303. The speech Joe Biden never wanted to give (Live from the Democratic National Convention)

How have the Democratic Party united behind Kamala Harris so quickly? What are some of the core principles of Project 2025? Was Joe Biden's farewell speech as success? Join Rory and Alastair live from the DNC in Chicago to answer all these questions and more. 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ 🇪🇺 New subscribers to The New European receive a signed copy of Tony Blair's new book. Claim yours at theneweuropean.co.uk/trip 📚 TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, 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, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport 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 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.

• 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 2:28Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 2:30Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And we are in Chicago, in the United States of America, where the Democratic National Convention, the DNC, is being held, at which Kamala Harris, no surprise, is going to be nominated and accepted as the Democratic Party presidential candidate. We've been here all day. We've been running around, talking to all sorts of people, and have literally just walked through the door, nearly midnight now, from a Joe Biden speech, which was the kind of climax of hours of speeches, some absolutely brilliant, some less so,

• 3:13Alastair Campbell?

  and a pretty spectacular start to the convention, I would say. So that's what we're going to talk about after the break. And before that, as you know, I've become mildly obsessed with Project 2025, which is this huge document written by a right-wing think tank called the Heritage Foundation, which is forming a big part of the attack on Donald Trump and the Republican Party at the convention.

• 3:42Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, here we are.

• 3:43Alastair Campbell?

  It's nice.

• 3:44Rory Stewart?

  In what Norman Mailer, in his amazing book on the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention,

• 3:49Alastair Campbell?

  Riots.

• 3:50Rory Stewart?

  Probably the last great American city.

• 3:53Alastair Campbell?

  Is that what he said?

• 3:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, put it, "last great American city." It's the most amazing bit of political reporting.

• 3:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, wonderful.

• 3:58Rory Stewart?

  Wonderful book. So, just, Chicago is a city I know a little bit. I actually came here as prisoners' minister to be shown the Cook County jails, features a lot of songs, and walked around the Cook County jails.

• 4:12Alastair Campbell?

  How was it?

• 4:13Rory Stewart?

  It was very interesting. I mean, quite revealing, quite good work on suicide, but also a very revealing moment when I was talking about relationships with prisoners and one of the prison officers, American prison officers, said, "I'm not interested in being friends with prisoners. You know, these guys are villains, etc." So there was a very, very aggressive militaristic attitude towards prisons, and it's...

• 4:36Alastair Campbell?

  Cook County Jail's quite a famous one, isn't it?

• 4:38Rory Stewart?

  Very famous, very famous.

• 4:39Alastair Campbell?

  Big.

• 4:39Rory Stewart?

  Huge, huge, tens of thousands of people.

• 4:42Alastair Campbell?

  And so how do they kind of sleep? They're not in cells, most of them?

• 4:46Rory Stewart?

  So a lot of them were in massive dormitories. So I walked into rooms with, I guess... Forty, fifty people in beds, quite a lot of guns visible and from the, from the, from the prison officers, which you wouldn't have in a, in a UK prison. But it was a time when, when Laurie Lightfoot, who's the previous mayor, Yeah.

• 5:04Rory Stewart?

  was just running to take over from Rahm Emanuel. We're in the middle of one of the great democratic cities, one of the great democratic states. Unlike the Republicans who chose to hold their convention a swing state, the Democrats have chosen to hold theirs in absolutely safe. Solid territory. So much so that Trump's not going to spend, I think, a cent doing television advertising here because he's not going to get any votes for the presidency and probably Kamala Harris won't either. This is very much assumed to be democratic territory. And a lot of the power here rests with the teachers' union. So Laurie Lightfoot was basically toppled by the teachers' union. And the new mayor of Chicago who's come in, a man called Brandon Johnson, very much brought in, he's an ex-teacher, brought in the skirts of the teachers' union. But a place that is struggling a bit, like a lot of these, it's not as bad as Detroit,

• 5:49Rory Stewart?

  but like a lot of these places in the United States, this was one of the great industrial heartlands. The population of Illinois is in fact shrinking. Employment's difficult in Chicago. Rahm Emanuel, who'd been Obama's chief of staff, who was the mayor, managed to get people like Boeing to move here, McDonald's to relocate. He's now the ambassador in Japan, isn't he? Correct. Boeing's now relocated out of the state. And some of the educational statistics, just to finish on, to give you a sense of some of the background problems here, just 22% of students are graduating proficient in reading and only 19% proficient in maths. But 83% of them are graduating and 86% of teachers are rated as excellent by the Chicago Education Board. So this is something we'll talk a little bit about.

• 6:33Rory Stewart?

  This is actually a good move into Project 2025. One of the things in Project 2025 you're about to introduce is about taking away federal control over education, putting it down at the state level. But my goodness, Illinois and Chicago is an example of how bad education can be at a city and state level. Again, if you look at ethnicity, 54% of white students are performing to grade at reading and 48% at maths. 17% of black students at reading, 8% at maths, 21% of Hispanics, 14% at maths. So. It is a real, real problem. This is, and it's not about funding. Funding's gone up by thirty seven percent while the role is falling. It seems to me there is a big problem in the

• 7:16Rory Stewart?

  education system, but anybody who challenges the teachers' union gets run out of town.

• 7:20Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Interesting. Well, I spent the flight from Paris reading Project Twenty Twenty Five.

• 7:30Alastair Campbell?

  It was a nine-hour flight and I managed to get to the end of it. It is interesting.

• 7:35Rory Stewart?

  And tell us what it is. What is this thing?

• 7:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, so this is written by the Heritage Foundation, which did a similar job, which they boast about endlessly for Ronald Reagan.

• 7:45Rory Stewart?

  And the Heritage Foundation's right-wing thing, which I, as a Conservative, was often invited to address, but generally it was people like Liz Truss and Priti Patel.

• 7:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and Robert Jenrick, I think.

• 7:53Rory Stewart?

  We go and talk to them.

• 7:55Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, it's a huge piece of work. It's almost nine hundred pages. It's a compendium, so they've got lots of different people writing lots of different chapters.

• 8:03Rory Stewart?

  Many of whom are ex-Trump staffers, is that right?

• 8:05Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of them quite close to Trump.

• 8:06Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 8:06Alastair Campbell?

  Trump appears to be distancing himself from it. I'm not surprised because I don't know if you noticed when you, when you arrive at the airport, you, you, you get, coming out of the airport, the first poster I saw was from the Democratic Party that said, "Keep Freedom Alive, Stop Project Twenty Twenty Five."

• 8:22Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 8:22Alastair Campbell?

  So they have finally decided, I think, this is the thing to go for.

• 8:27Rory Stewart?

  As the way of defining what Trump's policies will be if he gets into office.

• 8:30Alastair Campbell?

  Because it is, some of it is less ridiculous and rabble-rousing than I expected, but some of it is completely off the wall. I think if you were reading, you would think, who are these people? Why are they so kind of crazy about certain things? If it doesn't have an index, which for a nine-hundred-page book is quite annoying, but if there was an index, Joe Biden's in it a lot and he's very, very bad. Donald Trump is in it and he's very, very good in the main. China, massive. But the one thing that comes out in virtually every single chapter is abortion.

• 9:09Alastair Campbell?

  Even the chapter about veterans, it accuses the veterans department of trying to sort of, you know, push this grotesque homicide against the unborn child agenda. Health and the health department.

• 9:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Alastair Campbell?

  So it starts off by saying that the health department, if the health department was a national budget, it would be this fifth or sixth biggest in the world, 1.2 trillion. But it sets out the main goals of the health department.

• 9:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:38Alastair Campbell?

  Number one goal, promote the liberty of life, promote the sanctity of human life.

• 9:47Rory Stewart?

  Right, stop abortion is the number one goal.

• 9:48Alastair Campbell?

  Number three, number two is about patient choice. Number three is to promote flourishing, happy marriage.

• 9:55Rory Stewart?

  And so just sorry, just to again, situate listeners once more. So this think tank, the Heritage Foundation, which was very important in defining Ronald Reagan's detailed policy agenda.

• 10:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:08Rory Stewart?

  Has basically said, we are writing the manifesto and the detailed policies for Trump. And this is what he's going to do. And in fact, they've been caught by.

• 10:17Alastair Campbell?

  Somebody should do.

• 10:18Rory Stewart?

  And they've been caught by a UK journalist group that sent in a sort of fake shake to interview one of their people who, and he boasted to this, this UK journalist who were pretending to be potential big donors to 2025, boasted about how close they were to Trump, how much influence this was going to have on Trump, et cetera.

• 10:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Rory Stewart?

  So.

• 10:37Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, they say they had a lot of influence on Trump first time around.

• 10:40Rory Stewart?

  And Trump's response, Trump's campaign response is to say, no, no, no, he's made 12 pledges or whatever it is. Goodness knows anyone remember what those 12 pledges are, but anyway, he's made 12 pledges. That's all he said. He's not tied to this. And the reason they're saying that is within that 900 pages is stuff which, as you say, the Democrats can really hammer him on.

• 10:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Rory Stewart?

  If that, if this is indeed his policy.

• 10:59Alastair Campbell?

  But it's not really a manifesto as such, because what it is, it goes through every single government department.

• 11:05Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 11:05Alastair Campbell?

  And every single government entity, office of this and office of that. And it's sort of, it says what it does.

• 11:11Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 11:11Alastair Campbell?

  Why it's failing.

• 11:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Alastair Campbell?

  And what you should do about it. It's a sort of almost formulaic. And it's also saying, and this is not stupid in a way. They understand that the two things you've got that are key in government are where the money goes and personnel. And they're basically saying Trump made a mistake first time around. He didn't fill enough jobs with his own people. And he's got to fill all of these jobs with these people. And they're now using this document to train them, vet them, educate them in how to attack this woke agenda. The woke thing goes through every page of this.

• 11:46Rory Stewart?

  So to put it in a UK context, we'll come back to you on some more of the details. But this is relevant to the UK debate because, of course, my experience as a minister is that 95% of what goes on day to day, maybe 99% is really about the civil service, which in the UK case is a permanent professional impartial civil service, which can respond to prime ministerial direction, but generally, in my experience as a minister, responded more quickly if it was something in a manifesto and the prime minister wanted to do. And if you're a junior minister, you've got a bit more problem trying to achieve radical change. This is not unique to Britain, not unique to the US, not unique to every mature

• 12:29Rory Stewart?

  democracy. Basically, people grumble about the bureaucracy and the rules. And people like Dominic Cummings, who was effectively Boris Johnson's chief of staff, had a very similar view, which is that if you really wanted change in Britain, what you needed to do is basically blow up the civil service.

• 12:45Alastair Campbell?

  Blow this just up, yeah.

• 12:45Rory Stewart?

  Follow where the money goes, and that's the only way to get radical change. The Blair response when you were in was a prime ministerial delivery unit, which was trying to sort of focus priorities, drive from number 10 a little bit more change through departments. Back to you then. So the idea is that, and this is very common amongst the right all the way across Europe, they accuse the left of something called the march through the institutions, which is a kind of Trotskyite idea that you put a bunch of left-wing people

• 13:10Alastair Campbell?

  And in fact, they are the ones who are going to march through the institutions. So the introduction is by this guy, Kevin Roberts, who's the president of the Heritage Foundation. And he says, "The long march of cultural Marxism has happened. Liberty and freedom under assault as never before." This is on page one of this 900 book. Get this. "Toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading school libraries." They paint a picture that is a kind of exaggerated cartoon. So we talked about the education department earlier. They basically say that the education department is a one-stop-shop for a woke cartel. The great, he talks about the greater wokeness, and then he says the four big themes and the

• 13:55Alastair Campbell?

  big promises of this document. One, restore family. And he means husband, wife, kids, okay? Culture, woke culture warriors are killing the family. We need to delete the terms sexual orientation, gender, D E I, abortion, reproductive rights, pornography, jail those who make it, register sex offenders, all who purvey it, shut down the tech firms that facilitate it. Excise critical race theory and general ideology from all curricula. This is just the first couple of pages. Then the big thing, dismantle the administrative state, okay? The administrative state, they say, has become more powerful than Congress, they're unfireable, we've got to fire them.

• 14:38Alastair Campbell?

  Environmental Protection Agency, strangling energy production. This is, the Department of Education injects racist, anti-American, ahistorical propaganda into America's classrooms. The Pentagon, now, what's your image of the Pentagon? Right?

• 14:57Rory Stewart?

  Mine would be pretty, pretty conservative.

• 14:58Alastair Campbell?

  Pretty tough, pretty tough, right? The Pentagon, full of woke bureaucrats forcing troops to attend white privileged training seminars. It's like a sort of mad, dailymail column.

• 15:09Rory Stewart?

  So just, just pause for a second. So you, you can pick up quite a lot of this stuff going on, obviously, all the time when we look at our ex Twitter accounts. The American, the American, American right have picked up, for example, on a ad the British military's put out of a woman in uniform leaning letterously and a man in uniform sort of turning away, and we're against sexual harassment. And it's been posted by the US right wing blogger, who I know a little bit, Ben Shapiro, under the heading, "This used to be an empire on which the sun never sets." And the idea is that, you know, the British, British military's gone to woke columns. So they're completely transfixed by this.

• 15:50Rory Stewart?

  But it still keeps coming back to the sort of question of the balance between whether people actually naturally care about this, whether people even encounter this in their daily lives, to what extent this is whipped up, and then to what extent the whipping up makes it reality. I mean, maybe my decision, because, you know, I, I begin, and I'm afraid I have this view on quite a lot of this stuff in the UK, I literally cannot understand either side of this debate. I can't understand why people, because in daily life... It's so invisible, right? It's just not there, right? You, I, I, I, drag queens are not perpetually out there turning up in schools, et cetera. So, but of course, social media makes it seem as though it's there because the one image of the drag queen shared three million times.

• 16:32Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's like in my constituency, again, I often thought, when I began in 2010, I remember a woman saying to me, "Oh, it's a disgrace, you can't see a white face in Penrith anymore", right? But it's 99% of my community was white, right? There were, I think, 650 Bangladeshis in the whole constituency, right? Out of 70,000 people. And I remember thinking, well, this is daft. But of course, what I underestimated is, it doesn't really matter whether her statement about the high street in Penrith is correct or not. What matters is that if she's living in a social media environment in which she's able to think, and this is what she responded to me when I said, "Well, really, do you encounter..." She said, "Oh, well, not, not, not here then, but somewhere else."

• 17:14Rory Stewart?

  So it's quite possible that this stuff, I, I don't know, but here's my, here's my challenge to it, though, is that in that Musk-Trump interview,

• 17:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Rory Stewart?

  I noticed that Trump basically focused on immigration, cost of living, immigration, cost of living, and didn't get into any of this weird stuff.

• 17:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, maybe he's, maybe-

• 17:29Rory Stewart?

  Because I think Trump probably suspects that he's, the way to win the election is actually on immigration, cost of living, and that all this stuff is a bit fringe.

• 17:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they go, listen, they do go big on immigration. They do, and, but, but the, the point is that, the, what, the thing that runs through it, there's so much projection in this. There's a section about taking, or taking the reins of government. It says, "America is divided between two opposing forces, woke revolutionaries",

• 17:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know what a woke revolutionary is, and those who believe in the ideals of the American revolution-

• 17:58Rory Stewart?

  We know what a woke revolutionary is, right? But, but I think, so, so I think a woke revolutionary presumably is a very, very tiny number of people on the far progressive left of American politics-

• 18:10Alastair Campbell?

  But they're basically saying that anybody who is not them is a woke revolutionary.

• 18:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, isn't, isn't this the way that this kind of dialogue works? That instead of acknowledging that there is a tiny number of woke revolutionaries and a tiny number of weird MAGA obsessives, and that the vast majority of the American population, generally speaking, doesn't think about this all the time? They want to create the illusion of a civil war by suggesting you've got 50% against 50%.

• 18:33Alastair Campbell?

  But they also, they also want to make people think that the country is terrible. Yet they have, they've got this line, right? "You'll get a better job..." If you are a drug addict, alcoholic, morbidly obese, have IBS.

• 18:47Rory Stewart?

  Irritable bowel syndrome.

• 18:49Alastair Campbell?

  Or a psychological disorder.

• 18:50Rory Stewart?

  You get a better job.

• 18:51Alastair Campbell?

  You get a better job. Now, where's that coming from? And then you get this.

• 18:55Rory Stewart?

  Where do you get a better job?

• 18:56Alastair Campbell?

  I don't. In the civil service.

• 18:57Rory Stewart?

  In the civil service, right.

• 18:58Alastair Campbell?

  In the federal government, because the federal government is all bad. I suspect that is complete nonsense. But then you have all this stuff about, so back to defence.

• 19:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:07Alastair Campbell?

  The DOD, Department of Defence, has emphasised leftist policies over military readiness. There's no backup to any of this stuff. They just sort of, they assert it. They, even in the DOD, there must be no support for abortion, for travel to abortions.

• 19:23Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 19:23Alastair Campbell?

  Talking about, when they get on to China, okay, and listen, China is a big deal.

• 19:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:30Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, and you can argue about whether Trump, Obama, Biden, Trump, how they've all dealt with China.

• 19:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Alastair Campbell?

  Whether they got it right, whether they got it wrong. But, so for example, one of the things they're suggesting, the defence section.

• 19:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Alastair Campbell?

  Is that chaplains.

• 19:45Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 19:46Alastair Campbell?

  Should have a bigger role about emphasising Christianity.

• 19:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Alastair Campbell?

  And the two of the Chinese are going to absolutely quake at this sort of stuff.

• 19:56Rory Stewart?

  The American military praised a lot, I remember in Iraq, they took over one of the central bits of Saddam Hussein's palace. And one of the most surprising things as a British person serving in Iraq was early in the morning, thousands of Americans in uniform going into pray every morning. All of them in their combat fatigues before they went out to their day. It's a very, it's a much more, much more religious society. Um, listen, let me try to obviously not defend Project 2025, but think a little bit about where they may be on to something and where they may be getting the wrong solution to the problem. So there is no doubt that left to their own devices, because civil servants

• 20:37Rory Stewart?

  and government aren't serving customers directly, they're not like a coffee shop that can go out of business. It's not uncommon, I found, in the Ministry of Justice, in DIFID, in the Foreign Office, in DEFRA, for departments to slightly chase their tail. You can end up with an incredible number of committee meetings, an incredible amount of money going to consultation, into posters, into away days, into new initiatives which people are championing, which don't have much to do with making the public's life better. I tried to, I was slightly having this conversation with your friend Gus O'Donnell when we interviewed him, on what I hope will be the first of a number of interviews with department secretaries. But I was pointing out to him, for example, that, and this kind of agreeing with Project

• 21:19Rory Stewart?

  2025, when we were doing the Syrian war, my unit working on the Syrian war was relocated to East Kilbride near Glasgow, because that was meant to be good for regeneration. So they couldn't turn up to meetings on the war in London. I was then told, well, they'll be able to fly down. And then I turn up there to say, well, I haven't seen you. And they say, well, we've been looking at our carbon figures, so we can't fly down, right? So I do think some of this stuff goes on. And I felt in the Ministry of Justice, they put a lot of money into producing posters.

• 21:46Alastair Campbell?

  I suspect you'll be a footnote in the next version of this.

• 21:49Rory Stewart?

  Posters saying, look, no, I remember in Ministry of Justice, assaults on prisoners had gone up from 10 to 30,000. The entire prison situation was out of control. And a lot of the focus of the department secretary was generating posters saying things like, we celebrate diversity, we have a zero tolerance attitude of violence. People literally being assaulted under posters saying we have a zero tolerance attitude of violence. So there is some of this stuff. And the question is, how in any of our countries is the sensible way of challenging this without throwing the baby out of the bathwater?

• 22:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, they, there is something in it, but they exaggerate it to such an extent that they come over as completely unhinged. Let's, Agencies for International Development. Now, let's be honest, America, Japan,

• 22:30Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 22:31Alastair Campbell?

  UK,

• 22:32Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 22:32Alastair Campbell?

  Big powers in international development, okay? They describe international development as a self-serving complex of aid organisations and NGOs. Biden has turned USAID.

• 22:42Alastair Campbell?

  Into a huge fund for abortion, gender issues and climate extremism is being captured by and is enriching the left. That is insane.

• 22:52Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's totally insane. And let me explain what that means. So what that means is that they have, again, very modestly begun supporting family planning, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, where there are big problems on population size, Niger, Sahel, where these coups are happening, average family size, seven point two children, in countries which are ravaged by drought.

• 23:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:14Rory Stewart?

  And where many women want some basic support in family planning. And it's completely disgusting.

• 23:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:20Rory Stewart?

  To have a situation.

• 23:21Alastair Campbell?

  So they say what USAID is doing is, quote, "supporting the global abortion industry." I think it's just the fact of constant exaggeration of, of a case that just after a while becomes mad. Virtually every chapter has abortion. It has masks and vaccines.

• 23:39Rory Stewart?

  They're very anti-mask.

• 23:40Alastair Campbell?

  Anti-mask, anti-vaccines.

• 23:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Alastair Campbell?

  And, and on education, just get rid of the whole department.

• 23:46Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 23:46Alastair Campbell?

  Get rid of it.

• 23:47Rory Stewart?

  And oddly, as I was saying, in fact, I am very shocked by this. What they're basically saying is that all education policy should be left to states and cities and not be done federally. But in fact, a lot of the progress and America's education, not at the elite level, I mean, their elite schools, places like Yale where I'm teaching are unbelievable. And, you know, just to put in a little plug, just in case people are interested around the world listening, the Jackson School at Yale is offering fully funded tuition, so free tuition, particularly looking for people from the developing world who want to go to this incredible American university to study government. So do, do apply for that.

• 24:27Rory Stewart?

  But at the other level, if you get down to primary, secondary, American results are not good in international terms. And one of the only ways in which this was turned around was by the federal government, initially, in fact, by your friend, George W. Bush, who put a lot of money in trying to focus on standardized testing, proper focus on literacy and numeracy. And that was massively resisted by teachers' unions, massively resisted at the state and city level. And yet, here's the Heritage Foundation now trying to dismantle all the federal role in education.

• 25:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I think George Bush would see this document as some weird shit, as he once said about, about, about Donald Trump. Let's just, honestly, there's so much stuff in this. Energy. Stop the war on oil and gas. I mean, the other issue is climate. These are big climate change deniers.

• 25:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Alastair Campbell?

  They they talk about the climate crisis alarm industry, which of course, you know, the woke left are driving. They want to get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency. And and this this thing about that, you read it like.

• 25:28Rory Stewart?

  The Environmental Protection Agency, I think, was one of the great achievements, actually, of Richard Nixon. And so a Republican brought this in, and I, when I was the environment minister in Britain, learnt so much from the Environmental Protection Agency. It was a real progress in the United States in terms of protecting American citizens and protecting the American environment.

• 25:47Alastair Campbell?

  So here, Health and Human Services, page one, goal one, protecting life, conscience and bodily integrity. Abortion and euthanasia are not healthcare. That's your main point about health. It's sort of.

• 26:02Rory Stewart?

  One of the things going on here at the back of it, just a sort of geeky thing for people who are interested in in political theory, is there's something called unitary executive theory going on. So the conservatives on the Supreme Court, Supreme Court justices since Reagan have been leaning into Article Two, Section Two of the Constitution, which says all executive authority is vested in the president.

• 26:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 26:25Rory Stewart?

  And they've been trying to use this to argue that there should not be any independent agencies and that the president, not Congress and not anybody else, should control the full executive branch.

• 26:34Alastair Campbell?

  That's what they're saying.

• 26:34Rory Stewart?

  And drive it all the way through.

• 26:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And they shouldn't have to have such difficult clearance by the Senate and so forth.

• 26:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And being the being US, instead of the sort of discussion we'd have in Britain, which would be relatively pragmatic and be adjusted by legislation and talking about what the right balance between the civil service and Parliament and the Prime Minister should be, being the US, it's all getting down to legal discussions on what the word vesting meant in the 18th century and what powers exactly the British king had in the 18th century and all this kind of stuff.

• 27:01Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, I I I don't know whether I would recommend people read it or not. There is this, by the way, I should say, it's not 100% pro-Trump. It's not as keen on Vladimir Putin as he is.

• 27:11Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 27:11Alastair Campbell?

  By a long way. And there's a very interesting, once you hit page eight hundred and something, there's a very interesting section on trade where they have two people giving very different opinions.

• 27:22Rory Stewart?

  Including one on pushing for free trade.

• 27:24Alastair Campbell?

  Basically, somebody who says that Trump pulling out of the the Trans-Pacific Partnership was his biggest mistake and that his tariffs were a big mistake as well and warring against all the tariff stuff. So that's in there.

• 27:38Rory Stewart?

  And that's interesting because this Trump convention that just happened is the first time that the Republicans, this time they had a manifesto, they haven't recently, but it's the first time a Republican manifesto has been produced without a huge emphasis on free trade. I mean, he's a protectionist, leaves in tariff barriers, one hundred and ten percent on Chinese vehicles, ten percent on rural vehicles, et cetera.

• 27:59Rory Stewart?

  I'm interested in this because it's probably the most fundamental problem that Trump will face if he gets elected and is a huge opportunity for the Democrats campaigning against him. He's pushing on costs of living, but putting up tariff and trade barriers will almost certainly raise prices

• 28:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 28:20Rory Stewart?

  for Americans on lower incomes and is completely against most right wing thought, which was always traditionally about free trade in the United States.

• 28:28Alastair Campbell?

  What's interesting is that Milton Friedman gets quoted lots in this book, but not about the economy. It's quite about education. The guy who makes the case for free trade is called Kent Lastman. And he starts off saying, "Our economy is not in decline. We've had two centuries of good growth. Productivity is pretty good. Tariffs in the Trump era are counterproductive." He produces research that says that the tariffs on steel lost seventy five thousand jobs for one thousand that were gained. So it's not a wholly kind of pro-Trump thing. It's kind of having the conservative argument. And what that bit shows is this is where this big argument is going on with this law. Whereas the other guy, the one thing I did find very interesting, again on China,

• 29:10Alastair Campbell?

  the guy who makes the case for what he calls fair trade, supports Trump, is a guy called Peter Navarro. And he has this very, very, very long list of stuff that the Chinese do to give themselves a competitive advantage. And I hadn't realised that within the WTO, which these guys, by the way, say America should come out of, that China is still treated as a developing nation. And therefore is able to get away with a lot more than, say, America or the United Kingdom or Canada, whatever it might be.

• 29:39Rory Stewart?

  Well, the rational thing there, I think, is not a trade war with China, but trying to push for fair trade with China rather than the tribal. Just before we go to the break, just to give people another little picture of where we are, given that we're in Chicago at the moment at this convention. One of the big issues which will absolutely resonate with international listeners is Chicago feels as though it's in the middle of a migrant crisis, rightly or wrongly, some debate about this, but an enormous number of migrants have moved to Chicago relatively recently. And Chicago is spending a lot of money on housing them. So some of the most iconic hotels in the centre of the city have now been given over to migrants.

• 30:21Rory Stewart?

  And you are now getting a lot of opposition here in Chicago from African Americans and from the Mexican community, who are very, very angry at migrants turning up and getting very generous treatment. People beginning to mutter about how community centres that used to provide services for the African American, Mexican community are now being handed over to migrants. In other words, there's some things going on around us here in Chicago, which are a little bit reminiscent, unfortunately, of some of the stuff that was lying behind the riots in Britain, and of course, that we see right across Europe.

• 30:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, listen, immigration is a huge issue and is going to be a big issue in this campaign. The question for the Democrats is whether they can show that they have a plan that is better than the kind of waffle and the bluster that Trump comes up with.

• 31:05Rory Stewart?

  And presumably, the challenge, if you were working for Kamala Harris, is the Republicans are going to say, you as Vice President had the immigration brief, and you're on record three, four years ago, making very friendly comments about immigration and attacking Trump. Now you're saying you're tough on immigration, but as Trump keeps saying, where's your record on this? How would you flip that around? How would you, if you were her, how would you deal with that attack line?

• 31:26Alastair Campbell?

  You know, I was thinking this morning that when I couldn't sleep, it happens to me this morning, and I was, I was thinking, well, one, I would love to help Kamala Harris, but this is a classic for me. You know, I said to you before, lots done, lots to do, lots to lose. This is a classic.

• 31:42Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 31:43Alastair Campbell?

  Lots done, lots to do, lots to lose.

• 31:44Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 31:44Alastair Campbell?

  You have to show that you are serious about having a plan. You have to show that you get. So I, I think you've got to be careful not to pander to the sort of stuff you're talking about, not to, not to exaggerate, not allow it to be exaggerated, but to accept that it's real.

• 31:58Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 31:58Alastair Campbell?

  And have a plan to deal with it. Um. But I think where she's, where I feel the mood on this is, and it's, you know, you've got to be very, very careful. And people talk about the vibe.

• 32:07Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 32:08Alastair Campbell?

  But it does feel very, very powerful at the moment. So walking around the place, it feels pretty buzzy.

• 32:14Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 32:15Alastair Campbell?

  It feels pretty confident.

• 32:16Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 32:17Alastair Campbell?

  In a way that I think when you're looking at Trump's events at the moment.

• 32:20Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 32:21Alastair Campbell?

  They just don't. There was one the other day I was watching on, on television and the camera kept flicking to more and more seats emptying out as he carried on rambling.

• 32:30Rory Stewart?

  He kept rambling on.

• 32:31Alastair Campbell?

  And then he said, you know, they're going to say I'm rambling. Yeah. And he says, I'm not rambling. I'm really smart. I'm smarter than she is. And do you know what I think has happened? She has got inside his head in a way that Biden didn't. Trump worked all the time about getting inside the head of the others.

• 32:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 32:50Alastair Campbell?

  And he was very successful at it.

• 32:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 32:51Alastair Campbell?

  I don't get the feeling he's inside her head.

• 32:53Rory Stewart?

  Doesn't know how to deal with her yet.

• 32:54Alastair Campbell?

  And I think the fact that she laughs and he calls it the cackle, the fact that she dances and he does that stupid kind of whatever he's done, even what he's doing.

• 33:03Rory Stewart?

  Well, the old populist, you know, Proboa, the, the sort of

• 33:06Alastair Campbell?

  I never saw all that dance.

• 33:07Rory Stewart?

  Special Forces General in, in Indonesia.

• 33:09Alastair Campbell?

  Does he dance?

• 33:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. He basically won the election in Indonesia as president on the basis of really crap dad dancing.

• 33:16Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 33:17Rory Stewart?

  Rehabilitate himself from being like a proper human rights abusing Suharto's son-in-law, Special Forces Commander. And then by doing a little bit of dodgy dancing, suddenly becomes the lovable uncle that everybody wants.

• 33:27Alastair Campbell?

  I think what he will hate is the fact that there was a clip this morning I saw, she was meeting the fire service and there was a dog there and she just started playing with this dog and it was so sort of natural.

• 33:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Alastair Campbell?

  And somebody said, you can't imagine Donald Trump doing that. And it's not when she dances, she, she just looks kind of ease with herself.

• 33:47Rory Stewart?

  She seems confident, doesn't she? She's somehow got a confidence, which is wonderful and it, it, and very difficult to replicate. And probably a more, and a confidence that doesn't seem patronizing in the way that I'm afraid Hillary Clinton sometimes came across to people. Well, I think the final thing, Alice, just to finish, because it relates to what we're talking about, is that at the core of it, I think, is an idea of mass deportation, isn't it? Deporting millions of undocumented immigrants.

• 34:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, they don't quite go that far, you see. They make this very much a sort of, this is how we would change the government machinery.

• 34:16Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 34:17Alastair Campbell?

  But it's surrounded by all this kind of mad stuff.

• 34:20Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 34:21Alastair Campbell?

  And if you, look, I'm sure there are some people who really, really, really think that abortion is like the biggest issue in the world and it's terrible. And there are people like that.

• 34:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, presumably it's 20% of the population, not enough to win an election.

• 34:34Alastair Campbell?

  I wouldn't have thought so.

• 34:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 34:35Alastair Campbell?

  But if you read this, you basically think you're reading somebody who, deep down, what they really care about is abortion.

• 34:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Alastair Campbell?

  And I think you've got a president in Joe Biden who's been, you know, he's pretty old, practicing Catholic, probably finds the whole abortion issue quite uncomfortable, hasn't really made it a big deal. She's going to make it a big deal.

• 34:53Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 34:53Alastair Campbell?

  And I think what you're seeing, I saw a very interesting interview with Frank Luntz, the pollster, who said he was trying the other day to set up a focus group for undecided women under 27, and he couldn't find them. So if you're Trump, that's a problem.

• 35:10Rory Stewart?

  That is a...

• 35:11Alastair Campbell?

  And if they can vote, and it was interesting to listen to the Mooch and Katie Kay the other day, saying 50% of young people did vote last time.

• 35:18Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 35:19Alastair Campbell?

  And that feels low, but actually that's quite high for America.

• 35:22Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 35:22Alastair Campbell?

  If they can get another 5, 10% on top of that.

• 35:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 35:25Alastair Campbell?

  They're getting close.

• 35:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think, let's head through to a break.

• 35:30Alastair Campbell?

  And when we come back, listeners, things may sound a little bit different because we're going to be out and about at the convention itself.

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• 37:31Rory Stewart?

  Well, here we are at the, at the convention. And we're, we're at the early stages, first night. So I, I'm not to be rude about the speakers behind us, but at the moment they are relatively junior. We just had a state senator, a state senator from Michigan speaking. This is a great opportunity for young, up and coming politicians, for more junior sort, to put their name on the Democratic convention stage.

• 37:54Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, there's a lot of energy in there already and there's a lot of energy out here, but compared to British party conferences, it's, it's just the scale is so big. I mean, the protests were big. The queues were big, but they're very well organised. And it's just big. I mean, look at it. They are. Look at it now, inside. Absolutely huge.

• 38:14Rory Stewart?

  The size of the thing is enormous, yeah. Actually, it's not been too bad getting in.

• 38:18Alastair Campbell?

  It's been good.

• 38:18Rory Stewart?

  Um, and just, just to give a sense of, of what's going on, which I guess is a little bit like a Tory or Labour parliamentary conference. You've got young activists. Uh, we've been interviewing person who's the Connecticut Whip, for example, from Kamala Harris. Um, these are people who are trying to make their mark. There'll be people who are volunteers who are hoping to catch the eyes of people, get promoted.

• 38:39Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of donors.

• 38:40Rory Stewart?

  Lots of donors, various businesses, lobbyists, presumably around the end. But a little bit so far, a little less commercial than the Conservative conferences. CNN has got a little grill going here where Bernie Sanders has been holding force.

• 38:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, which was nice. And we went in there and had some. We didn't, we didn't avail ourselves of the free food, but it was very nice. Saw Mark Thompson, now running CNN. Anyway, I think we should go inside.

• 39:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, okay, let's go and find out what's next. It's, it's, it's the windy city.

• 39:05Alastair Campbell?

  Which is not windy, not cool windy because of the wind, but.

• 39:08Rory Stewart?

  Because you, people like you and me talking all the time.

• 39:10Alastair Campbell?

  All right.

• 39:11Rory Stewart?

  That's what it's.

• 39:11Alastair Campbell?

  About talking, yeah.

• 39:12Rory Stewart?

  About talking. All right, let's go inside.

• 39:20Rory Stewart?

  So, Alistair, convention, pretty amazing. So enormous, as you pointed out to us. Alistair's at Chicago Bulls Stadium, twenty five thousand people. Incredible crowd. We were sitting in terrific seats. And here's a little clip to give you a bit of a sense of the atmosphere.

• 40:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 40:14Alastair Campbell?

  So that was the crowd chanting as they did at many, many, many points, we love Joe. And there was a lot of love for Joe Biden. There was a lot of for Kamala Harris when she came on. So it was, it was a pretty amazing event. We're now back at base. So what are your reflections?

• 40:29Rory Stewart?

  It was enormous. I noticed towering over our heads in nets were red, white and blue balloons.

• 40:35Alastair Campbell?

  I think they'll be waiting for Thursday, I suspect.

• 40:36Rory Stewart?

  Waiting for Thursday. And most striking of all, I suppose, is that all the speakers we saw, and we saw a lot of speakers.

• 40:43Alastair Campbell?

  There were a lot of speeches.

• 40:44Rory Stewart?

  A lot of speeches. Blown up to a tremendously enormous size. I don't know whether this is going to happen to us when we play the O2 in London, but they, I, I calculated that if their bodies were attached to the size of their heads on those screens, their bodies would have filled the entire stadium from the ground floor up to the roof. They would have been people who were like sort of 200 feet tall. It, it was an extraordinary thing, looking at these giants.

• 41:09Alastair Campbell?

  So we, we, we were in absolutely perfect seats, right at the front of one of the sections, sort of second section up, looking straight at the speaker. You couldn't identify the speaker from where we were sitting.

• 41:23Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 41:24Alastair Campbell?

  So you have these giant screens. It was very well choreographed. There was no debate as such, though it was literary to speeches and films. But some, a pretty good succession of a kind of mix of big names and small names.

• 41:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Alastair Campbell?

  People from different parts of the party, different parts of the country, a lot of women.

• 41:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, a lot of women. So I thought I detected a bit of a narrative, which was kind of quite well organised, much better than we ever get some sort of Tory conference or something. This is a pathetic comparison, actually, when you look at the scale of this thing. But it started with, in the section we saw, which was the kind of big concluding section, we're now on the first day of, of, of the convention.

• 42:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and bear in mind, there'd been a couple of hours even before that of kind of rules and procedure, and then a few speakers. Even as we were getting in, there was screens outside playing the speeches from inside. So I think we. We saw a lot of speeches and we probably got the best.

• 42:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, our section started with Gina Raimondo, who was the governor of Rhode Island and is now in Biden's cabinet. And it then moved on through a series of very, very impressive female politicians. The governor of New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, who gave a startlingly brilliant speech, which we can come back to.

• 42:38Alastair Campbell?

  She was the first one who managed, given that lots of people were coming and going, arriving. She was the first one that managed to keep the crowd quiet, other than when they were cheering and applauding, which was a lot.

• 42:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but maybe if we just stop on that second before we go to the kind of big structure. For anyone who hasn't seen her speak, we'll try to put a little bit of a clip up of her speaking style. I've never seen a politician like it.

• 43:01Alastair Campbell?

  Really?

• 43:01Rory Stewart?

  I think it's just extraordinary and particularly the way that she uses her eyes, her smile, her hands. I thought I detected 14 different hand gestures. So I was trying to record every single angle at which she puts her hands, the way that she turns. And she was the first who wasn't delivering a speech straight at a teleprompter in front of her. But instead, her eyes were flicking all the way around.

• 43:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Rory Stewart?

  And you really got the impression she's improvising. Then Hillary Clinton, over to you, you were quite impressed by Hillary Clinton's speech.

• 43:26Alastair Campbell?

  Terrific. I think AOC has got amazing charisma, very, very beautiful. She's got a nice voice and she speaks really, really well. And she was hammering maybe points for the left of the party. So she was getting going down very, very well in the audience. Hillary Clinton got an amazing reception when she came on. I think it was actually quite taken aback by it. She knows she's popular in the Democratic Party, but it went on and on and she kept trying to start the speech and people cheered her again. But I thought, I mean, Hillary is not a kind of Barack Obama style speaker. But I thought the climax of her speech was fantastic.

• 44:02Rory Stewart?

  What happened at the climax?

• 44:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it was just like, sort of, I mean, you were saying, you know, she's got sort of several endings to this speech. But I think what happened was that the audience worked out when it was going to end. And she just had this sort of repeating lines that were getting louder and louder and louder applause until the very end. And she was trying to do this, this kind of big message that tied in the story of herself, which is obviously very well known, that she was defeated by Donald Trump. But the keep going, we keep going because we have beliefs. And this sense of tying her story to the story of America. I mean, Trump obviously figured large in most of the speeches, but not in a way that made it feel like it was all negative stuff. So I think she was doing a very, very positive,

• 44:47Alastair Campbell?

  you know, we keep going, we're still here and we're going to win again. Lots of the speeches and you and I didn't do a kind of male V female count, but I've got the sense of more female speakers than.

• 44:58Rory Stewart?

  Certainly of the active politicians.

• 45:00Alastair Campbell?

  And then we also had this surprise appearance by Vice President Harris herself. That was not in the running order.

• 45:07Rory Stewart?

  And again, not in the running order, really exciting for us, for the whole audience. She came on very short. I think AOC spoke for about six minutes. She spoke for about three minutes. But again, magical smile, such confidence coming across the moment. You can see why people are excited by her. In terms of the structure of the story they were telling, and I thought it was really good storytelling.

• 45:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 45:26Rory Stewart?

  First bit was a series of politicians, three of them in turn, saying, I come from a modest background, middle-class family. My dad worked in an ordinary job. And then actually, in the case of, um, Raymondo, he lost his job because it was offshored. Leading up to the punchline, which is delivered, I think by AOC, which is Kamala Harris understands the middle class because she comes from the middle class. Then we moved on to a union section where we were talking about how they cared about the working class. And interestingly in America, this is strange thing where they move between saying we're on the side of the middle class and it was only the union organizers who actually used the word working class. Everybody else says we're from the middle class.

• 46:08Alastair Campbell?

  But a lot of middle-class people in America consider themselves to be working class, what we would consider to be working class.

• 46:14Rory Stewart?

  Or, yeah, it's the other way around. Working-class people call themselves middle-class. Yeah, exactly. It's only the unions, I think, who still use the word.

• 46:20Alastair Campbell?

  Working class in the same way that we do.

• 46:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:22Rory Stewart?

  Then they moved on to talking about how important it was that she was a woman, which was your Hillary Clinton speech. There were these videos interspersed and quite a lot of them were building up to beginning to understand a little bit more about Kamala Harris.

• 46:37Alastair Campbell?

  Where she came from.

• 46:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, there was a lot.

• 46:39Alastair Campbell?

  Childhood.

• 46:39Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Her childhood and then her childhood friends spoke and her childhood friend's mother spoke.

• 46:43Alastair Campbell?

  Her sister. I mean, I'd never, I'd never seen her sister speak before.

• 46:46Rory Stewart?

  And that was all about her being a protector.

• 46:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Rory Stewart?

  And arranged around actually rather a sweet story about how at the age of four, she stood up to a bully. We then got on to law and January sixth, because we then had a speech that you quite liked, delivered by a law professor who I thought was a little bit wooden and now representative from Maryland.

• 47:05Alastair Campbell?

  It was one of those, it was, it was a very, very well crafted speech that at times was very well delivered. Other times, less so. But I think they were, what they were getting to then, he was talking about what it was like being in Capitol Hill. As the mob was kind of descending. That became quite a theme through the evening, which Biden, President Biden also referred to. So there was this kind of section where it was sort of not to us, not that very well known, not very well known congresspeople. Including, I hadn't realised, Katty Kay was there tonight, our colleague from the Restless Politics US. And I hadn't realised that Chris Coons is one of Biden's very, very, very close personal friends. So he then started to get into the Biden story.

• 47:50Alastair Campbell?

  Because the other thing that was going on was everybody being very, very, very nice about Joe Biden. I think that's why Kamala came on. Other than to sort of, you know, get the audience up. I think it was also, that was her moment with Biden. Sort of topping the bill, as it were, tonight, for her to say something very, very nice about him.

• 48:09Rory Stewart?

  And so we built up over a four and a half hours of speech, video, speech, video, almost without a break. We, we were trying to record.

• 48:19Alastair Campbell?

  There wasn't a break.

• 48:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I was trying to record a tiny bit to camera and basically it's applause, next person, applause, next person. Then they brought in abortion. So there was a very moving, actually very disturbing section where three women who'd had to have abortions for different reasons, building up to a woman who said, I am the classic American story. I'm a cheerleader, I'm the homecoming queen, I'm a survivor. I was raped repeatedly by my stepfather and found that I was pregnant when I was 12. And led on to say that in her current state, she wouldn't have been able to, to have an abortion. And other people talking about how they were forced to go to emergency rooms twice for miscarriages, almost lost their lives because of this. And then, as you said, we lend on to the Biden tributes.

• 49:03Alastair Campbell?

  Just, just before we leave, leave abortion, two things to say on that. The first is that. Just as I was making the point that on the 2025 document abortion kind of just goes right through it abortion women's control over their own bodies reproductive rights was mentioned again and again and again tonight but what I thought was interesting so the first the first story was told by a couple and it was the man who was speaking whose wife then made the point this is an issue that has to be fought by men as well as women which went down really really well with the men and the women in the audience and then was then followed by the governor of Kentucky Andy Beshear from which state

• 49:48Alastair Campbell?

  the woman who was made pregnant at 12 came so I thought that was interesting as well that the main as it were just about abortion speech apart from the three the couple and the two other women was actually from a male politician I thought that was quite significant and then as you say into the next chapter

• 50:06Rory Stewart?

  And then and then the final chapter I guess was as you say these extraordinary tributes to Biden which led into Jill Biden and Ashley Biden his daughter and then finally Joe Biden himself giving an hour long speech and it was very I mean I thought sort of mesmerizing because I felt at least that one was watching his age I guess I was thinking like many people in the audience would he have been able to do another four years probably a bit of relief that he stepped down gratitude that he stepped down he did fumble and stumble over his words at one point and the audience

• 50:38Alastair Campbell?

  The audience helped him through it

• 50:40Rory Stewart?

  Helped him through all of that

• 50:41Alastair Campbell?

  They clapped through it

• 50:42Rory Stewart?

  But generally speaking he was he was pretty good for he's got this issue though which I think would have been a problem if he continued for another four years partly with his I'm maybe I'm getting too much from his speech his hand gestures he can't really raise his hand comfortably with his shoulders when he's pointing to people he looks looks a little bit

• 50:56Alastair Campbell?

  I mean what I what I sensed about them and look I know anybody who listens to this podcast knows that I really really can't stand Donald Trump and I think he's a terrible human being But I think when a lot of the stories that were told about Vice President Harris were about her empathy, so there's one speech which I found really quite moving, a Texas Congresswoman, Jasmine Crockett, black, female, and she's told the story, she was all about Kamala Harris's empathy. And she told the story about how when she first arrived in Congress, she thought she'd made a terrible mistake. She was unhappy, she couldn't kind of find out her role. I was kind of thinking, you should probably send

• 51:40Alastair Campbell?

  her your book Rory. And she said that her first meeting with Kamala Harris, her first words were, "What's wrong?" And she sensed something. And she said that she burst into tears. And then told this story, and she started crying as she was telling it. She started trying to stop herself crying. And she said, "I couldn't really quite, the most powerful woman in the world was wiping away my tears." And she told, so it sounds schmaltzy, but how it came over was this genuine sense of empathy.

• 52:12Rory Stewart?

  It was really lovely, wasn't it?

• 52:13Alastair Campbell?

  Which I think you see with, when you see Kamala Harris with people. And likewise, when Donald Trump did an interview recently, and he mentioned Melania, and he was describing what Melania was doing when he was shot, and what she was on television, she was wearing. Then he said, "That means she likes me, or maybe she loves me." Or it was just sort of weird, the whole thing was weird. Whereas hearing Jill Biden speak about Joe Biden, and then Joe Biden speak about Jill Biden, and the daughter speak about both, you kind of, you know, it's, as you say, it's a show, but that was genuine. That is a genuine couple that's been together 50 years.

• 52:51Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that humanity, just, I think is one of the things that's really driving this kind of buzz there is around them at the moment.

• 52:59Rory Stewart?

  Really interesting also, I mean, we talked about the fact that the campaign, the Kamala Harris campaign has raised well over $300 million last few weeks and that this is going to be a billion dollar campaign. And you can see in that convention, some of the ways in which real money is spent. And one of the ways in which it's spent is, I think astonishing scriptwriters, thinking very carefully about exactly the sequence between each speaker and who's coming on when and how they hand over to the next speaker. You gave the example of the governor of Kentucky coming over after the woman from Kentucky, et cetera. And I guess the question is, is it worth it? Because very few people would have sat through the four and a half hours in the way that we did. And very few people would have watched it like that. But what I've noticed, of course, on social media, is that

• 53:43Rory Stewart?

  almost every story that we've spoken about has been picked up. So Slate has picked up one, Huffington Post has picked up the story of the man with his wife who had to have the abortion. Another one has picked up the woman crying, another one has picked up the comments from Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton's comments about glass ceiling has appeared in another website. So it's all, somebody's also thought very carefully about how to give almost exclusives, I guess, to different news organizations previous to these speeches, so they can go out immediately.

• 54:12Alastair Campbell?

  One speech we haven't mentioned, which I thought was a really good speech as a speech, was the speech by Steve Kerr, who's the guy who coached the American basketball team in Paris.

• 54:24Rory Stewart?

  Can I just ask one question on that, though? Because, I mean, he got a gold medal for basketball, but am I not right? The Americans always get a gold medal for basketball because they're the only people who really play basketball. So they've never not got a gold medal for basketball in the Olympics.

• 54:35Alastair Campbell?

  America is very good at basketball, right? But they, but they were in Paris against the French, who are also quite good at basketball. Okay. But my, the point is, he was making the point that if you're like him, he made, he said, you know, I know there'll already be on Twitter saying, stick to blowing your whistle or whatever you do. So he's putting his head above the parapet, but essentially saying he feels he had a duty to do that. But then what I thought was really interesting is he talked about leadership from the context of being a leader and what he wants to see in a leader. And he didn't really, he did put the boot in directly to Trump at one point, but essentially he was saying the qualities good leaders need. And I don't know if you were, but I was thinking, every single one, I was thinking, well, Trump doesn't have that.

• 55:18Rory Stewart?

  And the one he led one was being able to laugh at yourself.

• 55:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and honesty.

• 55:24Alastair Campbell?

  And loving the team and understanding that sometimes the best ideas come from the team, not from yourself. So I thought that was a very, very effective part. And so that was about leadership. And then, so, yeah, you're right, it was sort of framed in chapters. The other thing you saw was the production values. I mean, I was involved in lots of party conferences for the Labour Party, and we were very, very professional and very well organised and what have you. But when you looked at the scale of the televisual organisation of tonight, it was huge. It was more like a kind of rock concert.

• 55:58Rory Stewart?

  And they were changing their speakers, their costumes as quickly as Taylor Swift. I mean, it was quite a kind of shifting fruit.

• 56:04Alastair Campbell?

  And the other thing was the, I mean, I don't know whether you did, I sort of pretending to be a kind of independent minded observer, I wasn't taking any of the placards, but every single speech, they came around with new placards.

• 56:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so you knew Jill was about to speak because he's suddenly got a green Jill placard.

• 56:22Alastair Campbell?

  Jill placard, you know, we fight to win. So, and again, that's choreographed to what the speech is going to say.

• 56:28Rory Stewart?

  And some of those placards were quite useful because the only moment of uncertainty in the thing was when some people unveiled a banner saying, stop arms sales to Israel, at which point another group of delegates moved there, we love Joe banners in front of it to try to hide it from the cameras. There was a great sort of tussle.

• 56:47Alastair Campbell?

  I was, from Joe Biden's perspective, I was a little bit nervous at that point because it was getting quite noisy at one point. The people unfurling the banner were getting quite loud. And I could see he was kind of just a little bit edgy. But then I noticed he, he just didn't look there again.

• 57:03Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 57:03Alastair Campbell?

  And he just carried on, carried on speaking. I tell you what I think, he's got, he's got a lovely man, he's got a fabulous smile.

• 57:09Rory Stewart?

  Incredible. Those are all his own teeth, incredible white teeth.

• 57:11Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they're teeth that have obviously had quite a lot of work, right? I think, I don't know whether they're his own or not, but they're good teeth.

• 57:17Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 57:17Alastair Campbell?

  He's got a lovely, slightly lopsided smile. And he's got these interesting habits, which I think you only see if you do watch him at length like that. So he uses this phrase a lot, that's not hyperbole.

• 57:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 57:32Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so he'll say something, he'll say, you know, Donald Trump's the worst president, that's not hyperbole. And then the other thing he does, when he says something bad about Donald Trump.

• 57:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Alastair Campbell?

  And the audience regularly boo.

• 57:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 57:43Alastair Campbell?

  It's almost like he feels he has to engage with them as though they're booing his point.

• 57:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, listen to me, listen to me, this is serious, this is serious.

• 57:49Rory Stewart?

  This is true.

• 57:50Alastair Campbell?

  So he's got these little sort of tics and mannerisms. But listen, they loved him, they did love him.

• 57:55Rory Stewart?

  Just to finish from my point of view, and as we get late in tonight, I also thought there was a sort of terrible pathos to it.

• 58:02Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 58:03Rory Stewart?

  The sense of this man who is visibly aging, reflecting on his incredible career, you know, he entered the Senate, was elected to the Senate at 29, young as you could possibly get in. And the sense also of America's power potentially waning. You know, he was saying again and again, this is the greatest country on earth, there's no country on earth that can beat us. And you could feel, I felt anyway, a world changing between beneath his feet, that America's position in the world is not what it was in the 1990s. And here was this very old man, speaking almost like a kind of strange prophet, about his sort

• 58:45Rory Stewart?

  of vision of the kind of incredible, undimmed brilliance of the United States. And I felt there was a certain kind of edge and pathos to that.

• 58:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, where I felt the pathos was in the fact that he is the president, he's got five months to go, he's incredibly popular with that audience. But the truth is, even tonight, though it was largely about him, it was actually much more about Kamala Harris. And when you talk about the story that the strategists want to tell from this convention, the story they want to tell is her story. And what I think Joe Biden did really well, and it's part of his kind of whole generosity, was the way that he talked about her the whole way through. Every time that the crowd started singing, "Thank you, Joe," and he would go, "And thank you, Kamala." You know, he was very, this is a team kind of thing.

• 59:38Rory Stewart?

  And giving her credit for things honestly that she didn't have that much to do with.

• 59:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But so what I felt was that almost in the, in the kind of the love and sympathy that was going towards him, part of the fact is the understanding that actually the power is moving away and it's moving to a different place.

• 59:56Rory Stewart?

  I also think, and maybe you feel this as somebody who's, who is very much part of this, the intense family tribal loyalty of the Democratic Party. I mean, that is a riven party. AOC, very much on the progressive left, very different views on Gaza to President Biden. And yet, when it counted, all the key bits of the different leadership, all the stars of the party stand up, they sing from the same hymn sheet, they're pushing the same message. Doesn't matter, you know, that they're rebels, doesn't matter that they annoy the party leadership. When the crisis comes, they're all standing up, saying exactly the lines they're supposed to be saying in exactly the right way.

• 1:00:33Alastair Campbell?

  It's probably true that people won't necessarily have watched in the numbers that maybe they would have done a few years ago. But if I think about when I got up this morning, very, very early in the hotel and went down to the gym, and whichever TV station it was, was billing all day, nonstop coverage from the convention. Dan Balts, who I mentioned, who, who works for the Washington Post, was telling me they've got about 80 people here. So this is a huge event. And there'll be very, very few people in America tomorrow who don't know at least some of what's gone on, and who will get the sense that this was very well organized, she was at the center of it, Joe Biden was really bigging her up,

• 1:01:17Alastair Campbell?

  as was Hillary, as was AOC, as they all were. And I think a much clearer attack line that's developing about Trump. And I think it does actually relate to what we were talking about in the first part, is this kind of extreme agenda, which they're identifying as being kind of... They really were identifying Trump, I felt, as kind of so obsessed with himself that he's actually anti-American and anti-American values.

• 1:01:44Rory Stewart?

  We in the kind of left of the Conservative Party always like to describe ourselves as kind of American Democrats because we see them as quite a right-wing party. But actually, on Show Tonight was a reminder of the fact that they do have proper left-wing roots.

• 1:01:59Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:00Rory Stewart?

  It's a big thing, a million workers from the Automobile Union. There was Joe Biden saying, "I'm proud of being the first president on a picket line." The middle class made America and the unions made the middle class, one of his lines.

• 1:02:12Alastair Campbell?

  Not Wall Street?

• 1:02:13Rory Stewart?

  Not Wall Street. An enormous amount about building factories.

• 1:02:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Rory Stewart?

  "We're going to put factories back in all those towns." You know, "We used to export jobs and import goods. Now we're going to import jobs and export goods." Quite a lot about putting up taxes. But above all, I suppose, I think maybe this is my thing to finish with a question to you. We heard a lot today from different people, including pollsters, that the aim of Kamala Harris in this election needs to be to reassure the independent voters that she's got the young people, she's got the progressive left on side. Can she win over the sort of centre-ground swing voters and reassure them that she's not too progressive and she's a sort of solid, stable pair of hands? Do you think today did enough to do that or she's got more work to do?

• 1:03:03Alastair Campbell?

  I think this is, today is day one of a four-day presentation to the American public of a new candidate. Everybody was talking about her. She was mentioned in every single speech. So I think what today was about was thanking Joe Biden and giving him the stage for as long as he wanted it. And he took an hour to sort of say what he'd done and why he'd done it and then kind of pass on the baton. I think if they, if the next three days go as well as today has done from their perspective, I think they will feel that they've, they've delivered on that.

• 1:03:40Rory Stewart?

  Is there any risk at all that by focusing on unions and things like that, that isn't exactly the language that's going to appeal to the floating more right wing voters?

• 1:03:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, interesting, when you mentioned the kind of, so the guy, just to tell, I don't suppose this will have made much in the European media. So the guy from the Car Workers Union at one point took his jacket off and had this red T-shirt, which said Donald Trump is a scab. And then Joe Biden himself, and as he said it, I was saying to myself, I can't imagine Tony Blair having said that. He said, you know, I'm proud to be called the most pro-union president we've ever had. So I think that is partly about signalling to the party, we're still the Democratic Party and this is stuff we believe.

• 1:04:24Rory Stewart?

  And partly blue collar voters in Pennsylvania.

• 1:04:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And then I think, but I suspect when we get to Kamala Harris, I think she'll be tougher than he was in relation to Israel, even though he did the whole end the war, hostages back, etc. But, you know, I think she'll be slightly calibrate that. But I think that what she has to do is to inspire, motivate, because they're talking about campaign here, but also reassure. The inspiration and the motivation bit is vital for what's happening in that hall and vital for people who are pressing that number to give donations, which will be all over their laptops and phones and what have you. And the reassurance is

• 1:05:10Alastair Campbell?

  the bit that says, somebody who's not following this stuff as closely as we are, but sees it on the telly through the week and thinks, yeah, I can see her, I can see her doing it. Yeah, I think she'd be okay. Yeah, she seems all right. I mean, I think that's, and getting that balance right is quite tricky. But thus far, in all of her communications since she got the nomination, I think that's what she's been doing.

• 1:05:32Rory Stewart?

  And now I'm leaving you and you're going to have a very exciting time because the amazing thing about American politics is there are just so many stars. So we saw AOC and Biden today. You're going to see Michelle Obama.

• 1:05:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43Rory Stewart?

  You're going to see Barack Obama.

• 1:05:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:45Rory Stewart?

  You're going to see Kamala Harris herself. You're going to see.

• 1:05:48Alastair Campbell?

  Tim Walz.

• 1:05:49Rory Stewart?

  Tim Walz.

• 1:05:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:50Rory Stewart?

  And, and maybe some celebrity singer, although you're a bit doubtful about that.

• 1:05:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, James Taylor was on the schedule for today, but he never appeared. I just wondered if they ran out of time. But there was, there is this buzz going around about Beyonce and whether that happens or not. Do you know what? I've got, here's a left field one because you have the Steve Kerr, the basketball guy.

• 1:06:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:09Alastair Campbell?

  I wonder if Simone Biles might come out and just do a little kind of, you know, traipsing across the stage.

• 1:06:15Rory Stewart?

  Am I right in saying that there wasn't actually that much music? In, in, famously in Tory party conferences, they're always coming on with, you know, ridiculous tunes. They weren't really going with the music, were they?

• 1:06:25Alastair Campbell?

  And yet there was a band, there was a huge band just off to the right of the stage.

• 1:06:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Alastair Campbell?

  No, there was a bit of music, but not much. No, anyway, listen, it was pretty well choreographed.

• 1:06:35Rory Stewart?

  I thought fantastic. I'm really pleased I was here with you. And again, enormous respect for keeping going at what is now nearly eight in the morning, your time.

• 1:06:44Alastair Campbell?

  We've done, we should also tell listeners, we've done several interviews today, not with the big names, but with different aspects of the convention, which we'll be putting out over the next, next few days.

• 1:06:54Rory Stewart?

  Yes, people, I hope people can listen and enjoy it. It's unleading. So we've got, we've got a veteran Congresswoman, we've got a young elector who's the whip for Kamala Harris from Connecticut. We've got an amazing attack dog, an ancient attack dog who's been produced from California. And we've got a pollster, a loyal Democratic pollster. And I think those four voices probably give a better idea of the real substance of the convention than anything you'll pick up anywhere else.

• 1:07:19Alastair Campbell?

  And if I bump into any Tim Walz tomorrow or Barack Obama, and I'll say, look, normally I do these interviews with Rory Stewart, but he's.

• 1:07:26Rory Stewart?

  I'm just, I just.

• 1:07:27Alastair Campbell?

  He's buggered off.

• 1:07:28Rory Stewart?

  I buggered off. You do your own. Thank you, Alison.

• 1:07:30Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 1:07:30Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 1:07:36Speaker 08

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