522. Has Hungary Shown Britain How to Beat Farage? (Question Time)

Is Trump's brand now toxic for the global far-right populist movement? Why are crypto billionaires pouring millions into Reform UK? Are we witnessing the death of two-party politics across not just England but Scotland and Wales, too? Join Alastair and Rory as they answer all of these questions and more. __________ If you’re Gen Z, take our survey ⁠⁠here⁠⁠ and if you’re 29 or over, use this ⁠⁠link⁠⁠. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at https://fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: James Clayden, Lorcan Moullier Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Chris Sawyer General Manager: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Rory Stewart?

  People thought that it was going to be very difficult to defeat him.

• 0:03Alastair Campbell?

  He didn't just win, he absolutely trounced him.

• 0:06Rory Stewart?

  How do you dismantle what the other lot have done in a way that is legal, effective and quick?

• 0:13Alastair Campbell?

  On day one, he called for the country's president to resign.

• 0:19Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:17Rory Stewart?

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• 1:27Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:29Alastair 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.

• 1:42Rory 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 and 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.

• 2:05Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:12Rory 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.

• 2:28Speaker 02

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• 2:31Speaker 03

  It could be chronic migraine, fifteen or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have fourteen or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away, as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 3:21Speaker 03

  Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

• 3:36Rory Stewart?

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

• 3:40Alastair Campbell?

  And with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:41Rory Stewart?

  Lots of questions. We're going to do quite a lot on Hungary, where there's been an incredible result. We'll also look at the local elections coming in Britain, Scottish elections and Welsh elections and much more. But Alistair, I wanted to start with a question from Joe. Is it not possible that the Hungarian people have just pinched their noses to vote for Magyar due to fatigue from sixteen years of Orban's government? Given Magyar's own politics, are they really out of the populist quagmire?

• 4:12Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, I think that is a little bit harsh on the new incoming Hungarian Prime Minister. It is true, Joe, that a lot of people... Who would not normally vote for Magyar, who essentially is a centre-right politician, did so because they just wanted to get rid of Orban, no doubt about that at all, including people considerably well to the left of him, quite a few people who might have stood, didn't, some of the parties pulled their punches and essentially anybody who was not for Fidesz and Orban wanted Magyar to win.

• 4:48Rory Stewart?

  Sorry, I'm interrupting, this is very naughty of me, but I've got a note from a Hungarian telling me that the correct pronunciation is Peter Madjar.

• 4:56Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, Peter Madjar did a pretty amazing job. And yes, it's true, Joe, that a lot of people who wouldn't necessarily have voted for a centre-right politician decided to do so because the big driving goal of the election for so many people was just to get rid of Orban. Are they out of the populist quagmire? Well, the answer to that is hopefully. I thought his very interesting is press conference because Orban is much more than the Prime Minister of Hungary, he's this big global figure, part of the populist nationalist authoritarian politics that is kind of spreading like a virus and which is why it's so good that Madjar has managed to sort of put a stop to him.

• 5:39Alastair Campbell?

  But I thought his press conference, he covered an awful lot of ground. He was definitely being more reasonable towards Europe. He was being pro-Ukrainian, saying Ukraine has to be able to sort out its own future. He said if Trump phoned him, he'd take the call, but he wasn't looking for it. And he said the same about Putin. He said he hoped that the UK rejoined the European Union, tick in my book. Let's just not underestimate this. In any election, you have to fight what's in front of you. And he had to fight a guy who's been in power for 16 years, who has set the institutions of the state, basically as extensions of his own political project, with a massive control of the media, Russian money pouring in, Trump sending Vance and Rubio to back

• 6:24Alastair Campbell?

  him up, Trump himself saying on the day, you know, vote for this guy if you want a direct line to the White House. And he won, he didn't just win, he absolutely trounced him.

• 6:35Rory Stewart?

  It's an incredible day, isn't it? It's a really incredible day because.

• 6:40Rory Stewart?

  In many ways, many people who knew Hungary well thought that Orban had stacked the cards in a way that it was going to be very, very difficult to beat him. What Orban essentially had done over sixteen years is demonstrate, or it felt like he could demonstrate, that you could create the beginnings of a proper authoritarian, non-democratic state without doing any of the formal things that you would expect an authoritarian government to do. So use a genuine majority in parliament to re-rig the constitution and stack the judiciary. Use state money to rewire the media. So he didn't need to actually censor independent media, but basically use market mechanisms

• 7:21Rory Stewart?

  and enormous subsidies to boost his own media. Use government contracts and procurement to create a new class of corrupt oligarchs, to reinforce gerrymander district boundaries. And so with district boundaries gerrymander, the courts captured, the media captured, and all the stuff you're talking about, real interference, people thought that it was going to be very difficult to defeat him. And such credit, I think, to Majja for doing this, because, I mean, the guy visited something like ninety-five percent of all the parishes in Hungary during this campaign. So he managed to see three hundred and twenty-seven

• 8:01Rory Stewart?

  towns, five hundred and seventeen times, visited a hundred and sixty-one parishes out of a hundred and seventy-four, often managed to visit six or even nine towns in one day. So I think it's a real inspiration that absolutely populists can be beaten. But I think the second point is, it's not inevitable. It takes real boot leather, it takes real energy. And if people are going to do this, my goodness, they've got to work harder.

• 8:29Alastair Campbell?

  Because Orban has been such a dominant figure, not just in Hungary, but as part of this broader political debate around the world. I think we underestimate as well the role of civil society, that it did keep going. There were lots of organisations who did keep trying to call this stuff out as it was happening. But listen, the campaigning, he literally, as you say, went right around the country again and again and again, just trying to get his message through because he couldn't get access to the mainstream media. It's maybe a point here, Rory, to plug the populism series. We delayed episode two because of the Zelensky interview, but it's out for members on Friday. And this is an extended interview with Liam Byrne. And a lot of what Magyar has done, sorry, I'm finding the Magyar very difficult.

• 9:11Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of what the new Hungarian Prime Minister has done relates to some of the the lessons and the messages that Liam Byrne is putting in his book, Why Populists Are Winning and How to Beat Them, which is what we talk about. So, for example, I saw a lot of the kind of celebration of people on the left was was based on the assumption that this was a traditional left-right contest and the guy on the right has lost. No, he stayed very much as a right of centre politician. He refused to get pushed into a lot of the kind of so-called woke debates. They kept trying to lay a trap for him to come out on LGBT. They kept trying to sort of suggest that he was going to, you know, be so pro-Ukrainian

• 9:56Alastair Campbell?

  that your kids would be sent to war as soon as he became Prime Minister. And he just held very, very firm in the centre. And so I think that's one lesson. The other thing is, I think that, and this is something that Liam Byrne said, you don't win people over to your side by telling them that they're wrong the whole time. I think the other thing that he did is he created a new framing for why somebody who did support Orban could be persuaded to come back to something more mainstream. And sensible. And when we get to part two on Friday, it's very much where we're talking about how to beat populism. And I think that, you know, Magyar is going to be part of that story going forward.

• 10:37Rory Stewart?

  There was a question from Douglas, one of our listeners, after democratic success in Hungary, in part due to Fidesz's pro-Russian stance, what do you think UK voters' red lines are? Do you think reform and other European right-wing parties will change their tactics? Now, some of you keep pointing out Hungary, which is quite a small country, and my goodness, you don't envy Peter Magyar, because he is dealing with a country which is in demographic decline. Women are having on average 1.3 children, the Hungarian population has been dropping since 1980, has a serious debt problem, serious problems productivity, and quite a small population. But why did it matter? And you keep pointing this out, this tiny country matters so much. Well, Pániak's Orban became, for 16 years, increasingly the global

• 11:19Rory Stewart?

  cheerleader of the populist right. He used Hungarian state money, for example, and Fidesz's linked banks to fund Marine Le Pen's party.

• 11:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:28Rory Stewart?

  And he put these huge global conferences together, and he had, he thought, this wonderful recipe that he was sharing with Trump's team and MAGA, which was this whole recipe about how you could, while apparently still operating within a pretense of a constitutional market framework, rig the whole system in favour of your populism. I just think, though, that in terms of reform, and this is a point you've made in the past, and I'd be interested in how we develop this, one lesson from this is that Trump is increasingly becoming a liability. Second lesson from this is that if we look at three people that we've discussed a lot recently, Magyar, Mamdani, the person who's won in New York, and Zelensky, who

• 12:12Rory Stewart?

  you've just interviewed, these are people who ran very unconventional campaigns outside the mainstream media. They challenged the sort of Trumpian model not by doing conventional campaigns in the mainstream media. In the case of Madja, he had to. He couldn't get to the mainstream media. In the case of Mamdani, basically, the democratic establishment under Cuomo had stitched the whole thing up and had the money running behind Cuomo. So what they have found is is the other side of social media. On the one hand, of course, social media has superpowered people like Trump and the new media environment, but it also gives these chinks of light, these opportunities for insurgent independent candidates to

• 12:54Rory Stewart?

  come out of nowhere. We see this maybe with Zach Plansky and the Green Party, getting a kind of name recognition that's never been seen before. Anyway, over to you for the UK implications.

• 13:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I look, I think it is interesting how Farage is without a doubt trying to distance himself a little bit from Trump. He went in both feet into the start of the Iran War, saying we should be alongside him, quickly realised that was a stupid mistake, and is trying to sort of wriggle his way out of that. Vidal, the leader of the AfD in Germany, she has become increasingly quite critical of Trump. I noticed that the weekend that Maloney, right wing populist in Italy, she was critical of Trump because of his attack on the Pope. Mark Carney, who in a sense partly became Prime Minister because of the Trump attacks on Canada, which so damaged Pierre Polievre, the right wing populist

• 13:46Alastair Campbell?

  candidate who was so far ahead. Mark Carney spoke at his party conference at the weekend, and he was not messing about in terms of hitting back at Trump. Sanchez, who you mentioned in the main podcast, he's another one. So Trump's brand is tanking. And if you just think about some of the judgements that Nigel Farage represents, pro Putin, terrible. Pro Trump, terrible. Absolutely obsessed with money. And I think that one of the really big things that damaged Orban so much was this sense of corruption, even though it wasn't that widely reported because the media was controlled. People knew that he had these massive mansions. They knew that his best friend, the gas fitter, had become a billionaire. And if you project yourself as the man of the people, and suddenly you

• 14:30Alastair Campbell?

  become the corrupt that you're meant to be fighting against, you're going to pay. A price. I think that Farage, Vidal, Le Pen, I think they also lost in this election. But here's the thing, only if the progressive left learned the right lessons from what's gone on here, don't assume that this mean the sorts of culture wars that lost the Democrats' support in the United States.

• 14:54Rory Stewart?

  No culture wars. And I think a second lesson is you really need very, very aggressive, active, charismatic campaigning. I mean, just coming back to both Mamdani's skill with social media and Marja's relentless turning up in every village hall over two years, building his base. I mean, if Starmer wants to do well in the next election, Labour wants to do well in the next election, they need to either find a way of Starmer communicating like this, or they need to get rid of Starmer and find someone who can do this. The only way, I think, of defeating the populace I'm seeing over the last six, seven years is real communication skills, charisma, skill with social media. And all those people that you've talked about

• 15:36Rory Stewart?

  have that. And I think what can't happen is kind of grey, steady-as-you-go, boring technocracy, safety-first, tempting though that is. It didn't really work for Theresa May. It's not really working for Starmer. It didn't work for Biden. You need a very different type of approach. Final one from me, and you've made this point, but the reason, of course, we're talking about the Hungarian election is the really big change is in terms of what it means for Europe. Orban was the big disruptor, the big veto holder, the big guy who could really disrupt Europe coming together. And on Ukraine, Peter Marja's first statement, which I just want to read out, because I just think it's so startling for the difference. "Everyone in Hungary," he said in his speech, "knows that Ukraine is

• 16:19Rory Stewart?

  a victim of this war, and no one should tell them under what conditions they should enter a peace or sign a peace treaty. We cannot tell any country to give up their territory. And this is what the Fidesz politician said. Then I'd like to ask them, what would you do if Russia attacked Hungary? Which Hungarian counties would you be willing to give up? Ukraine should receive security guarantees and territorial guarantees that can be observed and kept. Ukraine, under the Budapest Memorandum, something you discussed with Zelensky, gave up its nuclear arsenal for guarantees, but those guarantees were violated repeatedly by Russia."

• 16:58Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, very good, very strong. He's still pretty young, he's mid 40s. Um, he's got something of a checkered past and all these accusations related to how he treated his wife, who was also a minister, and he says it's all smears and all that. But I just felt he fought an amazing campaign that met the moment. And I'm sure he came under lots of pressure to be maybe a little bit less centred in, in the, the strategy that he pursued. Just on this, this corruption thing, because I mean, I'm staggered that the issue of corruption in the United States is not far, far, far bigger than it is. But I think there's always something, Gary Kasparov makes this point. There's always something about the far right that they really like Putin and they really like money.

• 17:43Rory Stewart?

  Alison, we've, we've done a lot on Hungary. I think there's a lot more that we could do because I think it's probably one of the most exciting moments. I mean, we've been leading up to this for four years where we actually, at the beginning of this show, covered Orban's first reelection. So 16 years of Hungarian populist rule finished. But something that we maybe need to get into a little bit more is the challenges that Marsha will now face in not just kind of demographic economic, but as with Poland, one of the challenges is the way in which the whole thing is stacked. And we had a, a question from Henry, who asked, are the lessons from Donald Tusk in Poland for what Marsha would have to do in Hungary to turn the situation around?

• 18:28Rory Stewart?

  And to remind people the problem there, that Donald Tusk defeated the Law and Justice Party, which had been in power in Poland since 2015. But he found that the whole institutional structure of the Polish state had been rigged in favour of the populists. Marsha's now taking over a situation where the judges have been appointed with a central bank governor, where most of the leading business people are all stacked on Orban's side. Orban will be gambling, he can just wait this out, have another go in a couple of years' time and try to make sure that Marsha can make no progress because he can basically paralys him. And that the challenge the Poles have faced is how do you dismantle what the other lot have done in a way that is legal, effective and quick?

• 19:11Rory Stewart?

  Because often what you find is that in Poland, you have these very strange situations where Tusk has been criticised. For firing judges that the last government, the populist government, was criticised for appointing in the first place. So

• 19:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, I think thi- this is why the the two thirds super majority was so important because it means he does have a greater power to make constitutional change. But so, for example, on day one, he called for the country's president to resign. Why? Because the country's president is there basically as a sort of tool of of Orban. So he knows he's going to be oppositional. There are all sorts of new bodies, institutions that Orban set up that Majiar will want to get rid of. We've talked a lot about the media. He essentially what you have is a sort of Russian style propaganda outfit running as the state broadcaster. He'll need to change that. And of course, as you say, now that he stops being the challenger and he becomes the incumbent,

• 20:09Alastair Campbell?

  he it then becomes a little bit harder. That's why I think he should really go for this. The old cliche, hit the ground running. He should really make some big moves very, very quickly. And Orban, interestingly, yesterday, two interesting things about Orban. First is he threw the towel in very, very quickly. I hope that wasn't to do some deal about, you know, not being gone after himself because Majiar has been very clear through the campaign, people who have looted the country, you know, like the best friends who've become billionaires and all the rest of it, he feels that they had there has to be some sort of accountability. But Orban did a very short piece to camera which said to me, he's not going away quietly. He kept talking about the patriots in the country have got to stick together. I suspect we'll see a lot of

• 20:53Alastair Campbell?

  him on the Liz Truss CPAC circuit. He's not going to go away as a voice and he's not going to go away as a thorn in in the new government's side. So

• 21:02Rory Stewart?

  Well, the other thing that won't go away is that he still has a lot of supporters. I mean, this was a huge victory for Majiar. But we mustn't forget that there is still a very, very big group. And this is something you've been discussing in your Populism mini series. Who genuinely remain very polarised, very divided and will be very angry about Marja's victory. So there are a lot of Orban supporters out there who buy into the narrative that Europe is rigging things against Orban, that they're facing cultural decline, that they're fighting for the survival of the Hungarian nation against immigration, that

• 21:43Rory Stewart?

  they're being dragged into a war in Ukraine by Zelensky and a global elite. And so we're not in a world in which it's easy to sort of do round tables and compromise and bring people together. He's got to find some way of re-engaging that group with the body politic. He won't get them all on board, but but just quickly, because this was the theme of your mini-series on populism. What is the lesson about how one would re-engage what I suppose are the Hungarian equivalents of the Reform voters?

• 22:12Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this is where I found Liam Byrne's analysis so interesting, because essentially he's he's done a lot of research, a lot of polling, a lot of survey work, breaking them down into different groups. And essentially, he's saying there are a fairly sizeable group of people who are Reform-minded or Reform-curious, who are just not going to vote anything but Reform. A lot of them may not vote, but they're not going to vote Labour, they're not going to vote Tory, they're not going to vote Lib Dem. He reckons it's about forty percent that Labour could get back. And partly it's this thing about respect. It's this thing about understanding why they're so pissed off with the main parties, why they feel their lives have not got better. And you have to give them the arguments for that and the policies

• 22:56Alastair Campbell?

  for that. And you have to, back to your point about communication and being out there the whole time, you have to make them feel that you you get their lives and you want to be part of making their lives better. And then I think the other thing that that he was really strong on is that, you know, we've got our three Ps, populism, polarisation, post-truth. And he's got his three As that he says are absolutely fundamental to the way that populists operate. Appeasement.

• 23:22Alastair Campbell?

  Autocracy and avarice. Now appeasement basically means, and this is what Allband did brilliantly for four terms, even the opposition felt, we're never going to beat this guy, he's got too much control. So you give in, or you give up.

• 23:35Rory Stewart?

  And that's what Trump's gambling on in the global system, isn't it?

• 23:37Alastair Campbell?

  Totally.

• 23:38Rory Stewart?

  That in the end, everybody will appease Trump and will just suck up whatever America does.

• 23:41Alastair Campbell?

  And then autocracy is the system that you build around yourself. But he says that the third one, which is so important, I'm really glad that the Philip Brightcroft review is underway. I think the government needs to go even further in cleaning up the financing of our politics, because the third A is avarice. And there is something very, very strange. I mean, why aren't people appalled at the money that Trump and his family are making being in power? Why has it taken the Hungarians 16 years to realise that this is just utterly sickening? And yet, when you see Nigel Farage and some of his money-making schemes, the one that I nearly fooled you on April 4, where his Bitcoin thing with Kwasi Kwarteng,

• 24:23Alastair Campbell?

  all the money that they make from GB News. And one of the other interesting things that Liam Byrne has analysed is that there's this huge, over £150 million worth of media infrastructure that is essentially built there to help the populist far-right. We've just got to be far better, the progressive left in particular, but centrist politics, and I would argue the Tories who are centre-right as well, far better at exposing this. So, listen, I think there's a lot in Liam's book, and the series, but there's also a lot in what Magyar's done that I think parties of the left can learn from, not just parties of the right.

• 25:03Rory Stewart?

  We had a question from Robert from York. What did you make of British crypto billionaire Bendello's recent £4 million donations reform? It's apparently made before the government's cap on donations to political parties by British citizens living abroad and was brought in, but he's actually moving back to the UK, so he'd be able to donate more in the future. I mean, just before you get on to that, it is interesting, why on earth are all these rich people giving so much reform? And given that there will be a lot of business people who... Won't believe that reform will be good for the British economy. A lot of more conventional British people who traditionally would have given money to Labour or the Conservatives, believing that a little bit more predictability, a little bit more reason, and maybe even a

• 25:45Rory Stewart?

  little bit more of getting close to the European Union will be good for their businesses. Why are they staying away? And why are all these other guys coming in? Is it that a lot of them made their money in crypto and that makes them, in a sense, naturally quite anarchistic, anti-status quo, anti-elite? And of course, crypto money is made so quickly and has so little to do with normal predictable functioning economies, that maybe that is the sweet spot for a lot of these people on the populist far right?

• 26:15Alastair Campbell?

  Totally. I think you've answered your own question. They don't want any sort of government oversight, not just of crypto, but of anything that they do to make money. You know, we're back to my argument about the sovereign individual, we're back to why Musk projects himself as a believer of free speech. What he means is that he should be free to do whatever he wants to make more and more money and assimilate more and more power. I just think we've got to wake up to this, that the sorts of, you know, and I don't know these people individually, they may be very, very nice, they may be very nice to their mums and very nice to their dogs and cats. But, you know, I'm instinctively very suspicious of somebody who lives in Thailand and makes his money in crypto and gives loads of money to Nigel Farage. I'm very suspicious of this guy who comes back

• 27:00Alastair Campbell?

  being portrayed by Richard Tyson, Nigel Farage and the Daily Telegraph as a great patriot because he's coming back to put his money into reform. I'm sorry, I do not see this as patriotism. I see this as people who can clock that if they can get Nigel Farage into power, people like them are going to be able to make more money with less oversight and the public will not have a bloody clue what's going on and inequality will widen rather than narrow. And just before we go to the break, Rory, to listeners and viewers who are not yet members of Trip Plus, who want to hear our fantastic series on populism and all the other bonus content that we put out there.

• 27:40Rory Stewart?

  Just remind people, we've got AI series out there, we've got your series with Michael Wolff on Murdoch, we've got our series on JD Vance, lot of stuff to get into and much more coming because it's where Alistair and I pursue our specialist enthusiastic projects.

• 27:57Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, episode one and two of The Rest is Politics, mini-series on populism. Get them by joining Trip Plus by going to therestispolitics.com. Now we'll take a break.

• 28:10Rory Stewart?

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• 28:53Rory Stewart?

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• 29:16Speaker 02

  I get so many headaches every month.

• 29:18Speaker 03

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• 29:23Speaker 04

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• 30:53Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 30:57Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. Now, we've done a lot of international stuff recently.

• 31:01Alastair Campbell?

  We have.

• 31:02Rory Stewart?

  But there's some very interesting things happening in the UK. So, Tian, who's a TripPlus member from Bristol, what role will binary divisive populism play in these upcoming local elections? I noticed both the SNP and Reform are reframing these elections in referendum terms. SNP leader John Swinney is pitching another Scottish independence referendum for 2028, while Farage is pitching these local elections as a referendum on summer. Just on that issue, that's quite interesting, what Tian's picked up there. What's happening in campaigns where essentially you say in a local election, and in Farage's case, you know, you're talking about local council elections, this is a referendum, a binary choice on a big issue, who should be Prime Minister or whether Scotland should be independent?

• 31:48Rory Stewart?

  Over to you.

• 31:48Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it plays into something that I've always felt is really, really terrible about the way that we talk about, cover and campaign in local government. I mean, local councils are so important to so many of the things that people really care about, when their bins get collated, how clean their streets are, whether there's actually a local youth club to go to and what have you. And the media has always done this game and they're doing it in this one as well. Is essentially, they play into the idea that actually what you do at the end of the local elections, you add all the votes together and it's like a gigantic opinion poll and you say whether the party of government is in trouble or not. And it's really, really, really tedious. But of course Farage, who understands the media frankly better than

• 32:30Alastair Campbell?

  most of the media do, that's the game that he's playing with this. Fiona and I were on our way to the Heath the other day and the Reform were handing out leaflets outside our local railway station and they actually look like Labour Party leaflets because they're red and there's a picture of Keir Starmer and Tulip Siddique, local MP on there. And you think, oh, that's interesting. And it turns out this whole thing attacking Keir Starmer and Tulip Siddique and say, if you want to get rid of them, vote Reform. Well, if you want to get rid of them, you have to vote for them in a parliamentary election. This is an election about Camden Council. So I can see the politics of it, but I just think it's really sort of pathetic and puerile. If you go to the Scottish question in Cian's

• 33:14Alastair Campbell?

  Point, then it's true. We've interviewed Anna Sawa and it's on leading on Monday. We interviewed John Swinney a few weeks ago, the Scottish First Minister. And when they did the first of the big TV debates the other day, the news that came out of it, the news as decided by Her Majesty's BBC, was that John Swinney has indicated that if they win the election, it's the green light for a referendum. It's not really what this election's about. And I get why he's doing it because Labour is trying to make it a referendum on 20 years of SNP government. He's trying to make it an opinion poll about whether Scotland wants another independence referendum. And meanwhile, all the issues that the Scottish

• 33:57Alastair Campbell?

  Parliament is responsible for and the people in Scotland fought to get, health, education, transport, crime and all the rest of it, they barely get a look in. It's very frustrating.

• 34:08Rory Stewart?

  Just on the YouGov polls, and you know, we've had a lot of painful experience on this podcast of how wrong polls can go. But just to understand why people see this as so seismic, I came into Parliament 2010. And if we look at the elections since 2011, it looks as though in this election, after 15 years, we're going to end up in a position where the SNP are basically in one of their strongest positions ever, and where Reform, which didn't manage to elect any MSPs into Holyrood, it's only MSP in Holyrood, it's actually a Tory who's defected a cross,

• 34:49Rory Stewart?

  is going to go from zero in the 2021 election to 14, 15, even 20 MSPs. Meanwhile, Conservatives and Labour literally will fall off a cliff. I mean Conservatives might go down from 31 MSPs to seven, Labour might go down from 22 down to about 15. So we're really moving into a world in which, instead of where we were in 99, when you were, you know, first set up Holyrood, which was 56 Labour, 35 SNP, and for a long time, basically a

• 35:29Rory Stewart?

  two-party system in Scotland, Labour, SNP, I mean 2007, 47 SNP, 46 Labour, into a world which is dominated in seat terms with the SNP, potentially with Reform, which was nowhere, emerging as the second party, and Labour and Conservatives almost vanishing.

• 35:46Alastair Campbell?

  Because I think Anna Sawa is a genuinely good campaigner and good candidate. And when the interview comes out on Monday, I challenged him, you know, a bit because I wasn't that happy when he sort of came out at the time that he did saying Keir Starmer has to go. But when he explained the strategy and the reason why they are polling so badly, you kind of get a sense of why he felt he had to do it. And it's true, this goes back to the conversation about populism. I think we've always felt, or too many people have felt, that Reform was always going to really, really struggle to get any sort of foothold in Scotland. You know, if you remember previous visits when Nigel Farage went there and you get hounded out and what have you. So there's always been a kind of right-wing populist streak in Scottish public opinion.

• 36:28Alastair Campbell?

  But as you say, it's why where it's going to reform is because of the collapse of the Conservative Party.

• 36:35Rory Stewart?

  Can I just challenge challenge that because presumably what you've done on your mini series also suggests that quite a lot of those reform voters will also be coming from Labour. That's certainly true across the United Kingdom as a whole. Yes, a lot of them come from Tories, but a lot of them come from Labour too. I mean, it's basically the implosion of the two main parties with their traditional voters going to either SNP or Reform.

• 36:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Or in where there isn't the SNP, what's happened in parts of England is they go, those on the left go to Green and those on the right maybe more curious about Reform. But I think that what what will happen if, you know, it does seem to me extraordinary. We go on about, you know, power corrupts absolutely. If you actually look at the SNP record, I think this is something you feel even stronger than I do. You've had these, you know, gigantic figures in Scottish politics, Alex Salmond, who's, let's be frank, whose career ended in ignominy. You've had then Nicola Sturgeon, whose husband's career is, you know, not ending exactly where either of them would have wanted it to do.

• 37:34Rory Stewart?

  Which is a polite way of saying about your friend that the guy's under massive police investigation.

• 37:39Alastair Campbell?

  I was I was conscious of the of the legal ramifications as I was as I was speaking. My journalistic training of essential law for journalists many, many, many years ago. And then you've got John Swinney, who literally has been a big figure in the SNP for 20 years and he's essentially, he's the change. And so it just feels a bit weird. And because what Scottish Labour people I talked to say, say they're being dragged down by the sense of the Labour government at Westminster not being what people thought that they that they voted for. Because Scotland did go very much to Labour at the last election, at the last general election. I don't know what the odds would have been, but you'd have been pretty nailed on if you'd

• 38:21Alastair Campbell?

  have put a bet on, on, you know, people thought that Anna Sawa was going to be coasting to First Minister. Doesn't look like that's happening. And then Wales is, you know, Wales, which has always been Labour. And there it's not impossible that well, that Labour comes third there with Plaid and and the and Reform. So we do, we now have these systems that were devised in a very different era. For what we now appear to be the development of this very, very multi-party politics. I've got to say, by the way, you often say, I don't criticise, as you call him, my friend Keir Starmer. Very much. I didn't much see the point of the party election broadcast that Labour put out.

• 39:03Alastair Campbell?

  Because it was essentially, it was Keir Starmer at a lectern with two union flags behind him, talking mainly about Iran and the war. Now, it's incredibly important, but he does press conferences, he does Parliament for that. You know, I think there should have been a really strong local government message. Why your local council matters, why these choices matter.

• 39:25Rory Stewart?

  That's where I thought Anna Sawa's interview was interesting. The strongest bit, the message that would appeal to me and that I hope is going to get him to win over some centrist voters, the kind of, I suppose, the centrist Tory voter or the centrist Labour voter, is that he was basically saying, it's about performance. It's about sorting out the Scottish economy, he'd like to see taxes come down, he'd like regulation to go, he'd like to grow businesses. He talks very openly about the fact his father was a very successful businessman and entrepreneur. It's a kind of pro-business, let's sort out the education system, set up standards. Quite an optimistic, local vision for a more vibrant Scottish economy and public services.

• 40:06Rory Stewart?

  I felt, and I have interested in some feedback, that he could have actually been a little bit more colourful and developed a few more, more striking phrases about the moral corruption of the SNP. I would have gone with that. And let me, you know, let me reinforce this, I know you disagree with me, but listen. We've just seen Peter Maria win a whole election by going against the corruption of another party. It's a massive valence salience issue. And so I would be tempted to say that in modern politics, if you want to campaign against, and I see the SNP as actually being an equivalent of populist nationalists, you want to run against them, you've got to have striking, impressive things. And it can't just, and the problem with Anna is, I love the underlying message, which is

• 40:50Rory Stewart?

  solid, good, competent, pro-business policies, fine, but it's got to excite people. And you've been given a gift, I'm afraid, by the incredible moral conundrums that the SNP found themselves in. If you can't land something on a party that managed to produce. Alex Salmon, Nicholas Sturgeon's husband. You're really struggling.

• 41:12Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I hope this has made people want to listen to the interview when it comes out or leaning. But the reason I was laughing, Rory, is because when I got home, and I said to Fiona, this is what I said, and what did she say? What did Rory think about him? And I said, he thinks he needs better adjectives. And so, and it's true, you did say, so I was walking by the kitchen going, what do we want? Better adjectives? What do we, what do you want them now? So, anyway, I think he's a, he's a, he's an interesting character and I hope people listen to and enjoy our interview with him on, on Monday. Now, here's one, Rory, I know how much you like my former, I nearly said former friend, my friend and former colleague, Peter Hyman. This is from Emma,

• 41:57Alastair Campbell?

  Emma in Glasgow. Should we ban the social media for kids, tic, tic, and instead be teaching what Peter Hyman recently described as the lost art of discernment in schools? Did you have time to read it? I sent it to you. It was this sub stack he wrote about a teacher that he'd hired when Peter was a head teacher, who he said was brilliant at teaching and, and getting kids interested in writing and reading and language. But actually, this point about discernment and kind of, I guess, separating wheat from chaff and have understanding motivation, understanding that as you scroll endlessly through Instagram, somebody's making money out of you and starting to think of those things. And it was sort of a kind of deeper form of critical thinking, but I thought it was a lovely

• 42:43Alastair Campbell?

  old fashioned word, discernment.

• 42:45Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I think one of the challenges in a way is not that young people are gullible. It's that they're unbelievably cynical. I mean, I notice with my now nine year old and 11 year old that if you watch advertisements with them or you watch Trump give a speech. They are incredibly quick to say, this is a scam. Who's making money out of this? They're very, very alert because they're being scammed all the time. I mean, they're aware on social media that, you know, they're trying to buy some five pound thing for their video game add-on. And it turns out to be a brilliant video that ends up in a rubbish product.

• 43:25Rory Stewart?

  They're very, very conscious when they're watching Trump speak that it's all nonsense. They'll be very aware of his kind of image of himself as Jesus, et cetera. So one of the challenges, I guess, if you're teaching in schools is not how do you develop cynicism? I think basically the world is making young people very cynical. And, and, you know, they're also taught critical thinking in school, which involves questioning politicians, questioning historical texts. They're very good at that. Part of the problem is how do you encourage them to actually believe anything? How do you encourage them to work out where the skepticism and the questioning ceases?

• 44:08Rory Stewart?

  And where you're actually prepared to say, in the end, this person, though flawed, is the lesser evil. This person may not be perfect, but actually it's the kind of politician I want to support. And I want to support passionately. Here's the compromise I'm prepared to make because the real challenge, I think, is that we create, and, and this I'm worried about sometimes, my Yale students, which is a hyper-intelligent, hypercritical, but ultimately quite cynical and nihilistic culture.

• 44:38Alastair Campbell?

  Peter ends his piece by, he goes through all these things that you think you have to, that are part of this discernment, establishing whether something is true, understanding the context, working out whether it's actually worth your time, thinking and caring about it. Is there a value attached to it, moral purpose? Self-knowledge, what triggers me, what flatters me, what confirms my biases? What kinds of narratives am I too ready to believe? On it goes. And then he says, this is the hardest thing of all, to choose to live life with a greater repertoire of experience, to be discerning about what we watch, read, consume and do. And without teaching the next generation discernment, without all of us asking these questions, we're likely to drown. Under the vast, never-ending weight of content, or be mown down by the AI juggernaut

• 45:21Alastair Campbell?

  heading towards us. Anyway, it's an interesting piece. We'll put it in the newsletter. And also, Rory, just those that are listeners and youngers of all ages, but particularly the young, I hope will be interested in this. We're planning a mini-series on Gen Z, which is going to be presented by somebody else, not us, because we're very, very not Gen Z, you and I, Rory. But we are, we are going to try and find out how Gen Z are perceived, how they perceive themselves, and what they think about their prospects in life.

• 45:51Rory Stewart?

  Can you remind us, I'm so non-Gen Z, I don't even know what Gen Z is. What is Gen Z?

• 45:55Alastair Campbell?

  If you're aged 14 to 29, you are Gen Z. And we've put together two surveys. We're already getting a fantastic response to them. One is for members of Gen Z, i.e. 14 to 29, and the other is for the rest of us, above the age of 29.

• 46:14Rory Stewart?

  So Gen Z means anyone who was born after Tony Blair's first election victory?

• 46:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, no, but then it stops.

• 46:22Rory Stewart?

  Stops, stops basically, I don't know, sometimes two years into David Cameron.

• 46:27Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. We've asked all sorts of questions. Would you ever consider going to politics? Would you ever consider joining a political party? How do you see your own future? How are you, how worried are you about AI? So anyway, please take part, especially Gen Z people, take part, but also getting some very interesting insights into what, what older people think of Gen Z, which I think is a lot of it misaligned with reality, but there we are. So the forms to fill in, whether you're Gen Z or not, are in our free newsletter and they're in the episode description below. So either just go follow the link in the episode description, or just go to the rest is politics.com. Final question, Rory. Izzy wants to know, well, first of all, she says,

• 47:10Alastair Campbell?

  welcome back. How was your week off? Did you do anything exciting?

• 47:15Rory Stewart?

  Well, so I was in the Galapagos. And the Galapagos, people who don't know, is a set of volcanic islands about 1,000 kilometres off the coast of Ecuador. So I was in Quito, and then I went across the family. Very, very lucky. I was on a National Geographic boat. And... For people who haven't visited, I mean, it's tough getting there, it's expensive getting there, but it is a life-changing experience because the animals are quite unlike any animals that you'll see anywhere else on earth. The particular group of animals is a very unusual one, it's giant tortoises, I think people have heard of, iguanas, blue-footed boobies.

• 47:58Rory Stewart?

  But the main thing about them is that they grew up effectively without any predators, and because it's so inhospitable, very little fresh water, no humans until very recently in geological time. Darwin visited and became very interested because it's a real sort of way of telling the story of evolution. It's isolated enough from the continent to have developed these very independent species, but the little island chains produce tiny microvariation species to species. But this means that you can sit, as I did, on a beach, and a sea lion will come straight up to you, or it will play with you in the water. Giant tortoises will walk straight past you as though you're not there, iguanas will

• 48:39Rory Stewart?

  sit on your foot, birds will almost land on your head, you can see albatrosses, I mean, and it's like a sort of picture of the Garden of Eden. It's very, very strange and startling. And of course, the one thing they're not worrying about is Donald Trump. So I had a very, very happy hour lying on a beach with a sea lion, being, and essentially the sea lion was teaching me, do you just lie on the beach, just let the water wash you up and down again? You get very sandy, but you don't think about Donald Trump.

• 49:07Alastair Campbell?

  But you know what's really interesting? I'm just looking at some pictures now, and, I mean, the beaches are incredible, they're like, they're kind of, they remind me of the Hebrides, the sort of goldy, light gold is how I'd describe them.

• 49:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, there's that, but it's also that these are very recent islands in geological terms, and Scotland, you know, bits of it are. Four hundred fifty, five hundred million years old, you know, my bit of Perthshire's like that. These are islands that came out of the sea between five hundred thousand and five million years ago. And therefore, some of the islands you go to are basically just black volcanic lava with one or two tiny sprigs of grass. That's the sort of newest ones, and there are active volcanoes. Even the oldest, in inverted commas, islands are still just establishing themselves. And it is that sense of being almost at the beginning of creation.

• 50:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Where did you stay?

• 50:01Rory Stewart?

  Stayed on a boat. Stayed in a boat. Because the whole thing, Ecuador has turned the whole thing into an enormous national park, and it regulates very, very carefully where you can go, where you can snorkel, how many people can go on each place. They actually tell you which bits of the islands you can go to at any one time. It's very, very well organised. Lots of Restless Politics listeners, so when I was lying, embarrassing myself, looking pretty unattractive in my swimming trunks, playing with a sea lion, people would walk up to me and say, you know, well done on the Restless Politics.

• 50:31Alastair Campbell?

  They didn't say, why weren't you with Alastair to interview Zelensky?

• 50:34Rory Stewart?

  No, they didn't ask that. But a very particular demographic, I mean, our little boat was basically doctors, university professors, vets seemed to be the demographic being picked up, people like your dad.

• 50:48Alastair Campbell?

  Are they trying to develop a tourist infrastructure or not?

• 50:50Rory Stewart?

  No, they're trying to keep most of it offshore on these boats. So they take you in on these Zodiac, these rigid inflatable crafts that take you into the shoreline. And they're very limited on where they allow you to walk unless you're actually, you know, like my great friend, Robert Sapolsky, a genuine naturalist who could sit under a tree and stare at the sea lions for twenty years. No, I'd really recommend it. It's unbelievable. And it made me so moved by nature and so moved by the sense, when you're underwater snorkelling, and I'm sure many people love snorkelling as much as I do, that you're looking at such an ancient world that, you know, horseshoe crabs that have been there four hundred million years, sharks that have been there hundreds of millions

• 51:32Rory Stewart?

  of years, turtles that have been there hundreds of million years, they're before the dinosaurs, moving around in these strange, dark submarine environments.

• 51:41Alastair Campbell?

  You said that Charles Darwin went there. And I know if you read about Darwin, his visit to the Galapagos, was that not, didn't that not play? Quite a role in his developing theories of evolution. What happened to him that when he went there?

• 51:57Rory Stewart?

  Well, he he arrives on the Beagle, this amazing five year journey that he takes as a young man. And he collects all these specimens and he notes in it that um a man says to him that you can tell just by looking at it which island and tortoise comes from. So the islands where the tortoises have to stretch their heads up higher to get to the prickly pear trees, their shells have a different shape. They have a sort of saddle shape so their heads can go up. And they have a more domed shape in the place where the vegetation is near the ground. There are these finches which have totally different beaks, depending what type of um fruit they're going after or nuts they're going after.

• 52:38Rory Stewart?

  Now, Darwin didn't catalogue this very well at the time. In fact, Captain Fitzroy he's travelling with does a much better job at cataloguing properly which island. But later, when he writes The Origins of Species, he gives a lot of credit to his voyage to the Beagle, a beginning to get him thinking about natural selection. And the species, they're beautifully written books. There's a wonderful audio recording actually of Origin of Species, read by Richard Dawkins, if people wanted to listen. And essentially, what the Galapagos Islands tells us, even if he wasn't fully aware when he was there at the time, is through these island environments, you can see most clearly of all the way that evolution works, the way that very specific microenvironments can generate entirely new species.

• 53:21Alastair Campbell?

  Fantastic, fantastic. Well, it sounds amazing. And the kids at no point said, can't we go to Euro Disney?

• 53:28Rory Stewart?

  No, because it's wonderful for kids too, because because they get to literally walk and look at they, I mean, they've got everything. They've got penguins and flamingos. Very oddly, these very cold water meets very warm water. So you have animals together that you'd never expect to see together, and they're so tame. So you don't need binoculars. I mean, you're literally right next to an albatross or right next to a flamingo or a penguin.

• 53:50Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, that's great. Well done. Well done.

• 53:53Rory Stewart?

  Well, thank you for letting me off, and I hope this is going to encourage Alistair to take a holiday sometime.

• 53:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, whatever.

• 54:00Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 54:01Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 54:02Rory Stewart?

  See you soon. Bye bye.

• 54:03Alastair Campbell?

  Take care. Bye.

• 54:04Rory Stewart?

  Bye.

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