140. Johnson and Sunak at war, Sturgeon's arrest, and the death of Silvio Berlusconi

Are we on the brink of Tory civil war? What is the legacy of Silvio Berlusconi? Why has China pivoted to Latin America? Join Alastair and Rory as they answer all these questions and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to buy presale tickets right now to our live shows in Bath and Edinburgh this September. You'll also enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen 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.

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:34Alastair Campbell?

  Hello, welcome to the Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:37Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:38Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, before we get on with the podcast today, a little bit of news for our listeners about, and don't get too excited, people, it's not going to be any day soon, our next two live shows. Pens ready? Wednesday, September 13, we will be in Edinburgh. Rest Is Politics Live at the Usher Hall. And the following day, Thursday, September 14, we will be in Bath, or I spell Bath, as Rory would call it, at the Forum. And Rory, by an amazing coincidence. These are going to coincide with the launch of a book, Politics on the Edge.

• 2:16Rory Stewart?

  Politics on the Edge. Thank you very much for remembering that. And I'm really excited to see people in Bath and Edinburgh. And tiny plug for me again, which is anybody in the Manchester area wants to come along. I'm doing a solo thing on 2nd September in the Lowry, and I will be doing sterling work signing. But I believe Alastair will also be prepared to be signing a little bit. So there'll be a double opportunity, the two of us sitting next to each other at the desks.

• 2:41Alastair Campbell?

  So, pre-sale tickets to these shows for members of The Rest is Politics Plus are on sale right now. If you want to take advantage of that opportunity to buy early tickets in this pre-sale, just sign up at therestispolitics.com. If you're someone who's really keen to secure tickets, this is worth doing, as the general sales often sell out literally in under five minutes. So head to therestispolitics.com to avoid disappointment.

• 3:06Rory Stewart?

  And the general sale will still then open to the public Friday 16th at June 9am. We'll tweet the ticket link from the Rest is Politics Twitter account, @RestIsPolitics, at exactly 9am on Friday. Now, Alastair, tell us where you are and what you've been up to.

• 3:21Alastair Campbell?

  I'm at home in a very summery shirt. I'm feeling quite virtuous and fit, having done the Great North Swim in Windermere up in your old part of the world. Since when, Fiona and I have been going absolute, we've been absolute culture vultures in recent days. We've been to the theatre three times, seen Patriots at the Noel Cow Theatre, which is about Putin and Beresovski's relationship. Absolutely brilliant. We've seen The Motive in the Q, which is about John Gilgood directing Richard Burton in New York in Hamlet in 1964. Sounds very niche, but it is absolutely brilliant. And last night, James Graham, who's a Declaran Interest, a good friend, probably the best playwright in the country, I'd say at the moment, and his new play, Dear England at the National Theatre, which

• 4:05Alastair Campbell?

  is about Gareth Southgate and penalties. And honestly, Rory, even though you know less about football than anybody on the planet, you will really enjoy it. And I think anybody will enjoy it. It's just absolutely brilliant.

• 4:17Rory Stewart?

  Oh, thank you. Well, my news, I'm at Naman. I'm about to fly to Doha this evening when I get off the phone with you. And Shoshana has been in Syria and in Afghanistan. And it's been fascinating. I mean, I think firstly, the sense of Syria, just how tragic things are on the ground in Syria at the moment and how depressing. And then in Afghanistan, oddly encouraging. She was visiting the primary school that we set up together 15 years ago and meeting female graduates who came back to speak at the school, who've done degrees in chemistry. And it's been really kind of moving. So anyway, that's, we promised at some point, maybe to see if we could get Fiona and Shashana on the show and we should try to do that.

• 4:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, also, we promised that we'd give some good news every now and then. And that sounds even in a pretty horrific set of circumstances. She's there on the ground and saying things are showing some signs of improvement. That's rather encouraging. So Rory, as for today, we're going to talk about Johnson fallout. I mean, I was really hoping we wouldn't have to talk about him again. But I think that the sense of absolute open warfare now between him and Sunak and this utter nonsense about Nadine Dorries and peerages and interns going to the House of Lords, the whole thing's horrific. But we'll talk about that. I think we should talk about Nicola Sturgeon as well. That was sort of quite big news as we were driving back from Windermere when she was arrested

• 5:39Alastair Campbell?

  by the investigation into SNP finances. Little retrospective look at the life and times of Silvio Berlusconi, dead at 86. And also, you've been saying for a while that we don't talk enough, and you're right about this, we don't talk enough about Latin America. So we're going to do a little section, well, probably quite a big section at the end on Latin America and in particular, relations with Beijing and Washington. So do you want to kick us off with the whole sort of Johnson mess?

• 6:07Rory Stewart?

  Given that you've got a lovely, you enjoy nothing more than the question of Eton. There was a good letter in the newspaper from someone called John Cawton, who was a master at Eton, writing in The Times, saying, Whatever wider strategy Eton adopts, the school will continue to educate the global elite. Perhaps its most important mission will be to ensure that its pupils are saved from a sense of privilege, entitlement and omniscience that can produce alumni such as Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Kwasi Kwarteng, and therefore damage a country's very fabric. Sadly, I failed in that purpose, John Clorton, Master, Eton College, 1984 to 2001.

• 6:49Alastair Campbell?

  Wow, very good, nice letter like that. I mean, I have to say, Rory, I think it is the inbuilt privilege, et cetera, that leads to such people thinking that they're entitled as they are. But Johnson's levels of entitlement are now reaching barely imaginable that he can seriously think that having been kicked out of office by his colleagues, who decided, if you remember, going back to Downey Street, there were sufficient ministers willing to stay with him, and then a parliamentary committee of his peers deciding that after all, you know what, yes, he is a total liar, and he did lie during Covid, that he somehow thinks that despite all that, one, he's done nothing wrong, two, he's the victim rather than the cause and the villain

• 7:34Alastair Campbell?

  of his own problems, and three, that he should be entitled, despite having been, by you and I agree on this, the worst prime minister in our history, he should be entitled to send even more people to the House of Lords than these 25-year-old interns and others who have gone off to the House of Lords. And Nadine Dorries, meanwhile, is touring the studio, saying that there's been this terrible establishment plot against her. She, who has basically given up being an MP anyway, hasn't been to the Commons for god knows how long, barely speaks there, spends most of her time in her own TV studio. And meanwhile, Sunak is sort of pretending that he's standing on a point of principle because he didn't, because some of them weren't allowed by the committee.

• 8:18Alastair Campbell?

  But I go back to a basic point I've been making for some time. Every single one of these honours had to be signed off by Sunak. He could have said no to the lot of them, and in my view, he should have done.

• 8:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, you've you've you've said that from the beginning. I mean, he's he he did more than you thought. I mean, he stopped some of them, which is why we have people like Nadine Doris enraged. But definitely some of it. It's very odd what Boris Johnson and his attitude towards these honours. I mean, I've never seen a prime minister like it. There was a little bit of that going on with previous prime ministers. You know, Tony Blair had to feel felt he had to bring in 400 lords in order to deal with the fact that the Conservatives had a majority in the House of Lords. David Cameron brought brought in about 402, didn't he?

• 9:00Alastair Campbell?

  Hold on, Rory, hold on, hold on. Point of information, point of information. Just for the record, Tony Blair, who was no fan of the honours system, didn't even have a resignation on his list. He just thought, I can't be bothered and I don't blame him.

• 9:14Rory Stewart?

  Good on him. Anyway, there have been a lot of pretty peculiar people put in the House of Lords. There are also some very impressive people. I mean, I, you know, I'm full of admiration for people like, I don't know, distinguished judges, scientists, the Astronomer Royal. And it's just a real, real pity that an institution which is the only bit of Parliament that actually does serious scrutiny work. I was talking to a civil servant again yesterday who was saying that in their experience of bringing through legislation, that in this case it was on pensions, the House of Commons was a complete waste of time. They never bothered to look at any of the detail, never scrutinised anything. The only thing that really concerned them was the House of Lords, where there really were people who went through things forensically. And, you know, you will have friends in the

• 9:55Rory Stewart?

  House of Lords who you admire and who do a really hard, hard job. But, boy, oh, boy, as Johnson, I mean, taking the piss. I mean, it's extraordinary. It's, I mean, it began, you remember, his first thing when he came in as prime minister was to put his brother in the House of Lords. But it's as though he's behaving like, um.

• 10:14Alastair Campbell?

  Like a Berlusconi.

• 10:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, sort of weird medieval monarch, isn't it?

• 10:18Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Well, the thing about apparently. I mean, who knows what's true and what's not true, because the number ten version of events does seem to change a little bit from time to time. Rishi Sunak said yesterday that he was asked by Boris Johnson to do something which he did not think was the right thing to do, and that, I think, was to overturn or to resist and go back to the House of Lords appointments commission and say, can you look at these again? But also, it seems that Boris Johnson was absolutely furious because he'd obviously told his father that he was going to give him a knighthood, and it turns out that somebody in the system, whether it was number ten, whether it was a commission, I don't know, or it was Sunak, said, no, no, that would be utterly absurd. But I, do you know the one that I think is,

• 11:01Alastair Campbell?

  if anything, the most absurd of all? What on earth has this young woman, Sharla Owen, done to deserve to become a life peer? That means she takes a seat in the House of Lords, she becomes part of our legislature for the rest of her life, alongside others who've sort of, you know, helped Johnson through his useless premiership. She's 29, she's got a two one in politics and international relations from the University of York, and her main CV, the main points of her CV has been that she's been an intern and a parliamentary assistant to a succession of Conservative MPs. Now, honestly, can you explain to me how that justifies a peerage?

• 11:42Rory Stewart?

  It's totally astonishing. No, no, I think he's, I sometimes think that he's deliberately trying to bring the whole house down around his head. I mean, he's, he's doing things so provocative, like, I mean, partly, you know, putting his brother in the House of Lords, giving his father a knighthood is very out of central casting for some of these kind of Edward the Second medieval monarch types with their favourites and their families and that. But it's really, really weird. And I think some of these appointments are sort of him just thumbing his nose at the establishment and trying to discredit the whole thing as he does it. If people want to look on Twitter, there's a writer called Nicholas Shakespeare, who's just written a very good book on Ian Fleming, but who

• 12:21Rory Stewart?

  absolutely specializes in brutal takedowns of Boris Johnson and has collected the greatest articles written on Boris Johnson over the last few days. And he picks out Anthony Seldon in The Times. Who says, "His inner emptiness made it imperative to be the centre of attention. Not a single person whom he encountered in his life has not been cheapened or damaged by their association with him." And then Matthew Said, "I can't help thinking that the UK has in certain respects taken the qualities of the former PM. His deceptiveness entered the body politic like a poison." And finally, Max Hastings, "He's perhaps the most selfish human being I've ever met.

• 13:04Rory Stewart?

  Indifferent to the welfare of anyone save himself. It's striking that he has few, if any, personal friends. He demands loyalty but is incapable of giving it to others."

• 13:15Alastair Campbell?

  But you know what? You mentioned Anthony Seldon there, of course, has written this book about Johnson. And Robert Saunders, who is on social media as @RedHistorian, he, I'm grateful to David Miliband for this, because David sent this to me, spotted it. Robert Saunders has written a very, very, very, very long thread on social media, which we'll put in the notes, pointing to very, very long list of statements made in the past in his writings by Anthony Seldon, essentially saying, "What a marvellous chap Boris Johnson was as he rose through the ranks." So I do think that it's all very well. At least some of us have been consistent from the word go that this guy should never be. Listen, there's another one in the House of Lords, where this is, I've just, I've just

• 13:58Alastair Campbell?

  looked up Ross Kempsol, who is heading to the, um, the House of Lords. So this is his entire Wikipedia entry. It won't take me long to read it. Ross John Kempsol, born 1991 or 1992. My assessment is if the Wikipedia can't be bothered to say when exactly you were born, then you're really not up to much. Is a British political adviser, who was political director of the Conservative Party and director of the Conservative Research Department. He was given a life peerage in the Prime Minister's resignation honours. Kempsol was educated at the BLAR, where he wrote for the weekly student newspaper Varsity. He is a former journalist at the Guido Fox political website. In 2019, Kempsol interviewed Boris Johnson during his campaign for the leadership of

• 14:43Alastair Campbell?

  the Conservative Party, in which Johnson Declared that he liked to make models of buses to relax. He also worked as a journalist for Times Radio and was political editor for Talk Radio. That is it. That is his life on Wikipedia. And he has been sent to the House of Lords by Boris, presumably for services to interviews about how to make model buses to relax.

• 15:08Rory Stewart?

  Can I ask one question? So one of the things that you've been picking up in our podcast a lot is that Boris Johnson was very keen to put Paul Dacre, the editor of the Daily Mail in. In fact, so much so that he put him in one honours list. It was rejected by the Appointments Commission. In March, he put him back on the honours list. Am I right in saying, though, that this is something that Rishi Sunak did ultimately manage to prevent, that Paul Dacre has not become a lord?

• 15:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Paul Dacre has not become a lord, and that is great news for the world because it's the one thing above all else that he wanted. And a man who's done as much damage to our public debate as Dacre shouldn't be given anything that he wants. But Rishi Sunak's line is that apparently there have been eight people who've been rejected by the House of Lords Appointments Commission. Now, it is an absolute failure of modern journalism that we don't yet know the names of these eight. But I suspect over time, we will hopefully find out who they are. I really do hope that Dacre is one of them. People saying it is. I'm assuming that Dean Dorries is another. I'm assuming Alex Sharma is another. I don't know whether that guy Adams, who's provoked this third by-election.

• 16:16Alastair Campbell?

  But honestly, Rory, what does this say about our country? That this is, I was flicking through my German news websites, as I do every evening last night when I go back from the theatre. And there's this story there about, this is the row between Sunak and Johnson about whether his dad should be called Sir Stanley. I mean, we're just a joke at the moment.

• 16:37Rory Stewart?

  I mean, it's beyond imagining. It's absolutely beyond imagining. In fact, so disturbing. Unfortunately, north of the border, we now have something else going on, which is really peculiar. Which is Nicola Sturgeon was put in custody. I mean, the police actually took her into custody and then released her again. And that's an incredible thing. So just to quickly remind people of this story. This relates to a police investigation into 660,000 pounds of donations that went to the SNP.

• 17:11Rory Stewart?

  That seem in some way to, well, something's gone wrong with them. And we have to be a bit careful here on not getting ourselves sued or put in prison ourselves. But anyway, that's what the police are investigating. And amongst the people they've started investigating were Peter Murrell, who is Nicola Sturgeon's husband, who we talked about this too, in an incredible conflict of interest. He was this chief executive of the SNP at the same time as she was the first minister in Scotland. So he's been interviewed by the police. She's been interviewed by the police. There's been this stuff about some kind of mobile home that was bought, which was seized from her, his parents' house.

• 17:53Alastair Campbell?

  Also, the, the, the party treasurer has also been interviewed by the police. All three have been interviewed and released without charge. Now, at the risk of my Scottish Labour friends shouting at me as they have in the past for being far too nice to Nicola Sturgeon, I think we should make clear she was released without charge. No charges have been, have been brought forward. And Police Scotland have been very, very clear that all of us, you know, and that includes us, Rory, should be very, very careful about how we discuss what is clearly a live investigation.

• 18:23Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 18:24Alastair Campbell?

  I was talking to, you get some amazing people in the, in the swimming pool that I go to, but one of them was a, a judge. And I was, I was sort of asking about this thing. I said, why, why couldn't this have been done? Why do these things have to be done with this sort of process of arrest and taken to the station and so forth? And he was saying it's partly to do with taping. They have the equipment there to tape everything. But it's also that they, they want to give people, the police in this sort of investigation, want to give people a real sense of the seriousness of it. But I, I think it is, it's a pretty, it's a pretty astonishing turn of events.

• 19:04Rory Stewart?

  One of the big things happening in the SNP is there are huge calls, including from one of the last leadership candidates, to have her suspended, partly because Nicola Sturgeon was actually famous for frequently suspending or removing the whip. From any other SNP politician who faced police investigations. And there's a great list of them on the BBC. So Alex Salmond quit the party in 2018. You remember he was tried and cleared at trial of sexually assaulting nine women.

• 19:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 19:32Rory Stewart?

  Patrick Grady was suspended from the party for making another MP for making a sexual advance to a teenage member of staff. Former Mike Finance Minister Derek Mackey was suspended for messaging a 16 year old boy on social media. Margaret Ferrier lost the SNP whip after speaking in the Westminster Parliament while awaiting the results for Covid tests in September 2020 before travelling back by train to Glasgow without self-isolating. And another former SNP MP, Natalie McGarry, was sentenced to two years in jail for embezzling £25,000 from the SNP.

• 20:03Alastair Campbell?

  It's quite a long list, isn't it?

• 20:05Rory Stewart?

  It's quite a long list. And, and, and I think, you know, one of the things that obviously Nicholas Sturgeon was doing by suspending these things quickly was to try to say, this is not a tiny cosy set of people. But it's striking that Hamza Yousaf hasn't done what I guess you would advise him to do, which was suspend her straight away until the results became clear. Or is that not your advice? What, what do you think he should do?

• 20:28Alastair Campbell?

  I was aware of some of those cases that you mentioned. I wasn't aware of them all. It does suggest that that was the approach. He is obviously, Hamza Yousaf is obviously taking a, a very different precedent because he said in an interview on the back of this, when he was under, as you say, under pressure from a lot of people to suspend Nicholas Sturgeon. He said, I'm not suspending Nicholas' membership. I'm treating her in the same way that I've treated, for example, Colin Beattie. Now Colin Beattie is the aforementioned former SNP treasurer who was, has already been arrested and released without charge. So he's decided that is the precedent he wants. He says, those that have been released without charge, I see no reason to suspend their membership.

• 21:13Alastair Campbell?

  So that says that he's decided he will suspend them from the party if and when this escalates further. But look, I do, I do feel a bit sorry for him, to be honest. I mean, he is, what a total mess he has now inherited. And every time he tries to get onto the front foot and speak about something else, there's something else is popping up to kind of knock him down.

• 21:35Rory Stewart?

  So my friend Angus McNeil, who's from the Highland and Islands, who I used to go canoeing with on the Thames, he was one of my friends.

• 21:43Alastair Campbell?

  He's a Gaelic speaker, isn't he?

• 21:45Rory Stewart?

  He's a Gaelic speaker and he was a friend of mine in Parliament. So he's been out saying this soap opera has gone far enough. Nicola Sturgeon suspended others from the SNP for an awful lot less. So I guess Angus McNeil would be appealing to you as a former expert on communications, saying that he thinks the longer she remains, the more the soap opera continues. And he thinks it's necessary to move fast to courtise this by suspending her.

• 22:08Alastair Campbell?

  The only thing I'd say to that is that I think that when you're talking about a former First Minister and you're talking about somebody as well known as Nicola Sturgeon, I think it moves to a completely different level when it involves Police Scotland making these inquiries. So I think, look, what happens now is what's important in terms of that police investigation, rather than some sort of short term tactical thing that Omzayusev tries to do. So I'm guessing that what Angus is saying there about this is part of this. What I think has become clear since Nicola Sturgeon left is that the divisions within the SNP, both personality and policy and political,

• 22:49Alastair Campbell?

  are much deeper than maybe you and I, looking in from the outside, were aware. Because the sense we got the whole time was that Nicola Sturgeon had a really tight grip of the whole party, pretty much.

• 23:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's amazing. I've been reading David Torrance's biography of Nicola Sturgeon. He also wrote a biography of Alex Salmond. And it's very striking. He wrote it just after the Brexit referendum, when she was absolutely at her peak. Because after the referendum, she came out very, very clearly. She was celebrated internationally for being the one leader with a very clear view in Britain about how to respond to the referendum. And it's an extraordinary story. It's a story of somebody who was a very, very hardworking girl from a tough working class background in Ayrshire who got Glasgow University, was fanatically interested in politics, in SNP politics from the age of

• 23:46Rory Stewart?

  16 onwards. She'd spend her holidays at SNP youth camps. And her first connection with Peter Morell, now her husband, former chief executive of the SNP, was that he was running SNP communications and put her on television at the age of 18. That was her first appearance because he already spotted the talent. And somebody who was initially far to the left of you. She was disgusted by Neil Kinnock, for example. She thought he was far too right wing. She very much on the kind of Benite side of things. And, you know, very much CND was incredibly important to her.

• 24:23Alastair Campbell?

  That strand exists still in the SNP. And I think that's the thing that she's managed to straddle pretty well. But I think there's no doubt she's been a very, very significant political figure and has been viewed widely as a very, very effective politician. But the big thing that she's fought for all her life looks to me like is less likely to happen than it did. And obviously, her statement was very, very strong. I'm confident. I haven't done anything wrong, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So that's why I say ultimately where this case now goes will decide her legacy as much as anything.

• 24:59Rory Stewart?

  Well, as we move to the break, we're about to move on to another major political figure who had a lot to do with the police and courts. Silvio Berlusconi, who claimed to have appeared in over 30 court cases and appeared in the witness stands, he claimed 2,000 times. But his relationship with the truth was always a bit peculiar and we'll return to that after the break.

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• 27:44Alastair Campbell?

  So, welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 27:46Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. And Alistair, one of the things that we wanted to just touch on is, is we did this interview with Kate Rayworth, who's an economist who developed this idea of doughnut economics, which people can listen to on The Rest Is Politics leading. Kate Rayworth, what did you think of that interview?

• 28:06Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it seems to have gone down very, very well. Lots to love for on Twitter, because we said in our discussion afterwards that we both, I think, found something utterly compelling about her vision and the need for the change, the scale of change required, but, but we just couldn't quite see how to make it happen politically. But I'll tell you, I don't know if you've been following this, I'm going to just hold this so you can see it, and we'll, we'll put it in the show notes as well. Have you seen these graphs on the temperatures of the water in the Atlantic, which are just absolutely terrifying? So essentially, the, it's a graph that shows that water temperatures are rising way higher than they should be. And she was talking about, you know, the dangers of actually reaching sort of tipping point. You look at stuff like this and it's just terrifying.

• 28:51Alastair Campbell?

  And I'll tell you the other thing I think is interesting. I do think there's, it's important that at some point, those people like her, who are utterly, you know, not single issue, because it's everything, but, you know, absolutely fixated, fanatical, and I use these words in a positive way, campaigning on something as important as that, but, but understanding that you have to, at some stage, engage properly with the political process. And I guess that's where you and I can maybe, I don't know, help do more, I don't know.

• 29:20Rory Stewart?

  By demonstrating the world-weary cynicism of the political process.

• 29:25Alastair Campbell?

  I know, and you getting on another bloody aeroplane today as well.

• 29:28Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. That's it. That's it. Quite right. Now, we are now going to move on to the amazing story of Silvio Berlusconi, who you met, right?

• 29:38Alastair Campbell?

  I met many times, yeah, absolutely.

• 29:40Rory Stewart?

  I want to really hear about that, but I'm just, just for the sake of listeners, just to remind them a little bit about Berlusconi. Berlusconi, born in 1936, so he was born in Mussolini's Italy. He started life as a law student. He was a very, very keen singer. Famously, he was a crooner on cruise ships. And he then went firstly into real estate development, where he built these enormous sort of interconnected nineteen seventies futuristic skyscrapers for four thousand people connected by weird bridges, then set up a television company initially serving

• 30:19Rory Stewart?

  his skyscrapers and exploited the fact that Italy was a pretty conservative lockdown place in the nineteen seventies, early nineteen eighties, and their equivalent to the BBC was a very, very prim Catholic broadcaster. And he pioneered essentially women with their tops off and entertainment shows and eventually managed to persuade an Italian prime minister in the early nineteen eighties to pass emergency legislation allowing his shows to be shown through the country and ended up controlling ninety percent, literally ninety percent of Italy's television. And he used this position to go on to, I bet you'll tell us a bit about

• 31:03Rory Stewart?

  this too, he owned AC Milan. He wrote the theme tune for AC Milan, thus getting into his sort of musical theme. He co-wrote it, he co-wrote it with a proper writer. And then in nineteen ninety four, he decided to go into politics and using his incredible television platform, he got fifty of the advertising executives on his company to also stand with him, used his coverage of ninety percent of Italian TV to get himself and then eventually his fifty advertising executives elected, became PM in ninety four, served ninety four to ninety five, prime minister again two thousand and one to two thousand and six, which was very important because he came in behind George Bush and the Iraq War, and then again two thousand and eight to two thousand and eleven. And the reason

• 31:47Rory Stewart?

  we're just talking about him is he's just died, but over to you who has some personal experience of the man.

• 31:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he is a truly extraordinary figure of our times. And I was doing an interview with CNN yesterday about my book, as it happened. But because of Trump in the indictment and Johnson going through his troubles, they wanted to talk about the whole sort of populism thing. And the researcher had done his work because they flashed up a quote from the book as follows. When it comes to the use of post-truth strategies in Western democracies, perhaps the first big mover was the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi. I think he is

• 32:34Alastair Campbell?

  in many ways a precursor of Trump and of Johnson. And I think what he did, which was incredibly clever, if his aim was always to go into politics, which I suspect it was, and he once said to somebody, by the way, that the first time he went into politics, it was to avoid landing himself in a terrible court case where he thought he was going to go to jail. So he basically understood, as many politicians have, that getting good media on your side is very, very helpful in politics. But he did it completely differently. He created this media landscape, as you say, with 90% control, and then went into politics. And that 90%, you're talking almost kind of authoritarian levels of media control.

• 33:19Alastair Campbell?

  And the other thing he was, he became the showman. He was a crooner. I actually think he's one of those guys who was much better looking before he had all the plastic surgery. I think he was actually a very good looking young man. Apparently, he was quite a good singer. I did hear him sing once, but only in a kind of he was messing around sort of way. But he then became this great showman. The football was a part of that. You know, Italy's a pretty football crazy country. AC Milan, he owned AC Milan from 1986 to 2017. They had a lot of success during that period. So that made him popular. The TV stuff made him popular. And this kind of populist blokey, the whole bunga bunga parties thing.

• 34:00Rory Stewart?

  Let me just quickly interrupt, tell people what the bunga bunga party is.

• 34:03Alastair Campbell?

  I thought you'd be interested in bunga bungas.

• 34:05Rory Stewart?

  So bunga bunga parties were his names for these parties where he had an enormous number of young women gathered at a villa. And it came to public attention because one of these women was arrested by the police. And he managed to get her off by telephoning the Italian police. And telling them that she was the niece of, I think, the president of Morocco or something. And that it was incredibly embarrassing, created diplomatic incidents, and she was then released. She subsequently claimed that he never slept with her and that it was all very innocent. And he was just a lonely old man who liked having seventeen year old girls performing in parties.

• 34:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, one of one of his wives did make a very voluble complaint about his seeming predilection for very young women, which seems to have lasted his entire life.

• 34:50Rory Stewart?

  Part of his whole identity, wasn't it? I mean, he was.

• 34:52Alastair Campbell?

  Totally.

• 34:53Rory Stewart?

  I suppose a bit like a lot of populist leaders. I mean, it's part of, I guess, what initially appealed to people about Boris Johnson, which is his kind of off colour humour, that he would make these kind of bar jokes all the time. And some of them were completely extraordinary. Some of them, you know, more straightforward, he would say, come and invest in Italy because we have the most beautiful secretaries in the world. But then he would compare, you know, a German member of the European Parliament, he would say, ah, she looks like the kind of person who'd work in a Nazi concentration camp.

• 35:24Alastair Campbell?

  I'll tell you my my favourite Berlusconi story. So NATO summit, Berlusconi has, because remember, he was prime minister, I think, in total for nine years. He was prime minister through four different governments of varying length. But at one point he became, Italy took on the rotating presidency of NATO. He hadn't been prime minister that long. And he made this sort of amazing speech about NATO and the power of NATO, the transatlantic alliance and the relationship with America. And it was very, very, very pro-American, very pro-NATO.

• 36:00Alastair Campbell?

  And as you said earlier, he was, you know, he supported George Bush on the Iraq war and he was a very Atlanticist when it came to security. Jack Shirak was sitting there getting grumpier and grumpier and grumpier as Berlusconi became more and more sort of florid in his pro-NATO statements. And so Shirak, very loudly, a demandé la parole, demanded to be the next speaker. And of course, he was quite a senior dude. So presses his microphone and the lights on and there's Shirak speaking. Shirak then starts to give Berlusconi a rather gentle at first, but then getting less gentle taste of his opinion as to why, you know, Europe is where his heart should be and all this stuff about, you know, NATO, let's not lose sight

• 36:45Alastair Campbell?

  of Europe and da, da, da, da, da, da. At which point, Silvio Berlusconi sort of clicks his fingers. And this is the bit I'm not sure. I think I have to describe it in this way because it is relevant to the story. A truly stunning young woman, who was clearly one of Italy's most renowned models, suddenly walked into the room, walked round the room. And I have to say, I think virtually every single person in that room, male or female, was looking at this incredibly beautiful woman walking into the room. And she went over to Berlusconi and she whispered into his ear and he turned to her and whispered

• 37:26Alastair Campbell?

  into his ear. And then she went out of the room and she came back while Shirak was still speaking away with fewer and fewer people listening. She came back with a tray of watches. These watches which were then sort of being offered to the various leaders around the table.

• 37:45Rory Stewart?

  So all guaranteed to make sure that as Shirak was making his serious speech, nobody was paying any attention at all because they were all looking at the woman or the watch?

• 37:53Alastair Campbell?

  They were looking, they were looking first of all at the woman and then they were looking at the watch and then they were trying on the watches.

• 38:00Alastair Campbell?

  So yeah, he was. But I'll tell you what, the one thing I would say where I think, you know, we could maybe laugh about that kind of thing. But he was also a precursor to Trump and Johnson and Putin, if you like, in the constant undermining of the rule of law. I mean, the whole thing about he used politics to change laws to help him get out of legal situations that he was in.

• 38:22Rory Stewart?

  And he totally and of course, used politics completely to for conflict of interest reasons for his own media and property empires.

• 38:30Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 38:31Rory Stewart?

  I mean, he was a very, very strange, disturbing figure. And I think he, you know, at some points, he'd pay tribute to Mussolini. He clearly had, like Trump, an incredible chip on his shoulder about what he perceived as the establishment. So even though, like Trump, he's a billionaire, both of them are property billionaires. But both of them felt the establishment never took them seriously. He was always known as Cavaliere. He had he'd got this sort of dodgy knighthood, which he'd eventually given up. But I think a lot of his life was about feeling weirdly that he was the kind of underdog fighting against the kind of sneering and someone like Chirac would have really, I guess, wound him up

• 39:12Rory Stewart?

  because he would have represented the kind of great auteur, the sort of French intellectual talking down at him.

• 39:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he's I hadn't really thought of him in that perspective because he always emanated a sense of incredible self-confidence and he had a real kind of look at me feel to him. But you could be right, maybe because his background, I think, was quite, his dad was a fairly lowly bank official, his, his, his mom, I think, was a housewife who just looked after him and the family. If you sort of look up Berlusconi, I guess this is inevitable, given the role of organized crime in Italian history. But, you know, the links with the mafia, there's always that sense of, you know, how close he was or wasn't to organized crime.

• 39:57Rory Stewart?

  Well, because De Lutri, who was the co-founder of Forza Italia with him, was eventually sent to jail for nine years for his mafia links.

• 40:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 40:06Rory Stewart?

  And there's a lot of questions about where, I mean, it's the same. With that horrifying figure in the United States, Jeffrey Epstein, with both of them, there are huge questions about where they got their first money from. People can sort of understand the logic of how he managed to use the money he made from his 4,000 apartment blocks into building the media empire. What's much less clear is where on earth he got the money from to start.

• 40:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, apparently, it's reckoned that, I mean, the various assessments you see is that he's worth somewhere between six and eight billion dollars. So he's got, I think he's got five children between two different women. So they all stand to gain a fair few, Bob. The favourite little fact that I didn't know until I saw the, some of the obituaries, is that he was a Freemason and his lodge was called, if, I think if I was a Freemason, this is the lodge that I would join, it was called Propaganda Due.

• 41:03Rory Stewart?

  Propaganda Due.

• 41:04Alastair Campbell?

  Propaganda Due Lodge is, was Berlusconi's lodge.

• 41:07Rory Stewart?

  That's a very, it's a very, it's a good fact. Okay. Now, we, we don't have much time left in the podcast, so we wanted to touch briefly on Latin America. And you've been looking at something called the Lithium Triangle and relationships with China. And obviously, we'll have chances to come back to Latin America in more depth on other pods because we don't do enough on Latin America. But I'd love to hear from you a bit on what you've been finding out.

• 41:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this was your idea, really, to say, you know, we didn't really talk about Latin America much. But I think that, you know, we've talked about Africa, and you've got a lot of experience of Africa. And it seems to me that during the Cold War, there wasn't that much interest being paid to Latin America, particularly by, by China. And I can't remember who it was, that somebody came up with the, the idea that we've gone from the Cold War to a Cold Peace. And that, and that China has actually been very, very, very systematic about developing relations in, in Latin America. It was Richard, Richard Haas, who's the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. He says, he's, he's got this view that power is now spreading to a greater number of actors in the geopolitical

• 42:14Alastair Campbell?

  space. And that Latin America is a target for that. And you've probably heard this phrase about- About geopolitical swing states. You know, we all know what a swing state is in the the American electoral context. But there are now geopolitical swing states who basically are, they're not necessarily pro this side or pro that side. They're making calculations according to their own, sometimes commercial, sometimes strategic interests. And, you know, the lithium triangle is essentially lithium is such an important commodity for batteries, for cars, for transferring to renewables and so forth. And Argentina, Chile and Bolivia are right up there in terms of possessing the lithium

• 42:57Alastair Campbell?

  that other nations, in particular the Chinese, want. And of course, the Chinese then have the capacity to to take it and do with it what they will. So I just think that you're seeing far more attention from China, from America. Interestingly, how, you know, America is starting to look slightly different to Venezuela in recent months. And so I think there's a lot going on there.

• 43:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we've we've talked about in the podcast, and I was, I mean, looking at the kind of big six, so Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia. You can see that there's a kind of, obviously, there's a there's a pattern that many, many countries around the world have followed, but it's maybe more dramatic in Latin America than elsewhere, which broadly speaking feels like a Cold War history, often military governments. And then, as they moved from the late eighties into the early nineties, the emergence of these kinds of technocratic, Washington consensus new presidents. So in Brazil, Cardoso, who's an intellectual, in Argentina, Menem,

• 44:02Rory Stewart?

  in Chile, Largo, in Peru, Fujimori, in Colombia, maybe Uribe, in Mexico, Zidane. And there's this credible boom largely driven by commodities, which means that they're not hit as hard by the 2008 financial crisis as Europe or the United States are. But what hits them is the commodity crash in about 2014. And it's from then onwards that you see these populist governments emerging. I mean, dramatically, as we've talked about, on the right, Bolsonaro in Brazil. But we've also talked about the left wing populists.

• 44:34Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 44:35Rory Stewart?

  Who emerged. And so Boric, for example, Gustavo Petro, Obrador, Pedrio Castillo.

• 44:41Rory Stewart?

  And I, I think, I mean, maybe this is where your friend who brought us the three Ps of

• 44:48Alastair Campbell?

  Why is his name?

• 44:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, populism, post-truth, polarization.

• 44:52Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 44:53Rory Stewart?

  His book really begins in Latin America, doesn't it? And sees that this phenomenon as being something that Latin America explores first.

• 44:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, there's, there's, there's another book I'd mentioned in which he actually, he does feature, and it's got a very staid title, but it's, it's worth looking at. It's called China and Latin America Development Agency and Geopolitics. And it's written by Christopher Alden and a guy called Alvaro Mendez. And it's literally, it is literally that, a history of relations between China and Latin America. And the turning point seems to have been Deng Xiaoping in the late seventies and the whole sort of reform, reform program. And the restoration of diplomatic links that frankly, during the previous era, had just been sort of virtually untouched. And, and the, the interesting, the, the country that really seems to have sort of led this in a way was Peru.

• 45:43Alastair Campbell?

  And there was a new Peru-China trade agreement in 2009. And that led to sort of, you know, massive new foreign direct investment. Argentina, obviously hugely important. They've got an election coming up this year, but, but part of the debate in that has been, are we America? Are we China? And obviously Brazil, Latin America's biggest economy, biggest population, lots of natural resources and so forth. And Lula, interestingly, has been out to China quite recently, and they're talking about this big, big partnership on a satellite.

• 46:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so this is related to the Belt and Road Initiative, which is this amazing Chinese infrastructure investment, $4 trillion worth, which you see a lot of in Africa, you've seen in Pakistan and in Latin America, which is about building an incredible network of...

• 46:32Rory Stewart?

  Infrastructure from dams, ports, roads, bridges, and actually has even had European and East European outshoots as people have signed up to the Belt and Road Initiative. It's a sort of Chinese massive soft power play with an enormous amount of development finance behind it.

• 46:51Alastair Campbell?

  No, and that's exactly what it is. And the point is that in the past, a lot of Chinese diplomacy has been conducted through stealth. And they're now out there very, very open, openly inviting partners in Central and South America in the Belt and Road Initiative. They've got this new partnership with the community of Latin American and Caribbean states. And China's now become South America's first trading partner, largest source of financing in space, infrastructure, energy, 2,700 major China-funded companies operating around the place. And the other thing that's interesting that comes out in this, in the, in the book that I mentioned, China and Latin America, is that the, that experience of African countries of, in a sense,

• 47:36Alastair Campbell?

  being drawn into development traps linked to growing external debt, there is obviously the worry that that is going to be replicated across Latin America.

• 47:47Rory Stewart?

  Um, listen, just as we come to that, I'd like to plug a guy called Michael Reed, who's written a very good book called Forgotten Continent, who I think was at The Economist. But anyway, a British journalist who's, who's done some brilliant work on Latin America.

• 47:59Alastair Campbell?

  Good. Well, okay, um, we should, um, call it a day then.

• 48:03Rory Stewart?

  Well, thank you all very, very much, or thank you in particular, not all of you, well, also the team, but yeah, thank you to the team. Thank you to our producers. We don't thank enough. And also, uh, thank you to you.

• 48:14Alastair Campbell?

  All right, Rory, speak to you soon.

• 48:16Rory Stewart?

  Speak soon. All right.

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