32. Question Time: Treating addiction, feminism, and a fear of ketchup

Join Rory and Alastair for the latest episode of 'The Rest Is Politics: Question Time', where they discuss removing the stigma around addiction, feminism, Eton, Alastair's fear of ketchup, political cliches, Rory's worst interview gaff, whether the SNP has a mandate for another independence referendum, and how Iran and Afghanistan have changed since Rory's walk. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

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• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Right, welcome to another episode of the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:48Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:49Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, there's a great question from John Devine for you. What killer question would you have asked the Tory leadership candidates who've been talking about the need for greater honesty and integrity in politics?

• 1:59Rory Stewart?

  So I would say, John, that the key thing is, what hard truth are you prepared to say to the Conservative Party? So I would want them to say, look, we are making a complete mess in Northern Ireland. This fantasy that we can have total free trade deals with the world and no border in the Irish Sea is nonsense. I'd want them to point out that we cannot be selling that right tax cutting measures at a moment when our debt and deficit is twice as high as it was when Margaret Thatcher was running things. And I'm not seeing them demonstrating their honesty and integrity by saying uncomfortable things.

• 2:42Alastair Campbell?

  No, and also they're sort of trying to distance themselves from Boris Johnson whilst at the same time not really calling out just how bad things have been. And the other thing I think the public find a bit nauseating, they will tell each other how marvellous they are all the time. You know, they talk about, you know, what a great set of colleagues and this is the Conservative Party at its best. If this is the Conservative Party at its best, Rory, I'd be quite confident if I was Keir Starmer right now.

• 3:07Rory Stewart?

  But it's also very interesting, isn't it? If you think about it, the two candidates on that stage who would be more traditional, Foreign Secretary and Chancellor, but it's very interesting that the party has changed so much that three of the other candidates are not Cabinet Ministers. Whereas in the debate in 2019, everybody was a Cabinet Minister.

• 3:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:26Rory Stewart?

  So something's changing in the way that politics works. I mean, we've been very interested in this question of Camille Badenoch and her coming through. And I think she does have, I mean, she holds herself well on stage. She clearly is very self-confident and she's found a route through to a part of the Conservative Party. But it's very interesting that we're now in a world in which it's so easy for somebody who's come into politics quite recently, who hasn't had a cabinet position, to suddenly be a leadership candidate.

• 3:56Alastair Campbell?

  She doesn't say anything. She just keeps saying she's going to tell the truth, but she didn't tell you what these great truths are. What are they? Listen, here's a good one. Jeff Spink, how many of the current Cabinet will be in the new Prime Minister's Cabinet? Who will sink without trace?

• 4:09Rory Stewart?

  Oh, okay. So Nadine Doris is not going to get a job.

• 4:13Alastair Campbell?

  Well, she's going to the House of Lords.

• 4:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, absolutely. With your friend Paul Dacre.

• 4:16Alastair Campbell?

  There's going to be a fantastic by-election, that one.

• 4:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, really good, that one. So Nadine Doris is not going into the Cabinet. Jacob Rees-Mogg is not going into the Cabinet. Yeah, I would imagine it will be one of the most dramatic reshuffles we've seen. I'd imagine 70% of that Cabinet will not be reappointed because. Far too many people were there simply because they were Boris Johnson loyalists.

• 4:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:39Rory Stewart?

  Here's a question from Jack. As a recovering drug addict, I find there is still a huge stigma, but that the recovery community isn't always helping itself to challenge it. The most famous support group has Anonymous in its name, and while valuing people's rights to privacy is important, what can be done to encourage those with lived experience of addiction and recovery to speak out and improve support and outcomes for people with addiction issues? Thinking of your fantastic work with Time to Change here also, Alastair.

• 5:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that is, funny enough, I'm, this book that I'm writing at the moment, I actually have a session, a section on Alcoholics Anonymous, which I think is one of the most extraordinary stories of two, literally two people, Bill and Bob, coming together because one of them needed help at a point of getting through a kind of, you know, trying not to drink and just meeting somebody else who was trying to do the same thing. And from that grew this incredible success story around the world.

• 5:39Rory Stewart?

  And remind us of how it works. Is it, there's a sort of Christian story at the beginning of it, is there or not? The sort of faith story?

• 5:45Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the 12, the 12 steps, they could, they could, look, a lot of people who use Alcoholics Anonymous are not, don't have any faith at all.

• 5:53Rory Stewart?

  But, but in the origin?

• 5:55Alastair Campbell?

  There is, there is a faith element to it, yeah, absolutely. And it's recognizing that you have no power over the addiction. And there's a higher, there's a higher power, but your higher power can, doesn't have to be God. For a lot of people, it is God. But the thing, so I like the anonymity. And when, when Bill was named as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the century, he didn't let them have a photograph because he, he feels the anonymity was, he felt the anonymity was so important.

• 6:24Rory Stewart?

  And why, why is the anonymity important? Sorry, let's just get into that for a second.

• 6:27Alastair Campbell?

  Because you need to be able to have complete trust in anonymity and feeling that you can go along to these meetings and nobody's going to talk about you outside.

• 6:38Rory Stewart?

  Right. So that's incredibly central to them, that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Nobody's allowed to leave the meetings and say who else was there or what.

• 6:46Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure Vegas is the best comparison to use, but, but yeah, basically, that, yeah. I mean, of course, people talk and people share their stories and what have you. But I think the general point in the question, in Jack's question. About drug addiction in particular, is there still a stigma? There's still a massive stigma to addiction. Um, you know, I still think that although organisations like Alcoholics Anonymous have kind of de-stigmatised alcoholism to some extent, there is still a huge stigma attached to it. There is a greater stigma attached to drug addiction because of the criminal element attached to that as well. So I do think that the more that people speak up about their own conquering addiction, or maybe conquering is the wrong word, but are dealing with addiction.

• 7:27Alastair Campbell?

  I feel for myself, for example, I had a drink problem. I was diagnosed as having a drink problem, but I'm not convinced that I'm an alcoholic. I think I'm an addictive personality and my addictions, you know, at the moment, I'm probably addicted to waking up every morning and checking that the podcast is at number one in the UK podcast charts.

• 7:46Rory Stewart?

  Well, thank goodness, thank goodness it is. What's going to happen when it isn't?

• 7:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you know, then I'll find another one. But it's a healthier addiction than alcohol or drugs or any of that stuff.

• 7:56Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Well, I don't know what we're going to do with this one. Ben Lam, having recently come off my honeymoon, where during periods of travelling in downtime, I listen to your fine podcasts, I can confirm so far the rest is politics is key to a happy marriage. That's a little bit self-congratulatory. I'm not really sure I should have read that out.

• 8:12Alastair Campbell?

  No, I don't think you should. In fact, there was a review in the Sunday Times of our podcast, Rory, it said that we were very pleased to be at number one, but it also said we were a little bit too pleased with ourselves.

• 8:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, that's

• 8:24Alastair Campbell?

  That's not a good characteristic.

• 8:25Rory Stewart?

  And that's not good, Ben. Okay, we're going to ignore that one.

• 8:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I don't know. I think we should keep it in because it shows a very interesting aspect of your of your character.

• 8:35Rory Stewart?

  Thank you so much. Justin Barry, you've discussed the young age of some of the conservative leadership candidates, but in America you have Biden and Trump who are much older. Should Biden step aside and let a younger Democrat run for the presidency?

• 8:48Alastair Campbell?

  I think the short answer to that is yes. But the question is who it would be? And the question is how much does he damage himself if he makes that clear? Look, I really like Joe Biden, but his ratings are absolutely terrible at the moment. I think there is a, you know, the one thing you need for election campaigning is massive energy. And I'm not saying he doesn't have energy, he does have energy, but I think I think it'll be very difficult and obviously it depends to some extent on who the opponent is. I think Americans are much more open to older candidates than we are.

• 9:19Rory Stewart?

  Why is that, Jay?

• 9:20Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know. I think it's because they they're maybe more used to it. If you go back through, I mean, Obama was a bit of an exception, Clinton was an exception. But I think if you if you if you look at the American senators, American congressmen, I think that they do tend to be older than our MPs.

• 9:37Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and they and they develop over time, don't they? People like Teddy Kennedy are able to sort of survive the scandals of their youth and reemerge as these great kind of lions of the Senate and people like John McCain, I guess. I I think they the Democrats in the United States are in a catastrophic situation. They cannot fail to lose the House in the midterms and they almost certainly will lose the Senate. They've got it by a tiny margin and the polls are terribly badly against them.

• 10:03Alastair Campbell?

  Now, here's one. John T Moore, I'm an A level politics teacher. I've recently been teaching my students about feminism. Firstly, do Alice and Rory consider themselves to be feminists?

• 10:13Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 10:13Alastair Campbell?

  Related to this, Roy, let's just stick with the education theme. Will, what makes the Eton experience different from other top private schools and why does it produce so many prime ministers? We'll come on to that one in a moment. First of all, on feminism, I have definitely become more of a feminist under the influence of my daughter Grace. By the way, tickets for her Fred Edinburgh Fringe gilded balloon appearance the month of August, she told me to say are now on sale. But I've definitely become more of a feminist. And I think that one of the things that's most influenced me is her constantly saying that until men understand that feminism is an issue for men and women, then the debate is not going to change and the dial is not not going to move as quickly as it should.

• 10:55Rory Stewart?

  And I think the same is true on on all social justice issues, right?

• 10:59Alastair Campbell?

  And and what about Eton? Let's let's talk. We haven't talked about Eton for at least a week.

• 11:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, so, look, it's it's true. It's it's it's all the things that you say about it, or many of the things that you say about it. But still, he's put his finger on something interesting. Why is it particularly that school rather than lots of other expensive private schools up and down the United Kingdom that seems to be generating so many politicians? And also, interestingly, a lot of soldiers. From my year at Eton, I think fifty of us joined the army. So there's something going on in that school which seems to be, from the moment that you enter, directing people towards, many of them towards careers in the army, in civil service and in politics. Whereas many of these other schools, most of the people leaving would never consider going to the army, wouldn't want to be a politician, and they go off to have a happy

• 11:48Rory Stewart?

  life, making money as bankers or management consultants.

• 11:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there's quite a few bankers who went to Eton, I think.

• 11:54Rory Stewart?

  There's definitely lots of bankers who went to Eton, a lot of journalists, a lot of actors. I mean, it's an interesting school like that. All these people, Dom West, Damian Lewis, I think Eddie Redmayne, Hugh Laurie, am I right? Yeah, Hugh Laurie, I think. Yeah, so, and of course, George Orwell, George Orwell, of course, that's the one that we need to focus on.

• 12:14Alastair Campbell?

  Eric, Eric, Eric, as we call him. Jean Lin, we're back on Taiwan. I'm a Taiwanese listener. We're obviously very big in Taiwan, Rory, and I appreciate how you guys talk about us through a relatively holistic lens, as opposed to just pieces on the geopolitical chessboard. What's the most effective narrative that Taiwan should adopt in order to form a strong alliance with other democracies? Should it be based on values, freedom, rule of law, et cetera, economics, e.g. semiconductors, that we were talking about earlier, or something else? That's a good question.

• 12:42Rory Stewart?

  That's a brilliant question, isn't it?

• 12:44Alastair Campbell?

  I think they don't have a profile, really, other than on the technological side of stuff, and as a potential victim of what would be a catastrophic and highly controversial Chinese takeover.

• 12:59Rory Stewart?

  I think the democracy element is important, isn't it? I mean, one of the reasons why we remain, the world remains incredibly well disposed towards Taiwan, is because of that democratic transition. But my goodness, they're in a tough situation. When you look at all those countries around the world that were allied with Taiwan, we were talking about some of the South Sea Islands recently. Who've been flipped to China and there's just a scale and size the Chinese economy and the way in which Taiwan, which is an incredibly productive, economically successful place, but simply can't compete on scale.

• 13:32Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, we'll take a break now. We'll be back in a sec.

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• 15:43Rory Stewart?

  I was gonna go with Richard Cassidy. So he said he really enjoyed his trip to the House of Commons, but he was really disappointed that they didn't have HP sauce in the gift shop. And he wanted to know whether you liked HP sauce or ketchup.

• 15:57Alastair Campbell?

  Wow. Rory, do you know who Danny Baker is?

• 16:00Rory Stewart?

  No. I obviously don't know who anyone is. So every question you ask me, the answer's the same.

• 16:05Alastair Campbell?

  Danny Baker and Gary Lineker used to do a podcast together. And Danny Baker also used to do a show on a Saturday morning, which I listened to as I drove up the motorway to go and see Burnley. And I was once a guest on his show. And part of the show was you had to say whether you like red sauce, brown sauce, or no sauce at all with your bacon sandwich. And I revealed, and I thought I was revealing something that was very, very private to me, I revealed that I actually had an irrational fear of ketchup. I cannot be in the presence of ketchup. If somebody has ketchup on the table, let alone sprays it all over their food, I feel sick and I have to leave.

• 16:44Rory Stewart?

  Wait, wait, wait. Let's just get into this for a second. What on earth is this? What's going on there? When did this begin?

• 16:49Alastair Campbell?

  I think when I was a child, I just never liked, I don't like ketchup near me. My daughter Grace, when she wants to annoy me, she gets ketchup and sort of chases me around the house with a bottle of ketchup.

• 17:00Rory Stewart?

  This was something that was true when he was sort of five, six years old and you haven't managed

• 17:03Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's been worse as an adult, but I didn't like ketchup as a child. But as an adult, I literally can't even be near it.

• 17:11Rory Stewart?

  Why? Why do you think you don't like it?

• 17:13Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's to do with blood. I'm a bit squeamish about blood. I don't know. But I've always had it. So I said it. And then Danny contacted me later. And there'd been lots of people who got in touch and said, I've got the same thing. They have the same thing. And I then discovered it's a hell, it's a condition. It's called saltomophobia.

• 17:33Alastair Campbell?

  Saltomophobia. And in Australia, in Australia, it's called equus mortis phobia, because equus mortis, Latin for dead horse, dead horse rhyming slang red sauce.

• 17:45Rory Stewart?

  My goodness.

• 17:46Alastair Campbell?

  We educate, we educate on this so much.

• 17:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm also interested in this thing about blood. My father, who like you was a big match show Scottish guy, was also surprisingly, didn't really like blood, despite having been in the army. Despite, actually really loved being in the army, fought all the way through the war. I'm completely indifferent to it. I mean, I handle dead bodies. I've had to try to, I've tried to give mouth to mouth to people who haven't come back. I've dealt with people, a lot of blood, a lot of piss. Doesn't, doesn't affect me at all, but my dad hated it.

• 18:15Alastair Campbell?

  I've, one of the first times I met Fiona, when we were trainee journalists together, we were taken on a tour of the Devon and Cornwall Police Headquarters and we were taken into this room where they're investigating a murder and there were pictures of the dead body all over the wall and I just passed out, I fainted. I'm a bit squeamish with that stuff and, and I think the source is about that, but honestly Rory, um, don't ever bring out the red sauce.

• 18:38Rory Stewart?

  No, I won't, I won't.

• 18:40Alastair Campbell?

  Now, here's a good one for you. Here's a good one for you from Una McGarvey. Rory, what interview question have you fluffed? And Alistair, how should he have answered the question?

• 18:49Rory Stewart?

  Oh my lord, well, the problem is the, the interview, the interview questions I've fluffed, I'm afraid I know how you would have answered the question.

• 18:55Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 18:56Rory Stewart?

  My most humiliating one was, um, during the flooding in 2015, I was a young flooding minister and I was really loving my job and it was horrifying, obviously. It was Storm Desmond and I, Storm Eva, and I was charging up and down the country, Cumbria, Yorkshire, Lancashire, standing up to my knees in floodwater. And I thought I'd really got my head around the detail. I felt, you know, I knew more about floods than Dean Doris knows about rugby league and it was all going very well. And then eventually, uh, a television interview, it's about sort of seven in the morning, just before dawn in Carlisle's winter, asks me what's going on. And I said, well, the fact is, you see, these walls that we've built, these two metre walls, flood walls that we built, are working really, really well. The only problem is that the waters come over the top of them.

• 19:39Rory Stewart?

  And, and from then onwards, as you can imagine, straight into have I got news for you next week, you know, the most hapless, idiotic Tory minister.

• 19:49Alastair Campbell?

  Oh my lord, I'm not even, well, as you say, you know what I would say, you should have said. That, that is, that is, that is pretty, that is pretty, that is pretty low grade. Rory, what about this one? Which political cliche do you hate the most?

• 20:03Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I, I hate them all. I really hate them all. I, I mean, to be serious, I actually get a little disturbed about all the parties talking about equality all the time, because I'm not sure that actually, to be rude, any of them really mean equality. When, if they were really serious about real equality.

• 20:22Alastair Campbell?

  They'd get rid of private schools.

• 20:23Rory Stewart?

  We'd have a complete, well, we'd have a completely different economic system. I mean, to be honest, if you look, you know, Labour keeps saying they're committed to equality. But actually, if you look at their taxation system, if you look at the kind of stuff they're proposing economically, they're not really in favour of radical equality at all. Another one that annoys me is sustainability, because it can mean three different things. It can mean financial sustainability, it can mean environmental, or it can just mean it's a good thing. And it's a way I felt civil service just sort of killing a conversation. Somebody would say, yes, but how about sustainability? And everyone kind of stroke their chin and look wise. What do you hate in jargon?

• 20:59Alastair Campbell?

  I loathe a raft of measures.

• 21:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, okay.

• 21:03Alastair Campbell?

  I loathe game changer.

• 21:06Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 21:09Alastair Campbell?

  And one of the things that I can't stand, and this is where, this is more a media thing. It's when they say, in his most personal interview yet, or in his most difficult week yet. You know, when they, everything has to be a sort of, sort of superlative. Now, Richard Eccles, by the way, I couldn't find a random item just now. I looked everywhere. My wife employed the Rory Stewart protocol. It'll be in the original place. I looked again. I found it in two seconds. No wonder you're the number one podcast.

• 21:38Rory Stewart?

  It's, I, you know, actually, this is probably the most serious contribution I've ever made to humanity. You, you won't have been following my Twitter feed, but I've getting literally hundreds of people writing in every week, telling me that I had found their car keys, I'd found their pen, I'd found their wallet. It's literally revolutionary. I mean, I, I feel a little bit like it.

• 21:58Alastair Campbell?

  I think they have to take a little bit of credit themselves. I really do. I don't think you can take the extra credit. Remember, Harry Truman said, it's amazing what a small group of men can achieve, provided nobody cares who gets the credit.

• 22:07Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's, that's good. That's good, but they are very sweetly giving me the credit. I feel vaguely, just to remind people what this tip is. The tip is that if you've lost something, it is where you think it is. In other words, you looked first time, you couldn't find it, you go back, you find it, and it doesn't work every time. My friend John Hat got in touch with me and he said, Rory, that was a bit much. You've got to point out it doesn't work every time. Although I thought that might sort of remove some of the religious fervour of this insight. But definitely, it's literally the most important philosophical or religious insight I've ever arrived at.

• 22:43Alastair Campbell?

  Final quick one. Katie Bott, in which city would you choose to have a street named after you?

• 22:49Rory Stewart?

  Oh, brilliant.

• 22:50Alastair Campbell?

  Where would you like to have Rory Stewart's streets, Rory?

• 22:53Rory Stewart?

  Oh, goodness gracious me. I'd love it in Kabul. And I guess with you, the answer's got to be Tirana, right?

• 22:58Alastair Campbell?

  It might be Tirana, or maybe Pristina. Maybe Pristina. Pristina, which has the worst statue of Bill Clinton that's ever been built.

• 23:06Rory Stewart?

  Let's do something slightly grim, just to finish our questions, which is a more serious political one. Do you agree the Scottish government has a mandate for a second independence, taking into account the recent election? If not, why not? And how would a mandate otherwise be acquired? So just to remind listeners, it seems at the moment as though Nicola Sturgeon is genuinely trying to argue that she's got a mandate to have another referendum, really not many years after the last referendum. Certainly doesn't feel like a generation after the last referendum. Do you, Anna, still think she's got a mandate to do that?

• 23:39Alastair Campbell?

  I think technically the answer is no, because of where the power lies to call a referendum. The question then is whether politically she has that. And I think that's, I'm not convinced. Has the debate shifted so significantly? I don't know. You're living up there at the moment. What was your view?

• 23:59Rory Stewart?

  Unless she can show a much bigger chunk of the Scottish population. If it remains, it is a sort of marginal call, where actually in many polls, it's showing that a minority of people are now in favour of independence. I think it's very difficult for her to call for a second referendum, having said it's a once in a generation opportunity. Final question that I got here, just while we're rolling. Somebody very, very kindly called Catherine Malik, said she'd just finished reading The Places in Between. Yes, I know, super late. Have a question for Rory. 20 years later, how does he think those villages he walks through will have changed, if at all? And I've been thinking about this. I walked across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal.

• 24:40Rory Stewart?

  And definitely Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have changed far less than 20 years than you could possibly have believed. It's really depressing. I would never have guessed if you'd said to me 20 years ago, you know, what's it going to look like in 2022? And to discover that so much of rural Iran has remained unchanged, that society seems so stagnant and frozen, in many ways going backwards. And the same, of course, is true of Afghanistan. I mean, so much rural Afghanistan still doesn't have electricity, doesn't have functioning roads, doesn't have functioning clinics.

• 25:11Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, you're depressing me again.

• 25:12Rory Stewart?

  All right, we're gonna, well, we don't want to depress. So go finish with one happy story and we'll wrap up the question. Oh, except for the really happy story, of course, is that listeners should be listening to my wonderful BBC Radio 4.

• 25:23Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, for God's sake, you've just plugged the book. You've just plugged the book. You're now plugging.

• 25:29Rory Stewart?

  I'm learning, I'm learning, I'm learning.

• 25:31Alastair Campbell?

  On the podcast, on the podcast, you plug the podcast.

• 25:35Rory Stewart?

  That's not true. You're always plugging, you're always plugging, you're always plugging your TV show about choosing a politician.

• 25:40Alastair Campbell?

  Make me Prime Minister.

• 25:41Rory Stewart?

  Okay, Prime Minister. So let me just plug mine. Long history of argument, long history of argument from Socrates to social media on Radio 4 on Tuesdays at nine. Right. Finish with a happy thing, Elsa. Give us something cheery to go away on.

• 25:56Alastair Campbell?

  I got a lovely message from the genius Icelandic manager of ABBA, saying how much Benny and Bjorn loved my attacks on Boris Johnson recently.

• 26:06Rory Stewart?

  No, well, also they loved your singing, apparently, is what you told me. They loved you singing in German.

• 26:11Alastair Campbell?

  They loved me singing Dankeschön Musik auf Deutsch. Yeah, yeah.

• 26:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that is nice. Okay, that may be a little self-congratulatory for us to end on, but we have no alternative other than to end. Thank you, guys, very much indeed.

• 26:23Alastair Campbell?

  Bye bye.

• 26:47Speaker 05

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 26:51Speaker 06

  I'm not the first man.

• 26:52Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 26:57Speaker 09

  Espolone Tequila. Balanced, delicious. 100% agave, 0% ego. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 27:07Speaker 05

  Espolone Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaq America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.