500. Japan, China, and the Fight for Taiwan (Question Time)

Are Japan and China closer to conflict over Taiwan, after the landslide victory for Japan's 'Iron Lady', Sanae Takayichi? Does Trump’s crumbling American-Hispanic vote explain his extreme reaction to Bad Bunny's historic, Spanish-only Super Bowl performance? Is the Winter Olympics a sign sport is the only thing that can make us feel good right now? __________ Sign up for our free newsletter at ⁠therestispolitics.com⁠. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your free trial at ⁠therestispolitics.com⁠ to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠fuseenergy.com/politics⁠. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ ⁠nordvpn.com/restispolitics⁠ It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ Listen to 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Will Die' by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares here: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/0p66zkQAAmmJ7PWsCSGgCT⁠ __________ Instagram: ⁠@restispolitics⁠ Twitter: ⁠@restispolitics⁠ Email: ⁠[email protected]⁠ __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Adam Thornton Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Senior Producer: Callum Hill General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:29Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:32Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 2:34Alastair Campbell?

  Now, we've done three episodes, at least in recent days, on Labour and their current travails flowing from the Epstein files. So we're not going to talk about that in question time. We're going to talk about the Japanese election, fascinating. We're going to talk about the presidential election in Portugal, also fascinating. We have a little bit of sport, Rory.

• 2:53Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 2:54Alastair Campbell?

  But the politics of sport.

• 2:55Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 2:55Alastair Campbell?

  Winter Olympics.

• 2:56Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 2:57Alastair Campbell?

  Super Bowl.

• 2:57Rory Stewart?

  Lovely.

• 2:59Alastair Campbell?

  And then we might do something a bit lighter.

• 3:01Rory Stewart?

  Lovely.

• 3:01Alastair Campbell?

  Later on.

• 3:01Rory Stewart?

  Lovely.

• 3:02Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  All right.

• 3:02Alastair Campbell?

  So should we try and be really disciplined and not talk about Labour? And should we try not to talk about Trump?

• 3:10Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 3:10Alastair Campbell?

  How that be? That be? It could be hard, but we'll try.

• 3:13Rory Stewart?

  Okay, I'm not going to take your challenge on not mentioning Trump because the first question that we're getting is from Matthew Wright in Wilshire, which is about Japan. What does Japan's election result mean for its relationship with China and tensions in the Pacific? I mean, the beginning of the answer, of course, Matthew, is that Taiwan has become the big flashpoint between China and Japan in this election because Sanai Takahichi, who is the Japanese Prime Minister, has now said explicitly for the first time, Japanese Prime Minister, that they would effectively go to war to defend Taiwan against China. And Xi is somebody who's seen as being closer to the man that you don't want to mention in this podcast and the US alliance.

• 3:55Alastair Campbell?

  Just this episode.

• 3:55Rory Stewart?

  And it's going to be weaponized a great deal by China. And we'll get into that a bit later on the podcast, how the Chinese might perceive it. But first, tell us a little bit about this election.

• 4:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, it's an incredible story, this. So Sanai Takahichi is the first female Prime Minister in Japan. She's the leader of the LDP, this incredible party that has been in power kind of all of my life and more. And is a sort of formidable political machine that's sort of been spluttering in recent years and prime ministers falling over the edge, a lot of corruption, a lot of gerontocracy. And along comes Takahichi, and she takes over the leadership. She becomes Prime Minister for the third, the third time of trying. And she's in power for one hundred and ten days. She does some really quite bold economic things. We'll talk about whether we think they're going to work or not. And then she calls a snap election.

• 4:49Alastair Campbell?

  And she does three things that you're constantly told not to do. Don't make the campaign so short that even your own campaign candidates can't prepare properly. She has a two week campaign. Never do it in the middle of winter because people struggle to get to the polls. She does it in these massive snowfalls. And don't do it when students are doing exams because particularly like her, when she's got a big appeal to young people. So she does all those things. Middle of winter, students off, and it's a snap election, literary snap election. And she's won massively, three hundred and sixteen of four hundred and sixty five seats.

• 5:22Rory Stewart?

  Up from one hundred and ninety eight. So she's gone from a minority to basically nearly two thirds of the lower house.

• 5:27Alastair Campbell?

  And if you get two thirds in the Japanese system, it means you can make massive change. And she can do that with a bit of support from this other party, the Innovation Party. So she's gonna do a lot and she's, she's a very, she is a very interesting figure. When we first talked about it, when she became the leader, we both said, you know, that she, because she dresses like Thatcher and she says she, she, she says she likes, wants to be seen as the iron lady and she models herself on that. And I had a very interesting email from a woman called Tina Barret, who is a professor of political science at a university in Tokyo. And she sent me a long note way back, saying, you guys are getting caught out by the propaganda. This woman is more distrust than Margaret Thatcher.

• 6:12Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's, I mean, so, so much to talk about here, but I think first thing is Japan really, really matters. I mean, we'll, we'll, we'll get, we'll get on to Portugal in a bit, but Japan is still one of the largest economies in the world. It is America's big partner in the Indo-Pacific, big balance against China. And the first thing I think that really strikes me is a reminder of how unpredictable global politics has become. Because I was following very closely, I, I was in Japan last year and I was following very closely it, a series of Japan experts, both Japanese and foreigners, talking about this election. And basically, it's been surprise after surprise after surprise. It got it all wrong.

• 6:55Rory Stewart?

  So the, the first thing is that when she was running for leadership, as you say, because she'd been defeated twice already. And she's a woman, and she's quite an unusual woman from the right. A lot of the conventional wisdom was hoping that the victor was going to be Koizumi. Koizumi is the son of the man that you knew, so he's the supremacist's son. He's in his early 40s, he's glamorous, he's quite kind of centrist, more on the left of the LDP. And actually, what happens is that he manages to run against another centrist, split the vote. He ends up with 27% of the vote, she gets 31%, so she comes here on a pretty narrow margin against all the pundits' predictions and becomes leader.

• 7:38Rory Stewart?

  Next thing that happens is everybody then sucks their teeth and says, well, it's going to be pretty difficult for her because actually, you know, she's seen as a bit of a sort of outsider in a party dominated by these people who are, as we've often said when we're talking about Japanese politics, many of them are dynasts, you know, they're children, grandchildren of ministers and prime ministers. And she's from a more modest background from Nara, didn't go initially to the fanciest universities, et cetera. So it's going to be difficult for her and and she's in an impossible situation. The story was she can't do it because a far-right party has emerged, Sensei To, which is beginning to pick up big anti-immigrant vote.

• 8:20Rory Stewart?

  And at the same time, she's going to lose her coalition partner on the left, who have signaled they're extremely uncomfortable being connected with a right-wing party. So her problem feels a bit like, you know, for example, the Tory party in Britain, you don't want to overstretch it, but she's got the rise, as your friend Chris Mason would say, the rise and rise of Sensei To of reform.

• 8:41Alastair Campbell?

  The rise and rise of reform.

• 8:43Rory Stewart?

  He was a bit upset, I thought. But we'll not talk about it later. Anyway, that's happening on her right. Meanwhile, she's about to lose the left-wing coalition. And the story is, nobody can change Japanese politics because, to use another cliche from British politics, governance is broken, Japanese government's broken. And basically, the story is, prime ministers don't last, nothing can get done. The LDP is mired in, as you say, old people, corruption, these incredible factions and policy machines, so she's stuck. And then she calls an election.

• 9:18Rory Stewart?

  And then everyone's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, how on earth is this going to work out? Because how on earth is she going to deal with the populist rights and the fracturing Japanese politics?

• 9:26Alastair Campbell?

  What we're talking about in the, uh, in the episode we did on Monday, this thing about reputational currency in the bank. So what you're describing is a place where she didn't have that much reputational currency. And as I said on Monday, where politicians get big reputational currency is by winning elections. And she has won so big.

• 9:47Rory Stewart?

  Yes, exactly. So I wanted to just sort of develop that, but so it's, contrary to most of these pundits' predictions, she's killed it. And again, you know, you, you can imagine when people call snap elections, people have visions of Macron, but she didn't do it like Macron. Having been in for a long time in a very weak position, she moved very, very quickly. But you've also pointed out three reasons why that election might not have worked. So it actually worked brilliantly. Okay. So now she's in. Next problem that we have, which is that journalists writing about it find it sometimes, if you, I, I, we can share a New York Times article, which is a classic example of this. They get very excited by the fact she's the first woman. She plays the heavy metal drums. So there's a lot of memes about her playing the drums with the South Korean president.

• 10:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Rory Stewart?

  And there are lots of, um, special celebrity toys being made with her face and there's a bit of a movement around her, et cetera. And so a lot of the journalism is quite personality driven and it's not really asking the questions we normally ask in an election. What actually happened district by district? How is it possible for this party to go from basically being a minority to having a super majority? What, what on earth happened to the opposition? What's happening with this youth vote? I mean, she's kind of a right wing traditionalist anti-immigration. And then the young people.

• 11:03Alastair Campbell?

  And she, and, and the other thing that she, and again, a, a, a position that Japanese politicians traditionally have been very wary of getting too close to is actually the idea of militarization and national identity and the military. And she even had a go at China over Taiwan, which again, got very little sort of entrance into the, the election debate, but has got massive significance because China has already retaliated. Banning seafood, urging Chinese people not to go to Japan on holiday, and a fifth of all tourists to Japan are Chinese.

• 11:39Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so let me just give the Chinese perspective. So I, I, I, uh, over the weekend spent a couple of hours with, um, somebody from mainland China. And he was emphasizing, he said, you know, to be fair, he said, look, some of this is propaganda in our school textbooks, but some of this is genuine belief. The Japanese, from the Chinese point of view, invaded Manchuria, invaded China, committed unbelievable atrocities, killed millions of people. And after the war, there wasn't really a denazification, and they didn't apologize properly. In fact, right wing politicians, of which she's a good example, continued to visit the shrine dedicated to war crimes. So from the Chinese point of view, they're looking at this and they're saying, here is an aggressive, nationalistic militarist

• 12:24Rory Stewart?

  power that has never come to terms with what they did during the Second World War. And here's a leader from that faction, saying that she is going to fight on Taiwan's behalf against China, when Taiwan belongs to China. So from the Chinese point of view, and this again, isn't being picked up in the coverage, there's, there's a real sense here from China that they're thinking about Japan in the way that maybe, um, I don't know, Europeans might have thought about a resurgent Germany if it had suddenly militarized in the 1960s, not long after the war.

• 12:55Alastair Campbell?

  No, I, I think you're right. The China, um, I mean, and true, to be fair, this podcast too, we don't talk enough about Asia. But if you've got the Chinese Communist Party saying to the Chinese public, uh, please don't go to Japan, we don't recommend you go there for your holidays anymore. A lot of people are not, are going to follow that. And that is a big hit on the economy. And if, if I go back to my professor friend, Tina. The reason why she says that she's more trust than Thatcher is because of the economic policy that she is already pursuing. So she's she's really going for very loose monetary

• 13:35Alastair Campbell?

  policy, big spending and cuts to tax. So she's she's promising massive cuts in consumption taxes.

• 13:42Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 13:43Alastair Campbell?

  And at the same time, she's talking about massive boosting of spending.

• 13:46Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 13:47Alastair Campbell?

  And Tina, who is a professor of Japanese politics, is saying this has got a horrible feel of the trust quating mini budget.

• 13:55Rory Stewart?

  And one of the questions here is, we've talked about this a lot, the Japanese debt to GDP ratio is enormous.

• 14:00Alastair Campbell?

  Off scale, yeah.

• 14:01Rory Stewart?

  Off scale.

• 14:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:01Rory Stewart?

  And normally people say that that's less of a problem than it would be in the UK because a lot of it is owned by the Japanese, sort of internal things. But there's a limit to that.

• 14:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:10Rory Stewart?

  And it's interesting, the markets have responded positively to her election, but there will be many other people looking, saying, where on earth is the Japanese economy going? The Japanese economy really, really matters to the world. Final, final thought. I think we need to watch carefully the geopolitics of this, and this maybe relates to the the question from our our listener, because she is very clearly going pro-Trump. She sees herself as a disciple very much of Shinsoo Abe, who Trump liked a great deal. She will be taking a more nationalistic line against China. We really have to watch this question on the constitution. Is she going to change the constitution?

• 14:49Alastair Campbell?

  Because she probably will be able to, if you want to.

• 14:51Rory Stewart?

  To allow Japan to become a fully militaristic power. And if so, this is the big change because for decades now, Japan was pacifist economic powerhouse under American security umbrella. If she shifts it to an assertive, more militarized nation-state, semi-autonomous, then I think we're in a very different world.

• 15:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The other thing that she was doing, partly, I think, to to deal with this far-right party, was very, very strong line on immigration. Now, of course, compared to most of the developed economies, Japan doesn't have that many.

• 15:26Rory Stewart?

  Very few. There's a few Kurds living in some town.

• 15:30Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they've got they've got slightly more than that.

• 15:32Rory Stewart?

  And she claims in her hometown of Nara that she saw a tourist punch a deer in the deer park.

• 15:36Alastair Campbell?

  I know. And there was never any evidence of it at all. So she's got a little bit of, I'm not going to mention the DJT guy, but a little bit of Trumpism to her communication. But the truth is, Japan, I mean, what's one of the stories that we've talked about Japan for years and years and years and years is way ahead of us, the aging population.

• 15:55Rory Stewart?

  Mean age in Japan, about fifty one, median age in Britain, about forty, median age in Europe, higher than Britain. But by the time you get down to somewhere like Nigeria, it's sixteen to get a sense of them.

• 16:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. What's your favorite Nigerian stat?

• 16:11Rory Stewart?

  One in ten children born in the world will be born in Nigeria by twenty fifty.

• 16:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. The reason why I keep asking you to repeat that is if I live to twenty fifty, we're gonna, we're gonna come back and see.

• 16:23Rory Stewart?

  It's also, this is, it's also true that all demographic projections are always wrong.

• 16:28Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 16:29Rory Stewart?

  I mean, but also, I mean, yeah, I mean, we need to talk about that in more, more detail some of the time.

• 16:34Alastair Campbell?

  And, and so you've got this aging population, they're all living a very, very long time. And yet she's saying, no more, you know, we're going to cut back on immigration. Like us, they're going to need.

• 16:46Rory Stewart?

  And, and, yeah, and as you've pointed out, it's, it's obviously not just that they're very healthy and eating good food, it's also they're just not having any children. And that's a problem for South Korea. South Korea, I think, you know, the average fam, uh, number of children is now getting down to about point three per family. So there's this demographic collapse and no immigration coming, yeah.

• 17:03Alastair Campbell?

  Just on, on the, we should do a thing on demography at some point, but do you see that the French are right, the government are writing to every twenty nine year old, basically saying, get on with it.

• 17:14Alastair Campbell?

  Have kids now.

• 17:15Rory Stewart?

  What do you think about Viktor Orban's policy? I mean, it's quite interesting, right? He's saying that anyone, any woman who has three children is exempt from income tax. Now, any woman who has two children exempt from income tax. It's pretty quite, you know, if you were wondering, am I going to have a second child, third child? Being exempt from income tax for your whole life, that's pretty good, huh?

• 17:31Alastair Campbell?

  And we've got an election coming up and I wonder if that might be why he's suddenly saying, let's give some more money to parents.

• 17:37Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:38Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Josephine in Southall, what lessons can progressive British politicians draw from the Portuguese presidential election? About how civil society can mobilise and cross-party elites can coordinate to counter anti-democratic movements. And this relates to the presidential election, which is not the same as a parliamentary election. I think this is, look, there is a lot to unbundle here in terms of left-right, far-right, progressive battles. But I think from the British perspective, this is as much about political systems as anything else. This is the second round of a presidential system, where in the first round, anybody can stand and the top two go through. And what's happened is that the far-right guy,

• 18:21Alastair Campbell?

  Ventura, who was a former sports TV commentator, kind of Gary Lineker of Portugal, he founded this Chega party in sixty, seven years ago, and has made a huge impact upon Portuguese politics. But what's happened is that having got into the second round, there has been this mobilisation. So the equivalent for Britain would be if, in our, we've said often, what's, what we've known as a two-party system becoming a four, five, six-party system, is if rather than having our parliamentary elections, you had, in the next election, let's see who votes for the wall, and then the top two, let's say the top two are Starmer and Farage, they go through.

• 19:01Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely.

• 19:01Alastair Campbell?

  So it's a totally different system.

• 19:03Rory Stewart?

  Then it's much easier to see people allying against.

• 19:05Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 19:05Rory Stewart?

  And so I, I think the positive story, which is what our question is pushing, is, it's rather interesting, because what happened is that the Catholic Church came out for the left-wing presidential candidate, quite a lot of right-wing politicians came out against the far-right. So there was this sort of nice story of people creating a kind of firewall to exclude the far-right candidate. And boy, is he a far-right candidate. I mean, his posters during the election were, this is not Bangladesh, right? This is a key, key example of his posters. But, but, but, as we've said before, two years ago, people were still talking about the Iberian exception, the idea that Portugal and Spain were somehow immune to populism.

• 19:46Rory Stewart?

  This guy, on the far-right, this is not Bangladesh, over thirty percent of the vote now, that's a big vote. His vote share is basically the same as Keir Starmer got in the last election in Britain. So. This is a huge political force. He's taken it from zero to, I think, fifty seats and

• 20:03Alastair Campbell?

  No, I see. I wonder whether, in Josephine's question, is the thinking that this shows you can come together and fight them off. Now, on one level, it does. And there was obviously a lot of public awareness. You had quite a lot of conservatives voting for the socialist to stop Che Guevara, stop Ventura winning. But I'm not sure there's much beyond that. I agree with your assessment that this shows that actually, in a country that not long ago, former fascist country, don't forget, that we see this maybe, we shouldn't be too rose-tinted about this. This is a little bit of a, I think it's a warning sign as much as anything else. It does show if progressive forces get together and fight, they can win. But it also shows that these guys are

• 20:46Alastair Campbell?

  on the rise. Maybe that's two elections we're going, why don't we come back next week and talk a little bit about Thailand?

• 20:52Rory Stewart?

  Lovely.

• 20:53Alastair Campbell?

  Because that's another huge election. And of course, longer to unbundle that one because the battle there is not necessarily the battle of the ballot box, it's what happens after with the monarchy and all that.

• 21:03Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, let's do that. And let me maybe to bring a lighter, quicker tone, because we've done quite a lot of serious, in-depth geopolitical stuff.

• 21:13Alastair Campbell?

  Here goes Rory, sports not serious.

• 21:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, there we are. A question from Alex in San Diego. Is the Winter Olympics a sign sport is the only thing that can make us feel good right now? Now, is that true for you? Is that the only thing that makes you feel good at the moment?

• 21:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there's a lot of things right now making me feel bad, neither of which I'm going to mention. But I, here's a great, have you watched any of the Winter Olympics?

• 21:37Rory Stewart?

  No, and I'm really, because I ski, I'm an obsessive, I'm completely obsessed with winter sport. So I love watching skiing.

• 21:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I've, I watched, I'll tell you what I've watched so far. I watched the opening ceremony, which Danny Boyle will never, ever be beaten. London twenty twelve was the best opening ceremony of all time. But the Milan Cortina opening ceremony was terrific. It was really, really good. And it was actually quite moving. And the speeches were moving. A bit long, could have done with a good, you know, Campbell red pen through them. But they were good. And their message was about this, about there's so much division in the world, there's so much hatred, sport can bring us together, sports about this, this, this, this. It was good. And of course, the fact that J D Vance was in the audience was, you know, I think it was pointed. And the other, the other moment, uh, notice I'm not mentioning his boss.

• 22:28Alastair Campbell?

  When the American team came in, the loudest cheer of the evening, bar none, was for the Ukrainian team. The Ukrainian team came in and it was really moving. The whole place went absolutely crazy. They went pretty wild for the American team. And then the feed, the live feed camera panned to J D Vance and his wife and the booing started. And they cut away instantly. And it then transpires that one of these American TV stations, one of the ones that's been taken over by these awful tech oligarchs that are destroying the world. They, they dubbed out the sound of the booing, the booing. My other favourite Van story is one, an American athlete, a skater. Who was, as we say in the sports world, tipped for gold. She got silver.

• 23:14Alastair Campbell?

  And I think the reason was, it turns out she was almost Mr Start. Because she was held up by this forty car convoy ferrying J D Vance around Milan.

• 23:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, he cost them the gold. That's not good. Yeah.

• 23:29Alastair Campbell?

  So I think, well, I don't know if he did, but I'm saying he did.

• 23:31Rory Stewart?

  And there's, there's, uh, as somebody who is, um, who loves this stuff, I, I really, all I want to do is live in the mountains and live in the Alps and be at altitude and ski.

• 23:40Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, but just on that, so you ski, you like skiing and you're.

• 23:43Rory Stewart?

  I'm not, not, not, not just like it. I'm, I'm actually reasonably good at it. I was actually in teams for this kind of thing.

• 23:48Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, we need film, we need film, we need film, the rest is skiing.

• 23:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you can see that, yeah.

• 23:53Alastair Campbell?

  But let me ask you this though, why then do you not enjoy and like watching? I've never skied in my life.

• 23:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Alastair Campbell?

  But I like watching the competition of the skiers. So last night I was watching this sport. I don't even know what you call this sport. Where these skiers were, it was like an obstacle course. They were jumping onto, on, jumping onto tubes and skiing down those and doing these sort of.

• 24:15Rory Stewart?

  This is a freestyle.

• 24:16Alastair Campbell?

  I think it was more than freestyle because it was like barriers and all sorts of stuff. It's almost like a show job.

• 24:21Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 24:22Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing I love about the Winter Olympics is that when they're out on the mountain. You know, it's, there are relatively small crowds because it's very hard to get to and you can't build the infrastructure. But it's these athletes, they come down and then their family are there.

• 24:36Rory Stewart?

  Oh, it's so lovely.

• 24:37Alastair Campbell?

  And it's just brilliant.

• 24:38Rory Stewart?

  The other thing that makes it so unusual is, I don't know, and maybe there are other sports like this, but particularly on freestyle, for example, when you're coming from the very, very top of the mountain down to the bottom, if you're the ninth person down the course, the course is completely transformed because you're skiing generally for freestyle on virgin powder, untouched, thick snow.

• 24:58Alastair Campbell?

  Real snow.

• 24:58Rory Stewart?

  Real snow, yeah. So if you're, and if you're the first couple of people down and you're trying to get lines for your line, for your jumps, your style, your elegance. If you're the first person down, you can fly off the edge of a cliff, you land in fresh stuff, and then you can do a beautiful series of turns through that. If you're number six, three people have already landed there, that's wrecked. You're going to have to find another bit of the mountain to come down, you're going to have to cross their tracks, et cetera. Or if you watch Slalom or Giant Slalom, it's true too, you'll see that it is getting icier and icier and the cuts around the flags are getting sharper and sharper.

• 25:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I guess something similar is the fact if you're playing test cricket, that part of your calculation is the state of the pitch over five days and how it develops. But no, that's a good point. But whenever we've talked about sport before, you said, basically said you've got no interest in sport because you, you think, it's almost like you don't think that you're doing sport, you're doing skiing. Sport to me is watching people in competition.

• 25:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm happy if I'm having lunch in a, in a bar to watch people ski. I love to watch ski and I'm learning from them. Basically, I watch it in order to learn technique. I'm interested in learning because I'm interested in their angulation, I'm interested in their weight transfer.

• 26:06Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to the Munich Security Conference for the weekend. The ski slope's not that far away.

• 26:11Rory Stewart?

  I would indeed be doing that.

• 26:13Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we've got to get a film of this. If you, you said, I will quote what you said, you said, I'm really quite good at it.

• 26:18Rory Stewart?

  I can give you a shot of me skiing in Antarctica if you want.

• 26:21Alastair Campbell?

  Oh.

• 26:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you can see me skiing on the South Pole. Yeah.

• 26:24Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. Talking of poles.

• 26:26Rory Stewart?

  I've got three plugs.

• 26:28Alastair Campbell?

  The first is about polls is a while you were doing whatever you're doing yesterday. I recorded a mini series with the guy whose book I mentioned about the Arctic. It's really, really interesting. I think the first episode is out on Friday.

• 26:43Rory Stewart?

  Great.

• 26:43Alastair Campbell?

  Guy called Kenneth R. Rosen, very interesting, very quirky character, really good, really enjoyed it doing it. Learned a lot. Hope our listeners and viewers will learn a lot. Second plug is the current leading, Jeremy Fleming, GCHQ. Third plug, Rory, have you got Shashana a Valentine's Day card yet?

• 27:03Rory Stewart?

  Oh, no. Have you got a good recommendation on that?

• 27:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, apparently.

• 27:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Alastair Campbell?

  You can get, you can buy trip plus membership.

• 27:12Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 27:12Alastair Campbell?

  As a Valentine's present, you just go to therestispolitics.com and click gifts. And this is a perfect present for the woman who stopped me on the tube yesterday. Said, my boyfriend loves your podcast. I said, well, get him the bloody membership.

• 27:23Rory Stewart?

  Do you know where you and I are spending Valentine's Day? The Munich Security Conference.

• 27:29Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know where this is going. Yeah.

• 27:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 27:31Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 27:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's where we're gonna be. Yeah.

• 27:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's gonna be a romantic, a romantic moment, the Munich Security Conference. Nothing quite as romantic as the Munich.

• 27:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 27:38Rory Stewart?

  I wonder whether the Munich Security Conference is gonna have weird sort of German chocolates with flowers on their face.

• 27:43Alastair Campbell?

  God, I hope not.

• 27:44Rory Stewart?

  I bet they will. I bet they will. Anyway, let's take a break and then there's some cultural plugging I'd like to do after the break.

• 27:50Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. We have to do Big Bunny.

• 27:51Rory Stewart?

  Okay, see you after the break.

• 27:52Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 27:58Alastair Campbell?

  Now, just a quick pause in the podcast to mention our sponsor, NordVPN.

• 28:02Rory Stewart?

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• 28:17Alastair Campbell?

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• 28:25Rory Stewart?

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• 28:41Alastair Campbell?

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• 28:47Rory Stewart?

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• 28:52Alastair Campbell?

  To get the best discount on your Nord VPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/RestIsPolitics. You'll get four extra months free on the two-year plan plus a 30-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the episode description.

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• 30:38Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 30:42Alastair Campbell?

  And me Big Bunny.

• 30:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, well, that's right. As Alice has picked up, generally what he does is, you might have noticed, is mock me about my incredible ignorance of popular culture. But most of our listeners will be sniggering at the fact that he calls Bad Bunny Big Bunny.

• 30:57Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, before we go, let's have the question, because this was from Catherine in the Wirral. What could apologize as love for Bad Bunny's Super Bowl performance, his celebration of love, community and joy, stands in stark contrast to the divisiveness and negativity of name deleted and his allies, whose responses to the show looked so pathetic and weak by comparison.

• 31:17Rory Stewart?

  I watched Bad Bunny. Did you watch him?

• 31:19Alastair Campbell?

  No, I watched a bit on the news, that's it. But I've never got into NFL.

• 31:24Rory Stewart?

  That's pretty amazing. One of the weird things is if you watch it on YouTube and it's, you know, it's Apple Music sponsored Super Bowl.

• 31:35Rory Stewart?

  They don't offer anything other than Spanish subtitles unless you select the auto subtitle function. And so he's singing in Spanish. I mean, you can see why Trump was completely thrown off balance. I mean, firstly, the whole thing's in Spanish, so you've got no idea at all what he's saying unless, like me, you're trying to rely on the also stuff. Shoshana, her Spanish is good, but she couldn't follow half these lyrics. 135 million viewers, it's one of the biggest Super Bowl halftime.

• 32:00Alastair Campbell?

  Is that bigger than Restless Politics?

• 32:01Rory Stewart?

  Ever. It's bigger than Restless Politics. It's bigger than us, bigger than us. Yeah, it's bigger than us. Bad Bunny is bigger than us. And I don't, I don't want to annoy any of the 135 million viewers. But to describe that song as purely a celebration of what was it? Community.

• 32:16Alastair Campbell?

  Joy and love.

• 32:17Rory Stewart?

  Joy and love. Maybe this is a time turn off for, for younger listeners, but it's an extraordinary performance where he's spending most of his time clutching his crotch and rotating in front with an enormous number of, surrounded by incredible Latino dancers, most of whom have got their skirts in the air. I mean, I mean, this is, this is much more than just a celebration of community and, and community and world peace.

• 32:39Alastair Campbell?

  The reviews I saw and heard, I heard a guy from Rolling Stone magazine saying it was the most mesmerizing live show you'd ever seen. And I think I've seen all sorts of people. But one of my fellow swimmers, Dan, he showed he showed me a video this morning of, I'm going to look at the script. Was it bad or big? I get them mixed up again. Bad, a bad buddy performing when all the backing music collapsed, all the electronic stuff collapsed. And it was honestly, it sounded like me at the bath. It was terrible. So has he got a good voice? Or is it the word? Is it like Eminem? Is it the words that are good?

• 33:17Rory Stewart?

  I think his voice is interesting, but I think it's the whole picture. It's the whole, I think, I mean, it's, it's about, the songs are about celebrity, they're about girlfriends, they're about love, they're about Puerto Rico, they're about being a Latino, they're about the fact that other people want to be Latino, can't be Latino. I mean, it's a whole statement about culture.

• 33:38Alastair Campbell?

  And

• 33:38Rory Stewart?

  And about Puerto Rico.

• 33:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and I'm going to break my promise now. Um, I mean, the thought of the President of the United States, sitting, watching, in the Oval Office, or wherever he was, ready to say, this is terrible. Because the buildup, all the buildup I heard was this guy was really going to go for Trump because he's gone for ICE, he said they're terrible, he's not doing the States because he's worried about Puerto Ricans.

• 34:02Rory Stewart?

  And he didn't.

• 34:02Alastair Campbell?

  And he seemingly didn't.

• 34:04Rory Stewart?

  His only thing he did is he said, God bless America, and then he listed all the countries of America. And I thought the joke was going to be, he was going to go Ecuador, Paraguay, Costa Rica, and then jump to Canada. But actually, he included the United States in the whole thing.

• 34:15Alastair Campbell?

  Right. But Trump then said, this is terrible, nobody can understand a word he says. How many Spanish speakers are there in the United States? That was revealing, wasn't it? Because that basically shows that he doesn't see them as being American.

• 34:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, and, and the, the, the, the research is wonderful research in Texas done by the producers, and not something sort of bolted into the back of my brain with a, a weird memory stick. Um, and it was something beautifully covered, actually, on Trip US yesterday. But our researchers pointed out, in the Texas election, Taylor Repmed captured approximately seventy nine percent of the Hispanic vote in the district, a twenty six point jump from the fifty three percent that Kamala Harris received in the twenty twenty four election. Precincts with a majority Hispanic population swung an average of thirty four points towards the Democrat, compared with the Democrats' performance in twenty twenty two. So there is a real sense that Trump may be losing the Hispanic vote. The surprise in that election, Trump's defeat of Kamala Harris.

• 35:07Rory Stewart?

  Which made a huge marginal difference was African American voters and Hispanic voters voting for Trump, and that seems to be certainly with the Hispanic vote collapsing, and maybe this is part of that story.

• 35:17Alastair Campbell?

  No, and it seems really strange as we head to the midterms that you single out anybody who speaks Spanish as somehow being a non-American. So there's 70 million Hispanic Latinos in the United States. That's virtually the population of the United Kingdom. And Donald Trump seems to think that because he doesn't like Big Bad Bunny, as he's going to be called forever, that somehow he should be able to insult them and say they're not really American.

• 35:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's kind of, but it is extraordinary how successful he's been insulting huge bits of his demographic voter base again and again.

• 35:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Okay, Rory, we both love trees.

• 35:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 35:53Alastair Campbell?

  So this is from our friend Darren Moorcroft, CEO of The Wooden Trust. And by the way, let me say, you know, that wonderful tree in Glasgow, the Argyle Street Ash, that was Tree of the Year, it's now in the poll for the European Tree of the Year.

• 36:09Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 36:09Alastair Campbell?

  And you have to go on and vote. So go on to, is the European Tree of the Year, you can find it all on the interweb with Big Bad Bunny, but vote for Argyle Street. So Darren says, Rory, this is specifically for you, as someone involved in creating the 25 Year Environment Plan, do you share concerns it's become a largely defra only project? Very good point. Why, despite growing evidence of nature's cross-government value, does the issue seem increasingly siloed? What does this reveal about how the government works and defra standing within it, and how would you fix it?

• 36:42Rory Stewart?

  Well, Darren's right. When we were bringing together that 25 Year Environment Plan, even though it was a Tory government, there was a moment of real cross-party optimism around this. And actually, you know, I disagree profoundly with Michael Gove, and I thought he went too far on some of the rewilding stuff. But broadly speaking, there was a moment where we were working very strongly with environmental charities, with the national parks, with Natural England, the Environment Agency to define a 25-year plan. Which has largely been taken on by the new government and pushed ahead. But at the heart of it is nature or pompously biodiversity. And we talk a lot about climate, which is completely critical. But this is about the fact that we are losing species at an incredible rate. Many indicators suggesting eighty five percent decline in various species.

• 37:28Rory Stewart?

  This idea of the anthropocene, which is that basically humans are eliminating biodiversity around the planet. And Britain particularly brutally affected. We have much less tree cover, for example, than most European countries, most comparable countries. So there is a huge opportunity for us to lean into this. And one of the things that's making me sad is if the government's looking for projects that can really have an impact and catch people's imagination and change perceptions. I want them to return again, and if Emma Reynolds is listening, I'm going to push this again on her. Not just thinking about farming and people who look after the landscape, particularly small farmers, who I think are being marginalized, but also trees.

• 38:08Rory Stewart?

  So for example, I want to push again this idea that I think the green belt around London could become the largest forest in England. Could be, and I mean a native forest, I mean oaks. I mean biodiversity. It will be great for the weather in London, it'll be great for air quality, it'll be great for climate change because of the carbon capture. It'll be great for the populations, millions of people getting into nature. But most importantly of all, it'll be something that will be there for future generations. I mean, the oaks trees will still be there in four, five hundred years' time. So imagine if you're Keir Starmer or Emma Reynolds, what a wonderful legacy that would be. To in twenty years' time, find yourself in this incredible forest of hundreds of millions of trees with all the transformation and biodiversity.

• 38:53Alastair Campbell?

  And Dan's point about silos is absolutely right. If you think about what nature, the role that nature could play in our health policy. Social prescribing. One of the things I love about whenever Fiona and I are taking the dog out in the morning. There are these tiny kids who are all being sort of led up by teachers who are, who are learning. As part of their education is about just sort of living on the heath for a day.

• 39:19Rory Stewart?

  So this, this, uh, this, um, I've pitched already this, uh, documentary that's just out on Amasson on the King on Harmony. But one of the points that's made there by a professor at Cambridge is that, uh, in on your social prescribing point, when you go out into woodland, you're literally breathing in molecules from these trees. When you're smelling pine trees, you're taking the pine molecules into your bloodstream. And some of these molecules have impacts similar in impact to almost prescription drugs. There's also data that shows that every 300 metres further away you are from a piece of green space in a city, your health and your general indicators decline dramatically.

• 40:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, green spaces, absolutely, is, I mean, the, the, the way that cities are, are developed is fundamental to this.

• 40:08Rory Stewart?

  Okay. And you are a parent of young children in London. Everybody will presumably go through what I went through on Saturday, which is what the hell do I do with kids on the weekend, right? And there's a limit to how much you can schlep around the zoo or go to the museum. Imagine if you could get on a train from central London and be immediately in the middle of one of the greatest forests on earth. And there is the greenbelt. Nobody's using it. It's a sort of horrible post-industrial golf course zone that nobody can build houses on because of the legislation, but nobody's making it work for nature.

• 40:39Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Although we should say, we're pretty blessed with parks and

• 40:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 40:44Alastair Campbell?

  and trees and nature.

• 40:45Rory Stewart?

  Huge tribute to them.

• 40:46Alastair Campbell?

  Given that it's one of the biggest metropolis in the world.

• 40:47Rory Stewart?

  Huge tribute to how, how well we do with that. But, but, but what we don't have, um, are really lovely natural forest spaces. I mean, imagine how wonderful it would be to be able to walk for 20 miles through an incredible native forest.

• 41:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 41:01Rory Stewart?

  Just on the outskirts of London.

• 41:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, with the planes going over.

• 41:07Alastair Campbell?

  It's like that story of the the American couple arriving at Heathrow, the pilot says, if you look out of the window, you'll see Windsor Castle, where the Queen lives. And the wife turns to us and says, why she build a castle so near to your airport?

• 41:22Rory Stewart?

  It's good, it's good, it's good, I like it, it's a good joke. Okay, here we are. Final one for you. Gareth's Trip Plus Cornwall, is happiness a state of rebellion? In a world in flux, and with so many existential threats from the likes of Trump, I'd be interested in hearing Alistair and Rory's advice on how they navigate all of this and keep sane and positive. And Thomas, what do you do outside of politics that gives you hope and joy?

• 41:45Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, well, fun enough, allows me to plug on to my 21 books, The Happy Depressive.

• 41:50Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's a great title.

• 41:52Alastair Campbell?

  It is a good title, yeah. And it's a book about how, well, it's first of all, how do you think about happiness? Because I think one of the reasons we're in such a mess as a world is we're completely confused about what we mean by happiness.

• 42:06Rory Stewart?

  Okay, what do we mean?

• 42:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, what I mean by happiness is kind of long term fulfillment. I think what a lot of people think happiness is, is feeling good in the moment. I actually think that the feeling bad in the moment is often, for me, the spur or the inspiration to to then do the pursuit of stuff that leads to long term fulfillment, where I think you find happiness.

• 42:28Rory Stewart?

  So you're saying it's not really about the minute by minute pleasure? It's the sense of a longer project, a bigger activity?

• 42:36Alastair Campbell?

  Totally, totally. I think that, and I think along the way, you, we all have lots of really bad moments, lots of low moments, lots of setbacks, lots of failure. And it's how you use them to build the stuff that at the end of your life, you look back and think, well, that that really matters. So I think that sense of, and that's why I've said to you before, I think we We we think that having a good time, particularly in this country where it seems to be having a good time is so often associated with basically changing your natural state.

• 43:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 43:06Alastair Campbell?

  Through drink or drugs. How is, how can that possibly really be what the pursuit of happiness is about? To me, that is usually the escape from unhappiness. So, and then, and and why I went to the book, not less that book, because that was a sort of, that was actually a speech that became a book. But then the other book I wrote about my own depression, uh, that was an absolute exploration of how do you find happiness even when you're depressed?

• 43:31Rory Stewart?

  Well, here's a couple of things that I was thinking about this week. Um, one is, I I went for a run yesterday with Shishana, uh, down to an exhibition that she's just done in the.

• 43:41Alastair Campbell?

  Did she beat you?

• 43:42Rory Stewart?

  Uh, we we weren't racing, we were, we were sort of doing a sort of plodding couples jog together. Um, uh.

• 43:49Alastair Campbell?

  I'd back her against you.

• 43:51Rory Stewart?

  Although I'm all kitted out with wearables at the moment, so I'm sort of endlessly following my sort of micro heart rate variations and stuff.

• 43:56Alastair Campbell?

  Pointless.

• 43:57Rory Stewart?

  Pointless stuff. And and we got to the Garrison Chapel where Shishana and Tarko Smatton are doing this amazing exhibition, open to the public. Please, anyone who's coming through London, have a look at it. And what it's showing is all the work of craftspeople, particularly women, making incredibly beautiful things in Afghanistan, in Myanmar, in Palestine, and in other countries around the world. Um, and I love that because I I I was trying to work out why I felt happy in the evening. But I thought with two things, I mean, one of them's, yes, I was changing my state with my endorphins. Um, but secondly, it was the sense of being able to help in a small way with her exhibition, talk about her speech and see all this beautiful stuff. Now, the second thing, though, which is a completely other end, I went to see Hamlet over the weekend. Have you seen Hamlet?

• 44:42Alastair Campbell?

  I have, Hamnet.

• 44:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Hamlet.

• 44:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I'm interested in your review, I'll give you mine.

• 44:47Rory Stewart?

  Well, basically, uh.

• 44:50Rory Stewart?

  As the parent of a young boy, I was in bits through most of it. I mean, I just couldn't handle the grief and the horror of this young boy dying. But I also felt it was very, very powerful. I felt a real sense of catharsis. I felt a sense of, in a way that I very rarely do. You know, Aristotle says you go to the theatre and you go through this catharsis and your whole worldview's changed. I did feel that with that film. I found it devastating. I was crying all the time, but I came out the end of it.

• 45:24Alastair Campbell?

  Seriously?

• 45:25Rory Stewart?

  Really feeling, yeah, that they had made a really incredible point about. And one thing you should be able to relate to, I thought, is the extraordinary sense that William Shakespeare, who's the central character, is saying to his wife, yes, our kid's got, has just died, but I'm going back to work in London. I've got to write my play.

• 45:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 45:42Rory Stewart?

  And she's like, no, you effing aunt, you're not, you're not leaving me with a dead kid. And all your sympathy is with her. You think it doesn't matter what your job is. Don't abandon your family like this. And then you have to get to terms with, but on the other hand, his job is being the greatest playwright that's ever lived. And he's writing the greatest play that's ever lived. And what the film I thought did at the end is balance those two things, that as it were, the tensions of work and life.

• 46:10Alastair Campbell?

  You see, I, I, that's really interesting. Well, I went to see Oh Mary.

• 46:14Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 46:14Alastair Campbell?

  Which is on just down the road here at the moment, which is about, and it's, once you get into it, it's very funny.

• 46:20Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 46:20Alastair Campbell?

  It's about Abraham Lincoln being this sex-starved gay sort of, it's, it's not based on the, I don't think, the real Abraham Lincoln. And the wife is alcoholic, mad, demanding, crazy. It's a, it's a crazy sort of play. And I spent the first half hour really not enjoying it because I think this is so not Abraham Lincoln. It really offends me. And I felt that a little bit about, about Hamlet. I couldn't quite get my head around the fact that Shakespeare, who I regularly think is the greatest person who ever lived because of what he's, what he contributed to the world and still does.

• 47:01Alastair Campbell?

  And by the way, if people haven't seen it, Ian McKellen on the Stephen Colbert Show last week, doing this amazing piece of Shakespeare. But anyway, which is about what's happening in America now, we'll put it in the newsletter.

• 47:14Alastair Campbell?

  So I got really irritated by it. I then got really irritated by some of the production stuff. The end when they're all that sort of the the focus on on the wife and the and the the sort of dreamy bits and what have you. I thought it as a film, I thought it was rescued by the performance of the son.

• 47:32Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 47:32Alastair Campbell?

  Who I thought was brilliant. But I wasn't as moved by it as you were. Maybe it's because your kids are so young. I don't know.

• 47:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I I I I was a bit cross with my mother because she told me to go and see it. And I was like, where is the health warning? How can you possibly expect a parent of an eight year old to watch a whole film about an eight year old dying?

• 47:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. See, I I a part of me couldn't imagine that Shakespeare could have been quite as harsh and cruel and self centered. But maybe it was. And that's the other thing, I think, with these, when you're dealing with historical figures. The truth is, we don't know. We know a lot. There's one of the most amazing things about Shakespeare is actually beyond what he's written. We don't know that much. It's not like it's not like.

• 48:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's amazing. Have you have you read, for example, Shakespeare in Silver Street?

• 48:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Rory Stewart?

  Where they take a single, two sentences. Shakespeare's only recorded words are in a small court case in London, which was then discovered in the 19th century in an archive. But you're absolutely right. I mean, that that film is based on Agnes Hathaway or or Anne and and the one of the questions around her is based purely on his will. He leaves her his second best bed. And there's birth certificate or death certificate stuff. And we have some idea about how many children they had. And we know that Anne had died. And out of that, Maggie O'Farrell has created this incredible masterpiece. But yes, certainly,

• 48:55Rory Stewart?

  if you were doing The Rest Is History, it's astonishing, given his stature today, how little was recorded about him.

• 49:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think I think that is part of the reason why he's so it's not just that he's an amazing writer and brain. I think it's also that he's that allows itself to mythology. Anyway, I'm glad you found it moving because that's two things we've learned today, Roy. Because normally I say I'm the one who gets terribly moved by, you know, the music and culture. There you've been moved by that. And then and we've also learned that you're an Olympic quality skier. Maybe this is a really good thing to close with. I this made me this made me really happy this week. It's a, it's a message from one of our readers, okay? She's called Seraphina Jennings, and she says, Dear Alistair, my name is Seraphina, I'm seventeen years old. I'm a regular listener of Trip. Politics is a huge interest of mine, and after watching your recent episode, this is my monologue,

• 49:46Alastair Campbell?

  when I was sort of bearing my soul about all this recent stuff in the, we're not mentioning Labour, but you know what I'm talking about. She said, I can't help but want to reach out and offer reassurance. As a Gen Z, there is no one better suited to talk about reactionary politics. Most people my age get their knowledge from TikTok, and as an avid TikTok user, I haven't seen this far-right domination of the app. Every politics video I watch denounces Farage. For every video which supports him, there are a thousand comments educating people of the nastier policies Reform would implement. And it's not just my algorithm. I went out and made fresh accounts where I don't interact with anything political, and the first videos to do with current affairs were left-wing, pro-abortion, anti-Trump,

• 50:29Alastair Campbell?

  anti-reform, not to mention millions and millions and millions of pure disgust at Trump and Epstein. I urge you to look at the Democrats' TikTok page, it brings me a lot of hope for the future. As for the image of New Labour, she goes on, after the Mandelson revelations, can I just say, most people my age hadn't heard of Peter Mandelson until last week. We cover the Blair Brown governments in history, he actually isn't mentioned. And from what I can gather, even in A-level politics plays a very insignificant role. Tony Blair is often credited amongst young people, and in the many conversations I have, as a great Prime Minister. We've grown up with no memory of New Labour, but the stories of non-existent waiting lists, massive education in child poverty, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 51:09Alastair Campbell?

  Finally, you'll be pleased to know Brexit is treated as the biggest sin of our time. Among young people, repeatedly videos anti-Brexit surpassed one hundred thousand likes, denouncing it as the biggest failure we have seen. So she goes on, she says, this is probably a stupid thing to write to you, I just wanted to make you transparent, there is a future. I genuinely believe humanity will always prevail over hatred and lies. Please don't lose hope. So Seraphina, that made me happy this week.

• 51:36Rory Stewart?

  That was wonderful. It's wonderful. I will restrain myself from

• 51:40Alastair Campbell?

  Go on, be cynical.

• 51:41Rory Stewart?

  Making a massive series of pro Tories sceptical comments about the whole.

• 51:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Seraphina, austerity was the right thing to do, says Rory Stewart.

• 51:51Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Yeah, what's all this? Exactly. No, I I love the answer. That was lovely stuff. Um, well, thank you and look forward to hearing what viewers made of Hamlet, whether they're on your side or mine.

• 52:03Alastair Campbell?

  I think they'll be on your side. I think I was probably in a bad mood. I went to see it as a wave escaping from the thing that I'm not talking about. And and it didn't lift my mood.

• 52:11Rory Stewart?

  And and I'd also love, if anyone makes it to Garrison Chapel, see what they think about what all these artisans would tell us about the world.

• 52:17Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. And by the way, if you want to, if you're not a member and you want to listen to the mini series on the polar war in the Arctic, then just go to therestispolitics.com and sign up after you've got your Valentine's Day gift.

• 52:29Rory Stewart?

  Brilliant. Okay.

• 52:31Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye bye.

• 52:36Rory Stewart?

  This episode was brought to you by Penguin Audiobooks. There are audiobook club parts, very, I love Penguin Audiobooks, partly because I'm a Penguin audiobook person, selecting the titles that help us think clearly about where the world is heading, what's at stake when power and technology move faster than politics.

• 52:52Alastair Campbell?

  And a book that we are recommending to all of you, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

• 52:59Rory Stewart?

  It's written by Elisa Yudkowsky and by Nate Soars. Um, it is a really fascinating lesson. And and if you want to see the extreme case for fear around AI, this is a book arguing why AI could potentially kill us. And he does it in the style of really good popular science. He's also very, very good on explaining how in some ways these large language models are evolutionary. They're sort of natural bodies that are developing rather than things that are fully programmed like old models. He was right at the heart of the AI revolution. He's very controversial. There will be people, and you'll see this in the mini series, who are horrified that we're recommending it, but I think listen to it.

• 53:42Alastair Campbell?

  Visit penguin.co.uk slash T R I P to browse our audiobook club and find the link to listen to If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies in our bio. Find Penguin Audiobooks now on Spotify.

• 54:07Speaker 07

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 54:15Speaker 08

  We assess, Prime Minister,

• 54:18Speaker 08

  with high confidence it was Russian.

• 54:21Speaker 09

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 54:23Speaker 10

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 54:26Speaker 07

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself: Do you want to play? You're the Prime Minister. You've done... NOTHING!

• 54:39Speaker 11

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 54:41Speaker 07

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

• 54:50Speaker 09

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 54:55Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 54:57Speaker 09

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

• 55:01Speaker 12

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

• 55:06Speaker 09

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 55:08Speaker 12

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 55:11Speaker 09

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

• 55:15Speaker 12

  We have two tight friendly KIA's.

• 55:16Speaker 09

  Where Britain plays its strongest hand He's the best. Against its strongest foe. Don't do it, Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.