370. Starmer’s Silver Bullet and Trump’s War on the Poor

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• 0:04Rory Stewart?

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• 2:21Alastair Campbell?

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• 2:27Rory Stewart?

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• 2:43Speaker 02

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• 3:21Rory Stewart?

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

• 3:24Alastair Campbell?

  And with me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, we are going to talk about Donald Trump, but we're going to do it in the second half. I think it's about time we had a bit of a deep dive on the UK, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and how it's doing. So how do you feel about that? A bit of Britain and then a bit of America and?

• 3:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I think it's a really good way of framing probably the most central question in our politics, because in a way, these two ancient English speaking allies are on very, very, very different paths. If you wanted to describe the crisis in modern democracies, you'd basically put, I think, Starmer against Trump. And they represent very, very different approaches. And one of them, I think, if you were going to criticize Keir Starmer, and we'll get into this a bit, is whether it's not a little bit too much status quo. Business as usual, and I think you're going to tell us a little bit how he tried to address that challenge in a cabinet meeting. And on the other hand, we're going to get on to Donald Trump in the second half, which is the radical opposite, incredibly

• 4:21Rory Stewart?

  authoritarian, boy, is it not status quo, trying to upend the United States and the world order. Let's start with with the British model and the way that Keir Starmer is approaching politics. And tell us a little bit about what's been happening in the last couple of weeks.

• 4:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you had this six hour cabinet meeting, and I don't think we ever had a six hour cabinet meeting in my time with Tony Gordon Brown. There might have been the odd strategic away day, but that would tend to be a very small group for which many cabinet ministers played that they were excluded. But they had a two hour political cabinet and the rest, I guess, trying to sort of really get the government focused on with clarity on this forward agenda. And interestingly, we've said quite often on the podcast that the battle, this is what you're alluding to really with Trump, the battle in most elections around the world now, and in most political systems is between major disruptor and those who are disrupted. And the line that was briefed out from Keir

• 5:19Alastair Campbell?

  Starmer's cabinet meeting was that he's saying, we have to be the disruptor. And of course, if part of your shtick, rightly in my view, is that you believe in the rule of law and you believe in institutions, then it's maybe harder. If you come along like Trump and you say, why should I care about the rule of law because I'm a convicted felon anyway? Why should I care about institutions? Because all those institutions have ever tried to do is do me down. I'm going to blow them up. And I'm going to have alongside me this this sort of megaphone of Elon Musk, who's going to break even more rules than I do. So that that frames it in a really difficult way for Labour. Added to which, I think there is an issue around, you said this last week about, is there anything that Labour

• 6:03Alastair Campbell?

  can learn from the way that Trump has been communicating this kind of, you know, never ending sense of change and energy and what have you. And the executive order thing is gives him that in. Our system is very, very different. But I think part of the discussion was, how can we connect better with the public, the story that we're trying to tell? About about the country.

• 6:25Rory Stewart?

  Alistair, if you put at the centre of this, the fact that Labour's number one mission has always been growth. Labour was elected saying that growth was going to be the answer. And of course, this is something that Conservatives absolutely agree on, and Labour agrees on, very unifying. Conservatives because they believe in the private sector, Labour because they believe in the private sector, but also because they have picked up on the fact that if you have more growth in the economy, the government can increase its spending on public services without having to increase taxes. However, the crisis that Labour is currently encountering is that the growth forecast in the UK has just been halved by the Bank of England, down from 1.5 to 0.75%, which I think is one of the things that triggered this six-hour cabinet meeting. And you've put your finger on something that

• 7:10Rory Stewart?

  runs through this whole question of the growth strategy, which is, how can you get growth in Britain unless you do something pretty radical? Because, of course, the Conservative government that I was part of, which didn't do six-hour cabinet meetings, as you say, was also believed it was generating growth. And of course, anyone who's worked in government can provide a very, very sophisticated, thoughtful answer on why we're not getting growth. And a lot of that is about institutional constraints. It's about planning, it's about judicial reviews, it's about regulations, it's about rights, it's about taxation. In other words, it's not really about technocratic economics, it's about politics.

• 7:48Alastair Campbell?

  The sense I've had of talking to a few people who were at and involved in this meeting is that they recognise that there is a kind of issues to the public mood. And you and I have seen this very, very clearly last week. You and I did an event with about 300 business people last when we came back from Syria. And I was giving them one of my my beloved show of hands situations. And I gave them three choices. The Labour government is performing as I expected, the Labour government is performing better than I expected, the Labour government is performing worse than I expected, and Interestingly, I don't think anybody said better. There was a fairly sizable majority for worse than expected.

• 8:31Alastair Campbell?

  And for those who said as expected, they said it was because they had low expectations. And there was just a kind of very down mood and you get that around the country. I think that's what Labour probably were talking quite a lot about in the political cabinet. Because, you know, they've got Welsh elections coming up, Scottish elections down the track, local elections. And I think it goes back to this point that you and I've been making at some point is what is the story that they're trying to tell the country about itself? So the big, one of the big outtakes from the cabinet meeting was that reform has to be faster, has to go further. That's fine, but what kind of reform are we talking about? What are the key planks of it?

• 9:11Alastair Campbell?

  And you had an example in the last few days of if you don't have an overall coherent story, sometimes you can sense a clash of the different strategies. So yesterday, we're recording this on Tuesday. Yesterday, the big news was the, the bill that they're putting through to, you know, strengthen border security, get rid of the Rwanda plan, which I think everybody apart from Chris Philp and Cammy Badenoch seemed to accept was a total waste of time and a total waste of money. But they were singing very loudly, they were shouting very loudly about the increased figures of returns. They released these pictures of people, illegal immigrants or people who were being convicted of crimes, being put on a plane, sent home. So that's sort of saying, we are tough on immigration, which as you keep saying,

• 9:55Alastair Campbell?

  there is a demand for that right across Europe. And so you can say, well, yes, I get that. But then you sort of say, well, how does that relate to, if growth is the, the one, number one mission, the number one message, how does that relate to that? Whereas the bigger argument about immigration and how it fits within the economy. And I think that the problem in a sense with growth is that you don't feel the values within it. And I think that's where Labour maybe need to do the bit of work is what are the values driving everything they're doing?

• 10:24Rory Stewart?

  So traditionally progressive parties, you're completely right, would stick an adjective on the front of growth. They'd talk about green growth or they'd talk about sustainable and inclusive growth.

• 10:33Alastair Campbell?

  Or fair growth.

• 10:34Rory Stewart?

  Fair growth, yeah. These were ways of saying it's not just about growing the economy as quickly as possible. In fact, the traditional critique, I guess, that you guys would have made in the eighties, nineties is that even when the Thatcher and major governments were growing the economy quickly, I mean, so there were some impressive GDP figures, GDP per capita figures, productivity figures, the argument would have been that it wasn't fair, it wasn't sustainable, it wasn't inclusive. A lot of rich people were getting richer and actually median wages were stagnant.

• 11:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Rory Stewart?

  And I guess you'd also probably say that some of that growth, and this continued, this is a criticism of your government too, involved pumping up the City of London, taking a huge amount of risk on the financial sector, which went wrong in 2008. So the story normally from the progressive left has been, well, okay, what we need to do is balance that kind of drive to grow the economy as fast as possible with redistribution, so making sure median wages are looked after, infrastructure investment, so thinking about the medium long term, research and development investment, making sure that Britain is really generating the ideas and turning those ideas into businesses, and looking after the environment. So we've got Sadiq Khan coming out against the third runway in Heathrow, quite understandably,

• 11:44Rory Stewart?

  saying air quality is terrible in London, and if we build this thing, air quality is going to get much worse. So now we've got a government that's sounding in its rhetoric quite sort of, maybe neoliberal is a horrible jargon phrase, but the impression one gets is that Rachel Reeves wants to grow the economy as quickly as possible and that's the priority and that that's more important than what the environmental impacts of building a lot of runways might be, it's more important than the questions of risk. So part of the growth strategy is about getting pension funds basically to take more risk, it's about getting first time buyers to be able to get mortgages with smaller deposits, all of this adds to the risk in the system. And she's also made a bold decision, which I as

• 12:27Rory Stewart?

  A Tory would really support, but I think must trouble some people in Labour. She's lent very hard into the idea of a triangle between London, Oxford and Cambridge. Makes a lot of sense. You're you're investing in success. You're reinforcing where the big elite institutions are and where a lot of the innovation is taking place. But again, many people in Britain would say our economy is far too arranged towards the southeast. Most of the growth is already coming from London, Oxford and Cambridge, and we're just putting more money into reinforcing success rather than levelling up. Over to you.

• 13:00Alastair Campbell?

  You mentioned Heathrow and you and I disagreed agreeably last week and I said I was broadly in favour because I think we have massive capacity issues. And I believe in big infrastructure projects as well. But I said that was subject to somebody being able to explain to me that the sustainable aviation fuel thing was real. And I asked for people to send in there. In fact, we had some amazing engagement this week, Rory, because we asked about Canada. And we had dozens of people sent in there, Canadians, about whether Justin Trudeau was right to sort of see off Trump in the way that he did. Where most Canadians that wrote to us seemed to think that he was. But also in relation to this fuel business. I was sent, I don't know if you saw any of these, but I was sent sort of really detailed scientific papers.

• 13:42Alastair Campbell?

  And again, if I'm to sum them all up, the overall picture was, uh, this is not quite as good as it seems. This needs an awful lot of work. But what you said there about Rachel Reeves and the and the kind of planks of the growth strategy that she she set out. I agree with you. I think the Oxford Cambridge thing is one that was absolutely, has been crying out for that for some time. She sort of, I think with the North, she focused very much on this thing about, you know, new Old Trafford and all the building that were going around there, trying to improve transport links. But we've heard about that for so long in in the North of England. So I think that my point, I guess I was saying about values. So when you, and I understand the threat from reform, I get that.

• 14:26Alastair Campbell?

  But I think there's a real danger that we homogenise what we deem to be public opinion. And so at the moment, we should maybe talk a little bit about this book that's making a few waves, this book by Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogre and called Get In, which is about how Labour got into power and the strategy behind that. But one of the things that I think is poisoning this debate at the moment is because Reform and Nigel Farage is so good at sort of manipulating the media and playing them like a fiddle, that we've bought this idea that this red wall is just full of people who all think the same thing and they all don't like immigrants and they all don't like Europe. It's complete nonsense. Some of them do, some of them don't, and that's exactly the same in the south

• 15:07Alastair Campbell?

  of England. But we're playing what government should be doing, particularly a first term government that wants to get a second term, is essentially, particularly with a majority as large as Labour's got now, using that majority to make change that they said they wanted to do. Now, to be fair to them, some of that they're doing. They are doing the workers' rights, they are doing the Miliband green agenda, there's lots that they're doing, and the King's Speech is taking some of that through as we speak. But in terms of that sort of what country we're trying to build, I feel too often the messages clash with each other, the policies clash with each other. If you then have a kind of silo-driven government, so I can point to individual ministers and say, yeah, doing a good job,

• 15:49Alastair Campbell?

  I like what they said about this, I like what they said about that. But joining the dots up to create the big picture, that's what I still feel is not quite there.

• 15:57Rory Stewart?

  I think many, many people in Britain feel not only that the Tories failed, but that Labour is likely to fail because we have such a bureaucratic, sclerotic system. So let's just take one example. One of the reasons why this stuff around a third runway at Heathrow is meaningless for growth is that even in the best case scenario, there will be at least 18 months of a planning system and then at least three years of judicial review, and then at least five to seven years building this thing in the best case scenario. And we've talked about how much we both agree, we disagree on the runway, but we both agree on the Oxford Cambridge stuff, but I think the projection is that the target is to build

• 16:39Rory Stewart?

  150,000 houses around Cambridge by 2050. That's 25 years' time, by which time I will be well beyond retirement.

• 16:47Alastair Campbell?

  I'll be almost 100.

• 16:52Alastair Campbell?

  An age which I should say my amazing mother-in-law Audrey has reached last week, which is pretty much, I don't think I'm going to reach a hundred, but I will almost be a hundred when all those houses are built, Rory.

• 17:02Rory Stewart?

  And there was a very moving thing for listeners, which is that Alastair, who is not a great monarchist, was really moved by the card which, signed by the king and queen, that comes when you're a hundred.

• 17:12Alastair Campbell?

  I was moved by the response of others.

• 17:14Rory Stewart?

  Right. How much, well, how much it meant to the hundred-year-old, which I suppose matters more than what it meant to you.

• 17:19Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 17:20Rory Stewart?

  So how would you fix this? Well, I think if you really said, Britain is in crisis, we really need to turn growth around, and we believe the way to do this is infrastructure investment, then why don't you say, okay, I'm sorry, in the case of the third runway at Heathrow, we're going to pass a law to drive this thing through. We're going to suspend judicial reviews. We're going to, I'm just, I'm being provocative here, right? We're going to suspend the judicial reviews, we're going to suspend the planning process. The government is going to use its majority in Parliament to say, this is a national priority, and we're going to get this thing built by the time of the next election.

• 17:59Alastair Campbell?

  Cool.

• 18:00Rory Stewart?

  Now, that is what FDR did, and the reason I'm raising it is he's one of the great progressive heroes of all time. So Franklin Delano Roosevelt comes in after the Great Depression, and his first hundred days, he launches these ideas. And these ideas are sailing pretty close to the wind. He was actually challenged by the Supreme Court, who blocked some of the stuff he was trying to do, because it was authoritarian, and it was pretty close to illegal. And because he's FDR, he balanced. He accepted some of that, he changed some of the positions of the judges, and he navigated his way through.

• 18:30Alastair Campbell?

  He also got four terms.

• 18:31Rory Stewart?

  And he got four terms. But in order to do that, I think there are two things that are worth bearing in mind. Number one, they need a mandate. So it would have been really democratically, what ought to have happened, is Labour should have gone into the election, saying, if we are elected, we're going to do these very, very radical things, and we want a mandate from the public to be able to do that. No.

• 18:52Alastair Campbell?

  They did say in the election that they were going to shake up the planning of laws, and they saw them as an obstruction to growth. You're suggesting going even further, which is not impossible. It's not impossible.

• 18:59Rory Stewart?

  It's not impossible, and if you don't... Go any further, you know, we're in this horrible world where, you know, you and I will be here in five years' time saying, well, you know, disappointing growth. But unfortunately, you know, the truth is this is how the judicial process works. This is how environmental regulations work. This is our carbon targets. This is our net zero targets. This is workers' rights. This is the problem with taxation. And basically, we'll just be making a lot of excuses for why Britain is neither one thing nor the other. And the real risk that Starmer faces is it's not going to be growth like East Asian state led. It's not going to be growth like Germany and its heyday of getting behind industrial strategy. It's not going to be Thatcherite style deregulation, low tax growth.

• 19:41Rory Stewart?

  It's going to be some funny, risk averse treasury hybrid where we keep sort of bumping along and nothing changes very much.

• 19:50Alastair Campbell?

  The one European country that seems to be growing quite well at the moment is Spain, which is above three percent. And they seem to be putting it mainly down to tourism. And there may be other stuff going on, but there's a left of centre government. They've got a left of centre government like Labour. And for some reason, they have come out of COVID and the economy is growing better. But Roy, let me just throw something at you. I'd really like your response to this. I'm going to quote you George Osborne.

• 20:13Alastair Campbell?

  I want to ask you, I'm not sure where he said this. It was John Rental who who posted this on social media. There's such an easy trap here for the Labour government to set with the Conservatives. It has the immediate economic benefit of doing something that's going to help your GDP in the next few years. Do some kind of trade deal with the EU of the kind that's talked about, for example, making it easier to do agricultural checks. So we're not spending billions of pounds at the border doing that. You're basically digging a pit. You're putting the spikes in and you're inviting Kemi Badenoch to walk into the pit. Because once the deal is done, every new business will start to adjust to the new trading relationship, the new customs arrangements, which will be an improvement on the ones that exist today. Then you get to the general election and the Conservatives will say, this is outrageous.

• 20:57Alastair Campbell?

  They betrayed Brexit, you know, they've conceded some power to the European Court of Justice. They'll try and rerun the Brexit campaign from 2016, which will be ancient history. And every business will go, we're not going back to that. We're absolutely not going back into the Brexit chaos. And the Labour Party will win over the business community in that single manoeuvre. And the Tories will be stranded on a kind of ideological argument that really only has resonance with a small portion of the population. Right or wrong?

• 21:23Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely right.

• 21:25Alastair Campbell?

  Hundred percent right.

• 21:26Rory Stewart?

  A hundred percent right, and Labour, that's an example of where Labour must be radical. You know, that is a way, the good calculations out there, that that can actually generate serious growth for the UK. Europe remains our largest trading partner, it's right on our door, and everything's changed since 2016. So let's just quickly explain why the Conservatives would be doomed if they tried to run against basically what Osborne's described as the customs union. Why would they be doomed running against it? They'd be doomed running against it because nobody any longer thinks that we've got a friendly America and China that's going to give us nice trade deals. Secondly, we've seen the security threats from Russia and why we need to be closer to Europe. Thirdly, we've seen the economic damage of Brexit. Fourthly, we've seen public opinion change, and public opinion is now much more critical

• 22:10Rory Stewart?

  of the damage that was done by Brexit. Fifthly, we've seen how leaving the European Union involved the Conservatives bringing in almost a million people a year over two years from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, not delivering any of the control. So if Labour went for a customs union, which just to remind people, is exactly what, you know, my shire Tories used to talk about, which is the common market, no freedom of movement, Labour continuing to do the stuff you talked about at the beginning of the podcast, which is showing that they're controlling immigration, they're tough on immigration, customs union, and let's combine it with visas back and forth for young people between Europe

• 22:53Rory Stewart?

  and the UK, and I think you've got a winning arrangement, and as you say, a catastrophic trap for the Tories. So why is Starmer not doing it? What's the problem? If it's obvious to you, me and George Osborne, why is he not doing it?

• 23:05Alastair Campbell?

  I think he's not doing it because he said that he wouldn't do it. And we've said many, many times, we've said to that business audience that Labour took a judgment that they had to rule out tax rises, they took a judgment that they had to rule out customs union, single market return and freedom of movement. But interestingly, best for Britain, who very much kind of anti-Brexit organisation, but they got analysts at some, an organisation called Frontier Economics, to ask them, how much of an impact would a better deal with the EU on the UK economy be, staying within the red lines of the customs union, the single market and no return to freedom of movement? But just get the, get the best possible alignment you could get on goods and services. And the answer was.

• 23:49Alastair Campbell?

  A boost to GDP between 1.7 and 2.2 percent. Now, that brings back half of the hit to GDP by Brexit. And also, it's win-win because the UK stands to gain, they estimate, 32.9 billion. And the EU stands to gain 29.7 billion. And it also helps in the event of Trump going ahead with tariffs. And interestingly, they did a regional analysis of this. And, you know, we can put the report in the newsletter for people to read. And they said that Yorkshire and the Midlands are the two regions that would do best out of the approach that they're putting. Now, forgive me, red wall people, but if I'm not wrong, Yorkshire and the Midlands, we're talking a lot about there about so-called red wall seats.

• 24:33Alastair Campbell?

  And the other thing I think that maybe has been missing, we've seen it on Heathrow, we've seen it on workers' rights, we've seen it on one or two big issues where they say, right, we are making big change here. But actually, this is a change that I think would give them new energy. I think it would get them on the right side of arguments, which at the moment, they just feel like they're totally defensive in relation to. I mean, the idea that even Nigel Farage has stopped talking about the benefits of Brexit. You know, David Frost is about the last man standing, saying that he did a good deal for Boris Johnson. Nobody else does.

• 25:06Rory Stewart?

  And the thing that people would have said a few months ago, even Labour people, when I suggested this, we got a little bit of this in some of our interviews with Labour chairmans for the election, is, yeah, yeah, yeah, but Europe won't accept it. That's changed too.

• 25:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Rory Stewart?

  I think this is a very, very good time to do a deal with Europe because you've got European leaders who are desperate for wins, worried about Trump, worried about Putin, looking to demonstrate that Britain can be integrated more, trying to rebuild the Old West. It's a perfect moment to strike this deal with Europe. So let's hope, I suppose, that they do it and just call it something else. I mean, they may not, you know, for our sake, want to call it a customs union. By all means, not call it customs union, call it, I don't know. A Western Union.

• 25:55Alastair Campbell?

  Or call it, you know, the the UK Economic, European Economic Partnership or Agreement, doesn't matter what you call it in the end. Well, it does, but you know, I don't think we should get too hung up on that. The point is, are you going to try to align more closely? Or are you going to fall into the trap that Farage, et cetera, want you to of saying, you have to choose between America and Europe? It's nonsense. Just on this book, Rory, I've not read it yet, but I've read a lot of the reviews and it strikes me as a bit of a problem, this, that it's almost like Keir Starmer is a bit player in the story of Keir Starmer. And that is not good for Keir Starmer. I was talking to a member of the cabinet yesterday, who said, this is the sort of book you expect to appear 10

• 26:35Alastair Campbell?

  years into a political project, not at the start. And I think too many people are talking to too many journalists about the stuff that really helps journalists, but that doesn't help the government.

• 26:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that's the extraordinary thing. I mean, if if people have a chance to look at this book, it's a remarkable piece of journalism. And it's quite remarkable. We we had this, we interviewed, people haven't heard, our leading interview with Michael Lewis. He's incredibly funny about what it's like being a journalist when you're suddenly granted access that you could never believe that you were ever going to get, you know, so he sits with Sam Bankman-Fried. But somehow, these journalists have got a lot of people talking. And the picture they've portrayed, if I'm right, is that Morgan McSweeney, who's effectively the Chief of Staff, is portrayed as the kind of genius behind the whole thing. And Starmer is portrayed as somebody put in the driver's seat.

• 27:23Alastair Campbell?

  Of a driverless train.

• 27:24Rory Stewart?

  The driverless train, yeah. I was rereading your Tom Baldwin book, too, and trying to look for clues there. I was fascinated by that Baldwin book, because he makes a huge amount out of the idea that Starmer is the most working class Labour leader ever, seems to be the story. But actually, his description of Starmer's childhood makes it seem as though Starmer had a life pretty much like about 50% of the British population. He grew up in a commuter belt in Surrey. His parents both went to grammar school. His dad was a tool worker, his mother's a nurse. Their neighbours were pretty middle class people. He went to a grammar school, which later became a private school. And I'm sure it's true that he's more working class than Tony Blair, Michael Foot, et cetera. But that

• 28:08Rory Stewart?

  sort of says more about the Labour Party than it does about Keir Starmer. I mean, it's not that he comes from a particularly Extreme version. I think what we'd say about his childhood is unbelievably normal, isn't it?

• 28:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, possibly. I think it was the, it's more the challenges that he faced in his childhood with a difficult relationship with his dad and his mother being very ill most of the time and him having to kind of look after, you know, the brother who died recently was, was always somebody clearly needed quite a lot of, you know, special care and so forth. I think it was that and this sense that they didn't really have much money. But yeah, I think it probably was for most people living certainly in a place like Surrey around that time, probably as you'd say normal. But I just feel with this, this book, I mean, I was trying to think, we had lots and lots of books written about us while we were in power, but I don't remember ever sort of feeding them. I don't remember, I always felt you were better to be in a position to say, I had nothing to do with it. You know, Morgan McSweeney's got to watch this because he, you know, once you become

• 29:03Alastair Campbell?

  the centre of attention in a way that you can't control, this is kind of what happened to me. But it happened to me in large part because the media decided, I didn't want to be the story. The media kind of decided I should be the story. And that made my job a lot harder to do. But I think it, I, I felt reading, I think it was the FT Review I read and I thought, God, if, and Andrew Rawlsley wrote a piece in the Observer as well. So good. If I was Keir reading this, I'd think, no, this is not good. I've got journalists that I would count as friends. Tom Ball would be one of them, but Tom's no longer kind of, you know, journalism in the conventional sense. But you should never ever imagine when you're doing your job in government and they're doing their job in media, never ever, ever imagine that they, they're your friends. You know, you can be friendly with them, but they're not your friends.

• 29:47Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think that's a good line on which to finish the first half and move on to Trump, USAID, Musk and a very, very different world where, boy, is America approaching the modern world in a very different way to start them.

• 29:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, my dear, I also want to link it to, to Britain because I, I think that what they're doing to USAID is utterly horrific. But it's an opportunity this, I think, for Britain to, to step up because, you know, we've lost a lot of soft power and all of clout in the world because the Richard Johnson got rid of Difit. So let's come back on that.

• 30:18Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Bye bye.

• 30:20Speaker 03

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• 31:50Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart. And Rory, we should point people to Leading wherever they get their podcasts. And I thought this week's was particularly interesting. Ahmed Al Sharra, former Al Qaeda leader, now the president of Syria. And as Gerard Russell, our kind of Islamic expert, as he explained to us, often these interviews are more interesting for what's not said than what is. But I thought it was, I've listened to it a couple of times back now, and I think there's a lot in it. I wanted, can I just have a little correction? I said in the debrief that the Foreign Minister, I said Hassan al-Shabani, who is very close to the President, but I'd said that he'd also been a fighter with him in Iraq and that they'd crossed into Syria together.

• 32:35Alastair Campbell?

  That's not the case. Apparently, he's never, he's never been to Iraq. So apologies to the Foreign Minister, but thank you to him and to his assistant Razan for their helping with the interview, which is, we've already had 600,000 views of the Arabic version of Alone, right?

• 32:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's, it was, so we did it in Damascus. We travelled to Damascus together, saw it at this amazing moment of transition. And again, really pleased that we've managed to put out an Arabic version. And that's really being picked up across the Middle East. There's been a lot of press coverage in the Middle East. Also, encourage people, maybe worth, if you're doing it on YouTube, going forward to the end, where the two of us provide a little bit of an introduction and an explainer and context. It's probably the best, I think, you and I have done on trying to explain Syria and some of the contexts of Syria. So think about it as two things, an interview, but also quite an interesting self-contained episode at the end, if you're looking for a guide to Syria and some of the challenges he faces.

• 33:32Rory Stewart?

  Now, Alastair, we're now moving from Britain, which is struggling with how does it get out of the status quo? Is it just stuck in the mud? Can government do anything? Will it be allowed to do anything by courts and planning regulations and civil service? To the US, where Trump is taking entirely the opposite approach. He is behaving like a profoundly authoritarian, almost a kind of absolute monarch, and he is brushing aside checks and balances. He is firing members of the executive, the security services. He is challenging judges. He's ripping up international treaties. And the reason I think we wanted to talk about this is that there is a tendency of

• 34:18Rory Stewart?

  people who are sympathetic towards Trump to say that we're all suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. So I remember when we did our Gaza thing. Even members of your family were like, whoa, be a bit careful there. You know, you're making him sound more crazy than he really is. The fact is that by going carefully through what he's doing, I hope we can get people to understand just how radical it is that this isn't just talk. And the example of this, which means a lot to me, is what's happened to USAID. So if I've had a career at all, it's largely oriented around foreign countries and development. And I have been a contractor for USAID and the British Equity and I've been a Foreign Office diplomat, but I've also been a DIFID minister and finally the Secretary of State for international development in the UK.

• 35:01Rory Stewart?

  So this stuff, I run a couple of NGOs, so I kind of understand this world quite well. USAID was the largest development organisation in the world. It was spending almost fifty, sixty billion US dollars a year, if you take into account all US spend, and the core spending of USAID was about forty billion. As I think we said before, ninety percent of the assistance for the humanitarian crises in the Horn of Africa last year were coming from the American government. And to put it in context, the UK, which is a big development spender, will be spending about a third of that, about a third of that amount.

• 35:39Alastair Campbell?

  I think America last year spent eight billion dollars in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• 35:43Rory Stewart?

  It will have spent much more though. So what they've done there, and I can get into the weeds of this, but it's to do with whether you're just counting bilateral or you're counting multilateral.

• 35:51Alastair Campbell?

  Multilateral, okay, yeah.

• 35:53Rory Stewart?

  And so they will have also put billions through the World Bank, through the IMF, through UN agencies.

• 35:58Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so it's way more than that, yeah. So the eight billion was the bilateral stuff, yeah.

• 36:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so the money will probably be in Africa, given its importance, well, will probably be approaching fifteen, twenty billion. And they would have had thousands of USAID staff working directly, so these are people directly employed by the US government in Washington or in embassies around the world. And then there will be tens of thousands of additional people employed who are working for contractors, so big development contractors or NGOs. So we've interviewed David Miliband on the show. IRC gets hundreds of millions of dollars a year directly from USAID. So all the programmes he was talking about, when he was talking to us about programmes in Somalia, Sudan, many, many of those will have stopped.

• 36:45Rory Stewart?

  And to put it in context, the announcement was that all USAID money stops on a dime, with a few exceptions, which we can get into. Stopped. Doesn't matter. You have a contract. So, you know, turquoise mountain, which my wife Shishana runs, has a contract, had another million dollars to go. Money just stops. And then they've announced that all the staff are being fired. So lots of my friends who work for USAID or working for contracting organisations now emailing me, they've lost their jobs. And if you look at the Africa bit, they have gone from literally thousands of staff working in Africa, to guess how many staff now will remain to work in Africa?

• 37:23Alastair Campbell?

  Twelve.

• 37:24Rory Stewart?

  Twelve. Exactly. Twelve staff to oversee what was literally over ten billion dollars worth of annual funding in Africa. Twelve people.

• 37:32Alastair Campbell?

  It's hard not to see this as an act of absolute barbarism, cruelty, economic vandalism, social, political vandalism, call it what you want. So in Kenya alone, they reckon forty thousand people currently involved in aid and development will now lose their jobs. The Americans have been funding refugee camps in Kenya, where three quarters of a million people are located from nineteen different countries. Ethiopia, five thousand healthcare professionals losing their jobs overnight. And, you know, I guess the sort of MAGA people will say, oh, well, they can sort themselves out, they should, you know, but this is a relationship that the United States has built up with these countries

• 38:14Alastair Campbell?

  over decades. American aid and development money accounts for fifteen percent of South Sudan's economic output.

• 38:22Rory Stewart?

  But in Jordan, as we said, it's almost forty percent of the security budget.

• 38:27Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 38:27Rory Stewart?

  And key departments of the Jordanian government just stopped.

• 38:31Alastair Campbell?

  Jordan, which is now going to have to take a million refugees, otherwise it loses that money. The thing that I find so grotesque and offensive about Musk, here is the richest man of the world, on a massive ego trip and a massive power kick, taking it out on the poorest people in the world. And what you've got here is the weak being made weaker and the strong being made stronger, which of course is what Trumpism really is all about. And the other thing that's, that's worth saying about this does relate to, to Britain. Twenty years ago this month, Rory, a very important event happened in Trafalgar Square.

• 39:08Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 39:08Alastair Campbell?

  Have a guess.

• 39:10Rory Stewart?

  All right, you've already told me, but tell the listeners.

• 39:13Alastair Campbell?

  So Nelson Mandela stood in Trafalgar Square and launched Make Poverty History twenty years ago this week. There's a reception in London tonight to commemorate the event. And my favourite quote in a brilliant speech was this one, "Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great. You can be that great generation, let that greatness blossom." All the people that you were talking about, Rory, including yourself, including Shoshana, including anybody who's worked in this area, in the eyes of the man with the biggest Twitter following in the world, Elon Musk, you're basically all part of organised crime. He said you're all criminals.

• 39:52Rory Stewart?

  Can I get into this? So to loop back to this narrative point with Elon Musk. So two things that are interesting. One is that quite a lot of what they're saying about international development is what Boris Johnson's Conservative Party tried to say about DIFID. But the difference is that if Boris Johnson had taken it into its head to cut all UK development spending overnight and sack all the staff, he might have tried, and I'd like to get into you on this, he probably would have tried to place some stories in newspapers, Daily Mail writing some stories about wasted aid, bad development projects. You can always find them, right? If you're spending billions around the world, you can always find them. The classic ones are usually tiny projects which have been approved as a favour to someone in the country.

• 40:37Rory Stewart?

  So the one that dominated a lot of our lives when I was in DIFID, when I was a minister, was, I think, a forty thousand pound project for funding tropical fish research in the Caribbean, which the Daily Mail managed to run the headline, "Funding Nemo."

• 40:54Rory Stewart?

  And usually it's these small projects because the the big projects, these multimillion dollar projects, go through very complicated peer reviews, strategic plans, bidding processes. But often ambassadors or development professionals on the ground may be making smaller decisions with small amounts of money because it's something the president from the country has requested. For some reason, he's obsessed with trying to support his national aquarium or whatever it happens to be. So there's quite a lot of soft power and diplomacy behind these projects.

• 41:25Alastair Campbell?

  Let me jump in there, Roy. President Kennedy, JFK, when they set up USAID, and let's remember the word, the D, the USAID, it doesn't mean US aid, it's the United States Agency for International Development. It's about developing these countries, not just giving them sort of charity. And Kennedy made the point, he actually addressed the first aid workers, and he said to them, you should think of yourselves like soldiers in that you are going to places where you are representing our interests in a way that will prevent us having to send other Americans to take part in wars. And I think that that is an important insight in this. And and I think that what you have with Trump, because he's

• 42:09Alastair Campbell?

  Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, he made this really interesting observation. I saw him in Norway recently, and he says, we're moving from a Helsinki world to a Yalta world. And Helsinki is all about where smaller countries and poorer countries can rely on the bigger ones to kind of have rules and order and systems that will help everybody. And the Yalta world, which Trump wants us to be in, is where he and Putin and Xi Jinping can say, basically, you have this bit of the world, Xi, you have Taiwan, have bits of Ukraine, Vlad, and I'll take Greenland and Panama and Canada and anything else I can get my hands on.

• 42:47Rory Stewart?

  There's a point or so about an incredible change in the way that we think about our obligations towards other people, which I guess is the heart of this J D Vance attempt to say, as a Christian, he really cares mostly about his own family and country and not about other people. Because what the story since the Second World War has been. Is that the poorest countries in Sub-Saharan Africa have largely been stuck while the West has grown incredibly. So time of independence in nineteen fifty seven, GDP per capita in the UK compared to Ghana would be about four times that. The average person in Britain about four times wealthier than the average person in Ghana. Today, the average person would be twenty five

• 43:28Rory Stewart?

  or thirty times wealthier. And the contract was in the UK compared to Ghana. The contract broadly was, in the end, we're quite privileged. In the end, some of the story about how we made our money was to do with the ways in which these other countries were frankly exploited and the ways in which we did a lot of strange things with our companies and funding wars and not really investing in their structures.

• 43:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you can't say this. This is all very, very woke, hysterical. You know, you've got to be basically, we're great. The empire was great. Everything's fantastic.

• 44:02Rory Stewart?

  So the risk is that you end up slightly where we both had a conversation with the Prime Minister of Denmark on Friday. And what worried me about that conversation is that she seems to have entered a world which is basically push out the boat I'm in. Denmark is a lovely little country where we've got a lovely standard of living. We're terrific people and everybody else can go away. We're going to be a little island and we're not really going to care much about the rest of the world and we're not going to take positions on geopolitics and we're not going to challenge Trump.

• 44:34Alastair Campbell?

  You're slightly exaggerating what you're saying.

• 44:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'm exaggerating, but I suppose that in a way what she's caught is the new mood.

• 44:42Rory Stewart?

  Where instead of feeling we're very lucky and the way to both be generous and also ultimately protect ourselves from a lot of poor people starving around the world who might say, excuse me, I'll have a bit of that. How come you get to be so rich and I don't have anything? Is to invest in developing them.

• 44:58Alastair Campbell?

  Just to go back to our earlier conversation, I do wonder whether this much tougher approach in relation to the communication on asylum and borders and immigration with these pictures of people being loaded onto planes to be flown back to wherever it might be, whether that is part of the politics that she was talking about in Denmark. Where they have been very, very tough on asylum and immigration and they have seen off the Danish People's Party. But I agree with you, this sort of sense of nationalism that we look after ourselves. And I worry that Britain, which has been this great global leader, you know, we, the

• 45:40Alastair Campbell?

  Tony Blair government introduced it and created it and the OECD at the time said that the UK ran the most effective aid and development project of any country in the world, when you think of the money that we were putting in and how it was being, being used. And you, you mentioned earlier the thing about soft power. Soft power is real. Soft power means something. You just think about what America is doing to its soft power. If you define soft power as how it is seen by the rest of the world, how it is seen and how that affects its relationships. Trump thinks he can just bully everybody. What they're doing in pulling the plug on USAID, as you say, across Africa, who do you think is going to step in? China.

• 46:23Alastair Campbell?

  So there's a geopolitical element to this that they're just blind to.

• 46:26Rory Stewart?

  So you, you've put your finger on something really important geopolitically because the other thing is not just that it's giving space to China to fill the world order. What it's also doing is giving incredible encouragement to Putin and other authoritarian rulers around the world because what Musk and by extension Trump seem to be saying about USAID, which is that it's a criminal organisation and that NGOs, in other words, charities that take money from governments but don't necessarily agree with the governments are illegitimate. And what you're doing by doing that is you're handing a huge thing to your opponents.

• 47:08Rory Stewart?

  Suddenly you've got Dodic in Republic of Serbia saying, yep, we've always said that USAID is a criminal organisation. You've got the Russians and you've got Aliyev saying, yep, we've always told you that these NGOs are a complete outrage and we should shut down civil society and NGOs because these are organisations that receive funding from the US or funding from our government and criticise our governments. And now we've got the Americans admitting it, right? It's no longer just a conspiracy theory. It's no longer just us saying USAID is a criminal organisation. These guys have come out and admitted it. And then they accelerate. And you can see this, the Georgian dream will accelerate, shutting down civil society and NGOs, Republica Srpska will continue.

• 47:50Rory Stewart?

  And the whole narrative that Trump is driving will be picked up by players around the world and accelerated.

• 47:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it is, it is on so many levels completely mad. You talked about, you know, Johnson and the Mail would have put out these, you know, why are we spending this, why are we spending that? The White House Press Secretary gave a long list of projects, why are we funding this? Why have they turned out lots of them had nothing to do with USAID. As you say, you'll always be able to find stuff, there will always be some corruption here and there, you can find it. But the fact is, for Musk, presumably on Trump's behalf, to stand there and say these 10,000 people, some of whom are working in horrible conditions for not very much money, doing amazing things to help some of the sickest and poorest people in the world. And by the way, I saw somebody in the Foreign Office sent me a while back, an analysis of

• 48:40Alastair Campbell?

  the decline or the demise of DIFID. Part of the analysis was the extent to which projects that we had been funding on, on the health of women and girls, which a bit like USAID now, have just stopped. And systems that have been built up over years have just stopped. And I, I just say, I, I'm very fond of David Lamina, I think he's a very good Foreign Secretary, doing a very good job, but he's now the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth and Development Office. I don't necessarily like the idea of saying development is all about how we link that to growth and to immigration. It's actually got to be, how do we help these poorer countries develop? That's got to be the focus.

• 49:22Rory Stewart?

  I mean, this is a story that we need to be honest about in Britain. What we basically did is we took DIFID, which was a very, very impressive, world-renowned organisation. I mean, some of the most talented people in our country wanted to work for DIFID. I had these incredibly bright, impressive civil servants. And it could be a bit pompous at times, but my goodness, in World Bank meetings or in donor meetings in the Congo, DIFID were often the brightest, best organised people in the room. And the money was protected. So when I was the Secretary of State, I was overseeing a budget of $20 billion a year, to put it in American terms, and it was protected.

• 50:06Rory Stewart?

  The Treasury couldn't touch it. I could literally decide on the stroke of a pen, are we putting 150 million into health in Ethiopia, or 150 million into education in Nigeria? And everything was measured according to whether or not it contributed to decreasing global poverty. We weren't allowed to tie the aid, we weren't allowed to attach it to British businesses, we weren't allowed to try to leverage it in that way.

• 50:29Alastair Campbell?

  We had specifically untied it because if you remember during the Thatcher period, it was very much tied to big economic projects.

• 50:37Rory Stewart?

  And there'd been a great scandal called the Pergaud Dam, a sort of corruption scandal. So Johnson came along and a bit like Musk and to some extent Marco Rubio, said, no, no, no, no, we can't have what sounds like a big international NGO. What we're going to do is we're going to bring it under the Foreign Office, we're going to reduce the budget, we're going to tie the aid. So he cut and cut very hard. On the surface, the cut didn't seem that much because it went from 0.7% to 0.5%, but because so much of our money's already pre-committed to things like the World Bank and the IMF, the impact was that I turned up on the ground in Rwanda when I was running an international NGO called GiveDirectly and found that at the moment where I turned up, a few years

• 51:19Rory Stewart?

  ago, the British bilateral aid budget for Rwanda had reduced from about $100 million a year down to something in the region of $5 or $6 million a year. And I was coming in as an international NGO with a budget five times that of the British government. And if you imagine what that means when you're going into meetings with the President of Rwanda or the Cabinet, who are they going to pay more attention to? British government or this international NGO that's coming in with far more resources?

• 51:44Alastair Campbell?

  But Rwanda's managed to get a lot of money out of the British government in recent years, Roy.

• 51:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, they've done it in a very different way, haven't they? They've done it by trying to convince the British government to give them money for hosting asylum seekers. So Boris Johnson did this, and then we interviewed Keir Somer.

• 51:57Alastair Campbell?

  This was when Labour was still in opposition.

• 51:59Rory Stewart?

  Labour was in opposition, and one of the things that really cheered up many, many people is that he said that he would restore the 0.7% and restore DIFID. And both parties are committed to doing it when fiscal conditions allow.

• 52:14Rory Stewart?

  And they've never done it. When fiscal conditions allow, the Tories chose to do tax cuts. And when fiscal conditions allow, Labour chooses to put up, you know, salaries for train drivers. But nobody's suggesting putting more money into international development. Now, this is a huge opportunity, and this is what I'm going to hand over to you on. Because this is the moment where Britain should say, okay, America's leaving. Britain is stepping up to point seven percent. We're going to work with Europe on this. The West is going to be an international development player, and we're not going to hand the whole game to China. Don.

• 52:46Alastair Campbell?

  And it's another area where rather than sort of, you know, moving away from arguments where the Daily Mail, Nigel Farage, Etal say, you know, why are we giving money to these countries? And we've got so many problems of our own, which is such an easy simplistic populist argument to make. You make an argument about why it is a good thing to help poorer countries become richer, sicker people become healthier, et cetera. Tony Blair did an interview a while back, I think it was with, I think it was with Amol Rajan. I remember he said something, Tony's very good at sort of, you know, framing arguments. And he said that when we were in power, he felt there were three main planks to our foreign power, if you like. One was our relationship, close relationship with the United States.

• 53:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's kind of, we've still got it, but it's much more fragile maybe than it was because Trump's unpredictable. That was number one. Number two was we're a leader in Europe. Well, you can't say that anymore because of Brexit. And the third thing he said was we have enormous soft power through DIFIT. So two of those three, two and a half of those three are currently undermined. I would say all three of them have to be rebuilt.

• 53:57Rory Stewart?

  Final sort of point before we, we move off this. The bizarre thing about the Republican criticisms USAID is they're describing it as though it was the old DIFIT, as though it was this sort of very high minded technocratic organisation that had nothing to do with US government policy. The reality is actually the problems with USAID were the reverse. USAID was much more like Boris Johnson's Development Agency. It didn't have a secretary of state. It had an administrator who reported to the secretary of state. It was incredibly that most of the problems with USAID were when it went political. Many of the problems that I dealt with via USAID is because Congress had suddenly decided that, you know, they needed to take maize from farmers in Iowa and import it at

• 54:41Rory Stewart?

  huge cost into South Sudan, or Congress had suddenly decided they couldn't support family planning in Africa because there were Christians who didn't like the idea of family planning. Ambassadors had far more control over USAID locally than any ambassador had over a DIFID programme. So ambassadors, and a lot of the programmes that are being criticised, programmes where an ambassador basically is trying to do a favour to the president's wife by funding some charity that she supports, and those are exactly the things they... And in Afghanistan, of course, USAID was deeply part of the counterinsurgency strategy and did ludicrous programmes with big contractors, you know, 120 million on empowering women, where it turned out that about 57 beneficiaries resulted.

• 55:24Rory Stewart?

  But the reason for those problems was because it was far too political. It didn't have any decent guidance on what its budget was, what its targets were, and it was being pushed around by the White House. What Trump and Musk are doing is making the situation much worse, not better. Although, in fact, actually, what they're doing in practice, it seems at the moment, is just getting rid of the whole thing at all and leaving, as you say, a hole which is gonna end up, for weight and coordination, probably being, removing a quarter of the entire international aid spend of the world overnight.

• 55:58Alastair Campbell?

  But Rory, in other news, they've announced that white South Africans should be entitled to refugee status in the United States.

• 56:08Rory Stewart?

  And Elon Musk is a white South African, isn't he?

• 56:10Alastair Campbell?

  Indeed he is, indeed he is. So this is what I mean about the powerful getting more powerful and the weaker getting weaker, because that in the end is what they're about. And I do think that the world is beginning to catch up a little bit. I was listening to the Ezra Klein Show in New York Times with Kara Swisher, who's a journalist who's been covering Musk for a long, long, long time. And she was basically saying, this guy doesn't care about anything or anyone apart from himself and the things that he thinks make him this Herculean sort of historic figure. We should maybe think about getting on the podcast, it was a very, very interesting analysis of the guy.

• 56:51Alastair Campbell?

  But I would just say, the thing about DIFID, Rory, and this applies to USAID as well, is very rare that you can combine things that are both morally wrong and strategically inept. But I think this does it really, really well.

• 57:06Rory Stewart?

  My final point as we go to an end is I think there's another risk that we haven't lent into enough and that we should discuss in a future podcast. As America gets more authoritarian, it's very tempting to look at Germany and Italy in the 1930s and imagine that what happens is that as Trump ignores judges, tells the executive not to implement what they say, takes over the FBI and the security services, you end up with a very centralised authoritarian government. But the US is not Germany or Italy in the 1920s and 30s. It's a society with huge divisions and an immense amount of distributed power and opposition.

• 57:46Rory Stewart?

  So states, California, money, Wall Street, media and almost half the American population very, very angry. And as Trump begins to take institutions to pieces, those Americans won't put up with it. They'll push back. They'll try to push back institutionally. So you can see they try to push back with judges. But as Trump begins to get rid of those institutional safeguards, uses his majority in Congress, says these are Obama's judges, Musk's saying we're going to impeach the judges, not going to implement the judges' decisions, then the only route for the opposition is going to increasingly become non-institutional, non-constitutional, because Trump is dismantling the institution.

• 58:30Rory Stewart?

  In other words, without going all the way on Trump derangement syndrome, I would say that the biggest threat facing the United States over the next four years is not actually authoritarian control, but a society getting increasingly divided and violent as state governors begin to push back and reject federal rules. And Trump tries to use force to inflict them on people that don't want them. And this question of how minorities resist, I don't want to use the word civil war, but... That is a risk that we're not talking about enough yet because we're imagining that Trump is always going to win.

• 59:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 59:06Rory Stewart?

  Things get more dangerous, in fact, when people oppose.

• 59:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, very interesting. I mean, I, there's a debate going on already amongst constitutional lawyers and experts in the United States as to whether they're already in a constitutional crisis because Trump and Musk and Vance, Vance, who I say is now saying judges are not allowed to control the executive legitimate power, which is basically a way of saying judges aren't allowed to rule against what the government says it's doing based upon the the mandate it got from the people. And he was, this was on the back of a guy called Judge McConnell in Rhode Island, who he's the first to say that the White House has actually defied his order to release billions of dollars in federal grants. And that's the first time in this term that has happened. There are forty lawsuits have been filed so far.

• 59:53Alastair Campbell?

  But the crisis, if there is one, the constitutional crisis, if there is one, is because an elected president is deliberately testing the bounds of all the other parts of the constitution that you mentioned. And then going beyond that and to include media. I mean, some of these settlements the media make are quite mind blowing. This is bowing down to a perceived possibility of authoritarianism. You know, the George Stephanopoulos interview, the one where he is suing, is it CBS? Over their editing of an interview with Kamala Harris, which they're thinking of settling because it might then help them make a deal in another part of their business empire. This is kind of mafia stuff.

• 1:00:35Rory Stewart?

  Oh yeah, and you're effectively just giving billions to Trump. I mean, it's all hundreds of millions to Trump. It's, it's, it's a very, very horrible world. And I, I do think the problem for us is balancing the Trump derangement syndrome, we're being too alarmist. With continuing to remind people that, and we'll return to this tomorrow when we do question time, as we begin to look at Germany, Austria, Kosovo, Serbia. So we begin to look at how this plays out around the world, what this means for the West, what this means for democracy. And what happens in a society with as much distributed power as the US as people begin to push back.

• 1:01:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And finally, Roy, um, on Saturday.

• 1:01:20Alastair Campbell?

  You're going to have a day off. I'm going to team up with Anthony Scaramucci to have a chat about how to deal with Donald Trump with none other than Mark Carney, who is fighting to become the next Prime Minister of Canada. So we'll put out details of that soon, but that's going to be on Saturday, leaving you to watch the football all Saturday afternoon, which I know how you like to spend your time.

• 1:01:40Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. My favorite thing, favorite thing, yeah.

• 1:01:44Alastair Campbell?

  See you tomorrow.

• 1:01:45Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 1:01:51Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

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

• 1:02:07Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:02:15Speaker 05

  I'm not the first nanny.

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