102. The Secret Brexit Summit, Erdoğan under fire, and the death penalty

Why are ardent remainers and high profile eurosceptics meeting in secret to discuss our relationship with Europe? How has the earthquake in Turkey affected President Erdoğan politically? And why do MPs and members of the public have contrasting views on the death penalty? TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:13Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:16Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:18Rory Stewart?

  And Alistair, we've both got a cold, but you're under strong instructions. We're not allowed to mention that because you say it undermines the reputation of anyone if they're found to have a cold. You have some story from Tony Blair, is that right?

• 1:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I gave you instructions. Don't, you know, show, don't tell. And just get through it without mentioning you got a cold. And for heaven's sake, don't let people hear the cold in your voice because it's so irritating for the listener.

• 1:41Rory Stewart?

  What was the Tony Blair story? You once told him that.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  I remember once he had a really bad cold and he was doing all these interviews. And he said, why am I having to do these interviews when I've got such a bad cold? And I says, you're doing the interviews because we booked them before you got a cold. And you've got to get through them without telling people that you've got a cold. And nobody's going to care that you've got a cold.

• 1:58Alastair Campbell?

  I should say, by the way, Rory, a few days ago, I had much more than a cold. I had hypothermia in Lake Geneva. So there you go.

• 2:04Rory Stewart?

  And this was you doing your normal mad, swimming in the snow. And this time it actually went wrong.

• 2:10Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it was, Fiona and I went for our usual swim. We found Lake Geneva, which was absolutely beautiful. It was two degrees in the water, which is fine, but it was minus five outside. And I just didn't get warm quickly enough. I didn't get dressed. I just, you know, I was messing around. And then suddenly about 10 minutes later, I just started to feel really, really, really weird. And then I started seeing things.

• 2:31Rory Stewart?

  Oh, God.

• 2:32Alastair Campbell?

  So I shivered probably for about an hour.

• 2:33Rory Stewart?

  Well, we'll come back to this because I've got a hypothermia story too. But let's, let's do the menu quickly then. So you wanted to have a look at these Brexit talks that have been taking place at Ditchley Conference. And then I think you had a good phrase called a tale of two Andersons, looking at the Labour Party and the Conservative Party. And then I think we were going to have a look at Zelensky on tour, it's happening in Ukraine and Moldova, and Erdogan and the earthquake and how that's affecting his reelection chances.

• 2:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. So shall we start with Brexit?

• 3:03Rory Stewart?

  Let's, let's start with Brexit, but very, very quickly before we go on. Just, did you literally, that is hypothermia, isn't it? When you start hallucinating?

• 3:09Alastair Campbell?

  I felt I was having a stroke and it was all a bit scary. And Fiona said I was literally white. I mean, my face was white. And so, yeah, I, being a bit of a hyperchondriac, I, I phoned my friend from the swimming pool, Jim Darrow, who's an intensive care doctor. And he advised me, yeah, it's, it's basically mild hypothermia, nothing too much to worry about, get warm. So I did, it was fine.

• 3:33Rory Stewart?

  Ah, so my, my only experience of this is when I was walking across Afghanistan in the central mountains. I'd been walking for about 15 miles. And it was a long way between houses through the snow. And I was walking with the dog and I eventually sat down in the snow and I felt incredibly happy. And I felt, I've done all I need to do. I can just sit here. I don't have to go any further. And at that point, my dog, which was walking ahead of me, walked back and started sniffing around me and started barking at me. And then kept walking onwards. And I very reluctantly thought, well, Bugger, if the dog can keep going, I suppose I can keep going. But that's the closest I've ever had to that sort of strange feeling of kind of hallucinating in cold.

• 4:15Alastair Campbell?

  That's interesting because the thing about getting hypothermia in the water, they say the really dangerous thing is if you start to feel warm, when you know that it's cold. And and I did have that feeling in the war. I wasn't in that long. I was in a few minutes. But I did. I did have this feeling that my hands actually felt quite warm, which is actually why I got out. Uh, but the hallucination thing was like weird is every time I tried to open my eyes, I I was in a different place. It was a different vision of something. Sometimes it was it was like it was like a succession of very fast dreams.

• 4:42Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's so. Okay, right. Brexit talks. Yes.

• 4:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So Ditchley, are you on the board of Ditchley?

• 4:49Rory Stewart?

  I I am on board Ditchley and I do a lot with Ditchley. So shall I quickly explain a little bit what Ditchley is?

• 4:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and then tell us what you know.

• 4:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Ditchley is an amazing setup. It's this incredibly grand aristocratic country house, which was bought by an American tobacco family in the early 20th century. And was the place where Winston Churchill spent quite a lot of time during the war because it was a place they thought the German bombers wouldn't target. And then after the war, this family gave it to the nation. They actually gave it to the Foreign Office as a conference venue. And they did it in quite a clever way. I think this is true for some of, I think it's true for the Prime Minister's country house too. Because they were worried that the government in in terms of saving money would try to flog it off. They set up a careful trust, which I think says with some of these houses that if the government ceases using it, they're not allowed to sell it.

• 5:39Rory Stewart?

  Instead, the money will go to charity to stop Treasury doing that. And it's been used for many, many years for these wonderful meetings where you turn up on a Thursday afternoon. You start and you work quite hard and you do nine, 10 hours a day round a conference table. There's usually very, very good people invited. So you do Thursday afternoon, Friday. Saturday morning, you go for a bit of a walk or you can do a visit to Oxford. And then Saturday afternoon, you wrap up and and go home. And they used to get a lot of US senators over. I had amazing conversations there in Afghanistan at 10, 15 years ago. But this time they seem to have pulled off a really, really remarkable meeting with some very senior figures on Brexit, on which, over to you.

• 6:18Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm guessing that this was not done as part of the official Ditchley programme. Uh, it might have been. But the story emerged in The Observer and they talked about these secret Brexit talks. You have to have the word secret in a Sunday newspaper story somewhere. But I think when you look at some of the the main characters involved, it's hard to imagine that it would have stayed secret forever. Michael Gove, Peter Mandelson, David Lammy, Gisela Stewart, Michael Howden, Norman Lamont, they were the names that interested me because they are right out and out Brexiteers. And I remember doing a debate with Norman Lamont before the referendum and I was saying, I think, you know, if this happens, it's going to be disastrous.

• 7:00Alastair Campbell?

  And then he said, oh, you agency, you agency, it would be a lot better than you think. And

• 7:05Rory Stewart?

  Good voice, good voice.

• 7:06Alastair Campbell?

  That's going very, very, very well, Norman, not. But what they talked about was, and then Peter Mandelson was in the chair.

• 7:13Rory Stewart?

  Now, that I can correct, that I can correct. So here I come with my inside line information as a governor.

• 7:18Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent, excellent.

• 7:19Rory Stewart?

  It was chaired in the normal way by the by the director of Ditchley.

• 7:23Alastair Campbell?

  So it wasn't it wasn't a official Ditchley thing then?

• 7:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but it was it was a small cast and much, much more senior than you'd normally have. So often Ditchley conferences will have many more, a sort of range of people. Actually, some of the recent ones have been quite interesting. They've brought in younger people from the north of England, people in their teens. But this was a very classic thing. So confidential, but not secret, done in the normal Ditchley way. But my goodness, they got some impressive people around that table. So they got Michael Gove and Gisela Stewart, who was the big Labour lead on the on the Brexit campaign, Norman Lamont, as you say, and then on the other side, people like David Lammy, and then the main negotiator, Theresa May's main negotiator in Brexit. So

• 8:02Alastair Campbell?

  Ollie Ollie Robbins.

• 8:03Rory Stewart?

  Ollie Robbins. So definitely a room you would have wanted to be in for two and a half days.

• 8:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, perhaps it was Peter that was Peter Mandelson that was making this thing happen. I don't know. But I do think what's happening, though, what this reflects is that There are people on the Brexit side of the argument, and this, I think, is what emerged in some of these discussions, who, for all their ideological commitment to Brexit, are starting to accept some of the empirical facts around it and actually feel that they do have to at least begin to address the problems that Brexit has thrown up. Now, of course, the political problem they have was exposed immediately by the reaction of people like Nigel Farage, John Redwood, David Frost, who was Boris Johnson's negotiator, who essentially,

• 8:49Alastair Campbell?

  whilst on the one hand saying, "The deals that we made," in Frost's case, "the deal that we made that we used to think was brilliant is now rubbish, but anybody else who tries to change it, you know, I'm going to have my say." But I think it's all part of this movement within the Brexit debate, and I think this is reflected even more substantially in business, because although there were some business people there, like the guy, John Simons from GSK, the pharmaceutical company, the other two main non-Westminster people were Ollie Robbins, as you say, although he's now in the private sector, is best known as a civil servant, was around, I think, when you were there and when I was there, and Angus Lapsley as well, who's been a civil servant for many, many years. So I think that

• 9:31Alastair Campbell?

  what this was about is both sides trying to move on. And this actually relates to something that our next interviewee in leading is David Lammy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary. We recorded the interview a couple of weeks ago now. So before this, but interestingly, with a lot of the discussion was about Brexit, with me, you doing my usual, you know, if it's as bad as we see it, it's got to change, and David basically saying, "We've got to live with it, we've got to move on, we've got to make it work."

• 9:56Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yeah, I'd really encourage people to listen to that, because I think I've never, I thought that was, I've never seen more detail on what the Labour Party's position seems to be on Brexit, and how difficult it is, and how much they're tying themselves in knots on that. And also, as a bit of a spoiler, very, very interesting about international development, 0.7%, and fascinating on David Lammy's early life and story. I mean, he's an extraordinary individual with an amazing life history.

• 10:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he's also the thing I've I've known David for a very, very long time. He's definitely grown as a as a person and as a politician. And that may sound obvious, may say, well, we all do. But, you know, I think when when David was a minister way back in the day, if you'd have said to me, oh, I think David Lammy one day might be Foreign Secretary, I might have struggled with that. But actually, I didn't have any problem talking to David the other day, thinking this guy could be the next Foreign Secretary.

• 10:45Rory Stewart?

  It was amazing, wasn't it? So it's out on Monday 20th February on the new Leading Podcast feed. So just type Leading in rather than Rest is Politics into your podcast feed to get all these interviews. And an amazing interview with Michael Johnson that we'll talk about a little bit after the break, which has just come out.

• 11:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Rory Stewart?

  Now, just in terms, just to wrap up this stuff on Ditchley, the sort of things that were on the agenda was they were they were talking about containing Russian aggression. So working with the European Union on that, thinking about how we can develop independent energy supply. But they were also, interestingly, getting into a subject which is very much a European subject, but it hasn't been much in the British conversation, which is whether Europe and the UK together can develop more of an independent tech sector to balance that of the United States.

• 11:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. And the answer to that is?

• 11:35Rory Stewart?

  I think incredibly difficult, unfortunately, unbelievably brutally difficult. We have talked a bit about this, and I think it's worth bearing in mind because I I often fell into this trap when I was a politician of thinking, well, why don't we have Facebook? Why don't we have Google? Why don't we have all these things? And I would I'd make speeches saying, why shouldn't Britain have its own Facebook and Google in Silicon Valley? It's taken me a long time and actually spending a lot of time in Silicon Valley to understand just how ludicrous that is. Because, of course, they have created an extraordinary ecosystem. They've brought the most talented engineers in the world in there. They've done these extraordinary visa regimes. But also, the more capital that's there, the more startups that there, the more companies there, the more of a virtuous cycle.

• 12:17Rory Stewart?

  They've created and I also got it wrong. And I think this is something that maybe when you look at Labour's policy on green energy, we need to be careful about there as well, is saying, why doesn't Britain build the great gigabattery factories of the future or dominate the electric car business? That was something that, you know, we talked about from 2010 onwards.

• 12:36Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 12:36Rory Stewart?

  The government put a bit of money into, but in the end, our lunch was eaten by the Scandinavians and the Germans and above all by the Chinese.

• 12:44Alastair Campbell?

  And also Europe and the UK are both currently very, very worried by what's happening in America with Biden's Inflation Reduction Act and the huge support that the Americans are giving to their own industrial development, industrial strategy development in places where they're already far more developed than we are. So I think it's very difficult. And I think for Rishi Sunak does this big thing and so does Jeremy Hunt. You know, I was an entrepreneur and, you know, we'll be building the great businesses of the future. And well, we might, but I don't think we're going to be doing it because of a government strategy.

• 13:16Rory Stewart?

  No, no. Well, we certainly haven't got a very good track record. Because part of the problem is that when we talk about industrial strategy, if you look at this famous battery factory we were going to build, it always ends up that the British government is putting in hundreds of millions when the Chinese are putting in tens of billions. And it's very, very difficult to compete on that scale.

• 13:35Alastair Campbell?

  On the Labour Green thing, though, I had a bit of pushback, Rory, on something you said in the interview we did with the Sunday Times Magazine.

• 13:44Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 13:45Alastair Campbell?

  With Decca Aitkenhead, who devoted, was it really six pages? Somebody told me it was six pages. I just saw it online.

• 13:50Rory Stewart?

  With a great, great picture of you and me arm wrestling.

• 13:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we sort of looked like arm wrestling, didn't we? Although we didn't, let's not talk about what actually happened when we arm wrestled. That would just sort of play into the stereotypes of the alpha male and the effete Italian, which we don't want to do. But the the one thing you said that a few people asked me to pick up with you, and that was where you you were talking about, you were saying that I just think that, you know, get a few nice young Labour people in and things will be fine, which I don't necessarily think, but I get where you're coming from. And then you you said that, you know, Labour will come in and and they'll come in with all these great green plans and they'll they'll achieve absolutely nothing. And somebody said, surely we have to believe that it is possible with something as big as the climate, that governments can make

• 14:34Alastair Campbell?

  a difference and the change of government can make a difference. So are you are you not becoming a bit cynical about the very ability of politics and political change to make a difference to the outside world?

• 14:44Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think we can make a difference. And actually, one of the few things that David Cameron's government should get a lot of credit for is that it made a lot of progress on climate. Not as much as some people would like, but it actually went much further than many other European countries. We did very well in getting off coal. A lot of wind power was built until these recent changes. So I think governments can make huge changes. And I think the solar power subsidies made a huge difference in getting solar panels on people's houses and and transform that industry, although they were then cut. So I think governments can make a difference. I think what I'm a bit more worried about and always have been worried about is the green growth idea, because I think the green growth idea is a very neat way of pretending you can have your cake and eat your cake.

• 15:28Rory Stewart?

  In other words, you can do things which are absolutely fantastic for climate and the environment, and they're also going to have no negative impact on the economy. In fact, they're going to generate growth, they're going to generate jobs, and they're going to be absolutely a win win in every direction. And I'm always suspicious of government programmes that sound like that. I think there's a lot that the government can do, should do on climate and green investment, but we shouldn't necessarily pretend that's going to solve all our economic woes. In fact, it may cause economic problems.

• 15:54Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Now, let's talk about these two Andersons. Lee Anderson, former Labour councillor, now a Tory MP up in Ashfield in Notts, and Ian Anderson, a lifelong Conservative businessman.

• 16:11Alastair Campbell?

  Who has this week torn up his Tory party card and come out in support of the Labour Party and cited two things really. One was Boris Johnson's F U C K business, not just the quote, but the attitude, the attitude that business should just sort of do as it's told by government and just play along with whatever the government says. And then the other was the, what he called the exploitation of culture wars. And I think it's fair to say that Lee Anderson, the Tory vice chair, is somebody who is not averse to playing culture wars. So first of all, what do you think of Rishi Sunak's appointment of Lee Anderson? And secondly, how, how dangerous do you think it is that somebody like Ian

• 16:54Alastair Campbell?

  Anderson, who I think is quite well known in Tory party circles, and another guy today, Paul Dreschler, I see, the former head of the CBI, has come out for Labour? Do you think there is a sort of bit of a move in the business community?

• 17:06Rory Stewart?

  Let's start on that second one. So definitely, these, these people are coming out against, I, in, in the case of Ian Anderson, he's the, the Chair of Stonewall. So he's very, very connected with exactly these issues. And he's worried that the government is, is driving wedges between the LGBT community and transgender movements. He was particularly upset recently by the government's attitude towards Nicola Sturgeon's bill on transgender recognition, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago. I hadn't actually heard of him though. So I'm, I mean, it's an interesting question this, and it's something that you must have experienced, I guess, in the sort of 94 to 97 period, which is how you handle

• 17:47Rory Stewart?

  people defecting across, how you make the most of these media moments, who really counts, who doesn't. Because in both cases, I sort of feel played right by Labour, it can be really helpful for them to say, here's a senior Tory supporting businessman who's come across the Labour, or here's an ex head of the CBI has come across the Labour. But of course, it's also true that these are not necessarily household names that certainly I as the Tory MP had ever heard of.

• 18:15Alastair Campbell?

  No, I mean, well, the CBI is a household name, and I think in the business and political communities, Paul Dreschler would be would be pretty well known. But yeah, I agree with that. I think the other thing is, well, we were in the mid 90s, we were very keen for business people to come over. I think there's a slight, there's a slightly different problem for Keir Starmer. That's that one of the problems Keir has is this is the people on the kind of Corbynite left who's sort of constantly trying to say that Keir is no different to the Tories, which I think is, you know, both wrong and a very, very silly thing to be saying. So I think that the idea of sort of making a big deal for business people coming out. But I think for the general public, there is a feeling now, I think, that the Tory party, which has always paraded itself as the party of business, has lost

• 18:58Alastair Campbell?

  that, has lost the, not least thanks to Liz Truss, has lost any sense of economic competence. So I think business people coming over to Labour is is is very much a net positive. And I think with Lee Anderson, I do understand why Rishi Sunak has appointed him, because he's one of those guys who can get attention. He's shown that. He's probably had more attention since his appointment than than Greg Hands, who's been appointed as the chairman of the Conservative Party. The question is whether it's the right sort of attention, or whether it just doesn't play into this idea that the Tories now are polarising the whole time, and that has an appeal to a certain constituency, but it doesn't have a broad appeal.

• 19:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, let's just get into Lee Anderson for a second. I mean, he's such an interesting figure, isn't he? Because in a way, he's the absolute antithesis of the way that people normally perceive the Tory party. You know, you often fall into the narrative of these people are massively out of touch, old Etonians, and Lee Anderson is absolutely the reverse, isn't he? He's son of a coal miner, coal miner for 10 years, comprehensive school educated, nongraduate, Labour Party member from his youth. So he will have gone through, absolutely hated Mrs Thatcher, formed by everything that drew him into Labour through the 80s and 90s. He managed, he was the office manager of Glorinda Piero's office, the Labour MP for Ashfield's office for five years, became a Labour Party councillor. And

• 20:23Rory Stewart?

  I mean, he's definitely, sorry, just to put it on record, definitely not a guy that I like. And that's not the side of the Conservative Party that I'm comfortable with at all. And I'm actually slightly horrified of the emergence of these people because it is a form of a very strange form of new populism coming through. But he's also somebody who, I think you can see why the Conservative Party wants to have somebody who was a coal miner for 10 years, who spent 10 years volunteering the citizens of Vice Bureau, who can speak with a certain amount of, yeah, I mean, he's a local man, representing his local constituencies, got a wife with cystic fibrosis and all of this stuff, I think feeds into a narrative authenticity.

• 21:03Alastair Campbell?

  The vox pops I saw, I know you've got to be very, very wary of vox pops because they often either go out and just find, on the one hand, or the other hand, or there's an organisation that will go out wanting to find a certain voices, but the vox pops I saw were not very, very flattering about it. I also think that this strikes me as, you know, I think one of the things of modern politics is the lack of embarrassment that modern politicians feel about anything. I think if I'd have been done up like Lee Anderson was done up by Michael Crick.

• 21:33Rory Stewart?

  Remind people of that story.

• 21:35Alastair Campbell?

  It was, we'll definitely, we'll definitely put clips of this in the, in the weekly newsletter, which is going down very well with our listeners, it seems. But so Michael Crick, veteran television correspondent, made his name really doing by-elections and following candidates around and making their life difficult. And he basically was with Lee Anderson, and Lee Anderson forgot in a Gordon Brown moment, forgot that his microphone was still on, so walked away from the camera to phone a friend of his to say, I'm just going to knock on your door in a few minutes, I'm going to be with this journalist, can you sort of pretend you don't know who I am? No, you don't, you're not a friend of mine, but you're going to vote for me because you think I'm fantastic and all that. And of course, and they only discovered, they only discovered after they'd had this

• 22:20Alastair Campbell?

  BT at the doorstep where the guy duly said, oh yeah, I think you're terrific, we need them, I've been Labour all my life, I'll never vote Labour again. So it was perfect. And, you know, that sort of, it's sort of no shame, no embarrassment. And he just sort of, and I like to, I do think this is a particularly Tory thing rather than Labour thing. I do think in these days, that sort of thing that gives you profile, even when it's really bad for you, sort of helps you to climb the ladder rather than knock you off it.

• 22:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, one of the questions I guess that people will have thinking about this, and he's, Lee Anderson, of course, is in that position. Because he's part of that 2019 wave, part of that Red Wall wave. And I guess the party managers, and this goes to the heart of this whole question about the change in British politics, will have calculated. That he was the person that was most likely to be able to win that seat, that he was a perfect candidate. Labour councillor, coal miner, running in his own local seat, knew everybody, and sure enough, he took it. So, and then the question is, I guess, how much are his views important to his ability to cut through? So the sort of things he's got in trouble for, he's been challenging, he's gone again and again on the media saying he's,

• 23:32Rory Stewart?

  people keep telling him that people who are on incomes of thirty two thousand pounds or more need to use food banks, and he keeps saying, I challenge you to come with me to the food bank in Ashfield. I've never seen a single person on an income of more than thirty two thousand, he's talking about firefighters and nurses needing to use a food bank. He then said that travellers in his constituency steal lawnmowers and tools. He said that many people crossing the channel are economic migrants. And now he said he's in favour of the death penalty. Now, of course, with all these views, there will be a very, very large number of people, perhaps more than half the British population, that would agree with him strongly. And I just wanted to get to the question of whether that isn't really what we're dealing with.

• 24:11Rory Stewart?

  That populism in a way, and this is maybe what Trump was about, is articulating things that the majority of the population feel that no other politician wants to say.

• 24:18Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that is partly what populism is, but Rishi Sunak is, I think, taking a risk on this because, you know, I think a lot of the people who Hold those views. The question Rishi Sunak has to ask is whether he's going to get more people either staying in the Tory column, as the Americans call it, or moving into the Tory column as a result of this. And that's where I think he's playing to an outdated stereotype. It's like with the other major act of, I think, populist polarization we've seen this week was Suella Braverman and her handling of the trouble in Nosley,

• 24:57Alastair Campbell?

  where there was an organized protest outside a hotel, which is housing asylum seekers, and it turned very, very violent. And the local MP, Labour MP George Howard, Yvette Cooper, Shadow Home Secretary, that was straight out there condemning the violence, supporting the police, and saying there's no excuse for attacking people who are there as part of the system trying to process their claims. Suella Braverman said nothing through the first day, well into the second day, and she sort of did a bit of a Trumpian, you know, there are good people on both sides. She said, you know, that allegations of behavior by some of the asylum seekers is not an excuse for violence. And that was the first I'd

• 25:39Alastair Campbell?

  actually even known there had been rumors about the conduct of some of the people in the hotel, the truth of which I don't know. And the problem with this, you mentioned transgender earlier on, and some of these issues, these issues are now so toxic, so polarizing. And unless politicians in positions of leadership see it as part of their job actually to set out the facts, as opposed to exploit the polarization, then I think we've got a real problem.

• 26:06Rory Stewart?

  And it's amplified endlessly, as we've talked about before, through social media. I mean, it's extraordinary how you can sit in a Facebook group or a Twitter group where you will just be bombarded with this kind of information on either side. Can we just sort of finish just before we go to the break on this interesting question around Lee Anderson and the death penalty? So he's one of the only politicians who's come out openly in favor. And yet polling suggests that more than half the British population, we abolished the death penalty in Britain in 1965, more than half the British population, if you ask them whether they would favor death penalty for terrorist offenses, for example, is in favor. So it's an interesting democratic question, isn't it?

• 26:50Rory Stewart?

  Why a topic like that that more than half the population are in favour of? If an MP says they're in favour of, it causes complete consternation. And in the States, by contrast, Joe Biden, who you're, you know, and I too, I'm very sympathetic towards, he introduced the bill in 1994, which expanded the death penalty in the US. But he added another, something like 60 crimes which could be given the death penalty. And in 1960, Biden again got, got behind stopping judges for overturning federal death penalty cases. And he's on the left, so a very, very different country.

• 27:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and, you know, and I think it would be very, very hard to get elected in the United States as president if you were not in favour of the death penalty. I hope that it will remain very, very hard in the UK to get elected as Prime Minister if you are in favour. Margaret Thatcher was in favour of the death penalty, wasn't she? But, but never, I don't, my memory may be failing me, I'm not sure, ever pushed it.

• 27:47Rory Stewart?

  Traditionally, the Tory right was always in favour of the death penalty. And I remember when I was being trained for my selection in Penrith and Border by Tristram Garrell Jones, who was an ex MP on the left.

• 27:58Alastair Campbell?

  Oh my god, was he your trainer?

• 27:59Rory Stewart?

  He was my trainer, yeah.

• 28:00Alastair Campbell?

  Did he do, did he do most of it in Spanish? Because he'd be actually preferred talking Spanish to English, as far as I recall.

• 28:05Rory Stewart?

  Well, he's great training. So he'd gone for selection back in the day. And of course, he was very much like me from the left of the Conservative Party. And in order to get elected, they wanted, the association in those days wanted you to say you were in favour of the death penalty. And his answer was like this, he'd say, I'm not in favour of the death penalty. But if a man were to kill my sister, I would kill him myself. And the, and the whole association would go, yay, like this. And he'd get around the question that way.

• 28:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, of course, that's how, that's, I mean, that's, that's not a bad way of getting around the question. But of course, the, the reverse of that is what, what really did for Michael Dukakis, who was a Democrat American presidential candidate. Who was, I think the question was, you know, even if your wife was raped and murdered, would you still be against the death penalty? And he gave a very kind of technical, non-emotional sort of answer, and it kind of.

• 28:59Rory Stewart?

  Killed him in, in 1988, yeah, destroyed him, didn't he?

• 29:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:02Rory Stewart?

  Well, on, on the happy subject of the death penalty, maybe time for a break.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Here we are getting a statement from Number Ten on that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 29:31Speaker 05

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 29:33Speaker 06

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  Man in the cradle is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not?

• 29:42Alastair Campbell?

  You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 29:49Speaker 03

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 30:00Speaker 05

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:07Speaker 05

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

• 30:11Speaker 07

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

• 30:16Speaker 05

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 30:18Speaker 07

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We have two tight friendly QIAs. Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it, Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:52Rory Stewart?

  So, welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And you've just done a brilliant interview for our leading podcast with Michael Johnson. What a legend. Well, do you now know who he is, Rory? I do now know who he is. I thought it was a lovely interview and I thought you had a lovely relationship, the two of you. I didn't quite get a full sense of how well... So, sorry, just for listeners who, like me, don't know, he's the most amazing Olympic athlete who won 12 gold medals. Actually, won 13, you explain, and then had to give one back.

• 31:17Alastair Campbell?

  He won four, I think, four Olympics, eight Worlds, and he gave one back because one of his relay colleagues, Antonio Petecru, had cheated.

• 31:25Rory Stewart?

  So what's, what's the story of how you got to, you seem to have a very, very warm, easy relationship. Have you known him for a long time?

• 31:30Alastair Campbell?

  No, not that long. I know, I know him actually through a guy called Nick Keller, who runs the Sport Industry Awards. I've only really met him, met him through that and talked to him a few times about this, that and the other. I think he, I think he's just, he's also what a voice, honestly, that voice. I mean, I really wish I had a voice like Michael Johnson's. It's just sort of, you can listen to a voice like that all day. But I thought it was, you know, I, I was a bit gingerish about the way that I led into the whole thing about the state of politics in America. And like, his very, virtually his very first answer, he said, you know, this is a war. We are in a war. Athletes have to be soldiers. I mean, he was basically saying, not only should

• 32:10Alastair Campbell?

  athletes have the right to speak out about political and social issues, they, they have a duty to do it. It was a very, very, very strong kind of call to arms. He did admit that, you know, it's easier for him to say it because he's not doing it now. And, but my God, he's

• 32:26Rory Stewart?

  I thought that was incredibly powerful message. But I think, as you say, that the thing that was very much almost on brand for the type of politics that both of us are trying to encourage and promote is just how thoughtful he was about it. So along with him saying it's a war, he was incredibly self-reflective and interesting about all these subjects. I, I felt he was actually passionate in the centre ground. So he would say, look, of course, I think people should be taking the knee, but I'm not sure I would have done it because I would have been worried about sponsorship.

• 32:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:57Rory Stewart?

  He said on the transgender issue, he wasn't really drawn. He was thoughtful about this thing that we've been talking about over the last few weeks about classified documents being carried out of the White House and said, I mean, almost in whatever you think of Trump and Biden, you've got to ask some questions about who's doing the document control. And then I thought, you know, there was, there was something lovely about the way he reflected on this story of his colleague who had taken drugs and who meant that he'd had to give back his gold medal. But the way in which, and I think this takes a lot of self-knowledge to say that he doesn't fully want to judge him, that he can imagine the shame that the man felt, that the hollowness

• 33:37Rory Stewart?

  of winning a medal when you've cheated, the pressures that were on him. So I thought he came across as a very kind of wise and reflective guy. In fact, I felt very sorry that I wasn't on the interview. I fault entirely.

• 33:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And he was also, you know, I'd said to him, I hadn't known that he'd met Tony Blair in South Africa, and he said that Tony said to him, as I said, why have you never thought about going to politics? And he said, I think I'd be terrible at it. And he might be right, he might be wrong, but he's certainly the sort of guy, the sort of voice you need with a political platform, for sure.

• 34:09Rory Stewart?

  I thought it was great, really great. Well, highly recommended for everyone on Leading Now. And of course, next leading is David Lammy. Now, Zelensky has been on tour, and he's been in Britain.

• 34:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 34:19Rory Stewart?

  He's been asking us for fighter jets, met the King, has been in the House of Parliament, etc. What did you think about how Zelensky came across when he was in the UK?

• 34:27Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I think on all of his visits, he's, I've actually written, sorry to keep plugging my book in advance, but I've written a section about Zelensky, this was before this tour, so it's too late for this, because the book's finished now, but about how wherever he takes the message, whether it's to a local audience, whether it's to a frontline, meeting the soldiers, whether it's to the White House, wherever he takes a message, he tailors that message absolutely brilliantly. And I think he did it in Parliament, I think he did it in Brussels extremely well. I thought his meeting with Europeans went incredibly well. Now, none of them have actually yet given the thing that he most asked for, but that was the same with the tanks. If you remember, it took him a while to persuade them to give

• 35:11Alastair Campbell?

  him the tanks. So we'll see where he gets to with these high-speed jets. I think part of the problem is, I mean, you know, the training, I think you saw in his visit to the UK that Rishi Sunak wanted to focus on the training of Ukrainian military that we were involved in. But I think he's an absolute class act as a communicator and as a politician. And I think the other thing is, you feel, I mean, okay, he's addressing people who are, you know, prime ministers, foreign ministers, finance ministers, MEPs, MPs, lords, whatever it might be. But I think just in every generation, there's always, I guess it was Mandela in the generation that I was there. I mean, Zelensky just has a

• 35:55Alastair Campbell?

  Has an appeal that has cut through and and he uses it incredibly well.

• 35:59Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary, isn't it? Because unlike Mandela, he doesn't have this history as a political prisoner. He was a very successful comedian who had this extraordinary show where, a bit like Veep, where he acted a slightly hapless Ukrainian president. Boy, has he grown into that role. And wonderful, too, that he understands so instinctively and unashamedly how to combine his role, inspiring people on the frontline and remaining there in Kiev, with also understanding that it's very much his role to get around those foreign capitals, that that isn't in any way a distraction from what he needs to do. In fact, almost the most important thing he can do is get the international support.

• 36:33Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, is to build international support. And that's why, I mean, I wanted to talk a little bit today about Moldova, because, I mean, Ukraine is a pretty big country. Moldova is tiny. It's 2.6 million people. It's smaller than Wales. And it's sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania with this little bit down the eastern side, Transnistria, which is unrecognized where there are tens of thousands of Russian troops. And this amazing event the other day by the the president, Maya Sandu, who I know a little bit. And she basically stood up, and this in part was driven by Ukrainian intelligence, and said she warned that Russia was going to provoke

• 37:18Alastair Campbell?

  an attempted overthrow of the government, which, you know, and she said that people were going to be arriving from Russia, from Belarus, from Serbia, and they were going to be there, not in military uniform. They were going to be provoking trouble. They were going to organize protests. And this is in a country that is, I think, the second poorest country in Europe, has been very badly hit by Ukraine, big influx of refugees, power cuts because their power supply is very much linked up with with Ukraine, cost of living crisis that is pretty grim. And just before this, she's changed the prime minister.

• 37:56Rory Stewart?

  Who I know a little bit, actually, just as you know, the president. I spent a bit of time with her this summer in the States. So that's Natalia Gavralita, and she's a really Really, we should get her on the on the podcast. She's a prime minister in Moldova. She's a economist, multilingual, worked for the World Bank, credibly impressive technocrat, but she'd been trying to lead eighteen months of reforms and run into real trouble on inflation, energy, and basically has that government has collapsed and your friend, the president, Mya Sandu, is having to form a new government now. It's the second poorest country in Europe, just after Ukraine, but it's an EU candidate state.

• 38:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And what's interesting, what's interesting about the successor, this guy, Dorin Retchan, he's a kind of defence expert, but he's been, he's been brought in as the new prime minister and he's, he's, if anything, if it's possible to be even more pro EU. This is, I suspect, why Putin will be looking at this with some alarm, because Moldova, of course, you know, has had, it's had a history of Poles, Crimeans, the Ottomans, Russians, of course, they've, you know, they were annexed, the Second World War, became the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic. You know, so for a small country that's been independent since nineteen ninety, I think was the first parliamentary election that they had under, as it were, the current system.

• 39:17Alastair Campbell?

  So it must feel very, very, very scary to be there right now. And they're essentially saying they really need help. They've done everything the West has asked. They've stood up to Russia. She's been absolutely strong in her condemnations. And they want financial support for the energy and the security investment. They've got to diversify energy supplies. We all have, but they need support in that. And, and also they're going to need support for the modernisation of their, of their defences. So it's, it's going to be another ask for the, for the Americans and for the, and for the, the other European powers.

• 39:48Rory Stewart?

  And as you say, unbelievably vulnerable, because, you know, barely over two million people, credibly poor, stuck there in this very difficult situation. And they're in Transnistria, essentially is, is a a Russian occupied breakaway state like Abkhazia and South Ossetia. So it's, yeah, watching Moldova, I think, is something that we don't talk enough about in Britain, but I think it is something that actually people in Washington DC are very, very conscious of, because Moldova is. Right there on the frontline.

• 40:16Alastair Campbell?

  Fiona, my Fiona, not Fiona Hill, who we talked to the other day, the American foreign policy, government foreign policy advisor. But she was sort of saying, you know, what is the difference really between Hitler and Putin? And you look at, when he has his eyes on a place like Moldova, it's sort of thinking, where are the easy places I can go? This is now a kind of expansionism that I think is going to try, he is going to try to draw another place, not least because that's a way of sort of, you know, focusing the attention of the West elsewhere as well.

• 40:48Rory Stewart?

  And we talked about, we didn't actually probably talk enough about the Russian influence in Cyprus when we were talking about the Cyprus elections. We've talked about it in relation to Serbia.

• 40:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Rory Stewart?

  Listen, another thing that we've touched on a bit, but is developing fast, is the whole technology story around the Ukraine war. And two big things there, there's Musk and his satellites, which is the Starlink system. And then there's a company called Palantir, which is providing the algorithms and artificial intelligence, which is doing the targeting. So just to start on the second one, because we've talked a bit about algorithms and artificial intelligence, they are managing to bring together, and this seems to be a lot of the Ukrainian success. They can take mobile phone images shot by a Ukrainian civilian, takes a photograph of a Russian tank, and they can crowdsource it and put it together with classified information,

• 41:37Rory Stewart?

  satellite imagery, remote sensing imagery, and that allows them to know exactly where the Russian troops are, what type of troops there are, what kind of missiles to hit them with. That's one example of an American company transforming the battlefield. The other example is Musk and his Starlink, because you remember, we discussed this, that last October, Musk, who provided this vital internet capacity to Ukraine, suddenly proposed that they give up Donetsk and Luhansk and Crimea, in other words, basically allow the Russians to keep everything that they'd conquered. Then he started saying that he wasn't going to keep paying for the satellites, he wanted the Pentagon to pay for them. And now he said that he's not going to allow these satellites to be used for military purposes. So it's already been the case that when the Ukrainian troops advance beyond the existing

• 42:22Rory Stewart?

  front lines, essentially their internet stops working. But they have been used to coordinate the drone flights of the Ukrainian military, and Elon Musk is stopping that too, because he says he's trying to stop World War III. And it's a very interesting example of how Musk has put himself in the position of Both initially being the sort of savior of Ukraine who provided this capacity that nobody else could provide, and now somebody who's providing a real obstacle to Ukraine's ability to prosecute its war.

• 42:51Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, I see he was sitting with Rupert Murdoch at the Super Bowl.

• 42:54Rory Stewart?

  Ah.

• 42:55Alastair Campbell?

  So these, generation by generation, the oligarch, the media oligarchs stick together, it would seem. I saw, on listening back to our, one of our podcasts last week, the advert was for Battleground, the goal hanger, yet another goal hanger success story, which I think, albeit briefly, knocked us off the number one perch for a while. But the clip that they, that they used, which led me to listen to the whole thing, was of this, I mean, here's you talking about the kind of really modern approach to warfare, which I agree has transformed what's happening in Ukraine. But here was a position where the Wagner Group were using these convict soldiers, people who'd been taken out of prisons and sent to the frontline, and literally using them

• 43:39Alastair Campbell?

  to send out, to find out where the Ukrainians were positioned. So they send them out and they, oh, lo and behold, that's where the Ukrainians are, these guys get wiped out and now we know where the Ukrainians are.

• 43:48Rory Stewart?

  Amazing.

• 43:49Alastair Campbell?

  So, on the one hand, you've got this incredible high-tech war going on, on the other hand, you've got something that frankly is, you know, feels slightly medieval barbaric.

• 44:00Rory Stewart?

  This was totally true, of course, in Afghanistan. I mean, Afghanistan was the most dramatic example of that. So 20 years of US involvement and UK involvement, $2 trillion of expenditure, 150,000 troops on the ground, at a time when all our defence departments are arguing for more investment in cyber, more investment in AI, all the students that I taught at Yale, many of them from military backgrounds, desperate to focus on the latest technology. And the truth was that the United States was defeated by the Taliban, who were riding around on ponies and whose most... A sort of modern piece of technology was a Kalashnikov, which is a 1940s bit of Russian weaponry. So it's extraordinary how that was the most dramatic example of how $2 trillion and the fanciest

• 44:45Rory Stewart?

  tech in the world was completely unable to defeat a force that was operating in a way that was not very different from the way people operate in the 19th century.

• 44:53Alastair Campbell?

  Just to close on Moldova, President Sandu is going, I understand, to the Munich Security Conference, where many of the influential world leaders, defence experts, foreign ministers, et cetera, will be. So I do hope that she will get the political support that they obviously need at what is a pretty tricky time for them. And to close on Cyprus as well, you mentioned the Cyprus situation. We had a very brief chat the other day about their election, and it was won at the weekend by the former foreign minister who ran as an independent, Nikos Christodolidis, who is promising a unity government, but who is pretty cool on the idea of peace talks on reunification. And he had a narrow win,

• 45:35Alastair Campbell?

  52-48. I think we can all remember 52-48s.

• 45:40Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, one person who may be going to Munich Security Conference, and definitely has been at Munich Security Conference frequently, is Erdogan, the Turkish president. And we talked a little bit about this question of whether this earthquake was going to be a net positive or a net negative to him as he runs into the election.

• 45:55Alastair Campbell?

  I think we were a bit off the pace. I think last week we thought, hmm, I remember I said, you know, well, you know, you're the president, you've got your hands on the levers of power, you can make big grand statements. I don't think he's handling it well. And I think the stories that are starting to emerge of corruption in the building industry, some of it from among his supporters. I was listening to a German podcast the other day, and they were talking to this, a guy called Norbert Gebiken, who apparently is something, he's sort of, he's a building expert and has also been involved before with the German military, the German Military University. And he was making the point that it is not impossible to build things in earthquake zones that can survive the

• 46:40Alastair Campbell?

  earthquakes, even one of this magnitude. But there were clearly, there's a lot gone wrong here in terms of the of the building. And and also Erdogan, I guess this happens when you're a dictator. We talk about Zelensky as a sort of warm, empathetic communicator. Erdogan said nothing at first, then he put out a written statement, then he he eventually made a a visit. He said this thing, which I thought was pretty incredible. He said, such things always happen. It's part of destiny's plan, which I think if you're picking your family out through the rubble, is not exactly going to warm you to him.

• 47:12Rory Stewart?

  So I I I saw this in a very, very small way. I was the minister responsible for flooding an emergency when we had the big floods at the end of twenty fifteen. Obviously, nothing like the scale of anything that's going on in in in Turkey, but it just may be a way of reflecting a little bit about politics and emergency response. One of the things that I realized when I came into that role was that there was a lot of opposition to politicians getting out on the ground immediately. Understandably, the emergency services worried that if politicians turned up immediately, we'd get in the way. But I realized very, very soon that you needed to be there on day one. You needed to be in the floodwater when it was rising. You needed to be with those families. You needed to be with the emergency response teams. You also needed to be thoughtful and respectful and not get under their feet.

• 47:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Rory Stewart?

  But it simply does not work to do what Erdogan did, or indeed what George W. Bush did. Do you remember during Hurricane Katrina, very slow to react? And eventually flew in a helicopter over the area. And in the case of George W. Bush, which complete humiliation for him, but partly apparently driven by his comms and press advisers who said, oh, you don't want to go on the ground. It's going to be a very bad look. Everyone's going to shout at you. They're going to humiliate you. It's going to be very bad imagery. Stay away. And and that had somehow percolated through to the British government. So I was being told the same thing. And I found completely the reverse, that if you turned up immediately, people were reasonably grateful that you were there and you could do small things to help them. And I was able to join the Cobra meetings, these crisis meetings from the ground.

• 48:43Rory Stewart?

  Rather than being stuck in a bunker in London and I was able to say, actually, this bridge is down and you're hearing nonsense there and we haven't actually managed to do this, that and the other. Whereas if you turn up four or five days late, people are understandably very, very angry indeed. Did you, you went through this though, you went through big floods though, didn't you?

• 48:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we had, we had all sorts of situations. It is a very fine judgment about when the, you know, in our case with Tony, the Prime Minister should go and visit and, you know, I think, I think some, and it is a real, at that level, someone like Erdogan who will have massive security, I imagine that will have been a factor. They're probably all also worrying about aftershocks and so forth, but I think there's something about his manner that went down really, really badly. It is also an area, I think, where, I mean, we're talking about an area, you know, 13 million people in the area that's affected. So it will, it will, it will cover all of the kind of politics of the, of the country in a way. But I think you're talking about a place where he's not necessarily,

• 49:40Alastair Campbell?

  it's not, not necessarily a stronghold. But he, you know, and now we've got this, this question about, about when the election is going to be held. So it was, it was, it was set initially, I think for June 18. Erdogan announced pre-earthquake that he wanted to bring it forward to May the, May the 14th, I think it was, or May, May 13th. And now there's some talk that actually he wants to postpone it because it'll be impossible for everybody to be able to get a vote and so forth. So I think the, the politics around these disasters is always very, very tricky. He's also made this huge pledge that everybody will be rehoused within a year. That is quite a big promise, but of course it's one that straddles the election. And he's making big promises about raising the

• 50:24Alastair Campbell?

  minimum wage and increasing pensions and so forth. So I think it's, it's, it's such a horrible tragedy. It's going to take years. It's going to take a lot of reconstruction. There's going to have to be a lot of international support to get them back on their feet again. But I don't think he is, you, you talked about George Bush, that became almost defining, that, that sort of, you know, his seeming bad handling of Hurricane Katrina. And I wonder whether Erdogan can get this back or not.

• 50:52Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's, it's interesting, isn't it? Because it, it points to the question of the power and limits of power of these leaders. Because of course, the public will understandably put a huge amount of blame on the person in charge. But equally, President Bush or Erdogan or the British Prime Minister. Is a very, very long way away from the details, very, very long way away from the question of where exactly you move the trucks, what's going on with the roads and the full response system. And I found this with prisons, I found this with anything that goes badly wrong, the question of, in a democracy, how you think about how people are responsible. The final thing, I think, is I found in all the departments I was in, a real reluctance from politicians and even from civil servants to run exercises

• 51:35Rory Stewart?

  to practice for the worst case scenarios. People often hoped it's not going to happen on my watch, you know, flood only comes around, bad flood only comes around every decade, so I probably won't be here when it happens. I really had to push very, very hard to get people to act through crises and get the system up and running. And I felt this too when, when Covid happened in Britain and how slow the Boris Johnson government initially was as the news started coming out of Italy and China, to really pull itself together. Governments aren't good at this stuff, because it, obviously, an earthquake like this in Turkey only happens once every hundred years. And how you get a government on a war footing, that's what you've got to do, move it from the sort of steady pace of civilian administration

• 52:20Rory Stewart?

  into a war emergency footing is something that very few people crack.

• 52:23Alastair Campbell?

  You say it's one in a hundred years, but Erdogan, his rise to power, one of the staging posts was a, was a huge earthquake in 1999, which, to a very large extent, not totally, but to some extent, was responsible for the fall of the, the then nationalist secular government. He emerged during that period, and of course, has now been in power. We're talking sort of Putin lengths of power, first as prime minister and, and then as, as president. And, and I think he will be, I think he will be worried about that. And I think he, it was interesting, again, to go back to his first visit, he was in a pretty defensive mode, and he said, don't give the provocateurs an opportunity, this is a time for unity and solidarity.

• 53:06Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, he is, he now is being criticised very, very widely. They are shutting down some of the social media networks. And of course, at a time like this, you need social. One of the great things about social media networks in times like this is you can, you can tell people where help is needed, you can raise money.

• 53:22Rory Stewart?

  Totally remember that. I remember in Glen Ridding in the Lake District, we were hearing from the police that there were no problems in Glen Ridding. And suddenly on Twitter, everyone was saying a whole wall of boulders was coming straight down towards the centre of the village. And they've been flooded for the third time in two weeks. And all of that was coming off Twitter.

• 53:38Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Rory, sometimes we get criticisms that we don't talk long enough, but we've done about 55 minutes.

• 53:44Rory Stewart?

  They don't want me to talk about the Galilean earthquake of 749, which I was really keen to get on to.

• 53:49Alastair Campbell?

  You mean you just Googled it while I was talking about the 1999 earthquake?

• 53:52Rory Stewart?

  Actually, no, I experienced it because in Jordan.

• 53:54Alastair Campbell?

  You experienced an earthquake in 700, wow.

• 53:57Rory Stewart?

  It's very weird. All the way around us in Jordan are these amazing Roman cities, which were cities of 40, 50,000 people, which by the 19th century were just villages. And they were all wiped out by this earthquake. And the centre of Amman is collapsed buildings and right up through Syria, down, down into, into Israel and Palestine. It's just astonishing to see how this earthquake basically wiped out the whole Umayyad civilisation of, of the Levant. So anyway, that, that's, that's something not to talk about now because we've got to wrap.

• 54:30Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to say goodbye and see you next week.

• 54:33Rory Stewart?

  See you next week. Bye bye.