494. Carney’s Trump Fightback and the Starmer-Burnham Fallout

Can the 'middle powers' escape Trump's grip and build a world beyond American and Chinese dominance? What is the 'Board of Peace' and why is Trump its chairman for life? Is Starmer’s ‘control-freakery’ shooting Labour in the foot? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠fuseenergy.com/politic⁠s. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ ⁠https://nordvpn.com/restispolitic⁠s It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Lorcan Mouillier Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Senior Producer: Callum Hill General Manager: Tom Whiter 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?

  This is a rupture, not a transition.

• 0:02Rory Stewart?

  The world is fundamentally changed. The US is becoming almost as much of a threat to the West as China.

• 0:08Alastair Campbell?

  This foreign policy stuff matters more than it's ever done because of the United States behaving the way that it's done.

• 0:14Rory Stewart?

  The idea that Europe can't survive without the US, or even that Britain can't survive without the US, is just technically not true.

• 0:21Alastair Campbell?

  There are limits to American power. We saw that.

• 0:23Rory Stewart?

  Those people who've been appeasing him over the last year hasn't worked. We can see with Greenland that when you appease him, he actually escalates.

• 0:33Rory Stewart?

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• 0:36Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:48Rory Stewart?

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• 1:21Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:32Rory Stewart?

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• 1:46Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:48Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns, the West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed... Managed to watch it. There you go.

• 2:01Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a Nord VPN 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 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.

• 2:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this. Or should I say Fiona Fiona managed to do this?

• 2:31Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your Nord VPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/resthispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/resthispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 2:48Speaker 02

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• 3:22Rory Stewart?

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

• 3:26Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:28Rory Stewart?

  Alistair, here we are, recovering from Davos. Davos was one of those extraordinary moments. I think it all, it's not quite Munich, but it's one of those things that really feels as though the world has changed because Trump's threats against Greenland were followed by an unbelievable coordinated response at the centre of which was this amazing speech by Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, saying, we're going to have to move away from a US order to a new order of middle powers. And everything now is about how do we define these institutions, which are going to somehow try to do some of the things that the US-led international system has done for 80 years in the absence of the United States.

• 4:06Alastair Campbell?

  The big unanswered question out of Davos was when my Mark Carney talks about middle powers, maybe embracing their power more. What might that actually mean in practice?

• 4:17Rory Stewart?

  And let's just take it back one step. So Davos was pretty extraordinary. It's very, very rare world events that you get a moment that seems to shift the world. So we've spent more than a year now talking about whether Trump has fundamentally upended the global order, and we've talked about whether you're beginning to get a situation where in some areas, US is becoming almost as much of a threat to the West as China. Not in the sense that it's a state like China, of course, a much friendlier, more democratic state, but the vulnerabilities we have to the US means it could do this. And I guess what Davos represented is the moment where that Greenland threat from the US changed something very, very fundamentally.

• 4:58Rory Stewart?

  So we had Mark Carney's speech, which we were very focused on, which was the moment at which he tried to sketch an alternative post-Trump world. We had Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president, laying out his visions for multilateralism. We had a moment where even heads of smaller states, you know, the Belgian leader coming out and saying, you know, we've now become vassals. And a moment at which Greenland threat happened, Europe then began to signal that they might look at anti extortion tariffs, which would have tens of billions of tariffs back towards the United States. The markets dropped. Mark Rutte did one of his normal creepy moments as the head of NATO, being polite to Trump.

• 5:41Rory Stewart?

  And some combination of unknown factors, whether it was Rutte's politeness, Europe's decisive sanctions response, or the drop in the markets, led Trump to apparently back off, but despite him backing off, the world isn't returning to normal.

• 5:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, because he backs off. And then it's like, we're going to talk in question time about Minnesota. And last night, for example, the whole media was about, is Donald Trump softening his approach? And we sort of, we parse and analyze these sort of movements that he makes. But I think the thread that goes through all this is still very much on. We're the only power that matters in the world. You lot are weak, you lot are becoming irrelevant. And what he did in Davos was he reminded, he, he, he made that blatantly clear. There was no even an attempt to sort of say, this is a partnership. It was brutal, hard politics. And I think the reason why Mark Carney's speech was so significant. And of course, whether it genuinely goes down in history, which it might,

• 6:43Alastair Campbell?

  depends on how long he survives and it depends on what this new world order becomes. But I think that's what was really interesting about the whole thing is people were, he, that phrase that he used, this is a rupture, not a transition. And also, I don't know if you remember this, when we interviewed him for the first time, I think, before, it might have been the second time, he's, he's one of the few people we've interviewed twice. But he, that phrase that went down as a big part of the speech, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu. He said that in those terms when we interviewed him. And I think what you saw in that speech was him bringing together a thinking that he's been developing ever since he ran for office. But I think what's fascinating is whether the middle powers, as they're called, which includes us, which includes France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Canada,

• 7:28Alastair Campbell?

  some of the Latin American countries as well, is whether they respond to that and if so, how. And there's a very interesting example this week, I thought. Not necessarily as, as eye catching as stuff on defence or cyber or misinformation or whatever. But this agreement that the UK has made with eight other European countries about energy. They're all doing these, this giant wind farm, giant wind farms. And of course, one of Trump's great shticks at Davos was constantly on about windmills.

• 7:56Rory Stewart?

  For about 15 minutes.

• 7:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, he's just, and this droning on about, and this lie, one of his many lies, China manufactures them but doesn't use themselves.

• 8:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's just to remind people, I mean, it was completely dishonest. But it was also, you could see for his audience, quite a kind of funny riff. The, the riff was China's running a long con on the world. They don't actually use these things themselves, or they might have one or two, just pretend, yeah.

• 8:18Alastair Campbell?

  And it costs you a thousand pounds, a thousand dollars of return.

• 8:21Rory Stewart?

  Basically, wind turbines, things the Chinese are too smart to use themselves, but they flog the rest of it. Despite that, it generates 16% of China's energy, et cetera, et cetera.

• 8:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, as you said, they sell them to the stupid countries, Britain, France, Germany. So there's yet another insult. So that was an example that Ed Biliban was in Hamburg, I think it was, signed this deal with Germany, Holland, Netherlands, Norway, others. And so they're going to share the production. And then share the use of electricity produced by by wind. But then I think if you look at stuff like defence, I mean, we we were talking to some people out there who were who were making the point that we talk about our independent nuclear deterrent. Now, France has a genuinely independent nuclear deterrent. We don't. We are reliant on America for firing these missiles, for servicing these missiles.

• 9:07Rory Stewart?

  For navigating our submarines.

• 9:09Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 9:09Rory Stewart?

  Depend on US equipment.

• 9:10Alastair Campbell?

  So.

• 9:11Rory Stewart?

  The missiles fire from submarines. So that's why I mentioned submarines.

• 9:13Alastair Campbell?

  So would so would we would we, in part of this Mark Carney middle power, actually think about, does France become European nuclear defence? Does Britain kind of straddle between Europe and the US? And if so, how does that make it make mean changes that have to be made to our systems?

• 9:32Rory Stewart?

  I think let's just come back to the fundamental, because this will be what's happening, I suspect, in in the National Security Council in the UK. And probably this conversation in the UK versions of it will be happening elsewhere. So the first thing to begin with is the idea of the UK National Security Council seriously looking at the question of how to de-risk and deleverage away from the US. In other words, see the US as a potential threat to the UK and begin to develop national security strategies about ensuring yourself against the US is very difficult. Because basically since 1945, particularly since famously the Suez catastrophe, where Britain tried to go it alone in 56

• 10:15Rory Stewart?

  and then discovered that actually the US could cut the legs out from under us.

• 10:20Alastair Campbell?

  And did.

• 10:21Rory Stewart?

  And did. We've been in this world, which I, you know, I keep joking about that when I joined the Foreign Office, the senior mandarin, when I asked him a policy on a particular issue, he said, find out what the US is doing and do a little bit less, right? This is the sort of general general story. So there will be many, many people around the national security table. Who have spent their entire professional careers completely embedded in the US system. And therefore, it's going to be incredibly uncomfortable for them. And just to illustrate why it's so uncomfortable, if you go to GCHQ at Cheltenham, it is swarming with Americans. You know, our entire signals intelligence is completely backhauled into the American NSA. You've talked about nuclear. So the story that they will tell, I think, and this is what I want you to challenge, right? I'm going to, we're going to play this game.

• 11:06Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so you're going to be the skeptic around the table, trying to say maybe that we need to think again. If you're the old establishment Mandarin in the British National Security Council, you'd say, come off it. We can't really diversify away from the US. We're too weak. Europe is kind of divided, fractured and pathetic. It's not a genuine alternative. China is a much more risky, nasty player than the US. Trump's not that bad, you know? Yeah, he's made these demands, but we can generally handle him and he's not going to be there forever. And in the end, the US is this kind of deep liberal democratic state that's been our best ally for a hundred years.

• 11:47Rory Stewart?

  So let's do what we can not to annoy them. And basically, it's better to flatter him. This is the Mark Rutte view. Appease him a little bit, give him a little bit what he wants and we'll be okay because the alternatives are unimaginable.

• 12:05Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, and how well is that going?

• 12:08Alastair Campbell?

  How well is that strategy going?

• 12:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's a, it's a really good question, okay? But, but of course, if you're really stuck in the optimism bias, you can tell yourself stories. You can say, well, you know, we didn't threaten him with tariffs on Greenland, Europe did, but Britain didn't, and he backed off.

• 12:23Alastair Campbell?

  Look, if you look at the Ukraine war and how that has been handled, and I think what's happening at the moment is the European leaders, who recognize that they alone cannot necessarily, particularly given their economic and political circumstances, run the whole fight. So they need America to be part of it, particularly in relation to intelligence and the stuff that Ukraine cannot do on its own and cannot do without. So what the European leaders have been doing, they've been doing a little bit of the Rutter strategy to keep them on board. But at the same time, building up their own defenses and then saying, we're only doing that because Trump bullionism to doing it. Okay, I think they've all worked out, they actually need to do it. What Mark Carney, I think, has done, and this is what leadership is about, in my view, he has signaled, he used the phrase, this is a rupture, not a transition.

• 13:08Alastair Campbell?

  Now, it may be that the rupture post-Trump, or if Trump, you know, departs the mortal coil, it may be that the rupture is not permanent. But I think the mindset that Carney is trying to give these other leaders is that we cannot stop pretending there is any way we're going back to the status quo, Andy. And I think he's right about that. So they do have to build up defence, and they do have to improve their relations. You say Europe's a basket case. Europe is not as strong and as powerful as maybe it could be. It's not as economically powerful as it could be. Its defence and security isn't as powerful as it could be. But they could still get there. And they're only going to get there, in my view, if they actually do have the mindset that says, this is a rupture, not a transition.

• 13:51Rory Stewart?

  I agree with you.

• 13:52Alastair Campbell?

  So I've run you around already to a different argument.

• 13:54Rory Stewart?

  If I join you in this, and the reason I'm doing the national security thing is I was very struck, I saw some senior UK officials at Davos, and it was amazing how quickly they wanted to reassure themselves it was all going to be okay.

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 14:07Rory Stewart?

  And the difference with the Europeans was fascinating.

• 14:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Rory Stewart?

  So I'd see senior people from the Commission, senior Europeans who were like, the world has changed, we need to move. And the Brits were all like, oh, no, no, no, don't get too excited by it. It's just a little, you know, thing.

• 14:21Alastair Campbell?

  All I was saying, I'll tell you the thing that I kept hearing is, look, let's stop pretending that China can remotely fill the gap that we've had with America. Nobody's saying that. Mark Carney didn't say that. Keir Starmer's not saying that. He's off to China today. And at a time when I think it's The Telegraph is reporting this story that Chinese spy on number 10 and blah, blah, blah, what's new? So I just think that we're not saying that. What we are saying, I'm saying two things. One, the only other body in the world right now that might get even remotely close to American power and Chinese power is Europe. That's the European Union plus. And I think part of this Mark Carney post-Trump world, we should be thinking about accelerating enlargement rather than slowing it down.

• 15:06Alastair Campbell?

  We should maybe be thinking about having different sorts of associations with the European Union for those countries that aren't fully ready. But Europe is the only one that can remotely embrace that power. And from the United Kingdom's point of view, that means we have to get closer and we have to undo the damage of Brexit as fast as we can.

• 15:26Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Just to lean into this one more time, what we're saying to the National Security Council in the UK and other countries is, I'm sorry, you want to put your head in the sand and pretend it's all going to be all right, but it's not. The world is fundamentally changed. And it's not just about Trump. Because if Trump was replaced by JD Vance, a lot of this would continue. But actually, to be honest, if Trump were replaced even by a Democratic president, there is not much appetite amongst general American voters for continuing to be the kind of global financing policeman that America wasn't the past. That world's gone. Secondly, we can already see that the strategy that people have pursued, those people who've been appeasing him over the last

• 16:06Rory Stewart?

  year, hasn't worked. It hasn't actually delivered what we wanted in Ukraine. It's bought a little bit of time, but my goodness, he keeps consistently coming at us.

• 16:16Alastair Campbell?

  He's on Russia's side.

• 16:17Rory Stewart?

  Secondly, we can see with Greenland that when you appease him, he actually escalates. Being nice to him, put him in a position that he thought that he could just turn around and say, give me Greenland and nobody was going to do anything about it. Why does he do it? Because actually, over 12 months, we basically signaled weakness to him. We've signaled to him that there's nothing Europe can do, there's nothing you can do to defend it. He can have whatever he wants. And sure as eggs is eggs, if we continued to indulge the US, and maybe this is worth explaining to the public, the other sorts of things that the US would begin to demand from countries like the UK that we haven't seen yet. So, number one, unrestricted access for US tech companies. Very quickly, they would say, it's completely unfair, these

• 16:58Rory Stewart?

  absurd regulations of stopping American companies operating. So we're going to impose tariffs and sanctions until we can get the American companies. We want, and they do this, I mean, the reason we know this is they do this with weaker countries. We want preferential access to US firms in procurement. They didn't phrase it quite like that.

• 17:18Alastair Campbell?

  They kind of do.

• 17:19Rory Stewart?

  We want you.

• 17:20Alastair Campbell?

  On defence, they do.

• 17:21Rory Stewart?

  We want you to get rid of certain ministers who's been offensive to us. You can see that, you know, can see that particularly in Latin America, they actually pinpoint.

• 17:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Rory Stewart?

  This person's got to go. Stop trading with China or else, right? You can see they did this in UAE. They basically forced UAE to strip all Chinese products and their entire tech stack.

• 17:38Alastair Campbell?

  They've threatened Mark Carney, who is the trade dealer with China.

• 17:41Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. Support us in the UN Security Council regardless. We don't care what your view is unless you're going to support us. That is just the beginning. You cannot be in that position. Why can't you be in that position? Well, you can't be in that position firstly because increasingly it will push against your own national interest. You know, to take a small example, whether or not you agree with the US pressure on stripping Huawei out of this Chinese tech company out of the British economy, probably costs us about £2 billion to do that. There will be other examples, but perhaps more fundamentally, Britain needs to think and Kierstam needs to think about our long-term reputation as a country. If we actually want to continue to be even an upper middle power, taken seriously in the world,

• 18:26Rory Stewart?

  we cannot allow the world to think, if let them imagine you have Saudi or UAE or India or, I don't know, whoever dealing with Britain. If they begin to say, actually, Britain doesn't have an independent foreign policy anymore, there's no point talking to them. They simply do absolutely everything that the US says because they think they have no other options. So that means, I think, that the strategy needs to be a 10-year plan for how we reduce our dependency on the US. But that requires very tough conversations, the N S C, about how much that costs.

• 18:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:58Rory Stewart?

  What the timelines are, what types of dependencies you're trying to reduce, who you create new dependencies with, et cetera.

• 19:05Alastair Campbell?

  You see, I would argue that the coalition of the willing, so-called, in relation to Ukraine, which Kierstam has played a pretty leading role in, that is a form of the new sort of politics that Carney's talking about. I think middle powers could do something very interesting and very soft power focused.

• 19:25Alastair Campbell?

  In replacing and undoing the damage that Trump has done by scrapping USAID. Now, we're not in a strong position on that because we've cut aid as well. But if you think about the some of those middle powers I mentioned, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada, UK. Coming together and saying, we are going to try to fix the damage that has been done by the USAID vacating the field. What I thought was really clever about the way that Carney handled himself last week and in China. He didn't even talk about Trump. He didn't. He just he just talked about this is a new world and we have to address it. We know what the context is, but I think there's lots of ways, I think in energy, I think in cyber.

• 20:09Alastair Campbell?

  I think in misinformation and disinformation, these right wing autocratic networks of which Trump is now the sort of head. They operate together, they operate as a team, they pump out the same message in the same way, they use the technology in the same way. The progressive side of life, they've got to form alliances to do that as well as the right do it. And what it means, by the way, I know, sorry to keep going about Carney, but I really did think he was impressive last week. Somebody pointed out to him that since he'd become prime minister, he'd spent 60% of his time travelling. Okay, now here we have never hear Keir, right? That's what they call it. Mark Carney was challenged about that and he said, you know what, I should probably be travelling even more.

• 20:50Alastair Campbell?

  Because this is this is where leadership lies now. This is where countries have to engage with each other. And Keir should do the same. This foreign policy stuff matters more than it's ever done because of the United States behaving the way that it's done.

• 21:03Rory Stewart?

  Okay, let's imagine we agree that in 10 years' time, we've got to have less dependency on the US. We've got to create more of a Carney multilateral world, more of a world where we have a network of connections with lots of other middle powers. We then have to be serious about what the problems would be achieving it. Otherwise, all those grumpy old buggers in the NSC saying it's all impossible will just say you're being naive. So I think the first thing we'd have to be realistic about, what are the major obstacles? Obstacle number one, the middle powers are much Smaller than we like to acknowledge. So, you know, the the UK economy was bigger than the Chinese economy as recently as two thousand and four. It's now about a seventh the size of the Chinese economy in certain types of measurement.

• 21:47Rory Stewart?

  And and and one way to maybe illustrate it for the audience is let's think of other collective active problems. So you mentioned climate. It's probably the biggest, simplest way of explaining what the problem is. China and the US are the problem. China and US omit it all, and the biggest solution to climate change is for China and the US to stop doing it. All the middle powers, you know, Britain emits, I don't know what is one percent of this stuff. Getting together, making little climate agreements without China and the US doesn't really fix the big global problem because China and US are just so big. You know, make the same argument around uh nuclear, right? The nuclear arsenals of China, the US and Russia, I don't know if it's big or not, AI, all the AI is in China and the US.

• 22:32Rory Stewart?

  All the tech, the next generation of cloud, the next generation of chips, basically in the US with China trying to catch up. So that's the first problem. Second problem is, um and I I don't want to keep listing problems because we've got to fix these problems. We need to see the problems before we fix them. Second one is you're completely right. Obviously, the first move we should be doing is trying to reinforce some of the basic systems that have been set up since the Second World War, rather than reinventing the wheel. We've got a UN. The US has removed, I think, two billion at least from UN peacekeeping. Has anyone stepped in to fill the gap? No. The US has removed almost ten billion from the international system.

• 23:12Rory Stewart?

  Has anyone else stepped up to fill the gap? No. So the the first litmus test has to be, if we're serious about rules based international systems, multilateral systems, et cetera, there are ready-made bodies there that we could be pumping money into. And that requires Keir Starmer and the Canadians and the French and the Germans to say, okay, we're going to increase our international developments. Then we're going to show the US that we can replace. We we we got stuck in this world in which, you know, the US has been paying for our defence, they're stepping away, they're going to pay for it. But probably more important. For actually peace, security, pandemics, climate, et cetera, is us stepping into the non-defense, the more civilian systems, which we're not stepping into.

• 23:55Alastair Campbell?

  That's what I was saying. I think that if you put these, all these countries together, if Mark Carney wants to take what he said in Davos to the next level, it requires him, I think, to get three or four of the others to agree with his analysis and to agree with his conclusion and then to say, so for example, one of the other big moments in Davos was Donald Trump launching his Board of Peace. And if you look at it, it was basically Trump plus quite a lot of Stans and quite a lot of people with very, very profound oligarchical tendencies. Okay. You didn't see many of the big democracies.

• 24:30Rory Stewart?

  That's a polite way of saying his early signups were places like Saudi, Azerbaijan, and then rather disappointingly, your friend Eddie Rama signed up.

• 24:39Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this is a very interesting point. I had an exchange with Eddie about that. And he said, we are not France or Canada, he said. So they're a small power. Okay. You've got big powers too. You've got the middle powers of which we're one and you've got the smaller powers. Albania is one of those. And he said, part of it was also, he has to stay close to some of those Gulf countries and the Muslim side of life, as it were. And I said, Jim, yeah, but you're also European. So he's got a very, very tricky balancing act. He, in a way, has been a victim of his own success. He's become a much bigger figure in the world than a, the leader of most countries of three, four million people. And therefore that's why Trump invited him. Now, he's not becoming one of the billion pound permanent members. He just said he's going to support it. But the point I was

• 25:23Alastair Campbell?

  going to make is that what the Canada, UK, Germany, France, Israel, imagine if they developed a board of middle power prosperity. Imagine if they actually created a new, a new, a new grouping, which was explicit, this is what they're about. And this happens all the time. The G20 didn't exist until the crash and that Gordon Brown, I think, led the creation of that. BRICS.

• 25:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 25:46Alastair Campbell?

  Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. That was a new formation, which is now developing.

• 25:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Alastair Campbell?

  So I think actually they should use this to say, there are going to be, we're going to have global summits about the environment and America and China won't be there. We're going to have a global summit about the effect of AI and America and China won't be there. You, you, you make it specific. We are middle powers in this new hegemonic world that he described, and we are going to have structures that come together on a regular basis. And you can have people who don't necessarily share all your values. You would maybe have the Emiratis and the Saudis there, but you're discussing common challenges in a new forum. And I just think that's not a bad way to go.

• 26:28Rory Stewart?

  I think it's a very, very good idea. And maybe you're right that something which is a sort of this funny GX formula where you set up a new body from USU may often be more practical than trying to set up what the French tried to do in 2019, which was a multilateral alliance of 40 countries trying to replace the US, which never really worked because they could never work out whether they were actually inviting people who weren't from the West in and whether they're inviting non-democracies in or not.

• 26:53Alastair Campbell?

  You can also, by the way, you could invite states. You could invite California.

• 26:59Rory Stewart?

  Ah, that's very interesting.

• 27:00Alastair Campbell?

  To be part of the middle power.

• 27:01Rory Stewart?

  You're facing a very interesting question there. And one of the amazing things that is a story that hasn't been reported enough, I think, is that there is, I believe now, strong evidence that Trump's Board of Peace is going to completely fail, that it's gone wrong. So his idea was he was going to set this thing up. And just to remind people, it is a bizarre organisation. It is the head of it with an absolute veto and the chairman who decides everything is not the President of the United States, it is Donald Trump for life. So he tried to say-

• 27:29Alastair Campbell?

  There is a line that says if he's incapacitated, the board can vote him off. I don't know who snuck that one in. He clearly didn't read it himself.

• 27:37Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, the idea was going to be essentially it would replace the United Nations because he was going to not just have all the European countries involved, he was going to have Belarus, Russia, etc. And what's been really interesting is Greenland absolutely screwed it for him.

• 27:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 27:50Rory Stewart?

  Because now every major European country has said they won't join. Canada signaled it wouldn't join, so he's told Canada they're not welcome and they can't join anyway, even if they want to, right? So basically, the whole thing has turned out to be a joke, a very, very, very expensive joke.

• 28:07Alastair Campbell?

  He doesn't give up, though, does he?

• 28:08Rory Stewart?

  And a bunch of very eccentric countries. I mean, this is not what he was hoping for, right? He was not hoping to be the head of an organisation that consisted almost exclusively either of tiny European satellite states, Kosovo, Albania, Middle Eastern monarchies, or oil-rich autocracies. That was not the idea. So I think it's failed. The question is, is anything else going to work? So trying to set up a new alliance that doesn't have the US and China, how does that work? Because of course, and this is maybe where you're right, you go ad hoc, because anything else, you have to accept that France and Germany can barely agree within the EU.

• 28:47Rory Stewart?

  If you start getting the question of how India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Saudi, UAE, Britain start agreeing.

• 28:56Alastair Campbell?

  I just think there'd be something very invigorating and exciting about the body that basically said, this is a body for the middle powers. So part of the challenge they're all dealing with all the time, without being very open about it, is how do you deal with the United States and China in their current form? Have a discussion about that. And I just think that Khan is really on to something with this. And we've got to grow up and stop. Because the truth is, look, America is incredibly powerful. But I think the other thing that you sensed at Davos was that if those other countries did actually sort of find a way of coming together, America becomes a bit of a show as opposed to what Trump projected at, which is all-powerful.

• 29:41Alastair Campbell?

  It's not all-powerful. There are limits to American power. We saw that.

• 29:45Rory Stewart?

  Well, to be really extreme about this, I mean, I don't want to hammer at its head too much, but the idea that Europe can't survive without the US, or even that Britain can't survive without the US, is just technically not true. Shashana and I work in Afghanistan. Afghanistan survives without the US. Afghanistan, actually, the Taliban spent twenty years fighting the most powerful military on earth. The US spent one point five trillion dollars. And the result is the US have left it. Now, you don't want to be Afghanistan, but they're surviving to put it in the most extreme case. Now, Europe and the UK is not Afghanistan, right? We have some of the most advanced life science in the world. We have some of the most advanced tech in the world. We have some of the leading universities in the world. We have a enormous economy. We have four hundred and fifty million people.

• 30:29Rory Stewart?

  Right, the idea that we cannot survive, I mean technically cannot survive without the US, just simply isn't true.

• 30:35Alastair Campbell?

  Frankly, all win a war against Russia, providing he doesn't unleash all the nukes.

• 30:38Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. What we then have to talk about, though, is that someone in the NSC needs to define what dependencies on the US are real and extreme. Which we can get away from in five years. Which we can get away from in ten years. Which are ones where it's almost technically inconceivable at the moment for us to advance. And where, in some cases, it's technically conceivable, but it's expensive. So, you know, nuclear, for example, there's an option, doing more with the French. AI, we don't really know what that option is, and there's some very difficult bets. We could get to a stage, for example, on semiconductors, if Europe and the UK were serious about it, where we could have resilience for our critical infrastructure with semiconductors,

• 31:20Rory Stewart?

  but we would probably never have the type of advanced chips which Nvidia are currently driving. And then you put a price tag on, so this is my final point. We have to be honest with the public now, and this is a problem, because the country's bust, demography's going the wrong direction, our welfare bill's expanding, we're spending more, that this is going to cost some money. If we're going to develop with the French more independence on nuclear, it will cost twenty five billion over ten years. If we're going to develop our own satellite capacity and our ammunition stockpiles, twenty five billion over ten years. If we're going to invest properly in rebuilding the UN system, climate, development, et cetera, similar amounts. So, you're probably talking about the UK finding an additional.

• 32:06Rory Stewart?

  Ten to twenty billion pounds a year in order to do this seriously?

• 32:10Alastair Campbell?

  War bonds.

• 32:11Rory Stewart?

  War bonds. But you could totally do it, right? If I had you selling this stuff, explaining to people why they needed to do it. We've done it in the past.

• 32:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 32:18Rory Stewart?

  I mean, that's the problem. If you really work backwards from it's got to happen. And you sat down with the NSC, say, how do we do this over five, 10 years? Of course you can do it.

• 32:25Alastair Campbell?

  So listen, as I said earlier, Rory, we're talking on the day that Keir Starmer's heading off to China. First British prime minister to go in eight years. He actually made quite an interesting speech about China, which didn't get much attention at the time. His, his, uh, Lord Mayor's banquet speech, or Lady Mayor, as she knows. A lot of it was about China and essentially saying that we've sort of gone from the, this hot world where Cameron Osborne said China's where we sort of, you know, bank the future. And then we've had eight years since Theresa May was prime minister, where literally nobody's gone to China. And whilst Macron's been there three or four times, May, I think, is going next month. I mean, it is pretty dumb not to engage with China. What, what, what do you make of our relationship with China? And the extent to which that plays into this world that we're talking, we've just been talking about.

• 33:09Rory Stewart?

  I, I think Starmer's in a real problem, real, real problem. Because there is a bipartisan consensus in the United States, which includes the Democratic Party, that China is the number one adversary. Everything that the DOD is doing about reducing, American Department of Defence or Department of War now is doing, and reducing its competency, is about challenging China.

• 33:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, hold on. Do you know the new defence strategy? They, they published the new defence strategy. It doesn't even mention Taiwan. China is just a sort of economic competitor as much as anything.

• 33:38Rory Stewart?

  You're quite right. There seems to be a tension because we, we don't even know what's going on in the American head. But certainly the deputy secretary is obsessed with China. Quite a lot of the Republicans are obsessed with China and a lot of the Democrats are obsessed with China. So I think the risk that Starmer's going to face is if he goes full Carney. And as we pointed out last week, what is that? That's going to China and saying, we'll drop all your tariffs on your electric cars. We'll sell you a lot of our canola oil and we'll have a jolly reg, which the Chinese are really looking forward to.

• 34:05Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 34:05Rory Stewart?

  Right? And they keep producing sort of fortune cookie proverbs about how you never need to do anything when your enemy's falling on its face or whatever. But very, very rapidly, you saw it around the debate around the Chinese embassy in London. This new Chinese embassy in London, where the press have been full of, we're selling out to the Chinese. Chinese spies are all over us.

• 34:22Alastair Campbell?

  Hold on a minute, let's just on that for a bit. Are they saying the Chinese shouldn't have an embassy here? Or it's just a question of scale? So on the one hand, we're saying that China is now the, this massive power on a power of America. And on the other hand, we're saying they shouldn't have an embassy. I don't quite get this debate.

• 34:36Rory Stewart?

  I don't, I don't get it either because listen, the fact is China currently has seven or eight facilities in the UK. Most of its spying is not actually being done at the moment out of its diplomats. It's being done from other people. Actually, it's going to be much easier to monitor them when the diplomats are mostly in one building. Yes, there's a fiber optic cable that runs past the building, correct. But given that we know that that stretch of fiber optic cable is only a few hundred metres long, it's right next to the Chinese embassy, there are things that we could do to try to make sure they don't get on the fiber optic cable. So I completely agree with the intelligence and security chiefs that this stuff, this fear mongering is not actually being driven by analysis in the NSC about the actual threat that this building poses.

• 35:19Rory Stewart?

  But the reason it's important is this is what's going to hit Starmer from the, and this is driven from the US, all driven from the US, this stuff. So the closer the UK gets to China, the more exposed it will become. And this is why Starmer has to decide what he's doing. Is he prepared to take cost and pain or not? And the big example of where he's still getting it wrong is when Europe said Greenland will not be taken, Denmark's sovereignty will not be taken, I'm at these, we are preparing anti extortion tariffs. Yes, Starmer said, I agree with Europe on sovereignty, but he refused to get behind them on the tariffs. He's got to be able to act in, he's got to be able to act jointly with Canada and the

• 36:04Rory Stewart?

  EU, joint statements, joint positions. If he allows himself, as I suspect he will be, to be stuck between Europe and the US on all these issues, he's not going to get the kind of deals that Carney got out of China. He'll end up in a muddle in the middle, being pushed around by everybody without much economic benefit and without getting any credit from his potential allies.

• 36:24Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, I think you're a bit harsh on that. Listen, we're, we're going to talk about Keir and Andy Burnham in the second half, but I actually think on the, so let's just say last week, you and I, and particularly I, were absolutely spitting blood feathers the lot about what he said about NATO troops pulling back from the front line. Keir Starmer did eventually go out and courted out for what it was and may or may not pay a price for that. Likewise, I think you'd be harsh into, I think he did stick with the Europeans on tariffs.

• 36:55Rory Stewart?

  No, his whole speech, his whole speech, I mean, we can debate, he may have said differently. The main speech was one where he kept saying, I don't think tariffs are the way to go. We don't want to get into tariff war, it'd be too costly for the British economy, etc. And it's one way of looking at it, we just step back. Did any one in the world notice Keir Starmer's comments last week? They're all talking about Mark Carney's speech, right? They're all talking about what Stubbe from Finland is saying.

• 37:16Alastair Campbell?

  Multilateralism against multipolarity.

• 37:18Rory Stewart?

  The New York Times is covering the Belgians. People are talking about Macron.

• 37:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's like.

• 37:22Rory Stewart?

  Starmer?

• 37:23Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 37:24Rory Stewart?

  Starmer? Where is he? Where is he?

• 37:26Alastair Campbell?

  He's in China.

• 37:27Rory Stewart?

  And the reason, the reason he's not in this conversation, I'm afraid, goes back to the beginning of our conversation, which he's still sitting in national security meetings where the British are going, it's all too difficult, this is all too dangerous, this is not realistic, we can't get really bad in Ben Chai, we can't imagine getting away from the US. The idea that we've even begun to do the planning the Canadians have done, the Canadians are already planning on fighting a counterinsurgency warfare against the Americans. That's developed by their military, their NSC, leaked to the Globe and Mail. The idea that anyone in the British National Security Council is actually fully beginning to do what we need to do, five-year planning, 10-year planning, what are the dependencies, how much it will cost, where we're going to spend the money. If they were doing that, Starmer would be speaking in a different way.

• 38:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, okay, okay. Well, listen, we'll, we'll talk about Keir Starmer again after the break, and I suspect you'll be even less flattering. See you then.

• 38:19Rory Stewart?

  Look forward to you after the break. Bye bye.

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• 39:55Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Polities and me, Alastair Campbell.

• 39:59Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. Now, Alistair.

• 40:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, Rory.

• 40:02Rory Stewart?

  This is a moment where I'm going to stop talking and start asking you questions because it's something you understand much more than me.

• 40:09Rory Stewart?

  My first question, obviously, is what the hell is going on with the fact that the Labour Party has decided not to allow Andy Burnham, the extremely well-known, extremely successful Mayor of Greater Manchester, who now wants to enter Parliament, this incredibly amazing, high-profile Labour talent. They're not even allowing him to get on the long list to apply for a parliamentary seat. What's going on?

• 40:34Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, hold on, Rory, before we get into this, you're sort of describing Andy Burnham though we're talking about kind of Nelson Mandela or Abraham Lincoln.

• 40:42Rory Stewart?

  Or Matt Hancock.

• 40:45Alastair Campbell?

  Not that bad. So I imagine that a lot of our British listeners will know what's been going on with Starmer and Burnham. Some of our international listeners may not. Andy Burnham, former Cabinet Minister under the last Labour government, Manchester Mayor, pretty popular figure up there, but has made no secret of his desire to get back into Parliament. So he put his name forward for the long list of candidates for a by-election that's just come up in Manchester. And the national executive, the ruling national executive had a committee hearing over the weekend and voted by eight to one for him not to be allowed to put his name forward. They say he should stay and deliver on his mandate for four years as Manchester Mayor.

• 41:30Alastair Campbell?

  This is a tricky one for me. I think they're both wrong. I think they've both been in the wrong.

• 41:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, but both Burnham and Starmer.

• 41:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 41:39Rory Stewart?

  God, that's a popular position to take in the Labour Party. That's like you're alienating everybody.

• 41:43Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'll tell you why. Because, look, part of the job of political leadership is to have and make sure you have good relations with all the people who might become a threat. And I'm not sure, I look, I know Andy Burnham well and I talked to him from time to time. I think he has felt that the number 10 operation has sort of been suspicious of him, pushed him away, kept him at a distance. He's a Labour politician, okay? And he's the Mayor of Manchester and he's been elected to serve several years as Mayor of Manchester. And in a way, he signaled too overtly, in my view, that the reason he wants to get into

• 42:25Alastair Campbell?

  Parliament is to mount a challenge against Keir Starmer. Now, if you're Keir Starmer, it's not your responsibility to lead the Labour Party to say, bring it on. I think Andy Burnham must have known, should have known, that the national executive was likely to block him from doing this because that was the state, that was the, that was the purpose.

• 42:44Rory Stewart?

  It's such a weird thing, though, just quickly to try to understand this, because I don't think something similar would happen within the Tory party. If I suddenly decided that I want to run in a by-election, and I'm not a Tory at the moment, so maybe that would be a problem, but I think it would be very, very unlikely that the Conservative machine would prevent it. So Boris Johnson is the classic analogy. Boris was Mayor of London, quite clearly wanted to be Prime Minister, decided he was going to stand for election in 2015. It's inconceivable that David Cameron would have said, despite all that stuff, you're not entitled to run. I mean, we generally rest on the assumption that somebody in good standing, who's been an MP and therefore has passed the candidate selection list, and who isn't actually in jail.

• 43:28Rory Stewart?

  Should be able to go to a constituency and say, I would like to be our MP and the constituency decides whether or not to take them. This added layer of saying we're going to veto people and and the grounds they gave. I mean, clearly, the reason they did it is they don't want Starmer challenging, doesn't want Burnham challenging Starmer to be Prime Minister. But they just lied. I mean, this idea that the reason they're doing it is that it's too expensive because it's going to cost a million pounds to run a match thing is not the real reason. It's obviously not the

• 43:56Alastair Campbell?

  No, well, hold on a minute. I think there is something. I was really surprised over the weekend when this was going on. How many people, including big supporters, one in particular, big supporter of Andy Burnham in Manchester, who said to me, this, he said he was sickened by it because, he said, Andy Burnham's been elected as mayor, every recognizes he's doing a very good job. And he's basically saying to Manchester, you are a bit of a kind of stepping stone because I think I should be Prime Minister.

• 44:29Rory Stewart?

  Well, it'd be true for Boris in London, true for any mayor running. I mean, it was

• 44:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but hold on.

• 44:33Rory Stewart?

  That's, I mean, it's a difficult thing and it's the same if you're a US senator or governor or governor or mayor running for the presidency. I mean, yes, absolutely. You're saying in the end, running the United Kingdom is more important than running Manchester. And that's, that's, that's offensive to Manchester, but it's true.

• 44:51Alastair Campbell?

  Everybody's focusing on Keir Starmer's. And by the way, I think they're both to blame for the state of the mess that's been created. Okay?

• 44:57Rory Stewart?

  Would you have blocked Burnham?

• 45:00Alastair Campbell?

  If I'd have thought that he was doing this in order to get a seat, in order to mount a challenge against Keir Starmer, I think I probably would.

• 45:12Rory Stewart?

  Okay. In which case, would it not be more honest to just say, the number one thing we need at the moment is stability. We're not interested in changing a prime minister.

• 45:22Alastair Campbell?

  They're kind of saying that. They are kind of saying that.

• 45:24Rory Stewart?

  I kept up so much their argument yesterday was around the cost of running another election in Manchester.

• 45:28Alastair Campbell?

  It's not just another election. It's the, it's the, it's the mayoralty election, which is like 20 odd by-elections. You're talking millions. You are talking millions.

• 45:35Rory Stewart?

  We're talking in a country which is currently spaffing hundreds of billions up the wall. Okay. So, listen, don't you think in communications terms, it would have been a little bit more honest to say fundamentally? This guy has been incredibly disloyal. Document everything that he did to attack the Prime Minister during the last Labour conference. Say, transparently, he's made it clear the reason he's coming in is to mount a leadership challenge against Starmer. And we as the Labour Party do not want a leadership challenge against the Prime Minister. It's the last thing the country needs or wants at the moment, that's why we're not letting him in.

• 46:08Alastair Campbell?

  That is certainly the truth.

• 46:10Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 46:10Alastair Campbell?

  And, you know, I think in politics, it's usually, it's wise to get as close as possible to the truth. But the reason why I say that I think there's been a fault on both sides here is that there should have been a relationship and a series of conversations that prevented this from happening. I think Andy Burnham knew that when he put his name forward, he was going to be blocked. Now, I actually think Andy's weakened himself, because if you go round, if I was a voter in Manchester now, I'm sort of thinking, this guy doesn't actually want this job as much as he wanted another job. And the other thing I think that's happened is that, so you've got to, this is happening because Andrew Gwynn, Labour MP, stepping down.

• 46:54Rory Stewart?

  For a scandal, proper scandal.

• 46:56Alastair Campbell?

  Scandal slash, calls it health reasons.

• 46:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 46:58Alastair Campbell?

  Stepping down, by-elections happening in a seat that is pretty tricky for two reasons. Well, for one reason, this seat in Manchester is going to be, there's a, there's a part of it that is very, very susceptible to the Greens, and there's a part of it that is very susceptible to Reform. Now, where there is a case for Andy Burnham is that if you looked at the markets and what they were saying about this seat, if Andy Burnham was the candidate, Labour was something like thirty-eight, thirty-odd percent, thirty-six, thirty-eight percent on to win, and Reform and Greens were sort of twenties. That's been flipped.

• 47:34Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so let me come on on that for a second.

• 47:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Rory Stewart?

  So if that's true, let's assume that's true, that Burnham would be much more likely to win that seat. My guess is that if Labour now loses that seat, it will look even worse for Starmer and probably a bit better for Burnham.

• 47:47Alastair Campbell?

  But my point is that Andy Burnham has partly created that. If Andy Burnham had really thought this through. And had honest conversations about what was going on. I think he might have reached the conclusion that said, because in the end, yes, he's the mayor of Manchester, but he is also a Labour politician. And he's a Labour politician who was with mistakes on both sides, has created a total mess. He's actually made Labour's defeat more likely. In a by-election where he knows that at the end of that, Keir Starmer gets more of the blame.

• 48:19Rory Stewart?

  It's so fascinating. Labour Party is not my party. So I'm just looking at this as an anthropologist, but there's so many things going on here.

• 48:24Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe we should get Robert Sapolsky back.

• 48:26Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, exactly. Which resonates with me from the Tory party. So basically, he's in the position that Boris Johnson was in when he was mayor of London, wanted to be prime minister, and actually ran for parliament, and actually under the Conservative laws, continued to be mayor of London even while he was an MP. And like Burnham, he was an MP for something on the outskirts of London. So he could argue that he was representing London in a different way. But the reason it's so difficult to analyse is there's the first big question which you keep talking about, which is this question of loyalty. This guy is a Labour Party member. What on earth does he think he's doing endlessly undermining the prime minister? And then the second problem that Burnham's got, which is that another group of people want to topple Keir Starmer. So they don't have much loyalty towards him. For example, it is almost certainly the case that the big article in the Sunday

• 49:11Rory Stewart?

  Times saying Wes Streeting has 200 supporters in Parliament probably came from Wes Streeting's camp. And that article was framed as, we don't want Andy Burnham to come in because Wes doesn't particularly want a challenge from Andy Burnham. And you could develop this. Look, you know, I personally, I think Wes Streeting would be a better prime minister than Keir Starmer. And I'm lining up to see if I can offer my services to him, or indeed to many other people that I really admire. So.

• 49:38Alastair Campbell?

  Is this because Keir Starmer hasn't given you a job?

• 49:39Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. It's everything. And this is.

• 49:41Alastair Campbell?

  So you're just another self-serving politician out for your own ambition.

• 49:45Rory Stewart?

  I represent that middle part.

• 49:47Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know whether we should get Ben Wallace or David Gork. I don't know who we'd do on the podcast.

• 49:51Rory Stewart?

  Middle part of the Labour Party that feels really resentful. They didn't get the job from Keir Starmer. I'm there with all the rest of the backbench that's just sort of sitting there.

• 50:00Alastair Campbell?

  There is a lot of that. There's always I'm.

• 50:01Rory Stewart?

  So I'm thinking, okay, Wes Streeting, you know, obviously, I like Peter Carr very much. I'm a great fan of Al Khan's that we haven't spoken of, and I'm doing incredible response to Trump. I mean, literally, the Trump, if you compare his response to Trump to Keir Starmer's.

• 50:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, when he did the video.

• 50:19Speaker 06

  So tracking some comments made that NATO troops stayed a little off the front lines in Afghanistan, and that the US has never necessarily needed us. Well, it's a real shame to hear that. Many courageous and honourable service personnel from many nations fought on the front line. Many fought way beyond that. I'd served five tours in Afghanistan. Many alongside my American colleagues, we shed blood, sweat and tears together. And not everybody came home. These are bonds, I think forged in fire. Protecting the US are shared interests, but actually protecting democracy overall. There is only one worse thing than working with allies. That is working without them. And when you do, always remember, never above, never below, always side by side.

• 51:02Rory Stewart?

  To say casually, as he's saying, I served five tours in Afghanistan, right? And he's the one politician-

• 51:10Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, but hold on a bit. Keir Starmer can't say that because he hasn't.

• 51:13Rory Stewart?

  He certainly can't. But he's the one politician in British politics who, any American general, any American politician looking at our cons, cannot be-

• 51:23Speaker 06

  Did you see his video the next day?

• 51:25Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 51:25Speaker 06

  He did. So he did the one to Trump, basically saying, you know, I've served five tours in Afghanistan, kindly, please don't insult our comrades who died, uh, serving in Afghanistan. The next day, he did another video where he basically said, I've just been for a two-hour run with a 15-kilogram backpack.

• 51:45Rory Stewart?

  He's a bit like you, yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 06

  And he looked, just wasn't even out of breath. So, no, listen, he's a president. This is, this is where I will-

• 51:51Rory Stewart?

  But, but, sorry, I just want to develop. I mean, just to get the point, I don't think people fully understand this. So many veterans in British politics, their military records are good, strong, but our cons-

• 52:05Speaker 06

  His is a different level, yeah.

• 52:07Rory Stewart?

  It's a different level. I mean, the guy-

• 52:07Speaker 06

  Well, he's got a military cross.

• 52:08Rory Stewart?

  The guy was literally in a helicopter with a weapon on the front line, with the American special forces again and again, literally looking out of the helicopter with a gun.

• 52:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:20Rory Stewart?

  So, so that was a really good response to Trump. And then something about Starmer's response. Yes, I, I was delighted that in the end he stood up.

• 52:30Rory Stewart?

  But his voice, his delivery, I mean, this could have been his great moment to turn it around.

• 52:36Speaker 07

  I will never forget their courage, their bravery and the sacrifice that they made for their country. And so I consider President Trump's remarks to be insulting and frankly appalling.

• 52:49Alastair Campbell?

  Where I'm going to side with you a bit, I'm going to give you a quote from Abraham Lincoln, who, as you know, is one of my sort of political heroes.

• 52:57Rory Stewart?

  You're always mentioning, so is Abraham Lincoln, Nelson Mandela and Matt Hancock.

• 53:05Alastair Campbell?

  The three degrees.

• 53:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 53:07Alastair Campbell?

  God, yeah. Abraham Lincoln famously brought in his opponents to build his team, so-called team of rivals. And he explained it as this, we needed the strongest men of the party in the cabinet. We needed to hold our own people together. I had looked the party over and concluded these were the very strongest men. I had no right to deprive the country of their services. Right, brilliant. And that's the case for Keir Starmer saying, whatever the threat to me, Andy Burnham's pretty good. He's done a good job in Manchester. I'll get him in. And I would also argue, so Al Khan's, for example, is a very good example of where Keir Starmer did reach out beyond the Labour tribe. But I think it's possible to make the case that he maybe should have thought, can I get David Miliband to come back?

• 53:52Alastair Campbell?

  Can I get Alan Milburn to come back?

• 53:54Rory Stewart?

  Hypothetically speaking, my guess is very strong that if David Miliband had wanted to stand, he would have allowed him to stand either. You know, in other words, this control freakery is stopping talent, not just Andy Burnham, but David Miliband and many other people who wanted to come in. What he wanted was young, pliable people.

• 54:10Alastair Campbell?

  And there was something in that, and the control freakery is certainly sort of part of the kind of narrative against against Keir Starmer. But I think on this one, I think it's much, much more complicated than the way that maybe it's been projected. And if you look at the polling, it says Andy Burnham should be allowed to stand. Well, fine. But then you also do have to at least weigh up in the judgment, the idea of, let's just say Nigel Farage fielded a really strong candidate for Manchester mayor. And let's just say they won. Okay, that's a disaster for the Labour Party and for the country. So you've got to weigh all of these things up. So what they've decided, I think, is that the considerable short-term hit that they've suffered and the sort of the sense of Andy Burnham now being an even bigger figure.

• 54:55Alastair Campbell?

  As a sort of antidote and an opponent of Keir Starmer, they've decided that is better to live with than the prospect, one, of a guy coming in and you just have endless, when's he going to make his move, when's he going to make his move, when's he going to make a move, or a reform win in Manchester. They are considerable factors that I think they were right to weigh up.

• 55:15Rory Stewart?

  I'm just trying to get a sense of whether Starmer is actually going to be running as the Labour leader in the next election. And what's your sense within the Labour Party? I mean, are we now in a position which I fear was probably true for Theresa May after she lost the 2017 election, which is, my memories of it is that every Tory MP and every coffee room was basically plotting. And there were people, you know, this horrible comments about, you know, dead woman walking, you know, it's when, not if. And basically the sense that by the time I put my hat into the leadership race, so I am May 2019, it

• 55:56Rory Stewart?

  was clear that Boris Johnson, Michael Gove had had campaigns running for about 12 months beforehand, had already raised the money, had already had their staff, had already had Grant Shapps running. Is the general sense now in Labour that the majority of MPs would be surprised if Starmer took them into the next election?

• 56:17Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I think he's in a really, really tough place. And to have gone so quickly from a three-figure landslide majority to this sense of people are having those sorts of conversations. So I think he's in a really tough place. I don't think he knows that. And the question then, given that one of his big messages was country before party, where does that lead to? I think he's in a really difficult place.

• 56:41Rory Stewart?

  So you're basically, I don't want to put you on the spot, but what I'm hearing from this, and I think the audience would hear, is that the chances of him taking Labour into the next election is 10%.

• 56:53Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know about a percentage, but I'm shocked by two things. One, in the public, because I don't think Keir Starmer's a hateful person at all, but a number of people say, I hate that guy, hate that guy. I really don't get that. But I think what you're hearing amongst a lot of the MPs is that, you know, this just isn't working. We are not a functional government.

• 57:13Rory Stewart?

  So that's the comms point that you've made often. They're not communicating clearly. What are the other things they think are not working?

• 57:18Alastair Campbell?

  Partly that, they don't sort of feel that they're able to connect with the public on what they call the good things that they are doing, which I can list, and I think they are doing a lot of good stuff. I think Keir has been impressive, particularly on the foreign affairs.

• 57:31Rory Stewart?

  And then there'll be doorstep stuff. There'll be my constituents are annoyed, the party's annoyed. They will feel felt he took, he was too slow on Gaza. They won't be happy at all with what's happening with the budget. They won't be confident about the balance that's being struck on welfare. They will feel that a lot of the promises on immigration weren't delivered, the promises on growth weren't delivered.

• 57:51Alastair Campbell?

  The big thing that ties that together is the fact that the slogan was change. And there are changes that you can point to. But do people feel that their lives are being transformed by a change of government? Certainly not yet. And then added to which, this is the thing that kind of pains me the most, is that the thing that made the last lot so dysfunctional was this centre, you've seen this in the way it's operating now, you just saw some sort of pretty second rate people projecting themselves as though they were the centre of the universe. And I think what you, the reason why I think Keir Starmer is likely to be feeling incredibly frustrated right now, is there he is trying to sort

• 58:33Alastair Campbell?

  of, you know, get a new government in place, get the government going. And we're already talking about who's next. Now, he either actually lays down, he says, you can do what you want, I'm not going. And then he's going to force the hand of people like West Streeting if they are sort of pushing to get him out, because Andy Burnham's not going to be there to do it for him now. But I think right now, I I'm pretty down about the way the government has developed, and I'm pretty down about the way the public is seeing it. And that's got to be fixed, because the Tories are not going to win this election. The Tories are not going to win the next election. And therefore, the choice that the country is facing is do you want a Labour or a Labour-led government, or do you want Nigel Farage in Downing Street?

• 59:16Alastair Campbell?

  Now, some people are still saying yes to the latter, but I think there is a real desire for that not to happen, and the only way it's going to be stopped is for Labour to get this out together.

• 59:26Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Okay, well, end of this episode. Look forward to discussing this more in Question Time.

• 59:31Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to talk about Minnesota, we're going to talk about Suella Braverman and her defection to Reform.

• 59:35Rory Stewart?

  And we're going to talk about very exciting new development, which is an attempt to build a centre-right movement.

• 59:40Alastair Campbell?

  I know.

• 59:41Rory Stewart?

  Trying to get there in the centre, trying to make the argument for the centre ground.

• 59:44Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, and also I've taken you up on your suggestion that we interview the people that we talked about last week, who have been campaigning against and exposing this horrible new thing, but not new phenomenon, massive phenomenon of child sex abuse online.

• 59:58Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, talk then. Thank you again. Bye-bye.

• 1:00:07Speaker 08

  There we are getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with three hundred and fifty passengers on board.

• 1:00:16Speaker 09

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 1:00:24Speaker 10

  We assess, uh, Prime Minister,

• 1:00:27Speaker 10

  with high confidence it was Russian.

• 1:00:30Speaker 07

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 1:00:32Speaker 11

  They took down a British passenger jet containing three hundred and fifty people.

• 1:00:35Speaker 09

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 1:00:48Speaker 12

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 1:00:50Speaker 09

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. Disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 1:00:59Speaker 13

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia.

• 1:01:04Speaker 09

  Yes.

• 1:01:06Speaker 13

  New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 1:01:10Alastair Campbell?

  You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom McDuff, Duffy!

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• 1:01:33Speaker 13

  Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.