20. By-elections, strikes, and populists

Join Rory and Alastair as they discuss by-elections, how Alastair would run as a Tory, strikes, trade unions, Colombia, France, Henry Kissinger, Carrie Johnson's ghost story, Rory's visit to a kibbutz, Welsh Labour, ethics advisors and unrequited love! Reading list: Here’s what Labour should say on Brexit and immigration - Peter Kellner Henry Kissinger at 99: how to avoid another world war - Niall Ferguson Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport The New European Offer: theneweuropean.co.uk/trip Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Hello, welcome back. This is episode 17 of the main The Rest is Politics podcast. We are still riding high in the charts, number one. And today, we're going to get through some pretty significant by-elections. We're going to go through strikes. We're going to talk a little bit about more about what Labour can and should do. We're going to cover France. We're going to cover Colombia and Latin America. And we're going to also talk about this mysterious vanishing of a story about Boris Johnson trying to get a £100,000 job for his then mistress at public expense. What a disgusting human being he is. But we'll come back to that. Rory, let's kick off with by-elections. Have you got any great by-election memories?

• 2:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think the one that... Meant most in my career was the election that happened in Cumbria in 2019, which Trudy Harrison won in Copland. So that had been a constituency which had been held by Labour almost unbroken for a hundred years, particularly the west coast edge of Copland, ex-mining communities. And it was the election which triggered Theresa May into holding her general election. Sorry, I said 2019, I meant 2017. So this was fascinating. So we were out on the doorsteps and it was almost unheard of. In fact, people calculated that in 150

• 3:06Rory Stewart?

  years, a sitting government had not won a by-election in this kind of circumstance. And what it did, and this is why it's going to be relevant to these two by-elections coming this week, which we can talk about Wakefield and Tiverton, is that it completely changed the view of the party. It took Theresa May from a situation in which she'd been saying that she wouldn't hold an election, to deciding that she could win an election. And of course, it was an election in 2017 that she effectively lost, losing her majority and basically destroying her entire Brexit project and leading to Boris Johnson.

• 3:40Alastair Campbell?

  So the combination of that by-election and then the long walk in Wales with her husband, she came back, we're going for an election, she thought she was invincible and she, she really never recovered from that. And, and, and that's one of the reasons why we're in the mess we're in now.

• 3:53Rory Stewart?

  And, and also just, just very quickly, just, sorry, I didn't explain it very well, but just to explain what happened there. So Trudy, who was a, a local mum, basically, in Copland, took the seat against all the odds. And I think the reason people were surprised was, was because Theresa May seemed to be doing so well in 2017 on the doorsteps. People liked the sense of dignity, they liked the sense of seriousness. That also contributed to her running a disastrous election, almost a presidential election under her name. But the other thing is that in retrospect, it was the beginning of the cracking of the red wall. That was the sign that a lot of these traditional Labour seats because of Brexit were likely to go Conservative. Sorry, back to you. Yeah.

• 4:33Alastair Campbell?

  No, I was just going to say that I I can remember by-elections going way, way, way back to the eighties when I was a journalist, because back then by-elections were huge in the media. They were like covered almost like many general elections. You had press conferences every single day. You had senior national figures who sat alongside the candidate. I remember Brian Gould and Bruce Grokot was always in charge of sort of managing the Labour candidates' media. And you had to make, you know, what they exposed was some of the problems the parties had. So I remember there was a whole succession of by-elections where the Labour leadership wanted kind of candidates in their image. And they ended up with like Peter Tatchell was one of them. There was a woman called Deirdre Wood, I

• 5:15Alastair Campbell?

  think it was in Greenwich. There was a guy up in Glasgow. I can't remember his name, but it was it was it was a Labour SNP fight up in Glasgow. I think his name was Gillespie. And he had the he had the letters King Kong tattooed on his knuckles, which was at the time Neil Kennedy was trying to project a sort of more modern image of the Labour Party. It was quite difficult. But now, and of course, those that was the area when if you know the journalist Michael Crick, he really made his name kind of harassing by-election candidates, forcing them to kind of give interviews, take positions. Now, I've got to be honest, I don't think I could name any of the candidates in these two by-elections. Because all you hear about is this, how will it affect the national picture? A vote on Boris Johnson, a vote on Keir Starmer. And we've lost that centrality of by-elections

• 5:59Alastair Campbell?

  to the debate, other than as kind of little symbols of what's going on nationally.

• 6:03Rory Stewart?

  Yes, and I think there's a sense in which we maybe put, it's fascinating how little emphasis we put on the individual qualities of those candidates. We assume that the national polls will determine it. I don't think anybody commenting on it. Thinks that if you had a really strong local candidate, they could turn it around.

• 6:20Alastair Campbell?

  Which, by the way, we had Kim Ledbetter, when, I mean, obviously, different situations. She was standing in for her sister who'd been murdered and it was like, you know, obviously it was a different set of circumstances. However, with these two, I was, I was doing this TV thing the other day and I got in the back of the car and I'd actually been, it's a programme about politics and we were testing some members of the public about whether they could make a speech. I got in the, and they were okay, they were quite good. I got in the car and the first two things I saw were the Tory candidate in Wakefield, who's again, whose name I can't remember, who was doing this interview where he's suddenly, out of nowhere, talking about the candidate that he was, the MP he was replacing, who was going to jail for child abuse, sexual

• 7:01Alastair Campbell?

  abuse. He suddenly, he suddenly introduced Harold Shipman into his quote about why we should maybe forgive a bit and.

• 7:10Rory Stewart?

  It was, it was extraordinary, wasn't it? He said, um, he said, just because Harold Shipman murdered lots of people doesn't mean we don't go to see a GP. But it was a really bad analogy. It might have worked.

• 7:21Alastair Campbell?

  What was that about?

• 7:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think obviously it was one of those things that you kind of say to a mate over a drink and it sounds fine. And then you say it in public and you suddenly realise it sounds horrible.

• 7:30Alastair Campbell?

  And then I saw the, the Tory candidate in Tiverton, again on social media, doing this Q and A with the public, defending Boris Johnson as a moral, ethical person. And she was so patronising to the audience. And it was quite a big room. It was like a hustings. It was quite a big room. A lot of people in there. And there was, the camera sort of panned to the, the audience and I saw some of them literally wincing. And I think they were probably Tory supporters who thought, oh my God, how is she doing this? You know, so the candidates have got to be stronger.

• 8:01Rory Stewart?

  And Alistair, just, just to flip this around, very, very unfair question for you because it's something you would never, ever want to do. But if you were a Tory candidate running in one of these by-elections, what is the least damaging way of handling the question on Boris Johnson? So let's say I said to you, Alistair, you're running as a Tory candidate, do you think that Boris Johnson is a beacon of moral integrity?

• 8:22Alastair Campbell?

  I would say, if I was the candidate, I would say, well, I'll choose my words, not yours.

• 8:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Alastair Campbell?

  I would, I would say that he's, for all the faults that we hear so much about, he's still got extraordinary strengths. I see that when I, when he comes up to the constituency, that yes, there are some people are going to come out and boo him, and I've seen that, but I also see these people. And in the end, he's doing this, and he's doing this, and he's doing this.

• 8:44Rory Stewart?

  And if they keep pushing you, keep interrupting and saying, but, As, you're not answering the question, is he a beacon of moral integrity? How do you get out of them asking the same questions six times?

• 8:53Alastair Campbell?

  I would, I would say, I'm not going to choose those words. And because, you know, he's done things which have clearly upset and offended quite a lot of people in this country, including this constituency. But I'm standing here to represent this constituency, to represent the Conservative Party, da, da, da. So I wouldn't say yes, and I wouldn't say no.

• 9:10Rory Stewart?

  Gotcha.

• 9:10Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, the truthful answer is he has got no moral integrity whatsoever. I'll tell you, the other thing, the other thing about by-elections is that I think the parties, as you said about, you know, they can be, you can exaggerate the consequence. But at the same time, I can remember once being in Washington in opposition, we were doing a visit in opposition, seeing Clinton, and, and there was a by-election, I think it was in Dudley, I think it was in Dudley. And Fiona Gordon, who was our regional organizer in the West Midlands, and she phoned me, it was about midnight UK time, and the result, she knew, she'd seen how the result was going. We'd been sort of laying expectations for

• 9:51Alastair Campbell?

  a kind of narrow win in what was a Conservative-held seat. And she basically phoned me up and said, you know, it's massive, we are, it's massive. And I remember Tony was at this dinner with all these sort of, you know, big American political figures. Clinton wasn't there, but there were Secretaries of State, and there were foreign ambassadors and so forth. And I remember going in and just sort of whispering to him, we've absolutely rinsed them. And he sort of goes, give me, and I said, it's going to be massive. And he was desperate not to sort of just go, yes. But I knew it was. And I think it was one of those moments where we thought, do you know what? We can really win this big.

• 10:25Rory Stewart?

  It's a huge thing, isn't it? The another sort of random fact is there used to be many, many more by-elections. One of the ways in which we can tell that politics is becoming, as it were, more professional is that the number of by-elections from about, I think it's about eighteen eighty to about nineteen eighty, the number of by-elections between parliaments halves every parliament. In the parliaments back in the nineteenth, early twentieth century, you'd have sort of a hundred, hundred and fifty by-elections between parliaments.

• 10:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Rory Stewart?

  And and that's because people didn't see politics as something that they were going to stick in for a long career. It was much more normal to to step down and that. And you had very different candidates. Nowadays, the only candidate you'd run in a by-election, obviously, is a deeply local person, often a local councillor. But they would do things like run Winston Churchill in Dundee. Or, you know, people like me and Tony Blair, who aren't local candidates, running in places. You wouldn't do that in a by-election today.

• 11:16Alastair Campbell?

  But also, also, I think the other thing that's happened is that because there are more younger people going into politics, younger, which I think is a good thing, but it means that there are fewer deaths. Um, I'm very surprised that there haven't been conservatives over the Boris Johnson thing, who haven't just said, I can't put up with this anymore. I'm actually going. Uh, and I'm really surprised that. Have there been any?

• 11:37Rory Stewart?

  No, there haven't. And there's huge pressure on the whips to prevent it, of course. That's when they really start bribing and trying to offer you nighthoods and peerages. If you'll just hang on, because it's catastrophic for them to have a by-election. They, I remember David Cameron's basic joke with me all the time when I was going to places like Libya was always, please, please don't trigger a by-election.

• 11:55Alastair Campbell?

  Don't fall out of the sky. Listen, what do you think about, um, how much in both Wakefield and Tiverton, how much do you think there will be tactical voting? And how much do you think Labour in Tiverton and the Lib Dems in Wakefield will actually be covertly encouraging it?

• 12:12Rory Stewart?

  I think there will be tactical voting. It's a very interesting though to understand. I mean, obviously tactical voting is when you don't vote for the party that you really prefer, you vote for another party in order to get rid of, get rid of another party. So let's say I was a Labour supporter and I thought the Lib Dems had a better chance in Tiverton, I'd vote Lib Dem. One of the questions I guess that people often ask is why is this covert? You remember there was a sort of thing which we discussed in one of our first episodes where the Tory party chairman wrote a very aggressive letter accusing Labour of tactical voting. And he clearly thought this was a kind of big deal. And it's difficult to understand. Have you got a sense on why he thought that was such a big deal and why he thought he could get a public relations hit by accusing people of doing it?

• 12:56Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know why he did that, but I do sort of understand why parties find it so difficult to encourage it overtly because, you know, you've got a situation where in Tiverton at the moment, there is a Labour candidate. I don't even know the name. He or she is going around knocking on doors and putting leaflets through doors and trying to get people to vote for them. Now, if I've got to be honest, if I was that candidate, I'd kind of stay at home. But that's why it's difficult because you're basically saying, well, don't vote for our candidate. And you're also saying, I guess, if you're Labour or Tory or the Lib Dems, you're saying we are no longer a national party. But I think for these by-elections, look, I think the Tories are really trying to set expectations.

• 13:38Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, Tiverton, if they lose Tiverton, it is absolutely massive. Okay? It would be one of the biggest defeats ever. But they're already sort of setting it, oh, well, we'd expect to lose this by-election. I think actually Wakefield feels to me like Labour will win. Tiverton, I think this is probably still less clear. The Labour candidate, by the way, I shouldn't do a disservice, she's called Liz Poll. So she's going around trying to get votes and I would just say, Liz, just kind of have a couple of days off and try and lose your deposit and the party will actually love you for it.

• 14:11Rory Stewart?

  And the problem is trusting the party to love you. I think one of the other things that makes candidates so angry if they suspect that's happening. I mean, I remember with colleagues that it was often.

• 14:21Rory Stewart?

  Not necessary tactical voting, but just a sense that somebody in head office had decided that your seat wasn't a priority and all the money and all the resources were going to other seats when you felt you had a chance of doing it. And you have to feel you've got a chance of doing it, otherwise you can't get out of bed in the morning. And then they would feel that the party would then punish them for not getting a great result in the election, rather than being forgiving.

• 14:42Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, Rory, can we just talk a bit about, before we do strikes, can we just talk briefly about, I sent you that polling presentation that Peter Kellner has written.

• 14:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Alastair Campbell?

  Which actually is running in the New European this week. It's very, very long, it's very, very detailed. But I thought it was incredibly interesting because he was basically saying that there are these two types of voter. He called them, I hate these labels, but let's go with it. He called, one is Joe, who's kind of over 50s, working class, lives in the north, voted Brexit, switched to the Tories recently, used to be rock solid Labour. And then you've got Jenny, who's a young, European minded, professional, liberal minded, et cetera. And Peter's take, and I'm afraid I agree with it, is that at the moment Labour are mistaken, in my view, putting all their eggs into the Joe basket.

• 15:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 15:29Alastair Campbell?

  And taking Jenny for granted. And Peter's arguing that actually if we stop treating Brexit and immigration as issues of national and cultural identity, and see them as issues of social and economic realities, that Labour actually can build a coalition that goes for both.

• 15:46Rory Stewart?

  Highly recommend it. I think there's a couple of other interesting things he says in the article. One of them is that Jenny, in the 1980s, he says, would have voted Conservative.

• 15:56Alastair Campbell?

  The Jenny of the 1980s.

• 15:57Rory Stewart?

  Of the 1980s, yeah.

• 15:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 15:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, who would have been born in the late 50s, early 60s.

• 16:01Alastair Campbell?

  And Joe would have voted Labour.

• 16:03Rory Stewart?

  And Joe would have voted Labour. And that what's happened is that the default has swapped. Jenny now, very obviously, professional person. Almost all professional people, Peter Kellner says, there's a sort of general, I mean, obviously it's not true of everybody, but generally speaking, professional people voted Conservative in the early 80s. And generally speaking, professional people vote for Labour or the Lib Dems now.

• 16:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 16:25Rory Stewart?

  And essentially, the the Joe vote, which is a working class northern vote, of course, is is voted Brexit more than it voted Remain, and therefore voted more for Boris Johnson's 2019 election. The problem, though, that he points out is it's incredibly difficult to come up with a programme that appeals to both Jenny and Joe. And he acknowledges that, and I think he tries to come up with a an argument on how you could do it, but it's really tough. I mean, those are two quite different groups.

• 16:52Alastair Campbell?

  I I listen, it is tough, but I really don't think it's impossible. And I do think it's easier. I think the big point he makes that I really agree with, and I've been trying to say this, and I think because I'm so identified as a sort of, you know, absolutely can't stand Brexit, et cetera, et cetera. I I'm probably the the the one of the worst people to say it, but I think Keir Starmer can say it, which is basically we've got to stop falling into these culture war traps, stop seeing Brexit as an issue totally of national identity. It's an issue now of econ- our economic future and our economic strength. Whether we like it or not, we are going to have to develop good trade relations. And I think what's really interesting is polling is that even amongst the Joes, even amongst the Leavers,

• 17:35Alastair Campbell?

  they don't have any longer have Brexit as the sort of driving interest in their politics. And two to one of them, that's of the vote, the people who voted Leave in the North, two thirds of them do accept that Brexit is going badly.

• 17:48Rory Stewart?

  But interestingly, David Canzini, who's the kind of guru, election guru in in Boris Johnson's Number Ten.

• 17:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, who who helped Scott Morrison to defeat, by the way.

• 17:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, is in on the record saying the next election is going to be about Brexit. I think he had a meeting in Number Ten where he said, anyone who thinks the next election isn't about Brexit, leave the room.

• 18:04Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he's he's making a mistake. He's making a mistake. And I'll tell you, they go on about these Aussies about how great they were. I told you, Linton Crosby, the worst. Our easiest campaign was 2005, when Linton Crosby was in charge of that campaign. And they've just been in charge of Scott Morrison. They think they're absolute geniuses, and I think Labour are too spooked by this idea of these great Aussies and what have you. Labour can get a strategy, and I honestly recommend that they get the Peter Kellner piece and they really, really focus on it. But let's talk strikes.

• 18:32Rory Stewart?

  Yes, question. Gordon McEwan, where do you both stand on what should shouldn't be run by the state, railways, utilities, et cetera?

• 18:40Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, let's start with schools.

• 18:44Rory Stewart?

  Are you fully now, you're not just against Eton, you now want to get rid of all private schools?

• 18:49Alastair Campbell?

  I think I would, look, it's not going to happen, but I do think if you look consistently at the Pisa League tables, the countries that are always there or thereabouts at the top, you know, Canada, Finland, Singapore, that the private sector is minimal to zero. And so, but let's look, that's just me going off on one. Let's just talk about, I guess this is about the strikes. Look, I don't have an ideological private v public. I don't buy this idea that just because it's public sector, it is going to be better. But I do think railway privatisation has been a bit of a disaster in terms of the outcomes. Often, looking, I love railways, I love going on the train and, you know, most of the journeys I do, which are long

• 19:34Alastair Campbell?

  distance for football matches or up to Scotland, most of the time it's really, really good. Okay. But I think when you talk to people who are having to commute every day, I think the railways are a bit of a nightmare. They're incredibly expensive, the prices are very variable. And I think about these strikes, again, I think the Tories are trapped in that sort of, you know, Daily Mail, Sun type language about, you know, union barons and all this stuff. We're talking here about people who are, for example, the cleaners who are members of RMT, who are very, very poorly paid, haven't had a pay rise for three years and are now facing double digit inflation. If a union's not going to fight for them, what is the purpose of a trade union in the first place? And this idea that, you know,

• 20:16Alastair Campbell?

  nobody should ever consider industrial action. Yes, it should be a last resort, but if you look at the way this whole thing has been handled, the Tories are just sort of, I mean, I thought Keir Starmer was right in the Commons when he said to Johnson, we don't want this strike, but I get the feeling you lot do, because they want more division.

• 20:32Rory Stewart?

  I think they may do, because I'm afraid they've spotted that the public is not on the side of these strikes and that it would be a big, big mistake, whatever you think personally, but a really big mistake for Labour to weigh in hard behind the RMT on this. And I saw, you know, we talked about Wes Streeting on Question Time with me, he's had to now, I think, come out and apologise for what he said and try to distance himself from his apparent support for the RMT.

• 20:56Alastair Campbell?

  I thought that was, that, look, I, I, I'm not saying I support the strike. I am saying that I think that this debate is so skewed. We talked about this. I mean, I was, I was talking this week, I was interviewed by a German newspaper, Zut Deutsch Zeitung, and we were talking afterwards. It's the guy who's only been here for a year. It was fascinating to talk to him. I actually wanted him to write a piece for the New European because he just had such an interesting view about the British media, its hold on our culture and so forth. And he, but he was making the point about, you know, when you have a big strike in Germany, you have a real analysis of what the issues are. Whereas here it's about, is it good for Labour? Is it bad for Labour? Is it good for the government? It's all about politics rather than the fact.

• 21:38Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, have you seen an interview anywhere with a cleaner on the trains and asked them how much you're making?

• 21:43Rory Stewart?

  What's he been like? The interesting thing is that, or have you seen an interview with people pointing out that the signalmen are getting £44,000 a year? That the drivers are on four days contracts where they only have to drive four days a week? And on southern, until recently, they were having to get overtime if they ever drove on the weekends. So the point is, even in our conversation, even in our conversation, we're getting, it's, it's already rapidly going from the facts and figures into the big politics. So your friend is right, but we're playing it out.

• 22:09Alastair Campbell?

  I want you back to the facts. You, for example, threw in the train, the train drivers. The train drivers in the main are members of ASLEF. It's a different union. This is about cleaners. Yes, it's about signalmen and women, but I just think that, I wish we could have a more mature debate about our industrial relations. And I do feel with this government, we had a question, I don't know if you can find it, and it was anonymous for obvious reasons, but we had a question which I was going to raise tomorrow, but I'll do it now. It was from a police officer who said that when you are treated as badly as we feel treated by this government, then don't be surprised if the issue of whether the police should actually have the right to withdraw their labour becomes a live issue. I do think there's a problem by the way this government treats people. And the point about inequality as well. I know we're going to go and talk about Columbia and the Columbia elections,

• 22:53Alastair Campbell?

  but the fact is that the rampant inequality. So when people look at the, how much money has been made by these train companies since privatisation? How many of these so-called fat cats have become fat and fat and fat?

• 23:04Rory Stewart?

  The risk, the risk is, and it's a, it's a, it's a difficult one. I think there's a reason why Labour's being cautious about not going down this path. Because

• 23:13Alastair Campbell?

  I do get that.

• 23:14Rory Stewart?

  Because a lot of the extreme poverty in the country, a lot of the inequality is with people who aren't unionised.

• 23:19Alastair Campbell?

  Ah.

• 23:20Rory Stewart?

  And there's a, there'll be a lot, but it's a, it's a fundamental fact. We're looking at where the real misery is and where people are really suffering. It's not members of the RMT. So I think the, trying to frame this as we've got a back.

• 23:32Alastair Campbell?

  Some of them are though, some of them aren't. Some of them are already. If you think about, you're on, you're on very, you're a cleaner on a train. You're paid, you're paid maybe the minimum wage, maybe just above. You've got two kids, you've got three kids, you've got, you know, you're trying to, you've had Covid, you've had, you've got the cost of living crisis, you've got double digit inflation. These people are scared. They're scared. And the inequality is growing.

• 23:52Rory Stewart?

  The biggest issues of inequality, the people who are worst off in our society are generally not members of unions. And, and I think the risk of weighing in behind, for example, the police federation and talking about the police going on strike, the risk of a lot of this is that we get into the conversation we had last time, which is about the fact that some of these organisations are in a monopoly position.

• 24:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Rory Stewart?

  And we'll be back to the 1970s again. I mean, that's what people are going to get scared by. Yeah.

• 24:15Alastair Campbell?

  Back to the question about, I mean, I would, what should the state run? The state should definitely be running the military, definitely be running the police, definitely be running, but maybe can allow independent oversight and some role for the private sector in all of our public services. But I do think you're underestimating just how many people are what you call working poor. And I do say to people, I look, I'm new Labour to the core and I always felt the late, the unions maybe had too much control within the Labour Party, et cetera. But to any individual out there who's struggling at the moment, if you can, and it's relevant to your job and the work you do, for heaven's sake, join a trade union.

• 24:53Rory Stewart?

  Right. We're going to move on now.

• 24:54Alastair Campbell?

  You should, you should become a member of the National and International Union of Podcasters.

• 24:58Rory Stewart?

  Exactly.

• 24:59Alastair Campbell?

  We'll, we'll start one, we'll start one. So listen, shall we do a bit of Columbia?

• 25:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So I just wanted to touch on this for a second. I mean, I, I think we, we talked about this a little bit and I think we got some questions coming in behind this. We talked about your experience of the FARC and Santos and the peace deal and all of that in 2016, and he got a Nobel Prize. Then we talked about the way in which actually he was, his, his movement was effectively swept from office by Uribe, who'd been his predecessor and the kind of conservative faction took over again. And now we're back in a situation in which there was an incredible standoff between a right wing populist and a left wing populist. And the person who presented themselves as the moderate centre ground guy who'd been a good mayor of Medellin, technocrat. Suddenly found himself, yeah, facing on the one hand, a kind of seventy seven year

• 25:46Rory Stewart?

  old businessman who punched a councillor in the middle of parliament, took a law and said he was going to wipe his ass with it. And on the other hand, another guy who had been a member of an urban guerrilla group that had taken over the parliament, killed ninety two people, kidnapped people.

• 26:03Alastair Campbell?

  Been to jail, been to jail, been tortured.

• 26:05Rory Stewart?

  Been to jail and is now the president.

• 26:06Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. And he's the president with, and when people say, oh, it doesn't make any difference if you vote, he won by naught point five percent. So if the other guy, the ass wiping seventy seventy seven year old Trumpian, who once expressed his support for Hitler, just a few more votes, just a few more thousand votes in certain places, and Hernandez becomes the president. So this guy couldn't, the extremes could not be more marked. And it's a little bit like the other, of course, massive election at the weekend was in France. And of course Macron lost his majority because of the extremes, both of Le Pen on the right and Mélenchon on the left. And this guy Petro is very much in

• 26:47Alastair Campbell?

  the kind of Mélenchon Corbyn kind of space. They sucked so many millions of votes away from the centre, Macron's lost his majority, and France becomes a very difficult place to govern. The other thing in Colombia, which was fascinating. So he's the first left wing leader they've ever had. But his deputy, and who ran very much on the ticket, a woman called Marquez, Francia Marquez, she's called, she's an extraordinary story. She's the first Afro Colombian, she's black. She's also, she started life as a cleaner. She became an environmental activist. She took on the big mining companies and all that sort of stuff. She's incredibly sort of strong and very, very strident in her politics. So that's

• 27:30Alastair Campbell?

  going to be, and he ran with her very, very, very much on the ticket. So how they bring the country together with that level of division, God only knows.

• 27:39Rory Stewart?

  And I think it's sort of, just, just before we get to the break, I mean, I think it's fascinating Latin America, how this seems to be repeated. And repeated both in the left right standoffs and the fact that candidates seem to be getting more and more populist, that often the people who are being elected have very little governing experience. I was, I was just in Chile at the beginning of the year. And there, there's this amazing guy called Gabriel Boric, who, like a classic student activist, kind of shaggy beard, shaggy hair, got in at the age of thirty five. He talks very openly about his mental health issues, took a few months off Parliament because he was struggling. Pedro Castillo, who's just come in Peru, who's openly Marxist.

• 28:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Rory Stewart?

  And I wonder whether Latin America maybe historically is an exception, or whether it's a sign of where things may be going across many other democracies, this increasing polarisation.

• 28:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the polarisation, definitely, but maybe because the pendulum in Latin America was, in general, very, very far to the right, to authoritarian rule. It's swinging back. But also, I wouldn't underestimate the role in Latin America of four years of hearing from the world's pin-up global demagogue, Trump, about how vile these rapists and murderers were who were constantly trying to invade America. I think he's fuelled a lot of this as well. Just one final point before we leave the outside, the global picture. Do you remember a few weeks ago, we talked about this German biography of Xi Jinping that I'd read?

• 29:10Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 29:11Alastair Campbell?

  And I was bemoaning the fact there wasn't a good English-language biography. Well, lo and behold, the publisher got in touch with you last week, it's being translated into English and it's coming out in September. Quality books, well done, I say.

• 29:22Rory Stewart?

  Fantastic. Great. Everyone must read it. I will read it. Time for the break. Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.

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• 31:31Alastair Campbell?

  So, welcome back, part two of episode 17 of the Rest is Politics main podcast. And we're going to talk a little bit about about the press, which is highly relevant to the moment because as it happens, the paper that is sponsoring the podcast this week, The New European, broke a very, very, very significant story this week. And that is that The Times ran a story written by Simon Walters, ex of The Mail and The Mail on Sunday, and of The Sun, back in the days when I was in The Mirror. And he was a very, very, very tough opponent, I have to say. And he had a story in The Times that basically revealed that Boris Johnson, when Foreign Secretary, tried to get a job at six-figure salary for his then mistress, Carrie, who is now his wife and the mother of two of

• 32:16Alastair Campbell?

  his many, many, many, many children. The story vanished, literally vanished. And then we later discover, thanks to The New European's investigations, that The Mail had had the story and decided not to run it. They did apparently briefly run it online, but that vanished as well. Now,

• 32:36Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, what the hell is going on?

• 32:38Rory Stewart?

  It's very weird, isn't it? Very weird. And well, I mean, obviously, what must have happened is number 10 must have somehow sat on these editors and convinced them not to run it. But

• 32:48Alastair Campbell?

  These great buccaneering so-called great journalists Rupert Murdoch and Paul Dacre, that they're so easily sat upon.

• 32:56Rory Stewart?

  Well, I don't know what on earth's going on. And then I also don't understand why the other newspapers were reluctant to move ahead. Is it legal anxieties? Or is it, I mean, what is it that's happening? Why did this have to go on Twitter?

• 33:08Alastair Campbell?

  I just don't know. Well, no, to be fair, to Tim Walker, ex of Man, he's now Mandrake in the New European, he broke the story and he basically, since then, the newspapers, as you say, very reluctant to pick it up. I'm afraid that I think a lot of our newspapers have essentially become extensions of the Downing Street Press Office. Murdoch and Dacre are now the highest paid press officers in the history of the planet. How can that not be newsworthy? If that was, listen, it wouldn't have happened, but if Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, or David Cameron, actually, had tried to appoint a mistress at a six-figure salary to a senior job in the Foreign Office, can you imagine it? It would leap the bulletins for weeks, probably until resignation.

• 33:49Rory Stewart?

  What is it that's been holding people back? Because I noticed, I mean, obviously, one of the interesting things is you can't hold things back anymore because Twitter exploded.

• 33:56Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there are super-

• 33:57Rory Stewart?

  We all saw the story. So it was stupid of the newspapers not to report it because we all saw it on Twitter anyway.

• 34:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but hold on Rory, we do know there are other situations. We're talking about it because we, look, you and I are quite, you know, well informed. We know lots of people in the media. Nobody has said to me, there's a super injunction. There are super injunctions, just super injunctions out about other issues involving the private life of public figures. Better not say any more than that. However, on this one, I just don't know. But look, I mentioned the German interview. I did an interview this week with a Serb journalist called Lubisha Ivanovic. I hope I haven't- Killed his name there, Lubisha Ivanovich. And he wanted to interview me until he phoned me to say he wanted to listen to you. I didn't realise it was the 50th anniversary of the Watergate story and of Nixon's resignation. And he, he actually, on the back of our interview, I told him this story about a conference I did with Carl Bernstein.

• 34:46Alastair Campbell?

  He's one of the Watergate journalists and we did a conference together, a journalism conference in Perugia a few years ago. And I remember Carl Bernstein is a lovely guy and he, he said, um, Watergate was probably the greatest newspaper investigation of all time. But it's the worst thing that ever happened to journalism. Because journalists now just think everything is a gate, everything's got to bring down the government.

• 35:08Rory Stewart?

  You were, you were very funny about this, I think, three, four weeks ago, where you, you were talking about all the gates that were attached to every, every single thing we did. I also read a, a really interesting interview with Henry Kissinger, uh, done by Neil Ferguson. Kissinger's now 99 and I saw him last year. It is pretty extraordinary. Whatever one thinks of him, uh, you know, morally, of the horrors of the illegal invasion of Cambodia, of all the stuff that happened, simply as a physical specimen, that he is really smart at 99.

• 35:36Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, absolutely.

• 35:37Rory Stewart?

  And one, one of the things that he, uh, expressed was the most intense abiding loyalty towards Richard Nixon. And a still very, very strong resentment, uh, that Watergate brought him down. Now, let's just come back to New European though, because I thought that Peter Kellner piece was very smart. We talked about it a little in the first half, but I think what it did, which most newspapers would be reluctant to do is to give real time to both show the polling, show the problem for the Labour Party and show the potential solution of having how they might think about appealing both to young progressive professional voters and older voters from working class seats.

• 36:12Alastair Campbell?

  Well, one of the things I like about writing, I write a weekly column for it. One of the things I like is that, you know, they have articles in there. They had an article last week from Tom Swarbrick, who you probably know, used to work with Theresa May, he's now in LBC. Really, really long detailed argument about this drug that I'm very interested in in terms of treatment for depression called psilocybin. And it's, it's, it was just like, I can't imagine, maybe one of the Sunday magazines, you might see something like, even though I doubt it. So it does loads of stuff that other papers just aren't doing, both at home and abroad. And that I, you know, the reason I think both of us like it is because we do so much foreign stuff. And I just want to say this week, Rory, you, I hope you'll enjoy the New European because the front page is essentially a blank, a blank white canvas.

• 36:57Alastair Campbell?

  And the headline is those Brexit advantages spelled out in full blank space. Inside six pages on all the things that have gone wrong. And to be fair to the New European, every single edition, we call out the disaster of Brexit. Though this week I've actually decided not to write about the alleged prime minister, nor to write about Brexit. I've written about issues of disability and all sorts of other things. Subscribe to the New European for just one pound a week for the full digital package. Or if you'd like to get your hands on the award winning newspaper each week, you can get it delivered to your door for just an extra one pound a week at www.the new european.co.uk forward slash T R I P. And here's one for you, Rory, as a capitalist.

• 37:41Alastair Campbell?

  If you want to go a step further, you can own a piece of the business. Because the New European has launched a co-ownership scheme for people who care as much about our future as they do. You can own a piece of the newspaper and support their journalism if you've got anything from 15 quid to 15 grand. Visit www.the new european.co.uk for a once in a lifetime opportunity to own a newspaper, Rory, and bring capitalism and socialism together.

• 38:12Rory Stewart?

  So that, that leads me on to something that I'm a bit uncomfortable with, and I'll probably put my foot in it. But I was in Palestine and in Israel again last week, just came back on Sunday. And thinking about socialism, I visited a kibbutz. And to be fair, I just spent a couple of days looking at kibbutz and talking to a guy who'd grown up in a kibbutz. So there'll be a lot of listeners who will challenge this, but it's very striking. What's happened to what was basically socialist experiments? This particular kibbutz I was looking at had been founded around the time of the First World War by very, very idealistic socialists. But it had involved, by the time this guy, who I guess is sort of fifty, was young,

• 38:52Rory Stewart?

  he was taken away from his parents at the age of three weeks and put in a children's house to be grown, to be brought up with other children. With the idea that the parents would see them, I think it was two hours a day, but that it was more efficient otherwise than to be brought up. And I said to him, you know, was this, I imagine the people looking after you were very loving. And he said, no, not really. They were pretty, pretty professional. And every couple of years, we were moved on to another parent figure who looked up New Age group. And they had to be, I think they started their chores at the age of five. They would stand by their beds, folding blankets, almost as though they were in a sort of military unit.

• 39:33Rory Stewart?

  And it was fascinating trying to get in firstly to what this had done to his own psychology, his own mental health, but also what had happened to these experiments? Why they were so authoritarian? How some of them have since been privatized? How some of them have become very wealthy? Why it's difficult to keep these experiments going more than two or three generations?

• 39:54Alastair Campbell?

  Did they see themselves, did they see it as a socialist project?

• 39:57Rory Stewart?

  Very, very much. Everything was owned in common. Even today, I visited it. All the cars are owned in common. You just take a car for the day. All the profits are shared in common. It's a really interesting, but some of them are breaking up, of course. And the ones nearer Tel Aviv and Jerusalem are being sold off because property speculators are coming in. Anyway, I thought, I mean, it's, maybe it's not something that we should be dragged into, but I, I am very interested in these sort of utopian experiments and why it's difficult for them to be sustained.

• 40:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's interesting, you know, if you think about it, that we talked about Xi Jinping, the extent to which, you know, the Chinese power and the whole methodologies remains founded on the idea that they're allegedly communists.

• 40:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Alastair Campbell?

  Which, you know, and likewise, you know, I had a conversation with somebody really quite intelligent the other day, said, you know, actually said, you know, Putin's quite, he's quite right wing for a communist, isn't he? I mean, it's like, you know, so you, you can, and you know, what was Nazism? It was National Socialism. So yeah, that's a very, very interesting point. Can I very briefly go back to Carrie?

• 41:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Alastair Campbell?

  Um, I did spot, I'm not a big reader of the, of the Daily Telegraph, but I did see on the BBC review of the papers, there was a tiny little story down the front page that said Lord Geith, the ethics advisor who's decided that Johnson is so unethical that he can't, he can no longer work for him. But there was a tiny little story, it just said that Lord Geith expressing the view that the Carrie job offer is worthy of investigation. And that says to me, he knows something which is, and he was obviously fed up with the whole wallpaper thing, which also involved her. So, and I also wonder whether, this is another one from the Dominic Cummings grid, I just don't know.

• 41:37Rory Stewart?

  I also wonder, Alison, with that whole thing, am I right that the current story is that they're not proposing to appoint a new one? That they're almost saying that the, that I, I think it's almost like they're suggesting that ethics advisor is somehow an outdated position, like one of those royal titles, like being a nursery footman. The world's moved on, says Boris Johnson. We don't need ethics anymore. Ethics advisor, that's something, that's some medieval concept. I'm in a new world.

• 42:01Alastair Campbell?

  But this is, but this is all part of the gaslighting. There was a clip circulating on social media yesterday, it was just a four second thing of Priti Patel at the dispatch box saying that this government always abides by the law at home and abroad. I mean, it's like, how do you say that when you've got this guy who's now broken both domestic law and international law?

• 42:19Rory Stewart?

  Is, is, do we know whether they're going to get another one? Or is, and, or, and if he is going to sign someone up, is anyone ever going to take that job? How can you take the job? I mean, it's a disaster.

• 42:28Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know. Well, they're floating the idea that, that they might sort of have, and this is what they do, back to Moses Naim's book on autocracy, they, if the rules work against you, you change the rules, but you have endless discussion about the process. So we're sort of playing his game by saying, you know, how can they possibly not have one? And then in a few weeks' time, you know, you might appoint Carrie to the job, you might appoint Rachel, his sister, who regularly goes on the radio and talks about how marvelous he is. And by the way, I saw somebody posted this morning. During lockdown, Rachel Johnson, a story, I think it was in The Mirror, that she was also breaking lockdown, not least to play tennis. And guess who she was playing tennis with? John Witherow, the editor of The Times. I mean, it's also cosy.

• 43:08Rory Stewart?

  I'm a bit bitter with her because she was out on LBC saying, the reason I mean about Boris is that I'm bitter that he didn't give me a job. So I'd like to put on the record that I said from the moment he was standing to be Prime Minister, I would never serve in his cabinet and I would resign if he ever became Prime Minister.

• 43:22Alastair Campbell?

  But you did work for him in the Foreign Office.

• 43:24Rory Stewart?

  I did. He was Foreign Secretary and I was the Minister of State. But luckily, I was appointed to that job by Theresa May, not by Boris Johnson.

• 43:30Alastair Campbell?

  Now, listen, Rory, the other place I've been to since we last spoke is Dublin. And don't worry, I'm not going to shout at you about Ireland. But I did meet a guy called Theo. And this guy, he's called Theo Davis Lewis. You don't get much more Welsh than that. But he was briefing me about this whole business about the Welsh. You know, people keep saying we don't talk about Wales enough. And I think we don't, to be absolutely fair. But there's this big debate going on in the moment in Wales about they want to grow the Senedd, the Welsh Assembly. And I think it's a good thing. I think it shows that, I mean, I hadn't quite realised that Wales has got more, I think I'm right in saying Wales have got a bigger population than Northern Ireland, but the Welsh Assembly

• 44:15Alastair Campbell?

  is still much smaller. Added to which, there's an ongoing debate about changing the voting system. And Wales, he reminded me, I hadn't really thought about this, Wales has been in power. Labour's been in power in Wales forever, effectively. It's quite extraordinary. Wales has never been anything but Labour. And it just made me thinking, got me thinking, maybe Labour nationally needs to sort of listen a bit more to how the Welsh do things.

• 44:41Rory Stewart?

  Can I just come back on that? I think it's a terrible idea to increase the size of Senate. So the Senate, which is the Welsh Assembly, has got 60 members. And Wales has got a population of about 3 million. I mean, famously, the US Senate has got 100 members and it's got a population of about 300 million.

• 44:57Alastair Campbell?

  You're comparing pears and apples. The Senate in America is, if you like, the upper chamber. The Senedd is the chamber.

• 45:04Rory Stewart?

  Even Congress has barely got 300 members and it's got a population of 300 million. I think that actually these assemblies would do with being smaller. I think the Senate's really lucky to have sixty members and I think the House of Commons would be much more effective if it was a much smaller institution. They could concentrate on more serious issues.

• 45:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I have to tell you, the reforms are supported by both Plaid and Welsh Labour. It's only your old party. They've got a super majority as well, by the way. They've got forty out of six members are going to back it. But the thing that I like about it is that the Assembly is working pretty well in most people's eyes, a lot of people's eyes, and they're having a kind of grown-up debate about democratic, further democratic renewal. Now, I focused on one element of it, but actually they're also going to look at the voting system. Whereas look at where we're nationally, we're just stuck with this, you know, two great beer moth parties, neither of whom are terribly popular in the country. And I've got to say, Mark Drayford, and he's not, you know, he's a Corbynite and all that stuff, but he's done a really, really good job in Wales. I think we should sort of acknowledge him, respect that.

• 46:06Rory Stewart?

  So on, on voting, one of the things we didn't emphasise is the way in which the success of the Teal Independents, who are this wonderful group that you drew everybody's attention to, these women who won in the Sydney Bay Area, who are blue in terms of their economic policy and green environmentally and gender. The reason they came through was to do with the preferential voting system. That's the system that we used to have in the London election. It's the system that Macron won the presidential election. And it's, it's a system that I think all the success of the centre in Australia has been due to that. And we should really look again at a preferential voting system. Just to remind people what it means. It means that if you don't cross fifty percent in the first round, there's a runoff of the two last candidates. And it allows you to try to reach some kind

• 46:49Rory Stewart?

  of consensus, make sure the person who gets in at least gets more than fifty percent of the vote.

• 46:53Alastair Campbell?

  But isn't, isn't it interesting though, just to go back to France? So there's, there's Macron. He wins the presidential elections. We then go into the assembly elections and I sort of think there's a feeling that the French public thought, oh, we didn't want him to win by quite that much in the French presidential elections. So they've sort of punished him a bit in the legislative elections. And they have, as we said earlier, kind of gone out to the to the extremes.

• 47:17Rory Stewart?

  So the French system might be helped if they held the elections at the same time, wouldn't they? Because one of the reasons this happens is that you is that the second vote acts almost like a by-election, a chance to kind of kick the incumbent government, which happens with the midterms in the US as well. If you held them at the same time, you'd probably be more likely to get a more consistent result. I think we're now heading towards the end of our show.

• 47:39Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there you go. And I we've got we've got question time tomorrow. I want to deal with with one question right at the top. Anti-Socrates. Mr. Stewart's declaration of love for Mr. Campbell warmed my heart. Does Mr. Campbell love Mr. Stewart back?

• 47:58Alastair Campbell?

  Look, Rory, please don't take it amiss, but I love Fiona, I love my kids, I love my dog, I love my bagpipes, I love my bike, I love my football club, but I can't I can say I like you, I respect you, I enjoy our conversations, but but love is special. You can't just throw love out like that.

• 48:16Rory Stewart?

  I don't don't rank as high as your bicycle.

• 48:21Rory Stewart?

  It's a terrible thing to end on. Right. Look forward to question time tomorrow. Thank you all for listening.

• 48:25Alastair Campbell?

  Bye bye.

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 48:43Speaker 04

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 48:49Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 48:56Speaker 05

  I'm not the first then.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 49:04Speaker 09

  It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolón Tequila. Balanced, delicious, perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth, then hold on tight. 100% agave, 0% ego. Espolón Tequila. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 49:26Speaker 10

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