90. NHS in crisis, the Blair-Brown years, and Mandela on Gaddafi

In our first podcast of 2023, Rory and Alastair discuss the NHS in crisis and how government investment needs to be coupled with structural reform. There's also a look back at Alastair's diaries during the transfer of power from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown, and an analysis of newly-released documents from the National Archives. Show notes: Ian Kennedy, 'The NHS Dream is Dying', The New European, 08.12.22 John Burn-Murdoch, Data Scientist Johann Hari, Chasing the Scream Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, join the TRIP Plus Discord chatroom, 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 + 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.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  So, welcome to the first The Rest is Politics of 2023 with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:49Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

  On his 50th birthday, no less.

• 1:54Rory Stewart?

  So it's a big deal. Do you remember your 50th birthday? You don't really like birthdays, do you?

• 1:57Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not big on birthdays. It was 15 years ago. I don't recall doing anything special. I do feel it's a long time ago, though. Fiona had a big party for her 50th.

• 2:09Rory Stewart?

  Uh huh.

• 2:10Alastair Campbell?

  And I do remember that. We went to Paris and I remember she was a bit shocked that I wanted to come back like six o'clock the next morning because Burnley had a league against Arsenal. Um, I think fifty does feel like a big ship. Honestly, Rory, you've got a long, long, long, long way to go. You've got thousands of episodes before you get to sixty five.

• 2:31Rory Stewart?

  Don't need to panic then. It is quite a panicking age, actually. It's a troubling age. Um, right. Now, Alistair, tell us, I'm looking at a view with Ben Nevis in the background.

• 2:41Alastair Campbell?

  You just see the corner of Ben Nevis. Yeah, I'm up in the Scottish Highlands.

• 2:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 2:44Alastair Campbell?

  Um, where actually we've had, we've been here for about a week and the weather has been absolutely amazing and sort of very cold, obviously. We've been swimming in some very, very cold water. Um, but very beautiful. It's such a beautiful part of the world. Made my annual visit to Charles Kennedy's grave to play the lament that was played at his funeral. It's one of the most beautiful burial grounds on the planet. Clan Cameron allowed Charles's family, uh, to be buried up in this absolutely stunning. You wouldn't define it as a cemetery. It's just a burial ground and you have to climb up this this quite sort of steep, rocky climb.

• 3:22Rory Stewart?

  Is Clan Campbell going to allow you to be buried in some spectacular spot in the Highlands?

• 3:27Alastair Campbell?

  I would hope so. I would hope so. I've actually, I would, there's been a bit of revisionism going on about, because this, of course, is not far from Glencoe.

• 3:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 3:34Alastair Campbell?

  And we don't, we don't want to morph too much into the rest is history, but there was a pretty famous massacre there. But I've discovered, Rory, this is, this, I was going to throw this without you because it turns out that although there's no doubt that the Campbells did sort of.

• 3:48Rory Stewart?

  Didn't treat the Stewarts well.

• 3:49Alastair Campbell?

  No, and that's what's given us a bit of a reputation as being one of the most duplicitous clans around. Um, and brutal as well. However. Digging into it a little bit, I discovered that actually the real mythology around this was the Campbells murdering the McDonald's in the dark in the middle of the night actually flowed almost 150 years later from a few sort of quasi-official inquiries that were really being set up to absolve the then King William of any blame for the whole sort of fandango. So I think the Campbell's reputation, here I am spinning as ever, the Campbell's reputation, not quite so. There is still a there is still a pub up there that has

• 4:34Alastair Campbell?

  a sign outside, no Campbells or Hawkers allowed.

• 4:38Rory Stewart?

  We got to return to this in a bit. I mean, let's get you on to the less controversial ground of the National Health Service. But I think we've got to return at some point to this because I'm afraid the Campbells did a lot of bad stuff before Glencoe, which we may want to explore at some point. But anyway, on to the NHS. You've been talking about basic view is Britain's broken and you've been talking a lot about NHS and trains. Is that right?

• 4:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think it's interesting how this time of year, when people's conversations are about, you know, next year and arrangements and so forth. I mean, for example, two of the people that we were expecting to join us up here didn't actually make it. One of them made it as far as Newcastle by train. Another one made it as far as Preston by train. But I think the health service is, I mean, obviously, as you know, the papers up here are very, very different to the papers in London. And it's quite interesting to see how the the papers in England seem to be all about A and E services, just not not functioning, wait times, staff morale, all this stuff, ambulance waits, et cetera. And you've got exactly the same in Scotland, where you have a combination of Labour, the

• 5:43Alastair Campbell?

  Lib Dems and the Conservatives calling for a recall of Holyrood so that the Scottish Government can be held to account for the shambles of the health service. And of course, in England, you have the Conservatives saying, no, no, no, no, nothing to see here. It's all going very, very well.

• 5:58Rory Stewart?

  And just sorry, just for listeners, just to remind them, that's because health services are devolved. So it's one of the great political footballs. And I remember when I entered politics in 2010. Um. Health was going badly in Wales and one of the great attack lines in the House of Commons, whenever the Conservatives were attacked about health in England was to say, well, Labour's managing it badly in Wales. And then I guess at the moment it's the SNP's managing it badly in Scotland. But maybe that's a chance at some point for us to talk a little bit about structurally, why the health service is in such trouble and is likely to remain under very, very serious trouble, almost whoever comes in.

• 6:30Alastair Campbell?

  Sorry to kick off our very, very first podcast of the year on your birthday, but I do think we have to talk about austerity here. There was an absolutely fantastic, I don't know if you follow this guy from the Financial Times called John Byrne Murdoch. I really started to get to notice him during the Covid pandemic because he was, he's a data scientist and he just looks sort of ruthlessly, relentlessly at data and writes about it. And he did a fantastic thread. I think we should put it in the, in the show notes and we should really, really have a look at it because he did a fantastic thread two days before Christmas. And it starts as follows, Britain's grim winter strikes falling incomes and a worsening NHS crisis. This is not some unfortunate

• 7:11Alastair Campbell?

  series of events. It's the inevitable result of a decade of Tory austerity that has steadily weakened the state's capacity to respond to shocks. He then posts a number of graphs, he posts a lot of graphs on the spending of healthcare as a percentage of GDP. He actually does put blue for the Tory years, red for the Labour years, and you can see in terms of public sector fixed investment, government spending on healthcare as a percentage of GDP, really significant rises during the new Labour years and then flattening out. And then he meets the point, and this is the point you often make, Rory, some will say the Tories' hand was forced in 2010. Most countries had to tighten their belts as they faced off against the global crisis. But, he says, the Tory belt tightening was tighter

• 7:56Alastair Campbell?

  than what other governments did in any of our peer countries. And he then sets these graphs against the other countries and how they have recovered better. And then makes this, I think, incredibly important point. Technically speaking, he says, the NHS budget was protected from the cuts, but with a rapidly aging and ailing population, merely maintaining health spend has been proven insufficient. So other countries- Have continued to grow their spending as a share of GDP, whereas here we've declined. And then, of course, you throw Brexit into the mix, which has directly, I think, caused some of the staffing problems, and I actually think some of the morale problems within the health service professions as well. And then he's got a stunning graph about nurses' pay in real terms, where you see it going up and up and up and up

• 8:39Alastair Campbell?

  during Labour and then flattening down under the Tories and now had quite a substantial fall. So I've only covered the first three or four graphs. He's got about twenty fifty graphs on it. It's really worth looking at.

• 8:50Rory Stewart?

  So I think firstly, for listeners, I think that's absolutely true, no doubt at all. Labour spent far more on health. I think on average, Enough Your Trust has got some great data on this, and under the Labour government, ninety seven, two thousand and ten, average real term increases of about five point four percent a year. So that's not just keeping in line with inflation, that's five point four percent above. Period before ninety seven, the Conservative government was running in the two, sort of two point five, two point six percent year. Early years, the coalition basically flatlined and then changed under Boris Johnson. So the last two, three years, there were some very, very substantial increases. So Boris Johnson put an extra thirty four billion in, which even in real terms was going to be a seven point four percent increase.

• 9:32Rory Stewart?

  So one hundred and fifty two to one hundred and eighty two billion a year going into the NHS.

• 9:37Alastair Campbell?

  A lot to do with dealing with the pandemic, of course.

• 9:39Rory Stewart?

  No, that's excluding the pandemic related costs. That was a huge increase under Boris Johnson, and that was the eleven billion pound national insurance.

• 9:47Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, right.

• 9:47Rory Stewart?

  Into the NHS stuff.

• 9:48Alastair Campbell?

  Which he said was part to fix social care.

• 9:51Rory Stewart?

  And then he diverted it back to the NHS, yeah, which is one of the structural things. All these rises have been massively eroded by inflation running at ten percent. The government awarded a five percent pay rise to NHS in July, but that's been swallowed up immediately by by inflation. So you're completely right. The Conservatives have spent much less year on year in real terms increases than Labour. The question, I guess, is, is this a sustainable situation? Because as the man you're quoting points out, the fundamental problem underlying it all is that costs have skyrocketed. So in real terms, we're spending about four percent as much as we were spending in nineteen seventy nine on health and doubled the share of the GDP we're spending on health compared to nineteen seventy nine. So it's going up and up and up all the time.

• 10:37Rory Stewart?

  But in the last thirty years, the number of people over eighty five has doubled, and the number of people aged between twenty and twenty four has shrunk by a fifth. So the fundamental structural problem. Is fewer and fewer young people paying for the care of more and more elderly people and getting more expensive all the time.

• 10:53Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, which is, which is another reason why there has to be a far more grown up debate about immigration.

• 10:58Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, because we need more young people coming. But let me, let me sort of pay tribute to somebody who I think is one of the heroes of this story, which is Alan Milburn. So Alan Milburn really tried to grip the situation, Labour Health Secretary, and he tried to make some very, very fundamental changes to the way the NHS had been designed. In fact, he tried to, if you were going to be cheeky, you'd say that he went right back to the 1940s in the debates between the Conservatives and Bevan, the Labour Health Secretary, on how the NHS was going to be set up. The Conservatives were pushing more for what is now a kind of Dutch system, where you had more independent hospitals, and that's what Alan Milburn was really trying to do. And he tried to do it with a massive injection of money, which is the right way to reform

• 11:40Rory Stewart?

  the NHS, bring in more money at the same time as reforms, try to set up these foundation trusts, and then had his legs cut out from under him by Gordon Brown, I guess.

• 11:49Alastair Campbell?

  I think Alan would have described it in even more colourful terms.

• 11:56Rory Stewart?

  So what is the story of that? Do you remember any of that stuff? And what happened?

• 12:01Alastair Campbell?

  God, I wish you'd have warned me because I could have consulted my, my diaries because I hate talking about these things from sort of what becomes a, a false memory. But certainly, I mean, the specifics of the reform, I think Tony was, Tony Blair was always of the view that the, the massive investment that we promised had to be allied to reform, that if you just sort of basically put the message that all it ever needs is more money and there's not reform alongside it, that that becomes problematic or politically as well as structurally for the National Health Service, you have to have that reform running alongside. This did come at a period where the so-called TBGBs, the kind of difficulties between Tony and Gordon were, I guess, reaching something of a peak.

• 12:43Alastair Campbell?

  And I think you're right to pay tribute to what Alan was trying to do. But it's sort of got swallowed up in that in that sense of Tony really is the kind of archmoderniser and Gordon, you know, projecting a slightly different image of himself and what he believed the government was for. And I can remember there was, I can't remember how many pages it was, but Gordon wrote an analysis, it was a very long analysis of what Alan's proposals were, which, as these things often did, found its way into Her Majesty's media and triggered, you know, some pretty difficult infighting. And once that happens with policy development, it becomes very, very difficult to get the show back on the road.

• 13:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, one of the things I couldn't ever do as a politician, and I guess politicians can't do, is try to talk openly and honestly about the problems in the NHS, the structural problems which which Alan Milburn were trying to fix. So if I could just take a little time to do that, I think, and beginning by obviously paying tribute, very, very strong tribute to doctors and nurses and the incredible work they're doing. But they are in a very, very difficult system. And if we were designing the NHS again, we wouldn't make it look like this. I think we'd make it look much more like the Dutch or French system with more of an insurance basis on it. Because we've got a lot of the problems of a very, very centralised, nationalised industry. And I guess one of the biggest problems is the way the Treasury works, which is, the Treasury is always very, very reluctant to make any

• 14:10Rory Stewart?

  capital investment, because that costs them a lot in the short term, instead of which they tend to give way on current investment, which costs them less in the short term, but much more in the long term. I guess the analogy would be somebody refusing to do the work on fixing the roof in their house and instead paying much more for the plumber every year to keep on going. So we're massively under invested in terms of the capital of the NHS. We haven't begun to put the right investments into data. We've just don't have, if you compare to leading countries like South Korea or Japan, I think it's got four times the number of MRI machines, six times the number of CAT scanners compared to the UK per head. And we haven't really been able to deal with some workforce

• 14:52Rory Stewart?

  issues. There isn't unfortunately still serious bullying and racism in the NHS that hasn't really been dealt with. All these things, I think, are very tough for any politician to talk about. And as Alan Milburn found out, very, very difficult to bring through the reforms, which we need to bring through because it's not a sustainable system in the long run.

• 15:09Alastair Campbell?

  Well, also, if you go back to the Richard Johnson era, where this whole focus on, you know, 40 new hospitals, which aren't actually new hospitals, as though that is what the infrastructure of the health service should be. And when you mention Holland, I think that one of the problems we have is that we have a national illness service. We don't think about it as a health service. So the focus, you know, rightly, when people get sick, they want to know that they can see a doctor, they want to know that there's a hospital there if they get very, very sick, and they want to know that they can get an operation in good order, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But there's very little focus, or there's insufficient focus on what we can do to keep ourselves healthy. And I don't, I actually, even though Truss is now gone, I think you could sense even

• 15:52Alastair Campbell?

  in that brief period that she was there, this idea that, well, people actually should be allowed to make their own choices about, you know, how they live their life and exercise and diet and all this other stuff, you know, she didn't even want to do that sort of, you know, fairly inexpensive propaganda programme about how to insulate your homes. And so all the stuff that we can do to make ourselves healthier, I think, figures very, very little in the debate about health within the UK. Whereas you go to some of these other countries, I think I've told you before about, in relation to mental health and addiction, for example, that the place where my son, and actually where Charles Kennedy almost went to. For treatment for alcoholism, a place in the Scottish Borders, was kept alive,

• 16:35Alastair Campbell?

  kept going, courtesy of the Dutch government sending their hardest case heroin addicts to be treated for their addiction because the Dutch government had this view that if they could really treat them, stop them being addicts, they were going to not just make their lives better for the long term, but also save the healthcare system money in the long term as well.

• 16:58Rory Stewart?

  Just on that one, I'll say 100%. And without sounding too sort of centrist right about this, that's because the incentives align for the health providers in Holland. So they have incentives to try to improve public health because it helps their bottom line, it reduces pressure on the system.

• 17:15Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. But that's the way that we should be thinking about our prisons budget, is the way that we should be thinking about our health service budget. And the problem I think we're into now is that, and I do think this is becoming existential, and I do think it's becoming existential, partly fuelled and ventilated by the right wing of the Conservative Party. When you see the, some of the things that they say, well, it's the system that's busted, therefore we need to break the system, therefore, and you know what they mean, they're talking about moving to a much more American-style healthcare system. And Ian Kennedy, I think, I don't know if I've talked about Ian Kennedy before, Ian Kennedy, who's a friend of ours, but you might remember him, he chaired the Bristol Babies Inquiry, he actually, he brought in the system for passports, for pets, for

• 17:59Alastair Campbell?

  dogs and cats to be able to travel with their owners when they go into the European Union. He's a kind of, he's in the health sector, but he's also academic and he's a lawyer. And he wrote a piece in our good friend, The New European, recently, where he'd heard us having this discussion on the podcast, and I had said, look, there is a part of me that thinks that some of these Tories actually really do want to break up the health service because they see it as the kind of ultimate in a socialist experiment that they don't like. And Ian wrote, and again, we should probably put this in the notes if I can get a link to it, he wrote a piece saying that he's actually moved to that opinion as well, and going back to austerity, and then through the implications of Brexit, and then through the belief that the market is actually the solution to all.

• 18:39Alastair Campbell?

  And he wrote a very compelling piece that suggested that actually there is a very strong strand of opinion now on the right of British politics that really wants to undermine the health service. And I'm finding it very baffling, Rory, that Sunak is virtually silent on this. His New Year message had a sort of throwaway line about how much money they're putting into the health service. Stephen Barclay appears to me to be next to invisible in terms of actually trying to resolve these problems that we're facing, you know, here and now. And is there a sense that they just will let this drift a little bit longer and eventually people say, do you know what? The health service has had it. We've got to throw it up in the air.

• 19:12Rory Stewart?

  Where I agree with Ian Kennedy is that there is an element on the far right. It isn't Steve Barclay and Rishi Sunak. They're not trying to destroy the health service, but you're definitely right.

• 19:20Alastair Campbell?

  It was that element that pushed the mainstream, for example, towards Brexit or for example.

• 19:24Rory Stewart?

  You're absolutely right. There is an element on the far right which which we have to worry about that. And actually, the worst health secretary on record was Enoch Powell, who was the most terrible health secretary imaginable. I mean, the right of the Conservative Party has been terrible.

• 19:36Alastair Campbell?

  Andrew Lansley will be pleased to hear that there was a worst health secretary.

• 19:40Rory Stewart?

  No, Andrew Lansley was trying to reform things.

• 19:43Alastair Campbell?

  That was a cheap shot. That was my first cheap shot of 2023.

• 19:46Rory Stewart?

  Thank you. Thank you. I'll have a cheap shot at Frank Dobson then, who was a totally hopeless health secretary and made no efforts at all.

• 19:51Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, no, that's not true.

• 19:52Rory Stewart?

  Patricia Hewitt tried, tried hard, but didn't maybe have the human touch. But definitely the prize here goes to Alan Milburn. But I think the the question, though, is, and I suppose this comes to question of, but maybe we can move on to these New Year messages. Is Keir Starmer going to be able to come in? It was wonderful to hear in his New Year message that he was talking about reform, reform to the public sector. But definitely the thing, the best sales pitch that you can make for Tony Blair's government is people like Alan Milburn, putting in more money and reforming at the same time. And of course, the worst of what people worry about with Labour is that he'll come in, he'll put more money in, and he won't have the political courage to reform.

• 20:31Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Yeah, it's interesting how Gordon was a cash plus reform person as well. And so Tony absolutely was a cash plus reform. I'm sure Alan Milburn will be delighted to hear all this praise showering his way, but I think the the problem there did become the one of the of the bigger political problem that was that was slightly engulfing the government at the time. I've just dug up Ian Kennedy's piece and and he does say, funny enough, this relates to the point that I'd made earlier. Maybe this is where I sort of, you know, had implanted itself. And I'd forgotten, Ian did the wreath lectures back in 1980. And he said this, he said, redefining the NHS as a healthcare service, or even an illness service, turns the spotlight onto hospitals.

• 21:14Alastair Campbell?

  They, it is said, are the NHS's future. We need more of them, apparently forty more, according to one of the recent Prime Ministers, Johnson. This is so perverse in so many ways that it's hard to know where to begin. Safe to notice that the developers and the builders will be rubbing their hands. We've already seen that if health is the goal, building hospitals is an own goal. And I think the point he goes on to make is that, you know, that the health service is much more than buildings and it's much more than hospitals. And the big part that I think is really, really struggling at the moment is the staff. The staff morale, because we've talked so much about health today, let's not do it in the Q and A. But can I just throw in some of the questions that have come in this week on health? Alan Clark, consultant gastroenterologist at Airdrie in Scotland.

• 21:59Alastair Campbell?

  Happy New Year. What are you two most going to miss about the health service when it goes? Because it is going to go and everyone in politics and the mainstream's media seems to be standing around and letting it happen. What I'm going to miss is looking after patients who can't afford healthcare. Rachel Clark, she's a palliative care doctor. She said, witnessing the horrors in hospitals currently. This is directly a question to Rory. Based on a 12-year record, do you have any reason to believe that your party isn't wholeheartedly committed, determinedly destroying our once great NHS? Stuart Bertie, have Rory and Alistair ever known a time where public services have been run down to this extent? So this is coming from people who are working day in, day out, on the front line in the health service. And they're sounding like they just can't see a future for this.

• 22:44Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's a terrible situation. I mean, I think Covid was a blow beyond imagining. And I think it's going to be very difficult for the NHS to come back from that. I think we have a crisis every winter, goes all the way back to your time in government.

• 22:56Alastair Campbell?

  We do, we did stop the NHS winter crisis, Rory, we did.

• 22:58Rory Stewart?

  Very good, very good. But these winter crises come again and again and again. And I think this public health point is totally critical. But I also think there's a fundamental design problem. I mean, Bevan was driven, obviously, by his consciousness that at that period in Wales, the quality of healthcare was much worse than it was in richer parts of the country. And he thought the solution to this was to nationalise. But the consequences have been that a lot of the stronger trusts were undermined. And we've ended up now in a very odd system in which some poorer parts of the country, like Manchester, have better healthcare than wealthier parts of the country, like such as East Anglia. Cumbria, where I was the MP, was terrible. As I say, you know, most of

• 23:41Rory Stewart?

  the old people in Cumbria would make this joke that they would rather, you know, they could save money going to Switzerland to die by going to the Cumberland infirmary because so many people were dying.

• 23:49Alastair Campbell?

  And was that, was that fair? Was that, was that?

• 23:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it was absolutely terrible. They did breast cancer screening and then they lost all the X-rays. And it turned out a lot of the women they'd screened did have breast cancer and they just didn't bother to get back in touch with them. And the superbug results were terrible. And it was actually very interesting trying to get into what the problems were there. You know, my grandfather was a doctor, my uncle's a doctor, my cousin's a doctor. I mean, I come from, very much from that world. And I think they are extraordinary people. But I do think the NHS structurally desperately, desperately needs reform. And it also desperately needs more money. But I think the two things got to go together. Now, New Year messages.

• 24:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 24:27Rory Stewart?

  What did you think of the messages of Keir Starmer, Rishi Sunak, for example? Let's start with them. Because I think the King just did a Christmas message, right?

• 24:35Alastair Campbell?

  I did think his was interesting. I thought, I thought Charles's first Christmas broadcast as King was, was interesting. I think it was more, I don't want to use the word political in a, you know, I think it was more political, small P, than his mum's used to be. I suspect if you were a striking ambulance worker watching, you're probably feeling quite sort of chuffed at the recognition. I can remember one of the banes of our life used to, oh God, not the New Year message again. It's like, it was one of those things, you sort of feel the last thing politics people want to hear as a privateer to tell you that what they should feel and think for the next, the next year. So I, I say this with that insight and with that. That knowledge that often you put a lot of work into it, knowing that it's just going to kind of, you know, drop like a stone.

• 25:20Alastair Campbell?

  Um. I thought it was interesting. You picked up the point from Keir Starmer's and it was, it was, I thought both of them, both Sunak and Starmer were more, more in commentary mode. Than political leader mode, but I agree with you that the point that I picked out of Keir Starmer's was this, this emphasis on. Essentially, he was saying that they've now got to move into setting out the alternative agenda. As I've been saying this for, for some time, this is absolutely the period where that has to step up, I believe. I thought with Sunak, there was quite a lot of kind of blaming going on. It was, it was very much, and for both of them, of course, the, the Brexit murder stands, there was very little mention of the elephant in the room. Sunak, I think, was wanting us to believe that Covid and Ukraine were giving us these terrible problems and, you know, we were sort of a great enough country to be able to see them off.

• 26:05Alastair Campbell?

  But there, there wasn't much of a plan there. I didn't feel.

• 26:07Rory Stewart?

  I agree. I mean, I, I think the sad thing where was that the plan seemed to be we're going to have a coronation and we're going to keep fighting for freedom in Ukraine.

• 26:15Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. We're, we're all going to come together when King Charles gets the crown put on his head.

• 26:19Rory Stewart?

  So tell me, you're, you're the, obviously the specialist in this, but if I'd been doing that speech, um, my temptation would have been to say. We are facing an enormous problem. Right. This is terrible and everybody can see out their windows that this is terrible. And we, the government are part of the reason for that. It's also true that our lives have been made more difficult by Covid and by Ukraine, but I'm not going to keep blaming those things forever. Um. Here's the solution. This is what we're going to do. It's going to be tough. We're going to make it through. It's going to be a pretty horrible year ahead, but these are the things that make me feel that within a year, we're going to come out the other side. Um. Why, why don't they give those kinds of speeches? Or why didn't Rishi Sunak, I guess, who's the prime minister, give that kind of speech?

• 27:02Alastair Campbell?

  Um. I, I honestly don't know. I felt his speech felt like somebody, somebody said when he was at, I think he was at the CBI, one of the sketch writers. I think I've got the right event. And he said, it was like watching somebody who'd rather unexpectedly be made head boy of his school. And he'd been given five minutes to go and talk about anything he wanted to talk about. He didn't come across like a political leader. He came across like a commentator trying to persuade us that things weren't quite as. Bad as maybe they felt. Whether a new year message is the right place to do that, whether it gets lost, I don't know. But I think in terms of the overall messaging, that's the sort of messaging that they did around the financial statement, wasn't it?

• 27:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 27:37Alastair Campbell?

  It was, and that's, I think, we're not through that, that kind of feel for the country. And I think this sense of he's standing in Downing Street, it's all looking a bit grand and glitzy. We had this bizarre, I mean, I don't know what you thought of this, Rory, as a sort of piece of communication strategy. Did you see the piece that his wife had this sort of profile piece where her friends had sort of cooperated with the tatler to sort of tell us how in touch she was. And I just thought that Rishi Sunak, it strikes me, he hasn't worked out how he intends to put himself across to the public. All we know is that he's being quite low profile.

• 28:15Rory Stewart?

  I think that's right. And I think the key in that is that he's in charge. He's got to be in charge. And he talked about this government, but I would have wanted to hear more. I get there's a problem. This is my solution. This is where we're going. Come with me.

• 28:28Alastair Campbell?

  But I think if you've got, like, so two big things going on at the moment. I haven't managed to get private eye up in the Scottish Highlands, but somebody's gonna be a photograph of this thing. It's an advert for the BrexO detector. Can you find the hidden Brexit bounty just waiting to be discovered beneath Britain's sovereign soil? This technological marvel, it's got a sort of Hoover type thing, it's been made in Singapore by Dyson. It can detect the tiniest opportunity buried where no one can see it. Just turn on the Brexit opportunity detector and ping. Is that a trade deal? No, it's a bottle top. But you never know, next time it could be a huge increase in GDP. Price, three hundred and fifty million pounds. So that's kind of, I think, where a lot of the public are.

• 29:10Alastair Campbell?

  I think I'm right in saying that neither of the Keir Starmer nor Rishi Sunak made any reference either to the Irish context or to the fact of the trade implications and the health service as well. Sunak barely mentioned the health service, other than we're putting lots of money in.

• 29:25Rory Stewart?

  We're putting lots of money, yeah. Well, the only thing that made me cheerful about Keir Starmer was that he stole part of my slogan for my London Merrill race.

• 29:33Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God.

• 29:34Rory Stewart?

  My slogan was fair.

• 29:35Alastair Campbell?

  Fairer, greener, more united. And he went with fairer, greener, more dynamic. So I'm thinking I'm I'm cutting through. I wonder if he did. I don't think we should sort of overblow our own trumpets. We do enough of that. But I do think that if you remember when we met him to interview him for the podcast, we said two things. One was that, you know, was he really seized of how constitutionally the country felt a bit broke? And also that we were pressing him on this idea that actually the nature of our politics, what our politics had become under Johnson, that there needed to be much more about that in the public debate. And he did, he was on to that in the New Year message as well. He was good on that. He was good on that. Shall we go for a break and come back? Then I think we should come back and talk about what I think was the New Year message, not just of this New Year, but of many New Years, and that was Zelensky's. Very good.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2, causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 30:33Speaker 03

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

• 30:39Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 30:48Speaker 03

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

• 31:00Alastair Campbell?

  Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. Now, before we get going on the second half, where I think will be more foreign policy focused, I know a lot of our listeners, like Rory and like me, are on Twitter. But as you know, and especially with Mr. Musk at the helm, it can be a rather chaotic, often unpleasant place when politics is raised. So we have started a new online politics chatroom for the members of The Rest Is Politics Plus, many of whom joined over Christmas to see us at the Albert Hall on the website Discord. It allows our listeners, as I call them, or readers, as Rory calls them, to debate the latest political news, discuss the content.

• 31:45Alastair Campbell?

  From our most recent episodes, agree disagreeably amongst yourself or even disagree agreeably and just carry on the conversation in more depth. If you're interested in joining, just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. And if you're already a member, we've already sent you an invite to the chatroom on your email. And hopefully you can look forward to taking part in even deeper conversations about politics and all that it involves.

• 32:09Rory Stewart?

  Well, Alasdair, thank you for that. During during the break, I've been doing that famous Googling that you're always accusing me of. And I found the entry just before your 50th birthday. I say, sorry, on your 50th birthday.

• 32:21Alastair Campbell?

  You're joking. So 25th of May 2007.

• 32:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And this is your meeting, Gordon Brown. It relates quite neatly, actually, to what we were talking about in the first half, which is the politics, the NHS and the problems of trying to get reforms through. So I jumped in a cab, arrived just on time. Gordon Brown looked tired. His second chin was larger, hair a mess, nails on right hand, not so gnarled, but on the left, they were bitten right down. He was not in great shape, I would say.

• 32:49Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, Rory, Rory, we're trying to persuade Gordon to come on the podcast and do an interview.

• 32:54Rory Stewart?

  Okay, I say sorry about that. I think he might have read it already. He went straight into a thing about how competence was the issue. We've lost the NHS as a political argument, all that money, but we've lost the argument. He went through a plan someone had put together for him to revise healthcare in London as a way of showing how it can be done elsewhere. I said it felt it was too much accepting the culture of negativity. But he said, if he was out there just defending the record, nobody would listen. I felt both were possible. He said he had to be the future. He could not just do the past. I said, you have to do both. He had to be continuity and change. One did not work without the other. Also, there was not enough of an attack on the Tories. That sounds like you about to come to an end here. I was in there

• 33:39Rory Stewart?

  for about an hour or so, and it didn't feel great. I felt de-energized by it. He lost it at one point when he raged about how much the party was in debt, how the machine had been allowed to atrophy. 26 million fucking pounds of debt. That is the inheritance. He was pressing me to work for him. And eventually, he said, he would either like a private arrangement, where I offered advice in the background, or what he would prefer, where I would run the Labour Party. He said it would not matter who the general secretary was, he would want me to oversee campaigns and comms. He went into a tirade about how since I left, there was nobody bringing it all together, coordinating message. Also, he wanted me to help him put together a plan to communicate new approach on health. He was very friendly, but a lot of anger spilled

• 34:20Rory Stewart?

  out at times. And I was trying to persuade him, he should be a lot more confident and optimistic, but not easy. Great writing incidentally, Alastair. I can see why your diaries are such bestsellers. I love the sense you get an image of him, a sense of how you were feeling during the meeting. Not true, I'm afraid, of Matt Hancock's latest diaries.

• 34:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, my favourite headline over the holiday period was in the Independent, and it said Hancock's diary is officially a flop. I don't know how they measure a flop.

• 34:49Rory Stewart?

  So just to explain, this is just a month before Tony Blair resigns and Gordon Brown takes over as PM. So that's Gordon absolutely presumably in his most nervous waiting to take over. And you'd left two years before, hadn't you?

• 34:59Alastair Campbell?

  I'd left in 2003, went back for the 2005 campaign. That was definitely a period when I was, I mean, I use the word de-energised. I think if you, if you read around that period, I'm seeing my psychiatrist quite a lot. I was not in a great shape.

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  And would your, would your psychiatrist have advised you to take up that job of running the Labour Party that Gordon Brown offered you?

• 35:20Alastair Campbell?

  What he said the whole time was that I, I felt trapped. And only I could decide whether I wanted to be in that trap or out of that trap. But there was no kind of half in, half out. And, you know, that's been, there's been this story of my life for quite a long time of that sense of being half in, half out. I did feel, because even though by, come that time, the Tony Gordon thing, as you say, it was, it was almost coming to an end. Gordon and I, we'd had many, many ups and downs. I remember the meeting itself. I do remember it specifically because I can remember, I remember, I think, I don't know if I say this in the diary, but I remember going home and talking to Fiona and basically saying, look, he wants me to go in and run the Labour Party. And she said, well, you know, that's not true. He wants you to go and run his campaign. And Gordon kept trying

• 36:03Alastair Campbell?

  to find these new ways of, you know, he'd offer me a place in the Cabinet, he'd offer me the Olympic Sport Minister, all sorts of different things. And I just felt the whole time that I was, I was trapped between these two people who were both giants, both of incredible talent and incredible skills politically, and both of whom I believed in.

• 36:27Alastair Campbell?

  And I was probably, you know, there are other members of the Tony circle who felt that I allowed myself to be used by Gordon, that Gordon did eventually get me to go back and help him run his campaign, did help with the transition from Tony. And that, I remember that phrase I used, I think that you read out about continuity and change. That became the kind of the mantra. Gordon had to represent continuity and change. And that became part of the, the thing that, that really, you know, led us to where we then, we then got to. I'm still very, very torn about the whole thing, to be honest.

• 36:59Rory Stewart?

  Whether you shouldn't perhaps have taken that, taken some of those jobs. Cause you, you chose, you chose not to do any of those things, didn't you?

• 37:04Alastair Campbell?

  Or whether I should have. Yeah. I think what I chose to do was to stay half in, half out. And it's never a very, very good place to be. I've just looked up the diary myself now, Rory, and I see that it ends at the Albert Hall. That entry ends at the Albert Hall because Fiona and I went to see Mick Hucknall singing.

• 37:20Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 37:21Alastair Campbell?

  At the Albert Hall. And I think, I think you'll find you were in his dressing room.

• 37:25Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I was in Mick Hucknall's dressing room. I went to see Gordon Brown just before that, before you saw him. I'd just come out of Iraq and I was in Afghanistan and he asked to see me and I went to see him in the Treasury. So he's still the Chancellor. And he gave me an hour of his time and he wanted to quiz me on Iraq. And it was a very interesting interaction. I managed to get in my normal, pretty pessimistic statements about Iraq. And I could see there was a sort of glint in his eye because he was going to announce as soon as he took over that they were basically getting out of Iraq and moving into Afghanistan. But it was also a sort of, for somebody who didn't really know politicians, I guess, yeah, that, that period, I was, I was still in my early, early thirties. The sense that I thought this guy has set aside a great honour, Chancellor

• 38:08Rory Stewart?

  Dzichek has set aside over an hour to spend time with a guy in his early thirties. He's just come, come back from Afghanistan. But actually what happened is I think out of that hour, for 58 minutes, he spoke. He lectured me on the Treaty of Westphalia. I learnt an enormous amount about 17th century European politics, but he didn't actually ask me that much about what I'd seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

• 38:31Alastair Campbell?

  It's funny, Lou, we didn't plan to have this trip down all our yestersdays. But of course, the other thing that's been popping up in recent days is this, all this stuff being released from the early days of the Blair government.

• 38:43Rory Stewart?

  So tell us about this. So there was one of the interesting things that comes out. And one of them is that Tony Blair remained, and this is something you've admitted, quite optimistic on Vladimir Putin. And it's clear from the release of the papers, National Archives now release them under the 25 year rule, that he remained optimistic on Putin despite officials trying to push back and saying he was still posting hostile intelligence officers in. He was trying to throw the UK under the bus for crashing a submarine into a boat, which the UK hadn't done. And the other thing that comes out of this is that Nelson Mandela had come to try to suggest that he could intercede with Gaddafi over the question of the Lockerbie bombing and Magrahi, who was the man who'd been accused of orchestrating the Libyan bombing. And I think Mandela was very much on the side

• 39:28Rory Stewart?

  of people who thought Magrahi had been framed and he wasn't actually guilty of this at all. Tell us about either of those things.

• 39:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think the thing about Mandela, there's a line in my diary somewhere where actually they were talking about Libya, and it might even have been in relation to this because Mandela did have quite a romantic view about Gaddafi, I think. And we've talked before about, you know, some of those links between, you know, Mandela, for example, in relation to Sinn Fein. You know, they sometimes, I think, felt like the underdogs, felt like the guys who'd been sort of, you know, hit upon by the global establishment and so forth. But I can remember Tony at one point saying, God almighty, Nelson, the trouble with you is everybody sees you as such a saint. You can come out with all this nonsense about Gaddafi, but we have to sit here and nod as though we agree with you. The other thing that's really interesting when these papers come out, there's one, for

• 40:17Alastair Campbell?

  example, the one about Russia. I read some of the media coverage and the headlines were, you know, Blair saw Putin as a Russian patriarch. There was a thing about us giving him these silver Downey Street cuff links as a sort of, you know, little gift and all this stuff. There's very little in those papers, I think, that you wouldn't have known from the time.

• 40:38Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 40:39Alastair Campbell?

  I think what's really interesting is when you get these papers where actually you you find out the stuff that you didn't necessarily know. I was fascinated, for example, to read that, and maybe I did know this at the time, that Jeremy Haywood, who was Went on to become Cabinet Secretary.

• 40:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 40:54Alastair Campbell?

  But there was a, there was a paper where he was so infuriated by the way that the press were covering us, that he was sort of putting around this idea that we should have a sort of a fact regulator, as some, somebody who could sort of check the facts of newspapers. And, you know, and there was, there's another one I saw, and again, I have no memory of writing this at all, a thing that I put around, it was a note I sent to, to Tony and the headline in The Guardian was Ministers' Media Indiscipline Beyond a Joke, Campbell wrote. And this is clearly just me and one of my sort of, you know, you've seen them occasionally, Rory, when I get into a bit of a bad mood and I kind of fire off an angry, an angry email. Well, this was that, and then you suddenly see them 25 years as though they're, so they're important. I don't think it was very important at all. I was just sort of, you know, letting off a bit of steam somewhere.

• 41:39Rory Stewart?

  The, the McGrahee thing is very interesting, isn't it? I mean, you, you read us a bit of Private Eye out earlier and Private Eye, I think, did a lot of the reporting on McGrahee, casting a lot of doubt on whether he hadn't actually been framed, that the FBI and CIA had paid huge amounts of money, it seemed, potentially to some of the witnesses, that one of the witnesses against him was clearly a bit crazy, that other bits of evidence pointed in fact to the Iranians, not the Libyans at all.

• 42:03Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 42:04Rory Stewart?

  And remember, he was about to appeal his case and a lot of British lawyers were very doubtful about the conviction which happened in Scotland, when he was released on compassionate grounds. And was, is this stuff you remember at all, people being worried about whether he was guilty and whether we'd been sort of pushed into it?

• 42:21Alastair Campbell?

  I only remember it in the context of, that context that we're talking about in relation to, that was a line that was being pushed quite heavily by the Libyans. And I do think that Mandela was more minded to believe them than believe us.

• 42:34Rory Stewart?

  But he may have been right. He may have been right in this, as in many other things.

• 42:37Alastair Campbell?

  Who, Mandela?

• 42:39Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 42:39Alastair Campbell?

  Um, before I answer that Rory, what stage is the legal process in right now?

• 42:44Rory Stewart?

  Poor McGrahee's now dead, so I think that whole thing.

• 42:48Alastair Campbell?

  There was something up here in the news about Lockerbie the other day, which wasn't about this.

• 42:53Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I see. Well, I won't drag you into a legal case.

• 42:55Alastair Campbell?

  I do. I do. I do remember Mandela once saying that those who feel irritated or confused by my relationship with with Gaddafi can go jump in the river. I think was the phrase that he used. He was certainly not backing down.

• 43:07Rory Stewart?

  Oh, right. Okay. So it's possible that he was right about McGrae and wrong about Gaddafi, who definitely was a very bad person.

• 43:14Alastair Campbell?

  It's quite funny and interesting to you because, you know, you get all these civil servants. I've got to be honest, there was some of the notes that were written that were sort of presented in the coverage of what's emerged from the National Archives that were written by people who described by as senior civil servants. And some of them, I literally can't remember them. So I don't know whether every piece of paper that gets released.

• 43:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 43:36Alastair Campbell?

  This is why, to give Rest is History another plug.

• 43:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 43:39Alastair Campbell?

  It's why it's so hard to be a historian. How do you differentiate in significance between a note that the prime minister has written, setting out his approach? Because the other thing that happened this week, Roy, the Irish government have released loads of papers related to the Good Friday Agreement.

• 43:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Alastair Campbell?

  And they're fascinating because they give a very different perspective of how they went into those talks and the issues that they felt were important. So if you're the historian sitting there, they can come and talk to people like us and we can try and remember who was in the room and what was said and what the mood was like. But honestly, I just I just think it's it's hard to work out.

• 44:17Rory Stewart?

  It's incredible. And when you go back in time, you realise how random it is which documents happen to survive and what a disproportionate influence they have and how excited historians will get medieval historians, you know, if they find one key administrative document and they'll try to use it to turn on its head all the assumptions.

• 44:33Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing that was in this this batch, do you remember a few weeks ago I talked about the worst idea I ever had?

• 44:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 44:40Alastair Campbell?

  Which was to get Celtic and Rangers to play each other, wear each other strips. I mean, it really was the worst idea I ever had. But in this batch was the the note that I wrote on it. And it's worse than I thought because it's a note that I sent to Tony Blair, copied to. Mo Molyneux, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, and Donald Jewell, Secretary for Scotland. I mean, heaven knows what they thought.

• 45:05Rory Stewart?

  The final thing, we'll leave maybe Zelensky and Putin to question time and talk about them in a little bit more detail. But could I just finish on Mo Molyneux because we're coming at the end. One of the things that she appears a lot on is that she was really determined to try to legalize cannabis, which obviously had nothing to do with her departmental role. She was Northern Ireland Secretary. But her voice was quite strong and Tony Blair basically said, we can't really touch this issue so long as Mo Molyneux is around, which sounded slightly threatening. So he was rather hoping to move her on at some point.

• 45:34Alastair Campbell?

  He said, I've got that one right in front of me right now. Because the other great thing about these papers is that when prime ministers are travelling, and this is certainly the case with Tony and I think with Gordon as well, you're often travelling, you can't be, you don't want to sit there pinging away at a laptop. So they're reading paper and they're reading things on paper. And then Tony would often just put little ticks at the bottom, which meant this is fine, whatever had been proposed. Or he might ask for more information. So this one, he just said at the bottom of a note that was written by Liz Lloyd, who was his advisor on Home Affairs stuff. Look, colon, now Tony loves a good colon, right? But the colon usually reveals that he's a little bit irritated that he's having to deal with this.

• 46:17Alastair Campbell?

  That is doubled down by the look, look, colon. We can't deal with this whilst Mo remains. She now just does her own thing. But I back Hello Wells' view, he was the so-called drug czar, and we just have to manage it for the moment.

• 46:31Rory Stewart?

  And Hello Wells' view, just to remind listeners, was that he saw cannabis as a gateway drug into harder drugs, and he was very determined not to legalize cannabis. Have you changed your mind on that now that you've become increasingly liberal and left wing?

• 46:42Alastair Campbell?

  I don't see this as being liberal and left wing. I changed my mind on drugs, not just on cannabis, but I had my mind changed by reading Johann Harry's book. Which was essentially that the war on drugs has failed. And it was a very compelling analysis and it just made me think, look, Mo could be absolutely wonderful. And we've talked about this in relation to Northern Ireland, when she suddenly just appeared at the prison. Or we did, even though she was going there and she was talking directly to the terrorists and we were going, what on earth is she doing now? But it turned out it was a good thing to do. On this, Tony, I think Tony's feeling was that she was just trying to be a bit cooler than cool. And wanted to sort of go around the place saying, hey, I smoked dope and you know, so what? And I think she had this line, you know, I took dope and unlike Bill Clinton, I inhale.

• 47:26Alastair Campbell?

  And she just, I think he saw it as part of her kind of profiling. And to be, I'm Mo Mole and I'm different to other politicians. And he didn't necessarily want this to become a big deal at that time. Hence, look, colon. I think I should probably write a piece somewhere about Tony Blair's use of the colon in relation to his mood.

• 47:45Rory Stewart?

  Look on, okay, well, let's, let's end on that and thank you very much. That was fascinating and just a little stupid plug for people, but, and maybe more suitable rest is history. But Mark Morris has written an amazing book on the Norman conquest that I'm reading at the moment. And if you want to see people going over the kind of documents you're talking about. Medieval historians finding the last surviving small poem in a 19th century book preserved from the 11th century or a particular chronicle. And how they try to guess what happened at the Battle of Hastings or what the hell William the Conqueror thought he was doing.

• 48:14Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I listened to the rest is history guys going on about Jesus on the way, on the drive up. We listened to a lot of the rest is history. And we also listened to the eugenics series by that guy, Adam Rutherford, where my God Churchill didn't come too well out of that one, I have to say. I think at least the rest is history guys admit that a lot of it, when they're talking about things like. I didn't realise, for example, there's a, there's a debate about when Jesus was born, that's 12 years long. So we have our entire dating system. It is now 2023 because of when Jesus was born, but actually there's, he could be 12 years out.

• 48:46Rory Stewart?

  So one of the points Mark Morris makes in this book is that with, by the time you get to Edward the first, which is much later, sort of 1300s. You literally know where he is every single day of his reign. But go 200 years earlier and you literally cannot tell whether William the Conqueror is in England or Normandy half the time. And there's an entire two-year period where we've got literally no idea where he is at all. So thank goodness for all these documents coming out about Mo Moleum smoking drugs.

• 49:12Alastair Campbell?

  Not to mention Sky News whoosh updates telling us where everybody is at any given time.

• 49:16Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. All right. Lots of love. See you soon.

• 49:19Alastair Campbell?

  All the best. Bye bye.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company told me of 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.

• 49:35Speaker 03

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

• 49:41Speaker 04

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

• 49:45Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 49:49Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 49:50Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.