153. How radical would Labour be in power?

Would Keir Starmer be radical or conservative as prime minister? Is enough being done to combat the current heatwave affecting much of the world? What should we make of Kemi Badenoch's new trade deal? Join Rory and Alastair on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics as they answer all this and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:13Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Restors Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:16Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:18Rory Stewart?

  And Alistair, this week, I think probably the most dramatic thing is that it looks like we're on to probably the hottest year on record. We just had the hottest June on record. Now it looks like we're going to have the hottest July on record. One of the hottest temperatures ever recorded in over 100 years, recorded in California. China off the charts, Greece wildfires, Italy temperatures almost up at 50.

• 1:44Alastair Campbell?

  And it's all your fault, Rory, because you're never off aeroplanes.

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

  And it's all personally my fault.

• 1:49Alastair Campbell?

  I must put my hands up. I have tried really, really hard this year not to fly as much. And I've actually been pretty successful. But I have made two journeys by aeroplane this week. So I apologize to the planet for that. Well, we've got to talk about that. We'll talk about that in the in the second half. I think we should kick off with Labour.

• 2:08Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 2:08Alastair Campbell?

  We had a big, a big sort of analysis last week about whether Rishi Sunak can find a path to victory. Let's talk about where Keir Starmer and Labour are.

• 2:16Rory Stewart?

  So then maybe we should do the Trans-Pacific Partnership. So I think you've been talking a bit about this on the media, but this is Britain announcing that it's joining a free trade deal in the Pacific. And it's a very, very interesting deal. And it's also a slightly comical story about government claims around something whose economic impact looks like it's going to be pretty small. Then I think you wanted to do intelligence report on China. So the House of Commons Select Committee on Intelligence and Security has just produced a report warning about Chinese infiltration into Britain and the lack of government action. And then probably finally, we should return to climate, particularly given what's going on this week.

• 2:57Alastair Campbell?

  Cool. Good. Well, let's kick off with Labour then. You're in Jordan at the moment, are you? Have you been able to follow much of the domestic scene? Keir Starmer did an interview on the BBC at the weekend, dropped another pledge, or what was thought to be a pledge, on child benefit, got a bit of flak for that. And today, speaking at the Future Britain Conference, which is hosted by the Tony Blair Institute, and coming out, I think, with quite an interesting speeches. Well, anyway, give me your thoughts first before I go.

• 3:23Rory Stewart?

  I think the first thing is that Labour's policy has been to be super cautious fiscally. And I'm interested to hear from you whether this is that they're worried that it could be like 1992, where John Major's government looked like it was in a lot of trouble. But the Conservatives were able to spin Labour, and those days Neil Kinnock, as being irresponsible on the economy, and they managed to pull off an unexpected victory. So maybe there is a fear from Labour's part of you that if they give an inch on seeming irresponsible on the economy, they could be in trouble. But the result is that Rachel Reeves, who's the Shadow Chancellor,

• 4:04Rory Stewart?

  has set up incredibly strict rules, which are basically not allowing her to spend money on anything. She said that she wants to reduce debt as a proportion of GDP. She's only going to borrow for investment. And the result is that so many of the things, free school meals, a child benefit limit, DIFID.

• 4:25Rory Stewart?

  The Green Investment Fund, Universal Childcare, all of this, they seem to be backing out of.

• 4:31Alastair Campbell?

  You know, when we talked to John Major on leading, you mentioned John Major there. And I said to him, do you think maybe you've been underestimated most of your life? And I'm beginning to wonder whether we're slightly underestimating Keir Starmer's ruthlessness in his determination to win. He's getting a quite a lot of flak at the moment for some of these decisions that he's taking, or more, I guess you could say, some of the decisions that he's taking not to do things. And obviously, the comparisons of the 1997 are very, very, there are some similarities, but the big difference is that, you know, the economy is absolutely tanking at the moment, as we've said, and that is going to be the case if and when Keir Starmer becomes Prime Minister.

• 5:12Rory Stewart?

  Which famously, it wasn't in 97, as John Major keeps complaining rather grumpily. The economy was doing reasonably well.

• 5:19Alastair Campbell?

  It wasn't this sort of, you know, wonderful benign green picture that they claimed, but it was certainly better than it is now. And so Labour will come in, if Keir Starmer becomes Prime Minister and Rachel Reeves is Chancellor, come in with a hell of a difficult entree. And I think what they're trying to do is, you know that famous phrase that Linton Crosby often used about getting rid of some of the barnacles off the bottom of the boat, so as they can focus on the things that they really want to emphasise? I think maybe they're doing a bit of that, but at the same time, what I've noticed in Keir Starmer's recent speeches, the best of which I thought was his education speech, is actually sort of really hammering some of these bigger strategic points. And I think it's interesting that he's at that Tony Blair conference today, because

• 6:02Alastair Campbell?

  Tony's absolute obsession, as I know from talking to him and from reading what he writes and says, is that there has to be a completely different way of governing, and it has to be rooted in fundamentally embracing the technological revolution in a way that currently we're not. And that's the way to transform public services, it's the way to transform the jobs market, it's the way to transform pensions. You remember the article he wrote recently with William Hague about the digital identity card? And it's interesting that Keir is there and sort of beginning, I think, to point in that direction as well. His big message seems to be, we can do absolutely nothing that we want to. Unless we grow the economy, and that means taking a completely different approach. And I think that message is is very frustrating for a lot of Labour people who are still in that

• 6:46Alastair Campbell?

  place of, well, the Tories cut stuff and we spend stuff.

• 6:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 6:49Alastair Campbell?

  And he's trying to move away from that, I think.

• 6:51Rory Stewart?

  Let me sort of push back for a bit. I mean, one of the problems is that if that's their view, they've created a problem for themselves by making announcements and then backing out of them. So Bridget Philipson announced that they were going to have something as exciting as the formation of the NHS, which was going to be the provision of free childcare all the way from the end of somebody's maternity or paternity leave, all the way through to when they entered school. It's going to be a fantastically dramatic thing. I think probably more generous than any other country in the world had. That was announced with a great fanfare. They've dropped it. Everybody's been pointing out that Theresa May's policy of putting a two-child limit on benefit payments has been very associated with a

• 7:35Rory Stewart?

  rise in poverty. Some people say, you know, thirty five billion pounds a year, however these things are calculated. That's been dropped. They signaled that they were in favour of free school meals for everybody. They've dropped that. And this green investment fund, which we were talking about six months ago, which was almost the only thing in their economic policy, they were going to be putting twenty eight billion pounds a year into borrowing for green investments. So the first problem, I guess, from a communications point of view is why on earth announce all these things and then drop them?

• 8:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that is a very, very good question, but I think it's because they've they've this is the strategy that they've now fixed upon. And I think there is a strategy to it. So if you think about through my my my OST, objective strategy tactic, approach to campaigns, objective, absolutely to win. That is the simple objective they have right now. Strategy is sort of cautious change. It's change but with reassurance. When I talked about being ruthless, he's not focusing on people like me. He's not focusing on people that want to sort of, you know, get out there and campaign. He's focusing on people who are a bit grumpy and a bit unsure. And the other thing I think that that explains the the kind of downplaying of big promises. One of the things that's been presented to

• 8:49Alastair Campbell?

  this conference, the Future Britain Conference.

• 8:53Alastair Campbell?

  There's some polling which I just got sent literally just before we started from the, it's called the New Britain Project and they've done this polling. And it's very, very depressing because what it shows is that people just don't believe the country can be transformed, they don't believe the country can be improved. Very, very negative views on politicians in general, lack of optimism about Britain's future, lack of optimism about our ability to meet the challenges. And therefore, I think part of the thinking is that in not sort of saying we're going to transform everything overnight, they're kind of playing into that mood. But John Ryan once said to you ages ago, there was a point at which when I didn't

• 9:35Alastair Campbell?

  really rate David Cameron very highly, this was when they were in opposition still, and Tony Blair said to me, yeah, but you know what, the public think he's good enough. And that always stuck with me and I think that's kind of where Keir Starmer is at the moment. I think people are sort of looking thinking, yeah, I think he's good enough, particularly against the 13 years that we've had. And the other thing I'd just say about the promises, I will lay you a bet now, if we're still doing this podcast in a couple of years' time, I will lay you a bet now that if there is a Labour government, they will lift the child benefit cap. And if there is a Labour government, they will do the childcare thing.

• 10:11Rory Stewart?

  So publicly, they refuse to say they're going to do any of that so they can get away with claiming they have fiscal discipline and then they can have Alistair out on the way of saying, don't worry, you're going to get all the goodies, even though they're saying they're not going to give you.

• 10:22Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'm not saying you get them all, but we did it. So for example, I can vividly remember fairly early in our term, because we'd, in our first term, because we'd said we were going to stick to the Tory spending limits for two years and we weren't raising taxes, very similar approach if you think about it, that one of the first things we had to do was to implement a benefit cut. I can't remember all the detail, but I remember Harriet Harman, I think was Secretary of State at the time, she was absolutely furious that this was something that she had to do. But it was kind of, we'd promised that we're going to do it. Now, if you look at what she then subsequently did of benefits, once we had started to get the economy moving in the right direction, once there was money, once we have been able to make changes elsewhere. So I suspect, listen, I think that's the strategy.

• 11:07Alastair Campbell?

  If not, I agree with you, I think it's all a bit baffling.

• 11:09Rory Stewart?

  Just to add to the bafflement for a second, I mean... This is an election which is more about the economy than almost any election I can ever imagine. I mean, this is really where it's the economy, stupid, is really going to show through. And they have nothing to say about the central issue in the election. And they're still 20 points ahead in the polls.

• 11:30Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, I think they're saying quite a lot. But what they're not doing is saying, and the answer to all of these problems is that we now spend more money on this. I was quite intrigued, by the way, one thing that leapt out at me in Keir Starmer's speech at the Tony Blair conference, was that he was kind of absolutely clear that this, I think he called it, this disastrous Brexit deal had to be fixed. I thought that was a step in the right direction. And the focus on growth, I think, you know, do you remember Tony's soundbite, ask me my three priorities, and I'll tell you, education, education, education. And Keir Starmer is sort of aping that today with growth, growth, growth. Now, where I agree with you, is that what you wouldn't be able to take from that speech, or any speeches made, is there's a detailed plan for growth. But I think what they're doing

• 12:15Alastair Campbell?

  is signaling that that's where they're going to be during the election campaign. And the other point I think is worth making on this, is that you just said, you know, they're not saying much about this and that, where they're still 20 points ahead in the polls. That's what I meant earlier when I was making the point about John Major being underestimated. It is quite an achievement to be 20 points ahead of the polls. And you've got these by-elections coming up later this week. Now, if you just think about when you were an MP, the idea of Labour ever winning that Selby seat that is now up for grabs, and the Tories are going around this place saying, well, you know, if we hold on to Selby, it'll be an amazing achievement. And so you think that what's happening is that the time for

• 12:56Alastair Campbell?

  change mood is so strong, that what Keir, I think, is refusing to do is to make it all about him, all about Labour, while the government continues to create as much mess as it does.

• 13:07Rory Stewart?

  We're in the classic game of all the parties spinning, one party saying, the Conservatives saying, you know, we'll be doing well if we lose all the seats, and Labour saying, we'll be doing well if we win one of them. And

• 13:22Alastair Campbell?

  Look, these things always have an expectation game being played. I think the Tories are really, really, really hammering the idea that they're going to lose all three and it'll be an amazing try-up if they only lose Selby by 3,000.

• 13:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, remember you told them off for saying that, you know, they tried to say last time, you know, we'll be lucky if we don't lose a thousand seats and then they ended up losing more than a thousand in the council elections. So now they're going to have to be even more cautious. That's the Alistair advice.

• 13:48Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing that I'm finding intriguing is that Peter Kyle, who we both like, he is running Labour's campaign in Mid Bedfordshire and he's tweeting pictures every day of the campaign in Mid Bedfordshire. But the wretched Nadine Dorries is still not, having said she's going to leave, she's still not left. She's still taking the money, doing her TV programme. And I wonder whether she's, either she's waiting to do it at a moment of maximum damage to Sunak, I don't know. Or she's just decided, you know what, I think I'll hang on a bit.

• 14:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think she definitely, it's, this is motivated by Nadine Dorries being angry with Rishi Sunak because she's not getting to go into the House of Lords. So she's essentially, I think, just taking the piss. She's going to turn up to Parliament almost not at all, take her salary, let down her constituents, let down her party, let down everybody and she doesn't care.

• 14:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, okay.

• 14:40Rory Stewart?

  So let me create another challenge on this. So we had the Kate Rowworth challenge, which is the world is in real trouble.

• 14:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Rory Stewart?

  Climate's in trouble, the environment's in trouble and no politician is being remotely brave in stepping forward with solutions.

• 14:55Alastair Campbell?

  And I agree with that.

• 14:56Rory Stewart?

  And I'm afraid that's true of the whole lot of them. We're not hearing any courage from Keir Starmer on that. But I'd add to that, if you think about the things that matter to voters, I mean, so let's set aside winning the election for a second, which I agree is a big deal and I think Keir Starmer is very likely to win that election. And he's very likely to win it because the economy is in such trouble that Rishi Sunak's not going to be able to deliver on getting inflation down and growth up and so he's finished. But if you think about what voters really want, currently many people are spending almost 80% of their take-home pay on their childcare. So childcare is a huge issue for parents of young children.

• 15:38Rory Stewart?

  At the other end of the extreme, adult social care remains a completely shocking, shameful disgrace. People in Cumbria are still being seen by a care about fifteen minutes a day. So at those both ends of life, there is an absolute crying need for someone to say, we've got a policy on childcare and we're going to try to address universal adult social care. And that's where I want to see some signalling from Labour, that they're going to do these things.

• 16:07Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, I agree with you. It's been a, it's been a sort of higgledy piggledy route. But they are signalling, for example, on childcare. But what they're not doing is putting out detailed policy that allows the Tories to say, these are just a bunch of spendthrifts who'll promise you everything and deliver nothing. I think if anything, what Keir Starmer's trying to do is under promise in the hope of over-delivering, based on the fact that he thinks he's going to win.

• 16:32Rory Stewart?

  So here are some things they could be doing without getting hit by the Tories on the grounds that they're, they're spendthrifts. They could be, I think, putting up income tax for the wealthiest and taking some revenue from that. They could be borrowing to build social housing. They could be really investing in an industrial strategy that focused on where our real science strengths were. So where we were with Paul Nurse going into the Crick Institute. It's controversial because it would mean accepting that the competitive advantage that Britain has at the moment in science is London, Oxford and Cambridge, and you need to throw the kitchen sink at getting from the basic research into developing

• 17:14Rory Stewart?

  products and businesses. Those are things that they could be signalling, and those aren't things that necessarily need to get them in trouble from the Tories.

• 17:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. We should say, by the way, that Paul Nurse is our next guest on Leading, which will be out next Monday. He's the Nobel Prize winning scientist who had some very interesting things to say about the failure of politics. And I think he would agree with what you've just said. I still think some of these, these things may come. Look, I have got a long, long experience going right back to when I was a journalist covering Michael Foot, let alone Neil Kinnock, John Smith and Tony Blair and Gordon, of Labour leaders get treated very differently in the run-up to a campaign. We've seen so much of this. Every time Labour polishes and opens the mouth, where's the money coming from? The Tories, they don't even get asked anymore about Liz Truss's ridiculous kamikaze budget that smashed a great hole in the in the economy. Rishi Sunak comes out all that

• 18:07Alastair Campbell?

  stuff this week about education and university degrees, and it was so sort of on the back of a fag packet that it was embarrassing, and yet it sort of gets portrayed as these great detailed crusading plans.

• 18:18Rory Stewart?

  I mean, you're also right. The government's made huge concessions on salaries, public sector wages, which they promised they weren't going to do, and they've now done.

• 18:26Alastair Campbell?

  And which they claim they're going to pay for, how they're going to pay for it, out of efficiencies and also out of charging more for migrant visas.

• 18:34Rory Stewart?

  They won't be able to pay for those things.

• 18:36Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. So I actually thought, Rory, on the public sector pay, that there was an element of them thinking, okay, you've been banging on about this, here's your pay rise, take it or leave it. In any case, we're not going to be the ones who are going to have to pay it because we will be out of power by then. There was an element to me that they they didn't even care that they hadn't got the detail on it. So they they get treated in a totally different way. And I just think Keir's being very, very cautious, but in in a way that's very frustrating to a lot of people, Labour Party members and so forth. But I think I'm getting a better understanding as to why he's doing it like this.

• 19:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, there we are. It sounds like you're becoming more of a in favour of the Ming Vard strategy.

• 19:11Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'm not in favour of the Ming Vard strategy because I still want them, ahead of the election, to have four or five really big things that the public are going to say, yeah, that's what I want. I'll tell you another thing, by the way, we haven't mentioned this, but I actually was quite taken with the speech that Angela Rayner made last week about standards in public life. I really do think there is a there is my political mileage and the public are yearning for somebody to come along and say, this is going to be a very different sort of government. And I know people don't believe the big promises, but I think on that. They will believe actually that Labour think the corruption that we saw during Covid, the lying of Johnson, the uselessness of trust. And I thought her idea about sort of, you know, really getting, trying to rebuild the sense of ethics and integrity in public

• 19:56Alastair Campbell?

  life. And that's not a big spending thing. So I really hope that they go down that track as well.

• 20:01Rory Stewart?

  Good thing to go on. Right. So on to the subject of the trade partnership, which the UK government's just signed up to. So little bit, little bit of background on this. The Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

• 20:15Alastair Campbell?

  CPTTP.

• 20:17Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Amazing. So just to give people the background and we'll then, I think, maybe divide this into two and let you talk about what the impact is on the UK and how this works as a response to Brexit. But a little bit about what this partnership was. It came out of an original agreement between Brunei, New Zealand and Singapore and Chile in 2006. And increasingly interested President Obama. And at its height, this was going to be a trade partnership which would embrace the entire Pacific Rim. So Chile, Japan, the United States, it was going to be nearly 40% of world trade was going to be caught up in this thing.

• 21:00Rory Stewart?

  And somewhere in the back of Obama's mind was an idea that this could be a counterbalance to China because the one Pacific nation which was not being included in these things was China. So it was part of Obama's tilt towards the Pacific. It was going to be an economic counterbalance to China. Incredible amount of work went into it. And these trade deals are so interesting when you look back at them. There were huge fights with Green Lobby. There were huge fights about human rights legislation, huge fights about whether companies had too much power over governments. So basically what you're trying to do is create an environment where companies feel secure investing in all these countries. But the more you do to reassure the countries, the more you limit the freedom of movement to the governments. Because the companies then can sue the governments if something changes on the ground which infects

• 21:45Rory Stewart?

  their investments. So all this controversy and the US eventually. Basically Obama managed to win most people round and it was pretty impressive. Had good stuff on labour rights, child labour, it was changing the way the Malaysians were dealing with human trafficking, doing good stuff on illegal logging. And then Trump announced when he was running for the election that he was going to pull out of the whole thing.

• 22:06Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 22:07Rory Stewart?

  And the Democrats followed suit. They began getting increasingly quiet about this. And this was all part of America's lurch from free trade to protectionism, meaning that what was left were the countries without the United States. And it's these countries that Britain's now joining.

• 22:21Alastair Campbell?

  This, of course, was part of the time when a guy, my namesake, Kurt Campbell, was in charge of this area of policy for Obama. And he was the guy, really, who was behind this, what became known as the pivot, the pivot towards the east. And central to that was this focus upon this, you know, what for the America would have been a big shift in, in trade policy. And as you say, part of their, their battle with, with China. And I think it's, it's very, very interesting now, the extent to which that's not even really part of the debate anymore in American politics. Um, and I, I've, I've just been reading a, a book, which I think you'd love, actually, called Sinostan.

• 23:06Alastair Campbell?

  Um, I don't know if you've heard of this. It's two guys, Raffaello Pantucci and an American called Alexandros Peterson, who sadly was murdered whilst writing the book in Kabul. It's quite an incredible book, actually, because these, these are two guys, they're basically academics, but they, they, you lose count of how many times they've visited virtually all of the stands, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan. And what's really interesting, though, is just when you see the scale of China ambition and the pace, the patience that they have in pursuing these very, very long-term objectives. And so you now see, and the other thing that comes through very, very interestingly

• 23:48Alastair Campbell?

  is the extent to which the tensions with Russia in that region are playing out an awful lot. And I just think it's almost comical to be, I was reading this book, which was, was at the time that the, that our papers were full of this stuff about the, about the CPTPP. And Kemi Badenoch out in New Zealand telling us this was a sort of marvellous win for Brexit. And the Daily Express telling us it was a, I think it was a 12 trillion pound Brexit deal, when in fact, even by the government's own reckoning, this is going to add 0.08% to the size of our economy over 10 years, which does not remotely fill the gap left by Brexit.

• 24:32Alastair Campbell?

  But meanwhile, the sense you get from this, reading this book about China, is that they're just absolutely on the march through that whole Central Asian region. So I, I think this is something that was interesting. I agree with you that, I think that you said at the start of this episode, you said that it's a fascinating deal, I think you said. I think it's a fascinating treaty. I think the British part of the deal, frankly, is a bit of a joke. And I saw somebody who was analysing the coverage of, of this in, in Asia, fair to say, wasn't quite as exciting as it was in the, in the Daily Express and the Daily Mail.

• 25:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think as you, as you pointed out, one of the problems is the UK already has trade deals with nine out of the 11 countries that participate. So it really doesn't make that much difference. You're only talking about bringing in deals with two of those countries. The other nine were already there in place and were rolled over from the EU deals. The other thing I think that's interesting is the way that the world, we, we often talk about that period, sort of 2014, 15, 16, as being a big turning point in the world, a turning away from the old liberal world order of the 1990s, which was all about open free trade, democracies, et cetera, to the world of populism and authoritarianism. And we can see now that this deal and Obama's hopes for it were the kind of last hurrah

• 25:56Rory Stewart?

  of the old period. Now, in the US context... Protectionism is very much the order of the day. It's no longer a people making traditional arguments about comparative advantage and how it's cheaper and better for everybody if goods are produced in the place where they can be produced most cheaply. Instead, people are very much about industrial strategy, about relocating chip factories, thinking about security interests, which I guess is something we'll get on to with the China report. And even I noticed there was a small detail on this. Jacinta Radden in New Zealand had been challenging this deal because it allowed Vietnamese to buy property in New Zealand, driving up property prices for New Zealanders.

• 26:38Rory Stewart?

  And it was another sort of interesting example of how Brexit was part of a broader world moving away from open global free trade towards more protectionism, more concerns about sovereignty. How do you prevent Vietnamese buying properties in your country? Whereas 10 years earlier, the story was all about let's make it easier for Vietnamese investors to come in.

• 26:57Alastair Campbell?

  They've stopped talking about global Britain though, haven't they?

• 26:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, we haven't heard about that recently since your friend Boris Johnson toddled off.

• 27:03Alastair Campbell?

  I assume he would have died with him. And I don't, I'm not convinced that the successors of these academics who've written this book about, called Sino Stan, I'm not convinced they'll be writing one about how Britain sort of transformed world trade through this membership of the CPTPP.

• 27:18Rory Stewart?

  I must say, when I first heard it, I got the number wrong. I thought 0.8%, that's not bad, but 0.08%, that's really not very impressive at all. 0.08% is not, not great.

• 27:28Alastair Campbell?

  And also, although he has dropped some of the Boris Johnson mantras, I do think it's pretty incredible that when he has these newspapers, these ridiculous newspapers like the Express, who will literally put on the front page, now do they do it because they're asked to by Number 10? Or do they do it just because they're on kind of autopilot to give whatever they think, the propaganda they think the government wants? But surely, if you're a serious politician and a newspaper says it's 12 trillion pound deal, I saw ministers going out sort of defending it rather than saying, no, no, that's obviously a nonsense, which is, and then, and the other thing he did, I'll tell you something else because you keep, we keep going on about how, you know, grown up he is and all that stuff.

• 28:10Alastair Campbell?

  I noticed after the NATO summit recently, Rishi Sunak did a tweet saying, Labour asked me not to go to this, but here's what I've achieved. And that was based upon the fact that at the liaison committee, I think it was Chris Bryant, who, by the way, I gave his book the wrong name last week. It's not Out of Order, it's Code of Conduct. But Chris Bryant has sort of said, you know, you do seem to miss Prime Minister's Questions quite a lot. Don't you think you should be in Parliament a bit more often? And on that basis, he does a tweet saying, "Labour didn't want me to go to the NATO summit." So I think, you know, Rory, we've got to call out his populist moves at the same time.

• 28:44Rory Stewart?

  I think it's the desperation of the comms machines.

• 28:47Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think it is? I hope, because I just think it's part of them playing into this post-truth world, of which our newspapers are such a part.

• 28:55Rory Stewart?

  I think it's even, I mean, if I think about people in Rishi Sunak's inner circle, who I like and sympathise with, most of them are not people who are populist. Most of them are people who are horrified by Boris Johnson.

• 29:07Alastair Campbell?

  But they shouldn't be. He shouldn't be putting out stuff like that, should he? "Labour didn't want me to go to the NATO summit."

• 29:13Rory Stewart?

  It's astonishing how, when the tension shows, when people are 20 points behind in the polls, when people are panicking, what complete nonsense people come out with. I agree. Right, shall we take a quick break?

• 29:25Alastair Campbell?

  Let's have a break.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  Here we are getting a statement from Number 10 on that flight with 350 passengers on board.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 29:50Speaker 04

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

• 29:56Speaker 05

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 29:58Speaker 06

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 30:01Speaker 03

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

• 30:07Alastair Campbell?

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

• 30:14Speaker 07

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 30:16Speaker 03

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

• 30:25Speaker 05

  A FRAGO that says to kill the president of Russia?

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 30:32Speaker 05

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

• 30:36Alastair Campbell?

  You're my soldier, are you?

• 30:38Speaker 08

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• 30:40Speaker 05

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• 30:42Speaker 08

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 30:46Speaker 05

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• 30:50Speaker 08

  We have two tight, deadly key.

• 30:51Speaker 05

  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.

• 31:18Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics, with me, Alastair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. We've put out two additional pods this week. And so, Alistair, you've interviewed your friend Fergal Sharkey. And we both interviewed Richard Engel, who's done an amazing piece of reporting on Prigozhin. Prigozhin being, of course, the head of the Russian Wagner Group, who led a mutiny and raced up towards Moscow, until at the last moment, he gave up. And he's told us the whole rich story. He followed him through mercenary adventures in the Central African Republic, through Syria, through Ukraine. He was personally threatened by Prigozhin. He's got a fantastic recording of Prigozhin saying,

• 32:02Rory Stewart?

  "If you come near enough to me, we will find out whether it is your Adam's apple or mine that gets squeezed."

• 32:10Alastair Campbell?

  No, I really, I really enjoyed talking to him and I, and I thought the, we'll put the, um, the film in the, in the, in the newsletter and, um, I think people will really find it interesting. And he's a proper old fashioned journalist, um, who just sort of, you know, does stuff from the ground, doesn't really speculate, just, but just digs out hard facts.

• 32:29Rory Stewart?

  And a real, and a real, just on that, I mean, I'm really struck by how difficult it was even for him to get commissioned. So he is a big star American reporter. He's one of the most famous American foreign correspondents, but even he found it incredibly difficult in the modern world to get a commission to do a story on something like Prigozhin. And they sort of let him do it a bit grudgingly, but my goodness, he's been vindicated. He obviously had a nose for the story.

• 32:53Alastair Campbell?

  And also he, um, a big part of the story, which I think was maybe part of the story that most people here will know less, was related to the, the Central African Republic. And I don't even aware of this, but there's a referendum there on July the 30th, where the, the president is trying to change the constitution so as he can stay on in power.

• 33:13Rory Stewart?

  Always a good sign, always a very good sign.

• 33:16Alastair Campbell?

  So powerful is the Wagner Group within the CAR that it's being seen as a test of them as much as it is of the, of the government.

• 33:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, Richard explained to us that they've built an entire statue to themselves in the central square in the Central African Republic. It's like a Wagner Group statue.

• 33:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he likes, he clearly likes medals and statues and he, he's definitely one of those guys who sees himself as a sort of, you know, a big man of history. And on, anyway, I thought he was great as a sort of old fashioned journalist. And, and I thought Fergal was terrific as an old fashioned campaigner who I got some message, a message from somebody who works at the, in the water industry, who basically said that they, they lie awake and like worrying about what Ferkelschuck is going to say next, which if you think about it, I can't think of which politicians have led a campaign on water. He has done it. And I think that's, you know, Big, big, big feather in his hat.

• 34:08Rory Stewart?

  And I wonder, is that something about the changing nature of the world that actually for a single SU campaign forty, fifty years ago, a backbench MP could really make their name around a single SU campaign and there were MPs who were very famous for that. I mean, obviously, you know, right back to Wilberforce leading the campaign on, on the abolition of slavery.

• 34:26Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 34:27Rory Stewart?

  But maybe today you've got more chance of doing it if you're a famous musician or you're a celebrity or someone than if you're an MP.

• 34:34Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, interesting. You look at somebody like Carol Vorderman and the kind of impact that she's having, particularly on social media, John Bishop, I noticed, is getting very, very angry with the government.

• 34:43Rory Stewart?

  Footballers on free school meals?

• 34:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Marcus Rashford, all that. By the way, the next time you, I know you're not a massive football fan, Roy, but the next time you're in London, go to see Dear England. I promise you, you will like it, even though you don't like football.

• 34:57Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 34:57Alastair Campbell?

  And even though it is all about football.

• 34:59Rory Stewart?

  It's silly. Are you really upset about what they're doing to the Barcelona stadium, which is almost the only place I've ever seen a live football match? And apparently they're now replacing it with a very kind of generic looking boring stadium. Does that matter to you?

• 35:11Alastair Campbell?

  As long as they don't change Turf Moor, which is the home of Burnley Football Club, I will survive.

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  Don't care what Barcelona does, very good.

• 35:17Alastair Campbell?

  Shall we talk about your friend Julian Lewis, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee in Parliament? Because I think this report was pretty surprising in a way. My, my experience of the Intelligence Committee, this is, this is a committee of MPs who are allowed to see intelligence reports that most MPs do not. And they've delivered a very, very, very scathing report, which says that China is all over us in terms of, you know, our economic sector, our university sector, our politics, and that the government really doesn't have a strategy for it. Now, the government's defence was that actually they brought in some changes in recent months, which will have addressed some of these problems. But what did you make of it?

• 36:01Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, I think just firstly, maybe give a little bit of background on, on the committee. So Julian Lewis is a veteran MP.

• 36:09Rory Stewart?

  He actually is quite famous because he went in as a fifth columnist as a young conservative activist, pretending, I think, to be allied to Labour in order to infiltrate and disrupt Labour meetings. So it's kind of classic politics of the early eighties. Bastard. Bastard, exactly. And he was, in my time, a sort of character. He's got a doctorate in Defence Studies and John Burco would love sort of chanting out, it was then the speaker, would love chanting out, "Doctor Julian Lewis", and this great thing, and then Dr Julian Lewis would speak. He was my successor as the Chair of the Defence Select Committee, so I knew him quite well.

• 36:49Rory Stewart?

  I ran the Defence Select Committee and then after I stepped down, he ran and was elected as the Chair. And he then went on to run to be Chair of the Intelligence Committee. And the Intelligence Committee was always traditionally a bit of a place for a sort of grand individual. So Sir Malcolm Rifkind was the person who had it. And Boris Johnson thought that he could tee it up for his friend Chris Grayling. So Chris Grayling, having been through a number of government departments, including the Ministry of Justice, where he'd privatized probation and then we had had to turn around and renationalise probation, and then gone through some pretty chaotic times with railways, was rewarded by Boris Johnson for his support by being told that he could be the next head of the Intelligence Select Committee.

• 37:34Rory Stewart?

  At which point Julian Lewis thought he was having none of this and ran at the last moment, getting a lot of Labour support, and to Boris Johnson's absolute fury, managed to take the Chair. And I had the whip removed from him briefly in revenge by Boris Johnson for him doing that. You'd forget all this stuff, I'd completely forgotten all of that. Yeah, it was extraordinary because it's just part of Boris Johnson's total contempt for Parliament, removing the whip from somebody who's been duly elected as a committee Chair because he's not the person that you wanted in. So Boris Johnson then stuffed the committee with a lot of his sort of Brexiteer friends. So on the Conservative side, it's people like Sir John Hayes, Colonel Bob Stewart, Theresa Villiers.

• 38:16Rory Stewart?

  So it's and I think that's important because it's important to understand that one of the things that a lot of these Brexit supporters were saying during the Brexit campaign is that if you look at the economic evidence, Europe is shrinking, China is growing dramatically, and therefore what Britain needs to do is leave the European Union and connect itself with this enormous seven percent rapidly growing a year economic powerhouse of China. And how rapidly that's changed, how rapidly the US confrontation with China, the problems with Russia, Ukraine, and now this big rush to try to de-risk or decouple from China, finds these Brexiteers in this very awkward position where the logic is

• 38:59Rory Stewart?

  almost saying to them, they should be returning to their natural allies in Europe, rather than reaching out to places like China and Russia where they were hoping to get their economic growth from.

• 39:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we talked about the pivot under Obama, and I guess there was something similar from David Cameron and George Osborne. And when we talked to George Osborne, if you remember, he still defends that as a sensible thing to do. And I think he is the one who would say that while we can de-risk, that decoupling would be a very, very, very big mistake. But I do sometimes wonder whether we underestimate the extent to which, in terms of its intelligence operations, China is now so powerful. Obviously, there's still a lot of focus on Russia. But what this report seemed to be saying is that if you analyze all the threats, the bigger one, the bigger one comes from China.

• 39:48Rory Stewart?

  It's amazing. I mean, and the report, for people who've got a bit of time, is worth reading in detail. It's a really impressive piece of work. And although Dr. Julian Lewis was often told off for being a little bit earnest, my goodness, he's done his homework here. What it really seems to argue is that the UK is not a top priority for China.

• 40:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 40:09Rory Stewart?

  The Chinese intelligence services are enormous, the number of their employees number in the hundreds of thousands. It's believed they have 40,000 employees of the Chinese intelligence services overseas alone, 40,000. That's more than the entire deployable strength of the British military. But in the case of Britain, the way that they wield influence is much more through economic power. So they've got One hundred and fifty thousand approximately Chinese students studying at British universities, which contributes about six hundred million pounds a year to the British university sector. And that, in addition to them setting up centres, means that university vice chancellors are a bit reluctant to host the Dalai Lama or come out criticizing Chinese human rights in Xinjiang.

• 40:54Rory Stewart?

  Listeners will remember that China was in pole position to build a lot of our digital network through Huawei, the 5G network, which was then stopped in 2020. They are in a commanding position for the next nuclear investment. They've put thirty seven billion pounds into Britain since 2000, which is more than China's put into France, Germany and Italy combined. But I guess one of the things I was left asking myself at the end of this report, which of course, as you can imagine, like all these reports, the conclusions tend to be less exciting than the problems. The conclusions are, we need a whole of government approach. We need to think about the security implications of accepting Chinese investment.

• 41:36Rory Stewart?

  But a lot of this is just another way of saying China is a giant economy. And with enormous economic strength comes enormous influence. And that would be as true for the United States all over the world as it is for China. Now, of course, in the case of China, unlike the US, they have a system that we don't like. They're on the wrong side on democracy, on the wrong side on human rights. And so they'll be using those influences in a way that we don't like. Whereas when the United States uses its economic influence, we tend to be more supportive. But I'm not quite sure this really adds up to a story about Chinese intelligence penetration so much as just a statement of Chinese influence. And Britain is just one example of a hundred countries where this is true.

• 42:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that book I mentioned, it's so evident that they literally went after all of the Stans and have made considerable progress. By the way, I was completely taken aback by one thing in here. I didn't realize that when President Xi launched the Silk Road Economic Belt, he did so in Astana. In Kazakhstan. And then the next big speech he did was in Jakarta, in the Indonesian Parliament. And I just go back to the point I made earlier, the scale of their ambition is so vast. They don't, they don't go around the place saying global China. They just sort of get on and do it. He, he really does under promise and over deliver.

• 42:58Rory Stewart?

  The other thing that that's been happening at the same time in parallel with this select committee is that the Americans in Congress have launched their own committee called the US Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the US and China. And we're going to interview in September Richie Torres, who's a Democrat member of that committee, and we'll be able to get into this a bit more. But it's essentially become the central battleground now in American politics for people out competing themselves on who can be most anti-China, most ramp up the Cold War rhetoric on China, coming out of this congressional committee. And it's led by a guy called Mike Gallagher, who I know a little bit, met a couple of times. He's a very, very impressively muscly, ex-US veteran

• 43:43Rory Stewart?

  who served in Afghanistan, did his three tours on the ground, I think, with the US Marine Corps. And my goodness, he sounds like it. I mean, you sound like you're being lectured by a drill sergeant when you talk to him. And he's got this thing on China where he says, this is a country that is committing genocide in Xinjiang, that is covering up the COVID outbreak, that has stolen hundreds of billions of dollars of intellectual property from the United States of America, and is about to invade Taiwan. And you really sense that the rhetoric, but you also sense that problem, which is they are still struggling to get allies, apart from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Philippines. There are very, very few people who seem to be signing up to this US confrontation with China.

• 44:26Alastair Campbell?

  And what do the Democrats on that committee say? Do they feel? Under pressure to go down the same road.

• 44:31Rory Stewart?

  Well, we should, we should push Richie on this. So I'm really pleased that he's coming on. He's a

• 44:35Alastair Campbell?

  Is this the guy you met on the plane?

• 44:37Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. First gay African American Latino congressman. And he is incredibly eloquent, a very, very good looking, like most American politicians. I always think that whenever I go to the US Congress. I remember I took the, um, I took

• 44:52Alastair Campbell?

  Do you really?

• 44:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I took, I took the part of Defense Committee.

• 44:55Alastair Campbell?

  I think they're well dressed. I'm not saying they're good looking.

• 44:57Rory Stewart?

  I took the Defense Committee and the Foreign Affairs Select Committee to, um, to, to the States. And it was really extraordinary. We all turn up. So it's me, it's Frank Roy. We're all about five foot six. We're not necessarily looking after ourselves that much.

• 45:11Alastair Campbell?

  Did you wear good suits, Rory?

• 45:12Rory Stewart?

  Wait, no, we didn't. We all went shambling in and the security guards literally couldn't believe that we were members of parliament. And then the Americans all come out. It's not just the white teeth. They're all over six foot tall. It's enormous handshakes, these great kind of classic square jawed faces. And again, I think they found it quite difficult to believe that any of us could really be politicians at all.

• 45:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Julian Lewis doubtless will be heading over there. I was grilled by the Intelligence Select Committee over the, the whole Iraq weapons of mass destruction is one of the several committees that I was in front of. And you did get the feeling with some of them that they just loved the fact that they were allowed to read intelligence reports.

• 45:53Rory Stewart?

  No, no, exactly. It was, it's an extraordinary thing. It's very weird. I mean, I remember how much showing off they do in the House of Commons. And, and I feel having, you know, come from a kind of diplomatic background. I feel that they are terribly, terribly under equipped to perform the role they're supposed to be doing. It's all very well producing reports on China, but what they're actually supposed to be doing is overseeing the intelligence and security services.

• 46:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:17Rory Stewart?

  And that is very, very difficult for them because it's not exactly as though John Hayes or Bob Stewart are the world's greatest experts on how those services work. And what happens, I'm afraid, is that you get these very, very charming presentations from the head of MI5 and head of MI6. And quite a lot of control over which classified information they're shown. And even if there isn't control over that, very difficult for them to know what to ask for. And so I think the oversight function, I think, remains very, very difficult.

• 46:49Alastair Campbell?

  Just to go on this point about the shift in America, I saw the director of the FBI giving evidence to committee of Congress the other day, and my God, they were vile to him. And basically, there was, these are all the Trump people.

• 47:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Alastair Campbell?

  Essentially saying that he was, and he's a declared Republican, by the way, this guy. You know, we've got to be very, very careful if we were ever to go down that road where people heading these important security agencies are being defined through their politics. I've just dug up the report in New York Times, Christopher A. Ray, he's called, and he did that thing which we're all advised to do when we're in front of these committees. This was all about, you know, the role of the FBI in addressing extremist violence, but it all turned into stuff about Trump. And he says, "The idea that I'm biased against conservatives seems somewhat insane to me, given my own personal background. The FBI does not and

• 47:48Alastair Campbell?

  has no interest in protecting anyone politically." But I think, you know, at least we can say, I think, that if Ken McCallum, the director general of MI5, or the head of MI6, or GCHQ, I don't think even the Johnson death cult people, as you call them, Rory, would say that they were politically biased.

• 48:03Rory Stewart?

  No, no, I think they'd be treated with a lot of respect. I almost think in Britain that we're almost a little bit too shy to hold the military and our intelligence agencies to account. We're a little bit too deferential. That's a bigger conversation. I mean, I've testified to the US Senate, and it's completely terrifying. It's a much more serious deal than testifying to British committees, partly because they have these enormous staffs. They're scheduled to the last 30 seconds, the questions that are going to be asked. They know exactly what soundbite they want to hit. I think we have to finish with probably the biggest story of the week, which is what we began with, which is this unbelievable temperatures.

• 48:46Alastair Campbell?

  It's awful, isn't it?

• 48:47Rory Stewart?

  El Nino, which is the Pacific Cycle, is still quite moderate. And so it seems as though there is a very strong correlation between these temperatures, obviously, and human-made climate change.

• 49:00Rory Stewart?

  And it's just an accelerating cycle, year on, year on, year of these extreme temperatures now.

• 49:06Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's terrifying. I find it absolutely terrifying. And, you know, I was at my Fiona's niece's daughter's christening at the weekend, even though I don't do God, I do witness God when other people do God. And I did genuinely have this thought about, you know, what sort of world is this going to be by the time she's my age? I find what's going on now absolutely terrifying. The stuff in China, fifty degrees plus. And then you see this, I don't know if you saw this stuff in Arizona where the tourists are sort of flooding there so as they can have their picture taken next to stuff, say, hundred and hundred and X degrees. It's

• 49:46Alastair Campbell?

  we're not, we're not cracking this at all. Just while we're on China, by the way, Roy, I was drawn to on social media to a picture, a graphic of all the railway lines that have been built in China in the last couple of decades. And it is phenomenal. When you think how long it's taken us to not build HS2. And you see this, these trains going there. And there's a guy called, he's on Twitter, he's called at Kyle Train Emoji. And he's just put together, he just seemed to have a sort of fairly fond view of the Chinese generally. But it's just absolutely article upon article upon article suggesting actually that China, we've talked about China leading the world in lots of things.

• 50:27Alastair Campbell?

  Actually, they are leading the world now in renewable energy, these amazing pictures of, you know, vast, as far as the eye can see, solar panels in which they're now leading, I think, both in terms of manufacture and use.

• 50:40Rory Stewart?

  I think this is why, again, I mean, I think maybe we can link these two things together, which is the climate change and the Intelligence and Security Committee report. Because the danger of a new cold war with China is that we desperately need China to fix all these global challenges. So the US and China combined are about forty percent of global emissions. And as you say, China is both one of the biggest emitters, still building coal-fired generation plants, but also leading the world in the critical rare earths, battery, solar panels, wind turbines, and everything that's needed for the energy transition. And we also need China, as we said before, desperately for AI regulation. They've actually come out with more restrictive AI regulation than anyone could anticipate. But again,

• 51:26Rory Stewart?

  The US and China working together on AI regulation is vital for the next three years of humanity. So I slightly am questioning whether we have the luxury to go on a cold war against China, particularly since the Chinese economy is now beginning to falter. Attention in China is going to turn more inward. And I'm very, very cheered up that Kerry's been visiting and working closely with the Chinese lead climate negotiator.

• 51:53Alastair Campbell?

  Is John Kerry the American climate envoy?

• 51:55Rory Stewart?

  John Kerry, the American climate envoy, another tall, good-looking American.

• 51:59Alastair Campbell?

  Square George. This guy, we should put in the newsletter some of the graphics that he posted. One was from the Financial Times. It's basically a graph that shows solar, wind, hydropower and other renewables. And it's got China, EU, US, India. And China is frankly in a league of its own. So, you know, then you look at some of the, they've done three times as much new solar capacity in the first four months of this year than they did in the same period last year. Whereas the others are kind of, you know, improving but lagging and behind that sort of progress. And it goes back to this point they made earlier about the scale of change that they can make when they want to. And it goes back,

• 52:42Alastair Campbell?

  I'm afraid, to the point that it's a lot easier when you're not a democracy, being told what you can and can't do. That's the real worry.

• 52:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think, honestly, maybe, you know, we're coming to the end of this, but there's so much more to do on climate change. And a couple of things I'd love us to pick up in another episode. One of them is how far short I think the UK is going to come of its own targets to get to zero carbon electricity. Government's offering 2035, Labour's offering 2030. Both dates completely unrealistic. And then the impacts of climate change on places like Somalia, seventh year of drought. We talk about climate change in terms of its impacts on olive growing in Italy. But when you get to the extreme poor, you think about what it means for your only cow to be killed, or your only half acre of maize to be wiped out when your child is already on the verge of starvation.

• 53:31Rory Stewart?

  And the sense that too much of this conversation is about people talking about technology and mitigation and the middle income countries and not enough effort is being put into the people who are at the worst receiving end of this and always will be, which is the people who've got no resilience at all, no other options when climate change hits them. And that's, that's the extreme poor.

• 53:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Just finally, I've, I've found this, we will definitely put this in the, in the newsletter, the, the graphic showing China rail, high speed railways in 2008, next to non-existent, again alongside what they have today. And then now, if, if, if all the railway lines that have been laid in those, in the last 12 years were laid one end to the other, they would wrap around the circumference of the earth.

• 54:22Rory Stewart?

  Wow.

• 54:23Alastair Campbell?

  And we still can't quite get our act together sufficient to build HS2, let alone the bit for the northern powerhouse that has been long been promised from Mr. Osborne and others.

• 54:37Rory Stewart?

  Amazing. Well, thank you, Alastair, very, very much. And congratulations on that beautiful Hawaiian shirt that you're wearing. I'm, I'm sporting in, in honour of your father, a northern veterinarian's shirt.

• 54:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, that is very much a Pedrith vet shirt, that one, definitely. See you soon.

• 54:52Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.