31. Rishi Sunak vs. Liz Truss

And then there were two... After finding out that Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak will compete to be the next UK Prime Minister, Rory and Alastair recorded a special episode devoted to that very topic. They discuss Truss and Sunak's reputation among Tory members, their suitability for the top job, and the relationship between ambitious MPs and the British media. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  A BetterHelp ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day, every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com/rustpolitics.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Right, welcome to another, yet another episode of The Rest is Politics. Yet another special episode to celebrate, if that's the right word. The finally, this reality TV show has got down to the final two. It is, as we foretold yesterday, Rory, it is Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss. So what do we think of that?

• 2:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think the first thing is that it will surprise people. There were a lot of commentators on Twitter, some people I followed, who were pretty confident that Liz Truss wouldn't make it through. Penny Morden was ahead of her consistently in the voting. And obviously, on that side of the party, Michael Gove had bet hard on... Kemi Badenoch, not on Liz Truss, who's an old friend of his. So I think that's the first thing, that it's unexpected. And I think what you and I were probably reading was the sense of that Sunday night debate, where it pretty much seemed to be a sort of Rishi and Liz show, didn't it?

• 2:41Alastair Campbell?

  Do you, do you think there were, looking at the numbers as they've developed, vote by vote, do you, do you think that Rishi, some of Rishi Sunak supporters were backing Liz Truss? Do you get the feeling that Rishi Sunak wanted Liz Truss rather than Penny Morden?

• 2:53Rory Stewart?

  I think there are two things going on. I think some foolish people in his camp may have deliberately tried to push Liz Truss through because they think she's easy to beat. But I think the bigger thing, which I was getting from MPs I was talking to yesterday, I talked to a couple yesterday, who felt that although they preferred Rishi, they're worried that the members aren't going to vote for Rishi. And they wanted a fallback from Rishi, who they thought at least had experience. And they thought that she had more, Liz Truss had more experience than Penny Morden.

• 3:21Alastair Campbell?

  I heard a very good interview with Ian Murray, the Shadow Scotland Secretary, who I think was the first Labour voice out of the traps after the result. And he made a very compelling case as to why neither of these two can even begin to present themselves as a fresh start, because they are so caught up with what's happened in the last few years. Liz Truss, even the other day, sort of continuing to defend Boris Johnson, Sunak, yes, as, as Keir Starmer said in, in our conversation with him yesterday, he said, you know, how can Sunak suddenly pop up now and say that he's Mr Integrity and Mr Honesty when he propped this guy up for, for almost three years? I think that does make it very, very

• 4:04Alastair Campbell?

  difficult. And I just think, you know, the points that you were making to Keir, funny enough, when I was, Fiona and I were driving down through France and we were listening to it, and the points that you were making to Keir about the economy. I kind of felt they're going to become a really immediate, really big challenge for whoever takes on this job. And of course, when you've got trust has been taken to Sunak, you basically have driven the economy into recession. And Sunak's line on trust, I think, is going to be that you don't really get the economy, you don't really get how this stuff works. I think they could do each other a lot of damage in the next few weeks.

• 4:39Rory Stewart?

  Yes. Well, I think one of the fundamental things is that you can ask almost anybody, and maybe in a way I was being unfair to Keir Starmer, pushing him so hard on this. I didn't think genuinely anybody in the world has a good answer to how they're going to generate growth at the moment. I think we're going into what feels to me like a horrible recession, period of stagflation. The numbers are all against them. Energy prices are going to go through the roof. You know, as people have been pointing out recently, saying that inflation is going to come down doesn't reverse the inflation. So you've swallowed the 10% inflation. Let's say inflation comes down to 5%, 6%, you're still looking at 16% inflation and the interest rates are about to go soaring up. So I don't, I, I think we're going into a horrible situation.

• 5:21Alastair Campbell?

  What do you, what's your basic sense of, if you've got friends who are saying to you, as somebody who knows them better than I do, what's your sense when people say, what do you think of Rishi Sunak? What do you think of Liz Truss?

• 5:34Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, I think the, the big call is, is of course, what are the members going to think? I mean, there was an interesting opinion poll on that debate on Sunday night by Opinem polls, which, and they put down Rishi at getting 24% of Conservative voters, 24% of Labour and 26% of swing voters, when Liz was on 20% Conservative, but only 9% of Labour and 17% of swing. So the point, I guess, there is that she's very, very close to Rishi Sunak in terms of the Conservative members or Conservative voters. Conservative members is a different question. She may be well ahead of him with Conservative members, but in order to win an election. Rishi would certainly be in a much stronger position.

• 6:16Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, the thing, the trouble is with this whole process, which I think has just been mind-blowingly awful. I think that I get the feeling that the Conservative Party and the contestants as well, I don't think they really understand how the public are looking at a lot of this. Yes, the public are fascinated by it, a little bit as if it were a reality TV show where one goes out and then another, you know, and here we are at the final. I think, I think millions of people are genuinely interested in this. But I think at the same time, there is something about this process that is making people feel that this is just profoundly undemocratic. And also that frankly, I think there's a growing sense that the, if this is the best that we can have as the next prime minister, then we've really got

• 6:59Alastair Campbell?

  a problem. I had a text this afternoon from a head of government who shall be nameless, but.

• 7:06Rory Stewart?

  Is it, is it Eddie Rama?

• 7:07Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's not, but it's, it's somebody who, who is, who is, let's say, a bigger country than that. But they're basically looking on thinking and actually said, are they really going to sit where Churchill, Thatcher and Blair used to sit? I think there is a feeling that this has been a very small contest of some pretty small people. Now, I have to say, as a, as a non-Labor Party member who supports the Labor Party, I do think that Liz Truss would be far better for Labor, if only because I think Sunak has a kind of, I think, I think they're both very right wing. I think Sunak is very right wing from an ideological perspective. I think he's, he's, he's on the sovereign individual

• 7:48Alastair Campbell?

  side of the Conservative Party. That's why he loves all this enterprise cities, enterprise zones and free this and all the sort of charter stuff that he's doing. But I also think that she, whether it's by design or by ambition or whatever, she's become very right wing. So we're actually talking about two figures on the right. The, the one thing that maybe Penny Mordaunt or Tom Tugendhat would have given you was a bit of a different choice. So I think that's going to increase the possibility of this being about them just sort of, you know, being very different personalities. And she is, as we said yesterday, she's channeling everything towards the membership.

• 8:24Rory Stewart?

  What do you think about their presentational stuff? So setting aside your Labor allegiances, what, what, what do you think about the way that they communicate and perform? What's the difference between them?

• 8:32Alastair Campbell?

  Oh God, I mean, I, I said a little bit about this yesterday, that, that, I, I find Liz Truss's whole manner. Um, this, I've, there's, look, I don't know her that well. So there's, I could be completely wrong, but there's, it's strike, there's something deeply inauthentic going on there. Um, it's almost like she's trying so hard to present in a certain way. And it is sort of sub Thatcherite. It's like, you know, I'm the woman, I'm the strong woman. I wish one of these interviewers, well, she hasn't done any interviews. She's obviously scared of being interviewed. I'd love it. And can we put out an open invitation to both of them to come on the podcast? I promise I'll be nice and respectful. Yeah, they're, they're definitely going to be queuing up for that. Yeah, I'm sure they are, Rory. But I really would. This thing about, you know,

• 9:17Alastair Campbell?

  she, this, this, she gives herself this massive global leadership role on Ukraine. She talks about always having got stuff done in the various jobs that she's done. I don't know if you've seen, um, have you seen Dominic Cummings' latest, latest offering tonight? Go, go, go, give us, give us that. Give us that. Well, it's quite, it's quite, it's quite dramatic. So Dominic Cummings, it's written as follows. I gave trust the nickname human hand grenade when she worked in the Department of Education. She said this week, it was a compliment because she got things done. No, it was because she causes chaos instead of getting things done. Trust is the only minister I ever shouted at to number 10. I think I shouted at more than one. The reason

• 10:01Alastair Campbell?

  was her compulsive pathological leaking. As soon as she left any meeting, she'd call people like Harry Cole on the Sun, Carrie's ex-boyfriend, and blurt out what had been said. This routinely caused chaos and often damaged the UK. I called her over to number 10. I sat in that tiny little room near the cabinet room next to the loos. I said to her, what are you doing leaking everything? Stop. Focus on your real job where you're failing to grip your department. Focus on that. He then says, the eyes had a thousand yard stare. I think we've seen that on the TV. What do you mean the real job? She said. It was pointless to go on. For her, leaking to the media was the real job. I mean, it's just sort of, and then he, he says this, Boris is supporting trust.

• 10:43Alastair Campbell?

  Why? One, he thinks it's the best way to stop Sunak. Two, he knows trust is mad as a box. Of snakes and he's thinking there's a chance she blows, then there's another contest and I can return back to your theory.

• 10:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I I think I think it sounds um sounds plausible. It's interesting also his phrase mad as a box of snakes. I like that. Mad as a box of snakes. Um, I think um, one of the issues is going to be that Rishi Sunak is going to have a challenge with Conservative Party members. I mean, to put my cards on the table, I'm much more sympathetic towards Rishi, I guess, than I am in the other direction. But I think that she's doing something very straightforward, which is that she is promising tax cuts. And people have got it in their mind that that's what conservatives are about. It's it's bonkers. It's completely mad at the moment. Because when Mrs Thatcher was doing those reforms, many, many things were different in the world.

• 11:40Rory Stewart?

  Firstly, Britain's debt position was not where it is now. We now got debt to GDP ratios, which are kind of the size of our economy. They were then about half the size of our economy. The deficit was much, much smaller, and we weren't lurching into a global recession at the moment at which she started working. But also the things that Mrs Thatcher were doing can't be done twice. So a lot of her privatization has happened. Her deregulation city London has happened. So what Liz Truss is doing, and it's a very dangerous part of the Conservative Party, is somehow believing that you can do it again, that you can, and you can see that's this, we're going to sell off the council houses again when they've already been sold off. So we're going to sell off housing association houses instead, or we're going to privatize more things when basically everything's already been privatized.

• 12:25Rory Stewart?

  Or we're going to deregulate more when most of the radical deregulation has already happened.

• 12:30Alastair Campbell?

  I think a lot of these things, they were they were very controversial at the time. Historically, within the Conservative Party, they have become very popular, but I'm not convinced that they're at all popular with the public at the moment. And I think, Rishi, you talked about the, I didn't really answer your point about Sunak in relation to the presentational point. I think what Sunak is going to try to do. Essentially is to embrace this thing about, you know, you don't love me as much as maybe you love these people who tell you what you think, what they, what you want to hear. But I'm going to be the guy who tells you what you need to hear as, and not just the sort of populist tell you what you want to hear. And the other thing I think he's, he's going to do is actually give a, a more coherent sense of what a modern economy is about. I mean, I think he was trying to, and it was interesting, again, in the interview with

• 13:15Alastair Campbell?

  Keir, you had already picked up on some of the messages that Sunak was putting out there about, I think you picked on innovation, education and something else that he said, I can't remember, investment. And you picked up on that as he was, and I think he's going to go into that kind of whole technological route as well. I think he's, but, but, but I think for his, his presentation is, is basically to say, okay, you might not love me the way you, you, you, and I don't have Johnson's kind of pizzazz and all that stuff, but I'm the kind of, I'm the only serious show in town. That's going to be the way he presents himself.

• 13:48Rory Stewart?

  It's very dangerous. It's very dangerous. I mean, it's true that what

• 13:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 13:52Rory Stewart?

  The, the number one thing they're looking for, they claim is trust and the second thing is competence. So that could help him on those things. But having tried in a Tory leadership debate to say that I wasn't going to cut tax and seeing the other four candidates looking at me as though I'd completely lost my marbles. Cause all of them knew, even though they weren't going to cut tax, they all knew they were going to raise taxes, that they had to say to the members, they were going to cut tax. So I think Rishi's got to be very, very careful here because I was talking to a friend of mine who's not a natural fan of Liz Truss's at all, but something about, he's a conservative, true conservative, and something about the, I want to cut tax appeals to them. And they're very, very suspicious.

• 14:34Rory Stewart?

  The risk for Rishi Sunak is that he's going to sound like a mouthpiece for the status quo. He's going to sound like a mouthpiece for the treasury. And conservatives like the idea that you're challenging the bureaucracy, that you're going to shake things up, that you're not going to just accept the status quo. And if he keeps saying, I've been the chancellor for two and a half years and the treasury tells me, you know, that you have to do it this way. People are going to be looking for somebody who's going to be radical. I mean, this is not a period, as we keep saying, this is a period of populist, post-truce politics, right? This is a period where people want to attack the status quo. They want to be against the elites, they want to be against the establishment. And it's very, very dangerous for Rishi Sunak if he begins to portray himself as the mouthpiece of the treasury.

• 15:16Rory Stewart?

  And of course, it's very easy to couch for Liz Truss to portray him as the establishment, unfortunately.

• 15:21Alastair Campbell?

  All right, let's take a quick break there, Rory, and we'll be back in a minute.

• 15:24Speaker 03

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

• 15:34Speaker 04

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

• 15:40Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 15:45Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 15:48Speaker 05

  I'm not the first then.

• 15:49Speaker 04

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

• 15:54Speaker 06

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 15:56Speaker 05

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 15:58Speaker 06

  How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.

• 16:24Speaker 07

  There is so much NFL on ESPN right now. Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game, every week. Unbelievable. And now NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on, all season long, on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

• 16:55Speaker 08

  How about a latte?

• 16:56Speaker 09

  Maybe dark roast?

• 16:57Speaker 08

  Vanilla?

• 16:57Speaker 09

  Caramel?

• 16:58Speaker 08

  Blueberry?

• 16:59Speaker 09

  You could get them to agree on one flavor, or give everyone what they want.

• 17:05Speaker 09

  With Keurig, there's over 500 K-Cup Pod varieties of fresh, flavorful coffee. No effort, no grind, no settling.

• 17:16Speaker 09

  Great coffee without the grind. Keurig.

• 17:28Alastair Campbell?

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

• 17:31Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 17:33Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, we've got a lot more listeners than when we first started this podcast. And it means that a lot of people will not have heard one of the favourite stories that either of us have told on this podcast, which was when you talked about your first encounter with Liz Truss. And I thought that might be a useful way to introduce how they would be as foreign policy prime ministers.

• 17:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so Liz Truss, I gave a speech for Liz Truss, and as usual, I was banging on about foreign policy. I can't remember what I was talking about, probably Afghanistan. And at the end of the speech, she took me aside and she said, "Thank you, Rory, but I cannot understand why you or anyone else is remotely interested in foreign policy. I think it is completely boring and irrelevant. The last job I would want to do is be Foreign Secretary." And still to this day, I am not sure she was joking.

• 18:24Alastair Campbell?

  Just on that point, by the way, the other part of Dominic Cummings' latest rant, he talks about this whole leaking culture. And he said, of course, you know, Johnson occasionally screamed, but on leaks, he basically didn't really care and was never prepared to take the tough action to control it. And of course, he and Carrie leaked and briefed against his own government's policies themselves. "The problem of leaking went through a transition during the collapse of May. Ministers got into the habit of leaking everything without consequence. I wanted to change this after the general election 29. I couldn't because the Prime Minister wouldn't." This infected, this is incredible. "This infected everything, including National Security Council meetings where, understandably and rightly, senior figures such as C, the head of MI6, stopped saying much because they knew ministers routinely

• 19:07Alastair Campbell?

  leaked. Generally, the system could toughen up on this legally and technologically, but won't without PM backing." And again, I think he's sort of basically saying Liz Truss is not a serious person and therefore not to be trusted with national security. It seems to be...

• 19:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, there's something completely mad about this leaking system. I mean, it's horrifying. And most of the people who make it to the top in politics, many of the leading candidates in the cabinet, have got these tame journalists who they're very close to.

• 19:36Rory Stewart?

  And they've built their careers on having journalists talking them up in the media. And the price of that, as you know far better than me last day, is that they're feeding them tidbits all the time. They're on the phone to them all the time, giving them stuff. That is catastrophic for something like the National Security Council, because the only way in which the intelligence services now are supposed to be controlled is not actually directly through the Foreign Secretary, it's through the National Security Council. And I was a member of the National Security Council, so sitting on it, Foreign Secretary, Development Secretary, Defence Secretary, Chancellor, Prime Minister. If these people don't speak openly, then they're not actually accountable to politicians. You can't actually know what they're doing, right? That's dangerous for our democracy. So you need to create a

• 20:19Rory Stewart?

  safe space in which you can talk to the intelligence agencies, and which they need to be very, very honest about the risks. Because if they start concealing things from politicians, either because they think they're leaking, or I think what was common with Boris Johnson, which is they didn't trust him to make a risk judgment. So they wouldn't actually take the real decision to him, because they were afraid that he would just take the most gung ho choice. But once these guys start losing any confidence, any good faith in their relationship with politicians, you lose the democratic accountability and control. And it's very dangerous if people working in a secret way in these agencies are not under full democratic accountability or control. So there's something else problematic about what he's told us.

• 21:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and you, but you probably, I'm sure, I know people still who work in the intelligence services, and I'm sure you do, and you do hear this all the time, that there, there is a concern, and I don't think it was there under David Cameron, and I don't think it was there under Theresa May, but it has definitely been there under Boris Johnson, where there is a real fear about sharing information with elected politicians. And of course, that then leads to the sort of paranoid rubbish that Johnson was talking about in his, in his, what you called his barnstormy speech the other day, when he actually used the same phrases Trump about the deep state. But if you can't, it works two ways this. If the, if the intelligence agencies feel

• 21:41Alastair Campbell?

  they can't trust their political leaders, then we really are in trouble. And if Liz Truss, I don't know whether this is right, and you know, Dominic Cummings, I think we can all accept is, is a, is an interesting, but not necessarily always reliable source. But if it is right that Liz Truss is somebody who is one of these politicians who is beholden to certain journalists. Because I have to tell you, Roy, and all that, I know we got the reputation of the spin and all the rest of it. One thing I think most of the journalists will tell you is that certainly for, as far as we, we were concerned, we did not use them in that way. We used them to communicate what we were trying to communicate, but it was never about sort of personal image building. I think that, that road lies death for all of them. Does Sunak do it, do you know? Does, does Sunak have friends in the media?

• 22:26Rory Stewart?

  I, I don't hear as much about that. I mean, the, the rumours were always very strong around Liz Truss, Priti Patel and others. And actually even around people like Tom Tugendhat, having very close friends in the media, but less so, I think, with, with Rishi Sunak. Although of course, James Forsyth, he was the best man at his wedding or the other way back. And Allegra Stratton, of course, is James Forsyth's wife. Jim Forsyth being the political editor of The Spectator, and Allegra Stratton being the Number 10 spokesman.

• 22:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 22:50Rory Stewart?

  Um, listen, let's just, I'm sorry, I just wanted to follow up, that's quite an interesting point you were making about the difference between getting your message across and image building. So the story is that when you were a Number 10, there was a particular journalist on The Times who was almost your mousepiece. I can't remember his name, but everybody talks about him all the time. I can dredge him up if you deny this.

• 23:08Alastair Campbell?

  Tom Baldwin and Phil Webster.

• 23:10Rory Stewart?

  That's right. There we are. Tom, Tom Baldwin's, Tom Baldwin's the name. That's it. Yeah.

• 23:14Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Tom. Tom's a great man.

• 23:15Rory Stewart?

  So the question is, what's the difference between the sort of messages you would want to put to Tom in order to communicate the government's policy compared to what you're saying is, is dangerous or death-like, which is the personality stuff?

• 23:30Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think, for example, I would argue, for example, that although Gordon Brown did become Prime Minister, I think that he had people around him, Charlie Whelan in particular, who were building up Gordon's profile at the expense of the government as a whole. In other words, they were basically promoting Gordon. They ran this line at one point, they ran this line which quite a few of their client journalists took, which was basically, Tony's like the chairman and Gordon's the chief executive, or Tony's more like a president and Gordon's the real domestic prime minister. And it just, I think any communication within a government should be done to the benefit of the government as a whole. Now, it's easy

• 24:14Alastair Campbell?

  to say that if I was working for the Prime Minister inside Downing Street, but I think that where you, and of course you have to do a little bit, you have to do some of that personal image building stuff if you're trying to get known, but I would argue that that whole Liz Truss Instagram thing, where she gives the impression that that's what matters to her, I think that's a bad way to go about your communication. And the thing about Tom Baldwin, all of my briefings are on the record, that's the thing that you have to remember. I put the number 10 briefings on the record, I assumed any conversation I had with a journalist was on the record, but there are obviously some journalists that you liked more than others, and I think that's just part of human nature. But I would never look at those journalists

• 24:54Alastair Campbell?

  and think, I have to help them get a story. It was always about, if I brief them on this point or that point, is that helping what the government is trying to achieve? That was always my rubic. And I think you have a lot of journalists, a lot of politicians at the moment, I mean, you see this in reshuffles. I mean, my God, they seem to be tweeting the journalists as they're walking in and out of the building, being offered defence, but I've said no. I mean, it's just unbelievable what goes on.

• 25:20Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary. Listen, the one thing I would say for Liz Truss is that I imagine, having worked with her in Deffra, she was my boss in Deffra, I was the junior minister and she was the Secretary of State, that she will probably be very, very tight on message discipline. I remember that I took through the plastic bag tax, put the 5p on the plastic bag, and then I, as the Environment Minister, started talking about putting a tax on takeaway cups to try to encourage people to use renewable cups.

• 25:55Rory Stewart?

  And I got the most unbelievable rocket from her immediately. She had a very, very clear sense of message discipline. And her great line to me was, stop being so bloody interesting, Rory. Your job is not to be interesting. Stop being interesting. And she would say this every time a story came, every time I was stepped out of line in Parliament. So I think you'd have some kind of, you'd have some fellow feeling for her in the way that I imagined she would run things if she was Prime Minister. She would not be encouraging.

• 26:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I, listen, I, I wanted, I wanted people to be interesting, but in a coordinated, coherent and disciplined way. That sounds to me, Rory, like she was maybe a little bit jealous of you getting, you know, a bit of profile that maybe she wanted herself. She obviously loves being very high profile, I think. And I'll tell you another thing that I think is, if you noticed yesterday, according to one of the papers, she left home in a dress of one colour, and then she arrived at the Cabinet meeting in a dress of a different colour.

• 26:55Rory Stewart?

  Very cool. She changed in the car like James Bond.

• 26:59Alastair Campbell?

  But why, why leave home in one colour and go to the BT in a different colour? Was it because, was it because she'd seen that some of the other Cabinet Ministers were wearing the same colour for the team photograph?

• 27:10Rory Stewart?

  Possibly. Or I guess it was to get you and me talking about her on the pod show, podcast. I mean, I think that maybe that's part of the trick.

• 27:18Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I suspect we're going to be talking about it. We're going to be talking about it for, for the next few weeks, I guess. But, I mean, this, this contest, how the hell. Look, a general election, the longest election campaign.

• 27:29Rory Stewart?

  Let me just back up and make my prediction at the moment, which is that I am inclining towards Rishi Sunak. I've not endorsed anyone. I had to put in the Sunak. I know I get told off if I call these people by their first names at the moment. So I'm inclining towards Rishi Sunak. But I am very concerned that actually Liz Truss has an edge with the Conservative membership. Because I'm worried that some people will not vote for Rishi Sunak because of his ethnicity. I'm worried, I don't think that will be many, but I think there will be some. I'm also worried that there will be people who find it difficult to relate to somebody who seems very, very wealthy and who seems to come from this sort of global elite. And Liz Truss has advantages there.

• 28:14Rory Stewart?

  And if she adds to that, speaking as the voice of Mrs Thatcher, and of course, the party incredibly nostalgic about Margaret Thatcher. The way for Rishi Sunak to win, I think, is to really hammer home that he is the person who understands Thatcher's economics and Liz Truss doesn't. And to say Mrs Thatcher would not be bankrupting the country at this moment. That when the debt side is, the deficit's like that, she would be trying to balance the budget. But that's going to be a difficult, difficult thing for him to sell.

• 28:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I, I, I repeat what I said yesterday, I, I, or when we recorded on Monday, I, I thought it was going to. I've always thought it was going to end up Truss, Sunak v Truss. I think if the Conservative Party has any sense, I'm not convinced that he'd be good for the country because I really don't like his politics, but I think that if they have any sense, Sunak is the only real grown up, and I think that's come out through the, the contest. I think, I think Liz Truss would be terrible. I also think she's, I think she's very, very unpopular. And she's not as well known as she thinks she is, but in, because Johnson is, people underestimate for the, for the general public, Boris Johnson has dominated the conversation between the government and the public overwhelmingly.

• 29:29Alastair Campbell?

  Matt Hancock was on the scene a little bit because of Covid. Rishi Sunak has got a profile, but frankly, the fact, even Ukraine, Liz Truss has not really made that much of an impact on the public. So I think that what Rishi Sunak has, he's, he's coming at this now from the perspective of having been the Chancellor, having been the one who defenestrated Johnson. Both of those things can be played against him in the membership. He's got to try to turn to his advantage. I think that's quite a difficult thing to do. But I think that. I think the Tory Party members, I think they're going to go for Truss. And don't underestimate as well, I mean, I despise the Daily Mail as you, as you know.

• 30:09Alastair Campbell?

  But, you know, we were talking about that to Keir, that police investigation in Durham would not have happened in my mind. Without the Daily Mail doing thirteen front, thirteen front pages on, in a row. They are backing Truss and they're going to be poisoning, pouring poison about Sunak. Straight into the minds of the Tory Party members, just as they'd been doing for Penny Morden.

• 30:30Rory Stewart?

  I also noticed in that debate on Sunday night that Liz Truss has got quite a cunning game going on. She is, on the one hand, presenting herself as continuity Boris Johnson. She presents herself as the loyalist. She's picked up all of Boris Johnson's supporters who are very angry with Rishi Sunak. And at the same time, she's trying to pin on Rishi Sunak all the things that people disliked about the Boris Johnson government. In other words, taxes going up, economy not performing in the way that people wanted. So she's, she's, he's got, if he's going to win this, he's got to turn that around. He cannot allow her to say, I represent all that was good about Boris Johnson. I'm going to pick up everybody who loves Boris Johnson and then I'm going to pin on you.

• 31:15Rory Stewart?

  All the things that people don't like about Boris Johnson.

• 31:18Alastair Campbell?

  I think they're both going to pay a price for having been in that cabinet for so long alongside him. And I don't know if you saw that, that Labour Party video that they put out yesterday, which, I'm going to give a, a shout out. I've heard that it was from a young guy who works for the party out in east of England somewhere called Liam. And he did it off his own back and it was absolutely brilliant. Did you see it where they've just taken cuts, clips from the Conservative leadership debates? And they've done it as a Labour Party broadcast because it's basically them just saying how awful the Conservative government has been for, for twelve, for twelve years. And so I think that is a problem for both of them.

• 31:58Alastair Campbell?

  You're talking about, to use one of your favourite words, Rory, you're talking about a distinguished former chancellor and a distinguished foreign secretary. These are two, these are two of the great four offices of state. Miss Patel appears to have vanished from the, from the scene of the crime. She just vanished. And Rory, I wanted to ask you, have you noticed how ministers just are not going to Parliament when they're summoned to these? Emergency questions and Patel has sort of now pulled out twice from a select committee meeting. The contempt for Parliament is becoming like a virus.

• 32:31Rory Stewart?

  Completely bizarre, isn't it? Totally bizarre. I think we probably should move to an end to of this, but but just something to finish on, which we were talking about just before we got on air, which is, and we were coming off the back of Keir Starmer and this economy point. I think the thing that will determine this race and the next election is whether anybody can convince the public that they have any clue as to what they're going to do about the economy. And I think that's a problem for Keir Starmer and it's a big problem for Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, because the idea that we know how to generate growth, or at what cost we're going to generate growth, is, I think, the big, big question. I don't think they can generate growth. And the only way in

• 33:14Rory Stewart?

  which I can imagine generating growth is going to be incredibly damaging to people's lives.

• 33:19Alastair Campbell?

  I think you were right to press Keir on it, but I think that you're talking here about a new Prime Minister, if it's Liz Truss, who goes on the whole time about how she was Chief Secretary of the Treasury, Rishi Sunak, who's been Chancellor for the last two and a bit years. I think for them, it is going to be the biggest thing in their inbox. And, you know, I don't know if you've been following what Martin Lewis has been talking about in terms of cost of living and energy prices and food prices. This is going to go into an even worse space very, very, very, very quickly. So I think that, you know, Sunak, I think, is banking on the idea that the Tory party is ready for some serious messaging. And, you know, that says to me that he maybe thinks that the populist virus is dying out, but I don't think it is.

• 34:01Rory Stewart?

  I'm afraid it isn't. I think it's a good thing to end on, but I think your your instinct is right. There are so many reasons. Right the way back to the fact that people felt left down by the elite since 2008, social media, everything we've talked about means that populism, we're in an age of populism. And in an age of populism, it's very difficult to run, as, as you say, the kind of serious truth telling technocrat pushing for prudent policies.

• 34:25Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. What is it? Very briefly, Roy, before we go, what sort of feedback did you get on the chat we had with Keir?

• 34:31Rory Stewart?

  I think the main thing that I got was this point about growth. I think people groan now when politicians of any party say they're going to deliver growth. I don't think people think they can. What did you get?

• 34:41Alastair Campbell?

  I got a lot of people saying they they'd not heard him so relaxed and confident. A lot of people saying that. I had a few people say they were absolutely chuffed that he committed to restoring Difid.

• 34:56Rory Stewart?

  I got a lovely message on that. I mean, I cannot tell you, my phone exploded with ex-Difid officials saying, really well done on getting that commitment on Difid out of him. There are champagne corks going off right the way across Sub-Saharan Africa.

• 35:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly. So that was good. And then, and I think that, so I think, I think people thought he was, the tone was very good. I thought he came, the people thought he came over really well. But I felt, but quite a lot of people saying, I think as we both felt, that on the economy, it's got to go much, much deeper than where it is now. But certainly the confidence, listen, don't underestimate the importance of confidence in a campaign.

• 35:31Rory Stewart?

  I thought his tone was lovely. I thought he was very likeable. I thought he was very warm. I think where I disagree with him, as I think we said afterwards, is that I think the problem is much, much bigger than Boris Johnson. And it's not just going to be fixed by getting in the Labour Party. I think our whole democratic structure is in a real problem. I think our whole world economy is in a big problem. I understand why he's doing it, but I think there's a real risk that if he just plays continuity, I'm more honest and I'm more competent than the last man. I don't think that's enough to carry him through.

• 36:02Alastair Campbell?

  Okey dokey. Well, that's another special episode of this very unspecial Tory leadership election for the rest is politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 36:12Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 36:13Alastair Campbell?

  I'll see you soon.

• 36:14Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.