564. Burnham’s Media Machine and West Bank Settler Impunity

Is Burnham’s Britain’s first ‘TikTok Prime Minister’ and what does that mean for accountability, old-fashioned journalism, and the Westminster lobby? Why are violent Israeli settlers able to act with impunity against Palestinians in the West Bank, and is Israel effectively annexing the territory? Should young people spend the last two weeks of their summer holidays thinking about the challenges facing the world? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in this week's edition of Question Time. Get involved with Politika’s Policy Ideas for Positive Change ⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠. The competition is open to all 16–18 year olds in the UK, and submissions close on 20th September 2026. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Summer sale is HERE: Get an annual membership for an extra 20% off with code SUMMER26 That's ad-free listening, every bonus episode, and full access to our exclusive members' series. Sale ends August 31st, so grab it before summer's over. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Becoming Burnham Trailer Editor: Dylan Bonham Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Bella Soames 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.

• 0:00Alastair Campbell?

  What is the thinking behind Andy Burnham's communications strategy? Is it working? Will it keep working through the very challenging times as well as this honeymoon period he's living through now? Whether it's ranking pub snacks or collaborating with content creators known as bus anti, Burnham's clear intent to reach different demographics in new ways has already led to him being called by some the TikTok Prime Minister. The new Prime Minister is certainly communicating very differently to the last one. His strategy relying a lot less on the Westminster lobby and a lot more on social media, TikTok, X, Facebook, Instagram, although he's not averse to a long chat on a podcast either.

• 0:45Alastair Campbell?

  And we're hoping he'll be on this one very soon. But in the end, while strong communications is a huge advantage to any politician in the modern media age, isn't it true that any Prime Minister ultimately will be judged on how they handle the really big challenges?

• 1:01Rory Stewart?

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• 1:56Rory Stewart?

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• 2:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 2:07Alastair 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.

• 2:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, and of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN, and it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 2:43Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:49Rory 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/racistpolitics. That's nordvpn.com/racistpolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 3:33Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:36Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 3:37Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, we're going to talk about Andy Burnham, his communications strategy. We're going to talk about settler violence in the West Bank. So let's get going. Where do you want to start?

• 3:48Rory Stewart?

  So much interesting and important stuff to get into, and I think we really need to talk about what's happening in the West Bank, which is underreported and incredibly significant. But before we do that, we have a question. Where is the line between communicating effectively on social media and becoming a semi-influencer? Do we really need to see Burnham ranking pub snacks or talking about vintage football shirts when there are so many real problems facing the country? I just, Alistair, want to hand that to you with two brief things. Firstly, of course, to remind the audience that you were Tony Blair's Director of Communications, so you understand better than anyone how a new Prime Minister comes in and organizes his communications. You did it very effectively, but you did it some time ago. And the second thing is maybe before you get into the analysis, can you tell us what you think he's actually doing?

• 4:33Rory Stewart?

  What's the sense of what's different about his strategy?

• 4:36Alastair Campbell?

  When I was thinking about this, we had lots and lots of questions about this in the last few weeks. And do you remember when we had Jeremy Hunt on the podcast? And he said that thing, which I've thought about lots since, because I think he's right. And he said that, you know, we have to, you have to learn from the way Trump communicates. And that doesn't mean we all go around, you know, lying and intimidating and all the stuff that he does. But what he meant by that, and this is something that I think we'd accept Keir Starmer didn't necessarily do, is you've got to be in the conversation. And Andy Burnham has definitely decided he's going to be in the conversation, and he's going to do it in a different way. So I was talking to somebody in his team in the last couple of days, and they were saying, for example, people are saying TikTok Prime Minister. Okay. Why are they saying that?

• 5:20Alastair Campbell?

  Because he's actually started to use TikTok quite effectively, his numbers are growing, and he seems kind of fairly regularly on there. What I've learned, this is something I thoroughly approve of, he's got 10 minutes in the diary every day. And the Prime Minister, I've said to you before, the Prime Minister's diary is such an important kind of commodity in government. Everyone wants in there. So 10 minutes every day, he's filming something. They'll maybe film a couple of different things on a couple of different themes, and then his team take them away and they package them up in different ways for all these different platforms.

• 5:59Alastair Campbell?

  And if you think of that, 10 minutes and the reach that he's getting from that is a very, very effective use of his time. More traditionally, and this is maybe where Keir Starmer was more inclined to go, Keir Starmer would make a speech and then turn it into a kind of press conference, take questions. I always thought that was a mistake because it meant that the journalists tended to set the agenda and make the weather out of the thing that you were trying to project. I think what Andy Burnham's doing is saying, I'm going to make the weather, I'm going to set the agenda, I will do it by doing big sit-down interviews, like I did recently with Laura Kuesberg on Panorama. I will do podcasts. Interestingly, I was talking to one of his team who said that the social care, so he made a big speech about social care.

• 6:42Alastair Campbell?

  It was covered live on the news channels, it was on the bulletins, the papers sort of, you know, talked about it a lot. But they actually said that the thing that, where they're in the focus groups that they do, where they really got a sense of it breaking through was when he went on Elizabeth Day's podcast, that demographic. So I think what they're doing is they're thinking, right, we're, he's a new Prime Minister. They're conscious of the fact that even though he's been around a long time, he's basically known by most people as Mayor of Manchester. Most, a lot of people don't remember necessarily his time in Parliament, he's known as Mayor of Manchester. So he's broadening his profile. I think he sees himself as being in that phase of his premiership where he's getting

• 7:27Alastair Campbell?

  the country to get used to him, whilst laying out some interesting big themes that you and I have talked about, so devolution, vocational education, and so forth. So essentially, he's putting together the different bits of a communications strategy around what is traditional, interviews, speeches, all the stuff that, you know, you know well, I know well from the time I did it, but then building in much more this sense of the modern.

• 7:54Rory Stewart?

  I was trying to think, you know, who's done this before in British politics and where did it came from? Twitter and Facebook are basically things that get going 2006, 2007.

• 8:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Rory Stewart?

  So just, just before Gordon Brown takes over. And by the time David Cameron is beginning to run and he becomes Prime Minister in 2010, he makes a comment before that election, saying that people who go on Twitter are twats, right? So he's, he's, he's still in a mindset, and I guess Gordon Brown won't have done much social media.

• 8:24Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 8:25Rory Stewart?

  But by the time we were getting into the 2015 election, the Conservative Party had hired Jim Messina, who had done Obama's 2008, 2012 campaigns, which were very, very much credited to brilliant use, not just of social media, but of super precise targeting, the use of A/B targeting, for example.

• 8:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Rory Stewart?

  And we were sent out knocking on doors with incredible sheets of data, which were supposed to tell us exactly who was likely to vote for us. It seemed on the basis of what they shot for in Tesco's. Fast forward, we then enter a series of Prime Ministers, only one of whom, I would argue, was ever only good on social media until we got to Andy Burnham. It certainly wasn't Theresa May's strength, it certainly wasn't Liz Truss's strength, and it wasn't particularly Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer's strength. It was Boris Johnson's strength. I mean, he had a real natural flair for comic video, you know, going all the way back to Have I Got News For You and the rest of it. And you remember, he went into an election campaign where he recreated the scene in

• 9:33Rory Stewart?

  Love Actually, standing there with, with signs outside, which really was Boris Johnson as an actor. I mean, very, very few other Prime Ministers would have been able to do that. And I think, one of the things I was thinking about when you were talking about that 10 minutes, is that for Keir Starmer, it probably wasn't just a choice. If you stuck him for 10 minutes in front of a iPhone camera, a lot of the Burnham things seemed to be selfies. I'm not sure he really would have been able to perform. I think he would have found it very, very uncomfortable. I mean, Andy Burnham is part of a new group of politicians who are able to do it very naturally. I guess, I mean, you do it very naturally. I mean, you're often asked to do little videos for schools and you've got used to it. But my sense is, I'm not sure the sort of Theresa May to Keir Starmer lot actually

• 10:18Rory Stewart?

  would have done that well at it.

• 10:20Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think what makes Andy Burnham an effective communicator for the modern age. Even though there's actually something very old fashioned about it, is that he will talk pretty much the same, whether he's talking to you as an MP that he bumps into in Parliament, or he's talking to a head teacher who's showing him around a school, or he's talking to an interviewer. I don't think he'd be picking up all these impersonators who have started to do Andy Burnham. And they're all doing it in slightly different ways. There's obviously there's the northern thing. Russell Kane does some very funny videos about, you know, I'm normal, I'm just a normal guy. Here are my bits of white bread in a

• 11:01Alastair Campbell?

  toaster, because that's what normal people do. But I think in terms of how it relates to his communication style, I think Matt Ford, who you and I both know Matt Ford, very funny Labour guy, and he's got this thing, I don't know if you've seen any of his impersonations of Andy Burnham, I can't do the voice, but in terms of the style, it's basically this thing about, well, what he does, Rory, he asks you a lot of questions, doesn't he, Rory? So, you know, he's talking about the economy and, you know, what people really want is a bit of help with the, with the cost of living, don't they, Rory? And he's got this sort of style of the, of the question, he's, he's very conversational. But then he made this point that he hasn't quite got the tonality structures worked out. So, for example, he'll be saying, well, I was at the football last night, Everton, we played really well and

• 11:44Alastair Campbell?

  had a few beers with the lads, my head's a bit sore this morning, but I've got to tell you, Rory, if the Iranians don't get their act together, I'm sending in the nuclear weapons. He can't do the pivot. So, and I think, but when, what you're speaking to, and I think Mark Carney's got this as well, is, is actually, they're very natural. They're not being something they're not. So when Keir, when you say Keir Starmer wouldn't be able to use the 10 minutes as fruitfully, it's because he'd be overthinking it, and he sometimes just sounded so kind of constrained and, well, is that word right? Whereas Andy, we talked about Jason Ardi yesterday, he obviously felt this was probably in his 10 minutes. He thought, look, I've got to say something about this, it's really serious. And what he said was just, he was

• 12:27Alastair Campbell?

  just speaking like a human being. He wasn't really making any political points at all. And sometimes that's, you have to do that as Prime Minister. And I think what's coming over is that it's very natural and very authentic, not too scripted, not too stilted.

• 12:43Rory Stewart?

  Here's, here's another thing I want to give him credit for, because David Cameron did a little bit of the taking you behind the scenes. So you'd sort of see him when he was Foreign Secretary, walking up those very grand stairs in King Charles Street and sort of looking over his shoulders, saying, you know, I'm going into a summit on this and the other. Most of the Andy Burnham stuff I've seen, there is a sense of division between what's going on in the Cabinet Room and what he's talking to you about. It's not that he's sort of, it's not a reality TV show where he's taking you in behind the scenes. It's more that if you are going behind the scenes, it's him sitting down with his Cambridge professor and having a little chat about that or something. But it's, it's not quite that he's like, here I am at the Cabinet Table, the Chancellor just made a

• 13:27Rory Stewart?

  rubbish point. We're not really getting that, which I think is good. We don't, we don't, we don't really want that.

• 13:31Alastair Campbell?

  No, we don't want that. We don't. And also that, that, if you do that, you're then relying, although, you know, the, the pub video thing that, the, the, the question I mentioned, was, that's the one that I didn't like that much. He was doing with John Healy, rating pub snacks, okay? I think we need a bit less of that, but a bit more of the, again, I'll tell you one where I thought was really effective. And this, this happened because of the, in part because of the timing of the 10 minutes that they had in the diary to do it. It was when he became, I think, the first political leader of any note, basically to come out against Infantino and the new plans on the World Cup. That was a classic

• 14:15Alastair Campbell?

  example of where you've got your 10 minutes in the diary. Normally, what they're thinking of doing is using him to supplement what is the main thing the government is promoting on that day.

• 14:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, so let me put, I'm interrupting here, because this is your thing, or is something very associated with you, which is the grid. And I think the idea of the grid was supposed to be, this week, the big story is adult social care. Last week, the big story is devolution. So the temptation would be to say, got 10 minutes for the Prime Minister, what we're going to do is we're going to use him and everybody else to say, this is what we're doing on adult social care, instead of which we get Infantino.

• 14:50Alastair Campbell?

  So I, I think most days, he will be thinking and his team will be thinking, right, we've got West Streeting is out today, doing some big new announcement on, on defence, let's get the Prime Minister in behind that. On Infantino, I think they, they basically just decided, this is a huge story, it does have a political dimension to it, and if he gets in ahead of this, that is a good use of this few minutes that we've got of his time now. And I think that's a, so that, that's a very good example.

• 15:18Rory Stewart?

  Now, now let me get back to the question from our questioner, because he does raise, I think, quite an interesting point, which is what's the downside of this? I mean, the upside seems to me that Burnham is charming, likeable, he's getting a lot of cut through. Incidentally, here's a kind of small thing. You'll see a lot of people saying that he's, he's a TikTok Prime Minister, run the Facebook Prime Minister. It's true, he's had a very remarkable jump in the number of people following him on TikTok. He's jumped up to about 400,000, 400,000. But interestingly, most of the real cut through is still coming on Facebook. So there's a very odd thing, which is that he's got fewer Facebook followers, but his

• 16:03Rory Stewart?

  Facebook posts are getting a million, one of them in case, almost 5 million views.

• 16:07Alastair Campbell?

  Just on that, Rory, that's really interesting, because the members of the team that I was talking to, they made the point that when he was talking recently about the prisoner release situation, they said that the really big breakthrough was actually when he's, he wrote a piece, I think it was the Daily Telegraph, old style, okay, put the whole thing on his Facebook page. And I don't know if that was the one that got the 5 million views, but that was where they suddenly started to notice feedback coming through.

• 16:35Rory Stewart?

  He's getting most when things are visible. So he's really landing, you know, he can land a million views if he's talking about buses, but buses seem to me quite a invisible, tangible thing. Oddly, when he's talking about cost of living or politics, he's getting, you know, only a few hundred thousand, a hundred thousand, 120,000, 160,000 likes. So sometimes a tenth of that, sometimes maybe a sixth of that. And the question then, this is my question, is, is that a bit of a warning sign for one of the problems of this strategy, which is it works best if you're talking about a bus and a bus route or a pub, but it's less good if you're talking about something that's more difficult to

• 17:19Rory Stewart?

  visualise, like welfare cuts?

• 17:21Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I wouldn't, if I were them, I wouldn't be overthinking it like that. I think they have to know what are the things that they're trying to communicate over a particular period of time. The other thing that, you know, one of my golden rules of communications is when you, the communicator, are sick to death of saying something, that is the point at which is getting to the outer radar of public consciousness. Now, Andy's got that. I always felt with Keir Starmer, he was a bit, you know, when you see those footballers doing interviews, they're like I said, like I said. In other words, they think they've just been given a line and they're just going to say it. And if you're a politician, you have to say, you have to say things like, because you need energy and Andy's got energy

• 18:04Alastair Campbell?

  and you need empathy, because you have to connect with people. If you say, you know, as I was saying earlier, or, you know, like I said on the interview I did this morning, people just think you're trotting out a line. You've got to have that sense of keep saying the same things.

• 18:19Rory Stewart?

  And you, and you also keep telling us that you've got to keep saying the same things, but not in the same words, otherwise you sound like a total robot. He's quite good at making the same point, but in interesting, different ways.

• 18:28Alastair Campbell?

  And I think, and I, and I think he does that. So to go back to the Matt Ford thing, he might be saying, you know, you've probably heard me say this before, Rory.

• 18:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 18:35Alastair Campbell?

  You know, he'll do a lot. He's got this very conversational style. Now, when, when does he get tough? I mean, he has had this pretty good start. We've had the, the prisons issue, we've had the, you know, the right wing going mad because he put out a post, the message to everybody about, you know, don't put your barbecues out. But I think he's had a good start. It will get tougher when Parliament comes back. And that's when I think this communication strategy gets more tested. And of course, the other thing that will happen, it's already happening a bit, is that the traditional media will start to get pissed off. And by which I mean the lobby and the Westminster journalists, they're going to start to get pissed off. He's got to hold his nerve on that.

• 19:17Rory Stewart?

  You can sort of see their point, because presumably, you felt a little bit peed off when you discover he's going to go on the rest of his football with our friend Gary rather than coming to us first. So.

• 19:28Alastair Campbell?

  No, of course I understood it. I understood it.

• 19:30Rory Stewart?

  You understand? Okay, all right. Well, maybe you're more sympathetic.

• 19:32Alastair Campbell?

  I'll be honest, Rory, here's something, you may not want to hear this.

• 19:35Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 19:36Alastair Campbell?

  If I'd have been Andy's, Andy Burnham's comms advisor at this point in his premiership, I wouldn't have advised him to do the rest of his politics.

• 19:46Alastair Campbell?

  Shall I say why?

• 19:48Rory Stewart?

  Let's hope they're not listening.

• 19:49Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, Rory, don't worry. It's all under control. It's all under control. He will be coming on The Rest Is Politics at some point in the not-too-distant future. But no, I'll tell you why I wouldn't have advised him to do it. Because you and I would have been interested, would have been nice, would have been polite, would have gone his childhood and his background and all that. But we both want him to be talking more than he is doing about foreign policy. Okay, they know that. So they'll be thinking, right, we're in that period of getting the country to get to know us a bit better, getting to know them a bit better. So during the World Cup, going on The Rest Is Football with Gary Lineker and Michael Richards and Alan Shearer is, it makes sense. As long as you're not avoiding the serious stuff.

• 20:34Alastair Campbell?

  And that's why I thought, actually, again, it was probably quite smart not to do the Laura Koonsberg show on Sunday morning where he gets 15 minutes and then three people sort of say how crappy it was, or whatever it might be. He gets a full one-hour, serious sit-down interview. So I think they're thinking about it very strategically.

• 20:52Rory Stewart?

  Well, here's the other challenge, I guess, which is the challenge of scrutiny. So the problem with social media, you might say, without sounding too much like I'm standing up for the journalists and the lobby journalists, is that on social media, he gets to choose what questions he answers and he gets to choose what he talks about. And I think political journalists would say in their defence, listen, you need us and you need a system where prime ministers feel under a pretty strong obligation to sit down with us regularly and take questions. And he isn't doing that. I mean, there was real grumbles from the political editors who were invited into the garden of number 10. And according to Tom Baldwin, all of them collectively were allowed only four questions between them.

• 21:36Rory Stewart?

  So they would say, there's a democratic point here. There's a point about democratic accountability, that we need to be able to pose questions that he hasn't seen in advance, that he's not expecting and he isn't necessarily that comfortable answering.

• 21:50Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure I buy that. I'll tell you why. Because we are, as you know, a parliamentary democracy. And he rightly gets tested hardest, should be tested hardest, in Parliament. I think he will do more and more, he'll do lots of media. I think he does make himself accessible. But I think it's this thing, one of my other golden rules is, you know, you, the communicator, you, the politician, you have to set the agenda. And so avoid the things where the agenda is going to be wrestled away from you. So for example, and it's just not the case, so I used to do two briefings a day. One at 11 o'clock in the morning, one at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Now, I was speaking on behalf of the Prime Minister.

• 22:33Alastair Campbell?

  The Prime Minister's spokesman in this system does the same thing once a day in the morning, 11 o'clock. Now, so that's it. Okay, you're not seeing Andy Burnham, but you are putting whatever questions you want. You are then also able to influence the government and Downey Street as to whether they then think they need to address some of these questions through him in a different way. If he spent his whole time just not engaging with journalists, not talking to journalists, then I could see that would become a bit of a democratic deficit problem. But I don't think he's doing that.

• 23:08Rory Stewart?

  Final ventriloquising for your friend Tom Baldwin, the biographer of Keir Starmer, who kept telling us never to underestimate Keir Starmer and anyone who'd underestimated him paid the penalty. His final line was to say that

• 23:24Rory Stewart?

  his team seems to have taken pleasure in misleading the lobby journalists, that they really enjoyed. Three of them, three of the inner circle, basically told the journalists that Shabana Mahmood was going to be the next Chancellor. So much so that the FT, which is very careful following up, ran it. And then after the event, they basically laughed at the lobby journalists and said, well, that serves you right. Shouldn't believe anything that you don't hear from official sources. And Baldwin thought that was a bit silly.

• 23:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, look, I think if that was how it happened, then it would be a bit silly. What they say to me is that, and listen, I had lots of experience with this and it used to drive me up the wall. Because what would happen is a newspaper writes Rory Stewart is being moved from international development to health. Okay, and then somebody phones you and says, is this story true? And you say, well, I'm not going to talk about it. I'm just not going to talk about it. What the team in number 10 say to me is that they neither denied nor confirmed anything. Maybe in their body language, they did indicate steer away from Ed Miliband.

• 24:33Alastair Campbell?

  And that led to people saying, well, the only people in the frame were Ed Miliband or Shabana Mahmood, and that is what led people. No, I don't know. I wasn't involved in those conversations, but I can see easily how that could happen. Okay? I think if you deliberately mislead the journalists, they're going to get very, very pissed off. And unlike the Americans, by the way, as you and I have talked about this, the Americans don't, seems to me, stick together at all. The British media pack is much more herd-like. And if you, if they start to think that you've been misleading journalist A and journalist B, journalist C and journalist D think it could have been them. And so they, you know, they'll push back hard at that.

• 25:15Alastair Campbell?

  But I think at the moment, I'm actually in Italy at the moment, and we're staying with some friends, some of whom, you know, work in this international communications world. And I just said, look, we're going back to the podcast with Rory Stewart. We're going to talk about Andy Burnham's comms, what do you think about it? And they all said, I think he's absolutely nailing it. But where the questioner is absolutely right, though, in the end, it is about what are the big decisions you're going to take? What is the economic strategy you're going to pursue? What is your foreign policy? These big questions are what ultimately will define success or failure, not, you know, how many views he gets on TikTok.

• 25:52Rory Stewart?

  Well, also, what a new world he's in. I mean, it's, I was looking at this amazing Reuters report, which has been done by Reuters Institute report from Oxford University, looking at where people get their news from.

• 26:05Rory Stewart?

  Again, we can share that in the newsletter, but the numbers are absolutely staggering. I mean, the number of people who say they basically are not interested in the news has gone from 16% to about 25%. The number of people whose primary source of information comes either from social media or from people like us, podcasts, is now more than the people who get their information from newspapers and television. So it's gone above 50%. And even within, we know print media is collapsing, something we've talked about a lot. And we know that television news watching is going down.

• 26:43Rory Stewart?

  Maybe less reported is the fact that traffic to the newspapers' own websites and content is dropping very dramatically too. I saw a, you know, really interesting example of this. You can see it again and again if you go on X and you see what these companies are having to do to try to get people in. I saw one of the most kind of big blue chip names in British journalism trying to work out how to convince people to register on their website and see if they can offer them a few free articles a month. How do you think you do that in the modern world? Again, do you imagine that you're The Economist or the FT and you're trying to get people to register and get three free articles? How would you do it on X?

• 27:23Alastair Campbell?

  Have you got an answer? Have you got a good answer?

• 27:28Rory Stewart?

  So what you do is you post something saying how to relax on your holiday and get off your phone. Click here, free registration and you can read the article. In other words, you're one of the big blue chip news organisations, but you're beginning to believe that the best way of getting people to register is to send sort of lifestyle holiday advice.

• 27:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, that's the opposite of what I would say. Absolutely. I'm not having that at all. If that's the FT or The Economist or Bloomberg or Politico, no, I don't support that strategy at all. But, you know, look, I'm nearly 70, Rory. Maybe I'm just sort of out of all this. But it's interesting. I like talking to, I had a really good chat with one of his comms team about, you know, because what I think is going on, I don't think they're obsessing about it. The thing I used to loathe about doing the job that I did with Tony Blair was the sense I had that the journalists are never happier than when they're actually talking about themselves and their own trade. And that's why, you know, whatever strengths or weaknesses or mistakes, whatever I made,

• 28:36Alastair Campbell?

  that's what really used to drive them mad about my relationship with them. I was always conscious of the fact that they were interested in me in large part because they were so interested in themselves. And so I like the idea of maybe think that Andy Burnham, you know, I hear he still reads the newspapers. I think we need to iron that one out, but he still sort of gets the papers. And of course, the worst thing about all the government buildings, I don't know why they do it, they leave the newspapers lying about everywhere. So if you're waiting to see something, and there's the Daily Express or the Daily Mail there, you know, you're tempted to pick it up. No, don't, don't waste your time. It's going to get inside your head and knock you off track. So I think that they shouldn't overthink it.

• 29:18Alastair Campbell?

  They know he's very, at the moment, he's popular, he's had a good start. But you're now going to build up to the party conference, return to Parliament. The big stuff has to start happening. And around it, you build a communication strategy, but his job is, that's a small part of it. And so the questioner is absolutely right. You and I, journalists, will talk about his comms, he will think about it a bit, but don't think about it too much. And he's so naturally good at it in terms of this style that he has. He's going to grate on some people and already people are saying, you know, when will this TikTok nonsense end and all that? Just ignore it. Because if he was only doing TikTok...

• 30:00Alastair Campbell?

  People would think he was a joke, but they see him doing TikTok, they see him doing the big speech, they're going to see him in Parliament. Don't underestimate how important that's going to be when Parliament comes back. So I think he's doing pretty well.

• 30:10Rory Stewart?

  I do think the tone has been very good. I mean, he's not a comedian. He's not Boris Johnson. He's not even like Georgia Maloney. He's not actually trying to generate content by doing outrageous things. He's certainly not Trump. And nor is he showing off. I mean, there's not a sense of kind of massive personal vanity or projection or overly selling. I mean, so I think, no, I think it's great.

• 30:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Rory, before we go to the break, you had a little break from the sort of intense podcast work and allowed me to do a three-part mini-series with Steve Rotherham, Metro Mayor of Liverpool, City Region, huge friend and very close political ally of Andy Burnham. And Steve and I sat down and we've done this three-part series, which we're calling Becoming Burnham. And it traces how Andy Burnham went from a teenager radicalised by Thatcher-era Liverpool to being our seventh Prime Minister in just over a decade. You can hear about all sorts of things. This is all from Steve, Andy Burnham's imposter syndrome, Catholic

• 31:15Alastair Campbell?

  guilt complex. We're going to hear about Andy Burnham, the DJ, Andy Burnham, the footballer. Very interesting on how his word humiliated he felt, losing particularly the second leadership election, the one that was won by Jeremy Corbyn. An astonishing story about how Andy Burnham actually found out about the Manchester Arena bombing, which will alarm some people, but there we are. His big beef with Boris Johnson and the battle for Covid funding, Manchesterism and all that. And above all, maybe Steve's very well-informed predictions of how Britain is going to develop under Andy Burnham. So that's all coming up on Becoming Burnham. You won't want to miss it. So sign up at therestispolitics.com. Here's a quick

• 32:00Alastair Campbell?

  taster of the series that I've done with Steve Rotherham.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  Who'd want to be Prime Minister of this country?

• 32:05Alastair Campbell?

  On Monday, 17th July, 2026, the UK got its seventh Prime Minister in just over a decade, Andy Murray Burnham. Some call him the King of the North, others a vibes leader, all warmth, no weight. Well, I'm sitting down with the man who knows him better than anyone, Steve Rotherham, Metro Mayor of the Liverpool City Region.

• 32:24Speaker 03

  I got introduced as Andy's bestie mate.

• 32:27Alastair Campbell?

  So how do you think he's feeling right now?

• 32:29Speaker 03

  He's probably thinking, how did this all happen?

• 32:31Alastair Campbell?

  Just weeks into his new job as Mayor of Manchester, Burnham has to lead a city in shock.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Breaking news out of Greater Manchester. Phone Andy, phone rings out. Phones Andy again, the phone rings out. Andy, my girls are in Manchester. A bomb's gone off at the arena. Can you get the girls out of Manchester? Do we get them out now?

• 32:52Alastair Campbell?

  Good evening. The next pretty defining moment was Covid.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Protect our NHS, stay at home and save lives. And there was Boris Johnson trying to play me and him off against each other, stupidly believing somehow that we weren't phoning each other every night. Every time I had a conversation with Johnson, I'd be telling Andy and vice versa. The frustration of a Prime Minister, the political leader in this country, playing politics during one of the most difficult times that any of us have ever been through.

• 33:19Alastair Campbell?

  Andy's people skills are very, very good. And yet, his relationship with Keir, it seems to me, did very quickly become a bad one.

• 33:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:27Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think if he had been allowed to stand in Gordon Denton, that you might have had Andy back in?

• 33:31Speaker 03

  They didn't want all the best players on the pitch.

• 33:33Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to squander this three-figure majority, and we're going to lose the next election to Nigel Farage.

• 33:37Speaker 03

  The first set of local elections frightened me. The second set literally had me petrified of what might come next.

• 33:45Alastair Campbell?

  To hear my three-part series with Steve Rotherham, Becoming Burnham, sign up at therestispolitics.com.

• 33:52Rory Stewart?

  And just a reminder that members have access to a whole range of Britain's series, including Caroline Lucas's new series on climate and national security, my series with Matt Clifford on artificial intelligence, Alasdair's deep dive on populism, the story we both did, looking into the real J.D. Vance, and much, much more. When we come back from the break, we'll get into something completely at the other end of the scale, which is settler violence, the West Bank, and what's happening in Israel-Palestine at the moment.

• 34:21Speaker 04

  Hello, everybody. It is Dominic Sandbrook here from the premier goal hanger podcast, The Rest Is History. And I wanted to tell you about a new series that we have out this week. It is about the troubles in Northern Ireland. Now, of course, this is one of the great landmark events, one of the darkest moments, really, in modern British history. It pitted neighbour against neighbour and set the streets of Belfast, and indeed of Britain, ablaze. Now, I can't exaggerate how important this story is. In fact, I think in Britain, we don't talk about this as often as we should. You had a low-level civil war in part of the United Kingdom. You had in 1972, almost 500 people dying in a single year. It changed the way, I think, that Britain thought about Ireland, but also the way that

• 35:04Speaker 04

  Britain thought about itself. And of course, it was a constant factor in a lot of people's daily lives. If you want a deep dive into perhaps the darkest moment in modern British history, then join us this week on The Rest Is History, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 35:23Speaker 02

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• 35:51Speaker 05

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

• 36:02Speaker 06

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

• 36:08Speaker 07

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

• 36:12Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 36:15Speaker 07

  I'm not the first then.

• 36:16Speaker 06

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2. Rated R. Under 17 ninety without parent.

• 36:26Rory Stewart?

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

• 36:30Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. Rory Noor, Trip Plus member from Wiltshire. In light of Palestinians being besieged in their own homes in Kuzra in the West Bank, and the increasing expulsion of Palestinians by Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem, what can be done to rein in the terror wrought by extremist settlers on Palestinian communities? Is the world doomed to watch helplessly until America ends its unequivocal support?

• 36:57Rory Stewart?

  Let me begin with two quotes from members of the Israeli Knesset, a minister and a former minister, to set what seems to be happening in Israeli politics. Here's one of them. "I think targeted killings should be carried out every night. Thirty or forty, not only those who pose a danger, if there are those who are not worthy of life, they're not people. In fact, I'm already complimenting them by calling them people." That's a quote from one minister.

• 37:27Alastair Campbell?

  A minister.

• 37:28Rory Stewart?

  Think of it. So really interesting, because you'll pick up that there's a very interesting echo there. He's using

• 37:36Alastair Campbell?

  Him.

• 37:36Rory Stewart?

  An equivalent of a German word, lebenswertes Leben, you know, people who are not people, unpeople. Here's a quote from another minister, former minister, Mirav Cohen, who's more from the centre. "Villages are being attacked, communities deliberately driven from their homes, sheep are being slaughtered, orchards burnt, people are being attacked because they are Arabs. This is indeed terrorism. It is Jewish terrorism." So that's Mirav Cohen talking about what is now happening in the West Bank. And she's brutally clear, but we've got Naftali Bennett, who's many people think is potential future

• 38:18Rory Stewart?

  Prime Minister, saying, "We did not establish a Jewish state so violent groups could operate within it." We've had the Chief of the IDF saying, "It's completely unacceptable what is happening." But here's the question. Israel is the most effective security state almost in the world. Extraordinary Intelligence Service, Internal Intelligence Service, Army, its control of the West Bank is unbelievable. Surveillance, vehicles, roads, infrastructure. And yet, apparently, it is completely unable to protect a house with a few Palestinians in it from being attacked by violent settlers with the Israeli army standing right by. And it goes on for days. How's that possible?

• 39:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's possible. It's only possible if there is, if they're working together. And I'm afraid that's the conclusion that you're left with, is that actually this is part of the Israeli state and the way that it operates. And the questioner, how can this be stopped? The international community, for want of a better phrase, has to stand up in a way that at the moment, nobody seems to be standing up. Apart from the NGOs, is anybody really speaking out against this at all? You know, we talked earlier about Andy Burnham clearly wants to be a domestic Prime Minister. Fine, I get that. And that's maybe quite a good thing, then, somebody as high-profile as Ed Miliband is Foreign Secretary. But my God, I could have done with some pushback from the British government on Netanyahu,

• 39:48Alastair Campbell?

  calling Britain the Islamic Republic of Great Britain. I mean, there are a lot of people in Britain who can't stand him, and that has turned a lot of people against Israel. You and I, I think, are both supporters of the state of Israel and supporters of a two-state solution. Very few people have done as much to damage it as he has. For him to talk about the Islamic State of Great Britain, I find deeply, deeply, deeply offensive. To be fair to Mick Huckabee, we've talked about him before, he is the American ambassador to Israel, he is as big a supporter of Israel as you're going to find, he is a huge supporter of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, despite its illegality, and he has described the settlers who have been besieging these homes in Kuzra as, quote, "Israeli terrorists."

• 40:33Alastair Campbell?

  That's as tough a statement as I've ever heard coming from him. The point is this, though. I saw, I can't remember where I saw it, I saw this picture in the, I think it was in the New York Times, and I've actually kept it here on one of my documents, it's of a young girl with her mother.

• 40:50Alastair Campbell?

  In their home in Kuzra. And they're just looking out at these people who are terrorizing them. And they just look like, I mean, they're really kind of beautiful faces. And they're looking out with this sense of kind of dignified fear and total bewilderment as to what's going on. And what happened is that the security forces did go. And they did say to the settlers, listen, go away. And then the settlers went away for a bit, and then the security forces went away again. And then, of course, the settlers came back. What's the judgment they've reached now? Well, we probably have to get the Palestinians out of there then. Who does that help?

• 41:33Alastair Campbell?

  That helps the settlers, who are bit by bit, slowly taking over the whole place. And Rory, I know you wanted to talk about the, you know, the numbers game and the, and the land. So just, why don't you just talk us through what's, what's actually happening in terms of land taking?

• 41:51Rory Stewart?

  Well, let, let, let's start with a brief explainer and reminder. So after the 1967 war, Israel annexed the West Bank. So this big Palestinian territory, which was then administered by Jordan. And what you've seen since 1967, in what's called by the British government, the occupied Palestinian territories, so international law does not recognize this as part of Israel. International law sees this as it would see Israel being in South Lebanon at the moment as a country invading its neighbor and occupying its neighbor. Settlements have been rolled out. And of those settlements, about 163 are considered illegal by Israel.

• 42:34Rory Stewart?

  And about 143 are considered legal by Israel, but they're all illegal in terms of international law. And if you look at this map of area A, B, and C, which is a map of the West Bank, you basically see that the majority of the territory now is under Israeli control. It's area C. And areas A and B are these tiny little archipelagos or islands increasingly separated from each other by Israeli security forces. And the Israeli settlers are reinforced by Israeli governments, who on the one hand seem to want to say, these are illegal, we don't approve of it, sorry, it's happened, but by the way, we're going to provide schools for them, we're going to provide water supply for them, we're going to provide roads for them, and we're going to send in the Israeli

• 43:17Rory Stewart?

  military to protect these settlements. And by the way, we're going to approve more settlements, which is happening at a very, very rapid rate at the moment. So what's going on? If you look at a map and what's happened over the last 80 years in the region, but particularly since 67, it seems pretty clear that what's happening is this is being annexed. The Israeli government, most Israeli politicians don't like that language, although there are people in the Knesset who are very open about it and simply say, this is Judeo-Samaritan, this should be part of Israel. But if you look at what's happening on the map, it's happening again and again. And the tendency seems to be to be pushing Palestinians out of almost all the rural areas, and this is what a lot of the settler violence is about, olive trees being attacked,

• 44:01Rory Stewart?

  orchards being attacked, sheep's being attacked, into urban settlements, which were increasingly divided from each other. So I was talking to a Palestinian friend today, and they were saying that they had just, it took them two and a half hours to travel 15 kilometers that morning from Ramallah up to Jerusalem, driving, yeah, 15 kilometers. Almost nobody in their family at the moment is visiting places like Hebron, because you simply don't know whether you're going to be able to get there at all. And it's not just the checkpoints will suddenly be closed, it's the settlers will actually attack your cars on the road as you're moving through. So this is two types of legal system. The settlers are mostly judged by civilian law, and they almost never are successfully

• 44:45Rory Stewart?

  prosecuted. 94% of investigations against settlers have had no indictment, and only 3% of them have ended up in convictions. Whereas the Palestinians are processed by military law, military courts, military detainment. And to make it even worse, there's a third group, which is causing a lot of the mayhem, which is a group called Hagmar, which is a form of reservist militia, who the Israeli settlers, predominantly from those areas with guns, who've been directly involved. One of them has shot two people, drove his car into someone praying. No investigations happened. Why? Because the police say, the Israeli police say, well, we can't investigate them because they're soldiers.

• 45:29Rory Stewart?

  And then the military say, oh, they're not really soldiers, so they're not business for the military court. Anyway, back over to you.

• 45:34Alastair Campbell?

  Poor, maybe a good point to tell listeners and viewers who haven't yet got across the latest episode of Leading. You and I sat down last week with these two extraordinary guys, Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah. Maoz lost his parents on October the 7th, and he gave a really harrowing account of what it was like discovering that his parents had been murdered. Aziz's brother was basically died because he was tortured inside Israeli prisons. So you've got a Palestinian and Israeli who both lost close, close family members because of this conflict. They've now come together, written an extraordinary book together, but they're now basically campaigning for peace.

• 46:15Alastair Campbell?

  And I, I'd love it if some of the people, the big decision makers, listened to them. But also, I think all of us should just listen to two people who are explaining why the current approach of the authorities, pretty much wherever you look, is never going to work. And the only thing that's ever going to work is if people do somehow reconcile in the way that these two are doing and asking others to do.

• 46:42Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's the most, I mean, if people haven't listened, they must. It's probably, I think, one of the most encouraging conversations I've had. One of the lovely things about this podcast is that we've got this privilege, I guess, to talk to people every week. And I just left so moved and inspired. And it's strange, because what they're saying is, they, they accept sounds naive, but they basically say, just work backwards. It's got to be about peace. It's not in anyone's interest to keep slaughtering each other. And once you accept that peace has to be the answer, it's possible, it can happen. This cannot be the route.

• 47:19Rory Stewart?

  There are still figures in the Knesset and in the IDF who recognize that this is a recipe for disaster. That if you release violent settlers, if you push more and more Palestinians off their land, you are going to repeat the Nakba. You're going to repeat that massive cleansing, which then led to decades of terror, resentment, hatred, and alienated Israel from the entire Middle East. So it's got to stop. And, and those were two wonderful voices, Israeli and Palestinian, suggesting how that might stop without too many recriminations. There was very little jargon, there was very little talking about the past.

• 47:59Alastair Campbell?

  I love the way that they kept saying, this could be done in two weeks. So two weeks comes and two weeks goes, it's not been, I say, yeah, but we could do this in two weeks. And I just, I just love that mindset, because actually it is true. It could end this, it could end in two weeks. Just on the figures, Rory. So the West Bank, roughly three million Palestinians live in the West Bank, 511,000 Israeli settlers, okay? Palestinians now, they occupy roughly 30% of the Gaza Strip, right? 30%. 40% of the West Bank and 13% of East Jerusalem. So they're being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.

• 48:41Alastair Campbell?

  It makes me think of those police operations of kettling, where you just get people into kind of small, ever smaller spaces. But what does that do?

• 48:49Rory Stewart?

  One is, it reminds me a lot of when my father was fighting the communists in the Malian Emergency, where they created something called a white areas policy, where basically they removed communities from rural areas and put them in these urban settlements so that they could supervise them and surveil them and put gates around them and fences around them. The second thing is, I was wondering whether there wasn't an echo when we were talking about the Hagmar militia with the Royal Alster Constabulary. And, and a question of, you know, whether you can, whether it can possibly make sense for the Israelis to say, the people responsible for security in this area are the settlers themselves and expect to police their own neighbors and expect them to be fair with Palestinian families.

• 49:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The chief executive of UNICEF, just come back from the West Bank, says he's worked in humanitarian development for two decades and more. He's never seen anything as bad as he's seen in the West Bank. Pope Leo. My new hero Rory, particularly now that my blurb from The Rest Is Politics is on the front cover of his book, he's come out with another statement today. Let's end this discussion on something a little bit more positive, though. So you probably know, Rory, I'm sure you watched Burnley against West Ham on Sky Sports Football yesterday.

• 50:05Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely.

• 50:06Alastair Campbell?

  Good comeback, wasn't it? Good comeback.

• 50:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, very good, very good. I mean, some weaknesses, I thought, in the midfield, but otherwise, fine.

• 50:12Alastair Campbell?

  You're not wrong. You're not wrong. Anyway, but here's this thing. We were talking last week about racism in the context of Abdul El Sayed. And I got this lovely email from a gentleman by the name of Wakas Farid. He said, you mentioned the racism El Sayed was facing because his wife wore a headscarf. Well, guess what? At Burnley Football Club, the women's team, unlike the men, were promoted last year. Then our professional team, they've employed a team doctor who happens to be my wife. Check out @theexercise medic. And she's the first headscarf-wearing sports medicine resident doctor in the country, by knowledge.

• 50:54Alastair Campbell?

  So there we go. Burnley Football Club is doing the right thing.

• 50:59Rory Stewart?

  Let's finish on a more positive note, as you say. Carl, Alistair and Rory, it's the last couple of weeks of the summer holidays, and I'm completely out of ideas for what to do with my children. Any suggestions? I mean, I feel for them. I've got my children endlessly playing football with me at the moment, which you would approve of.

• 51:16Alastair Campbell?

  Are you any good?

• 51:17Rory Stewart?

  I'm a bit better than they are. Yeah.

• 51:19Alastair Campbell?

  Are you? Do you let them win?

• 51:21Rory Stewart?

  It's only because they're nine and 11. No, I'm really competitive. There's only three of us. We take turns in goal, and then whoever scores gets to go in goal. I'm always trying to hoof it from a large distance.

• 51:33Alastair Campbell?

  I was talking to someone last night, what age do you stop losing deliberately with your kids? But do I get the sense that you've never lost deliberately?

• 51:41Rory Stewart?

  I, yeah, exactly. I'm like Boris Johnson, like mowing down the Japanese children on that. Now, come on. But apart from football, do you have any other suggestions for what children could be doing during their summer holidays?

• 51:55Alastair Campbell?

  They should be thinking about the future of the world, Rory. They should be, they should be thinking about the big challenges facing the planet, because it is their future that we're talking about. Okay. Now, do you remember? So here's the thing, and I'm being serious here. This is for parents to get their kids involved, and it's the kids to get involved anyway. Okay. So do you remember that last year, we helped promote a competition for Politica, Policy Ideas for Positive Change, where 16 to 18-year-olds submitted their ideas to change the country for the better. And this year, Rory, it's even better. It's

• 52:34Alastair Campbell?

  not just the UK. There are no category restrictions. You can write on any topic, 800 to 1,000 words, deadline September 20th. Okay?

• 52:44Rory Stewart?

  Just a small addition, which, I mean, I can get in there before you pointed out. Traditionally, the majority of entrants were from private schools. And since the appearance on Trip, I'm pleased to say, there's been an incredible turnaround. 84% of entrants were from state schools. So there's still a lot of people from private schools entering. I encourage them to do so. It's wonderful that you're sending in. But there's a huge number of people from state schools also entering, too.

• 53:06Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that is good news, Rory. And I was really impressed the way that you said that. And you said you were pleased that this had happened. By the way, I saw this week. Did you see? Have a guess, Rory, which UK university has the highest percentage of students from private schools?

• 53:21Rory Stewart?

  UK university core, blimey. Could it be, you know, something like Durham, or Bristol, or Edinburgh?

• 53:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well done. Durham. Durham is number one. Number two is Imperial College. Number three is Edinburgh. Number four is Oxford. Number five is Exeter. Six, UCL. Seven, Cambridge, 28.2. Eight, LEC. Nine is Bristol. And 10 is Newcastle. So there we are. 6.5% of UK children go to private schools, but that's the numbers. 39.1% at Durham. Nice working class area.

• 53:52Rory Stewart?

  When I was at Oxford, I think it was still over 50%. And I guess when my father was there, it probably would have been 80, 90%.

• 53:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 53:59Rory Stewart?

  Listen, it's 16 to 18-year-olds, no category restrictions. Idea can be on any topic, but these ideas for positive change, 800 to 1,000 words, deadline September the 20th. It's a lovely length, 800 to 1,000 words, and love to see a great idea for positive change.

• 54:15Alastair Campbell?

  A shout out to last year's winner, it was Rosie Halsall. She wrote a piece tackling barriers to women's sport, recommending free sports bra fittings across all secondary schools. And since that, by the way, she has met her MP, she's been on BBC News, she's been on her local news, she's connected with Sheffield United Football Foundation, and she's working with Radix Big Tent and Booby Do, a sports bra company, to transform her idea from theory into practice. So that is what we want. We want ideas that we can then help promote and support and get them to happen. And to sign up for that, just follow the link in the episode description.

• 54:56Rory Stewart?

  Now, Alistair, I'm going to do something which is very, very mean to you. But occasionally you tease me, so I'm going to tease you, because this is going to be extremely painful for you.

• 55:06Alastair Campbell?

  Oh.

• 55:06Rory Stewart?

  Alistair, I received a little box in my house and a note. And it went like this. This is my house in Scotland. Dear Rory was horrified to hear Alistair mentioning two French preserve makers on Trip recently. Here are some classic Scottish preserves. We are a second generation producer based in Galloway. Love the pods and books. Keep up the great work. All the best. Rory Hesketh, it seems to say. So let's do a little shout out for Scottish preserves.

• 55:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Rory Stewart?

  And here is, look, here's amazing cherry jam from Gate House of Fleet, raspberry jam. Best, best here. I don't know whether anyone can see it here.

• 55:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Rory Stewart?

  And it's not totally branded, the jam, but it's really lovely. It's called Galloway Lodge. Galloway Lodge, very, very simple branding. The most delicious jam. And of course, I'm here speaking to you in Perthshire, and Angus and Dundee, absolute centre. Dundee's centre of the marmalade, got all those famously, got all those oranges.

• 56:13Alastair Campbell?

  Jam and Duke and journalism.

• 56:15Rory Stewart?

  That's it. Jam, Duke and journalism. So I didn't want to put you on the spot, but along with everybody praising you here in Creef for your piping, I just wanted to say that you missed a trick on Scottish jam.

• 56:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, the only reason I mentioned the French guys is because I was in France. I mean, if I'd been in Scotland, I'd talk about Scottish jam. I think to say they were horrified is strong.

• 56:34Rory Stewart?

  That's what he said. I can share the note with the news. I'm not making that up.

• 56:38Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'm sure he's not. But I think that's a bit harsh on me, if I may say so. Somebody relentlessly promotes everything good about Scotland, and Scotland being everything good. Talking of which, although this rather upset me as well, we've just had Piping Live in Glasgow, and we've had the World Pipe Band Championships, won by another bloody Canadian band. I told Mark Carney about this, and he said, this is the consequences of global Scotland.

• 57:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, here's another.

• 57:08Alastair Campbell?

  Positive spin.

• 57:09Rory Stewart?

  I was, yesterday, Sunday, was the Creef Highland Gathering. And it was, I mean, really incredible. You had the Morrison's Pipe Band, you had the Comrie Pipe Band, you had Alyth, you had Blair Garry, marching through down the High Street and King Street. Huge. I mean, I don't know how many hundreds of people, huge noise. But then we had the Cattery Police Academy Band. So there we are, all the way from the Gulf to Creef.

• 57:33Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, well, in which case, I'm going to give a shout out to my teacher, Finlay, because my teacher, Finlay, who runs the National Piping Centre in Glasgow, he taught the Cattery Pipe Band. He teaches them.

• 57:44Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I wonder whether Finlay was there. You should tell him to say hello.

• 57:47Alastair Campbell?

  He probably was. He was definitely a piping live. And but the other thing we should put in the newsletter, because as you know, Rory, one of my remaining campaigns in life is to get universal love for the bagpipes played well.

• 57:57Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 57:57Alastair Campbell?

  There is, the BBC, we sometimes criticize them, they did a great job of covering it because they were just pumping out stuff on social media and on their website. There's one particular shot of the mass bands playing Scotland the Brave. And it is, honestly, you can see why the bagpipes led people into war. It's fucking brilliant.

• 58:16Rory Stewart?

  Final shout out. My childhood friend, Thomas Grochran, who very sadly died, was absolutely at the core of getting these first big mass bands gatherings going in Edinburgh and Glasgow.

• 58:28Alastair Campbell?

  Good for him.

• 58:29Rory Stewart?

  25, 30 years ago, really began getting these mass, you know, 10,000 people, I think is what he was aiming for at one point. So I think that was a hugely wonderful legacy.

• 58:38Alastair Campbell?

  The biggest, you know, Canada win the, Simon Fraser University, Canada win the world championship. Australia's got the current world record for the biggest mass pipe band gathering. Final point, Rory, maybe this was clues. We did a poll last week because we're now becoming The Rest Is Jam.

• 58:54Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 58:55Alastair Campbell?

  What is our listeners and viewers' favourite flavour of jam? I mean, I'm sorry, you lot. This is pathetic. Strawberry and raspberry and apricot.

• 59:04Rory Stewart?

  Oh, brilliant. I won. Go on then. Go on. Now, let me.

• 59:08Speaker 05

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• 1:00:08Rory Stewart?

  Let me, so next week, I want to poll on whether people agree with me that the Labrador is the best dog.

• 1:00:14Alastair Campbell?

  Oh.

• 1:00:15Rory Stewart?

  Because my mother was furious. I literally came back and she was boiling, because she has these Pekingese. And she was like, not only was she furious, her Pekingese were absolutely furious. She said to me.

• 1:00:25Alastair Campbell?

  With you?

• 1:00:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah. She was saying, what on earth are you doing? My mother said, supporting a fat, greedy thing that lolloped off a cod boat.

• 1:00:36Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, I'm happy for our listeners and viewers to be polled as to what is the best dog breed, as long as they all say Cavalier K. Charles. Okay, that's it.

• 1:00:45Rory Stewart?

  That's it. Very good. Thank you.

• 1:00:47Alastair Campbell?

  Great to talk to you.

• 1:00:49Rory Stewart?

  Great to talk to you. Bye bye.

• 1:00:50Alastair Campbell?

  Bye.

• 1:00:56Rory Stewart?

  Hello, everybody. We've got some exciting news to share with you.

• 1:00:59Alastair Campbell?

  We do indeed. As you all know, The Rest Is Politics Plus members get early access to Question Time, they get ad-free listening, they get exclusive series, and a host of other benefits.

• 1:01:08Rory Stewart?

  And probably for me, the most exciting thing is these exclusive mini-series we're doing. And right now, we're holding a summer sale. So you can get an extra 20% off on an annual membership from now until the end of August.

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  If that sounds good, head to therestispolitics.com and use the code SUMMER26 when you purchase an annual plan.

• 1:01:26Rory Stewart?

  Make the most of this deal and join us for a busy summer ahead. We've got some brilliant new series coming your way. So new stuff coming, for example, on existential threats. And then there's all the stuff. And what are some of the mini-series that you've enjoyed? Do you think people should be listening to?

• 1:01:40Alastair Campbell?

  I've enjoyed them all, to be honest. I really liked the Gen Z series that Vicky Spratt did. I've enjoyed the recent one on the funding of reform.

• 1:01:49Rory Stewart?

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