6. Globalism, Scottish Nationalism, and Rory's new job

Could this be the final ever episode of The Rest Is Politics after Rory's revelation last Friday, 1st April? Hopefully not! After more terrible news from Ukraine and some countries refusing to shun Russia, could this crisis herald the end of a globalism? Also, reaction to populist leaders Orban and Le Pen gaining support in Europe, the ethics of working with questionable regimes, and what first attracted Rory Stewart to the Conservative Party? Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson 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. 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/RestIsPolitics. That's nordvpn.com/RestIsPolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:13Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest Is Politics. I'm Alastair Campbell.

• 1:16Rory Stewart?

  And I'm Rory Stewart.

• 1:17Alastair Campbell?

  And we have a lot to get through today. Cost of living crisis, Channel 4 vandalism, I call it. They call it privatisation. Horrible, horrible, horrible news from Ukraine. But first, Rory, I mean, honestly, is this going to be our last ever podcast? Am I going to have to sack you?

• 1:34Rory Stewart?

  Well, you did sack me, didn't you? No, I sent out, for most listeners won't necessarily be aware, but I sent out a tweet on April Fool's Day, saying, "Very honoured to be appointed as the Prime Minister's Director of Communications." And it was extraordinary. It got 5 million views. The BBC ran it very solemnly, bottom of the ticker, Rory Stewart takes over as Director of Communications for Boris Johnson.

• 2:01Alastair Campbell?

  That was funny. That was genuinely funny, that they didn't even see through it on April 1st. My daughter, my daughter was taken in.

• 2:09Rory Stewart?

  Well, what's so, so weird about it, Alistair, is that it's, I, I, I'm, it's inconceivable for me that I could ever be in Boris Johnson's cabinet. Even weirder that I could be as director of communications. I guess the thing that we've picked up from talking to you is that the reason your relationship with Tony Blair worked is that you felt immense loyalty towards Tony Blair. You agreed with him on things. So you were able to speak for him. The idea that I'd be able to speak for Boris Johnson seems kind of insane.

• 2:35Alastair Campbell?

  But you know, I, I mentioned to you the other day that I'm reading this book at the moment, The Revenge of Power by Moise Naim. And one of the things he says in there, which I think is interesting, is that what's happened with polarization, of which of course Johnson's quite a big part, and populism, is that people are kind of, we're becoming programmed to be more liable to believe something that's not true. So even though you say it's absurd that you would work for Boris Johnson, it's kind of, people think, well, it's not as absurd as Nadine Dorries being in the cabinet. And it's, it's not as, it's not as absurd as him flying back from COP to rig the rules to help Owen Patterson. So crazy stuff happens and it makes you think that when you see someone that looks a bit crazy on the surface,

• 3:20Alastair Campbell?

  it might not be. But I've got to tell you, Rory, my daughter phoned me up in an absolute state. She said, if, if that man is working for that man, you are not doing a podcast with that man.

• 3:32Rory Stewart?

  It's incredible. I mean, I got all these very, very polite texts and WhatsApps from these diplomats, Middle Eastern diplomats. Congratulations, sir, on your new appointment.

• 3:41Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God.

• 3:42Rory Stewart?

  I have British ambassadors writing to me asking whether this was going to do. I had the ex-chair of my local Conservative association saying, I mean, he'd really put a brave face on it. He was like, well, Boris, you know, I really agree with you on Boris, Rory, but I'm glad to see you've swallowed your pride and, you know, I, I suppose, you know, you're the best hope they've got to try to pull it together. So it went on and on like this. And, and one of the things I found very difficult to explain, people, and this actually mattered because I think, unless I'm being unrealistic, tell me if I'm, I'm being pompous here, but I think it's, I think it's possible that if I'd stayed on as international development secretary, so I'd run against Boris in leadership, he defeated me. If I'd agreed to stay on as international development secretary,

• 4:24Rory Stewart?

  I might have been able to defend the 0.7% and keep that department independent, maybe. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it because the truth is that if you're in his cabinet, you have to be out there day in, day out on television defending him. It's not, it's not possible to serve in Boris Johnson's cabinet and think about him in the way that I do.

• 4:45Alastair Campbell?

  You basically cut and posted Ghetto Harry's tweet, didn't you?

• 4:49Rory Stewart?

  No, I, I took, I took Steve Barclay's.

• 4:51Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, that's right. I knew I'd seen it before. I knew I'd seen it before. Steve Barclay's, yeah. Um, but no, I, I think people would, and the other thing that was interesting, of course, is that there, there were this thing about polarization. There were lots of people saying, God, you're disgusting. How could you work for that guy? And then lots of other people saying, as your constituency guide had said, you know, well, this is good. This is good to see sort of, you know, somebody being serious and grown up about this. Um, but there were very, there were very few people. In fact, I think I blew your, by sort of doing my thing about how I was sacking you as co-podcast host and, and having the French commentator Avril Blag, a multilingual

• 5:33Alastair Campbell?

  joke, that is, Brexiteers. The, you know, I think I blew it a bit, but you got, honestly, I don't think I've ever seen a tweet by you that got so much traction. It was absolutely.

• 5:41Rory Stewart?

  It was, it was, it was five million views in something like three hours. Yeah.

• 5:45Alastair Campbell?

  It was crazy.

• 5:46Rory Stewart?

  And I think half the people now following me on Twitter assume that I'm speaking on behalf of Boris Johnson every time I say anything.

• 5:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, where, where you're not, I'm, I'm gathering from the backdrop that you're back in Jordan and you're channeling, the last person I saw wearing a waistcoat like that was Hamid Kazai.

• 6:07Rory Stewart?

  Certainly got it, Brian. So, Alastair, where are you?

• 6:11Alastair Campbell?

  I am in a place which I've been told I should not call Ivory Coast. It's Côte de Divoire. They do not like it when you translate it to English. So, yeah, I'm in the Côte de Divoire. Um, and it's, I'm having a really, really interesting time, actually. Um, I've, and I've just been doing the first four hours of what after three days will be 17 hours talking about strategy.

• 6:39Rory Stewart?

  Wow.

• 6:40Alastair Campbell?

  But they, but it's really interesting, you know, I. I mean, honestly, these these countries that get so little coverage in the UK and the European debate. But it's so interesting what's going on here. And and also, it's very the the session I've just done, actually, the Minister of Communication was there. And he was talking about this whole thing about disinformation and the impact of social media. And the the point I've just been making that people want to believe lies rather than sort of think that something a bit more, a bit less interesting might be true. And he was talking about this becoming part of the of the government's education programme. This whole thing about media literacy and and and how to establish what a fact is.

• 7:24Alastair Campbell?

  And we got into this whole debate at the conference this morning about whether there is such a thing as an objective as an objective truth anymore. And of course, what's going on in Ukraine and four years of Trump and and and I would argue Johnson's in the same in the same category. I think it's a real problem that people are really getting to a place of thinking, well, there isn't really an objective truth anymore.

• 7:47Rory Stewart?

  And what what what's it like? I mean, have you been to Cote d'Ivoire before? Is this your first time or have you been before?

• 7:52Alastair Campbell?

  First time, first time.

• 7:53Rory Stewart?

  So, I mean, it's a very, very interesting country, isn't it? Kind of coup d'etat, civil wars. I think the the economy in twenty fourteen was about where it was in the nineteen seventies. It lost kind of thirty years of growth during all that violence.

• 8:09Alastair Campbell?

  But they've grown they've grown about seven percent a year since.

• 8:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and what what and what happens? What do you think about when you're going there? Do you spend a lot of time trying to get your head around the history? Or do you tend to go without too many preconceptions? Do you worry about the governments you're dealing with? Do you have to sort of check them out? I mean, what's how does how does it work?

• 8:26Alastair Campbell?

  Um, yeah, you do. And but but I look, I've partly because it is, I mean, and I, you know, like you, I've been to lots and lots and lots of countries. I think I'm well into three figures. But I've never been here, so that was interesting to come to a place. And I was invited actually by this business organisation that's, you know, there were government ministers at my event. But it's a this is a we're a business organisation that's doing it. And they were in there, it was interesting that we talked about mental health, deforestation, all sorts of stuff going on. But I had this meeting with the minister and you talked about coup d'etat. He was, he was actually describing what it's like living in this region. So if you go the five neighbouring countries, you've got Liberia off to the west, you've got Guinea,

• 9:10Alastair Campbell?

  you've got Burkina Faso, you've got Mali, and of those three, all three have had coup d'etat. Two of them have got real huge problems with terrorism. And then you've got Ghana, which is, you know, probably the most stable of the lot of them. And he was saying that that, that has real implications for their priorities as a government. The security has become a much, much, much bigger priority. But in answer to your question, I, I, I do try to read up a bit on, on the history. I, I, I always think it's worth checking in with sort of experts at the Foreign Office and just sort of check out what they think. And, and then just, you know, you find people that you know, who have got a little bit of

• 9:53Alastair Campbell?

  a, a feel for the place. But then when you get here, I just like kind of talking frankly to anybody. And I'll tell you another thing which I picked up, it's quite interesting, is the, there's a lot more, sympathy is the wrong word, but there's a lot more plague on both your houses in the Ukraine situation.

• 10:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, now that's, that's something I've really been picking up. So I, I mean, and I'd love to hear what you're getting, Kurt, do you want? I mean, I was really struck. I mean, I'm, I'm meeting, you know, very senior people in different countries around the Middle East who are sharing conspiracy theories, saying there was nobody in the hospital in Mariupol, people who are producing huge defences with Putin. And it's a sort of, almost a kind of knee jerk thing going on in a lot of the world, of people just deliberately taking the other side, as though they're just sort of in the habit of taking the side against the United States. And, and you've seen Indonesia has just announced that it's, it's not going to accept Russia being excluded from G20. So you've got, and these photographs, which

• 10:54Rory Stewart?

  you can see of Lavrov standing with South Africa, India, Brazil, China. It's, it's very striking that we feel that it's brought the whole world together, but really in some ways, what it's done, it's brought Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States and... You know, Canada and New Zealand, Australia together, but there hasn't been quite that global movement you would expect.

• 11:17Alastair Campbell?

  I was in, I had one chap I was talking to who who said that, look, you know, Putin's obviously doing really, really bad things. Uh, but then next sentence said, but you know, it's Joe Biden's fault. I said, why, why do you say it's Joe Biden's fault? It's a world we had four years of Trump without a war. And then Biden comes in this war. And I said, yeah, but Joe Biden didn't start this war. And he went straight down the line, which of course, you know, the Putin apologists Farage and that lot all do is, you know, well, NATO provoked this by poking the bear. Um, and then the other thing which I think, I mean, I don't know if you've seen any of this Russian TV coverage. Um, there was one yesterday with a reporter embedded and they they announced him as an embedded reporter with the Russian troops.

• 12:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:00Alastair Campbell?

  Saying that he had seen, he had been with the Russian soldiers and knew that they had not been committing any of these atrocities and could, and and was stating as a fact that after they left that area, I think he even mentioned the Brits that, you know, the Ukrainians helped by the Brits, they know how to do these things. They moved in all these dead bodies and then they got the, you call it the necrophiliac Western media.

• 12:24Rory Stewart?

  That's right. So that was also on Russian state TV. There was, there's a big chat show that happens regularly on Russian state TV where again somebody was like, this is a British intelligence operation. One of the problems, though, watching this stuff, I find, is that you see it on Twitter, in my case, in these sort of 90 second, two minute clips. And it's very difficult to work out the context of what else is happening in that TV debate. Are there other voices in that room that are taking other views or is everybody pushing the same Putin line or other crazier versions of it? I mean, for example, there's an op ed which has caused a lot of consternation, which just appeared in the Russian newspapers, saying Ukraine must be wiped off the face of the map, the country can't exist, the elite must be killed because their minds can't be changed, that people have to be purified through war.

• 13:08Rory Stewart?

  Again, it's difficult knowing how representative this is or whether there are other more moderate voices out there which somehow are making it through or whether the whole thing's being whipped up. Have you got a sense of that?

• 13:18Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I mean, the question that you have to ask yourself there is when the Kremlin machine hears that kind of thing, are they nodding along because it's part of their broader strategy? The answer to that is yes. And I think the other thing that comes through this book I'm reading is just how, just how extensive, way more extensive than I think we realised at the time. When, I remember when the security services in the UK started to say there's this new form of hybrid warfare that Putin is pursuing, and it's going to occupy a lot of our attention, a lot of our resources. I don't think we really took it that seriously. And I think when you read the extent to which, and we're obviously talking about Ukraine now, but then this guy, this guy Naim, he says that for him,

• 14:00Alastair Campbell?

  the two big turning points in terms of Russian, Russian special operations and information warfare and so forth with Brexit and Trump. And then, right across the Sahel, and, and so the, the sense of, I think we wanted to persuade ourselves that Russian talk of all their great influence was actually part of this strategy of projecting themselves as more powerful, rather than that they were in this information space much, much more powerful.

• 14:28Rory Stewart?

  There's another thing I was thinking about there, which is that part of that hybrid warfare is of course cyber attacks. And that's something we were really expecting, and something we talked about, I think, a couple of weeks ago. But it's barely begun. You can now see the beginnings of Russian cyber attacks happening on companies in Europe. If that really takes off, the world is going to change a great deal. Over the last three, four weeks, we've learned that there's going to be a huge change in the way the world energy markets work, oil and gas, huge change in what's going to happen to food and fertiliser. But if we add to that attacks on the internet, then most of the things we've assumed about an integrated world are going to fall away, or a lot of them are going to fall away.

• 15:08Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 15:09Rory Stewart?

  And people are going to start getting wary about China, not just Russia. People are going to focus on the fact that if China goes into Taiwan, nearly half the world's semiconductors are made in Taiwan. And we're just beginning to understand what that kind of disruption means when we think about what's happening to our energy prices, what's happening to food. I think this is going to lead to a world which is going to end up with much more protectionism. And it's something that countries like the United States are going to find more comfortable. They're big countries, they can grow their own food, they've got their own, they've got all their own oil and gas, they've got their own technology companies. But countries like Britain are going to find themselves in a very awkward position.

• 15:44Alastair Campbell?

  Also, I don't, I don't think that we're, as a country, I don't think we're remotely educated what people mean when we talk about cyber warfare. I mean, a lot of it can be done at a very sort of low, constant buggeration level. And then they can also do the, you know, the big wipeouts of, you know, financial resources, healthcare systems, nuclear systems and what have you. And, you know, they might, that might be a little bit like the nuclear thing. It might be one place where they think, well, we've got to be careful because we know that they can do the same in return. But I think what we've seen with Putin is he always thinks that he'll get away with more because the West is just not, not prepared to kind of, you know, do the really, really, really difficult things.

• 16:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. I was thinking, when we began this five, six weeks ago, I was much more optimistic and was thinking how in a way it looked as though Putin had really shot himself in the foot and united the world against him. But I now feel that almost whatever happens in Ukraine, you know, whether he hangs on to Eastern Ukraine or expands or leaves, what he's really done is kind of divided and shattered the world, that this is the end of comfortable stories about globalization, comfortable stories about open trade. And that's going to mean big impacts on our economy.

• 16:59Alastair Campbell?

  And also, you know, Orban winning in Hungary, I think we have to face the fact that, yes, it's a bit like Putin, he's got virtual total control of the media, control of the courts, et cetera, et cetera. But this is a member of the European Union. Where it is perfectly obvious to me that he, his closeness to Putin helped him in that election rather than hindered him. And I think the same, to a lesser extent, might be happening in France with Le Pen.

• 17:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:29Alastair Campbell?

  I think that, I think, as you say, Western opinion, or what we perceive Western opinion to be, is Russia's a terrible, Putin's a terrible man doing terrible things and this is all their fault. But there's an awful lot of people who are sort of saying, yeah, well, at least he's standing up for himself. At least he's sort of sticking it to the Americans. And so I'm, I've just been in, I was in France for a few days before coming here, and two observations there. One was just how low key the election was. You know, normally in France, you see posters on every tree, you see them on, you know, they've got all the official posters of all the candidates in all the towns and villages, but very little apart from that. And the second thing is just that it's just becoming normalized, the

• 18:12Alastair Campbell?

  idea that the expectation that the runoff's going to be Macron against Le Pen again, and that she's in a far stronger position than she was.

• 18:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it does, it definitely looks as though she could win, doesn't it? And it, and it, and one of the questions is whether Ukraine is going to be affecting his popularity for positive or negative. Another thing is that we, when we tell an optimistic story about Ukraine, we say that it's about democracy standing up towards authoritarianism. But I think there's another story, which is that actually these kinds of conflicts can strengthen populism in democracies. Because crises can play well for showmen. It can distract people from the sort of practical business of everyday life and put it on to this very melodramatic stage. We can see this in a small way in Britain. I mean, it's not, you know, obviously, I don't want to compare Britain to what's happening in these other countries, but in

• 19:03Rory Stewart?

  a small way, you can see an example of it in the way that Jacob Rees-Mogg can very easily now say, oh, no, we don't need to think about Partygate. We've got much bigger things to think about in Ukraine.

• 19:12Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. I'm not sure it's working for them, though, to be honest, Rory. I'm really not.

• 19:16Rory Stewart?

  Well, it looks, yeah, go on.

• 19:17Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's working within the Conservative Party, which of course is the only vehicle that can get rid of Johnson, but I don't think it's working with the public. Uh, and I, I saw, I was alerted again through social media. I've got all these messages, you must watch Reece Mog on the LBC interview yesterday. So I went back and watched bits of it. And he was, I think utterly ridiculous on so many levels. Um, and I'm not sure, I think the British public do still find this whole party thing pretty offensive. Um, but you know, there was a, there was a headline, the main BBC UK news headline yesterday was Johnson congratulates Zelensky on pushback from Kiev.

• 19:58Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 19:59Alastair Campbell?

  I thought, well, you know, there's a, like, almost like Johnson has sent Koles, Zelensky out to do something and he's done it and he's saying, well done, my boy. Um, so he is definitely, you know, I, I agree that it's on, I think on a superficial level, it's helped him politically. But I also think, I think when you think of all the other stuff that's going on, the parties, um, the, the continued lying, which I think is a, a real problem for our, becoming a real problem for our democracy, but also the, um, you know, Sunak's spring statement and the accompanied by these, um, massive rises in people's energy bills. I mean, th- th- that is the stuff that I think is really going to start to hurt, um, hurt the government.

• 20:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that, I think that'll hurt more than.

• 20:42Alastair Campbell?

  And so it should, and so it should frankly, because you know, they go on about, what, what was it they promised in the Brexit referendum, they're going to get, it'll help us get lower energy prices. Well, one of the things I did notice in France is that people were not ranting and raving about energy bills because they've kept them pretty low and they'd kept it pretty low as a sovereign, independent government within the European Union, telling the energy companies, you keep the bloody prices down. So, um.

• 21:08Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, as long as Rishi has a nice holiday in California, that's the main thing.

• 21:12Rory Stewart?

  The energy prices are crazy, aren't they? And I think the the point about energy and food is that in Britain and everywhere around the world, obviously, it affects the very poorest much more brutally than it affects anybody else.

• 21:23Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, we did we did have, we did, Rory, have a few complaints last week that we were a bit too negative and a bit too down about the world. And we've been very, very down so far. So I've I've actually got some very, very positive news for you.

• 21:37Rory Stewart?

  Go on then.

• 21:38Alastair Campbell?

  Somebody has sent me the music, the sheet music to play the Ukrainian National Anthem on the bagpipes.

• 21:46Alastair Campbell?

  So when I get, when I get back home, that is, I shall be learning it. And I just wondered whether, there were a lot of calls for duets last week, Rory, when you admitted that you'd learnt the pipes as a kid.

• 21:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, we could, we could give it a go. We could give it a go, I think this whole, this whole podcast could just become one long bagpipe music discussion. That's the way to go. I think that's the niche they're looking for, the producers.

• 22:08Alastair Campbell?

  Now, listen, one final thing before we, before we maybe go to break. What, what do you make of the, I called it vandalism in the introduction, but Channel Four privatisation? And I, I'll be very careful on this because I know, I remember if I'm going to name names, Andrew Mitchells, your former colleague, said this to me. He said, you've just got to understand that this government, they basically now, all they're doing is, is doing stuff to try and rile people like, you know, wet liberals like you. So, but I do think that the privatisation of Channel Four is straight out of the Orban playbook. It's sort of, you know, make it difficult for people to vote. Orban did that. Johnson's doing that. And on the media, basically try and get, you know, big control of the media

• 22:48Alastair Campbell?

  by putting your, place people in key regulatory positions and basically try to punish the liberal, critical press and media.

• 22:58Rory Stewart?

  I'm, I'm a big opponent of the Channel Four move. It doesn't make any sense to me. It doesn't get any public subsidy. It's producing good programming. And the idea that it's going to be able to complete with Netflix or Amazon that have, you know, as we know, turnovers of, in the case of Amazon, over a trillion, in the case of Netflix, a hundred billion.

• 23:16Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely absurd.

• 23:17Rory Stewart?

  Is mad. Hey, but I tell you, you, you had a better challenge for me. Before your bagpipe music, you said, did I have anything positive? And the answer is, for once in my life, I've got something really, really positive.

• 23:26Alastair Campbell?

  Go on.

• 23:27Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so I was in Rwanda, as you know, last week, and I went to see these programmes giving cash to people. And even though I sounded pretty positive when I spoke to you, I was only halfway down the road and I hadn't really seen the programmes. And I can tell you, it is unbelievable. I've never seen anything like it in thirty years working on international development. Literally, I saw villages which a year ago were some of the poorest communities in the world, and a year later, they've gone from a quarter of people owning a cow, it would be three quarters of them, to everybody fixing their roofs, to everybody signing up to the government health insurance, to every single house having its own lavatory, which improves

• 24:09Rory Stewart?

  sanitation, to people buying bicycles, shops popping up, and have they done it? Complete transformation. They've done it just by giving eight hundred dollars to each household.

• 24:17Alastair Campbell?

  It was a thousand last week.

• 24:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, this is eight hundred dollars, unconditional. Do whatever you like with it. And it was so interesting, because I went to see government ministers later, and they were so against it. They kept saying, "This is crazy, you've got to make it conditional, these people will just waste the money on beer, you've got to buy a bicycle for them" or whatever. It was extraordinary. Literally, and they've done it across now eight hundred and fifty thousand people. If you were to go to an NGO and say, "Can you transform the lives of eight hundred and fifty thousand people in a year?"

• 24:51Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, where does the money come from?

• 24:53Rory Stewart?

  The money's mostly coming from philanthropists in the United States. So these are people who've been convinced of this very difficult thing to convince people. I mean, I find it difficult even explaining to my friends and family. I come back and say, "I've found this miracle. Everything we've been doing in international development for the last thirty years has been nonsense."

• 25:10Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, don't say that, because that will justify them. They'll say, "Even Rory Stewart recognizes we should have got rid of DIPIT."

• 25:17Rory Stewart?

  "But we should have kept DIPIT, but we should have spent the money on cash, assholes."

• 25:22Alastair Campbell?

  No, that does sound amazing. After our discussion last week, by the way, I did go away and dig a little bit more into the universal basic income.

• 25:34Alastair Campbell?

  Issue and I I think my conclusion is that while it is a brilliant idea for the sort of programme that you've seen, it won't necessarily work where you have an existing social security system, uh, because and and and actually that that would almost certainly lead to a rise in poverty because all, you know, housing, childcare, disability costs are going to vary so much that a flat rate system wouldn't work and you'd have to put taxes up a lot. Um, so that was my kind of.

• 26:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I I my gut instinct, I'm afraid, is that that may be true. The it's it's I mean, there's two hundred and thirty papers on this and the research on places like Norway and people question it, but seems a bit depressing.

• 26:19Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 26:20Rory Stewart?

  Those.

• 26:21Alastair Campbell?

  Because Norway, is Norway not one of the top two per capita countries in the world? I think them and the Qataris are sort of right up there.

• 26:28Rory Stewart?

  But I I think you've got to imagine that in the developing world, it's very different. The lady that I was with, I guess now six days ago.

• 26:36Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 26:37Rory Stewart?

  Uh, she was in a mud dwelling with no possessions, was nothing in the house except for one cooking pot and a plastic water bottle with its top chopped off. She, her daughter had gone away to town where she was earning nine dollars a month as a maid and she was sending six dollars a month back to her mother in exchange for her mother looking after her three kids. So granny, three grandchildren, six dollars a month, three dollars a month of that being spent on rent, which left her three dollars a month for the kids, didn't own any land, no water or soap ready to clean the kids. So they looked, you know, dirty, as you can imagine, nothing, nothing to sleep on on the floor. And the impact on that life

• 27:22Rory Stewart?

  of giving somebody eight hundred dollars is unbelievable.

• 27:25Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:26Rory Stewart?

  She, because she has been, I mean, this is why it's grotesque to say that she's not going to spend the money responsibly. She's been dreaming for twenty years about what she would do if she had a bit of money.

• 27:36Alastair Campbell?

  Before we leave Rwanda, uh, because we're democratic, interactive kind of people, uh, I did get another complaint from one of my fellow Hampstead Heath Parliament Hill Lido swimmers, Russell, who felt that we were both too soft on Kagami. He says, I can understand why Rory wasn't going to be too critical as he was still in country. Kagame has done some great things for which he's due every credit, but meddling in the DRC with massive loss of life, exploitation of conflict minerals, assassination of the political opponents, very limited democracy, to mention but a few. And he also asks, and who brokered the sponsorship deal with Arsenal? Has anybody ever calculated the benefits which

• 28:17Alastair Campbell?

  the average Rwandan citizen has derived from this? So did anybody tell you Rory that they were really pleased that Rwanda had a sponsorship deal with Arsenal?

• 28:25Rory Stewart?

  No, nobody told me that. No, I mean, actually, the question around Kagame is a really interesting question, and it's the same question, I guess, that people have around, the biggest development success story, of course, in the world is China, which took 350 million people out of poverty since 1980, or in fact Ethiopia. It's so difficult to judge, isn't it? I mean, it's absolutely right, that is an authoritarian regime. There are some very disturbing reports around human rights. And on the other hand, he came into a country that had just emerged from a genocide. He has created what seems to be a genuine one Rwanda policy. Nobody's talking to you about who was who to, who's Tutsi anymore.

• 29:07Rory Stewart?

  The development improvements have been unbelievable. And he would, of course, say that that was the only way he could do it. Now, we've got to hope that isn't true. We've got to hope that there are ways to take a country like that and turn it around and give that sort of growth while having a genuine, open civil society and a democracy. But I guess the pushback from many Rwandans would be that they feel that they're in a much better position they were in 10, 20 years ago. And I guess I would have been much more, it's a difficult thing to say, I would have been, I had a bit of a bit of an argument with Kagame when I saw him last, when I was the Difit Minister. And I remember, you know, I raised human rights with him and tried to, you know, publicize our anxieties about this. And he pushed back

• 29:52Rory Stewart?

  very hard. And I guess.

• 29:55Rory Stewart?

  Over time, I suppose, maybe this is just me losing confidence. I'm not so confident now that I'm certain that I can judge someone like that quite in the way that I felt I could five years ago.

• 30:05Alastair Campbell?

  No, and the truth is that they will, you know, those who are minded to be autocratic will be taking solace and comfort from what's happening in Russia.

• 30:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 30:14Alastair Campbell?

  Rather than from feeling that it challenges them. By the way, maybe final point for a break. One of the most interesting things I've discovered here is 24% of the population are classified as immigrant. And yet, they don't have, they're saying that actually their cohesion.

• 30:30Rory Stewart?

  And so let's just come back, come back to you for a second, because I think this is really interesting, because, you know, I'm now putting you in the same spot I was in Rwanda last week, which is asking you about your hosts in Cote d'Ivoire. But it is a question for all of us, which is that you want to help, I want to help, we want to support countries developing. And the truth of the matter is that almost every developing country has challenges, things that perplex you. I mean, in Cote d'Ivoire, I believe, its former president, the former prime minister boycotted the elections last time. So there will be many people that maybe you're not talking to, who are going to have very strong complaints about the government of Cote d'Ivoire. And yet, you're out there talking to me from your bedroom, helping them. I guess, we've got to hope, and maybe this is what

• 31:11Rory Stewart?

  politics is about, that you try to compromise, you try to be pragmatic, but that you set limits to it, that there are people we don't work with, and there are people that we do work with, but that somewhere in the middle is a lot of messiness.

• 31:24Alastair Campbell?

  There's no doubt about that. But the point, the point they were making about this 24% figure, one of them was, one of the ministers was telling me that he went to a meeting in Brussels with his European, and he was basically saying to them, you know, you lot have a kind of, you know, an absolute panic attack every time that, you know, you think you might get 1% of your population coming from immigrants, you know, we've got a quarter, and it's actually going pretty well. And it's, I think it's back to the whole thing about whether you, whether you view other people as a threat or an opportunity. And this in a region where there are so many people who are a genuine threat. And yet they seem, still seem to see people coming.

• 32:06Rory Stewart?

  And we owe so much to them, because of course what they're doing by taking those people is relieving the pressure that would otherwise come into Europe.

• 32:11Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 32:12Rory Stewart?

  And Uganda, for example, is unbelievable. They take South Sudanese refugees and until recently, they literally gave them land. So instead of having them in refugee camps, people would have fields, would have farms, would be able to set up. A lot of northern Uganda. Uganda's been extraordinary. Hundreds of thousands of people it's taken with very little public fanfare or fuss. And that's true, right the way across Africa, all the displaced from the conflicts in DRC, Somalia, South Sudan are being hosted by neighbouring countries. So we often pat ourselves on the back and, you know, talk about what we're doing in asylum, but in practice, African countries are doing so much for their neighbours.

• 32:48Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, if we haven't tripled our listenership in Africa by the end of this episode, Rory, I'll be very, very, very disappointed. But I think we should take a break.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 33:16Speaker 03

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• 33:23Speaker 04

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• 33:28Speaker 02

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• 33:41Speaker 04

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• 33:43Speaker 02

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• 34:46Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics and Rory, some news. We have a sponsor and apparently this is very, very important in Podland. And I'm very happy because even though I did not know they were discussing this with the producers, our sponsor is the weekly newspaper that I write a diary for, aka The New European. Very good, on brand for the podcast, I would say. I think so, I think so. For those who don't know, The New European was born as a four-week pop-up, bit of a tantrum really, out of the Brexit referendum, and it's still going strong six years later. And my experience is that people who get it absolutely love it.

• 35:26Alastair Campbell?

  There is lots of really well-written, genuinely interesting stuff in there on all sorts of issues in Britain, and a lot about abroad. And stuff that you wouldn't read anywhere else because frankly, too much of our media has become so self-obsessed and nationalistic these days. And some very beautiful front covers. They are. In fact, we're talking about possible exhibition. So there you go. They've also got a slogan that you'd appreciate, Rory, because I think it sort of sums up a little bit how we try to do the podcast, think without borders. And it definitely sums up their attitude to journalism, lots of fresh perspectives, and not just on politics, because half of what they do is a celebration of a great art and culture in Europe.

• 36:07Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, the news is they have come up with a special offer exclusively for listeners to The Rest Is Politics. For just one pound a week, you can get an annual digital subscription. Or if you're like me and you prefer newsprint in your hands, you can get the print version delivered to your home for two pounds a week, which is half the price you'd pay at the newsagent. It will also give you full access to everything online, including every back copy and every single word I have ever written for The New European in its six years. What is not to like about that? All for less than the price of a cup of coffee.

• 36:43Rory Stewart?

  A bargain.

• 36:44Alastair Campbell?

  Indeed. So if you refuse to accept the nationalist inward looking bullshit of so much of our politics and media, then sign up to the New European at www dot theneweuropean.co.uk forward slash rest is politics. www dot theneweuropean.co.uk forward slash rest is politics. Okay.

• 37:10Rory Stewart?

  Lovely. Right. Well, okay. After, after that amazing, God, they're very lucky to have you as their, as their, as their communications director. Um, let's, let's.

• 37:19Alastair Campbell?

  I'm a columnist.

• 37:20Rory Stewart?

  You're a columnist. That was very elegant, that. I know, I've had such an elegant ad break. Okay, questions?

• 37:26Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Joe Bardley has asked a question which says, for Rory, what fundamental beliefs caused you to align yourself with the Conservative Party and have they changed? I think, have the beliefs changed or has the party changed? I think it means the beliefs. If so, what would it take for your support to shift fully towards another party? And I promise you that I'm not posing as Joe Bardley here. That is genuinely from somebody called Joe Bardley, Rory.

• 37:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, I, I've been thinking about this a lot because, um, obviously my experience with the Conservative Party, my experience in government was in the end, pretty difficult. And it was pretty difficult, to be honest, not just with Boris Johnson, it was pretty difficult, um, actually even with David Cameron and George Osborne. And I, I, I had, um, it's a strange thing to say because I know she gets written off a lot, but I, I had an easier time with Theresa May. I could sort of understand the predicament she got herself in and I, I respected what she was trying to do. But the bigger picture of what's happened to conservatism is, is difficult. Why did I get involved? I got involved because there are many things

• 38:34Rory Stewart?

  that I believe in, which I thought the Conservative Party stood for. So I'm somebody who had been working in community development in Afghanistan. And I feel it sounds very naive saying this, but I felt, you know, I'd learnt that communities knew more, could do more than distant officials. And I felt the labour approach was often a bit too centralised. And it sounded really naive. I believed David Cameron, the big society. I liked the idea of the big society. I liked the idea of communities mobilising themselves and coming together.

• 39:05Alastair Campbell?

  I thought the big society, by the way, was classic Cameron. It was a great slogan. You had no substance behind it.

• 39:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think that's one of the problems, to be honest. And thinking this through, I think the same is probably true of the difficulty I had ultimately with the 0.7% on international aid. Because I think, and I think that's in the end what ruined a lot of these things. There's a common theme here. Big society, 0.7% on international aid, the Brexit referendum, the House of Lords reform. In every case, Cameron took a position, but it was difficult to really feel that he fully absorbed it, fully believed in it. He often seemed to be sort of apologising for his own position, compromising with his opponents. And the problem with doing that, the most obvious case obviously is Brexit, where obviously he was on the Remain side, but he spent a lot of time criticising the European Union, talking about how he's going to change the European Union. And the problem with doing

• 39:56Rory Stewart?

  that is that his opponents will have felt, he doesn't really believe in this, does he? He's sort of accepting all our points and he's just defending it for the sake of it. Whereas if he dabs-

• 40:06Alastair Campbell?

  Also, also, also, he forbade, you know, this sort of banning any attacks on Johnson and Gove and Cummings and the rest, and for all the lies they were telling. No blue on blue.

• 40:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 40:17Alastair Campbell?

  It was just another little party game going on with his mates from, dare I say, the school you all went to.

• 40:23Rory Stewart?

  And I often felt, I, it's schools in there again, I often felt the, that if he actually had found the voice to genuinely be passionate about international aid, instead of apologising for it and saying it's wasted and we're going to prove it, and really- Explain what he loved about the European Union. Um, actually, some people might have come behind him. There might have been a sort of loyalty. It would have been the same maybe on the House of Lords reform, where people might have felt, okay, I don't really agree with him, but he's my leader. He really believes in this. I owe him some loyalty. I'm gonna, I'm gonna get behind him on this, but.

• 40:54Alastair Campbell?

  So what about, what about the last part of Joe's question? If so, what would it take for you to support, your support to shift fully towards another party?

• 41:01Rory Stewart?

  I think I'd have to feel that, and I've left the Conservative Party now. I'm very much an independent. So I'm looking now to see if it's possible to build something, I guess, in the centre ground. And that would be about passionate moderation, uh, which sounds ludicrous, right? In a, in a, in a populous world. But I do think that, and it's about reality. I mean, I think one of the things that struck me about Corbyn and Johnson is that they exist in a world of kind of ideological.

• 41:31Alastair Campbell?

  Irreality.

• 41:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And actually, it's about getting down to what is actually going on. It's, it's not about abstract words. I, I felt this in Cumbria that you could get caught up in conversations about poverty or equality or youth unemployment. But what really mattered was getting into someone's house and seeing there was an old man who, when you opened the door, the place stunk of excrement. He was getting a carer for fifteen minutes a day. He hadn't washed, he wasn't being looked after, and he had no money. And that fixing that is the key, not, not sort of pontificating in a kind of grand ideological way. And I, I'd like to be part of a movement, a party that actually

• 42:16Rory Stewart?

  wanted to fix things, to have colleagues who were practical, who were, and I think that's the problem with all these political parties, even your own dear old political party, is that I don't exactly go into the House of Commons and feel deeply inspired even by your ex-Labour colleagues. I'm not sure I feel they're going to be fixing stuff.

• 42:34Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I've, I've got to tell you, Roy, you, you must, you, you will definitely enjoy this book. Um, because it's sort of, it's kind of, everything you said there is kind of echoed in it. Um, that what populism and polarisation and post-truth have done is drive out, is, is sort of deliberately aimed at smashing the centre ground so that there's nothing there. Um, and, and, and, and Corbyn and Johnson are both kind of symptoms of that. There were quite a lot of people commenting last week, by the way, that they thought you and I should start a new party and, and run the country. And I tried to explain to people is both steps of those are not quite as simple as they might sound.

• 43:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you feeling, you feeling up for it though? I mean, you, you feeling energized? You feeling ready to, ready to step in? Yeah?

• 43:19Alastair Campbell?

  I'm feeling pretty, I'm feeling pretty low at the moment about the political situation to be absolutely frag. I don't think I've ever felt, but we, but we mustn't get dragged down because we do get people saying we're, we've got to keep things lifted up. One other uplifting thing I want to drop in.

• 43:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Alastair Campbell?

  I watched Coda the other day, the film, the film that won the Oscars and it is apps for once. A film that has won the Oscars is one of the best films you're going to see this year. Um, so are you, you, you wouldn't join Labour? Lib Dems not for you?

• 43:53Rory Stewart?

  No, Lib Dems not for me. No, I, I think we actually.

• 43:56Alastair Campbell?

  I'm guessing SNP not for you.

• 43:58Rory Stewart?

  Now, that, that's a good, good, it's definitely not for me. Now, that's a good, good, good thing to end on us. So let's just quickly just do this because hidden underneath the surface of the bagpipe music, hidden under the surface of you saying you're proud to be a Campbell. And my sight is snarling at you down the screen, uh, is the fact that we're both Scottish, right? We're both Scottish people who somehow ended up living in England. Um. But do you, have you ever thought about yourself as a Scottish nationalist?

• 44:25Alastair Campbell?

  Um, no, and both my parents are dead and they'd be turning in their grave the, the hesitation. After the no, and that is not because I am any less of a, I don't like the word unionist, but a believer in the United Kingdom. I think the, I think we get a lot of our strength through the union of the four countries. I think it's what gives us a lot of our power. We put a lot of it at risk because of this wretched Brexit. But what I would say is where my kind of, you know, where things are moving is that I completely understand their argument. In a way that before I just used to stand there and try and demolish their argument.

• 45:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 45:06Alastair Campbell?

  Um, and if you, if you take some of the questions that were raised, like take the issue of the border, right? When you've got these clowns. Playing the games that they're playing with the Northern Ireland border. Um, you know, you sort of think, well, if that kind of Fantasyland stuff is no longer an argument in this crazy country that we're now part of. So I, look, I'm still at heart, I would, if I had a vote in the referendum, and again, another of Cameron's mistakes, I think, was that he didn't even think about seeing whether there was a mechanism for getting people for a vote for Scots, people who are, can I say, who identify as Scottish and who might have had a legitimate vote in the, um, in the referendum.

• 45:49Alastair Campbell?

  I would definitely, one hundred percent, back in twenty fourteen, I was voting, uh, no, and I would still vote no. But I'm less, you know, I don't think I'd go up like I did the last time and get involved in the campaign and.

• 46:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I, I, I come to it, um, I mean, like you, I mean, I had a very, very Scottish father, never been south of the border till he was eighteen. Became more and more exaggeratedly Scottish in his old age, sitting in Creve. Uh, he, he was really a man for tartan trousers and bagpipes and the whole lot. And.

• 46:23Alastair Campbell?

  Pinky, pinky ring.

• 46:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he still had a pinky ring, that's true, he still had a pinky ring, but it was a Stuart pinky ring, it's a Scottish pinky ring.

• 46:31Rory Stewart?

  But he was passionately proud of being Scottish, but he saw it in the context of the United Kingdom.

• 46:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:38Rory Stewart?

  And he thought it was fun being Scottish because it was a way of irritating the English. And he, he wouldn't have enjoyed it quite as much if we hadn't been part of the United Kingdom, if he hadn't been able to assert that Scots were better than the English was an extreme.

• 46:51Alastair Campbell?

  But that's interesting, because my brother was in Scots Guards. As a, he was in the first battalion of Scots Guards and, you know, there was never any doubt, because he was also a piper, that that was the part of the army that he wanted to join. And he ended up, he was invalided out because he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. But he, he had that same feeling that part of his Scottishness was to be able to say to other people in the British Army, you know, you'll never get a battalion better than the first battalion of Scots Guards.

• 47:19Rory Stewart?

  The other thing, the other thing, just on this, because there's obviously something we, we do both share here, which is that. The problem with nationalism of any sort, doesn't matter whether it's Brexit nationalism or Scottish nationalism, is that it's always reductive. It's always separating yourself from someone else. It's always blaming someone else for your problems and fantasizing if you just get rid of another bunch of people, everything's going to be fine. If you just draw up a border. And, and I think psychologically it's dangerous because I think we all have those temptations in our lives. We all go through moods where we think if we just cut off our old friends, we just simplify our lives, leave our partner, whatever, our lives are going to get better. And normally the answer is.

• 48:00Alastair Campbell?

  Are you telling, are you telling us something there, or are you? Big break in you.

• 48:06Rory Stewart?

  Actually, I'm actually very happy in that regard. I was just, just trying to, just trying to reach out through an analogy there, but no, you're right, that's a dodgy analogy and I apologize and giving the wrong impression.

• 48:15Alastair Campbell?

  But you know, the, you know, but the thing about, the other thing though for the Scots though, because of course, what, what they need to think, I think at the moment, look, you must see this, even though I'm sure you know, a few kind of Scottish tartan trouser Tories up there, most Scots cannot stand this government.

• 48:33Rory Stewart?

  But to the Scottish Tories too, all my tartan trousers friends can't stand Boris either.

• 48:38Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so it's more visceral even than it was with Thatcher, okay? So they're sort of looking down the road and they're thinking, if this lot are going to keep giving us this stuff as our government. And I was telling these, I got a couple of questions about Brexit and Johnson at this conference in Abidjan this morning. And I did a show of hands, by the way, about whether the whole Brexit had been good for Britain or bad for Britain. And, and I, it was not fifty-two, forty-eight, let's put it that way. It was about ninety-five against one, he wasn't sure. But I was explaining to them about, in the context of putting together an election strategy. If you go through the last eleven elections in our country, in the UK, from a Labour

• 49:19Alastair Campbell?

  perspective, it goes lose, lose, lose, lose, Blair, Blair, Blair, lose, lose, lose, lose. Right? Now, if you're a Scot looking at that, thinking, well, I don't want nationalism, but I sure as hell don't want this bloody Tory government again and again and again and again.

• 49:41Alastair Campbell?

  You start to think, well, if that's the only way that you can get a Labour government.

• 49:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but, but, but I think, but, but I think that's, I think the problem is that that's, I, I know many people think like that, but I think it's misleading because what happens is that when you go independent, a right wing party emerges. Countries don't end up with one party government just because they go independent. The politics reorganises itself and you'll end up with a right wing and a left wing party inside Scotland and people will have to fight that all through again. I, I think the bigger thing though is that Scotland, you know, can be proud of Scotland but can also get so much from Britain. I mean, I think it's the sort of, I, I felt obviously in Cumbria that there was so much

• 50:25Rory Stewart?

  in common between Cumbria and the Scottish borders. It was ridiculous to suggest that somehow these were different countries. I mean, I've been in countries which are different countries. Basically, we spoke the same language, we shopped in the same supermarkets, we watched the same television, we listened to the same music. I mean, it's insane. It's completely insane.

• 50:45Alastair Campbell?

  These guys are telling me today that, that, about this family on the border between Cote d'Ivoire and Mali and the house is in two different countries.

• 50:59Rory Stewart?

  That's good. That's good.

• 51:02Alastair Campbell?

  And they could choose, they could choose which passport, which jurisdiction they want to be in.

• 51:07Rory Stewart?

  That's very good. That's very good. Of course, a bit of that existed. I know in around Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, some of the great smuggling rings were run by farms that run.

• 51:14Alastair Campbell?

  There was a lot, a lot of petrol going through those very large tanks across the border. Yeah. Right. Well, I'll tell you one thing, Rory. I will be getting my usual incoming from various members of my Scottish family and friendship groups about what Douglas Alexander sometimes calls your flirtation with Nicola. But let's close on matters Scottish because there's somebody here. We've got a lot, and by the way, thanks to everybody for their questions. And please, even though we're not reading them all out, we can't because we're getting hundreds. But please do keep them coming because one, they make us think. And two, they're just, some of them really, really smart and interesting. And most of the reviews of this podcast, and by the way, you can put a review on wherever you get your podcasts, and it'd be very nice

• 51:57Alastair Campbell?

  if you did. But most of the reviews have been excellent. But there was one here from somebody called Clean Tech Wales, who said, someone woke me up playing bloody bagpipes last night. Note to self, don't go to bed listening to the rest is politics. That means they fell asleep. They fell asleep listening to us talking.

• 52:21Rory Stewart?

  He's dozed off in the middle of one of our great expressions of loyalty to Tony Blair.

• 52:26Alastair Campbell?

  I just can't, I'm not buying that. I'm not buying that. You've got to concentrate people. And we will, I think, one day, Rory, we're either in person, so as I can tell you, I can do what my dad used to do when he was teaching by bagpipes. If you get a note wrong, he used to take his old chad, try it the best, and tap it on my fingers. And that was his way of telling.

• 52:47Rory Stewart?

  So I started, I was taught by a guy who'd been the, the pipe major of the Scots Guards. But pipe major Scots Guards, not when your brother was in. He was the pipe major of Scots Guards in 1922.

• 52:59Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God, that's when my dad was born.

• 53:00Rory Stewart?

  So he'd been in, been in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 1922. And by the time he was teaching me, he was in his, his late eighties.

• 53:07Alastair Campbell?

  Wow.

• 53:08Rory Stewart?

  And I was a little boy.

• 53:09Alastair Campbell?

  Could he still blow?

• 53:10Rory Stewart?

  He could still play, and he could still play. And he was a very impressive, called Pipe Major Alec McDonald. And, but his great thing to me was he'd say, he'd insist on what he called the three Ps. And I'd say, what are the three Ps, Pipe Major? And he'd say, practice, practice, and practice.

• 53:27Alastair Campbell?

  It's better than populism, polarization, and post-truth, I've got to say. But, yeah, well, I, the other thing I learnt on, how do you think the pipe sounded last week, by the way?

• 53:41Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I, I don't, I mean, that was weird that somebody could pick up altitude with the pipes. Because, because as you point out, altitude and rain is, is what we kind of have in our homeland.

• 53:50Alastair Campbell?

  But my, my, that was my tutor, Finley McDonald, who runs the National Piping Centre in Glasgow. And he just, he'd heard them on social media because somebody posted something from the wedding. And he literally just sent me a text saying, are you at altitude?

• 54:04Alastair Campbell?

  Because my top note, the high A, was sharp. And the truth is, it was sharp. But I didn't realise it was the altimeter. I thought it was just that I hadn't tuned them properly. So there you go.

• 54:14Rory Stewart?

  There we go. Well, congratulations again, Arthur. And someday we'll try this duet.

• 54:18Alastair Campbell?

  No, we'll definitely do it. Maybe play the Ukrainian national anthem together.

• 54:21Rory Stewart?

  Right, okay.

• 54:23Alastair Campbell?

  Over and out.

• 54:24Rory Stewart?

  Over and out.