk about. Interesting news from all around the world. Austria, Switzerland, Sri Lanka. I'm going to start you on Austria. Lucy Archbold, election campaigning has been paused in Austria due to the recent catastrophic floods. Can you please offer some insight into what this means in practice ahead of the upcoming election? Alistair?

• 2:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the election is very, very soon, later this month. And we talked about it briefly a couple of weeks ago. It's an election where the far right looks like it could end up in government. And I think the floods are having an impact. Because anybody who's been following the floods, not just in Austria, but in Hungary and parts of Italy and all sorts of different parts of Europe, truly horrific, including in big cities like Vienna, where they thought they had sort of, you know, pretty well perfected flood protection. And there has been loss of life. There's been massive loss of property. There's been incredible costs and the clear up operation is still going on.

• 3:07Alastair Campbell?

  And the reason why I think it is having some impact in the upcoming election is because a lot of these far right parties, including Trump, including Reform Party here, there is this sort of, you know, climate crisis denialism that goes on. And the Austrian far right parties, and indeed the not so far right parties, have been very much part of that sort of, you know, climate crisis is overblown, people can't afford it, all the sort of, you know, populist stuff that's attached to that. And what this has done really has made the public, I think, more alert to the issue. And it's changed the nature of the debate. So whether it will fundamentally affect the outcome, I don't know.

• 3:50Alastair Campbell?

  But what I would say is Lucy, I think it might. Let's stick with another election Rory.

• 3:54Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 3:55Alastair Campbell?

  Other big news this week, this is from Dave Tunbridge. What are your thoughts on the results of the Sri Lankan election? And what this means for the country going forward in the wake of their recent economic crisis? And this was quite a big upset, this one.

• 4:07Rory Stewart?

  This is amazing. So in Sri Lanka, people will remember a couple of years ago, the great ruling dynasty of Sri Lanka basically collapsed when Rajapaskar fled. And you might remember images of the public breaking into his palace and kind of using his kitchen and stuff. Presidential elections come out of that. And AKD, who is the leader of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party, then JVP, has swept to an extraordinary election victory, picking up about 6% of the vote on a turnout of 80%. Huge upset, both for, of course, the old ruling dynasty, and upset for the caretaker government that's been in place.

• 4:48Rory Stewart?

  But also a remarkable turnaround for a Marxist-Leninist party, which in the late 1980s was involved in full-on Marxist-Leninist armed insurrection when he first joined that party. And has now become a party where, even though he, in his campaign, has been a bit critical of the IMF, Sri Lanka's been through a massive economic crisis, partly actually because they tried to go for a radical move to, there's a discussion, as you can imagine, about how much of a cause this was, but it was certainly one of the causative factors. They tried to go for a very radical move towards organic farming. And in pushing through fully organic, their agricultural production collapsed. They found themselves on the edge of food shortages, exports collapsed, and that was one of the things that triggered the economic crisis.

• 5:32Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, he is an example of something that we see around the world, which is somebody from a very, very radical populist party, apparently now moving more to the moderate centre, embracing the IMF and presenting himself as the candidate of moderation and good management with his opponents, of course, saying nothing's changed.

• 5:49Alastair Campbell?

  We talked in the main podcast about the current Labour government and how it was going to deal with the difficult economic inheritance. This guy's got a real, absolute massive problem. And it will be interesting to see how much time people give him to try to sort some of the mess out. It's interesting how much incumbency.

• 6:10Alastair Campbell?

  In so many of these elections, it does appear to be like a really big problem. I mean, Modi won his election and is still the leader of India, but didn't win nearly as much of the vote as we thought that he would. And here, the incumbent president got seventeen percent of the vote. He was third place, didn't go through to the runoff in the second count. Interestingly though, I thought he showed a lot of dignity in his kind of handover statement. He said, "With much love and respect for this beloved nation, I hand over its future to the new president. Let's hope that if Donald Trump loses, he can show similar grace."

• 6:42Rory Stewart?

  A lot of the themes we talk about a lot are going to come through now because one of them is that he doesn't have any position really in parliament. They've only got a couple of seats in parliament, so he's got to dissolve parliament in order to try to get parliamentary majority behind him. And I think we do keep, you know, with Georgia Maloney, the question is, has she gone from being a far-right politician to a politician at the centre? Can you go from being a Marxist then and a student insurrectionist to being a sort of moderate pragmatist? And I guess sometimes you can, sometimes you can't, says he without some regret.

• 7:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. We should probably, we should probably sometime in the near future, take a look at Millet in Argentina, because I think it's about a year now since he...

• 7:19Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's a great subject. We've got to do Millet.

• 7:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we should do Millet. Now, talking of far-right...

• 7:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I have a question for you. Josephine Amfo, Swiss biodiversity. With the climate and biodiversity crises becoming increasingly urgent, why is it that the Swiss public have just rejected a proposal to force authorities do more to protect natural habitats from pollution development? Was the farming lobby given too prominent a voice in the campaign? There we are, Anastasia, Switzerland, which we love.

• 7:44Alastair Campbell?

  This is one of those referendums that was happening because, you know, they have this sort of weird system, they have referendums and all sorts of things. And the government wasn't backing it, most of parliament wasn't backing it. And I think it does underline that this sort of whole nature protection, climate change, that the arguments that it might affect the economy, agriculture, construction and energy production appear to have won out. This was not a close vote, thirty-seven percent, that's only just over one in three. Voted to back the proposal. So this is, I think, part of this sort of the politicisation of the whole climate debate. And I think that the sort of those who really believe in climate, the climate catastrophe will be a bit alarmed by this.

• 8:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. David Lammy has pushed to really get the UK government, I admire him for doing this, leaning more not just into climate but into biodiversity.

• 8:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:35Rory Stewart?

  And of course, Switzerland is one of many, many countries in the world whose biodiversity is in crisis. British nature is in terrible crisis. I mean, it's been declining dramatically over the last 25 years, but the same is true in Switzerland. And regardless of how people vote, we're going to continue with very, very dramatic biodiversity loss, species loss. But of course, as we've talked about in the pod yesterday, the challenge for Labour is that on the one hand, we're trying to do stuff for biodiversity. On the other hand, they're trying to generate growth, they're trying to get houses built. And those two things will very rapidly find themselves running into conflict with each other.

• 9:09Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Just to point out, they also had a same day referendum on pension reform. I'm not going to go into the details because I'm not sure I fully understand them, but that got rejected as well. The other election this week, Rory, that's just worth a mention. The question from Ella here, please can you provide some insight into the recent election in Brandenburg and whether it was a huge success for the far right AFD? Well, they didn't win. They came second. The SPD, led nationally federally by Olaf Scholz, the Chancellor, they won, but it was narrow. I don't think we should kid ourselves that it was a total rejection of the far right. But I think it certainly sort of gives them a little bit of breathing space. But Scholz is still under quite a lot of pressure as a result of that election.

• 9:53Rory Stewart?

  Phones in Parliament, Digby Walker. Why are MPs allowed to be on their phones in the House of Commons? If you're in the chamber, you're listening and debating. Otherwise, quite frankly, you might as well not be there and be dining if you're home, you're considering.

• 10:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I know, I know what you think about this because I've heard you rage about it many times.

• 10:08Rory Stewart?

  It's ridiculous. There is no possible justification. If we're taking telephones away from children in schools, we should take them away from MPs in the chamber. There's even a very elaborate system of doorkeepers and notes. So you can, if you want to get a message urgently to someone in the House of Commons chamber, you can do so.

• 10:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:25Rory Stewart?

  But there is absolutely no excuse being in there on your phones. And there's also no excuse for reading speeches. You and I were sitting down for a couple of hours with Chris Patton. And he was talking about the fact that when he entered the House of Commons, you wouldn't even have been called by the Speaker if you were reading your speech, let alone a question off a sheet of paper.

• 10:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I can remember when I was a political journalist, sitting up in the press gallery, if an MP so much as looked at the back of their order paper that they might just be holding there, and their colleagues started to think they were reading, they were reading, reading, reading, and the Speaker would step in and say, you know, the honourable member knows that he mustn't read from notes.

• 11:04Rory Stewart?

  Oh, goodness.

• 11:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Rory Stewart?

  Well, because by the time I got there, I mean, amongst the many turgid horrible things about the House of Commons chamber, one of them is they were basically just reading out speeches written by some 22 year old research assistant who'd copied and pasted some nonsense from last week's Economist, and they'd drone on mispronouncing the names of every person and country in the world.

• 11:25Alastair Campbell?

  I think not being allowed notes is excessive, but I do think there's something about the use of phones. And I'll tell you, what you know as well, I mean, there may be that people are sort of, you know, engaged in sort of researching something that they've just heard or whatever. The truth is, most of them, you see, you can see from the movement of the thumb that they're basically just scrolling through social media, probably to see whether their intervention was sort of.

• 11:51Rory Stewart?

  Looking at pictures of tractors.

• 11:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, I think getting rid of, what was he called again?

• 11:56Rory Stewart?

  That was Neil Parish. His defence was, when he was found looking at pornography in the House of Commons chamber, said that he was trying to go for a website on tractors. He was a farmer.

• 12:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We obviously believed that excuse, didn't we? Milo, here's another one. I'm interested in the subject of political leaking. Why do people leak? What happens if you are caught leaking?

• 12:16Rory Stewart?

  Oh, tell us about that, Alison, because that's something that is a bit weird. I didn't do it. Even when I was in the Cabinet, I didn't do it. And I'm very conscious, though, that my more wily colleagues would point out to me when we looked at newspapers that there would be descriptions of Cabinet meetings I'd been in, where for some reason it would turn out that all the really good points were being made by Liz Truss, or all the really good points were being made by Gavin Williamson. In fact, it would give the impression that Gavin Williamson or Liz Truss had spoken for about 90% of the Cabinet meeting, given the amount of coverage to their comments.

• 12:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Rory Stewart?

  And this is something you must have been aware of, because I think you suspected Charlie Whelan of doing it, is that right?

• 12:51Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, sure.

• 12:52Rory Stewart?

  Tell us who Charlie Whelan was quickly, sorry. I know you don't want to get dragged back into this stuff.

• 12:55Alastair Campbell?

  He was Gordon Brown's press guy. You've got to be careful with this stuff. I mean, to me, a leak. Is where there is a piece of government information that is not been published and which you deliberately and willfully, for whatever reasons, put out into the public domain to a journalist, okay, that's a leak. I think it's different. You say you never leaked, but you will have had conversations with journalists and who will have picked up on things you said and will have sort of picked up on tone and so forth, and then they sort of take that away. I think that's different. I think what often people talk about when they talk about leaking, they actually mean that politicians have talked to journalists or civil servants or special advisers have talked to journalists.

• 13:39Alastair Campbell?

  And so I think you've got to differentiate.

• 13:42Rory Stewart?

  There's sort of three things, aren't there? There's the genuine breaking state secrets, which is what Gavin Williamson lost his job over. He was accused after an investigation by Mark Sebwell of having revealed a debate about Huawei and the National Security Council so that he could appear in these papers. The second one is your very mild thing, you know, if you happen to talk to a journalist or give a bit of gossip. But the third thing, which is something that I hate, which is the sense that there's a sort of agreement from the journalists that if you will be very indiscreet with them, they'll write you up as a great coming figure. And that was Liz Truss's trick. The reason she was always written up as the future leader of Conservative Party is that in exchange, she would give all this information to journalists over lunch. And I was talking to a US congressman on this.

• 14:27Rory Stewart?

  He was approached by the political editor of probably the most prestigious newspaper in the United States, who asked him to turn on his phone and record a private conversation between members of the US Congress and President Biden, members of the same party, the conversation which they were trying to persuade President Biden to step down. And this guy said to the political editor, you've got to be out of your mind. I'm not going into a meeting with my own party leader with a phone on the table, recording a complete transcript of it, and refused to do it. Sure enough, two days later, he looks at the newspaper and one of his colleagues has done it. The newspaper's got a full transcript of the conversation between the congressman and Biden. And sure enough, again, that congressman is then rewarded by being written up as one

• 15:12Rory Stewart?

  of the future rising stars of the party. Wow, wow.

• 15:15Alastair Campbell?

  That sort of thing, that sort of thing does go on. You've got to be very, very careful. It's why you, I always say to people, you know, in government, life is on the record. You never quite know who's watching, you never quite know who's listening. You shouldn't be paranoid, but you should understand that an awful lot of people are out to get you. The question there, what happens if you're caught leaking? Most leak inquiries go nowhere. Most leak inquiries lead to lots of energy being wasted. I think that you get a sense over time of whether people can be trusted. And I think within any given organisation, if the judgement is reached that somebody cannot be trusted, then you have to get rid of them.

• 15:52Rory Stewart?

  Were you ever unfair? Because I, I know that there was always, when I was a minister, there were always rumours that certain people leaked all the time.

• 16:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 16:01Rory Stewart?

  So it was, let's trust Gavin Williamson, I think more recently, Kemi Badenoch is accused of being an inveterate leaker.

• 16:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 16:07Rory Stewart?

  But of course, it could never quite be proven and they themselves denied it, but everybody in Number 10 was absolutely certain. Do you think when the Number 10 press people are very certain that these people are leaking, they usually are pretty certain about it? Or are they sometimes unfair in accusing people leaking who aren't leaking?

• 16:23Alastair Campbell?

  I'll give you a very good example of when I was unfair. And it relates to phone hacking. And this is why the phone hacking thing was so sort of insidious. And frankly, why I wish that the Leveson inquiry had been properly and fully implemented. And I was unfair to Carol Kaplan, who was a close friend of Cherie. Lots of stuff started appearing in the papers that I thought could only be coming from her. But of course, subsequently, I realised that it was coming through phones being hacked. So that was a time of being unfair. With politicians, over time, you get a sense of who you can trust.

• 17:03Alastair Campbell?

  And you get a sense of people that you're still willing to, to sort of treat with, even though you might have a few suspicions that they're, you know, they're putting stuff out there. But I guess, you know, what's going on at the moment within the Number 10 operation, we didn't talk on the main podcast about Sue Gray. But I, there's no doubt in my mind. That there are people inside the system, including, I'm afraid, civil servants, who are trying to do her in and they're feeding stuff out about her. And I think that is just wrong.

• 17:32Rory Stewart?

  And what happens? So I I noticed that because I noticed that, I think it was the Daily Mail had managed to get a photograph which somebody inside Number Ten had used their phone to take out of a window of Sue Gray having a row with a-

• 17:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, that's actually wrong. I saw that and was utterly horrified. So I looked into it. It actually, it wasn't taken in the garden. It was taken, you know, when you're walking up Downing Street to the, after you go past the sort of Number Nine Downing Street, and then there's a gap where sometimes cars park, and there's a little bit of grass there, there's a smaller garden there.

• 18:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Alastair Campbell?

  And that's where, and it was taken by a photographer walking up the street who spotted Sue Gray.

• 18:09Rory Stewart?

  My goodness, right. And that that produced a story about her having a massive row with-

• 18:14Alastair Campbell?

  A blazing row, which turns out to be complete bollocks. The photographer took the picture, gave it to the Mail, and they then set, I can't remember who it was, Pearce or Letts or one of those people, to sort of, you know, build an entire kind of fiction around it, based on the fact that the photographer said she looked really angry and she stormed off apparently. So that's going to happen. There's a very good example. If it had been somebody taking a picture inside Downing Street-

• 18:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Alastair Campbell?

  Of goings on in the garden, as happened during Covid to the Tories, if you remember. That picture of the more sort of lounging around, that is unforgivable. And that is worth trying to find out who is doing that.

• 18:48Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I think this is an important thing that we didn't touch on the podcast. It's a machinery of government points. So when David Cameron came in, he was very lucky to have inherited Jeremy Hayward, who'd been there all the way through from John Major, right, through Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's there. This is not the case at the moment. What's happened is Keir Starmer is coming in, and I think it's one of the things that's causing a problem for him. His Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, who was appointed by Boris Johnson when he was very young, and has been off on medical leave, so I think hasn't been in the office as much as as people would hope, doesn't seem to have the trust of the incoming administration, but equally isn't going anywhere. So they've got a sort of slight feeling that they may have a lame duck right at the heart of their civil service machine,

• 19:30Rory Stewart?

  who they don't fully trust and who doesn't trust them. They've brought in Sue Gray as the Prime Minister Chief of Staff. Who was a very senior civil servant and there's been this odd conversation around how much she's paid, where again, it seems as though it was a bit of a mistake because if she'd just been paid a few thousand pounds less, they wouldn't have been able to run the story. She's paid more than the prime minister. And I don't know why she did that, to be honest. I, it doesn't seem to me rocket science to think you might keep your salary just under the PM's if it's only a few thousand pounds difference.

• 19:58Alastair Campbell?

  Although there are plenty of precedents, by the way, you know, she doesn't set her own pay. There are plenty of examples you could have dug up from our time and also from the recent Conservative government where that was not an issue. It became an issue because at the moment, there is a sort of get Sue Gray thing going on. And I think the important thing to bear in mind on that, and I remember this is, this is something that gave me a lot of strength when I was getting, and I think Sue is to some extent playing the role that I played in terms of, you know, being the one that the press really want to try and get. And Tony Blair, I remember, was taken to be one side when I was really under the cosh and saying, listen, is this stuff getting to you? And I said, no, not really. And he said, the important thing to understand is they're doing this to you because they know that you're important to me and they're trying to take you out. And

• 20:43Alastair Campbell?

  if they take you out, then they'll move on to the next one. So as long as you understand that and you've got, fully got my backing in everything you do. And I think that's kind of part of what's going on now. Added to which, there will be people in the civil service who don't like the fact that Sue Gray went off and became a Labour Party person and is now back, you know, in a very, very senior position. And there may be some Labour people. I keep reading, by the way, this is where journalists just sort of repeat their own stuff. I keep reading that the, the problem is Morgan McSweeney, the political strategist, and Sue Gray not getting on. I know them both and have talked to them both, and I don't think that is where the problem lies. I really don't. I think there are other people in there who are just sort of feeding out stuff because that's how they get their kicks.

• 21:26Alastair Campbell?

  Now, when that happens, find out who they are and get them out of the system. That is the only way to deal with this nonsense.

• 21:33Rory Stewart?

  Okay, let's take a quick break and we'll be back in a minute.

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• 23:26Rory Stewart?

  Home birth advice. Georgia. I'm seven months pregnant, planning a home birth. After hearing briefly about midwife Rory delivering his baby at home, I'd appreciate any tips. I definitely would not come to me for tips. The key thing, obviously, is that the work in delivering a baby was done by my wife, Shashana. All I was really doing was following the instructions down 999 in my ear in a very easy birth. But it is a lovely thing if it works. I mean, take medical advice and work out what your risk level is. If it does work, it is a really lovely thing because we didn't have to go into hospital at all. Sasha was born here and Shashana was back in bed, our own bed, a couple of minutes after the baby was born. And Sasha never had to go into the hospital.

• 24:08Rory Stewart?

  And it was lovely to be able to spend those first few days, not in that sort of institution environment, but in your home. So it's a lovely thing if you're able to do it. Jacob Harris, question for you. The annual Labour Party Conference karaoke has produced some excellent social media clips in recent years. So I was wondering if either of you have a go-to karaoke song, or any memories of politicians giving iconic conference karaoke performances. Are you good at karaoke? You must be. You quite like singing, don't you? You and I were singing hymns together in Lambeth Palace with the Archbishop yesterday.

• 24:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we were. That was quite nice, wasn't it?

• 24:42Rory Stewart?

  That was good. I thought you had quite a nice voice. That was good.

• 24:44Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you. I noticed, by the way, that you, when you were doing the prayers thing, you speak in a very, very kind of formal way. Are you fearing God?

• 24:54Rory Stewart?

  I think it's probably that what you're seeing there is my sort of formal childhood voice preserved in some weird way in a church context. And this strange transatlantic drawl that I've developed is a later phenomenon. You're getting a glimpse.

• 25:07Alastair Campbell?

  It is not there at all. You sound like...

• 25:10Rory Stewart?

  Like a posh English person, yeah.

• 25:12Alastair Campbell?

  Very, very, yeah. And by the way, I noticed you didn't seem to know, as I did, that if there's a red dot at the end of a line of one of the Psalms, you have to have quite a long pause.

• 25:24Rory Stewart?

  That's, that was very good.

• 25:26Alastair Campbell?

  Did you not know that? Did you not know? Anyway, karaoke, karaoke.

• 25:29Rory Stewart?

  I love the way you're now posing as a kind of expert on church ritual.

• 25:33Alastair Campbell?

  By the way.

• 25:35Rory Stewart?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna take your opinion on karaoke, but less your opinion on church ritual. Go on, tell us about, tell us about your favourite karaoke song.

• 25:42Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, thank you for the music, Abba.

• 25:45Rory Stewart?

  That's the go-to. That's what you do.

• 25:47Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, because it's, what's so wonderful about it is you have the slow start, you know, "I'm nothing special. In fact, I'm a bit of a bore." And you go for that, and then you get to the booming bit. I actually do quite a lot of karaoke on my own, without a karaoke machine, in my bathroom.

• 26:02Rory Stewart?

  Oh, well, I guess, I guess a bathroom's good, aren't they? The good, good sort of echo qualities.

• 26:06Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah. That's where I practise my back pipes, in the bathroom.

• 26:09Rory Stewart?

  Ooh, ouch. That can't be good for your hearing.

• 26:13Alastair Campbell?

  What's your karaoke song when you're out clubbing?

• 26:15Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, no, no, I sing so badly out of tune. I can only sing decently if I've got someone next to me who's holding the tune. Otherwise, I change key in a horrible way.

• 26:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think I was booming out the hymn rather better than you did.

• 26:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you're definitely much better at music than I am. Okay, now, Tim, what books are you both reading this week? Okay, here are some books I'm reading, which I'm loving.

• 26:36Alastair Campbell?

  How many books are you reading at once?

• 26:38Rory Stewart?

  I am at the moment, I think, reading seven books.

• 26:41Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, for God's sake, Rory, that's just showing off. I'm reading one book, but it's Der Tod in Venedig. What does that mean?

• 26:47Rory Stewart?

  Death in Venice?

• 26:48Alastair Campbell?

  Well done. Well done.

• 26:50Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's a great book.

• 26:52Alastair Campbell?

  I'm reading it auf Deutsch.

• 26:53Rory Stewart?

  My goodness, wow, that's, that's.

• 26:55Alastair Campbell?

  No, Rory, I can't believe you, you can't honestly say you, you can't read seven books. It's impossible to do that and, and focus on them and absorb them. And do you ever not finish books?

• 27:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, often.

• 27:05Alastair Campbell?

  How many of the seven were you finished?

• 27:07Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I would say probably one out of seven.

• 27:11Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, wow.

• 27:12Rory Stewart?

  But they're not a fiction book. So let me give you an example of what they are. So I read Penguin History of Latin America, and there I'm particularly interested in the revolutionary moment, so independence. So I'll read the chapters on that, but I probably won't read the most recent bits. I'm reading Ed Conway's Material World, which is a wonderful book, looking at the stuff beneath our feet. But there again, you know, I'm particularly interested in his chapters on copper. Isabel Hardman, amazing book on the NHS called Fighting for Life.

• 27:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:41Rory Stewart?

  Great book, called The Unaccountability Machine, which if you haven't looked at, is just such a wonderful way of talking about Grenfell and our current world, because it's, as I guess the title tells you all, it's about the way in which our societies have become more complicated. It's very, very difficult to work out who to blame. I've been enjoying a book by Dan David called Lying for Money, about legendary frauds and what they tell us about how the modern world works. And I've also been watching The Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room. If you, if people haven't seen that, it's an old documentary now, but boy, it's a way of looking into capitalism going wrong. Just wonderful. And then finally, I mean, it's something that our more serious readers will know so well

• 28:25Rory Stewart?

  and love so much, but The Five Giants by Nick Timmons, which is a counter to the welfare state.

• 28:31Alastair Campbell?

  You're reading that now?

• 28:32Rory Stewart?

  I am.

• 28:32Alastair Campbell?

  God, I don't think I've ever read seven books at the same time. I normally read one fiction, one non-fiction. And I have them on the go at the same time.

• 28:39Rory Stewart?

  Well, you are reading in German. I mean, I'm not reading Thomas Mann in German. Yeah.

• 28:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, das ist wahr. Aber ich kann auch ein anderes Buch lesen. I must, there is a great book. Apparently, one of the books that's doing really, really well in Germany at the moment, which I want to get, because Marseille is one of my favourite cities. It's called Marseille.

• 28:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Alastair Campbell?

  So that's probably what I'm going to read next. Roy, let's go a little bit meta. How do you decide pod topics? Dr Ness, what is the process in releasing your podcast? Who decides the topics for discussion? Do you rehearse the discussions and who chooses which questions you will answer?

• 29:14Rory Stewart?

  We've never really discussed this, so I'll give you my view and then you give me your view.

• 29:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Rory Stewart?

  My view is the whole thing on the main pod, we decide what the main three or four subjects for the week are. So people who listened yesterday would have picked up that we decided the main subjects were Labour and its conference, Lebanon and Israel and long Covid. And then we'll go and do some research around those things, talk to people. I find it very, very useful having someone to call. I noticed on long Covid, you called a long Covid doctor.

• 29:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 29:42Rory Stewart?

  I'll call friends of mine on long Covid, or I'll call a friend in Lebanon to talk about what it's like being in Lebanon. I think in addition to the kind of written research, there's just no substitute for having a go to person who lives and breathes the subject all the time. Question time's a little bit more random. I mean, it genuinely is the questions that come flying in. But what's your view of our process?

• 30:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, the technical answer is that we have a WhatsApp group with us and the producers on it. And we sort of through the week, especially over the weekend, actually, will share quite a lot of thoughts and ideas and links. But basically, you and I decide. It's usually obvious what the main point of discussion is likely to be. But then other times we will do things like we did yesterday with long Covid. That was genuinely driven by people constantly saying, why do you never talk about long Covid? And then for the Q and A, I look at the Twitter ones, but we get them on all the different social media networks. We get them to send directly into [email protected].

• 30:47Alastair Campbell?

  And then the producers will look through those and I'll look through the Twitter ones and then we just sort of, but like today, we haven't told each other what questions we're going to ask and we never. Other than when we're sort of just sitting around talking before an event or something, we never discuss what we're going to say. So I didn't know what you were going to say about Lebanon. You didn't know what I was going to say about the Labour Party. We don't sort of rehearse what we're going to say at all.

• 31:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, which I think is probably part of the trick of it. I do love Question Time. There's so many questions. I mean, we can't get on to them all and it's sad. But, you know, this week we won't be able to do them, but we'll maybe we'll get back to them at some point. Lovely questions. Yeah.

• 31:22Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe we should do this one. The main man 28. Who is your favourite post-war US president? So this question allows us to plug November the 5th. You and I, Rory, we're heading to the United States. We're going to be joined by Anthony Scaramucci in The Rest is Politics US, Marina Hyde from The Rest is Entertainment and Dominic Sandbrook from The Rest is History. And we're going to take our viewers and listeners through the night as the Americans decide the future of the world. Who's your favourite post-war American president?

• 31:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, the one I know most about is Lyndon Johnson because of those incredible Robert Carrick biographies, just taking you through step by step his life. It's very difficult not to be in love with Kennedy, despite all that we know about him.

• 32:08Alastair Campbell?

  Scandal.

• 32:09Rory Stewart?

  And all the flaws and scandals. And of course, Obama is just so dignified, so smart, so thoughtful. Although I do slightly worry that he was maybe overly micromanaging and overly liable to try to run the presidency through a seminar. Anyway, over to you. Who's your?

• 32:25Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, John Soars, who worked with us in Downey Street, went on to be head of MI6. He always used to take the big oases. You and your fondness for Bill Clinton. It's really over the top. But I do, I do absolutely love Bill Clinton. But my favourite post-war American president is without any doubt Kamala Harris.

• 32:43Rory Stewart?

  Oh, beautiful. There was I thinking you were going to say Richard Nixon.

• 32:48Alastair Campbell?

  It has to be. It has to be Kamala Harris. Right, look, Rory, lovely to talk to you as ever.

• 32:54Rory Stewart?

  Lovely to talk to you. Speak soon. Bye bye.

• 32:56Alastair Campbell?

  Bye.

• 33:00Speaker 07

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 33:04Speaker 08

  On October 2nd.

• 33:05Speaker 07

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• 33:10Speaker 08

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• 33:13Speaker 07

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• 33:15Speaker 08

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• 33:17Speaker 09

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• 33:21Speaker 08

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 33:24Speaker 09

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• 33:26Speaker 08

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• 33:41Speaker 08

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