87. Question Time: Drugs in Parliament, the meaning of evil, and Jeremy Clarkson

Join Rory and Alastair in this week's episode of Question Time, as they discuss the prevalence of drugs in Parliament, Norway's sovereign wealth fund, Macron's relationship with the Pope, Alastair's swimming tips, and much more. Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Theo Young-Smith 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:44Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:48Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:50Rory Stewart?

  And I'm going to start you off, Den Carthage. So he says, Alastair Campbell mentioned the much missed Charles Kennedy in a recent podcast. Are there any other political figures you miss and wish were still around, Alistair?

• 2:02Alastair Campbell?

  The one that I really wish Philip Gould was still around.

• 2:05Rory Stewart?

  Tell us a bit about him.

• 2:06Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Philip was, he was my closest friend, really, and he died a few years ago. And Philip was a pollster. But as Tony said, at his, one of the events after he died, to describe him as a pollster is sort of like, you know, describing... I don't know, Diego Maradona is a bloke who kicks a ball around. I mean, Philip was a had a proper strategic mind. And he would, the other thing, he would have absolutely, although you and I get very kind of down about the way that politics is, Philip would have loved it because it would just represented such a sort of challenge.

• 2:42Rory Stewart?

  Tell us a little bit about him. I mean, he, he, he, how did he die young? I mean, did he, what, what happened?

• 2:47Alastair Campbell?

  He had, he, he got esophageal cancer.

• 2:49Rory Stewart?

  Oh, and am I right in saying you sometimes mention his daughter on the show?

• 2:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, that's Georgia. Georgia Gould is um his daughter, who's the leader of Camden Council. And I hope one day will be an MP. But like a lot of, I think, like a lot of people who go into politics is discovering you can actually get an awful lot done if you lead a council as big as Camden.

• 3:09Rory Stewart?

  So one figure I miss, I suppose she's not fully political figure, but was an amazing figure in, in my childhood growing up, was a lady called Daphne Parks, who was um, was the first senior woman in the British Secret Service.

• 3:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And yeah, I know all about her. Yeah.

• 3:25Rory Stewart?

  Incredible figure. And, and um.

• 3:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Rory, you're getting, you're getting close to outing yourself here.

• 3:31Rory Stewart?

  I don't know. She was a friend of my dad's. My, my father was a spy.

• 3:34Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 3:35Rory Stewart?

  So that, that was the link in there. But she was um, she, she, she was uh really not, not just a remarkable in terms of fact that she'd led the Secret Service station in the Congo during the Congo coups, but she was very, very canny in the way that she analyzed interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. She's one of those people, I think you're a bit like this, actually, who, maybe I'm a bit like this, who become more left wing as she got older. I think I got the impression that as she got into her seventies and eighties, she became more and more kind of radical in her views, which was my real political hero, who I can't claim to miss because um, but the real example of this was Gladstone,

• 4:16Rory Stewart?

  who went from being the most extreme conservative in his twenties, sort of pro slavery, to being the most incredible radical in his eighties.

• 4:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you're just going to keep going on your journey, Rory, and eventually we'll get you in the Labour Party. That's the most important thing. Now, duly fair, should the Tories be pressed by Keir Starmer to take drugs tests after cocaine was found at Number Ten in Chievening? Limited number of possible perpetrators, why don't they want to clear their names? Is this drugs thing? I mean, I'm going to tell you something that you will probably find absolutely extraordinary, Roy. I've never taken an illegal substance. I've taken way too much of legal substances, particularly alcohol.

• 4:52Rory Stewart?

  And why is that? Why have you, why have you never taken drugs? I always thought you were a bit kind of rock and roll.

• 4:56Alastair Campbell?

  No, because I just, when I was at university, I hated the people who took drugs and I used to sort of, I had so many chips on my shoulder. I'm actually, here's something else that's going to surprise you. Other than on television and in films, I've never actually seen cocaine in my entire life.

• 5:11Rory Stewart?

  The chips on your shoulder is that you associated drugs when you were at university with posh people. You thought posh people took drugs.

• 5:17Alastair Campbell?

  I did, I did.

• 5:18Rory Stewart?

  Which isn't really true, right?

• 5:19Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's not true. It's not true. But, but, well, I think it was, it was true there and I, I, and I think, I think there, there does seem to me, you may know better than I do, there does seem to be a kind of, a real sort of drugs thing inside the Conservative Party, which I never noticed in, in the Labour Party when we were in government.

• 5:35Rory Stewart?

  I didn't, I honestly didn't notice it in the Conservative Party. I may be very square. There was definitely true that, Michael Gove and David Cameron and George Osborne seemed to have been part of a set at university and after university, who I think reports have said used drugs. And Michael Gove sounds more like he did one or two geeky experiments at some Notting Hill party. But I definitely never felt in the House of Commons that there was any kind of open drug culture. I never saw people boasting about taking drugs in the House of Commons or.

• 6:10Alastair Campbell?

  But it isn't, I, I, I would have been amazed if I, if there'd been drug taking inside Downing Street when we were there. But there does seem to be, you know, the, and this thing in Chievening, I, I honestly, I really, if that was a school, or if that was a hospital, or if that was a, those people, the, the police would want to know, well, where's this, where's.

• 6:28Rory Stewart?

  So the claim, the claim is that somebody's told the press that some white powder was found?

• 6:33Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I thought it was more than that. I thought it was people in Chievening say that they'd come across the, the, the remains of, of cocaine taking.

• 6:39Rory Stewart?

  What it was, basically, most MPs, in my experience, are sort of geeky, serious student politicians who are very, very aware from the time they're 17 about their public reputation and are pretty, pretty, they're not very hip. I think that the number who are, are rock and rolling and taking drugs, I think is pretty, pretty limited.

• 6:59Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, there was this alleged story that Noel Gallagher says he took drugs in the Queen's. Toilet in Downing Street, which we've talked about, the Queen's toilet in Downing Street before, but I don't know whether I believe that.

• 7:11Rory Stewart?

  Alice Cavanagh, given the current discussion on the housing crisis and long awaited planning reforms, stroke levelling up bill, do you think we should be opening up the green belt for building new houses, Alistair?

• 7:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we're back to another massive political problem. I think no, I think no is my answer because I do believe in the protection of landscape. However, I think that there will come a point where, well, put it this way, I think this whole nimbyism in approach to planning and house building has got to be challenged and it can only be challenged by political leadership.

• 7:44Rory Stewart?

  But it's a tough one, isn't it? Because there's only that much land to build on. And I think, obviously, someone like me, very, very pro-green belt, I actually, and I think we talked about it before, I would like a political party to commit to turn the green belt into the largest forest in England. It'd be an amazing thing. You could get hundreds of millions of trees in there. It would transform air quality, temperature, carbon capture, all the way around our capital city. You could open it up as an extraordinary place for people to go and visit. A lot of the green belt looks a bit kind of drab and depressing at the moment, and it could be the great legacy for the future. So if any politician's listening, please sign up for that. But at the same time, we are rubbish at building medium rise in places like London.

• 8:28Rory Stewart?

  If you look at places like Paris, those beautiful streets are often six, seven storey buildings. And you can see actually in some of the fanciest bits of London, like up and down Sloane Avenue, for example, South Ken, Chelsea, you've got those big mansion flats, eight, nine stories. They look very attractive. You put a lot of people in there. The real problem is the sprawling, sort of semi-detached and terraced suburbs, which never go above two stories, which consumes so much land around London.

• 8:56Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Rory, Connor Hayward asks, in your recent Alba Hall live show, and by the way, thank you to everybody who came, it was a thoroughly enjoyable evening, Rory defined both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump as evil. What would your definition of evil therefore be?

• 9:10Rory Stewart?

  So for me, it is a total absence of any moral calculation.

• 9:17Alastair Campbell?

  Is it possible, though, to have an absence of moral calculation but not do bad? Or do you think if you have no calculation, moral calculation, you can you can only do bad things?

• 9:27Rory Stewart?

  I think it's close to the way that I would think about evil. I think actually that's sort of oddly what the devil is. I mean, I'm not a theologian here, but I think that it's about a total refusal to take seriously any moral rules, any sense of obligation to another person. And of course, what Boris Johnson does very well is present it as a sort of childlike selfishness, as though he's a wicked toddler splashing water out of the bathtub.

• 10:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:00Rory Stewart?

  But when you do it as an adult, I think the right word is evil because it's that total absorbing egotism, which I think is the core of devilry. I says he's suddenly sounding like some mad Puritan. But I do I do think that that part of being an adult, part of being a human, is getting beyond that childlike stage and acknowledging the existence of other human beings. And that's not what he's meant to do.

• 10:27Alastair Campbell?

  Trump likewise has he comes across as a child, doesn't he?

• 10:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, they're sort of frozen, aren't they, in time? They're still living, I think if you were a Jungian, they're still living this kind of magical heroic vision of themselves. They haven't sort of gone into their midlife. They haven't recognized their mortality, their limits, their death. They're still living a sort of cartoon life.

• 10:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, your turn.

• 10:50Rory Stewart?

  Go on then. Johnny Sells, should the railways be renationalized? So Johnny came to the Albert Hall event. He's a he's a tenor, I would want to say a distinguished tenor, who actually had some serious things to say about the acoustics in the Albert Hall.

• 11:03Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, did he?

• 11:04Rory Stewart?

  Yep. And he amazing, actually, the acoustics in the Albert Hall, because it famously is just a colossally difficult thing to get the acoustics right on those. So those, do you see those UFOs that were floating over our heads, those huge sort of sound bafflers to try to deal with them?

• 11:18Alastair Campbell?

  I thought they were real UFOs.

• 11:19Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, Johnny Sells asks you, should the railways be renationalized?

• 11:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there's got to be huge reform of our railways, whether whether renationalization, as Johnny envisages it. Railways run purely by the state, owned and run by the state. I think that is such a step and is probably way more complicated than than we realise. But there's got to be a government grip of our railways. And the system.

• 11:46Rory Stewart?

  Did you have any issues with railways when you were in power? What were the challenges around railways during during the sort of Campbell Blair era?

• 11:54Alastair Campbell?

  I don't really, I mean, I don't remember railways, but perhaps we didn't focus on them as much as we should. And we, you know, John Prescott was the sort of big transport guy for much of that time. And his whole thing was about an integrated transport system. And I think actually we did do some good modernising stuff on on on transport. But I do feel that the railways today, my sense of them is that they do not work as well as they used to. Now, whether that includes in an era when it was good old British Rail, I don't know what the cost would be. I don't know what the legalities would be. But I I wrote my new European column last week about a recent journey and it wasn't even that terrible. It was it's back to this point about we're just sort of so used to now stuff not really working quite as well as it should.

• 12:36Alastair Campbell?

  And they've got this wonderful shiny new departures board at Euston Station. And they have green is the trains on time and ready to go. Blue is you got to wait and red is it's cancelled. And I was there a day, this was before the coal snap and it wasn't a strike day. And it was entirely blue and red.

• 12:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:55Alastair Campbell?

  And eventually I got to Scotland about, you know, several hours after I was meant to.

• 12:59Rory Stewart?

  It's pretty, pretty depressing, isn't it?

• 13:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Rory Stewart?

  Shall we take a break?

• 13:02Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 13:41Rory Stewart?

  And welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 13:45Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. Now here's one, I love this question. Peter Ellis, "You are both clearly highly energetic and driven individuals. Do you ever say to yourselves, you know what, I just can't be asked."

• 13:57Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's a good question. Good question. What, when do you say, you know what, I can't be asked?

• 14:01Alastair Campbell?

  When I'm, at the end of the day, going, meant to be going out to a social engagement that suddenly I wish I hadn't agreed to. That happens, that happens quite a lot.

• 14:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, so my, my one, which I'm, I'm sure you get a lot of is that, because, and I get criticised for this a lot on Rest Politics, I'm travelling a lot, mostly for, for the, the charity that I'm working with. And that means that I'm away from my family a lot. And it also means that people very kindly ask me to do things. And I make the mistake of thinking, well, I can't do anything in the next four months because I can't see it. So I'll agree to do it.

• 14:35Alastair Campbell?

  Oh Rory, no, no, no, you must have done, I think we say, you know, give me some choice of days, you make them give you the days and you tell them that you're going to be in Connecticut that day.

• 14:44Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Well, my mistake is I'm like, I think things will have calmed down by June. June will come around. I'm like, oh, oh no, I've agreed to talk to my mother's cruel sewing club in, in Scotland. Or I've, I've agreed to go and, you know, do, do a thing for a nice, you know, so it's often really good causes, but I'm getting at the moment in my inbox at something like, I don't know. I think last week, maybe 250 different invitations to speak.

• 15:11Alastair Campbell?

  Oh yeah. And, and the thing is every, and every single one of them says, it'll only take you an hour. It'll only take a couple of hours of your time, but it's always more. We, we shouldn't sound too curmudgeonly about it Rory. We, people like to hear what we say. So that's a good thing. But there are many, there are sometimes, I think it's, you're absolutely right. It's stuff that you put in the diary, because when you put it in the diary, it doesn't seem that important.

• 15:32Rory Stewart?

  Okay, Ian, "Why does Norway have an oil-related 1.5 trillion sovereign wealth fund and the UK hasn't? You were both parts of government, which could have put one in place at some point." Why didn't it happen? Was there any discussion of that with you?

• 15:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, we we we mentioned this on the on the main podcast this week, didn't we? I think Norway, it is an extraordinary success story, what they've done with their sovereign wealth fund. And and I wish the UK had done that. I think it would have been a very, very sensible thing to do.

• 16:00Rory Stewart?

  Did you talk about it?

• 16:01Alastair Campbell?

  I don't remember. I don't I don't think we did. I don't remember whether there was stuff going on at the Treasury that I don't know. I don't know.

• 16:07Rory Stewart?

  I think it's a very unTreasury idea, isn't it? I mean, I think it's worked out brilliantly for the Norwegians, but.

• 16:12Alastair Campbell?

  And for others, there are other countries that have done.

• 16:14Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 16:15Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, no, it's the obvious ones, the Gulf. But, you know, I think some of the the some of the poorer countries in Asia have got, you know, what what would they are effectively wealth funds where they, you know, they invest their own money and they they they invest in businesses and they they do it in a way that keeps the thing ticking over.

• 16:31Rory Stewart?

  The traditional Treasury argument against it would have been, there's no particular reason to think the government is able to invest its money any better than anyone else. So why should the government turn itself into a sort of investment bank? Why doesn't it just raise its taxes, spend its money every year and keep on relying on taxes rather than income from a big fund?

• 16:48Alastair Campbell?

  While we're talking, I'm looking at this thing. If you go on to something called NBIM.no.

• 16:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. And you can see the the value of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund in real time. Have a look at it.

• 17:02Rory Stewart?

  Okay, all right. Let's let's have a look at it.

• 17:04Alastair Campbell?

  NBIM.no.

• 17:06Rory Stewart?

  And just as you watch it, just Norway gets richer and richer every second you're watching it.

• 17:10Alastair Campbell?

  It's going, it's literally going up. It's just gone up to another billion. It sometimes goes down, but it's very rare.

• 17:17Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Well, they're obviously geniuses. Now, listen, Chris Moreham, you mentioned that Macron uses the two form when talking about God's agent on earth, the Pope. But I learned from listening to Les Miserables in French, that the French use the two form when talking to God himself.

• 17:32Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my Lord.

• 17:33Rory Stewart?

  They talk to him like they talk to their father. It isn't an arrogant thing. Isn't that brilliant? And I think that is right, isn't it? Because I think one of the radical things of the way that Jesus Christ talked about God, the word he uses, Abba, effectively means daddy. And that there's something very, very radical at the very beginning of the Lord's Prayer, which which sounds very grand in English. Our father, but is is much closer to a child talking informally to their father.

• 18:04Alastair Campbell?

  Hallowed be thy name.

• 18:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, we oh, very good. Thank you. Thank you. There's the linguist again. You got it.

• 18:11Alastair Campbell?

  But I I assumed that, you know, I wonder if Macron was using the two for when he was say to a Bape, hey, give us a hug.

• 18:21Alastair Campbell?

  That's interesting, but Roy, it's quite interesting what's happening. That's twice that you've basically become sort of bit archbishopish in your utterings today. Quite interesting.

• 18:31Rory Stewart?

  I don't think that's really the future. Let's try to move it on to something that gets me off that. Kieran Seal, a good name for the question. I've been trialing out the various London swim spots and went to West Reservoir Swimming Centre the other week. It was 6.9 degrees and I wore a full wetsuit and boots. Where does Alastair swim for it to be 3.5 degrees? And does he wear a wetsuit? asks the Seal.

• 18:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Seal, I swim most days at the Parliament Hill Lido, where today it was five degrees. Two days ago, it was one degree.

• 19:06Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 19:07Alastair Campbell?

  And when I jumped in, and by the way, we also had an email from somebody who said I was very irresponsible in explaining that I jump in to the cold water. That is not the best way to go in. But and I think that's fair enough if you've not done it before, but I've always done that. So I think I agree that if you're doing it for the first time, that would not be sensible. But I actually landed on a sort of lump of ice.

• 19:30Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 19:30Alastair Campbell?

  I wear I don't wear a wetsuit. I wear I wear little gloves and little feet.

• 19:35Rory Stewart?

  Gah.

• 19:36Alastair Campbell?

  Um, but I love it. I absolutely love it. Listen, there's one question which I was really pleased to see, which I want to clear up because it really annoyed me because I saw this as well. Jeff Spink, question for Alastair. I've been watching that great beacon of historical accuracy, The Crown, the episode on the Hong Kong handover. Suggests that the heir to the throne had to sit in business while TB and you lot were all in first class. And I watched that and it was utterly ridiculous. So Charles, the whole sort of narrative was that Charles was sort of, you know, the great, the great guy coming along, he's the future and along comes Tony Blair and Tony Blair thinks he's the future. And it literally had this shot of Prince Charles being settled into his business class

• 20:21Alastair Campbell?

  seat while we were all at the front getting into first class. Anyway, I can tell you, Jeff Spink, it did not happen.

• 20:29Rory Stewart?

  Oh, all right. Um, final question, I think, coming to the end of this, because, because of the time of year we are. Murray Minz, what is your favourite Christmas song? Mine is Let It Snow, but she also loves playing Driving Home for Christmas on my commute or in heavy snow. Alistair.

• 20:48Alastair Campbell?

  It'll be lonely this Christmas, lonely and cold. It'll be so, so cold without you to hold this Christmas.

• 21:02Rory Stewart?

  Beautiful. Thank you.

• 21:02Alastair Campbell?

  It's a bit sad.

• 21:04Rory Stewart?

  No, but I did, you did it very well and it was great to hear you belting it out in the Albert Hall. We didn't get quite enough singing from you in the Albert Hall, but.

• 21:10Alastair Campbell?

  What did, um, what was your favourite Christmas song?

• 21:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, I, I'm, I'm, it's a difficult one. It's a difficult one, that, difficult one.

• 21:17Alastair Campbell?

  You can't just say difficult one, there isn't a song called difficult one.

• 21:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, I like Christmas carols, I suppose. I mean, I suppose they.

• 21:23Alastair Campbell?

  That's okay.

• 21:23Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's right.

• 21:24Alastair Campbell?

  Um, I can play, I can play quite a few Christmas carols on the backpipes.

• 21:27Rory Stewart?

  Can you play them all?

• 21:28Alastair Campbell?

  No, I can't play them all because some of them.

• 21:30Rory Stewart?

  Because some of them, some of them, the notes go, yeah, the range is too big. You haven't got the range.

• 21:33Alastair Campbell?

  How did the backpipe sign in the Albert Hall?

• 21:35Rory Stewart?

  I thought they were brilliant. I thought that was a great end. I think it's got good acoustics for backpipes.

• 21:40Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, Rory, you see, this is, this is where you and I differ. The middle drone was a bit off.

• 21:44Rory Stewart?

  Oh gosh, but you.

• 21:45Alastair Campbell?

  It was.

• 21:47Rory Stewart?

  So basically, I think, you know, we were asked, we were interviewed by somebody at the Albert Hall before we went on, big, big profile piece where they, she kept trying to ask which one of us was cleverer. And there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that you are much cleverer when it comes to language and music.

• 22:06Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, if there's one issue that produced more questions this week than any other, it was Jeremy Clarkson of all people. And I don't know if you followed this, but he wrote a pretty vile piece in The Sun where he said that he hated Meghan at a cellular level. He hated her as much as he hated Nicola Sturgeon and Rose West. And he couldn't wait to the day to see her paraded through the streets, having people throw excrement at her. Now, he's sort of apologised, but it does make you wonder about what the processes are that go through in the editorials.

• 22:39Rory Stewart?

  It's completely, no, completely horrifying. And there's something sort of stark naked, she was meant to be. So it was both kind of pornographic.

• 22:47Alastair Campbell?

  Misogynous.

• 22:48Rory Stewart?

  Scatological. I mean, it's a very, very disturbing kind of insight into his mind that that's what he fantasises about. And it's even more disturbing that he wants to make those fantasies public. And that somehow he thinks that his readers are going to want to share in this sort of horrifying.

• 23:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I guess that, I think there is, there is a little bit about, I mean, I said to, when I said on the podcast last week, I felt sorry for both Harry and Meghan for different reasons. And Fiona, when we were walking the dog the next day, she said, I don't know, what are you on about Meghan and Harry? I mean, what are you on about? But I think when you're subject, I've had a lot of abuse and a lot of hate. But I think when you're subject to on that sort of industrial scale across so much of the media on such a regular basis. And I think what happens with parts of our media is that because they're so loud and so outrageous and so over the top with stuff like this, you kind of find, you have to keep hitting ever new levels of hyperbole.

• 23:46Rory Stewart?

  And they're sort of aware of it, aren't they? Because I was reading that the extremely sort of disturbing Rod Liddle. So he reflects on this himself. He says that the cycle somehow seems to be that Harry and Meghan put out something and then the press respond with sort of more and more vitriol and bile. And then Harry and Meghan then respond to the vitriol and bile, feeling more and more persecuted and hated, and then produce another documentary or another book. And then Clarkson or Piers Morgan or Rod Little then hit them again. And it's sort of created this sort of mad world in which everybody's kind of feeding off each other in a vicious circle of horror.

• 24:29Alastair Campbell?

  That's why when you said, when we were at the Albert Hall and we were talking about, you said you despised, you said that one of your criticisms was me with, I can't find a single Labour person to say that I despise. I think despising people takes such an energy. There are some people that I despise, but they're not in the Labour Party, most of them.

• 24:51Rory Stewart?

  We picked that up.

• 24:52Alastair Campbell?

  But it's clear, to say that you hate somebody at a cellular level and you want to parade them through the streets. And by the way, my daughter Grace, who's a feminist, and she said to me, God, Dad, if you ever said anything like that. But of course Jeremy Clarkson's daughter is also quite a well-known feminist campaigner. So she's come out and said she thought it was, you know, she was really upset by it. And I suspect that's why he has, it wasn't really an apology, but he has sort of said he's horrified that the upset that he's caused. But I suspect the son will like it. They'll think, you know, we'll get more attention, we get people talking about us. It makes us feel like we're still relevant. All right, Roy, we're lovely to talk to you as ever. I hope you're not going to spend too much of the next week on aeroplanes.

• 25:33Rory Stewart?

  I'm going to try not to spend too much the next week on aeroplanes.

• 25:36Alastair Campbell?

  Where are you going to be at Christmas?

• 25:37Rory Stewart?

  I'm going to be in Scotland, in the house.

• 25:39Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, lovely.

• 25:40Rory Stewart?

  The house that you know and visited.

• 25:42Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent.

• 25:42Rory Stewart?

  With my little sister and my mother. And on that, let's finish up the question time.

• 25:47Alastair Campbell?

  All the best.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company formed with the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.