59. Question Time: Biden, barristers and the Black Watch

How do Alastair and Rory maintain a work/life balance? How dangerous are AI deepfakes for politics? Does Rory regret not pursuing a military career? Rory and Alastair answer these questions and many more in this week's Question Time episode. Plus they discuss Biden's popularity, the protests in Iran, barrister strikes and the relevance of think tanks. Blackpool live show tickets: Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producer: 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 Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:48Rory Stewart?

  And how are you today, Alistair?

• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

  I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm fine. How are you?

• 1:52Rory Stewart?

  I've got a bit of a flu-y coldy, I'm afraid. So I hope I'm going to be bright enough for you on the Question Time.

• 2:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I hope you're going to be bright enough for me in Blackpool on Saturday, more to the point.

• 2:03Rory Stewart?

  I'll definitely be bright enough by Blackpool. I'll be better by Blackpool.

• 2:06Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent.

• 2:07Rory Stewart?

  How's the reception to your TV thing going?

• 2:10Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, good. I think Channel 4 were very happy with the with the figures.

• 2:14Rory Stewart?

  Just remind just remind listeners, this is Tuesday nights, Make Me Prime Minister.

• 2:18Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, Rory, you're getting good at this plugging thing. Tuesday night, Channel 4, 9.15, Make Me Prime Minister. We're now on to episode three. I promise you, the next episode, episode three, crisis management is TV gold. If it doesn't win a BAFTA, I'll be very, very, very upset. But no, it's going well. And I think there was there was a wonderful, I tweeted on Tuesday, a picture of an article in The Guardian, which was about how awful Liz Truss was as Prime Minister, and the ad team and the algorithm had somehow conspired to have an advert for the programme inside that piece. I was very, very chuffed about that. I think it's showing the candidates that politics is a lot harder than it looks. But it's also, I think, showing why people like the candidates want to get into politics

• 3:03Alastair Campbell?

  because they don't like the way that politics has been done. So, and I think as we as we go through, we whittle down, eventually get down to the final three. I think people will start to see that there are some, you know, there are some potential very good politicians there.

• 3:16Rory Stewart?

  Good. Okay. Well, here's a question from Jill Logie. She basically asked how a budget's written, and there seems to be a statement from Truss that although she knew about the cut of the 45p rate, they hadn't discussed it with the Cabinet. So, question is, do chances just write the budget and everyone finds out the content when it's announced, everyone else in the Cabinet?

• 3:34Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I wasn't as shocked by her answer on that as others. And that's perhaps because I lived through the Tony Blair, Gordon Brown years. And sometimes we were, we'd be aware of the broad thrust. We wouldn't always have all of the detail. Tony, by and large, you'd expect the Prime Minister to know. But in terms of the Cabinet, not always is the answer. And don't forget, I know Dominic Cummings has been on about this, that Liz Truss, he believes, was the leakiest member of the Johnson Cabinet, that she was sort of, you know, briefing stuff out of Cabinet the whole time. And if that's true, it may be that she thinks that of her colleagues, that if you tell them things, the chances are that they'll brief it out. And of course, with the budget, that can be very, very difficult and very, very sensitive.

• 4:18Rory Stewart?

  Cabinet is very, very weird, isn't it? I was thinking about it because there's usually more than thirty people sitting around that table. So you've got the secretaries of state who run departments, you've got chief whips, and then you've got these ministers who attend cabinet. So Tom Tugendhat, you know, for example, is the junior minister in the Home Office, but he's attending cabinet as the security minister. And one of the questions is how you can actually run anything with that number of people around a table. I mean, when I was in the cabinet with Theresa May, it was very, very wooden. We would all speak one after another, but there wasn't really much opportunity back and forth. And running this NGO that I'm working with at the moment, I can't really imagine running a sort of senior leadership team with more than thirty people and getting sensible discussions out of them.

• 5:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, I remember Tony Blair always used to say that if he felt the first that he knew of a problem that a cabinet minister wanted to raise was at the table of the cabinet, he'd think that our political systems and management systems weren't working. I think the cabinet committee system run well is actually quite an effective way of running a government. But I do, you know, if you look back over the Johnson period, it does appear to have been one of the leakiest cabinets there's ever been. We actually had very little trouble with leaking from within the cabinet meetings themselves.

• 5:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, it's been very weird, hasn't it? Because there's been all these attempts where they get the cabinet secretary to literally look at people's phones and check their WhatsApp messages and threads.

• 5:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Rory Stewart?

  So that started with Gavin Williamson when he was accused of leaking from the National Security Council about Huawei and lost his job, which he's always very much denied. But that was the cabinet secretary at the time seizing his phone and going through it trying to find out who he'd called. And again, you obviously get this with Dominic Cummings talking about Liz Truss, a sort of paranoid attempt to keep secrecy.

• 5:58Alastair Campbell?

  Now, here's a question from somebody who I know, so know of. Celia Richardson, who I think it was the same Celia Richardson, works for the National Trust, an organisation which should be supported in my view. She says, a rival podcast, I think this may be the young upstarts, Mateless and Sopel and Goodall. On newsagents, a rival podcast looked at 55 Tufton Street, supposedly independent think tanks, and is basically saying that we should do the same. Now, maybe we should later do a proper discussion on 55 Tufton Street because I share her obsession with it. Dark Money, nobody quite knows where the money comes from. David W. says, did 55 Tufton Street decide who our Prime Minister should be? Now, what's your experience of

• 6:43Alastair Campbell?

  55 Tufton Street, Rory?

• 6:44Rory Stewart?

  So I've been in and out of 55 Tufton Street. So it's a little, I mean, it's literally a street just on the other side of Westminster Abbey and a lot of think tanks there and of course, very convenient for members from the House of Commons to pop over because it's within the division lobby. So you can go and give a speech and if the division bell rings, you can just about sprint back in time to vote. You've got eight minutes to vote before they close the doors. So you have to be within eight minutes run. And there's a surprising number of think tanks crowded around Parliament Square for that reason. It's not my style. They tend to be on the libertarian right of the party. I don't know whether Taxpayers Alliance is in there.

• 7:21Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. They're all part of it, yeah.

• 7:23Rory Stewart?

  But yeah, one of the things that Priti Patel and Liz Truss very much did was to take as their spads, their special advisers, when they became Secretary of State, they took them from the Taxpayers Alliance.

• 7:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, her economic adviser now is from 55 Tufton Street.

• 7:35Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 7:36Alastair Campbell?

  And one of the biggest critics of the U-turn, the double U-turn on the mini-budget, was Mark Littlewood, who runs the Institute of Economic Affairs, which is also there. And I do think our media treats them like they are kind of independent commentators. They are players. They are political players, part of a very, very, in my view, hard-right agenda. And so, Celia, thank you for the question and good luck with your campaign to stop being undermined by them.

• 8:01Rory Stewart?

  So my understanding is that it's also, you know, we use 55 Tufton Street as a kind of shorthand because although Taxpayers Alliance is still there, I think others, it was also where Vote Leave and Brexit Central were in the past. But I think it's a way of pointing to these things. The most influential Conservative think tank when I was in government was probably something called Policy Exchange, which was run by Michael Gove and then by Nick Bowles, where again, they very much didn't seem to like me very much. It's an odd thing. When I was running for leadership, people came to me in a very concerned way, saying, the head of politics exchange says you're not sound, that he'd be going around saying that to Conservative donors. So it's a weird world, but I don't think they choose the leaders. In the end, the leaders are, as it appears, directly

• 8:45Rory Stewart?

  chosen by that very small number of more elderly, more right wing people who form the members of Conservative Party.

• 8:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I guess what the question means is that they have so influenced the terms of the debate within the Conservative Party that that's what's happened. There's a great question here from Claire Q. I've just realised, she says, that Alastair is still in charge of Labour Commons. Step one, do a political podcast with somebody who appeals to soft Tory voters. Step two, get it to number one. Now, I guess what that's saying, Rory, is that she's thinking, Claire is thinking, that maybe you are helping to influence people to move over to Labour. And I think I'm right in saying that Nick Bowles has come out for Labour, hasn't he?

• 9:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Do you think I'm the sort of 55 Tufton Street of the new Starmer Labour movement?

• 9:32Alastair Campbell?

  I think you may be, you know, playing a useful role in that.

• 9:35Rory Stewart?

  What was it the Soviets used to call it? The useful idiot?

• 9:38Alastair Campbell?

  Useful idiot. I wasn't going to say that. I wasn't going to say that, but you've said it now.

• 9:41Rory Stewart?

  So I'm going to duck that one. Daniel Norris, as a regular listener from China, what would be your main concern and issues on the imminent reelection of Xi Jinping as he seeks to further strengthen his influence in the Middle Kingdom?

• 9:56Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. It's interesting that he's asking that question. Is he suggesting there's some doubt about him continuing? There have been sort of murmurings of him being in more political trouble than we think.

• 10:07Rory Stewart?

  I think he's fine. I mean, I think the regime in the end is in trouble. I mean, I think these Covid lockdowns have been devastating. Bits of the Chinese economic miracle are beginning to come unstuck. The property market famously is in real trouble. Debt and the banking system has always been difficult in China. But unfortunately, I think that that's likely to lead to more extreme behaviour, not less.

• 10:27Alastair Campbell?

  I'm assuming Mr Norris is a Brit living in China. That could be completely wrong. But if he is, from a purely British perspective, my worry is that they don't think we matter as much as we did. And I think that will have an impact on our trade and our power in the world. And my other worry is I think they, despite some of the setbacks that we've been talking about in relation to Putin, I think they think, they, the Chinese, think That they are much stronger than they were when Xi Jinping took over, and I think they are. I think we have to accept that.

• 10:59Rory Stewart?

  It's also, if we think about the fact that during the Brexit referendum, one of the big arguments made by Brexiteers was that by leaving Europe, we would be able to tie ourselves to the much more rapidly growing economies of China. And of course, it's true, you know, 50% of the growth of many of the European firms is in China. 50% of the profits come from China, and the Chinese economy is growing much more quickly than the European economy. So that was a tempting argument if you were looking just at the economics. But of course, geopolitics has changed all that. And we're now in a world in which betting big on Britain's trade relationships with China looks very, very dangerous when the United States and many others are trying to decouple from China, and where actually we probably feel under assault from Russia and Ukraine, that we

• 11:42Rory Stewart?

  need to redevelop deeper relationships with our political allies in Europe. There's been some quite good stuff. Macron has talked about this new European political federation, which Liz Truss has said that she will host a meeting of, which I thought was a good initiative. But of course, we would all hope that that might mean that we could begin to think about inner and outer circles and Britain becoming closer to Europe again.

• 12:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. New mantra. Do you think the global protests about what's going on in Iran will lead to a change in the region? And also, before we go into protests around the world, of which there'd be many, some pretty extraordinary protests in the last 24 hours or so involving schoolchildren inside Iran, which, I mean, these people have got real courage, haven't they?

• 12:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, extraordinary. I mean, you really do not want to be demonstrating in Iran. That is a brutal state.

• 12:25Alastair Campbell?

  So do you think it will lead to, do you think these protests may lead to change? Or do you think it's just going to lead to an even bigger crackdown?

• 12:30Rory Stewart?

  I'm afraid I don't think it's going to lead to dramatic change. I may be wrong. I mean, people have been predicting change in Iran for 40 years, and for 40 years, one's been on the side of assuming that it won't change. Neil Ferguson's just written an article trying to argue, I think in Bloomberg, that Iran, China, Russia, he thinks those regimes are going to go within his lifetime. Um. Possible, possible. You can certainly feel some of the fragility and vulnerability in Russia. And obviously, there is something fundamentally unstable in Iran about a regime where a very large chunk of the population, the educated urban population, is so out of sympathy with the ideology of the government.

• 13:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Adam S. I've been watching The Capture, and after watching Laura Koonsberg's interview with Liz Truss, I fear that it's happened. How robotic. Have you heard about The Capture already?

• 13:16Rory Stewart?

  What's The Capture?

• 13:17Alastair Campbell?

  The Capture is this programme that is essentially about a politician who becomes a victim of deep fake technology. So there are times when, for example, he is watching himself being interviewed live on television, but it's not him. It's like the Abba Avatars I've talked about at the concert. And it is kind of scary, and the technology is kind of moving in that direction. So I suppose there are two points here. One is about just how incredibly robotic Liz Truss's interviews are. Fiona and I have been, we listened to her interview with Nick Robinson, and while we were listening, we were both sitting at the kitchen table, listening to this interview, we were giving her answers before she was, because she does these long pauses, and then we were predicting the phrase that would come into her sentence.

• 14:00Rory Stewart?

  Did you get it right?

• 14:01Alastair Campbell?

  I got about 60%.

• 14:02Rory Stewart?

  What's the phrase that works best if you're trying to beat Liz Truss?

• 14:05Alastair Campbell?

  I've been very clear. I've been, I've been, I've been very clear. Let me be clear, I've been very clear. She's in the round. We have to make decisions looking at things in the round. She says that one a lot. As I said, in the leadership election is quite common. Putin's war in Ukraine is a very, very common one. But you do have a sense of somebody who's been programmed, and that leads to a feeling that she's inauthentic.

• 14:29Rory Stewart?

  But weirdly, not very well programmed. I mean, the amazing thing about some of the recent developments in AI is it's extremely difficult to tell that it's AI.

• 14:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, in The Capture, it's impossible. In The Capture, it's impossible. The guy is watching himself being interviewed, and it's really quite scary.

• 14:42Rory Stewart?

  So one of the things that I saw recently, somebody was showing me some very interesting innovative AI, where they've trained computers to answer examination questions. And it is extraordinary. I mean, within a couple of minutes, a computer can spew out an answer to almost any examination question and produce a pretty impressive, well-structured, well-argued essay with the right evidence. I mean, the computer isn't yet producing things which are dazzlingly brilliant, but definitely, I would have thought the kind of thing that gets you a 2-1 at university can now be done by AI with no problem at all.

• 15:12Alastair Campbell?

  God, well, I wish they'd have those in my days, because that's what I ended up with. Okay, all right, let's have a quick break.

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• 17:20Rory Stewart?

  Now Paragraph Films, I love hearing about foreign countries on the pod. Can you talk about any foreign country where things are going well at the moment? Well, my bet for this is the US. I think we're not focusing on the fact that Biden has been doing much, much better than people predicted, but I'm still very worried about the polls. I think all the things that got the American polling wrong the last three times around are probably going to get the polling wrong again, that something about polling companies is always underestimating the core right wing vote. They did it with Bolsonaro in Brazil, as we discussed in the last pod.

• 17:51Alastair Campbell?

  Did it with Brexit.

• 17:52Rory Stewart?

  Did it with Brexit, did it with Trump.

• 17:53Alastair Campbell?

  Trump.

• 17:54Rory Stewart?

  Did it with Boris Johnson in 2019. Something oddly about the sort of silent, quiet, right wing voter who doesn't quite want to tell the polling company what they're thinking against the very articulate progressive voter who is very noisy, seems to be misleading polls again and again.

• 18:10Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, I think it's hard to talk about America doing well, though. I mean, I agree with you about Biden, he's doing a lot better than people give him credit for, but we're just at yet another kind of terrible hurricane. I think the polarization issue is still there and very, very strong. But yeah, I mean, politically, I think they're doing better than we give them, the world gives them credit for. I think I'm going to, I'm thinking I'm going to give another plug to my friends in Albania.

• 18:32Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes, very good.

• 18:33Alastair Campbell?

  I think that is a country that's, that's doing far better than it's certainly far better than its international reputation. But I guess the premise of the question is, is right, that most places you look at in the world at the moment, the Portuguese government's done reasonably well, I would argue, but they've got problems with populism coming up as well now. Rory, it's a very personal question here, and I'm quite keen, quite keen on the answer. This is from Neil Russell. Why did you not pursue an army career after your Black Watch short commission?

• 19:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, I joined the, I joined the army in 1991 and at that stage it was options for change. It was a very weird moment in the world. Cold War had ended, we were a Type B home defense battalion, which meant that we were stuck in Shropshire doing a lot of drill, but we had four blank rounds per man to last us for a month for our training. We were still looking at pictures of Russian tanks and I believed that we were never going to go to war again. I didn't begin to guess that within four, five years, we'd be into the Balkans, then into Afghanistan, then into Iraq. It actually felt as though I was going to spend 30 years rehearsing for a kind of play that would never get put on and there were older officers in the mess. Black Watch hadn't been to war, perhaps from Ireland, hadn't been to war since the Korean War, which is the early 1950s.

• 19:44Rory Stewart?

  Forty years, so I could just see myself becoming one of these kind of old officers sitting propping up the mess, eating Kit Kats at elevenses and then marching over in our smart kilt with our swagger sticks to check on our sergeants. So it was not a good time to be joining the army and maybe if I'd joined five years later, I would have thought about it in a very different way.

• 20:02Alastair Campbell?

  Do you regret it? Do you regret that choice?

• 20:04Rory Stewart?

  No, because I actually found in the Foreign Office that I got to spend a lot of time with the military. I was based with them in the Balkans, I was based with them again in Iraq. And so I felt I got the best of both worlds, which is that I could do the political world, but I had much more freedom, I could get out of the camps, I was much more senior, much more quickly. I briefly thought of it, when I came back from my walk, I did this long eighteen, twenty-one month walk across Asia where I was walking through five hundred and fifty village houses. I was very fit when I came back and I briefly thought of trying to do SAS selection. But a friend of mine who was in the Special Forces said, Rory, they're not really, even if you pass, they're not really going to use you. You've got too romantic an idea of what you can actually do there.

• 20:48Rory Stewart?

  Here's a question for you, let's just try to get back to you and off me.

• 20:51Alastair Campbell?

  Do you not like talking about yourself, Rory? I'm not going to be your therapist. Do you not like talking about yourself?

• 20:56Rory Stewart?

  Particularly, I said you're horrible talking about the army because a lot of my colleagues, I feel, spend so much time talking about their time in the army and it's kind of embarrassing because you feel like a total fraud, particularly if, like me, you're only in the army for a few months. I mean, the whole thing is a...

• 21:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I get that.

• 21:10Rory Stewart?

  So, a couple of questions, take whichever one you want. Claire Brown was interested in the barrister's strike and the state of the justice system. And David Adger, on a more comical note, here's a question, can Alastair stop complaining when Rory says "you and me"? Rory's using a perfectly valid grammatical system since "me" is not the grammatical subject, the phrase "you and me" is. Does Alastair reply to "who's at the door" with "I"?

• 21:34Alastair Campbell?

  I had a few of these, actually. I'm sticking to my guns, but we don't need to revisit it. But you did have more support than I think you merited, Rory. Let me say that. Along the barristers, I think what we have is a criminal justice system that's in a state of near collapse. You know, if you think about the way that we talked about Suella Braverman's speech at the party conference in the main podcast, the extent to which they now, basically lawyers have joined those people that this government feels the need to attack the whole time. Anybody who takes up a case of an immigrant asylum seeker is a lefty lawyer trying to override the will of government elected by the people.

• 22:15Alastair Campbell?

  I think we should be very, very, very wary of failing to treat the rule of law itself and the institutions on which it depends with a modicum of restraint and respect. So the image that lawyers have is of very well-paid and, you know, important members of our of our community. The reality for an awful lot of lawyers is a pretty crap life, doing lots of crap cases for very little money and a legal budget that's been absolutely hammered by your friend austerity.

• 22:47Rory Stewart?

  That's really shocking. And we should talk more about prisons. We've been called up for not talking more about it. We'll do that in another episode. Peter Gunning, how do you balance both your work life and family life, especially if you and your partner work internationally? How often and for how long are you both at home?

• 23:01Alastair Campbell?

  I don't do as many long trips as I used to. I don't like long, being away from home for long periods of time. But I think we've got the balance a lot better now than I did when I was, when we had children, which is probably getting things the wrong way around.

• 23:20Rory Stewart?

  It's going wrong way around. I mean, I'm very worried about this because I'm doing a job that I really, really love, which is this GiveDirectly job. But it's taking me a lot to Africa, a lot to the United States. And, you know, I've got a seven-year-old and a five-year-old living here in Amman in Jordan. And it's tough because you come back pretty exhausted off a plane. And I feel a bit mad because I pack three days with 14 meetings a day where I'm sort of changing hats and changing subjects every half an hour. I feel like a total sort of comic fraud doing some kind of musical act. And then I stagger back for the weekend.

• 23:52Alastair Campbell?

  And you've got a cold. You've got a cold from flying.

• 23:54Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, got cold from flying. So yeah, that's all pretty weird. Here's a thing, I don't know whether you picked this up, but Svante Pava, who just won the Nobel Prize for sequencing the DNA of Neanderthals, and actually suggests that people with Neanderthal DNA were a little bit more vulnerable to COVID, was one of the discoveries that he did. And he also found a whole new species of human called the Denisovians by looking at their DNA. So it turned out, along with Homo sapiens and Neanderthals-

• 24:24Alastair Campbell?

  Has he asked us a question about whether we have Neanderthal DNA?

• 24:27Rory Stewart?

  His father, you might have picked up on this, Sunni Bergstrom, won the Nobel Prize himself in 1982. And this is the eighth time that a child of a Nobel Laureate has also gone on to win a Nobel Prize.

• 24:39Alastair Campbell?

  Wow.

• 24:39Rory Stewart?

  It's pretty weird, isn't it?

• 24:40Alastair Campbell?

  Who was the first person to win a Nobel Prize in two different disciplines?

• 24:45Rory Stewart?

  Oh, gosh, I don't know.

• 24:46Alastair Campbell?

  I'll give you a clue, it's a woman.

• 24:47Rory Stewart?

  Blimey, I really don't know. What an amazing thing.

• 24:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Marie Curie.

• 24:51Rory Stewart?

  Wow, two disciplines. Wow, that's pretty cool.

• 24:54Alastair Campbell?

  But they're both in the science world. Now, listen, here's two related questions here. Anne Marie Gillespie, Rory, do you wish that Liz Truss would stop trying to be so interesting? I think that's picking up on the fact that she once told you off for being too interesting. And Lisa Featherstone, this is more about Kia, what's wrong with boring?

• 25:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, definitely when we're dealing with massive ideologues, we all like a bit of boring. I think he's doing something right, isn't he? Because it's reassuring at the moment to have somebody who seems to be steady as you go, professional, thoughtful. But I guess Liz Truss is a bewildering phenomenon. Now, Alice, you tweeted out about a tic that she does when you think she's lying. What's the tic that you picked up?

• 25:36Alastair Campbell?

  It's not just when she's lying, it's when she's getting a question, it's when she lies, definitely when she's saying something that's not true. But also when she gets a question where she doesn't want to answer that question. She swallows and she has quite an active Adam Zapple. So you see her Adam Zapple go up and down very, very quickly. So I really do suggest that somebody gets hold of her and says that people will notice this sort of thing. I'm afraid they do when you're under this level of scrutiny. In fact, on this, there's a great question here from somebody called Nigel Booth. When you were in power, how much did you practise the art of completely ignoring a question and giving an answer about something you wanted to talk about? I've tried this with my girlfriend, but I'm finding it very, very difficult.

• 26:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, people accuse us of doing that on question time, don't they? They think that's basically what we do all the time.

• 26:23Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think we do that much. I don't think we do that much, but it is, I think if you're in the cabinet or the shadow cabinet, you have to do it quite a lot because of collective responsibility. You know, like for example, Reece Mog the other day was asked about Michael Gove and basically threw him under a bus quite happily. If Gove was still in the cabinet and Reece Mog was asked, do you think Michael Gove is a good bloke and doing a good job? Michael Gove is a very good friend of mine and I think he's doing an excellent job. That would have been the answer.

• 26:46Rory Stewart?

  The terrifying thing with Boris Johnson, one of the reasons I couldn't stay in Boris Johnson's cabinet is that the go to question for journalists for months was, do you think Boris Johnson is honest? And all my poor colleagues had to go out and say, it definitely is. Now, here's a final thing from from Abi Ennis, final question from me. What has brought us to this pass where intellectual humility and the acceptance of uncertainty are seen as weak, as distinct from realist? And then she goes on to say, it's as though the high modernist 20th century is longer than we thought. So a sort of idea that we've got into a world where absolute certainty, rigidity, which is what we see from Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, is considered more realistic than expressing uncertainty and humility.

• 27:30Alastair Campbell?

  But I'm not sure about that because I completely get why she's asking that question. One of the reasons why Kwarteng did what he did, why Truss went out and said what she did about it, is because ultimately they had to bow down to the forces of political and economic reality. And they sort of pretended to be humble about it. But actually, if they'd been genuinely humble about it, I think that it found that would have done them a power of good. So I think the public is much more ready for people to be doubtful and to talk about doubt. Yes, they want people who can make decisions, but this constant Expression of total certainty. And I think you've said about me that you think I always

• 28:12Alastair Campbell?

  express myself with total certainty. And I do up to a point, but I'm not scared to sort of go through the process of thinking about things. I thought one of her most extraordinary lines in her interview with Nick Robinson, she said, I'm happy to confirm, I am happy to confirm that we made the right decision. Are you indeed? Why couldn't we get the Office of Budget Responsibility to confirm that? I'm happy to confirm we made the right decision. Well, thank you very much indeed for that.

• 28:38Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think we're coming to the end and we'll see you all, or as many as you as going to come, and hopefully many of you will be there, live in Blackpool, coming this Saturday. There might be a little bit of music, you never know, might be a little bit of music.

• 28:50Alastair Campbell?

  You're not setting me up, are you? You're not setting me up.

• 28:52Rory Stewart?

  I possibly, because there's only one musician in this little pair on this podcast.

• 28:58Rory Stewart?

  All right. Thank you all very much. See you in Blackpool.

• 29:00Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye bye.

• 29:07Speaker 02

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