229. Putin’s sham election, Sunak under threat, and the rift between France and Germany

Who would Putin’s successor be? Could the Conservatives change leader again? Why is the Franco-German relationship deteriorating? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all this and more on today’s episode of The Rest Is Politics. 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP ELECTION TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, 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, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] 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 Creef. 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.

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• 2:08Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart. [7.35

• 2:08Alastair Campbell?

  And me Ellis Campbell.

• 2:12Rory Stewart?

  And today, there's actually some really interesting international news. We're going to do France and Germany and the relationship between French President Macron and Chancellor Scholz. We're going to be looking at the Russian elections, which sounds a bit weird, but will justify to you why Russian election is worth looking at. We'll do a little bit on the current problems of the UK Conservative Party and stories over the weekend that there might be a leadership challenge against Rishi Sunak before the end of the year. And then we'll look at the election of a new first minister to Wales, bringing the first, I think, black leader into leader nation anywhere in Europe. But let's start on France and Germany, which we're lucky enough to have with us, a man who loves France and Germany, speaks very good French and German.

• 2:58Alastair Campbell?

  Introducing a new guest.

• 2:59Rory Stewart?

  That's right, exactly. So give us a sense on where you think things are, because there are actually very few people I know who've got such a kind of sympathy for both countries and understanding of both in the British world, yeah.

• 3:10Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they had a meeting the other day with Donald Tusk, and it was set up really as this new prime minister of Poland, and of course, very well known to both of them because of his leading role in Europe. And I think it came at a very, very difficult time for them. I don't think there's any doubt that they're not soulmates, Macron and Scholz. I think Macron sees himself as a European leadership figure. Scholz is Chancellor of Germany, which is widely seen as the most powerful country in Europe. But they then, things really kicked off when they had this meeting on Ukraine a few weeks ago. And Macron talked about troops on the ground.

• 3:52Alastair Campbell?

  And Scholz went straight out to say, this is just not going to happen. Macron talked about cowards.

• 3:59Alastair Campbell?

  He reminded people that-

• 4:00Rory Stewart?

  With the slight implication that Schultz might be one of those.

• 4:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he also reminded people that there were countries at the start of the Ukraine war that talked about sending helmets, which of course was Germany. The Germans are very slightly fed up. There's a thing called the Keel Institute, which does an analysis of who's sent what and says that Germany is second behind the United States and France is well down the list. The French have got very uppity about that, saying actually they've sent a lot more.

• 4:29Rory Stewart?

  A figure produced from Germany, which has been repeated in the press, and this will be what's disputed. The claim is that Germany has promised, I guess the word is promised, seventeen billion euros worth of ammunition supplies and France is providing only three percent. So that's the the German view, that France is really not putting its weight. And then presumably the French say that's statistics nonsense and they're putting in more than that.

• 4:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and they also say that what they're putting in is more effective. So there's the the current argument going on, or one of the current arguments going on, is the fact that the British and the French have provided cruise missiles.

• 5:01Rory Stewart?

  Right, which which allow you to fire much longer range and accurately.

• 5:04Alastair Campbell?

  And the German cruise missiles, this Taurus system, which is deemed to be more effective. Schultz's argument seems to be that if the Germans do provide those, they also have to provide troops who have to be on the ground and that that then is risks being very provocative.

• 5:23Rory Stewart?

  They're too complicated to train the Ukrainians to be able to use them.

• 5:25Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. Now, Ukrainians argue that they could do that. Ukrainians have been complaining that lots of these promises from lots of different countries just have not been fulfilled. Anyway, so then had this meeting with Tusk and they all came out, it's called the Weimar Triangle, the three countries, and they came out. Schultz said unity is strength. Macron said they were united and determined. Tusk said that it shows that all these terrible rumours of bickering are overstated. But you do hear constantly that both personally and the teams do not get on very well.

• 5:57Rory Stewart?

  The history of this is really important because Germany and France have been the engines of European integration since the forties, since people started first talking about what used to be called a Franco-German. Federation. So after the Second World War, these countries which had been really at loggerheads violently from eighteen seventy, when Prussia took Paris and then seized Alsace-Lorraine and then the French seized the Rhineland. These are disputes about bits of German-speaking territory west of the Rhine, all the way through to the end of the Second World War. And after the Second World War, a really concerted attempt made by German and French leadership to get beyond that. And talks actually about single currencies even as early as that, single armies, single governments.

• 6:40Rory Stewart?

  And this really continued, I think, I mean, through a lot of very interesting relationships. So Adnaur and de Gaulle, fifty eight sixty three, Brandt and Pompidou, Schmidt and Giscaud Destin. Most dramatically, probably Kohl and Mitterrand, nineteen eighty two to ninety five.

• 6:54Alastair Campbell?

  Holding hands, famously.

• 6:56Rory Stewart?

  And then we had Schröder and Schirak, and then Merkel with Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron. Most of those relationships seem to sort of work. And this one, well, let me, let me, let me say on the first thing. Tell me a little bit about your sense of how Franco-German relationships worked when they were strong. Maybe this sort of Kohl, Mitterrand, Schröder, Schirak eras.

• 7:18Alastair Campbell?

  You shouldn't overstate, understate, rather, the whole issue of ego in politics. So I think Schirak, Schröder, who we saw very, very close up. You always had the sense of Schirak being le grand homme, the big guy. But Germany was the big country and that sort of balanced itself out. I think with Scholz and Macron, it does feel less integrated than those. I think Merkel understood that Macron likes the, the big moment.

• 7:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Scholz is very kind of, you know, quiet, steady, incremental. So when Macron, one of his early statements, and he said that NATO was brain dead.

• 7:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 7:55Alastair Campbell?

  Which of course, if Trump said it, we'd be going, this is absolutely terrible, but he said it. And Merkel came out and said to him, I'm, I'm really fed up of, of having to sort of. I like your grand gesture. I love that you're a disruptor, but I, why should I be the one to pick up the pieces afterwards and try and put it all back together again? And I think with Scholz, he just finds the whole big, big vision thing a bit irritating. So in. Relation to what's going on with Ukraine, I think he finds it irritating that Germany is spending more money on this. I think he finds it difficult that the French don't understand sufficiently why this is so difficult psychologically for Germany. Interestingly, although Scholz is not doing very well in German public opinion at the moment,

• 8:37Alastair Campbell?

  the one place where he's doing quite well is in his handling of Ukraine.

• 8:41Rory Stewart?

  Tell us about why it's psychologically difficult for Germany.

• 8:44Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I was talking to somebody in Germany yesterday who said that, you know, one of the first things she mentioned was her grandfather in Stalingrad. So their historical experience of war with Russia runs very, very, very, very deep. Scholz knows that. You mentioned Willy Brandt there. There's something in the German psyche that thinks that Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, this sort of let's try and get on with the East even during the Cold War, was one of the reasons why eventually the Berlin Wall fell. Reagan likes to take the credit, Thatcher likes to take the credit, but I think they think actually it was Germany's more cooperative approach.

• 9:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, really interesting, isn't it? Because you're exactly right, the narrative in the States is that the Soviet Union was crushed, the Berlin Wall came down because Reagan was very assertive and confrontational. And as you're saying, there's another narrative that actually the more cooperative approach was what made the difference.

• 9:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And so now, and bear in mind, we're in a European elections year. So Macron feeling under pressure from Le Pen. Le Pen identified as being sort of Putin poodle and therefore Macron emphasizing that by we're the tough guys. Meanwhile, Scholz is now presenting himself as Friedenskanzler, the peace chancellor, which again is how Brandt presented himself.

• 9:56Rory Stewart?

  So there's a really interesting difference between these two. They both face a similar challenge, which is that in both cases, the far right and the far left in France and Germany are basically pro Putin. I mean, in the case of the AFD in Germany, violently pro Putin. I mean, actually, you know, financial links to Russia, very, very clear that they would turn on the Russian gas again, that it's the cutting off the Russian gas which is driving the cost of living crisis in Germany. They would not provide any weapons to Ukraine. And really blaming the US for blowing up the gas lines. So that's the right in Germany.

• 10:33Alastair Campbell?

  And by the way, one of the reasons why they're doing particularly well in the east, where there's still that sort of nostalgic, historic sense of, well, we've always been different and we've always been a bit close to them anyway.

• 10:44Rory Stewart?

  Right. So there's more good feeling there. And actually, I'd like you to bring you back to that because another factor that Schulz is facing, we talk about election years, but of course, in Germany, it's a bit more complicated, it's a federal country where state elections matter more. And there are going to be elections now in Saxony, Suringia and Brandenburg, which are significant states, which are in former East Germany, where the far right and the far left are doing well. So we have that in Germany. So you've got this sort of push for peace and the response from Schulz in Germany is to try to mollify them by being the peace chancellor. In France, you have a similar situation where the right and left are more inclined to take Putin's position on Ukraine. But Macron has decided that his

• 11:29Rory Stewart?

  response, instead of mollifying them, is to confront them.

• 11:32Alastair Campbell?

  Whereas at the start of the war, he was very much, you know, do you remember the phone calls with Putin and quite warm and quite friendly and trying to bring him in the whole time. So he has definitely shifted.

• 11:42Rory Stewart?

  And he's become sort of, he's sort of taken a kind of Churchillian tone, isn't he? He's very much, you know, talking more radically than everyone else. We may have to put troops on the ground and all this kind of stuff.

• 11:49Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, they've slightly wound back from the troops on the ground. I can remember during Kosovo, the argument about Bodentropen, as they're called in German. I remember Schröder being very, very agitated by Bodentropen. But what's happening in relation to Macron, I think he was, he was pushing it. He was saying we should rule nothing out. It got picked up as being they're going to send in ground troops. And he's unwound from that. However, he's definitely out as a pretty hawkish figure on this and underlining, as Biden did in his State of the Union speech, that if Putin wins in Ukraine, then that will not be the end of the matter. Whereas Germany still don't talk about Ukraine winning,

• 12:31Alastair Campbell?

  they talk about them not losing. They talk about Putin not winning and Ukraine not losing. And I think the other thing to understand about the Germans is that A close relationship to the United States is a fundamental pillar of their foreign policy. In a way with France, it's always a little bit more ambiguous.

• 12:47Rory Stewart?

  So we have this almost kind of conflict of personalities which you've laid out. You know Macron is a very colourful provocative figure. Scholz a bit duller. I mean Scholz really seems, at least from the outside, to really struggle to be able to communicate and dominate a big stage. I wonder whether, I'd like to explore this, whether actually in a funny way, his story doesn't echo Rishi Sunak's. He was the kind of finance minister during Covid, like Rishi Sunak got a lot of plaudits because he was handing out a lot of money during the Covid period, struggled to win his own party election, found himself inserted as Chancellor and then has really struggled to do the charisma, public facing stuff.

• 13:29Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, he's been a kind of pretty big national figure for a long, long time in a way that Rishi Sunak wasn't. It is interesting though, but if you think about Merkel, she's not what you'd call traditionally charismatic. She's not a Macron or a Shirak. She's more, Scholz, she probably has a broader appeal. But I think he has struggled and and I think he's, the word you hear a lot in Germany is that he's disappointed, that he hasn't quite risen to it. He would argue that people knew what they were getting with him. He is the kind of more stayed sober sort of type.

• 14:04Rory Stewart?

  Is that not the Ian Duncan Smith's defence?

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  The quiet man is turning up the volume. No, he can do volume. I've seen him do volume. I also, I think that Macron does seem to be able to provoke, he provokes strong feelings in other people. Tusk, I think, probably did play a useful role in basically saying to them, listen, you know, this is, this is not good. And there's a very interesting speech, I don't know if you had time to see it, I sent it to you, from Meitz, who's the opposition leader.

• 14:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he's leading the right wing CDU party.

• 14:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and he actually made the point, he couldn't think of any Chancellor in German history who would have allowed this relationship to become so publicly so difficult. Even Schröder, he said.

• 14:43Rory Stewart?

  So we've talked about the fact that the left in Europe in general. Has been in trouble. We looked at the statistics since the high point of Tony Blair to today. Fewer and fewer sort of social democratic parties in Europe and in Germany now under real threat. So there are three people in the coalition, the Liberals, Greens and the SPD. And they are doing incredibly badly in the polls. The sort of centre right party CDU is doing very well. AFD now very strong. So Thüringen, when we're watching these elections this year, they look like they're above thirty percent.

• 15:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 15:19Rory Stewart?

  And probably with this left wing party, which we haven't discussed much.

• 15:23Alastair Campbell?

  Linko.

• 15:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, which is, this is, this is Wagenknecht, the wife of Oscar de la Fontaine.

• 15:29Alastair Campbell?

  She's like a sort of populist leftist.

• 15:32Rory Stewart?

  Possibly she combined with AFD may get over fifty percent of the vote in Thüringen. And then you've got these splits within the German coalition. So you've got big chairs of parliamentary committees from the CDU and the Greens putting out joint op-eds attacking Schulz. You've got senior liberals voting against the government. The Green Foreign Minister clearly seems to be actually more pro-Ukraine and seems to be saying she would be sending Taurus. So and then you've got this weird phrase coming out of the SPD where they're talking about freezing the conflict. The leader in parliament. And nobody quite knows what freezing the conflict means.

• 16:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think it's back to this point about is, you know, nobody wins, nobody loses. You just kind of hold the line on it. Just maybe as a bridge into talking a bit about the Russian election. Just on the last poll, sixty percent of Germans oppose supplying Ukraine with these Taurus missiles. Sixty percent. And that's up from forty nine in February. Twenty percent of Germans think they should be doing more to support Ukraine. Forty percent think they've sent enough weapons and forty percent think it's gone too far.

• 16:33Rory Stewart?

  So Schulz is very much in line with a public that's getting increasingly sort of cold feet about getting involved. The other thing that I think's been really interesting is the way that German politics is all about Ukraine and very, very little about Gaza amongst the political parties themselves. It's not like Britain where it feels as though Israel Gaza is actually a much more important. International issue in defining politics than Ukraine today.

• 17:02Alastair Campbell?

  But it's closer, isn't it? He is open about saying he does not want to provoke Putin into thinking that Germany's also in his sights. And he's saying that.

• 17:11Rory Stewart?

  And the Gaza thing, though, is interesting. You quoted 60%. 60% of the German population wants an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. Not a single political party is even talking about that. So there's a huge gap emerged between all the political parties and Germans, particularly younger Germans.

• 17:28Alastair Campbell?

  But again, just as they feel emotionally, the Russian issue affects them much more deeply. Likewise, I can remember Angela Merkel always used to say the two absolute fundamentals of her foreign policy, apart from Europe, were closeness to America and absolute support for Israel because of the, you know, the history that brought Israel into being.

• 17:47Rory Stewart?

  And presumably that could change. I mean, there's a very big Muslim population in Germany. Young people are taking a very, very different view of this.

• 17:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:55Rory Stewart?

  Okay, on to Russia.

• 17:56Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so Rory, Putin won. We got that one right.

• 18:00Rory Stewart?

  We predicted.

• 18:01Alastair Campbell?

  We knew he was going to win.

• 18:02Rory Stewart?

  Unfortunately, we're getting few too many right. It was a little bit too easy to predict that Bangladesh was going to go in the direction it was. It was a little bit too easy. It's a bit easy to predict India, where Modi is going to win.

• 18:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Rory Stewart?

  UK, absolutely confident in my predictions.

• 18:16Alastair Campbell?

  There you are. But I think there is a paradox between the fact we're having more and more elections with more and more people voting, but we're not necessarily a more democratic world. And it was interesting when Putin announced that he'd won almost 90% of the vote, which was just about 12% lower than Saddam Hussein got in his biggest triumph, when he got 100% of the vote. I think Kim Jong-un's record was 99.

• 18:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's good when you get over 100. That's when you really are.

• 18:43Alastair Campbell?

  You know, you really, really won it. But it was interesting who congratulated and who didn't. So, North Korea.

• 18:51Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 18:51Alastair Campbell?

  China, Venezuela. Iran, they sent their heartfelt congratulations, Modi in India.

• 19:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, warm congratulations from India.

• 19:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Rory Stewart?

  Congratulations from UAE.

• 19:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Rory Stewart?

  So India and UAE sort of obviously more surprising than Venezuela, Iran and North Korea. And and really does suggest, you know, these are countries where, you know, UAE, India are really meant to be part of the sort of. America would hope, you know, your friend Jamie Rubin would very much.

• 19:19Alastair Campbell?

  Your friend.

• 19:20Rory Stewart?

  Very much, my friend Jamie Rubin would very much want to emphasize that the balance against. China in the Pacific is India and that the US relationship with UAE is very strong. But it's very, very challenging for the US when an election has happened, which is. I mean, just to talk people through how bizarre it is, essentially Putin was supposed to step down, supposed to finish as president in two thousand and eight. And he did this strange thing of putting Myed Vidyev, who was the prime minister and as president from two thousand eight to two thousand twelve, and he became the prime minister.

• 19:54Alastair Campbell?

  I think we all know who was in power then.

• 19:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and then he came back again technically in two thousand twelve, same time as Xi Jinping. And then changed the whole constitution in two thousand twenty to allow himself to run for at least two more six year terms. So now it feels like he's president. He runs against him every time, a few sort of candidates, but they're never a threat. So he had three candidates, he had a communist, he had a nationalist, and then there's this weird party that's been created called the New People's Party. All these people get a tiny percentage of the vote.

• 20:25Alastair Campbell?

  One of them, their main, their main policy was execution of all Ukrainian prisoners of war.

• 20:29Rory Stewart?

  Right, yeah, that was the nationalist, yeah, Slavitsky, I think, yeah.

• 20:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so it's not exactly challenging the the central narrative.

• 20:37Rory Stewart?

  And and Katerynoff, I think, you know, real kind of old communist, but you can sort of see what the former KGB, the FSB is doing there. You know, let's have one party which is communist, one which is ultra nationalist. And one called the New People's Party, which sounds as though it might be sort of liberal democratic, although actually it's massively pro the occupation.

• 20:56Alastair Campbell?

  On the Q and A, was it last week or the week before about why do these dictators hold elections? But you could see from the way they. Presented it. If you're a Russian citizen who just watches state TV, you think, oh, this is an election and Putin's won again and they all look very happy. And and he's then out using this to say, I've now got popular support for any reforms I bring forward in the future, many of which will be more oppressive, and I've got popular support for the the war in Ukraine.

• 21:22Rory Stewart?

  So it's very helpful if he doesn't do it. He doesn't have this wonderful opportunity, the kind of festival of people, doesn't have the events to turn up and can't claim those mandates.

• 21:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And even though he's surrounded by voices from America, Europe, saying this is not a free and fair election, people in Russia are not hearing that in the main.

• 21:41Rory Stewart?

  I wonder from a propaganda point of view, actually, whether those kind of states wouldn't want to hold elections even more frequently if they're quite useful ways of appearing on a stage, mobilizing people.

• 21:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the fact the fact that we, you know, you could argue that we shouldn't really call it an election, because it's not it's not an election in the way that we would understand it. And yet we we talk about, you know, Putin winning another term, winning another term, like he's been democratically reelected.

• 22:07Rory Stewart?

  It's more like a sort of medieval royal procession, isn't it? Maybe, you know, I think kings would sort of come through the streets of London every three, four years to get people cheering and give a sort of general sense.

• 22:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. It was very interesting as well. When they when they played the National Anthem, he reminded me of, you know, sometimes you see footballers who look like they don't quite know the words. It looked like he was sort of mumbling the National Anthem. And I I wonder whether he now in his head is so grand that he shouldn't even have to sing it, because essentially it's about him. It's very much he is the state now.

• 22:34Rory Stewart?

  Even more troubling would be if if he's beginning to slightly lose the plot so that we can have a fantastic kind of, you know, slightly elderly, doddery people.

• 22:41Alastair Campbell?

  Gerontocracies of the world unite. Yeah, what Kim Jong Un becomes the only young one. Yeah, yeah.

• 22:47Rory Stewart?

  Um, finally, I'm on Putin. I mean, I guess it makes me wonder whether we're not slightly missing our labeling and that we shouldn't be talking about an age of monarchies coming back, that Erdogan, Putin, Modi, Xi Jinping. If you were a Martian looking at us, you might think these things actually resemble more kind of kings, the way that monarchies used to operate than what we'd call a democracy.

• 23:12Alastair Campbell?

  Who are the successors?

• 23:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, can they get their kids lined up as a question?

• 23:15Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, we know that Trump would, but I I don't know who Putin's successor would be. And I think part of his Strengthening of his power within Russia is that there's there's nobody, I mean, there's nobody that anybody is talking about as a possible successor.

• 23:30Rory Stewart?

  Does Vladimir Putin have children lining up succession and what's going on?

• 23:34Alastair Campbell?

  He has, I don't know that he has any sons. He has two daughters that we definitely know about, who are now in their, they'll be in their thirties, because when Putin and his then-wife, Ludmilla, came to London, he brought the kids. My daughter Grace does a whole comedy sketch about how the wife wanted to go shoe shopping and Grace advised them to go to Clark's. But I don't think Mrs. Putin was really into Clark's shoes. But even back then, they were absolutely paranoid.

• 24:04Rory Stewart?

  How old was Grace at the stage?

• 24:05Alastair Campbell?

  Grace was, well, this was, she'd have been a child, and they were children.

• 24:09Rory Stewart?

  So her advice on Clark's was was based on a child.

• 24:12Alastair Campbell?

  It wasn't based on fashion, it wasn't based on fashion. But I remember even back then, although their daughters were quite small, they'd be, you know, late ten, twelve, something like that, they were paranoid about not being photographed.

• 24:23Rory Stewart?

  And Grace went shoe shopping with them?

• 24:25Alastair Campbell?

  No, they didn't go shoe shopping, they went on the London Eye. All three of my kids with Putin's kids went on the London Eye and sort of wandered around there with Cherie and Fiona and Mrs. Putin. Mrs. Putin didn't look very happy with Vlad, I have to say, a lot of the time.

• 24:42Rory Stewart?

  It's a bit of the sort of Melania feeling.

• 24:44Alastair Campbell?

  Not not quite as bad as that, but it wasn't, I didn't feel close.

• 24:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 24:48Alastair Campbell?

  And anyway, that's now gone. I'm not sure what the daughters do now. There's there are rumours that he's got other kids with other women.

• 24:54Rory Stewart?

  He went out, am I right, is he a skater or a ballerina or something?

• 24:58Alastair Campbell?

  I think it was a ballerina that he was sort of quite friendly with and maybe still is.

• 25:03Rory Stewart?

  Maybe in confusing fact, he's an amazing ice hockey player, isn't he?

• 25:06Alastair Campbell?

  It says he is. Wins every year, has an annual match where he always scores the winning goal.

• 25:11Rory Stewart?

  And does he play famous ice hockey players, like you playing Maradona?

• 25:15Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know, there is an ice hockey player who's quite as famous as Maradona, but yeah, he plays with the best.

• 25:20Rory Stewart?

  He beats the best.

• 25:20Alastair Campbell?

  Plays with the best, yeah.

• 25:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 25:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and they organise it so he always wins.

• 25:24Rory Stewart?

  Can I just very quickly on this before we go to the break? The president of Afghanistan, I remember what's doing, it's Ashraf Ghani, invited up to the presidential palace. Aschaffir was a kind of a man with a doctorate who'd been a professor at Saisian Holcots in his early sixties. And he invited up the Afghan Olympic sprinting team. And he said to these young men, you know, I'm I'm pretty good at sprinting. Um, I'm going to race you. And so these eighteen nineteen year old Afghans are like, what, what? And so in the front of the presidential palace, Ashraf Ghani takes off his shoes and in his shower commies, stands at the start line with these sort of astonished eighteen year olds. And they set off and the president manages, I think, about six steps before he falls on his face.

• 26:06Alastair Campbell?

  Did he honestly think he could win?

• 26:07Rory Stewart?

  It was the moment where I thought there is something genuinely wrong. Yeah, genuinely wrong, because actually it's not even as though he's a particularly sporty individual. He's not just forty years older than, he's a kind of slightly weedy.

• 26:18Alastair Campbell?

  Did you see, talking of politicians and sport, did you see Rishi Sunak and the rugby team?

• 26:24Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 26:25Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God.

• 26:26Rory Stewart?

  I mean, that sounds like a bad moment. Why, why would you put Rishi with this rugby team? Anyone less like a rugby.

• 26:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, because he's he's on a permanent campaign mode, but they, this, this rugby player. But you know, when Tony Blair headed the ball with Kevin Keegan, twenty eight times older. Kevin Keegan is such a good footballer, he could literally plop it onto his head every time. This rugby player threw the ball at Rishi Sunak in such a way as a two year old could have caught it. Okay. But sadly, Rishi Sunak is clearly not two because he he couldn't hold the ball.

• 26:57Rory Stewart?

  One sort of would have predicted that he's not likely, and you can't really see him as kind of rugby club guy. I mean, he doesn't have that kind of.

• 27:03Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 27:04Rory Stewart?

  That air, does he?

• 27:04Alastair Campbell?

  No, anyway. There we are. I suppose the other sort of maybe finally on Russia, that it was interesting, albeit possibly just an expression of kind of the the impotence of of dealing with this guy. It was quite interesting, that protest, that, you know, the word went round around the world at twelve o'clock.

• 27:21Rory Stewart?

  Noon against Putin.

• 27:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, just stand in line somewhere.

• 27:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, one of Navalny's last requests was people would show their protest against Putin by turning up at polling booths at midday. Because as he pointed out, the regime could hardly stop you turning up to vote at midday. You could claim that just when you got off from work.

• 27:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So the queue here, I didn't see it, but I was speaking to somebody who who was outside the Russian embassy here in London. And said it went right, you know, on for a couple of miles. So, I mean, that that that was a sense of protest, but. You know, if you remember one of his previous elections, it led to pretty close to riots. People were out in the streets protesting. Well, I didn't see much of that this time. All right, quick break and then we'll come back.

• 28:04Speaker 02

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• 29:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 29:22Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alice Campbell.

• 29:23Rory Stewart?

  And we were going to talk briefly about the fact that the front page of the Sunday newspapers this week was reporting that there were going to be an uprising against Rishi Sunak and that some Conservative MPs were thinking of replacing him. And then there were a lot of quotes from Penny Morden saying, I don't know where this has come from. Nothing to do with me. I'm not, I wasn't intending to run. And then various sort of Tory grandees all on the record saying this is a suicidal idea. Why would we topple our leader just before an election? I guess this goes back to something we've been talking about for a few months where there are a fringe of Conservatives out there. Who even fantasize about bringing back Boris Johnson. And I suppose what they're doing is they're 20 points behind in the polls. They're not making any progress.

• 30:07Rory Stewart?

  At the moment, they're going into election where they're going to get wiped out. So there must be some of them thinking, well, why not spin the dice again? How bad could this be? I mean, we can't lose worse than we're currently losing. Why don't we try again in the hope that someone else?

• 30:19Alastair Campbell?

  I think they could lose worse. Given how bad they've been, I sometimes look at the polls and think, who are these 22% of people who are still thinking of voting Tory? I mean, what earthly reasons?

• 30:28Rory Stewart?

  So what would you say if, let's say, I'm going to put you in an unfair position, imagining you're in number 10. And Tory backbench MPs can come in and say, listen, the truth is we're toast. We're going to lose lots of seats. We're going to lose this election. Rishi Sunak isn't going to change between now and the election. He can't possibly win. Why don't we spin the dice again? Try to bring in someone else in the hope that they might do a bit better.

• 30:50Alastair Campbell?

  The argument against it is that it could make things even worse. And if you look at the two names that have, that have constantly been bandied about Penny Morden and Kemi Badenoch. It's really interesting how I look at them, just think they're not very good. And it's like with Kemi Badenoch, let's just go with her for a minute. So she made a lot of waves last week when she came out at a time when Sunak and number 10 were refusing to say that Frank Hester, their 10 million, 15 million pound donor, was racist in what he said about Diane Abbott should be shot and she makes me hate all black women. Profoundly, straightforwardly racist, but number 10 can't bring themselves to say that.

• 31:32Rory Stewart?

  So it's a repeat, isn't it, of what was going on with Anderson last week? Which is, they say it's wrong, but they're not racist. And I think with Anderson, it was, it's wrong, but they're not prepared to say why it's wrong.

• 31:44Alastair Campbell?

  And now what they've said with Hester is it was wrong, but he's apologized. Well, all he's apologized for, he said it was rude. He has not acknowledged, he has not himself acknowledged that what he said was racist.

• 31:55Rory Stewart?

  And I watched Graham Stewart, who's a minister in energy doing it. So his phrase was, it's profoundly reprehensible. And then, of course, the interviewer keeps saying.

• 32:04Alastair Campbell?

  Well, why can you keep the money then?

• 32:06Rory Stewart?

  Why?

• 32:06Alastair Campbell?

  If it's profoundly reprehensible.

• 32:07Rory Stewart?

  And presumably the answer is 15 million pounds is a lot of money.

• 32:11Alastair Campbell?

  And they've probably spent a lot of it already.

• 32:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 32:13Alastair Campbell?

  So Kemi Badenoch comes out and says it is racist. And lots of people come out and say, well done, Kemi, speaking as it is. And yet she was out yesterday on Monday doing the media round.

• 32:26Alastair Campbell?

  Suddenly deciding, I don't want to be talking about this anymore. Why are you still asking me questions about this? And of course, the answer to that is because you lot still haven't cleared this up. You still haven't explained how you can keep the money. But I think what had happened is she thought, oh, this is maybe I need to be a little bit more in that space where all the hard right are.

• 32:44Rory Stewart?

  And she's also been issuing press releases, taking credit for stuff, which then number 10 the following day are issuing press releases with the prime minister's quotes, which is a real sign of her pushing for leadership. And she, like Suella Bravman, is an example of somebody in Rishi Sunak's cabinet, and I absolutely hear this directly from his cabinet, who he does not rate. He doesn't think she's a good minister, but he feels for some reason he has to keep her in order to deal with the party politics, deal with the right. And that was a mistake he made with Suella Bravman, isn't it?

• 33:14Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 33:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:14Alastair Campbell?

  And it's a mistake he made with Lee Anderson. I mean, the only reason anybody knows who Lee Anderson is, is because Rishi Sunak gave him this job as deputy chairman of the Tory party.

• 33:23Rory Stewart?

  So if Rishi, if you had been Rishi Sunak's advisor and he kept saying to you, I think Kemi Badenoch's no good, but don't talk to me about her because I have to keep her. Your view would be be brave, get rid of her if you think she's no good.

• 33:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think there was a moment where Sunak had an opportunity to show a bit of strength. We've talked about this before. First of all, in differentiating himself from Johnson and Trust, he failed to do that. Then again, when the Johnson Privileges Committee report came, he failed to do that. And likewise, I think they all listen too much to this rubbish that gets talked in the kind of right wing media ecosystem. Anybody who watched Badenoch's interview, I think it was with Robert Peston yesterday. Just watch that interview. You're looking at somebody who's just not very good at this. Penny Morden, I mean, great. She held a big sword during the coronation and she looked great.

• 34:15Alastair Campbell?

  But if you actually watch her in the House of Commons, when she's doing the sort of weekly Commons questions, she's not that great. So what they're doing is they've gone from Cameron, May, Johnson, Trust, Sunak. At every point, you take papers like the Mail, the Express, they're saying. This is our saviour. This is the one that's going to do it. They're now building up a new one. They're going to be just as bad. So I think actually they could make it worse. Now, they might get a short term hit. People go, oh, this is new. This is interesting. But honestly, the country's just had enough of this.

• 34:49Rory Stewart?

  And I think.

• 34:50Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, Rory.

• 34:50Rory Stewart?

  It would also look ridiculous, wouldn't it? Because your immediate response if they did that would be, okay, this is totally illegitimate. We've had, whatever it is, three prime ministers since the last election, or four.

• 35:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it'd be the fourth.

• 35:01Rory Stewart?

  And, and, and this is a joke.

• 35:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Rory.

• 35:03Rory Stewart?

  Election now.

• 35:04Alastair Campbell?

  This would mean we'll have had six prime ministers since 2010. The Labour Party has had six prime ministers in our entire history. I mean, it's mad. It's utterly insane.

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  And of course, you get a new prime minister, immediately a new strategies announced, a new cabinet's announced, every department.

• 35:21Alastair Campbell?

  And it's just, but it's all showbiz for ugly people. It's not actually going to change the fundamentals. This is the difference between, I think, where the public are and where much of our media is, still portraying this like a serious party of government. I mean, to be fair to Sunak, the one thing I'll give him, he gets out there every day. He tries to do stuff. He's not a great communicator, but he's out there. And I'd find it very difficult to be out there. There'd be a part of me that'd be tempted to say, look, you lot are an ungovernable rabble. I'm off. But he can't do that. He's got to fight an election. But I think that you've talked before about these sort of six, seven different groupings within the Conservative Party now.

• 36:02Alastair Campbell?

  They're not operating like a, like a coherent United Party. And in an election year, that's death. Even I, Rory, am beginning to think they can't possibly get back from this. That being said, I still think Labour have to do more. I really liked Keir Starmer's art speech. I wish that had got a bit more coverage. But I was in Yorkshire. I did three fundraisers last week for Labour candidates and I was up in Yorkshire at the weekend, in Leeds, in the neighbouring constituency to Rachel Reeves, with party members and party supporters. And do you know what the single most raised issue was where they wanted to hear more from Labour?

• 36:36Rory Stewart?

  Your opinion?

• 36:37Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 36:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I couldn't, couldn't agree more.

• 36:40Alastair Campbell?

  Breaks it.

• 36:40Rory Stewart?

  We had actually a very interesting time last week. We spoke in Methodist Central Hall, you and I, to fifteen hundred high school students.

• 36:48Alastair Campbell?

  High school? Which country are you living in now?

• 36:50Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I'm sorry, secondary school. Secondary school students. And we actually, we recorded the podcast there, but didn't really have much of a chance to talk about it. I found it really interesting because they were overwhelmingly expecting Keir Starmer to win, and I think overwhelmingly would vote for Keir Starmer. But boy, oh, boy, we struggled to get them to stick up their hands for anything that they thought he was doing, which excited them. So then I thought, well, maybe this is because he's not talking enough about the environment. And I couldn't be more wrong. Because when we asked the crowd, how many of you think climate and the environment, these are 16 to 18 year olds, think climate and environment is the number one issue going into the election, probably only about a quarter of the hands went up.

• 37:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. They were very focused, I think, on inequality, cost of living.

• 37:37Rory Stewart?

  And that's really interesting electorally, because you would have thought the really core vote driving climate and the environment would be younger people. And if they're beginning to say, actually, cost of living is more important, because obviously, a lot of older people have been saying that for a long time. That's really interesting in terms of what that means for net zero, the investment we put in, the amount of taxes you put on people, the amount you put up, fuel prices.

• 38:03Alastair Campbell?

  There was a poll this week of, I think, 18 to 30 year olds. It's now Labour's 70, Tories seven.

• 38:08Rory Stewart?

  Seventy to seven, that's pretty extreme. Okay.

• 38:12Alastair Campbell?

  Now, what about Wales? So Wales has got, as you said earlier, Europe's first black leader, Vaughan Gethin, like me, the son of a vet. His dad, white, married a woman, a farmer in Zambia when he was working there. And Vaughan Gethin, who's, you know, come up through the Labour ranks in Wales, quite a controversial election, him against Jeremy Miles, who was the education minister. And the only time the campaign really took off nationally across the UK was in relation to a donation.

• 38:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 38:48Alastair Campbell?

  Two hundred thousand pounds from a guy who'd been convicted of environmental offences.

• 38:51Rory Stewart?

  Given to Vaughan Gethin.

• 38:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, peanuts, when you look at it, set alongside Frank Huster, but a very, Carwyn Jones, one of his predecessors as first minister, said that when he ran for the leadership, his campaign cost about fifteen thousand pounds in total. So there's that.

• 39:07Rory Stewart?

  Two hundred thousand serious, serious money.

• 39:09Alastair Campbell?

  And also the other thing that's happened, there's a meeting, I think it might be today, but the Welsh Assembly members are meeting. I think he did far better amongst the trade unions than amongst the members and amongst the elected representatives.

• 39:23Rory Stewart?

  Develop that for a second.

• 39:24Alastair Campbell?

  Tricky start.

• 39:25Rory Stewart?

  So Vaughan Gethin was the youngest ever, I think, president of the Trade Union Congress in Wales. He was a lawyer with Thompson's, which does a lot of trade union work. And he was up against Jeremy Miles. And Jeremy Miles is a fluent Welsh speaker, then went to New College Oxford, like Vaughan Gethin, a lawyer, part of this thing, I guess, Tony Blair and Keir Starmer lawyers, coming in to replace Mark Drakeford, who we did a great leading interview with if people wanted to listen to again, who is much more a sort of academic professorial figure, you know, it's a very intellectual figure. And the real moment of scandal was they both went to the hustings with Unite, which is a powerful trade union to get the endorsement of Unite. Jeremy Miles turns up, does his hustings,

• 40:09Rory Stewart?

  and at the end of the hustings, as the vote's about to happen, Unite say, oh, but by the way, Jeremy Miles, just to explain, we should inform you now that you're not actually eligible to stand and all our votes have to go to Vaughan Gethin, leaving Jeremy Miles thinking, what on earth is this? You know, I've been invited to this hustings to give my speech, and now I'm told for some obscure rule change the previous summer to do with whether you're a lay member of Unite and not eligible. And that then got Rodri Morgan's wife coming out, remembering what had happened in nineteen ninety nine, where again, Alan Mitchell.

• 40:40Alastair Campbell?

  Alan Michael.

• 40:41Rory Stewart?

  Michael had defeated Rodri Morgan, again with trade union votes. So she took to Twitter saying, this is the same stitch up happening in Wales yet again.

• 40:49Alastair Campbell?

  There was a little bit of central, Labour central hand in the Alan Michael.

• 40:54Rory Stewart?

  Alan Michael was more New Labour.

• 40:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Rory Stewart?

  He was the New Labour guy. And Jeremy Miles ran against our friend Stephen Kinnock, lost by one vote.

• 41:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Rory Stewart?

  Do you have any sense, are they in exactly the same part of the Labour Party or are they slightly different traditions or?

• 41:07Alastair Campbell?

  Jeremy Miles and Vaughan Gethin. I don't think ideologically there was that much of a difference, but I think that the, yeah, Vaughan Gethin, his opponents are saying that He won essentially through what they call trade union stitch up. And it was very close. I mean, it was it was a rerun of the Brexit. It was almost fifty two percent against almost forty eight percent.

• 41:25Rory Stewart?

  And being a trade union person, that doesn't necessarily mean you're particularly left or right. I mean, what what does it mean?

• 41:29Alastair Campbell?

  No, you can get, you know, there is a very right wing trade union tradition as well as a as well as a left wing tradition. But I think with I think with Vaughan Gethin, it was very interesting to me how he focused a lot in his campaign on education, as if that wasn't going very well. Jeremy Miles being the education minister and Jeremy Miles focused an awful lot of the Welsh economy.

• 41:52Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 41:52Alastair Campbell?

  Vaughan Gethin having been the in charge of the economy. So it wasn't a big ideological battle. As I say, the only issues that took off really were about the extent to which they were going to represent any sense of time for change.

• 42:05Rory Stewart?

  And I guess if you're Jeremy Miles and you're trying to challenge Vaughan Gethin's backing of trade unions, you might suggest that maybe he's less open to big dramatic regulatory change which challenges the trade unions.

• 42:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I don't think even that, I'm not sure even that he was really, really pushing it. Look, I think at the start, it was felt that Vaughan Gethin was was a runaway favourite. And by the end, it got very, very close and it was dominated by these two questions, this donation and then the

• 42:30Rory Stewart?

  The trade union backing.

• 42:31Alastair Campbell?

  The role of the trade unions.

• 42:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Alastair Campbell?

  So I think it's going to be a tricky, you know, it's a very narrow win. Quite a lot of healing to be done, I would say. The elected representatives feeling a little bit put out. So he's going to have to rebuild that. And then, of course, there are these big issues, you know, you've got the steel Port Talbot, you've got the steelworks under threat, you've got the the health service, you know, which is used as a political football nationally by the Tories. You've got some pretty tough education challenges. So it's not an easy place to be. He did get, by the way, I mean, I was looking at a lot of my German media, there were quite big profiles of him because, of course, you know, first black European leader is a pretty big thing. But that was the sort of tone as opposed to this is the

• 43:14Alastair Campbell?

  a clear signal of change of direction post-Dragford. I think we get easy enough to work that out as he goes.

• 43:19Rory Stewart?

  Small conclusion, I think, again, reinforcing something we talk about a lot on the podcast, which is the real urgent necessity of stopping the way that parties have financed in Britain. I mean, it's really struck that you saw in Australia, a premier who's trying to ban all contributions to political parties. But In a week in which we've had Hester giving fifteen million pounds, regardless of his racist comments, which were completely horrible, he's obviously a horrible human being, but fifteen million pounds is a ridiculous sum of money. I mean, it's a complete, I mean, I can't even imagine, he must be giving ten times as much as the nearest closest donor, and that gives you so much influence. I mean.

• 43:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's that which which makes number ten say to all these ministers, go out and defend him.

• 44:04Rory Stewart?

  And if you can imagine, it's not just defending him from his comments, I don't know what it means in terms of his influence over policy and these, I mean, you cannot take fifteen million pounds from somebody, which which, you know, in a normal election would be about half your entire election campaign budget.

• 44:20Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:21Rory Stewart?

  Without expecting them to have a really strong influence. And this is the conflict of interest stuff. This is why we must stop this stuff, because either you get, you know, if you want to be balanced about, and I'll try to be balanced about it, that the problem is the Conservatives end up getting money from business and finance, Labour end up getting huge amounts of money to the trade unions. But there's also a question of, you suddenly see internationalists who's entering British politics, because, you know, some donors want to focus on the Pakistani view on Kashmir, or want to focus on a particular position on Israel, Gaza. I mean, it really distorts your politics, this money. And we've got to find a way of getting a government. It cannot make sense.

• 45:01Alastair Campbell?

  But I wonder if the reason why the government came along and almost without debate in Parliament, doubled the limit, was because they knew they had this fifteen million pound coming down the track.

• 45:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Alastair Campbell?

  And Labour, of course, now are having to go out and try and do more fundraising to try to catch up, because they know that this stuff can be effective in a campaign.

• 45:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. We've got to get, if Kier Sommer comes in, we've got to use that majority to really sort this out. I know it's going to be difficult, because when you've won, it's tempting to think, okay, I don't want a Turkey voting for Christmas, but this is an opportunity. It's a complete scandal, this sort of money.

• 45:35Alastair Campbell?

  And I think people would go, I think although state funding is difficult, like, you know, last week, MB's got a pay rise and there was the usual sort of outcry. But I think in the end, if we don't fix the basis of the fundamental system, then we're in trouble.

• 45:49Rory Stewart?

  Final plug. If people are really interested in this, there's an amazing book written by a journalist in the FT, looking at the funding provided by a man called Mohamed Amersi to the Conservative Party, which went to a lot of the leading Conservative candidates and then led to him suing various candidates, claiming he'd been defamed. But it's a very, very beautifully written, complicated account of how money works within that party. And I think that should add, this is Tom Burgess's book, Tom Burgess's book should add to our campaign to clean up money in British politics.

• 46:21Alastair Campbell?

  Good. Well, Tom Burgess is constantly reminding me of his very good books. We've now given it a very good plug, I'd say.

• 46:29Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's brought us sadly to the end, but we'll be back with Question Time tomorrow.

• 46:34Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 46:50Speaker 05

  The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 46:58Speaker 06

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

• 47:04Speaker 07

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 47:06Speaker 08

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 47:09Speaker 05

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

• 47:22Speaker 09

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 47:24Speaker 05

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

• 47:33Speaker 07

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 47:38Speaker 05

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• 48:07Speaker 07

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