138. Question Time: The Bullingdon Club, democracy vs. capitalism, and overcoming foot-and-mouth

Should Rory and Alastair switch allegiance to the Liberal Democrats? Why is there no happy news? What was handling the foot and mouth disease crisis like? Listen to Rory and Alastair answer these questions, plus Rory explains how he was approached by the Bullingdon Club at Oxford, Alastair reveals his university party trick, and much more in this week's Question Time. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen 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/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:33Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:37Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. Where do you want to start?

• 1:41Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's just start on this because it develops a theme that we explored in the podcast yesterday, but I think it makes it a bit sharper. It's from Roger Wade. Given Keir Starmer's recent interview, where he categorically rules out the return to the European Union or single market, do you believe the Brexit issue is bigger than the Labour Party? And it is time to support the Liberal Democrats at the next election? And would you and Rory consider switching allegiances?

• 2:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you haven't come out for the Labour Party. I don't, but I get very angry with the Liberal Democrats as well. I don't feel that they're sort of really making... And by the way, even though I think leaving the European Union was a total catastrophe for our country, I'm not saying either of them should go into the next election, saying, let's rejoin. I am saying that I think that they should be calling out the damage that it's doing and making clear that a new government has to fix the damage. But you can't be open about how you're going to fix the damage unless you're open and honest about the scale of the damage. And when you read, as I did the other day, in fact, Chris Patton, I don't know if you saw Chris Patton on Question Time, but there was a clip that went viral of him just going through why it had been such a disaster.

• 2:52Alastair Campbell?

  But one factoid that sort of leapt out to me is when he said the poorest 20% in Poland are now better off than the poorest 20% in the UK.

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  That's very interesting. And that's partly, weirdly, because, I mean, with all the horrors of what that party has been doing in Poland, they've introduced something called the Family 500+, which has been giving much more generous benefits to the poor. This is Morawiecki, the Prime Minister, who's a very weird figure. I mean, a lot of these people in the Law and Justice Party are people who are sort of university professors and talk in this very sort of academic language. Morawiecki edited a book on European Union law. So you have this very sinister thing, which is a bit kind of reminiscent of, well, I guess it's a point, isn't it, that often these regimes are facilitated by smooth-talking intellectuals despite their very kind of sinister underpinnings.

• 3:44Rory Stewart?

  But the one good thing, I suppose, they've done is they've had a, they've set up much, much more generous welfare payments. And that's one of the reasons why they're still quite popular.

• 3:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Now, the producer having told us that the main podcast was quite heavy, let's try and keep this one light, you went straight back to one of the heaviest subjects in yesterday's podcast.

• 4:01Rory Stewart?

  Oh, well, okay, here's a way of moving us on, ready? Okay, I'm going to transition us on, ready?

• 4:05Alastair Campbell?

  Go on, go on.

• 4:05Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so Jeff Chambers has written me a letter, actually, a long letter. You promised to do, and this is just a quote from it, "You promised to do an episode a month on happy news, which you so far have not done."

• 4:17Alastair Campbell?

  Did we do that?

• 4:18Rory Stewart?

  "The world is full of bad news, but this is an active choice. I challenge you to present just one episode per month that is nothing but happy and positive." So now, tell us, as somebody who is a veteran journalist, why is it that the newspapers tend not to report happy news?

• 4:33Alastair Campbell?

  Um, first of all, though, did we make that promise? Because that was a very silly promise to make, or was that just you?

• 4:39Rory Stewart?

  No, I think we both sort of did. I think we must have been in an amiable mood. I think we did, yeah.

• 4:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the thing, the thing is, though, that the classy definition of news is something that somebody, somewhere, doesn't want published, right? That's the classy definition of news. And also, one person's happiness. Is another person's sadness, if we were to, let's just imagine there was a Labour landslide, okay, that would be happy news as far as I'm concerned, but it's very sad news if you're an active Conservative.

• 5:07Rory Stewart?

  My mother points out that Bloomberg does happy news, so they get news like this girl was born in jail but just got accepted to Harvard University, or she just sent me a whole list of these.

• 5:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, you get, but you get that, they're the sort of and finally things on News at Ten, aren't they? But also, remember Martin Lewis, the BBC guy, he tried to set something going where it's sort of much more positive. I think the reason is that, look, I actually think our media gets it way off balance. I think people want something, they understand that if you've got a sort of rail crash in India, then that's genuinely newsworthy and people want to know about it. You've got a war going on in Ukraine, you've got the economy going wrong, these are really important things. But I think within that, people do yearn for something maybe a little bit more positive, a little, little less alarming.

• 5:55Rory Stewart?

  Well, here's a nice story then, just on this, that there's a man who stopped a bank robbery with a hug, declares love overcomes all. Oh, I'm really worried though, that my mother actually has sent this, oh my, oh, I'm very worried, my mother sent it to me claiming it was from Bloomberg, it's not at all.

• 6:13Alastair Campbell?

  Where's it from, the Daily Star?

• 6:14Rory Stewart?

  It's terrifying, it's from Breitbart, which is that terrifying, right wing, Trumpian thing, that's extremely disturbing.

• 6:22Alastair Campbell?

  So, for the first time ever, we have quoted, thanks to your mother, we have quoted Breitbart.

• 6:28Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's awful, I'm so sorry.

• 6:30Alastair Campbell?

  Never mind, never mind. Now, listen, here's one, definitely for you, this one.

• 6:34Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 6:34Alastair Campbell?

  I've got two here, let's, we haven't been into this sort of, you know, we haven't been into your background much of late, I've stopped banging on about Ian. Tom Hanson, was Rory actually invited to join the Bullingdon Club at Oxford? And before you answer that one, Russell Grant, I don't think it's the horoscope guy, does Rory still support fox hunting and why?

• 6:55Rory Stewart?

  Goodness gracious, why are those two linked in your mind?

• 6:57Alastair Campbell?

  Because fox hunting is a pursuit of the TOF classes, in my opinion, historically, and because the Bully the Club is a really horrible organisation that says all the worst things about the TOF class.

• 7:13Rory Stewart?

  Right, okay, well, let me do both. Bullingdon Club, I was approached and I went to a meeting.

• 7:20Alastair Campbell?

  How does that happen? Oh, come on, go on detail here, how does that happen? Are you approached, does somebody sidle up to you? What do they wear when they sidle up to you?

• 7:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think it's a bit like that. And it was so, to explain to listeners who are not in the inside baseball of this weird stuff, this is a dining club at Oxford, an ancient dining club where people wear tailcoats. And in the 19th century, it was full of all the aristocrats of Oxford and was the smartest thing to be in. By the time it got round to the early 90s, it was dominated by people like Boris Johnson and David Cameron.

• 7:58Alastair Campbell?

  And George Osborne.

• 7:59Rory Stewart?

  And I think Darius Guppy, who later ended up in jail and who was a friend of Boris Johnson's. I was approached and I found it very, very disturbing. I don't know whether it was a strange meeting, but it seemed to be aggressive, arrogant, drunken, and although I'm sure many of the individuals in it were nice individuals, I thought as a group it was extremely unpleasant and seemed to me completely out of keeping with the modern world.

• 8:31Alastair Campbell?

  Why were you approached? Who approached you and why were you approached?

• 8:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think I was approached because I was considered to be a general kind of, I don't know, it's a class basis, Alistair, it's the class, it's all about class, isn't it?

• 8:43Alastair Campbell?

  So it was because of your background and your schooling?

• 8:46Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, that's the kind of stuff.

• 8:47Alastair Campbell?

  And what was the most unpleasant thing about it that made you think, I don't want to go back to this?

• 8:51Rory Stewart?

  Well, I don't really remember. I mean, I think I had a memory not of that thing, I think the one that I went to was fine, but I'd remembered seeing when I'd first arrived in Oxford, seeing one of these guys in his tailcoat standing on a table in a pub, shouting at everybody around him. And I just was horrified by the whole thing.

• 9:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I must confess, I did that once or twice as well.

• 9:12Rory Stewart?

  What stood on a table shouted at everybody?

• 9:14Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, I did, yeah. Usually people from the Bullingdon Club. I did, I did, I'm afraid.

• 9:19Rory Stewart?

  Do you think you were possibly quite an unpleasant undergraduate?

• 9:22Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, definitely. At times I was absolutely horrible. Yeah, I hated myself. I hate myself. So I used to have a party trick as well of opening doors by headbutting them. Very odd, very odd, yeah.

• 9:33Rory Stewart?

  Maybe lucky that I met you later in life.

• 9:35Alastair Campbell?

  I think it is, Rory, I think it is. And what about the fox hunting thing?

• 9:39Rory Stewart?

  Um, fox hunting thing is a Cumbrian thing. Um, so in Cumbria, it isn't a thing done by posh people. It's largely local farmers, it's footpacks, people aren't on horses. And it's a very, very strong community tradition in the Lake District.

• 9:55Alastair Campbell?

  But have you never, have you never done fox hunting prior to Cumbria?

• 9:58Rory Stewart?

  I'd never done fox hunting prior to Cumbria. I've never hunted a fox. I never hunted a fox. Even in Cumbria, I didn't hunt foxes.

• 10:04Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Um, now, Archie Sykes, this is, this doesn't need an answer. It's just, I think we should just do this because we're nice people. Our A level politics teacher, Mr Carpenter, is a massive fan, recommends your podcast every week. Could you give him a shout out as it's our final couple of weeks and it would make his day? So well done, Mr Carpenter, for inspiring your pupils to be interested in politics.

• 10:25Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's lovely.

• 10:27Alastair Campbell?

  And here's one, similar theme, Mia Davis, should basic politics be part of the curriculum for secondary school? Covering national and local politics and what each party stands for and what each body covers. My answer to that is definitively yes. I actually think we should teach in primary schools on how to argue.

• 10:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, and this is your whole thing. It's, it's not called rhetoric, is it? It's called oracy that you've been promoting. That's the one.

• 10:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Rory Stewart?

  Oracy.

• 10:51Alastair Campbell?

  Do you, do you support oracy?

• 10:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think oracy is a really, really good, well, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, in a way, one of the reasons why we end up getting dominated by these people who went to private schools is that they're given the confidence through being trained in public speaking. And actually, I think it's something, a reason why my father would say that Scots of his generation, coming out of small local schools in Scotland, often did very well in life, often did well in England when they went south because they were actually. Encouraged and trained to learn how to speak clearly, communicate clearly.

• 11:21Alastair Campbell?

  I wrote about that, I mean, the Scottish education system, less so now, I think, but there was a greater understanding, I think, of the role of debating and arguing in the development of people as human beings.

• 11:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, it goes all the way back to the Scottish Enlightenment.

• 11:35Alastair Campbell?

  Indeed.

• 11:35Rory Stewart?

  So it's the centre of the whole modern world. Now, CJ, you've mentioned there's a lack of ideas in politics right now. Why do you think that is and how can we generate more of them? That's quite a deep question. Go on, have a go at that one.

• 11:46Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think it's because there's a sort of anti-intellectualism, which is partly driven by dumbed-down media. I think it's partly driven by the sort of politics that we've seen, that we talk about a lot, populism. Populism is kind of, it's the antidote to intellectualism in that it's sort of, you don't think things through, you just think up a snappy slogan and say, let's go and pretend to people that that's going to solve the problem. And added to which, I think that within the campaign political infrastructure, I just think the ideas space has become a little bit diminished. Do you agree with that?

• 12:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it's because the dominant model that we had really through the 90s of pragmatically regulated free market and our particular views on democracy has begun to seem tired and tarnished.

• 12:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Rory Stewart?

  And it's been obvious now that there's a big chunk of the population in Britain, across Europe, across the United States, that feels in a very, very precarious situation, feels their children's lives are going to be worse than their own lives. And we don't have solutions because we don't really know what an alternative economic system is like, and we don't really have the courage to think about what it would really take to resolve what is obviously an unfair and in many ways completely unsustainable society.

• 13:06Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's probably a good point at which to plug our next episode of Leading, which is Kate Rayworth, Donut Economics.

• 13:13Rory Stewart?

  Donut Economics.

• 13:15Alastair Campbell?

  Having just done Mary McAleese. What about a related question, Rory? Martin Coleman, again, this is a really deep question, which is sort of PhD material, but we'll try and cover it in a minute. Is capitalism breaking democracy?

• 13:28Rory Stewart?

  Well, there we are. Exactly right. That's, that's, I think, connects very, very closely. I think it is. And I think-

• 13:35Alastair Campbell?

  So do we need a new capitalism or a new democracy to fix it, or both?

• 13:39Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think we probably need both. I mean, I don't want to be sort of pompous about it, but I, I think it's a situation where our economic system isn't delivering. Our democratic system isn't trusted by people. Trust in institutions, we haven't talked about this enough. But one of the things you see in the polls over the last 10 years is trust in institutions really beginning to drop very, very dramatically. And it's not just, I mean, I think this is important. We can get very wound up about the awful behaviour of politicians in Britain, but it's a pattern across Europe and the United States. And it's partly because more and more people feel the system is unjust. It's just not delivering for them. And so, Alistair, I think maybe time for a quick break?

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• 16:41Rory Stewart?

  And welcome back to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 16:45Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell.

• 16:47Rory Stewart?

  Right, okay. Moving swiftly onwards. Gus Cassie, foot and mouth disease. I'd be really interested to know what Alistair's reflections are on how effectively foot and mouth disease was dealt with. Rory's thoughts is his whole constituency right in the middle of it. And are we prepared for a similar incident now? So what's your memories of foot and mouth disease?

• 17:04Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, absolutely awful. Absolutely awful. First memory is of, and it's funny how I really have a specific memory of somebody coming to a meeting we were having with the Canadian Prime Minister Chrétien with a piece of paper and giving it to Tony and saying, there's a outbreak of foot and mouth in Kent. I don't think we got on top of it quickly enough because at the time, the Ministry of Agriculture were absolutely adamant that it was all under control. Everything was fine. It was going to be okay. And by the time we got back, he sort of had a sense of it being out of control. And I do mean out of control. It felt, it was one of those very, very rare periods when we were in government, where you sort of felt, oh my God, this is just, this is beyond anything.

• 17:49Alastair Campbell?

  And it really, it was only when we literally sort of got the army involved and the whole weight of government was sort of, you know, galvanised to say, this is, we've all got to just work out what we need to do and do it, that we got on top of it. But it was absolutely horrible, really horrible.

• 18:05Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's a classic thing, isn't it, that you often see with government, which is how, how long they take to really wake up and respond to a crisis or recognise it as a crisis. I mean, what's your tip in terms of crisis management for actually? Getting people to recognise that it's a crisis more quickly, because that's often the problem, isn't it? And I found it in everything I did with flooding and things, that we're often slow.

• 18:27Alastair Campbell?

  I think that partly this is because we're so used to everything being defined by others as a crisis, particularly the media, that that maybe makes us reluctant sometimes to accept that something might be a crisis. Added to which, I think this came through in the various sort of inquiries afterwards, added to which, I think there is a sense of a government department, because of the silo system of our government, you kind of want the government department responsible to be in charge, to take control and to run the whole thing. But it actually, with these things, often they reach a point very, very quickly where that is just, is beyond their capacity, and that's not a criticism.

• 19:04Rory Stewart?

  No, but I think that's, I think this is true in businesses too, that often you don't want to micromanage the department head underneath you. You want to trust them and let them get on with it. But pretty soon, you realise that you've got to take it all the way to the top, or there's just no way of getting on top of it. There's a brilliant piece, if someone wants an amusing read, a really lovely funny piece written July 2020 called Bad Resilience, Good Resilience by Rusi, and written by someone called Paul Martin and also by Jonathan Evans, who was the ex-head of MI5. And it's a spoof on government management. Just to give you a glimpse of it, this is rule one, have a plan and stick to it. And it goes like this, have a big fat plan, not a strategy.

• 19:46Rory Stewart?

  Make sure you have a very long and detailed plan with lots of diagrams and annexes written several years ago by your business continuity specialist or a consultant who's since moved on. The plan should give precise instructions about what to do in a range of specific situations, none of which will apply when the next crisis strikes. If a crisis does arrive, shoehorn it into one of your existing scenarios and stick to the plan. I'm just about to finish. Your persistence in sticking with the wrong plan will reassure your colleagues. It will also reflect the universal psychological predisposition known as sunk cost bias, which is what keeps us digging when we've invested heavily in digging a hole.

• 20:26Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, yeah. So what, the former head of our intelligence agency is going around writing spoof government plans. Well, that at least shows he's got a sense of humour. Now, here's one. Jake Woodya. When will government start acting in a way that is commensurate with the level of concern and desire for action on climate change and nature? Perfect timing with Great Big Green Week starting on Saturday, where people across the UK will be taking action, encouraging government to do so. And I want to plug another podcast, by the way. I did an interview on a podcast.

• 20:54Rory Stewart?

  What? Wait, hold a sec. Really?

• 20:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, it's fine, it's fine. As long as ours stays at number one. I didn't, I actually tweeted about it after we had got to number one with both of our podcasts last week. But it's called Planet Critical, and it's by a young woman called Rachel Donald, who's the daughter of somebody I trained as a journalist with many years ago, and who came to one of my talks on the book, and she sort of basically asked me to be interviewed on her podcast. She got a lot of flack for it, because I think a lot of her listeners basically are in the Ken Loach category of seeing me as a war criminal. But it was interesting, because she's absolutely in the sort of, you know, out and out activism, but understands that you do need people who understand government and how it works and power structures and how you change them,

• 21:38Alastair Campbell?

  before actually we're going to be able to get the level of concern that Jake Woody is asking for.

• 21:43Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I think that's another opportunity to plug the Kate Roweth interview, which was, I think, a very interesting, difficult interview for both of us, because she was being incredibly radical, really saying we have reached the carrying capacity of the planet, that effectively growth needs to stop, and if anything, our economies need to start shrinking. And when listeners go to that on Leading Next Week, you'll find us both really struggling to work out how on earth. I mean, our systems unfortunately are built on growth, not least because we have aging populations, we're having to pay for pensions, and also because health costs in every country go up much more steeply than inflation. And if the government doesn't bring in more money, we can't even stand still. So we've got, in a sense, we were in a system that feels it's got a greater standstill,

• 22:28Rory Stewart?

  and how we Balance that with what we're trying to do on the environment and climate, I think it's going to be very, very tough. So, political advice. Alex Kiriaku, I am the youngest active member of my local Labour Party, 19-year-old who joined because of the rest is politics. Ooh, that's a bit troubling, as it turned out that the rest is politics is just driving everyone to the Labour Party, dearie me.

• 22:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well done, well done, Alex.

• 22:52Rory Stewart?

  Dearie me. And I recently met the former MP of my local area, Bill Ramel, and he told me that one of his memories of the Blair years was that when he became a junior minister for the first time, Alastair's only advice for him was, "Don't fuck up." Well, that was the only advice he gave to you. Was that your normal advice to junior ministers? Anyway, what's the best, but also funniest advice you received during your time at Parliament down in Downings Street? Over to you, and then I've got one.

• 23:17Alastair Campbell?

  No, you go first while I think about it.

• 23:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, my best advice I ever got was, I was, it's not actually in Parliament down in Downings Street, but it's in government. I was down in southern Iraq, trying to, I was the acting governor of a province, and Andy Bearpuck, who was my boss, came down from Baghdad. And there was a civil war going on, and I was trying to build these buildings. I gave this very earnest presentation on my 50 main priorities for the area. And he said, "Rory, if I can return here in six months' time, and there's not a civil war, and you can serve me ice cream, I'll be happy."

• 23:51Alastair Campbell?

  I think, I don't remember saying "don't fuck up" to Bill Ramel, but, you know, I've no reason to dispute you whatsoever. But the piece of advice that I feel helped me both as a journalist and as a communicator, and here I am going to be non-tribal, Rory, I'm going to quote a Conservative chief whip.

• 24:12Rory Stewart?

  Oh, goodness.

• 24:12Alastair Campbell?

  By the name of Alastair Goodlad.

• 24:14Rory Stewart?

  Right. Yes, I like Alastair Goodlad, yeah.

• 24:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he once said to me, "Never use one word where none will do."

• 24:21Rory Stewart?

  Oh, very good.

• 24:23Alastair Campbell?

  And I just say that. And I think the whole point about, you know, communication and valuing the words that you use and being tight in your communication, I think is very, very important. And on which there's a question, Ingrid, what a name, Ingrid de Maersealke, how did politicians communicate before email and WhatsApp? Is there a case to go back to the old ways to encourage politicians to be more reflective? Absolutely, bloody, lutely, there is.

• 24:50Rory Stewart?

  It's, I mean, I think it's, I think it's something not just for politics. It's something we all experience in our own lives, isn't it? I mean, we're all fighting these inboxes. We're all fighting the WhatsApps pouring in. I mean, it's a, I don't, presumably your phone's like mine every time I, you know, I'll get off this two hour call, I'll have another hundred emails, I have another fifteen WhatsApps. And it's, yeah, it's very, very weird. My predecessor in Penrith and Border, predecessor's predecessor, Willie Whitelaw, I met the lady who ran his constituency office. And I explained that I was getting, those days, I guess, about 280 emails a week. And she said he got five letters a week. He could answer them all in the library of the House of Commons. Just sit down for half an hour, write, write little handwritten notes.

• 25:35Rory Stewart?

  Here's a question, interesting, very interesting question from someone called Andrew Gallagher. Macron didn't like his prime minister saying fascist this week. He said, "The fight against the far right no longer involves moral arguments. We must discredit them by the substance and the inconsistencies, instead of with words from the 1990s, which no longer work." Do you agree with Macron on that?

• 26:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I agree with Macron on a lot of things, but I'm not sure I do agree with him on that.

• 26:04Rory Stewart?

  What do you think he's trying to say there? Where's he going with that?

• 26:07Alastair Campbell?

  I think he's trying, it's the argument that we, we got into in a big way in this country over our boss, the gaffer, Gary Lineker, when he was in that row with the BBC about talking about the language of the 30s being used in the debate on immigration here now, is that the minute you use that word, the resonance immediately is Hitler and the Holocaust. And that is not necessarily relevant to some of the arguments deployed by the hard right in, in France at the moment. I guess that's what he's saying.

• 26:38Rory Stewart?

  He said, "Il faut les discréditer par le fond et les incohérences plutôt qu'avec des mots des années."

• 26:47Rory Stewart?

  Qui ne marche en plus.

• 26:48Alastair Campbell?

  Qui ne marche plus.

• 26:50Rory Stewart?

  Qui ne marche plus. Well done. Thank you.

• 26:52Alastair Campbell?

  I spotted you. I thought he's bound to make one error. I'll get him on one error at least.

• 26:55Rory Stewart?

  Well done.

• 26:56Alastair Campbell?

  And the plutôt, your you was just not quite sharp enough. The little circumflex on the you, you sharpen the you. Plutôt, plutôt.

• 27:04Rory Stewart?

  Gosh, it's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Hearing you speak French, that, that, that's. Maybe we could do a whole episode where you could just read, read French poetry to everyone instead of doing your bagpipes.

• 27:14Alastair Campbell?

  Sure. I'm not sure. We'd have ready listening to the end. No, I'm not sure I do agree with that, not least broadly, because as you'll remember from your very careful reading of, but what can I do? I do have a whole chapter about how I think the threat of fascism is something we need to take seriously right now.

• 27:32Rory Stewart?

  Yep. A couple of quick ones. AI and inequality. Keynes predicted technology would lead to a 15 hour work week. AI could fulfill the prediction, yet the working week is getting longer and the pension age is going up. Do you think the benefits of AI will be shared equally? Or will it just make the rich richer? So two different questions there, I guess. I think there's a real risk that the benefits will not be shared equally. And in fact, it's interesting to a lot of the big AI founders are in favor of universal basic income because they're very worried about this. And I think one of the threats of AI potentially is in terms of unemployment. I think the other thing, though, is this bigger point about technology and the working week.

• 28:12Rory Stewart?

  There's a famous joke by an economist who said, we see computers everywhere, except in the, except in the productivity statistics. And there is a sense in which, weirdly, we haven't seen what people predicted in the 1950s, which is that as all these new developments would come, we wouldn't have to work as hard. And I think that's partly about the way in which computers and AI develop new opportunities for us to spend an enormous amount of time doing things we weren't doing before.

• 28:41Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. I must say, Maria, I had quite a few people last week saying they thought you did a very good job explaining. The sort of potted history and the background to AI.

• 28:51Rory Stewart?

  Oh, thank you.

• 28:51Alastair Campbell?

  We talked about last week, but I I've been sort of reading a bit more about this and listening to it. First of all, here, let me just hold this up for you, Roy. Can you see that? It's the latest front page in the European.

• 29:00Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 29:01Alastair Campbell?

  Lots and lots of sort of coding. And it says in the yellow here, what if artificial intelligence saves the planet? And it's a very, it's a very interesting piece by a guy called Henry Shelvin, who is the Associate Director of the Leverham Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. And he's essentially putting the counter to this is going to destroy humanity. And then literally, I no sooner finished that and somebody sent me a message saying, you must listen to this podcast. There was something called Hard Fork, and it was with somebody called A J E Y A, Aya Kotra, Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy, who was kind of explaining how we could get to the place where this thing destroys humanity.

• 29:43Alastair Campbell?

  So I'm still sort of torn between these two things and I don't know how to make my mind up.

• 29:48Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, I don't, I don't think anyone does because I think particularly if we move to more autonomous, generalised artificial intelligence, we don't really know how to define the threat because almost by definition, it's learning and changing all the time. And it's very difficult for us to define exactly what it would or wouldn't do.

• 30:04Alastair Campbell?

  On the inequality point, if you look at the people who made the most money on our planet in recent years, they do seem to be the same sorts of people who are kind of, you know, plugging into this now. So I don't hold that much hope of the inequality thing, but that is where it's got to be taken by governments. How do we make sure that unlike other technological revolutions, that it is actually something that where we get equal access for people?

• 30:27Rory Stewart?

  And tax is going to be central to that.

• 30:28Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Roy, we're coming to the end here, and I think we have to, to end with this one, Roy, so that we can talk about one of the, one of the most exciting developments in the history of the rest of this policy last week. Richard Paulson, could Rory say a few words to mark the retirement of the remarkable Slatan Ibrahimovic?

• 30:49Rory Stewart?

  Thank you very much. I was hoping you were going to move on to some extraordinary thing about AI, instead of which we're on the retirement of a football player about whom I know absolutely nothing.

• 31:00Alastair Campbell?

  Do you literally know nothing about Zlatan Ibrahimovic?

• 31:03Rory Stewart?

  No, just he's a famous football player, but I go on, tell me, tell me about why we should.

• 31:07Alastair Campbell?

  Did you know he was a famous footballer?

• 31:09Rory Stewart?

  I think I'm, no, probably not. Probably didn't really know. I think I was a bit of a guess that he's a football player.

• 31:14Alastair Campbell?

  Seriously, was that a guess?

• 31:15Rory Stewart?

  Tell us, tell us about him.

• 31:16Alastair Campbell?

  He's almost as big as Darren Bent.

• 31:21Rory Stewart?

  Listen, can we just tell the story of Darren Bent?

• 31:24Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to do that, but let me just tell you, they are related because Zlatan Ibrahimovic, he's just below Messi and Ronaldo, I'd say.

• 31:31Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 31:31Alastair Campbell?

  He's an amazing footballer and an amazing character as well. And I think you'd actually enjoy, most footballers' biographies are absolutely awful, but Zlatan is not bad. He's kind of, he's got, he's got a touch of Cantona about him.

• 31:43Rory Stewart?

  So the only thing that I guessing from his name is that he would have been originally kind of Bosnian or Croatian and, and he's been nicked by another country. So he, he could have been there with my great heroes, winning the World Cup for them.

• 31:55Alastair Campbell?

  I know, I know, but never mind. I think if you had ever heard of him, he would have been one of your heroes, I think. So meanwhile, Darren Bent, so while you were travelling around in Japan or somewhere everywhere last week, I was, did an interview at Talksport because we discussed Darren Bent on the Q and A last week, as you'll remember, because a listener wanted to know why you had this obsession with Darren Bent. And the next day, Andy Goldstein, who's a Talksport presenter, he presents a show with Darren Bent, the former footballer, he played the exchange on his show and Darren Bent, totally straight faced, said, there's no way they talked about me. That is artificial intelligence. So we,

• 32:40Alastair Campbell?

  having discussed artificial intelligence last week, he said, this was artificial intelligence. So they phoned me up and said, would I go on? And talk about and try and persuade Darren Bent that this really was real. And but he spent the whole interview saying, no. And he was saying things like, move your hand, wave your hand. And I was waving my hands.

• 32:57Rory Stewart?

  And so one of the revelations was that Darren Bent wasn't that clear about who we were. He so he thought I was Rod Stewart, as in I am sailing. And he believes that you he knew you were Alice Campbell, but he believed you'd been the prime minister. Is that right?

• 33:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so I think that suggests that he probably did have a vague sense of who I was, but he did confuse you with Rod Stewart. It's true.

• 33:18Rory Stewart?

  I mean, it's quite a good idea, though. I love the idea of a podcast where Rod Stewart and a former prime minister present together.

• 33:26Alastair Campbell?

  I am, I did say, by the way, that the next time we do a show in London, that Darren Bent would be invited and he would come along to show that we are real and we would talk about Darren Bent.

• 33:38Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 33:38Alastair Campbell?

  So, yeah. And then the next thing I saw the next day, somebody in the swimming pool queue pointed said to me, did you listen to Talksport last night? And he said, well, Darren Bent's dad had sent a message into the programme. Tell Darren it is them.

• 33:56Rory Stewart?

  Very good. That's beautiful. Well, there we are. So I'm glad we've got people focusing on.

• 34:01Alastair Campbell?

  The big issues.

• 34:02Rory Stewart?

  On that beautiful vision of Darren Bent turning up to see one of our live shows. I think maybe we'll move to an end.

• 34:08Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

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