489. Musk's AI Deepfake Disgrace & JD Vance's Minnesota Lies (Question Time)

Will the UK ban 'X' over explicit, nonconsensual deepfake images of women and children generated using its AI tool? What does JD Vance's outburst against the Minnesota ICE shooting victim tell us about the misinformation age? After the attacks on Rory over the weekend from The Telegraph, Spectator, and Boris Johnson in the Daily Mail, what is it about Rory that so reliably enrages the right-wing press? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit fuseenergy.com/politics. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Senior Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Tom Whiter 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.

• 0:00Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.

• 0:03Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:15Rory Stewart?

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• 0:48Alastair Campbell?

  Fuse will install it in one visit, then take care of the tariff and smart charging, so the car is ready when you are. With the right setup, EV driving can cost under 3p per mile.

• 0:59Rory Stewart?

  Getting the electric car was the big decision. A smart EV charger is the easy one. Visit fuseenergy.com/ev.

• 1:13Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:15Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:28Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:51Alastair 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?

• 1:58Rory 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/reisterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/reisterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 2:15Speaker 02

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• 2:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 2:54Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, I hate talking about Elon Musk because the guy's a complete monstrosity on so many levels, but I think we must. Miranda is a Trip Plus member from Sussex. X is currently facing an epidemic where users tag Grok under women's posts and ask it to generate images of them undressed, which it does with alarming realism. Should there be new laws to regulate this kind of generative AI? Or is it up to Musk and the tech companies to police themselves? Dan in Swansea, we've got a lot of questions on this this week. I'm a father of two. This recent story about deep fake images of children being made and distributed on X is deeply disturbing. What was once confined to the dark corners of the internet is now appearing on one of the world's largest social media platforms. How is this legal? Is the government doing enough to combat it?

• 3:36Rory Stewart?

  Just quickly on the story. Elon Musk launched Grok. A lot of it derived from its relationship with X or what used to be Twitter as a rival to the other big, large language models. As a rival to ChatGPT that people will know or Gemini, which is the Google platform or Claude. And one of the reasons he did it very fast is that he got rid of almost all the people working on safety and content moderation. In fact, he doesn't really have set safety things that you can analyze. With the result that with Grok, unlike the others, you can type in, will you please take this photograph of Alastair Campbell and show him a picture of me, you know, in a bikini or with no clothes on? And then you can post it up on X and you can share it around.

• 4:17Rory Stewart?

  Not surprisingly, this became a vile way of creating deep fake pseudo pornographic images. Initiative. Adults than a children which were then shared all over the internet. This is unbelievable and it's completely illegal, obviously with child images and with adults. It is profoundly psychologically distressing, humiliating. So the British government, but not just the British government, also the Malaysian government, the Indonesian government, the Indian government. Began to challenge this and Elon Musk, being Elon Musk, pushed back and said, this is free speech. And the definition of a fascist state is one that wishes to. Put down on free speech, trying to make a joke out of it by posting images himself in a bikini.

• 4:57Rory Stewart?

  And when the British government finally stepped up and Ofcom decided it was going to mount a investigation. The only real concession that Musk has made is to say. The ability to create a deep fake pornographic images of private citizens will be reserved to the paying clients of Grok. Instead of being available to all the cheap users.

• 5:20Alastair Campbell?

  He monetizes it even more.

• 5:21Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. I first came across this because he was boasting on X last week. That Grok was the fastest downloaded of all the large language model apps. And I thought that's a bit odd because in many ways Grok isn't actually performing at the level that Gemini and Chat GPT is. Why is it the fastest loading app? And obviously the reason it was the fastest loading app is everybody suddenly discovered in a few hours that they could. Ask it to take the clothes off women or men or children or whatever they were doing.

• 5:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Ofcom are looking into it. I hope they look into it with more. Vigor and rigor than they've been looking into GB News. And my sense of Musk is that he's constantly seeking to overreach. I mean fascist to call, I know he's got this thing about Keer Starman, he's had it ever since the. The Southport killings and he's getting, you know, he sort of runs out of. Hate speech to throw at him. So he's now on the sort of fascist thing. I would argue that. We've seen more fascism in America in recent days and weeks, not least in Minnesota than we have in. In the UK and while we're on Musk and Trump, by the way, Rory, I think I note today that the. Homicide rates in London are at their lowest for god knows how long as this hellhole

• 6:29Alastair Campbell?

  image that the American MAGA seem to put of London gets debunked yet again. But I think on this, I mean, it was interesting yesterday, Kemi Badenoch saying that the Conservatives would go down the Australian route of banning social media for under sixteen year olds. Fiona, my Fiona, said the other day, do you think the world would really be any worse if Twitter didn't exist anymore? I don't think it would.

• 6:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, no, I think it would be dramatically, dramatically better, Alastair. I was at a talk recently by one of these tech billionaires who said, you know, can you imagine how terrible our lives were before smartphones? And I was thinking, with Shishana, no, our lives are pretty, I can't think our lives are terrible for, listen, I'm actually really sad that despite you and me banging the drum hard on Peter Malinowski's, that the Labour Government didn't embrace this. And well done, Kemi Badenoch. But it's yet another example of Keir Starmer being leaden-footed and missing a chance. Banning social media access for under sixteen is the correct thing to do.

• 7:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think it will happen eventually. The thing about this, though, is that I was talking to my friend Jim in the swimming pool the other day. He made a really interesting point, I thought. He said, what's gone wrong with the world is that the tech bros have sort of won in terms of who decides what matters and who decides what works in the attention economy. And we've lost any sense of the importance of historians and philosophers and social scientists. This debate, this goes back to your series on AI. The sorts of questions that you and Matt Clifford have been raising actually shouldn't be decided by scientists and boffins and tech bros. These are massive philosophical questions

• 8:08Alastair Campbell?

  about the future of the human race. And, and yet they get to decide what the game is, what the rules are, and who should be the winner at all times.

• 8:19Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. And they keep saying, don't regulate us. You don't understand what we do. You can trust us. And what Musk has just proved again this week is you can't trust him.

• 8:27Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 8:28Rory Stewart?

  The idea that you can trust him to put safety measures in place, absolutely not. The only thing that's going to control these companies is government regulation. But of course, they have now this incredible economic weight, these trillion dollar companies.

• 8:41Rory Stewart?

  That are essentially able to blackmail almost everybody. Why has Keir Starmer been slow to come out? I'm worried that it's partly that he doesn't want to fight with Donald Trump. And he's worried that all this, you know, great investment coming in and these American tech companies building data centers will be put at risk if he challenges the domination of the tech bruiser.

• 9:00Alastair Campbell?

  And to be fair, he's probably right to be worried about that because we are so dependent on, in so many ways, on America. I think one of the things we've learnt in recent months is we've allowed ourselves over generations to become way too dependent on a power, the broad goodness of which we've taken for granted. We should have learnt watching Boris Johnson. Once you get a good system trapped by a very, very bad man, then all sorts of bad stuff's gonna happen. And I think that's where we are now. But listen, I would love it if Britain led the way in saying, I'm sorry, Mr Musk, you know, you may be very powerful, you may be the richest man in the world, but you are now actually a force for bad in the world. And in so far as we can limit your influence within the United Kingdom, we are going to do it. What that would mean in practical terms, I don't

• 9:44Alastair Campbell?

  know, because I'm not as savvy on this stuff as you are. But I actually think we are moving to a place of saying, these people have got to be confronted with the consequences of the badness that they do on so many levels, just to get richer and richer and richer.

• 9:57Rory Stewart?

  I'm with you 100%, 100%.

• 9:59Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Rory, I know you're in Syria and you've been travelling a fair bit, but there is a, there is a question here from Louise McAnally, who wants to know why the right wing press is currently kicking lumps out of Rory Stewart. Are you aware that you're having lumps kicked out of you? Are you aware that the former Prime Minister, no less, devoted his Mail on Sunday column to asking why you are, I think he called you a bedwetting lefty. You're leading the bedwetting lefties of the world in opposing Trump's triumphant stance in Iran, Venezuela.

• 10:35Rory Stewart?

  You pointed out to me just before we came on air that I, there's also been a big article in The Spectator saying I'm a complete idiot and get everything wrong, and The Telegraph saying the same thing.

• 10:44Alastair Campbell?

  The Telegraph said that Rory Stewart is wrong about everything, but he gets away with it because he's posh. Which is a really weird thing for The Telegraph to say because The Telegraph normally loves posh people being wrong and saying that they're right. So I think maybe they're just worried that you're associating with other lefties of a non-bedwetting variety, Rory, such as my dear self. But listen, it looked a bit organised to me because if you think about it, Johnson Spectator Telegraph, you know, we're talking about the axis of evil here.

• 11:13Rory Stewart?

  I triggered something bad. So I triggered it partly, I think, from a very aggressive interview with Michael Gove, which may have meant that the editor of The Spectator was not feeling very well disposed towards me.

• 11:23Alastair Campbell?

  I thought you were quite gentle.

• 11:24Rory Stewart?

  Boris Johnson is not a great fan because amongst the predictions that I've made, my prediction that Boris Johnson would be a terrible prime minister, I think, was massively vindicated. The core of it, actually, was the fight with Dominic Cummings, who, for international listeners, was briefly Boris Johnson's chief of staff and was the architect of the Brexit referendum campaign, who put this sign on the side of buses claiming completely falsely that we were losing £350 million a week in our EU membership. And I challenged him about a claim he'd made, saying that the UAE had cut funding for students in Britain because they were worried about the Muslim Brotherhood. He turned out to be right, I was wrong. So I tweeted, "You were right, Dominic. I was wrong."

• 12:08Alastair Campbell?

  Oh.

• 12:08Rory Stewart?

  And then I apologised. Now-

• 12:10Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, hold on, before you go on from that. So you said, "You were right, I was wrong." I mean, I've had a few interesting exchanges with Dominic Cummings about Brexit. He's yet to say, "You were right, I was wrong" about that one and to apologise for his role in that, even though it has turned out to be the biggest crock of shit since, I don't know what.

• 12:30Rory Stewart?

  The very weird thing about this is that we all get things wrong. I get a lot of things wrong. Dominic Cummings gets a lot of things wrong. You get things wrong. I mean, we all get things wrong because we're engaged in trying to predict very uncertain futures. Some things I get right, right? I mean, Peter Sutherland walked around with a piece of paper on which I predicted that the Brexit referendum would be 15248, six weeks before the referendum. Now, am I pleased with that? No, obviously not. I was lucky. How did I know it was going to be 15248 a few weeks out? All we really have about the world is probabilities and it's really difficult. That's why the polling companies keep getting elections wrong, but we're surrounded with a world where everybody assumes, because they never remember what they got wrong, that they're right about everything.

• 13:13Rory Stewart?

  I was talking to someone recently who said to me that he got off a plane in Ghana and as soon as he'd met the first taxi driver, he knew which way the election was going to go. He'd never been to Ghana before. And he was vindicated, you know, the election went in the direction and the ambassador in Ghana was wrong, right? And I just, for God's sake, but you hear this all the time. Everyone's like, I knew Trump was going to win, you know, I knew Brexit was going to go here.

• 13:37Alastair Campbell?

  You knew Trump wasn't going to win. That's part of your problem with this.

• 13:40Rory Stewart?

  I knew Trump wasn't going to win, absolutely. So I think the best one can do, given that one can't predict the future, and that's actually a fundamental problem for AI too, it can't predict the future, is when you guess it wrong, to try to analyse how you got it wrong. So why did I get it wrong on Kamala Harris? I got it wrong because I believed that young African American voters were not going to turn out and vote, and they did. And then try to understand what it is about me that made me underestimate what was going on and then try to do better next time. But that, boy, is that not the world?

• 14:09Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 14:10Rory Stewart?

  I mean, the world is, if I challenge Elon Musk and say, for example, as I have, Britain is not in a civil war, Britain isn't in a civil war, incidentally, I think I'm right on that and Musk is wrong, immediately a thousand people come in on Twitter and say, I'd rather believe Elon Musk than you, Rory, you're wrong about everything. And I was trying to say, you know, is it possible Elon Musk isn't right about everything? Is it possible Dominic Cummings isn't right about it? Is it possible Boris Johnson isn't right about everything? Possible Nigel Farage is right? No, absolutely not. The right is right about absolutely everything and the left is consistently wrong.

• 14:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, that's, I'm afraid, is the sort of polarised social media world that we're in. But it did look like a sort of concerted little, I wouldn't let it worry your head, Rory, I really wouldn't. I'm pleased you didn't even know about the Boris Johnson one.

• 14:55Rory Stewart?

  Do you think it might affect my return to Conservative politics? Do you think there's a tone there that suggests I may not be very welcome back?

• 15:02Alastair Campbell?

  I think probably not, but the Conservative Party is, of course, has become a very different beast. And they've lost another one, by the way. Nadeem Zahawi has defected to Reform now.

• 15:12Rory Stewart?

  Which is a mistake from Reform.

• 15:14Alastair Campbell?

  A hundred percent, hundred percent.

• 15:16Rory Stewart?

  Given that Reform's line was supposed to be, we're not Boris Johnson's Tories, we're not what they did on Covid, we're not what they did on austerity, we're not the way they managed the country, to hire Boris Johnson's big champion.

• 15:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, even when we interviewed Nadeem Zahawi, when he was out of government and Johnson was out of government and out of politics, he still defended him to the hilt. And also what happens, I'm afraid I can see this ending quite badly for Nadeem Zahawi, because what will happen now is that the scandals around him that kind of got quietly forgotten as the Tories sort of faded into opposition, they're now going to come back and haunt him. And as a result, they will haunt, even though our press doesn't want to do anything that damages Nigel Farage, they will damage Nigel Farage as well. So I agree with you, I think it's a mistake on both counts.

• 16:03Rory Stewart?

  They also took Nadine Doris, who was, as we discovered when we took the election coverage, adores Boris and believes he's come from a disadvantaged background and rose to great things. They took Danny Kruger, who was Boris Johnson's Chief of Staff. There's something very interesting going on there about why they want to bring the Boris Johnson tribute acts into Reform.

• 16:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, if you're a sort of opportunistic politician of the right, you look at the opinion polls at the moment, you think, well, the Tories have finished, the only chance of getting into power are Reform. Nigel Farage has got this reputation of being a one-man band. He's tried to bring in somebody like Tais, Zia Youssef, two or three others to say he's not a one-man band. But then he can expand it further by bringing these other people. The trouble is, they're all Tory rejects and retreads. They're the thing that Farage said he was fighting against rather than fighting to, simply to be a poor substitute of. So from their point of view, I can see why he wants to grow, but he should actually be getting more people from outside the political tent. He's not really getting anybody who's not a conventional politician.

• 17:08Alastair Campbell?

  So these people, and you haven't mentioned Anne Whittaker and others like that, they are thinking this is their only way back into the political frontline. So that's obvious why they're doing it. But I think you're right, I think it's damaging to them, I think it's a big mistake. Well, look, should we, have we talked enough about Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson? I think we probably have.

• 17:28Rory Stewart?

  I think we have, and I mean, I don't know whether, I mean, it's just an interesting question, whether it was a concerted attack. It was a pretty amazing thing, though, to suddenly notice that three really big right-wing newspapers on the same day are running headlines with Rory Stewart.

• 17:41Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 17:42Rory Stewart?

  Not in a positive way, not in a way that my mother would like headlines about Rory Stewart.

• 17:45Alastair Campbell?

  You don't want to be a lefty bedwetter, Rory, that's not what you want to be.

• 17:49Rory Stewart?

  Not sure I necessarily want to be wrong about everything and only listen to you because I'm posh either. I mean, that doesn't sound that great.

• 17:54Alastair Campbell?

  No, you don't want that. But neither of those things are true. You're not wrong about everything, you've been wrong about some things, but you've been right about a lot of things as well. I, as you say, am occasionally wrong. I got something wrong in the Where Is Moldova quiz at the airport the other day, I was shocked to do that, only once.

• 18:09Rory Stewart?

  [laughing]

• 18:11Alastair Campbell?

  We should say, just on Moldova, I really do recommend people listen to Maya Sandu, the president of Moldova, the latest episode of Leading. I think she's unbelievably impressive, really impressive.

• 18:21Rory Stewart?

  And that was such a great trip. It was one of the, I mean, listeners don't necessarily get to go along with this in this trip, but I think the two great trips I've done with you, Syria and Moldova, was really, really wonderful.

• 18:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, they were both good, they were both. And I'm not really into wine, but anybody who's into wine, go and visit those wineries, they were something else. I saw you were very tempted to see whether you could nick Herman Göring's wine collection, that bottle of wine.

• 18:45Rory Stewart?

  Well, it didn't look like they were looking after her. I also, slightly traumatically, did I tell you that I discovered that Herman Göring was the same age that I am now, 53, when he went on the Nuremberg trials? It's making me feel very aged, because Göring didn't look that young in my memory of him. It's a real sign of aging.

• 19:00Alastair Campbell?

  No, no.

• 19:01Rory Stewart?

  Göring's my age.

• 19:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but think of it, you're also the same age as Maya Sandu. I think you're a year older than her, so that's a better comparison.

• 19:08Rory Stewart?

  That's true, that's true.

• 19:09Alastair Campbell?

  She's young with a whole future ahead of her. All right, Rory, let's take a break, and then I want to come back and rant about class war being waged upon us by the posh people.

• 19:16Rory Stewart?

  Very good, looking forward to it very much. Not. Bye-bye.

• 19:56Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Rest of the Podcast. It's Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 19:58Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart. Now, Alistair, you wanted a bit of class warfare, so here's an opportunity.

• 20:02Alastair Campbell?

  No, I didn't.

• 20:03Rory Stewart?

  And it comes from Melbourne. Melbourne, where there's a little bit of class warfare going on. Now, Alistair and Rory, what do you make of one Cambridge college's new policy to specifically target elite private schools for recruitment? Is it really about academic quality, or is it to ensure the next generation of deep-pocketed alumni remain firmly within their walls? So, Alistair, that's a trifecta. That's Australia, that's Cambridge, and that's posh private school people at Cambridge, which was your dominant experience at Cambridge. Go on, tell us about this.

• 20:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you say I want class war. I don't want class war. I want an end to class war. And the class war that is revealed in this policy at Trinity Hall College is the class war that says that if you are from one of these very expensive private schools full of very privileged people with parents who expect their children to be every bit as successful as they have been, that is the real class war. The reason I was so angry about this, and this is a letter from Trinity Hall Cambridge, saying they wanted more applications from these sorts of schools in languages, music, classics, art history, and theology. And they actually said that they worried that children from private schools

• 21:14Alastair Campbell?

  were being ignored and marginalised because of reverse discrimination. The idea that you can say that private school kids are ignored and marginalised within our Oxford system is utterly, totally ridiculous. 7% of kids go to private school, and 29% of Cambridge's 2024 intake was private school. Trinity Hall, 26%, down from 32% in 2022. So I just think this whole thing is basically about saying... We want to keep the broad social, cultural class system as it is. And we're fed up of these working class oiks being foisted upon us from comprehensive schools.

• 21:58Rory Stewart?

  I mean, does that make sense really for the kind of Trinity Hall's admissions tutor? And I can't imagine the Trinity Hall admissions tutor saying, what I really want to do is keep the working class oiks in their place.

• 22:10Alastair Campbell?

  No, they don't necessarily think like that, but I think that's where it, I think that's where the thinking comes from. That if you come from a very privileged background, you are of necessity going to be a better student, cleverer, more intelligent. And I think the opposite is the case. I think the fact of schools, some Cambridge colleges and Oxford colleges having gone out and admitted, we talked, you know, earlier about admitting when you're wrong, admitted that they've just relied too much on this sense of, well, there's the posh rich kids, get more of them in year after year after year. Hold on a minute, why don't we go and try and find some really clever kids in schools that don't even apply? I think that's been good for the schools and it's been good for Oxbridge.

• 22:52Rory Stewart?

  To defend Cambridge a bit, I, I suspect that when you were at Cambridge, the vast majority of people have been to private school. And by the time I was at that age, I think it was probably 50% of the Cambridge intake was private school. They've now dropped it down to just over a quarter. So I think you've got to admit, things are going the right direction, aren't they? And that's because exactly as you say, they've been out there doing really good jobs, reaching out.

• 23:17Alastair Campbell?

  That's why I think this is worrying because he's trying to take us back. He's trying to take us back in the old direction. That's why I don't like this.

• 23:23Rory Stewart?

  I assume, I'm trying to make up a defence. I've no idea what they think they're doing. It seems a bit weird to me because I'm not sure that Eton or Winchester or St Paul's needs much help in being encouraged to apply to Oxbridge.

• 23:36Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 23:37Rory Stewart?

  So I don't know what's going on. One possibility is that the cut of funding for languages and classics.

• 23:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Rory Stewart?

  And art.

• 23:47Alastair Campbell?

  And music.

• 23:48Rory Stewart?

  In schools.

• 23:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Rory Stewart?

  In state schools.

• 23:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:50Rory Stewart?

  Means that they're struggling to bring in people in those specific fields. So they need people to study Latin and Greek. They need people to study languages. They need people to study art. And maybe what's happening here is they're struggling now to find people coming in who have done any Latin at all.

• 24:07Alastair Campbell?

  When I read it, I felt that is the one argument I could have bought is if they said that because of state cuts. State funding being cut in some of these areas because there is this dearth of kids now learning languages in the way that they used to, which is I've admitted, back to admitting when you get things wrong, I think was one of the mistakes we made. It was no longer compulsory to have to learn a foreign language. I think that was a mistake. So they may be saying that, but they don't say that. They say that going to these schools, they're more aligned with the what we're trying to do with our education. They're more aligned to me, being basically saying they want more people like us. But social mobility should mean something in Britain. As soon as I

• 24:50Alastair Campbell?

  saw this, I thought this is an attempt to reverse progress in social mobility. And by the way, Rory, there isn't, you know, you talk about the, we talk about the old boys' club, right? And we all know what that means. That's the seven percent. People should join something called the 93% club. I'm a member. I recommend everybody who went to state school joins the 93% club.

• 25:11Rory Stewart?

  It also seems from the outside, sort of slightly insane. I mean, whatever this individual thinks privately, I cannot imagine why he thought it was a wise thing to write this because the reaction that you're giving was completely predictable.

• 25:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but hold on a minute. Back to your point about the, the sort of the, the right wing media attacks on you. The right wing came out and completely supported it. You know, the spectator was

• 25:39Rory Stewart?

  What did they say? What was their defence?

• 25:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they basically said that the reverse discrimination, as they call it, makes private school pupils feel unwanted, bursary students, that they like to be discouraged from applying. That Trinity Hall has been falling in the league tables, as if that's got something to do with the, the fact that they've got, they've only got one in four private school kids as opposed to other colleges which may have more. I mean, the thing is a complete nonsense. Anyway, I hope I've not been too unkind to Trinity Hall, but the problem with this country, Rory, let me tell you the problem with this country. We've never actually tried comprehensive education. We've never actually done fully comprehensive education. That is the problem with this country.

• 26:18Rory Stewart?

  Isn't that what the left always says? The problem is we've never really tried communism. We've never done it properly. Okay.

• 26:25Alastair Campbell?

  God. Well, you want to leave this with me being a communist. I am not a communist.

• 26:31Rory Stewart?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna move on to Vance in Minnesota.

• 26:34Alastair Campbell?

  I'll rant even more on that, I tell you.

• 26:36Rory Stewart?

  As, as, as an old Etonian Oxford graduate, I'm obviously finding this a very uncomfortable conversation, so I'm going to change the subject massively.

• 26:43Alastair Campbell?

  Johnny good.

• 26:44Rory Stewart?

  So, James Clopkin, does the reaction to the ICE murder, so this is the, the horrible killing of this woman in Minnesota by an ICE agent, show we are in a misinformation age? And just, just quickly, I mean, I, I didn't think, again, with an issue like this, hardly anyone in the world will have missed it. Yes, he's right, it's a misinformation age because of the awful way in which Vance and Trump and others responded, which we can get into. But it's also an information age because the reason we know they're all lying is that we have this incredible depth of cellphone footage showing the killing from different angles and clearly demonstrating that here is a 37-year-old mother in a car

• 27:26Rory Stewart?

  reversing in order to drive off while an ICE officer tries to pull up the handle. And apparently because she went, well, certainly every angle demonstrates she's not running over the ICE agent, an ICE agent steps forward and shoots her through the window, the car then crashes because she's been killed. Over to you.

• 27:45Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Jamie Clopkin's question, does it show that we're in a misinformation age? Absolutely it does, because Roy, you just said something very interesting. You said that the, when you look at all the videos from every angle, it's perfectly obvious that she was trying to get away and not threatening, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I've just watched a video put out by the Department of Homeland Security where a young woman in a blue dress is standing there, speaking on behalf of the American government, explaining the exact opposite of what you've said, where she says these videos clearly show that this guy was under attack from a domestic terrorist. So yes, we're in a misinformation age, and we're in a misinformation age where the misinformation is led by the elected president

• 28:30Alastair Campbell?

  of the United States. And by the way, Roy, I mean, I mentioned earlier about the, the sort of difference between crime and the use of guns in America compared to here. Do you know that every year in the USA, law enforcement authorities kill somewhere between 1,300 and 1,400 people? In Britain, it is two per year.

• 28:55Alastair Campbell?

  Three a day in America, two per year here. So on one level, we look at it and because there's such a focus on ICE, there's such a focus on Trump, we maybe think this is kind of truly shocking, which it is, but actually it happens there more than we than we realise. But what this showed was that because ICE are identified as Trump's thing, although they were created by a previous president, but Trump has massively invested in them, he's made immigration his big thing. And they were obviously long, when you first saw the first footage of this guy just shooting at the car, and then it emerged that she was white, she was she was middle class, you know, she sort of went against the agenda.

• 29:39Alastair Campbell?

  Then I made the mistake of turning on to see what Fox News were making of it. I mean, they were finding anything to attack her. So one of them was out there saying, you know, really, you know, she had pronouns in her bio. It's not just that we're in a misinformation age, we're in an age where every single thing by this American government is twisted in its favour for the narrative it's trying to promote at that time.

• 30:00Rory Stewart?

  It's worth maybe just taking a little time to remind people what Vance said. So most people now, I think, will have seen this video. And what quite clearly happens in this video is a woman is rather slowly backing her car back in order to drive off, right? And this is Vance's statement. He gets very, very angry. He says that the ICE officer who shot her nearly died six months ago after being dragged by a car. And then he goes, so you think maybe he's a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile? Good was part of a broader left wing network to attack, to dox, to assault and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job. You have a woman who was trying to obstruct a legitimate law enforcement operation. Nobody debates that.

• 30:45Rory Stewart?

  You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that.

• 30:54Rory Stewart?

  The reason this woman is dead is because she tried to ram somebody with her car and the guy acted in self-defense. You've got to be a little brainwashed to get to the point where you're willing to get to the point of throwing your vehicle in front of legitimate law enforcement officers and driving your car into them. What I'm certain of is the officer had every reason to think that he was under very serious threat of injury or in fact his life. What I'm certain of is that she accelerated in a way where she ran into the guy.

• 31:23Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, my Rory, my son, he sent me a message after watching that and said, why is it every time I hear J D Vance, I want to take a shower? I mean, J D Vance, I think it was Scaramucci who said this, J D Vance lives to say what he thinks Donald Trump is going to watch him saying on television. And I think that's what we had there. Tom Homan, the Homeland Security guy, he actually came out and his very first words were, this has just happened, let's take time, let's try to investigate what the facts are. Okay. Within no time at all, he'd clearly been bollocked and he went out and said, it's quite clear she did this, she did that, she did the other. And this goes to the heart of something we talked about with Baroness Hale.

• 32:05Alastair Campbell?

  Once you don't have an acceptance that law enforcement authorities work within the law and you have an acceptance that we should be entitled to know who they are and why they're asking us to cooperate with them in their duties of law enforcement. And once you don't have a place where we can all accept this is a fact, rather than that is something that's happened and I will express as a fact my opinion of what it means, which is what Vance was doing. Eventually, we don't have a democracy. And I think that's the road that they're on in America.

• 32:38Rory Stewart?

  It's also the total lack of separation between the executive, the president, the vice president and these ICE officers. I mean, if you think about it, if it had happened in the United Kingdom, a police officer had shot a woman in her car, you would not have had the entire cabinet, doesn't matter whether Conservative or Labour, immediately going out on the air saying, this woman is a vile terrorist who is accelerating and ramming an officer. I'm absolutely certain that everything the officer did was entirely legitimate. It's a, it's a sign of a sickness that's got into the system. It's not just the lies, it's the fact that they're not even taking that second that Tom Homan is trying to take to say, well, the thing that you know and all of us know.

• 33:20Rory Stewart?

  I mean, if I came to you and said, Alasdair, look, there's been a story about this, what do we say? Your immediate reaction, presumably in Downing Street, would be to say, well, we don't know very much. Let's wait and try to find out what the facts are. You know, presumably what you normally say is, this sounds like an absolute tragedy. We're looking very carefully at the situation. A full, you know, police investigation will be conducted, et cetera.

• 33:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, what happens in Britain, I think by law, is that as soon as an incident like this happens, it is automatically referred to those who investigate the police conduct. It's kind of, is the opposite of what's happened in the, in the state where they have decided. Go back to my point about Musk. They decide the game. They decide the rules. They decide the, the good guys and the bad guys. And they've decided based on the opposite of what they see with their eyes. They've decided she's the bad guy. The guy who killed her is the good guy. Vance even said at the end of that shower inducing speech that you refer to, he even said, we should thank him for his service and we should pray for him. I think pray for the kids of the woman, pray for the family that's just lost their, their, you know, their

• 34:25Alastair Campbell?

  mother. You, you used the word sick, is sick. And I'll tell you, I think what the sickness is. Trump goes on about Venezuela being a narco state. The real narco state is the United States and the real narc is the narcissism that he represents and that all these people around him feed at every level. They feed it rather than ever challenge it.

• 34:46Rory Stewart?

  We did an episode on ICE, but part of the problem is that these guys have been deliberately recruited with extremely unpleasant, frequently pseudo racist images. They're encouraged to swagger around masked. They're bringing in very, very rapidly. It's a massively expanding budget. So they're recruiting far too many people without proper checks. They're encouraging this incredibly aggressive culture. And they're signaling that they're exempt from the law. They're signaling that the Department of Justice won't prosecute them if they do stuff. They're telling them they don't have to reveal their faces or say who they are. And imagine the kind of person who wants to join that kind of organization. So you've got the wrong culture right from the beginning.

• 35:29Alastair Campbell?

  I've decided, by the way, I'm not going to the World Cup. I've, I've made a decision on that, Rory. I just don't want to go.

• 35:35Rory Stewart?

  No, really?

• 35:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I have.

• 35:37Rory Stewart?

  No, Scotland's qualified, Alasdair. You've got to go.

• 35:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, lots of people will go and there'll be lots of Scots in America will go. But no, I don't want to go and sort of, you know. I just don't want to, I just feels like it's not a place to go right now. I mean, I go out of curiosity, but not, I don't want to go to have a good time. And I, and we were with some American friends last night and they were saying it's just, it's just horrible living there at the moment. They all know people who think like this and they say it's becoming impossible to sort of to live alongside each other.

• 36:05Rory Stewart?

  Have you followed that he's now announced the prosecution of the Chair of the Federal Reserve, Jay Powell?

• 36:10Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, exactly. That, that's a classic. There's a guy, you know, this is a guy whose job is to try and keep inflation low, keep the economy on, on an even keel. And he, and Trump tells him that he's, he's, he's a dunderhead, he's an idiot, he's stupid and he should be cutting interest rates because that's what Trump would do. So they're, they're pretending that he's sort of broken the law in relation to the funding of refurbishment of headquarters as if he gives a damn. And he's being subpoenaed and he's absolutely come out and called it for what it is. This is them basically saying, unless you do in an independent job, what the president tells you to, then they will find a way of prosecuting you.

• 36:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I mean, that is, I don't care what anybody says, that is a major seed of fascism, hundred percent.

• 36:59Rory Stewart?

  Final question, Alistair, and I'm, I'm gonna, I, I, because we've been quite serious, I'm gonna go not that serious for you, Alistair. I, I was slightly distressed to hear you're not gonna go and watch Scotland and the World Cup because that, that, I know how much you love your football. Anyway, here we are. Jacob Turner, given the cold spell here in the UK, what temperature do you like your house? Do you get into thermostat battles with anyone at home?

• 37:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Rory, it will not surprise you to know, I don't have to work the thermostat. We, we, we have a very interesting relationship with the cold and the warm because Fiona and I start each day in the winter going into very, very cold water. Um. And so the when we come back, we like the house to be quite warm, but then we don't actually like being hot. Otherwise, we wouldn't be jumping in cold water every morning. So I I I hate I hate going into hotels where it's really, really warm. Hate that. So I'm a cold, cold temperature person.

• 37:54Rory Stewart?

  I'm a big sleep with a window open person, too. I love fresh air at night.

• 37:59Alastair Campbell?

  Even if it's cold.

• 37:59Rory Stewart?

  Even if it's cold. I don't know what the evidence is on that, but I'm sure it's good for you.

• 38:02Alastair Campbell?

  This this book I mentioned, Polar War, there are some amazing descriptions of just what the cold does to you. You've got this whole thing about when people get, if they put on too many layers and then you start to sweat.

• 38:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 38:14Alastair Campbell?

  And then the sweat turns to ice on your skin. You've got to be really, really careful about that stuff. Somehow we've gone from a fun question about thermostats to me talking about getting hypothermia and dying in the Arctic. Quite gloomy, been quite gloomy.

• 38:29Rory Stewart?

  It's a sign of the way in which things are going.

• 38:31Alastair Campbell?

  Look, we trust our listeners and viewers a lot. Maybe we should do one of our, one of our instant polls about whether I should go to the World Cup or not.

• 38:40Rory Stewart?

  Good idea.

• 38:40Alastair Campbell?

  But at the moment, I'm very settled. I'm very settled against it. It would have to be a landslide in favour for me to change my mind.

• 38:47Rory Stewart?

  Can I can I just remind listeners that your massively puritanical instincts, where you're going to lecture Alastair, try to think about yourself in his situation if you really, really loved football and Scotland had finally qualified for the World Cup, that he'd give you the same advice.

• 39:01Alastair Campbell?

  You look over my shoulder, you'll see a picture of Scott McTominay's goal against Denmark.

• 39:05Rory Stewart?

  Well, we've gone a lot of directions. We've done Grok AI, we've done uh uh me being attacked for being uh

• 39:12Alastair Campbell?

  Wrong.

• 39:12Rory Stewart?

  dodgy and bad at predicting things. Wrong, wrong, wrong and posh, wrong, posh and dead wetting. Um. We've done, we've done posh people at Cambridge. Uh. We've done Minnesota uh and J D Vance and his attitude to ice. And we've finished with temperatures and your trip to the United States. So let's get the answers from the poll. I'm I'm I'm in favour of you travelling. Right. Bye bye.

• 39:35Alastair Campbell?

  See you next week. Have a nice time in Syria.

• 39:38Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 39:38Alastair Campbell?

  Take care. Bye.

• 39:45Speaker 03

  Here we are getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with 350 passengers onboard.

• 39:54Speaker 04

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 40:02Speaker 05

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

• 40:08Speaker 06

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 40:10Speaker 07

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself: Do you want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done... NOTHING!

• 40:26Speaker 08

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 40:29Speaker 04

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

• 40:37Speaker 06

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia.

• 40:42Speaker 08

  Yes.

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