Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 133. Suella's speeding, Japan in focus, and what's the point of the G7? About this episode How was the G7 formed, and what is the point of it today? What will the consequences be for Suella Braverman following her speeding scandal? How does religion influence politics?
Join Alastair and Rory as they answer these questions, plus a discussion on the history and politics of Japan, what happened at NatCon, and why Bill Clinton is never in the same room as a flower stamen...
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Transcript 10,962 words · 13 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair 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.
0:19 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.
0:42 Alastair 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?
0:49 Rory 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/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
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1:32 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
1:35 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
1:36 Alastair Campbell? Sadly, yet again, we're going to have to talk about Suella Braverman and national conservatism and the net migration figures coming out. We're going to talk a little bit about Scotland and also about something that Rory and I both picked up last week on our travels in the UK about the way that Labour are seen at the moment, which I think is worth discussing. And then we're going to go into the G7, Zelensky's masterclass. But also Rory happens to be in Japan, where the G7 was hosted. We'll talk a little about Japan, a little bit about G7 and G8 summits, and frankly, whether there's much point. But Rory, let's kick off with Suella, as I like to call her.
2:16 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, let me start by paying tribute to the fact that your book is now the number one bestseller in the United Kingdom. Are you completely exhausted? You've been charging up and down the country, talking to every school in the country.
2:27 Alastair Campbell? No, I've enjoyed talking to the schools, actually, and I'm not really exhausted, no. The only thing that I found utterly exhausting was I left Glasgow on Sunday at seven, I left my hotel at seven thirty AM and I finally walked through the door just as the second half was starting in the four o'clock kickoff on Sky. So that was a pretty troubled train journey home.
2:51 Rory Stewart? Pretty troubled train journey and added to the irritation which you were presumably missing part of a football game that you wanted to see.
2:57 Alastair Campbell? I wasn't that bothered about the game, to be absolutely frank, but it was just one of those journeys where everything seemed to go wrong.
3:02 Rory Stewart? And at the very same time, as people pointed out on Twitter, I was on the bullet train heading between Tokyo and Nagoya.
3:09 Alastair Campbell? So why do the Japanese do trains so well?
3:13 Rory Stewart? Well, we're going to speak to that in the second half and part of that is enormous amounts of public spending. But tell us about Suella Braverman, your least favourite person, I guess, or one of your least favourite people.
3:24 Alastair Campbell? No, no, no, she's not, she's, well, I think she's part of my least favourite government for a long time. But she's got into trouble again, this time a story involving her time as Attorney General.
3:37 Rory Stewart? For overseas listeners to remind everybody, Suella Braverman is the Home Secretary. She represents the right wing faction of the Conservative Party. She was a leading Brexiteer. She competed to be Prime Minister. She was a big backer of Boris Johnson and she is occupying one of these three great offices of the States. So she's a real, in a sense, a big, big faction in Rishi Sunak's cabinet. And now, sorry.
3:59 Alastair Campbell? And also, the reason that she's there is because during the leadership election that led to Sunak being crowned, as it were, she dropped her backing, her vocal backing for Boris Johnson. She didn't get involved in the Let's Bring Back Johnson campaign and clearly some sort of deal done. She was forced to resign when she was in the Liz Truss cabinet over a breach of the ministerial code. That was to do with leaking documents to an MP who should not have been seeing them. And then within minutes of Sunak becoming Prime Minister, just literally a few days later, she's back in the cabinet. And now she's charged again with breaking the ministerial code, this time over allegations that when
4:44 Alastair Campbell? she was done for speeding. She asked first a civil servant and then a special advisor whether it would be possible for her to do it, rather than get points on her licence, to do a speed awareness course, but one on one. So she didn't have to go and sit with the hoy polloi.
5:00 Rory Stewart? So as an alternative against three points licence, you can sit in a speed awareness course, typically with maybe 20 people in a room, private sector provider explains things like driving five miles an hour more doesn't get you there any quicker than you expecting. Have you done a speed awareness course?
5:14 Alastair Campbell? I've done two and I vividly remember something from the first one, which I remember, which did not happen in the second one.
5:22 Rory Stewart? Okay.
5:23 Alastair Campbell? And this was one of those acronyms, COAST. And I do actually remember this and I do think of it sometimes when I suddenly realise I'm driving too fast. And COAST is concentration, observation, anticipation, space and time. And I remember that from, and actually every time I drive, it's up by Old Street, near the Angel, and every time I drive past the building where I had that speed awareness course, I remember it and I always slowed down. It's funny how these things sort of get into your head.
5:54 Rory Stewart? Just on the COAST thing, I mean, obviously I spend a lot of time saying to my eight year old and six year old, just concentrate, but I don't find it's very useful. I'm coming to the conclusion that telling people who aren't concentrating to concentrate doesn't really help them to concentrate.
6:08 Alastair Campbell? No, I think I don't agree with that. I think that if I tell myself I am losing concentration, I can get it back. But the point about Solah Braverman is that where I think she might come unstuck, yesterday she was quizzed by the media, she was quizzed in Parliament because she was doing Home Office questions or something else. And she just had this line, I was last summer, I was court speeding, I didn't dispute the offence, I didn't dispute the sanction. But she just kept repeating the same thing again and again and again and again. Where I think she might come unstuck is the fact that her advisers,
6:49 Alastair Campbell? and this would be her special advisor, told the media that actually there had been no case at all at some point in this story. Then the other thing they said, which I think just underlines what happens when you sort of, your story is unraveling. So she was the attorney general at the time. And I don't know about when you were in government, Rory, but I know that when, when I was working for the government, if my memory serves me correctly, the attorney general did not have protection. Okay. The Home Secretary does have protection. And one of the lines being used about why maybe she considered it would have been appropriate and reasonable for her not to have to go to a speed awareness course with lots of other people is that her protection team would have to go as well. Okay. But she didn't have a protection team.
7:34 Rory Stewart? When she was attorney general. But I suppose she was Home Secretary by the time she was making the request. Is that right?
7:40 Alastair Campbell? That's a good point. That is a good point.
7:42 Rory Stewart? Um, but, but, but, but what, what do you think the real reason is why she didn't want to go on it? She thought she'd be embarrassed that the media would show pictures of her sitting with nineteen other people and it would somehow be a humiliation? I mean, what's, what's the deal?
7:53 Alastair Campbell? I would be very surprised if this is earlier in her career. I'm not a hundred per, I mean, I think she's a very well-known political figure now because of Rwanda and Stop the Boats and all that stuff. I think Suella Braverman could go to quite a lot of speed awareness courses around the country. Nobody would have a bloody clue who she was. Um, I, I, I get a sense of her being a bit of a narcissist. I don't know about you, but my sense of her is she just loves all this attention. And I think she loves the fact that part of the narrative around her is that Sunak's scared to get rid of her. And I think she's either trying to provoke Sunak to sack her. She probably thinks, if you're right, that most Tories think that they're going to lose the next election. She is clearly lining herself up to be the main representative of the right, the hard right
8:38 Alastair Campbell? of the Conservative Party. And of course, if she gets sacked, that is better for her in those circumstances than being, than having to resign over something that is self-evidently scandalous.
8:52 Rory Stewart? Yeah. So maybe actually Rishi Sunak can't really afford to sack her over her not wanting to do a speed awareness course because that will be used by Suella Braverman's supporters to say this was a trivial thing, this was ridiculous, and turn her into a martyr.
9:06 Alastair Campbell? I mean, you've been saying for weeks that you think Rishi Sunak is desperate to sack her. I don't know if you've had any further conversations with people in the Conservative Party about that, but I don't know, I get the feeling that he quite likes having her there because she can do a lot of the nasty stuff and he doesn't really have to get his hands too dirty with it.
9:23 Rory Stewart? Well, let's, let's move on to the National Conservatism Conference that we spoke about a bit last week, which was this bizarre moment where last weekend, just at the moment where Rishi Sunak was trying to make some important announcements and meeting Zelensky on Ukraine and preparing for the G7 summit, Suella Braverman led this extraordinary conference called the National Conservatism Conference, and I've been digging into it a bit more, and I hadn't realised this. The National Conservatism Conference isn't only a British thing at all, it's a global phenomenon, and it's had some big conferences in the US, conferences in Italy, so Ron DeSantis is there on the website talking about how Florida is the great space for freedom, Dan
10:08 Rory Stewart? Prager is up there saying the left is trying to destroy Western civilisation, so this is extraordinary rant about how in the Guggenheim there's a golden toilet into which people can defecate and this shows that the left is trying to destroy art as well as everything else. And it's an extraordinary revelation of something disturbing because you see Giorgia Maloney being profiled in Italy, and Viktor Orban is right up there on the website. So Viktor Orban, I mean, just to remind people, this is a guy who the right look to, or that part of the far populist right look to, because he's closed the university, he's put academic bodies under government control, he's put most of the press in Hungary under direct
10:52 Rory Stewart? party control or indirect party control. So what I really want to say to people like Michael Gove and Suella Braverman and Danny Kruger who are attending this conference is there are some very odd edges to this which are deeply disturbing for the Conservative Party and which they should be distancing themselves. They had a US senator, as I said, J D Vance, who Backs Trump in saying the election was stolen in 2020. And then I suppose the second thing that struck me, looking at the conference, is how very odd that side of conservatism is. They combine a whole series of very contradictory things. On the one hand, they seem to be standing up for tradition, you know, my sort of conservatism. They talk about Edmund Burke. But actually, if you listen to Michael Gove, he's not really
11:35 Rory Stewart? a Tory in that sense at all. He calls himself a Whig. He's often in terms of kind of radical modernisation. He's not very comfortable with land ownership in Britain. He wants to take away VAT from private schools. Then you have other people who are standing up and saying they want bigger families. But the same people who say they want bigger families are supporting radical free market economics, which is one of the contexts which are forcing both partners to have to work.
12:00 Alastair Campbell? Edmund Burke's name was on the backdrop, by the way, because it was the think, one of the think tanks that carries his name that was, that was part sponsoring this event. And you mentioned Danny Kruger. I was on that TV programme with him on the day that this conference was happening. He and Miriam Cates are the two sole, they're the only directors of the company that has been set up to promote this thing. And I think that Miriam Cates is an interesting example of what you're talking about as well, because she is part of this, what I would describe as very right wing, Christian evangelical movement, that a lot of which is about, essentially about saying, the big problem in the world is birth. We haven't got enough children being born, therefore, women need to go back
12:43 Alastair Campbell? to a much more traditional role. They have pretty, the sort of very, the Christian evangelical movement in the States with very, very strong views on abortion and such like. So these are, I think you're right that this is far more insidious. Your point about it being an international network, is this related to the whole Steve Bannon thing? Or is it, is it separate from that?
13:06 Rory Stewart? It seems to be separate from Steve Bannon. But, but it is, it is interesting. I mean, so Miriam Cates is, is an MP. She comes from a Christian family. Danny Kruger was Actually, part of the Conservative movement quite a long time. He's an Etonian, who I guess must be now in his late 40s. He's the son of Prue Leith, the famous cookery writer. He was David Cameron's speechwriter. He ran against Tony Blair in Sedgfield, got himself in trouble in those days for calling for the creative destruction of the NHS, which was a reference to Hegel, he said afterwards, but people didn't interpret it as a reference to Hegel.
13:45 Alastair Campbell? Well, it shows how he was ahead of his time, though, because they're basically doing it now, aren't they?
13:51 Rory Stewart? And then he became one of Boris Johnson's private secretaries in Number 10 before he was elected as an MP. And he, again, a very Christian, and set up a Christian charity, and very much sees a former conservatism and tradition of Edmund Burke. But what's so odd about it is that conservatism that sometimes sounds in Britain as though it's about Britain and British tradition is also curiously allied to some of the organizers and speakers who are active in Israeli politics, who are themselves Israeli settlers, or are connected with people who are connected to Trump or the Republican right in the US. And again, Douglas Murray, who spoke, was somebody who's also been very outspoken
14:36 Rory Stewart? against Islam.
14:38 Alastair Campbell? He was the one who said we shouldn't stop being nationalist just because the Germans mucked it up twice in the last century.
14:44 Rory Stewart? Exactly. And he's also somebody who I used to argue with a great deal because he was a great neoconservative and defender of the Iraq war. So there's something about this style of conservatism that still confuses me. There's no logical connection between half a dozen different ideological things that I've mentioned here, but somehow they sit together.
15:03 Alastair Campbell? On the Christianity point and Christian evangelicals, I mean, I am not a person of Christian faith, unlike you. Were I to be so, is this me just reflecting my own politics? But I always imagine that I always imagine that Christ was, you know, far more of a socialist than a than a conservative. Okay, I think he had he had a view of the world which was about helping the poor and building people up. And and yet, the evangelical right in the States appears almost monolithically to be Trumpian. So defending a liar, an adulterer, somebody who abuses power, things that I would
15:47 Alastair Campbell? have thought Christ would have been against.
15:50 Rory Stewart? It's it's completely bewildering, isn't it? It's totally bewildering. And and I think even the Christian right in the US struggled to explain it. But you get these extraordinary bumper stickers, which are sort of portraying Donald Trump as the Messiah and as a guy champion of the church. It's it's true also in the in the paradoxes of a lot of these people in the UK supporting Boris Johnson, whose personal life is a kind of flagrant, a sort of attack on almost all the values that they seem to wish to uphold. And I think it's to do with an anxiety, a much older anxiety about the left representing materialist atheism. I think this goes right the way back to the 1930s, or even the late 19th century. And the Citroen Germany too, that the Christian parties tended to ally themselves on the right, because the left was seen as anti-Christian.
16:35 Alastair Campbell? But don't you think on the on Braverman that Sunak, who is coming over as quite a weak character and quite a weak leader at the moment, I think, don't you think he would be emboldened and strengthened if he just stood up and said, Look, it's perfectly clear that Suella Braverman, she's failing on the main policy agenda, in particular, the immigration. We've got the net migration figures coming this week, which are going to show yet another failure on that front. And added to which, it's been scandal upon scandal upon scandal. He promised that he would lead a government of professionalism, accountability, integrity. And I'm very, very sorry, Suella, but you've got to go. Would that not strengthen him?
17:14 Rory Stewart? Well, except you just contradicted yourself, because you pointed out that in a sense, she would like to be fired for something like this, like not attending a speed awareness course, because that would make her into a martyr and strengthen her position for leadership.
17:26 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, maybe. I well, no. But I meant that I'm thinking there from her perspective, that puts that puts her in pole position as the representative of the right. I'm saying from his perspective, vis a vis the country. That it would strengthen him at a time when he is coming over as very, very weak.
17:40 Rory Stewart? Well, I, I think he and Keir Starmer both come across as weak and that's very clear in almost all the polling. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna question that. If you look at, you know, a lot of the polling, weak is a word that comes up for Keir Starmer, weak is a word that comes up for Rishi Sunak.
17:56 Alastair Campbell? Hmm. Just thinking on, on, on Labour, you, you and I did two events together last week, one in Harrogate, one in Leeds. I did six other events, three in Scotland and three schools. And I asked the same questions of all the audiences as you and I asked of the audiences in Harrogate and Leeds, and got almost identical answers.
18:18 Rory Stewart? Remind people what the questions were.
18:19 Alastair Campbell? So the first question was, who do you think will be Prime Minister in two years' time? And between eighty and a hundred percent basically said Keir Starmer. We gave them a choice of Starmer, Sunak or somebody else. And about eight, between lowest was probably about seventy five, the highest was a hundred percent, saying Keir Starmer. We then asked them either to name any of the five missions that Labour has at the heart of its strategy, or to give the summary of Labour's economic strategy in a sentence. And apart from Harrogate, where one guy put his hand up and said he could do it, he gave a good fist of it. And I as a joke said, are you a candidate, a Labour candidate? And it turned out that he was.
19:00 Alastair Campbell? But for the rest of it.
19:01 Rory Stewart? And he could only manage four out of five.
19:03 Alastair Campbell? He, he got three and a half really. He didn't, he didn't get the whole, he didn't go the whole way. So I think there is a real problem in that, which Labour have to fix, I think, as a matter of urgency. Because I think that it is definitely possible to get over the line in terms of winning an election on the narrative that the Tories are the worst government we've ever had and they've got to go. But you won't be able to do the things, the difficult things that are going to have to be done as a government, unless you have buy-in for the change that you're offering. Keir yesterday made quite a big speech about the National Health Service and it got a fair amount of coverage. But even today, I've been getting quite a few messages from friends who are in the NHS saying, you know, went down okay. Some saying it went down badly because of specific policy ideas.
19:48 Alastair Campbell? But I think the point that Osborne, George Osborne made in our interview with him on the leading channel, that. You need at this stage to be able to say what your economic strategy is, what your health strategy is, what your education strategy is, what your foreign policy overall is. In a nutshell, you've got to be able to communicate it in a way that people say, yes, that's different and that's why I want them.
20:09 Rory Stewart? It's very, very unfortunate. I mean, JLP polling does these polls and they did one 26th, 27th April, where they do word clouds. In a word, please describe your view of Keir Starmer, 2086 UK adults. And the centre of the word cloud at the moment is weak, boring, useless. Now, I don't like those kind of words. I'm not very comfortable applying them to Keir Starmer. I'm not very comfortable applying them to Rishi Sunak either. I mean, I think, as I keep saying on this, on this show, that I think Rishi is actually doing a much better job than his predecessors. He's much more of a grown up. He's running a good cabinet. But where I do agree with you with both of them, neither
20:50 Rory Stewart? of them, I think, are quite managing to really communicate a clear vision to the public. And Rishi Sunak, actually, I suppose, maybe because they've got more control of the, of the media, you do, people, I suppose, can get to the fact that he wants to get inflation down, get growth and stop the boats. Right? Whatever we think about that, we sort of know that. With Keir Starmer, I, and I'd love to hear your views on this. I, I went through an evolution as a politician, which is that I was tempted initially when people said, what is your vision, to say, well, I just want to run things well. I don't believe in big flashy visions. But I realised when actually I was able to answer that question. So when I was running for the leadership and I was clear that what I wanted to do
21:33 Rory Stewart? was stop a no deal Brexit and stop Boris Johnson, that things became much, much easier for me. And again, when I was running as London Mayor, once I could see what I really wanted to do and communicate it again and again and again, things became much easier for me as a politician. I think Keir Starmer has got to get beyond what he'll feel, which is, well, I'll be more competent, which worked fine against Boris Johnson, but isn't going to work as well against Rishi Sunak, because the two of them seem too similar in that respect. They both seem like sort of technocratic managers.
22:06 Alastair Campbell? I think Keir is developing as a politician in a way that hopefully, well, I think we'll see him become Prime Minister and actually be quite a good Prime Minister. I think he does, I think a lot of the qualities that that he shows in terms of his overall commitment to public service, whether it was the DPP, the way that he could sort of clearly address his problems in a in a serious way. I think that will stand him in good stead in government. However, I think that to get into government, you have to counter this sense that, because I think the Tories deliberately want to create this sense that they're all the same, they're all as bad as each other. Yeah, we'd we'd been terrible. Yeah, nothing much has changed. But do you really think that guy's any better? And I think he's got to flip this sort of boring thing. I don't think he's boring, and I don't think he's particularly weak.
22:51 Alastair Campbell? I think actually, if you think about, you know, how many, I'm not even sure that Tony would have expelled a former leader from the party in the way that Keir does. So that's the sort of sign of strength. I think some of the policy decisions that he's taken, even this thing about, you know, he gets a lot of criticism for dumping on the pledges that he made to become leader. But it was interesting, at the event I did in Glasgow on the book, Glasgow City Halls, and there was, you know, it was quite a big crowd, and there's this guy stood up, and he said, am I missing something? He said, I actually quite like the look of this Keir star, but he seems quite ruthless to me. And I thought that was an interesting observation, that this guy, his name was James, he actually thought, there's a steel in there that is about getting into power. And I think what
23:36 Alastair Campbell? I like about the way Keir has conducted himself is that, we've said this before, stage one, decontaminate the Labour Party brand. Stage two, take on the Tories. Stage three, set out the alternative agenda. Now, what I don't like, that I think the missions approach is quite good as an overall thing, but if I've just got them in front of me, secure the highest sustained growth in the G7. Well, that's a great thing if you can do it.
23:58 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and let's just get to a sort of somebody who thinks a lot about phrases. I mean, it doesn't exactly trip off the tongue, does it? To secure the highest sustained growth in the G7. It slightly sounds like what they wanted to do was say, be the fastest growing economy in the world. And then someone said, oh, I'm not quite sure that we can say that. So then they said, how about fastest growing the G7? Oh, not sure about that. Can we stick in the word sustained? Because that might be able to.
24:24 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and what it's saying, what actually that says is that we want to get the economy growing again.
24:32 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
24:32 Alastair Campbell? I think that's a simpler way to say it.
24:34 Rory Stewart? And at the same time, and I think Rishi Sunak's word for that is growth, isn't it? He just uses the word growth.
24:39 Alastair Campbell? Exactly.
24:40 Rory Stewart? And that's another problem. It's not really a differentiator. His first one isn't actually different from the government.
24:46 Alastair Campbell? So the next one, and this is where I think they have had a little bit of traction. Make Britain a clean energy superpower.
24:51 Rory Stewart? Yep.
24:52 Alastair Campbell? And also that is the environment linking to the economy.
24:54 Rory Stewart? Yep.
24:54 Alastair Campbell? Next one, build an NHS fit for the future. That's okay. Make Britain's streets safe. Pretty standard. And then the last one, break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage, which again, I think is worthy and noble, but it needs greater harsh, greater sharpness than that.
25:13 Rory Stewart? It's not very sharp because as you say, it's a lot of words at every state. Break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage. The other thing that's missing there is the cost of living crisis. And Rishi Sunak, Rishi Sunak has put half, half inflation right there at the centre of his things. And I'm surprised Keir hasn't put that bang there because I would have thought inflation cost of living is the number one issue in British politics.
25:38 Alastair Campbell? I think these missions, I think the downside of our surveys, unless if we go through the audiences that we spoke to and the ones that I did, we're talking a cohort of about 4,000 people now. Okay.
25:52 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
25:53 Alastair Campbell? One of whom could name three and a half of the missions. Okay.
25:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
25:57 Alastair Campbell? So that's the downside. They've not cut through. The upside of that is that between now and the election, I think these should become the basis for five very, very clear, specific pledges that maybe are less global, less grand, less grandiose, that actually sort of bring them down maybe to a, to a level closer to people.
26:21 Rory Stewart? Yeah, to remind people, I mean. Rishi Sunak's five promises are we will halve inflation, grow the economy, reduce debt, cut waiting lists and stop the boats.
26:32 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
26:32 Rory Stewart? And you can see where the electorate is for that. You can see where the stop the boat electorate is. The whole country is in support of cut waiting lists. I guess the Conservatives are on the reduced debt side and the whole country is on halve inflation. So, I mean, we all agree there are huge problems with where the Conservative government is and it seems unlikely they get re-elected. But presumably if you were in Rishi Sunak's position and you were communicating for him, that's probably about as good as you can do in terms of defining something to take you into the next election. But if you were in the number 10 comms machine, would you think that that was a pretty good stab at coming up with five things if you're on Rishi Sunak's side to take him into the next election?
27:16 Alastair Campbell? Possibly. I don't think they're very ambitious and also I don't think they necessarily hang together. And I think the stop the boats thing is such an obviously polarising populist move at a time when I thought Sunak was going to possibly reverse the populism bandwagon on which the Tories have been riding.
27:34 Rory Stewart? But it is hugely popular, does seem to be very, very popular.
27:37 Alastair Campbell? I'm not convinced about that. I don't think it's, I think you can get very, very different views on this. I think for a lot of people it's something that just underlines why they don't like the Tories, that they're focusing on something that they, so like here we are today with the net, this week with the net migration figures and actually we're going to see that those people coming over on boats are a very, very small part of a much bigger problem, which actually business, for example, wants fixed.
28:02 Rory Stewart? Well, so, so, so I don't know, most of the polls, we can share some of this and stuff, are pretty consistent in putting illegal migration right up there as one of the top four issues among voters and top two amongst those who've backed Tories in the last election.
28:16 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but I think, I think these, you've got to be very careful about these polls. They tend to reflect. What the is kind of in the media at that time? Yeah, I don't deny there are lots of people who think that the the issue is people who are coming here who shouldn't be coming here. However, I think there is a broader debate on migration, which particularly in the business community, we saw in those people that we were speaking to in in Leeds last week, where they they would they would recognise that there are massive shortages in the labour market, there are skill shortages which they feel can't be fixed. And therefore, Rishi Sunak, I think rightly, this goes back to your point about being more grown up than Johnson and Truss and Braverman, is saying we have to be a bit careful about how we handle this this debate.
29:00 Alastair Campbell? So they're trying to create all the focus on the boats, essentially as a distraction for the more serious challenge they're facing, on which they're failing by their own standards.
29:09 Rory Stewart? Well, and the the big, big story there, absolutely, as we as we move towards the break, is that the UK is going to take in over half a million people in net migration this year.
29:20 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
29:20 Rory Stewart? That is over 300,000 more than were taken in last year, and it's one of the highest numbers on record. And if you look at the composition of the people coming in, there's been an extraordinary shift away from hundreds of thousands of people coming from the European Union towards the largest numbers now coming from South Asia and from Sub-Saharan Africa.
29:39 Alastair Campbell? And and also the the numbers inflated, I guess, by Hong Kong and Ukraine as well.
29:43 Rory Stewart? Hong Kong, Ukraine and Afghanistan had an impact on this, big impact on it. But it is a big change in the composition of Britain, and and it's an interesting one for a Conservative government to be doing, because I guess most of the Brexit voters, or many, many of people who voted Brexit, were doing so to reduce immigration. Immigration was a big issue for them.
30:02 Alastair Campbell? Absolutely.
30:02 Rory Stewart? And I I don't think they meant by that, we want to reduce immigration from the European Union and take a lot of immigration from other other places in the world, unless I'm missing something. You agree with me, right?
30:12 Alastair Campbell? I I do agree with you. Final point before we go to break, just a quick observation about Scotland, the dial against independence, I think, has definitely moved. I think there was a sense around lots of people that I met, a sense around the SNP that they really are in quite considerable political trouble, which is obviously a massive opportunity for Labour. And the second thing worth reflecting on again is the local elections in Northern Ireland, pretty stunning success for Sinn Féin. And that suggests, I think it's probably about them, the people there wanting to give a message to the other parties, get on with getting these damned institutions back up and running. But it also is the moving the dial, possibly in the direction of Sinn Féin's overall goal.
30:56 Alastair Campbell? Very good. Let's take a break.
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33:20 Alastair Campbell? Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
33:23 Rory Stewart? And me Rory Stewart.
33:24 Alastair Campbell? And Rory, we talked briefly about Sinn Fein there and politics in Ireland. Very good traction for the Leo Varadkar interview on leading. If people haven't heard that, just search Leo Varadkar leading podcast. Irish T-Schick, I thought, very interesting on all sorts of things. And artificial intelligence, on the future of healthcare, which he knows more about than most prime ministers because he's been a doctor. And also, I was fascinated by what he said about how the reason why the relationship with America matters so much is because they feel that for the last decade, the UK government hasn't listened to Dublin, but they always listen to Washington. And basically, Ireland gets its messages now through Washington. That was a very interesting observation to me.
34:08 Rory Stewart? And a lovely bit also, which I think we've talked about before, on the psychology of politicians, on how bitterness and paranoia plays into the mentality of.
34:17 Alastair Campbell? And jealousy, and jealousy.
34:19 Rory Stewart? Exactly.
34:20 Alastair Campbell? Now, shall we talk about the G7, which became the Volodymyr Zelensky show?
34:26 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, a little bit before we, we should bring you in on G7 because you've done a lot of G7 stuff, but very, very quick primer for people to remember. G7 emerged predictably from a sort of meeting of a group of five countries, a group of six countries, by the 1970s became the G7. And in those days, those countries were, let's hope we're going to be able to name them.
34:47 Alastair Campbell? Actually Rory, Rory, I'm going to correct you.
34:50 Rory Stewart? Oh, go on.
34:51 Alastair Campbell? Well, 1973, it was a group of four, and it was a group of four finance ministers. And that was Secretary of Treasury in America Schulz, Helmut Schmidt, the, from West Germany, Giselle Stang from France, and Antony Barber. From the UK and they met in Washington in the White House, they became known as the Library Group of Four because they met in the White House Library. Later that year, Schulz suggested that Japan be added and Japan was added and that became the Group of Five. 1974, all five members suddenly had changes in leadership of the country.
35:34 Alastair Campbell? George Pompidou died and Giscard d'Estaing became Prime Minister, Brandt in Germany, Nixon in America and Tanaka in Japan all had to quit because of various scandals. We had two elections in the year and therefore Gerald Ford, who was Nixon's successor, decided let's move it up from finance ministers, let's have a meeting of the leaders.
35:54 Rory Stewart? And how are those things logically connected? Why the political turmoil suddenly meant move from finance ministers to leaders?
36:02 Alastair Campbell? I don't, because Gerald Ford thought that the finance ministers could do so much, but there ought to be a forum where the leaders could meet in more relaxed setting than would normally be the case. And then in 75, Helmut Schmidt, he with the French proposed adding Italy. This was obviously to try to get more of a European input, so it became the Group of Six. And then in Group in 1976, Harold Wilson, who had been the leader of the UK, he resigned, Jim Callahan became Prime Minister and Gerald Ford decided that he felt they needed another more experienced English speaker. Therefore Pierre Trudeau of Canada was added and it became the Group of Seven.
36:47 Rory Stewart? And just to remind people, it's Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the United States, as well as the EU.
36:54 Alastair Campbell? And that's it.
36:55 Rory Stewart? At that date, when you're talking about, these were the seven largest economies in the world, and not just the seven largest economies in the world, they were about 70% of global GDP.
37:05 Alastair Campbell? I know. What is it now? About 30?
37:07 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and now we're down to about 30%. And now, of course, countries like China and India are in the top seven but are not turning up at the G7. And this is one of the big question marks. So it's gone from being representing the seven largest economies in the world and 70% of the world economy. To now presenting itself as as an excuse for not including China primarily as representing a gathering of of major powers with Western values.
37:33 Alastair Campbell? And of course, of course, for many years, Russia, for several years, Russia was added. It became a G eight.
37:38 Rory Stewart? And that was something you guys did, right? That was something that you did under.
37:41 Alastair Campbell? It started, I think, I think their very first one was, I think it joined the group for the first time in ninety seven, which was in Denver. I don't remember Yeltsin, yes, he was at that. And I think that they got kicked out a few years ago.
37:55 Rory Stewart? Twenty fourteen invasion Crimea.
37:57 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, exactly. But also you mentioned India there. So Modi was at this G seven, and so was Lula from Brazil, and so was Albanese, and there were others who so what's happening is that it's sort of evolving into something different. And Gordon Brown was very much in favor, I know of. He was very focused on the G twenty, thought the G twenty was a much more important body. So I think it it will evolve. It's funny, last night, when I knew we were going to talk about this, I had a quick flick through my my diaries to to look at some of the the G sevens I went to and sort of interesting. If I give you the highlights, most European summits, I can remember some pretty serious policy stuff. But if my highlight of the first one in Denver, the two highlights, the first was Northern Ireland was totally our preoccupation.
38:42 Alastair Campbell? And it was actually, I remember trying to persuade Bill Clinton to go out and do a doorstep, and it really pissed off his team that I got him to go out and do a doorstep with Mike Brunson of ITN. But the other highlight was the fact that Chuck Berry was there. That was big.
38:58 Alastair Campbell? Then then we had the we were then the UK was the the chair of the next one. That was in Birmingham. And what I remember about that one, the first was that Frank Sinatra died. The second was a story that we've talked about before, the Japanese Prime Minister Hashimoto decided he wanted to send the good luck message to Kerry Delgleish because Newcastle United are in the cup final. The next, the thing I remember was Boris Yeltsin at a dinner being very much the worse for wear, shouting quite loudly, all sorts of very, very strong opinions in Russian. But he had this in very meek. Interpreter who spoke incredibly softly. So Yeltsin would be shouting and bawling.
39:41 Alastair Campbell? And then the interpreter would be trying to translate the shouting and bawling, but nobody could hear what she was saying.
39:47 Rory Stewart? Because he was shouting so loudly over the top.
39:50 Alastair Campbell? No, it's just that she wasn't, she was inaudible unless you were sort of, I'm sure Yeltsin could hear what she was saying, but nobody else could.
39:58 Rory Stewart? So the poor man, none of you had any idea what he was talking about. So he's waiting to get your reactions to his rant and he was getting nothing back.
40:05 Alastair Campbell? Well, people, people, I remember Bill Clinton, I remember Tony Blair at one point just mouthing the word madhouse to Bill Clinton, who loved all that stuff. He just thought it was hysterical. And then the other really funny moment, that one was Bill Clinton, somebody in the UK Protocol team said that one of the worst things about having to have the summit was that somebody's job virtually full time was to go around taking, removing stamens from all the flowers that were on display. So like the dinner table, all the flowers, the stamens, when you were arriving at the sort of red carpet were lined with flowers and people had removed the stamens. And I said, why are they doing that? He said, oh, because Clinton's allergic to the stamens of flowers.
40:45 Rory Stewart? Wow.
40:45 Alastair Campbell? So I said to one of the sort of downtime bits, and I said to Bill Clinton, God, you must cause a lot of trouble around the world with this stamens allergy. And he says, it's bullshit. It's not true. Everywhere I go in the world, it's in the protocol notes, Bill Clinton is allergic to the stamens of flowers. So that was Birmingham. Then there was Cologne. And what I remember from Cologne was that Yeltsin was ill. And I also remember Shirak going into a complete rant about nouvelle cuisine, how he hated the fact that you got these big plates with silver platters on top of them. And when the platters were removed, there was this tiny portion of food there.
41:25 Rory Stewart? And was that not a French invention?
41:27 Alastair Campbell? It may well have been, but it was not one that was appreciated by the then French president.
41:31 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
41:32 Alastair Campbell? Japan, the next one in Japan, I'm going to read you a line from my diary here, Roy, you'll like this. This was in Okinawa. I do remember swimming in the sea. So at one point, we left for the G eight at a palace up the road from the hotel. Clinton was late because of the MEP, Middle East Peace Process Talks. Schroeder didn't bother. Shirak arrived last and in the end, TB was in hysterics, said it was possibly the most pointless meeting he had ever attended, enlivened only by Shirak's extraordinary rudeness to Larry Summers, the American Secretary of the Treasury. Then the next day, Saturday, July 22, TB over breakfast. In eight presidential suites in eight five-star hotels, there are currently eight leaders asking
42:13 Alastair Campbell? eight Sherpas and eight press secretaries, what the hell are we all doing here? And I have, I have no memory of anything that we actually, that was actually discussed at that, at that one. Then there was Genoa, which became Berlusconi was in charge of that one. And that was where the anti-globalisation protests started, since when they've all had to move to safer places.
42:35 Rory Stewart? I mean, so now, and then we come to the one that is that I come from Crete, from Scotland, as you know, and it was Gleneagles 2005. So it was a big event for Crete.
42:44 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
42:45 Rory Stewart? It's the biggest thing that ever happened in our neighbourhood. And actually, it was the moment where G7 has been quite useful. That's when it pushed ahead with its debt relief.
42:51 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
42:52 Rory Stewart? Which was a huge move and led to almost 100% debt relief for many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. Unfortunately, we'll probably have to get there again pretty soon because a lot of countries are now heavily indebted.
43:04 Alastair Campbell? I remember George Bush, I remember George Bush as well, using the G7 as part of his push on AIDS and antivirals and all that stuff.
43:13 Rory Stewart? HIV, it's amazing American programme, PEPFA. And then everyone getting in behind that one. George Edward Bush is really extraordinary bipartisan achievement on, on AIDS. And then I guess it comes to prominence again, sort of 2018, Canada, where Trump starts throwing his weight around, demanding that Russia is put back in again. And you get this real standoff with the, with, well, essentially with Angela Merkel saying the man's being ridiculous. And again, he disrupted it the following year too.
43:42 Alastair Campbell? There's that very famous picture, I think it was at a G7, was it, when Trump's sort of sitting behind a desk, looking like a sort of spoilt child and Merkel and Macron. And others are sort of, they've almost got pleading looks on their faces.
43:54 Rory Stewart? Well, he refused to sign the Economic Communiqué for the first time in 2018. I mean, it's a very odd thing. I mean, I went only to the Development Ministers' part of it when I was in the Cabinet, which was, that year it was in France, so we all went off to Paris. And I was served something that looked suspiciously like Nouvelle Cuisine, sitting around the table with a lot of
44:17 Rory Stewart? G7 Development Ministers. And we were trying to focus on Ebola, but I completely failed to get the other ministers to commit the money to Ebola in the way that I wanted and ended up only really getting the commitment by taking the head of the American delegation, head of USCID, Mark Green, for a walk along the Seine.
44:33 Alastair Campbell? It is interesting though how these, I mean, they attract so much global media attention and there's a lot of work goes into them. And the point about Sherpas, these are the people that are kind of constantly in dialogue with each other, usually civil servants, but sometimes politicians. And they're essentially planning, they're planning the outcome. So the next G7 will already be in planning. And Kishida, the Japanese Prime Minister, he's, you know, he's been spending much of the last year preparing for this summit, chose Hiroshima because his main ambition for the meeting was to push for global nuclear disarmament. That was the whole point of this G7. And of course, Zelensky, I mean, really was the only show in town. And therefore, nuclear disarmament is,
45:17 Alastair Campbell? I mean, were you even aware that that was the main theme of the conference?
45:20 Rory Stewart? Well, I think, I mean, certainly from here in Japan, there's a lot of focus on the fact that it happened in a place where an untold number of people died, whether it was 140,000 or 300,000. We still don't really know how many people were killed by that atomic bomb. But yeah, the symbolism of that is very, very clear to people and is very, very important to Japanese political culture. But you're right, it became and felt like very much two things. Firstly, Very focused on Zelensky. And secondly, from where I'm speaking in Japan, it was particularly being perceived by the Chinese as a very hostile act. And I mean, this is where the G20 is so different, because the G20 includes China, Russia, Saudi Arabia. It's got a very,
46:01 Rory Stewart? very different tone to the G7 in terms of the G7 increasingly sort of standing for this sort of minority Western tradition in a world where the BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China, now have a larger economy combined than the G7.
46:15 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I wonder whether it will evolve. There's talk about South Korea, Australia, you know, becoming added to it. But because I think part of the thinking is that they're liberal democracies as well as market economies. That's the sort of part of the thinking. But it could look quite outdated pretty quickly, I think.
46:34 Rory Stewart? Very good. Well, finally, Japan.
46:36 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, tell us, tell us what you do, what are you doing in Japan?
46:39 Rory Stewart? Here I am in Japan. I spent, I spent the day at Isijinu, which is an extraordinary shrine, reaching back 1600 years, and where the main buildings are reconstructed from scratch every 20 years. And one of the arguments for doing it is it keeps the living craft tradition alive, that people are relatively confident that the buildings you're looking at are the same buildings that you were looking at in the 7th century, paradoxically, because they're only 20 years old.
47:05 Alastair Campbell? Sorry, sorry. So the, I don't think I fully understand that. So they are 20-year-old buildings that are...
47:13 Rory Stewart? Exact, exact replica of their predecessor. And the great point about doing it every 20 years is you never lose touch with the craft tradition. You can be certain that you're remaking it on exactly the same techniques and technology that it was done in the last time round. And it's, it's an extraordinary place because it is at the heart of the emperor and the heart of Shintoism, which is not quite clear whether it really is a religion. I mean, it's a profound sense of Japanese spirituality and attachment to nature and rocks that preceded Buddhism, but also part of a Japanese religious psyche, which doesn't really distinguish. A Japanese friend of mine was joking today that many Japanese are...
47:59 Rory Stewart? Born Shinto, or sort of, as it were, baptized Shinto, marry as Christians and die as Buddhists without really feeling a very strong need to identify. And when I asked whether there was a conversion to Shintoism, I realised there was a translation issue. And certainly the Japanese in the room said, we don't really recognise the notion of conversion, that religions doesn't feel like that to them, in a way that in the West, we very much feel either you're a believer or you're not a believer. But in Japan, it seems to be that you can live in a sort of suspended ambiguity longer.
48:31 Alastair Campbell? They do good temples, don't they?
48:33 Rory Stewart? They do great temples, extraordinary temples, extraordinary food. But Japanese politics, we've talked about a little bit. I mean, at the moment, our current leader is from the LDP, which is this party that dominated Japanese politics. And really, in a sense, is the product of the American occupation after the Second World War. So Japan was defeated, the Americans came in, they rewrote the constitution. And then there was a very strange moment in the 1940s, 1947, where the Americans, panicking over the rise of Communist China, changed direction, particularly in Japan, and reversed their course on unions,
49:16 Rory Stewart? on breaking up the conglomerates, on war criminals. And essentially, and they did pretty similar things, I think, with the German security service in West Germany, began allowing back in some pretty right-wing figures who had been associated with war crimes during the Second World War into key political positions. And this created a world in which Japanese politics has really been dominated largely since the Second World War by families who are often old samurai families, many of them coming from one very small part of Japan. These are all people who go to Tokyo University. The current leader in Japan is the son of a politician, the grandson of a politician, his cousin's a minister, his uncle was prime minister, and his uncle's father and grandfather were also ministers. So getting onto the bus, leaving the temple, a young Japanese woman just said to me, we are completely
50:01 Rory Stewart? fed up with these people. They are all the same. It's a narrow political family. It doesn't represent us at all. They all feel like the same people. And it doesn't really matter which party's in power. But in particular, the LDP, which is back in again, has had a stranglehold on Japanese politics for 60, 70 years, surviving the most unbelievable corruption scandals.
50:22 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, they say about that, when she says, when the woman says that they're all safe, that the number of political parties in Japan is phenomenal. It's just that many of them have sort of naught point nothing percent of the vote. But if you go, if you, if you look up a full, full list of them, I think that my favorite is probably the party to realize a bright Japan with a female emperor. They got naught point naught naught two percent at the, at the last time.
50:51 Rory Stewart? But this is really important, and the reason it's really important is that there's a real problem with the imperial succession. So in Japan, the way the Americans wrote the constitution, the Japanese royal family are only allowed to marry either other members of the royal family or members of the aristocracy. But the Americans also abolished the aristocracy. So there's nobody really that they can marry. So the Japanese royal family has shrunk to about 10 people. And if a woman in the Japanese royal family marries a commoner, they cease to be royal. So currently we're in a position where the emperor has a daughter, and it's impossible for the daughter to marry anyone because there's nobody left in the royal family that she can marry, and she can't marry anyone else and remain royal.
51:30 Alastair Campbell? Why did they only get 10,260 votes in the entire country?
51:33 Rory Stewart? It's very unfortunate because, because the one route out of this is to allow women to take over as emperors, which currently doesn't seem to be possible. So there's a big, big crisis. And this is a royal family that goes back 130 generations.
51:47 Alastair Campbell? I've just, I've just, I've just looked up a full list. The ones that they got naught point naught naught percent were the wake up the Japanese party, they sound like fun, party to take over US military base in Okinawa to Tokyo party.
51:59 Rory Stewart? That's another, another big issue and has been for a long time, US military bases.
52:03 Alastair Campbell? They're huge issues, but the, they all have these parties, and I guess that these parties are a response to the frustration that the woman on your bus is reflecting, that the parties at the top. Are just the same old crew doing the same old stuff. But even at the top, by the way, there are, you know, you've got a constitutional Democratic Party, you've got a Communist Party, you've got a Social Democratic Party, you've got the NHK Party, you've got the, here's another one for you, Roy, the Happiness Realisation Party.
52:30 Rory Stewart? That's good. Well, that's, I'd, I'd vote for that. I'd vote for that.
52:33 Alastair Campbell? But still, the Children's Party got 50,662 votes, the Metaverse Party got 19,000 votes, and the Smile Party got 5,409 votes.
52:45 Rory Stewart? Yeah, that's not very many. Anybody interested, we can send some links in our literature that we distribute, but maybe a figure to really look at to understand post-war Japanese politics very clearly, the great figure is a man called Tanako Kakuya, who completely dominated Japanese politics, became prime minister in the 1970s, stepped down in the most colossal corruption scandals. He lived in something called the Meijuro Palace. He was a construction magnet, and he would hand out 100 million yen bundles to other politicians, and he ran his entire own faction in the LDP. And despite these various corruption scandals and judicial procedures, he continued to dominate right the way through to the 1980s.
53:28 Rory Stewart? So I'll send a little link because to understand how this man from a relatively hard scrabble background in the frozen north managed to break into this world of samurai elite politicians, and then despite the corruption scandals, continue to run this LDP faction from the inside is worth doing. It's also a sign of the Conservative Party. The current leader comes from something called the Kuchikai faction, or the Pond faction, which is a faction which is, I guess, more of the sort of one nation Tory tradition, we'd say, in the UK. And he's meant to be more progressive, more friendly towards welfare, more friendly towards the environment. So in a way, I suppose, if a party has dominance for too long, and maybe
54:12 Rory Stewart? this is true of the Conservative Party in Britain. You begin representing the public by factions breaking apart within the party.
54:19 Alastair Campbell? Well, they do have a pretty good, they have a pretty speedy turnaround of their prime ministers, don't they? And I think that is partly a consequence of factionalism. But Japan generally, they've been pretty stagnant for a long time, but actually economically, the Japanese seem in a pretty good place at the moment.
54:34 Rory Stewart? Well, I did, it's interesting, isn't it? So there's been some positive recent stuff, but on the big scale, the big scale is Japan grew like a rocket from the Second World War to 1989, became the second largest economy in the world. And when we think about the current anxieties about China in the United States in the 1980s, it was all about Japan. And there were all those novels produced about how the Japanese were going to take over the world and everybody's very worried about Japanese nationalism. And then suddenly, 1989, 1990, everything ground to a halt and the Japanese economy basically has not grown since 1990. I mean, that was the period, 1989, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, the land of the Imperial Palace was worth more than Manhattan. And Tokyo was worth more than the entire landmass of the United States.
55:19 Rory Stewart? It was this extraordinary moment since when property prices, I think some areas of Tokyo are still 10% of what they were in 1989.
55:27 Alastair Campbell? So but their stock market has just hit a record high. And the Berkshire Hathaway, Mr Buffett.
55:34 Rory Stewart? Yes.
55:35 Alastair Campbell? Largest foreign destination of investments outside of the US is now, is currently Japan. Chip making industry is returning to Japan. So there, you know, I think there are, there are, there are things they can point to. I thought it was the other interesting thing that came out of the G7 was the extent to which the Prime Minister Kishida clearly was wanting to push the other leaders into some, a pretty strongly, rhetorically at least,
56:02 Alastair Campbell? robust position on China. I noticed that Rishi Sunak in his press conference was very much sort of, he's obviously trying to avoid questions about Suella Braverman, but he was very focused on that sort of very tough message on China. And that relationship between China and Japan, which as you say, has kind of defined the region in so many ways. But it was, it was interesting to me that they were using the opportunity, not least with these other leaders there like Modi, like Lula. To say we have got a real problem and it's on our doorstep and you guys need to be more seized of it even than you are.
56:32 Rory Stewart? And of course, that's that's something that Modi is going to respond to well, because I think there's opportunities for India in presenting itself as the great growing superpower as a counterbalance to China.
56:44 Alastair Campbell? As Leo Varadkar said, China's growth has in many ways defined our world in the last couple of decades and it might be India in the next couple of decades.
56:53 Rory Stewart? Very good. Okay. Well, maybe something on which to end on those wise words, which can be listened to on the podcast leading.
56:59 Alastair Campbell? Good to talk to you. Speak to you soon.
57:01 Rory Stewart? Speak soon. Bye bye.
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