173. Question Time: Corbyn's expulsion from Labour, Belgium's sex education crisis, and how would Blair fare as PM today?

Was Keir Starmer right to expel Jeremy Corbyn from the Labour party? Why is sex education causing protests in Belgium? How would Tony Blair's Labour cope in 2023? Join Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell as they answer all these questions and more on today's episode of TRIP Question Time. 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. 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:23Speaker 04

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• 2:41Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to another episode of the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:44Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. Here I am, still in, still in New York, and I'm going to begin with a question which I think is very topical. So, friend of the show, doesn't want to be named, says, "What are Alistair and Rory's thoughts on India expelling a senior Canadian diplomat? After Trudeau suggested Delhi may have been involved in the murder of a Sikh separatist leader?" So just to remind people of what happened here, it's a pretty astonishing moment. A prominent Sikh activist in Canada was gunned down by two masked men in the street. And the Canadian government has now said they have credible evidence of the involvement of the Indian government, Narendra Modi's government, in assassinating a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil and have expelled a senior Indian diplomat.

• 3:29Alastair Campbell?

  But look, we're, we're, we're talking, we talked on the main podcast about impunity. We've had situations in, in the UK where the Russians have wiped out people here. We had a situation which was up in Manchester where Chinese diplomats were, diplomats in quotes, were involved in taking action against their own people on British soil. And I think if you go back to some of the discussions we've had in recent weeks about Modi, I think there is a real worry about the extent to which Modi is becoming more and more... How do we put it? Extreme in his positions and often if you become extreme in your positions, you become extreme in your actions. And I don't believe that Trudeau, I mean Trudeau would be absolutely

• 4:11Alastair Campbell?

  well aware of the consequences of him coming out and calling this out. So I suspect when he says credible allegations of a link between the death and the Indian state, I don't think he'd say that lightly. We should point out that India has made clear in their view that what Trudeau is saying is absurd, that it is not true that they wiped out this guy on the streets of Canada.

• 4:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, of course, I mean, this is a very deep issue. And when I was a minister, there was a strong issue about a British citizen who had been effectively kidnapped by the Indian government and was, there were credible allegations around his torture. He was again a Sikh. There are very longstanding issues between the Sikh community and the Indian government with the Indian security agencies very involved. And of course, Indira Gandhi was assassinated in her home in New Delhi by two of her bodyguards who were Sikhs who were protesting against the actions that she'd taken against the Golden Temple in Amritsar. And tensions between Punjab and Delhi are very strong at the moment, partly because a lot of the air pollution in Delhi is blamed on crop burning Punjab, etc. So there are many issues in the background, but I think the most important

• 5:17Rory Stewart?

  issue is that to assassinate in that way, and in particular sort of brutal public out of the back of a van, machine gunning somebody down the streets in a friendly country is a step that I would never have expected the Indian government to take. I mean, that's going into full Russia territory.

• 5:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Just to give people the issue that's at the heart of this, the guy who's been killed is called Nija, he'd been campaigning for something called Calistan, which is the creation of an independent Sikh homeland in the Punjab region. And clearly that is something that Modi doesn't like. Now, we don't know, you and I and none of our listeners have any clue as to who these people were that gunned him down, but I In a way that I probably would be a little bit sceptical of listening to Modi's denials. I do attach a certain amount of credibility to somebody like Trudeau standing up and saying what he said. Now, Karyad, can you talk about the protests in Brussels happening over compulsory sex education?

• 6:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's not just in Brussels, this is happening in several parts of Belgium. Have you been following this one, Rory? No, tell us about it. Essentially, what's happened is that there have been a number of arson attacks on schools that have been teaching sex education. And the Prime Minister, Alexander de Creu, he's actually called in the government experts on extremism after, I think, six schools now have been torched. And this is something called the Evera programme. And this is where children in schools are required to take four hours of sex education, split between aged 11 to 12 and 15 to 16.

• 6:59Alastair Campbell?

  Now, you wouldn't think that was very dramatic or very radical, but it's gone from being voluntary, which it was, to now being compulsory because they feel that they've got issues of sexual health and sexual education that they need to address. And it's led to a number of schools being attacked. It's led to divisions with some Islamic groups who have complained that this is all about the, what they call, hypersexualisation of their children. And, you know, back to our friend, misinformation, online conspiracy theories, all sorts of nonsense has been flooding the internet that what this programme, Evera, is about is actually sort of sexualising children, teaching children aged five to be, you know, sexually active and all this sort of nonsense.

• 7:44Alastair Campbell?

  So the government's out there trying to damp down all these rumours. And in the meantime, they're addressing a number of cases of arson. So it's pretty worrying and the local mayor in one of the areas where this happened has said this is no better and worse than terrorism, it is terrorism.

• 7:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's very striking. I mean, here in the States, I was talking to a group of people involved in the Biden-Trump campaign the last couple of days. And I was making the point that I saw economics as being central, the fact that the 2008 financial crisis, globalisation, had had such a bad impact on the incomes of many people in marginal bits of the US. And they came back with two things. I mean, one is they pointed out that actually incomes now outside London and the South East in the UK are somewhere between Mississippi and Alabama. In other words, we have very extreme versions of the same thing. But also, they said that it's a mistake to see much of what Trump is doing in terms of economics. It's largely culture war stuff.

• 8:40Rory Stewart?

  And of course, it's very much what the Suella Braverman tendency in the Conservative Party leant into and that Boris Johnson was trying to lean into whenever he was sending people out to talk about statues, that there is a sense in which something about the modern political landscape means that you can get a long way in politics, talking about sex education or transgender issues or in the US issues around abortion, rather than focusing on issues like how you regulate AI or sort out the economy.

• 9:05Alastair Campbell?

  Let's bring home Jeremy Corbyn, Anuk H. On Wednesday's podcast, Rory said Jeremy Corbyn has a problem with antisemitism but should not have been dismissed from Labour due to his status and history within the party. Isn't that like arguing that Louise Rubiales has an issue with sexual harassment but shouldn't be dismissed for the same reason? We talked a bit about your interview with Novara Media last week and we talked a bit about it in our trips to Scotland and Bath.

• 9:29Rory Stewart?

  The background first. I gave an interview to Novara Media where I said that I thought it was mad and disgusting that Keir Starmer had effectively, de facto expelled Jeremy Corbyn from Parliament. And I guess I was reflecting on a constitutional point that I care about a great deal. And obviously, maybe I care about it too much because Boris Johnson did the same thing to me and to 20 other MPs who rebelled against his version of a no-deal Brexit. The point is that in the British system, there are two reasons why leaders should not be able to expel MPs. One of them is that in a first-past-the-post system, our parties need to be quite broad coalitions because the Electoral system doesn't deliver diversity in parliament.

• 10:11Rory Stewart?

  But the second more important constitutional reason is that we don't have a proper separation between the legislature and the executive. And the only way in which we can have a functioning parliament is if members of parliament have considerable freedom towards their leaders and are able to exercise it. Otherwise, you end up basically with a kind of elective dictatorship.

• 10:28Alastair Campbell?

  But the parties do have rules.

• 10:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I would say that maybe choosing Jeremy Corbyn as my hill to die on was an eccentric thing to do. But I still hold to the point, which is absolutely there was horrifying antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party. Jeremy Corbyn equivocated around the report that was produced on antisemitism. And I think Keir Starmer is absolutely right to make it clear that he's going to root out antisemitism in the Labour Party. But there is a constitutional point, which is that MPs should be removed through legal processes, through parliamentary committees. But I don't think it's appropriate for them to be removed by their leaders. And one of the reasons for that is that actually what it does

• 11:13Rory Stewart?

  is very quickly play into the Labour left, who feel that this is an alibi, which is being brought together for Starmer to assert his power over the party. And obviously, I was hit very hard on this. I got attacked very hard by members of the Jewish community, who said I was being insensitive to antisemitism. And I was also attacked very hard by the Jeremy Corbyn left, who said that I was giving in to people by saying that there was antisemitism in Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party. So I was being attacked very hard from both sides. And it's a very strange experience on social media to do that.

• 11:42Alastair Campbell?

  If it's any consolation, Rory, I was being attacked for not attacking you enough. And I was also being attacked for attacking you too much. So I think it's just one of those issues that it's very hard to have a rational debate. But there was another question from somebody called Aaron, who just said, you know, you've kind of half addressed this. Has Rory read the EHRC report into the Labour Party and Corbyn's response to it? Corbyn was offered a way back in by apologising or withdrawing, but he simply refused. And I think that is the point. It's not that Keir Starmer was withdrawing the whip, kicking him out of the party because of being Jeremy Corbyn. It was the fact that he would not accept the process that they'd put in place.

• 12:19Rory Stewart?

  I'm afraid we live in a world, we have an unwritten constitution and that means that we have to depend on unwritten rules and conventions. And before Boris Johnson.

• 12:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but the Labour Party has a written constitution. The Labour Party has a rule book.

• 12:31Rory Stewart?

  Aside from the Labour Party's written constitution, leaders before Boris Johnson did not act to de facto expel their MPs. And the reason why it's a de facto expulsion is in a first past the post system, if you're stripped of the party whip and you try to stand again, it's almost impossible to get back into parliament. So we have to be realistic about what's happening here, which is going to be very difficult for Jeremy Corbyn now to remain in parliament. And I do think there's a tendency now, and this was started by Johnson, to say, well, is the leader right or wrong? So his supporters would say, in relation to throwing out me and Ken Clark and Winston Churchill's grandson and five cabinet ministers and the rest. Well, all that matters is that we were on the wrong side on Brexit and Boris had to get stuff done, had to drive through his no deal Brexit.

• 13:13Rory Stewart?

  It's also one of the reasons I'm getting upset at the moment about the fact that Biden is supporting the use of cluster munitions in Russia and Ukraine. When I say I'm completely against cluster munitions, people say, do you want Russia to win? And I'm saying, no, I'm not saying I want Russia to win. I'm saying that we spent a long time bringing together conventions on trying to stop people doing this sort of thing. And sometimes you are able, and it's a difficult thing to say in the modern social media age, you're able simultaneously to say, I profoundly disagree with Jeremy Corbyn, there was antisemitism in Corbyn's Labour Party, but also, and this is something Jonathan Sumption, who's a judge, has said, leaders should not be expelling MPs from their parties in this way. So lots more questions to come. Let's just take a quick break.

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• 14:11Speaker 04

  Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away, as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 14:48Speaker 02

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• 14:54Speaker 05

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• 15:42Rory Stewart?

  Question for you. Rob Wright, we have slipped inexorably from cabinet government, remember when secretaries of state used to make policy announcements, to a presidential style where number 10 and the PM decide and announce everything. But our institutions haven't kept pace. How can we trigger a review slash reset of the constitution?

• 15:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think if we were having a review slash reset of the constitution, which I think we talked about that in Bath, didn't we? I'd like to start with a blank piece of paper. But on that specific point, I guess what the question is about is the reassertion of parliamentary authority as Parliament being the place where ministers set out plans to the country. And, you know, we got criticised a lot for bypassing Parliament. I don't believe that we did. But I think what's changed is the 24/7 media age and now social media on top of it is that the policy development process is very, very hard to keep a lid on it. People, I'm afraid, people talk far too much and they talk far too much about decisions as they're being made as opposed to when the decision is made and therefore it makes

• 16:42Alastair Campbell?

  it very difficult for a policy decision to be made in Parliament. The truth is, we've gone way too far in the wrong direction. So, for example, if you go back to the last budget, I don't think there was anything on the day. Now, people, the chancellors used to resign for the slightest hint of the budget being leaked, but now it's just become sort of par for the course that the budget gets sort of trotted out through the newspapers.

• 17:02Rory Stewart?

  And it totally hollows out the significance of Parliament. I mean, you know, it's more and more difficult to make journalists concentrate on what's happening in Parliament. If nobody's concentrating, the standard of speeches drops, MPs don't bother to attend the chamber. The whole thing feels completely useless and one of the few ways of keeping Parliament central is to make sure that the big announcements are made and challenged in Parliament.

• 17:23Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. And you can do that, by the way, even as all the stuff is going around being dribbled out and leaked out. I think as long as the number 10 machine is basically saying, well, that's not coming from us and you're saying, you know, we'll set this out next Tuesday and people can blather away all they want, but that's when we're going to do it. And I hope that Keir Starmer, if he does become Prime Minister, does reassert that. Who comes up with Starmer's gags? This is from somebody called Mark Eggie. Starmer's inaction man gag was pretty good. This is when he called Sunak inaction man. Will he have come up with that himself or will he have got it from a colleague or aide? Do leaders take these sorts of quips from the public on local visits? What are the best gags can you remember? Were any of them given to you?

• 18:04Rory Stewart?

  Well, give us, give us, I mean, so you, you were talking about one of your favourite speeches, which you selected for Hansard as one of your, one of the 100 best speeches of all time.

• 18:14Alastair Campbell?

  John Smith.

• 18:15Rory Stewart?

  John Smith. So tell us a bit about his gag.

• 18:17Alastair Campbell?

  It wasn't really a gag. I mean, the, the headline of the speech or what became the headline of the speech was John Major, the man with the non-midas touch. And John had done this whole litany of things that had gone wrong and he said, no wonder we live in a country where the Grand National doesn't start and hotels fall into the sea. Because that week, the Grand National hadn't started, there'd been a false start, and they'd had to get all the horses back. And also, a hotel in Scarborough had fallen into the sea, which actually is quite sad for the people whose hotel it was. But John turned it into into a joke and a sort of metaphor. I mean, it's interesting about speech writing. The reason I laughed when I read the question out was because I used to ask comedians for jokes for conference speeches. And Roy Hud, do you remember Roy Hud?

• 18:57Rory Stewart?

  No, don't remember Roy Hud.

• 18:58Alastair Campbell?

  You must remember Roy Hud. Well, Roy Hud used to give us some very, very funny, very funny lines. And some of them were just a bit too near the mark. So we used to go through his jokes. We used some of them. I can't remember what they were. We did use some of them. But the thing about, I don't know if you were like this as a, as a speaker. I mean, Tony Blair is quite a serious guy, but for a party conference speech, he wanted at least three or four really good laughs. And I'm quite good at one liners, and I'm quite good at telling funny stories. But, you know, sometimes you, you do, you go out, you go out to the professionals. Anyway, what happened was that, I can't remember how it got out, but somebody told the press that we were using Roy Hud. And all of a sudden, there was all this talk about, you know, we were a joke and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So you've got to be careful with it. But yeah. And also, the thing about

• 19:42Alastair Campbell?

  getting them from people, the public on local visits, keeping your ears open to what people are saying about other politicians is sometimes worth doing, because you can get very, very good lines from what the public is saying about them.

• 19:53Rory Stewart?

  Finland's former PM, so Unimata Kukunan, what's your view about Finland's former PM, Sanna Marin, leaving the parliament so soon after the elections, contradicting her own assurances that she'll commit to work as an MP and taking a job at Tony Blair Institute? This is something that I think is a bit sad in British politics, and something that I've always admired Theresa May for doing, which is that she's remained in parliament.

• 20:15Alastair Campbell?

  And she's going to stay for the next election.

• 20:16Rory Stewart?

  And kept working as a backbench MP. And I think that's a really good thing. And I was, one of the things I wrote about in, in Politics on the Edge, is that when David Cameron was interviewing me to be an MP. He said if he ever stopped being Prime Minister, he would continue as the MP for Whitney for the rest of his life. And of course, he stepped down almost immediately. Well, what do you think about this tendency of people saying they're going to stay on as MPs and then heading out?

• 20:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I can say in my old boss Tony Blair's defence is that he always said that he was not going to hang around in Parliament. He felt that Prime Ministers hanging around, it made it very difficult for the departing Prime Minister, but also it could make it more difficult for the the Prime Minister who followed. So he felt it was the best thing to do. I think if you say you're going to stay, frankly, it's better that you stay. But you know, the fact, the fact, somebody like Sanna Marion, I think she's still only in her 30s. I think she's 37. So she's a former Prime Minister aged 37. Now, I assume she could go back into Parliament, she could go back into politics. Perhaps she's made a judgement that the things that she's particularly interested in pursuing, she can do it better

• 21:21Alastair Campbell?

  now on a with a more international focus. And I guess working for Tony Blair's Institute will give her access and opportunities. I think she'd probably have had those anyway as a former Prime Minister. I will, at least now that she's in London, Rory, I think she's

• 21:36Rory Stewart?

  Get her on the show.

• 21:37Alastair Campbell?

  Definitely a very interesting prospect for the for leading. So we'll, we'll go down that road. The fact is leaders are becoming leaders of countries much younger than they used to. And I think it means that the idea of people like somebody like her to sort of do a Ted Heath and hang around the Finnish Parliament for the rest of her life, I can see why that would have been pretty unappealing.

• 21:58Rory Stewart?

  But it's also partly, I'm afraid, that politics has become such a brutal and unpleasant business that, you know, somebody like Gladstone, it was a relatively high status, low stress job sometimes. And it was something that you could imagine him stepping down as Prime Minister, remaining on the back benches, giving it a few years, coming back in again as Prime Minister. I was talking to one of President Obama's aides, and he was saying how sad it is to get a sense that President Obama is a bit directionless, has slightly lost faith in the ability to really advocate for the centre ground in politics, that there is a real sense of pessimism and degradation in a lot of these countries. And I think one of the reasons Theresa May So impressive is the way that she just hangs on in there and keeps standing for the kind of

• 22:42Rory Stewart?

  things that she got into politics to do. But I think for many other people, and presumably Santa Maria is one of them, and it's presumably true for the ex prime minister of New Zealand too, that it's just so bizarre and horrible politics at the moment. You're asking a lot for people to to keep slogging away for the rest of their lives.

• 22:58Alastair Campbell?

  But it has, it either has to turn better or worse. And I think that one of the themes of your book and one of the themes of, you know, when we've talked about trust and Johnson, it's hard to imagine how politics is not going to get better in some way. You mentioned the the Tory and Labour candidates that you met in when they came out to see you in Jordan, and I met them as well, at the Ditchy Foundation. And I actually was quite encouraged by the sort of people they were, the sort of qualities. I mean, you know, you're making very quick judgments because you're just having a few small, short chats with people. But I was pleased that that the sort of people that I met, former soldiers, former business people, doctor, different, vet, different sorts of people who still felt, despite knowing all they know about apologies,

• 23:42Alastair Campbell?

  I still want to go in and try and make a difference. And I think eventually, we will hopefully make a turn for the better. Talking of MPs, here's a good question, which you'll maybe have a better answer than I would. Emailing my MP, Tom Billington, I'm emailing to us as I'm at a complete loss and disillusion with this country. For the first time in my life, I've emailed my MP, Tulip Siddique, Labour, and I just wanted to know from you what good this really does. What can I expect? Will it actually help? It's a good question, though, isn't it? Now, he attached the email he sent to Tulip Siddique, which is that he'd waited for nine hours in A and E before he was seen for a broken nose. What do you think? I mean, I regularly say to people, write to your MP. Do you think it does make any difference?

• 24:24Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's very difficult to know. I mean, one of the things is the volume's gone up. So, Willie Whitelaw, who was my predecessor's predecessor in my constituency, received, his secretary said, six letters a week, and he would reply to them all handwritten in the library. I counted in my first year in Parliament, I received 27,000 emails from constituents in a year. That's out of Only about seventy thousand voters.

• 24:48Alastair Campbell?

  And how, how, hold on, how many of those would have been organised lobbies? How many of those would have been, you know, pro-fox hunting or anti-fox hunting or pro-fracking or anti-fracking?

• 24:56Rory Stewart?

  Maybe thirty, forty percent, not as many as you'd think. But, but you're right, there's those, and those are weird because you'll receive three hundred identical emails, which you then have to reply to. I mean, it's important to understand that once the volume gets up, and if you're getting five, six hundred in a week, it's not reasonable to believe that the MPs are actually drafting the replies to every one of those emails. So they, what you end up with is big teams in your private office drafting, and then what I would do is I'd read through the reply and I'd edit it, or I'd add something at the beginning or the end, or I'd reject it if I didn't like it. But the work of the drafting is being done by the people. I mean, the other thing that was odd about it is that, of course, MPs don't have power of that sort. You know, we're not allowed to interfere.

• 25:38Rory Stewart?

  I mean, if you, Chilip Siddique was to ring up the A and E and say, look, my constituents stuck at the back of the line, can you put them up to the front of the line? And she would get a pretty shirty response from the hospital. And the same is true if, you know, if you intervene on an immigration case, the Home Office writes back. It's one of the good things about the British system and says, oi, we're not having political interference in what goes on. MPs don't have budgets, MPs don't have power in their constituencies, the power of an MP is to vote on legislation in Parliament. Now, it is true that when I wrote on behalf of constituents, nevertheless, what it does do is often make civil servants look for a second time at a case. And in perhaps almost half of cases, I was very struck that we were able to get things

• 26:21Rory Stewart?

  done by making the civil servant look a second time at some injustice that had been done to a constituent. That injustice was righted. But it did make me wonder, is this a sensible way of proceeding? Because effectively, the people who are lucky enough to get in to see the MP in the surgery have a fifty fifty chance of having a case turned around. Those that don't get to see the MP and are following the normal process, the normal procedures don't. So I, a lot of questions about whether this is a sensible way to run a country.

• 26:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I, I saw one of the interesting parts of our conversation with the two Andys, Andy Burnham and Andy Street, the mayors of. Manchester, the West Midlands, was when Andy Street was saying that he thought actually it was it was harder to be the mayor with a government of the same party. And I wonder sometimes whether for an MP, is it easier or harder if you're fighting on behalf of a constituent? Because, you know, you might know the minister, but the minister, frankly, isn't going to give, you know, too much attention to an individual constituency complaint, whereas an opposition MP might be able to generate all sorts of bad publicity for the minister if they don't.

• 27:25Rory Stewart?

  And it also depends whether it's a big majority. I mean, one of the problems is if there's a very slim majority, you've lost your majority in Parliament, then MPs can really exercise often very unfair power. Here's a question I liked, and I'm going to have a go at and then give to you. Adam Seraphin, does Rory think that sortition, choosing MPs by random lottery from a pool of volunteers is a viable option for modern democracy? I'm very attracted by sortition because it's the basis, obviously, of juries. That's how juries are selected and citizens' assemblies. And it's how ancient Athens worked. People were selected by by random lottery. I wouldn't necessarily do it even from a pool of volunteers. I'm very interested in what happens if you do it from the whole public. Now, I'm not sure I've fully thought that through, but I do think there's something

• 28:07Rory Stewart?

  really attractive about the idea of a genuinely representative sample of people and being more honest about the fact that, in a way, what MPs are there to do might be to represent the diversity in our society rather than particular forms of expertise. And it will take the power away from the parties, which I'd like.

• 28:24Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe you were singing the praises of the New Zealand PR system, although we did have a few Kiwis hitting back at that. But maybe that is the only way that it would work, is if you had constituency MPs, but you also had a different sort of MP who had a different sort of role, which was not constituency based, but which was almost like a sort of a permanent citizens' assembly or a permanent jury on the Parliament. But I don't think it's as balmy an idea as some people do. When we were in Bath, by the way, on the way to the forum, I went to do a talk in a in a primary school. And one of the children there said to me, asked me if I was in favour of keeping the voting age at 18, or would

• 29:08Alastair Campbell?

  I bring it down? And I said, yeah, I would bring it down. I'd bring it down to 16. And this child in front of me, arms shot straight up and said, why not five? And I said, I said, well, I said, no, you tell me why you think it should be five. And she said, because, well, listen to how we've been talking to you. We think about these things a lot more than grownups do.

• 29:30Alastair Campbell?

  It's quite a good, it was a fantastic, I've got to say, it was a, it was a primary school in Jacob Rees-Mogg territory and the kids, I was there for hours, the kids were just non-stop sort of questioning, but, and they knew a lot about climate change and they were very, very worried about it. And we also had a little, I didn't even say what I thought about Brexit, Rory, maybe some of their parents had told them, but we had a little vote on whether we should go back in the European Union, hundred percent in favour. So very sensible children, I'd say.

• 30:00Rory Stewart?

  So question for you, how would Tony Blair's Labour cope now? Patrick Chapman, if Tony Blair's Labour was coming to power post this Conservative Party, would they be successful in implementing change? They inherited a decent economy in 97, but it won't be the case now.

• 30:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, that's a very, very good question. I think, look, it's, it's true, look, Keir Starmer, if he becomes Prime Minister, he's not coming into a, a very benign economic landscape, but that's why some of the things that you talked about in your answer on the main podcast about, you know, how Labour should project themselves at the next election, about developing an industrial strategy, about having a different sort of commitment to the regions and so forth. It's not all about money in the first stage, is how I'd put it. And I think that's what we did. And don't forget, for the first two years, we did stick to Tory tax spend limits and, and, and then started to signal the changes and then made the changes. So I think you can do a lot. I think, and I, so I think Tony would have come in and, and wanted to take on some of the big challenges that we have now. I think he probably would make a lot more of science and technology and AI, I think

• 30:58Alastair Campbell?

  probably would want to rebuild relations with the European Union. But I was very pleased that even though I'm still raging about Brexit and still don't think Labour have called out the Brexit disaster nearly enough, I did sense this week the first signals of, of Keir Starmer, he did an interview in the Financial Times where he said, you know, when, when it comes to renegotiating the trade and cooperation agreement, we're going to have to get something far better than we've got. So there's an understanding at least that this thing's got to be fixed. My final question, we haven't talked about films for a while. Joe says, what films have really touched you both and what are your favourite films? Of all the films I've seen recently, I think the one that's touched me the most was Kenneth Branagh's Belfast. We're about three quarters of the way through the Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland.

• 31:44Alastair Campbell?

  I do think Northern Ireland lends itself to amazing human drama, whether documentary or a feature film. But I thought Kenneth Branagh's film captured something incredibly touching about what it's like to be a child, growing up surrounded by these hatreds. And I thought it was brilliant.

• 32:03Rory Stewart?

  I think the film that really touched me, which maybe not everybody's seen, is a film called Call Me By Your Name, which is a 2017 love story set in Italy with Timothee Chalamet.

• 32:15Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:16Rory Stewart?

  Really, really beautiful movie, set in, I guess, the early 1980s in all Italy. But it's essentially about a young boy falling in love with a slightly older man. And I think just beautifully paced, beautifully acted. On literature also, I cannot resist saying thank you to you for all your support on the sales of book, because we've made it number one non-fiction hardback, Politics on the Edge, sold 44,592 copies across all editions in the first week. So thank you very much for the support.

• 32:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there you go. Well done. Now, that's a, that's a big hit. That's a big hit. That's, that beats my first week, I think. So what, what are you reading? We know what you've written. What are you reading?

• 32:56Rory Stewart?

  Tom Holland, who does the Rest is History podcast and very kindly did an event with me at the Barbican, has got me on to these Mick Herron spy books.

• 33:04Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:05Rory Stewart?

  Have you tried them?

• 33:06Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely brilliant. I get slagged off for mentioning the Lider because it leads to people turning up. But those of us who are 365 day a year people, there is a sort of camaraderie and there's quite a lot of sort of books sending around. So Martin, Martin, Martin, there are two Martins, but Martin knows which Martin this is. This is what the one we call Martin Highgate Cemetery, because he does guide, he does guide tours of Highgate Cemetery. He got me on to the Mick Herron novels and they are very, very good.

• 33:33Rory Stewart?

  And just quickly for people who've not, not read them, they're, they're set in Slough House and it's kind of, it turns being a spy into living in a sort of grimy sort of version of a disheveled kind of regional, I don't know, social security agency.

• 33:47Alastair Campbell?

  I'm going to give another plug to the book I mentioned yesterday, Le Piege. To do it in the context of, I'm sure there are lots of people in publishing listen to our podcast. Honestly, an English publisher needs to get hold of it. It's a very, very good book. You don't understand Putin and what's happened in Ukraine until you really fully understand what he did with Nord Stream. So I'm reading that and I'm also reading a German novel by a guy, another, another book by a guy called Alex Kapus, who's not German, actually, I think he's Swiss, but he writes in German.

• 34:17Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, thank you, Alex, very much. See you soon.

• 34:20Alastair Campbell?

  Bye bye.

• 34:21Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 34:25Speaker 07

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 34:28Speaker 08

  On October 2nd.

• 34:30Speaker 07

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 34:34Speaker 08

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 34:42Speaker 09

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 34:46Speaker 08

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 34:49Speaker 09

  I'm not the earth, then.

• 34:50Speaker 08

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 and under 15 without parent.

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