107. Question Time: Bernie Sanders vs. Michael Foot, Universal Basic Income, and Boris Johnson's NATO ambitions...

Is there any point in writing to your MP? What are the benefits of UBI? Why do we say 'Mrs' Thatcher, but not 'Mr' Suank? Listen to hear all these questions answered, plus Rory and Alastair's cultural recommendations for the week, their thoughts on the chances of Boris Johnson becoming the next NATO Secretary General, and what to do if you're losing a loved one to conspiracy theories... TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, 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. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 1:40Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:44Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:46Rory Stewart?

  So, Alistair, to start us off, we've got a lovely question from Ellie Scott, who asks, "Share your best memories of Betty Boothroyd." And for listeners who haven't followed, Betty Boothroyd has died this week. So Alistair.

• 1:58Alastair Campbell?

  So Betty, Yorkshire born, Dewsbury, she was a tiller girl famously, a dancer, and became an MP for West Bromwich, and she was the first ever woman Speaker of the House of Commons, first female Speaker of the House of Commons, Labour to her core, but I think hugely respected as a Speaker, and of course became one of the most famous Speakers because it coincided with television cameras being allowed into Parliament. She wasn't the first TV Speaker, but she was the first that was there for quite a long time. And she was a lovely, lovely, lovely woman. If I had, I think if I had one, two memories actually that pop into my head when people said that on the day she died. The first was, I remember

• 2:42Alastair Campbell?

  during the period when I was really under the cosh in Number 10, when the, I felt like, you know, the Tories were after me, the media were after me the whole time, quite a few people on our own side were sort of thinking, oh, isn't it about time we sort of chopped his head off. And I got a phone call from the Speaker's Secretary saying, the Speaker wonders if you'd like to pop in for a cup of tea, which happened periodically. And so I thought, oh God, not Betty as well, it's going to be sort of ganging up on me. And I went there and we sat down and we had a cup of tea and we dunked our digestive biscuits and she could not have been nicer. And she just said, listen, you're getting a lot of grief, you're getting a lot of flak, but I just hope you understand that the reason

• 3:26Alastair Campbell?

  you're getting it is because this lot are scared of you. And they, they know that you're doing a good job for Tony and that's your job and that's what you, what you've got to keep doing. And so little acts like that. And then the other really powerful memory, she got involved in the People's Vote campaign. And I just remember the first time, and obviously a lot of the, the campaign was full of young volunteers and most of them, well, they weren't born when Betty was kind of, you know, on the TV the whole time. And she came along and she did this speech and there were these young people behind her, you can get film of this, there's young people on the stage behind her. And you could see the impact that she was having as she told her story.

• 4:07Alastair Campbell?

  Of why Europe mattered so much to her and she'd been to Germany after the war and she'd made some German friends and the last time I spoke to her, I said this on the main podcast, the last time I spoke to her was when she phoned me up after that Radio 4 debate I did with Jacob Rees-Mogg. And so I can honestly say, I don't know what her actual last words were, but I can say that her last words to me were, I will not stop, I will never give up on the dream that we'll one day be back in the European Union because this is an absolute, total, unmitigated disaster. So I will take that with me as inspiration going forward.

• 4:42Rory Stewart?

  Lovely. Now, time for you to ask me a question.

• 4:44Alastair Campbell?

  Mel Griffiths, how long did it take you to stop laughing when you heard that Boris Johnson is hoping to be appointed NATO Secretary General? And same theme, my dog Bert, do you think Boris Johnson seriously thinks he has a chance to become head of NATO? Isn't it common knowledge that he's taken Russian money, visited bunga bunga parties where they obtained kompromat, and put an ex-KGB son in this House of Lords, and also sat on the Russia report?

• 5:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's staggering, isn't it? He would be the most unsuitable head of NATO imaginable. I mean, that's a job which has generally gone to quite thoughtful, serious people who work collegially, who focus on the details of defence expenditure. It would be a great honour if Britain were to get that job. It's been a long time since, since, actually-

• 5:31Alastair Campbell?

  George Robertson.

• 5:32Rory Stewart?

  George Robertson, yeah, was, and who did a very good job and was a very respected

• 5:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Rory Stewart?

  NATO Secretary General, who'd been a Labour Minister. So Britain's been hoping to get that job back for a very long time. I know there was, there's been talk about Mark Sedwell, he's the ex-Cabinet Secretary, was in the running for it. Some people think Ben Wallace might be in the running for it, but I would have thought Boris Johnson would be, short of making him the abbot of a Trappist monastery, it would be difficult to find a worse job.

• 5:59Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. I also think that at the weekend, because the other thing about NATO is that that position is decided by the heads of government essentially. And I think the most important head of government in relation to NATO is the President of America. And this little mini campaign- Johnson was running, coincided with the revelation in one of the Sunday newspapers that when he was discussing the protocol issues with some of his colleagues and somebody said, well, the Americans, we've got to do this to please the Americans. He said, fuck the Americans. So I'm not sure that will help him either. More serious one, Rory, Nigel McPhee. Which is the better option?

• 6:38Alastair Campbell?

  For Ukraine to employ the might of NATO military hardware to completely push Russia out of all Ukraine and so risk World War Three? Or for Ukraine to cede Crimea and Donbass in return for Russian troop withdrawal from remaining areas and so avert World War Three?

• 6:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's, it's, it's a good question and it's one that people have got to keep asking because obviously the consensus now with the West, US and its allies articulated by Fiona Hill, who I hope people have a chance to listen to on our, our leading podcast.

• 7:09Alastair Campbell?

  She was good, wasn't she?

• 7:11Rory Stewart?

  She, she was very serious, very interesting and worth, worth definitely listening to. And for people who don't know, she's probably the leading Russia expert in around the US government. Um, anyway, the conventional wisdom is no appeasement, no compromise, arm Ukraine to the teeth and fight until Russia withdraws back to its pre 2014 borders, including giving back Crimea. But at the same time, we just can't get into that lazily. There's a lot to be said for it. It's absolutely true that Putin, unless he's contained, is a horrifying authoritarian dictator who wants to get his teeth into the Baltic and expand Russia in every direction. It's also true that if we don't stand up to him in Ukraine,

• 7:52Rory Stewart?

  China and other countries, we're tempted to screw around elsewhere. So I think we're on the right policy, but we've got to keep asking ourselves whether there is a route to peace. And in the end, peace does involve compromise. We're just not ready to get there yet.

• 8:07Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. And one of the, one of the things that Fiona Hill said was that she worried that this becomes like a kind of Iran, Iran, Iraq, just sort of grinds on. But I don't believe that the, the Western democracies will keep supporting it to the extent that they have been, which I think we both agree has been impressive, albeit with some sort of hesitancy. And some sort of slowness in response at times. But ultimately, you're talking about a country here that's being being destroyed. And Russia, we've said this so many times, Putin is not going to give up. He's the only person who actually could call this off. And he's unlikely to. And it feels like a sort of stalemate at the moment. It feels militarily like a stalemate. Now, how long can that go on?

• 8:52Alastair Campbell?

  And how long can people keep saying, well, we have to just keep arming them more and more? That's where I would like to be. But I I fear that there was a big demonstration in in Germany at the weekend. The hard right in America, the sort of Trumpians are becoming very kind of critical of Biden on continuing to sort of put so much into this. So the politics are not going to get easier.

• 9:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's not going to get easier. I think we both agree that the policy at the moment is correct. It was correct to get in behind Ukraine. It was right to challenge Russia. It's right to arm Ukraine. But it's also true that I've noticed over kind of thirty years in and out of foreign policy stuff that the West often gets overly optimistic. I remember in twenty fourteen, everybody predicting that Putin would be crushed by sanctions in six months. I remember people predicting in twenty eleven that Bashar al-Assad could only last six months. I remember, you'll remember, people predicting that, you know, Osama bin Laden would die of kidney failure. I mean, there's a lot of what's called optimism bias in this stuff. And I think Fiona Hill is more likely to be right.

• 9:55Rory Stewart?

  This is going to grind on for a long time and it's going to test our democracies to the limit. Here's a question for you from Evan Shawcross. I was listening to the Question Time episode last week when you got into conspiracy theories as well as dealing with grief. And I was wondering, Alistair, if if either of you have lost someone who were close because they changed their beliefs. Evan Shawcross, I, for example, am attempting to deal with a way in which my father has fallen completely down the conspiracy rabbit hole. We can no longer talk about anything because of his obsession over vaccines, among other things. Have you experienced anything like this at all? What would you advise people to do? Try and change their views? Cut them out?

• 10:35Alastair Campbell?

  God, that's because normally, am I wrong about this? Isn't it normally that it's older people who are worrying about younger people having conspiracy theories? Or have I got that wrong? This is a younger person saying that their elderly parent.

• 10:48Rory Stewart?

  Has got into this stuff. Yeah, yeah.

• 10:50Alastair Campbell?

  I find that quite difficult. I must be honest. I think all you can do is, do you try and persuade them? I don't know if you try and persuade them. I think you try and love them. And if you think they're at the end, towards the end of their life, I think you just try and, I don't know, that's a tough one. That's a tough one.

• 11:05Rory Stewart?

  Very tough one. And I guess, because I think one of the things that seems to happen in my experience, particularly with men as they get older, is that their minds become much more rigid. And I think it is a question of.

• 11:18Alastair Campbell?

  Not us, eh Rory?

• 11:19Rory Stewart?

  Not us, thank goodness. No, not us, thank goodness. But sort of getting people onto another track, working out how you have the techniques to sort of move on. But the problem is for Evan's dad, I guess, this question around his obsession over vaccines will be more important to him than almost anything else. And he'll be reluctant to sort of move on and talk about something else. And he'll sense that his son isn't taking him seriously. So it must be very difficult.

• 11:43Alastair Campbell?

  I think in those circumstances, I would do my level best to try and park it. But that's quite difficult.

• 11:47Rory Stewart?

  Okay, UBI, universal basic income. Andrew Oliver Riley. Be interested to hear your thoughts on universal basic income.

• 11:54Alastair Campbell?

  Broadly in favour, until you actually try to look at the detail of how it will be done.

• 11:59Rory Stewart?

  So in my case, I'm very, very much in favour of cash. Obviously, that's what GiveDirectly, the charity I work with, does in Africa. I'm particularly interested actually in the impact of one-time payments, which can transform people's lives if done at the right level, one-time cash payments. And in Africa, because the levels of poverty, a dollar there is like a kind of hundred, hundred dollars in the United States. And five hundred and fifty dollars can make a transformative difference to someone's life. Obviously, to some extent, our welfare states are based on the assumption that we should be providing cash support to make sure that people can meet their basic needs. The question is whether

• 12:41Rory Stewart?

  we're adequately doing that, and whether the best way to do that is to make it universal as opposed to targeted on the very poorest.

• 12:47Alastair Campbell?

  Ed Miliband's book, Go Big, has a lot on this, which is, is worth a read.

• 12:53Rory Stewart?

  Are you, are you missing him? Do you think he should be the intellectual powerhouse, the new labour movement?

• 12:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he's, he's part of the shadow cabinet, isn't he? He's doing the big green stuff.

• 13:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 13:01Alastair Campbell?

  I think it has grown out of leadership, as it were.

• 13:06Rory Stewart?

  Into his new position. Yeah. Here's a weird question for you. Sam Wiltshire. As a youngish Aussie that moved to the UK in 2010, I don't understand why Margaret Thatcher is constantly referred to as Mrs Thatcher. Whereas all other prime ministers are more often referred to as John Major or just Cameron. How come she has that distinction compared to Britain's other former prime ministers? You know, he says that's true, isn't it? I remember getting in real trouble from my constituency. When I first addressed them, I would refer to her as Thatcher. And they would get very, very, very angry Conservative Association members. They thought it was deeply disrespectful.

• 13:42Alastair Campbell?

  I think, I think there's two things here. The first thing, I tend to call her Mrs Thatcher. Whereas I would not say Mr Wilson or Mr Major.

• 13:50Rory Stewart?

  Or even Mrs May. You don't say Mrs May, do you?

• 13:52Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'd say Theresa May, I think, or I'd say May.

• 13:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Alastair Campbell?

  I think there is a sort of, this is back to the thing, I had one of those terrifying. You know, it's the old thing about, am I the only person who, when I sit on a tube? I'm sitting there on the tube and a woman gets up and I was just conditioned as a child that you stand up for a woman. Okay?

• 14:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Alastair Campbell?

  So now I'm sort of, I'm very reluctant because I think if I stand up, I'm basically saying to them, I think you're older and less fit than I am.

• 14:24Rory Stewart?

  That's good. Yeah, yeah.

• 14:25Alastair Campbell?

  But the same politeness.

• 14:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Alastair Campbell?

  Is, I think, what partly drives us calling her Mrs Thatcher. Don't forget as well, I think Thatcher became. People defined her as Thatcher in a very negative, aggressive, hateful way.

• 14:41Rory Stewart?

  It rhymed, amongst other things, with milk snatcher.

• 14:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Whereas, whereas with Cameron, I don't think when people say Cameron, they're saying Cameron, that awful person. They're just saying Cameron, who was the prime minister, and we call them by their surnames. Whereas Thatcher became quite a kind of, you know, if you said Thatcher, it meant you really hated her.

• 14:59Rory Stewart?

  So this is an Aussie talking about, so you're talking about the tube. My brief anecdote on this, I had a South African friend who was sent over as a young boy in the 1960s to Britain, never been outside South Africa. And his dad had told him that in Britain, you have to go around shaking hands with everyone, introducing yourself. So he got onto the district line and he walked down every seat saying, hello, just like to introduce myself.

• 15:24Alastair Campbell?

  Oh God, yes. Very good, very good. Right, here's one for you, because you've been an MP. Theresa Featherstone, is there anything to be gained writing to your local MP? My MP seems completely disengaged from her constituents. Her replies to letters are generic platitudes and she hasn't held a surgery in 10 years. Theresa, do send us in a question next week to tell us who that MP is, because I think MPs who don't deal with their constituents should be outed and named and shamed. But I often tell people to write to their MPs and I think sometimes it's worth it and sometimes it's not.

• 15:58Rory Stewart?

  Well, so I think, put it in context. So firstly, I'm very surprised that her MP hasn't done a surgery in 10 years. I mean, nowadays, it doesn't matter whether you're Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem, people are generally very, very assiduous constituency MPs. They'll be criticised a little bit by opponents, but in my experience, people do their surgeries very, very regularly and they aim to do on average one a week. And the postbag is insane. I mean, my predecessor's predecessor was Willie Whitelaw, who was Mrs Thatcher's Deputy Prime Minister, because I talked to his secretary when she was doing him in the 1970s. He got something like four letters a week and he would reply to them by hand in the House of Commons library.

• 16:39Alastair Campbell?

  His greatest contribution to political discourse was to say that his job was to go around the country stirring up apathy. So he obviously succeeded if he got four letters a week.

• 16:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, then again, I remember talking to a Labour MP who claimed that his predecessor had said to him on his first day in, let me show you how you deal with the correspondence and the safe Labour seat. And he picked up 200 letters on his desk and put them all in the rubbish bin.

• 17:03Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I don't believe that.

• 17:04Rory Stewart?

  Those days, I'll tell you who the MP is in the next podcast, but the truth is, since then, I think things have changed an enormous amount. I think all MPs really feel that the way they hold on to their seats is by being very hardworking constituency campaigners, getting out there leafleting. But I was receiving 23,000 emails a year from people, a year. And if you think about that... And every single one of them, I would write a personal response to, but I needed a team to help draft those. So I'd read everyone, I'd edit it a little bit, but I needed a whole team to put together hundreds of these replies a week. And one of the problems with the whole system, with the letters and going to see someone in surgery is of course,

• 17:48Rory Stewart?

  the active MP, which most of us are nowadays, really try to champion our constituents. And sometimes it actually works. So sometimes if you write off to complain to, I don't know, the diffid pensions office, you'll write an injustice. Sometimes you will be able to get somebody, you know, let off a parking fine, or you'll be able to get some influence on a planning decision. But the truth is, it's a very odd system because it's very unfair to the people who aren't getting into their constituency MPs. Because in a sense, by getting the constituency MP, you're jumping the process. And I don't know what the truth is there. On the one hand, you want to say, the civil service should be able to deal with citizens regardless of whether or not an MP writes in. But on the other hand, as an MP, an elected MP, I want to feel that my letters are read by

• 18:33Rory Stewart?

  civil servants, I have an influence, that I'm able to change a decision.

• 18:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yep, yep. And what about big letter writing campaigns? Like, you know, when you know it's a campaign, you're getting hundreds of postcards from the same, with the same line. Do you think they have any effect?

• 18:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, they do have an impact because you see them in your postbox and it does drive you to go to the whips and say, oi, oi, oi, I'm getting 500 emails this week about banchers, whatever it is. But we've learnt over time, because these things just started getting going when I began as an MP. Increasingly MPs will just post, if you write a standardised email, they'll just have a standard reply on their website, because they will have got 300 of the identical emails sent to them. So I think the influence of those things are declining a little bit.

• 19:18Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, let's go for a quick break.

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• 21:38Alastair Campbell?

  Right, Gabrielle, I'm getting the sense that Roy and Alistair don't do 50% of the housework and/or childcare. I would guesstimate this is not uncommon, but what is the justification for an unequal division of this work when both partners work? You gonna start off on that? Oh, there isn't, there isn't really one. And I can't, I mean, fifty percent doesn't even get close with me. I think I am probably the least domesticated person that anybody's ever met in terms of uh doing stuff around the house.

• 22:10Rory Stewart?

  Which is kind of weird. How did that happen, Alistair? Because you are basically a progressive lefty, but the only odd thing about you is that you spend less time doing domestic stuff than almost anyone I know. How did that happen?

• 22:21Alastair Campbell?

  I think probably having a mother who uh really looked after me on sort of things. So I I didn't learn to cook.

• 22:31Rory Stewart?

  Were you were you a very worshipped son? Were you the kind of favorite favorite boy?

• 22:36Alastair Campbell?

  I wasn't. No, I wasn't worshipped. In fact, when when I when I was born as the third son, when my mum died, we found all these these letters. She wrote this letter to her sister, my auntie Matty, who died recently and having made a hundred. And she said, and she she started, I say, it was something like, he's very nice, but sadly it's another boy.

• 22:56Rory Stewart?

  Oh, but that was you as a baby. But but as you grew up, presumably you were the adored youngest son, the the last boy in the house.

• 23:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I certainly I didn't. I didn't have to. I never cooked. I never learned to cook. I've cooked one meal in my entire life. I'm I'm not boasting about it. I'm saying it. It was some show. I've never changed a plug. I don't know how to change a tire. I am utterly impractical. I don't know. Honestly, when people say to me, how much money have you got? And I say, I don't know. They think I'm just sort of ridiculous. But it's because I don't actually know how to do online banking and I and Fiona does everything. And I'm not proud of it. I'm not proud of it. But I'm I'm good at what I do. I'm good at what I do. And Fiona's really good at what she does. It's just that she does stuff that I do, work stuff, and she does a lot of other stuff as well.

• 23:42Rory Stewart?

  I think it's it's and and actually, not not to completely sort of let us off the hook, it's actually true that in general, still, men are not doing fifty percent of the work.

• 23:52Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. And what about what about you? What about you? Which I was pretty good with the children. I was pretty good when the children were growing up.

• 23:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, so I'm I'm talking to you at the moment. Shashana's away in the States. I've got the kids alone here. So I've had them alone for three, four days.

• 24:04Alastair Campbell?

  And were you cooked three meals today?

• 24:06Rory Stewart?

  Well, I don't go much. They don't get very good food with me. They get boiled eggs with me. It's kind of a bit rubbish. It's a slightly rubbish situation. But they'll get home off the school bus at half past four and I will be with them from half past four until seven, when I'll read them a story and put them to bed. And then I'll start doing some work at seven. But no, Shoshana does so much more of the heavy lifting than I do. And I think that it is deeply unfair. And I think if you are a working woman, and Shoshana's managing a major international charity with 300 staff, she's dealing with problems in Afghanistan, in Myanmar, and she's worrying about all that stuff that you're talking about. And it's just impossible. I think it's very, very tough being a working mother with young

• 24:50Rory Stewart?

  kids. Callum Swanson, did Tony Blair ever seriously consider remaining in Parliament after stepping down as PM, perhaps even serving in Gordon Brown's cabinet?

• 24:59Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 25:00Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 25:01Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely not. He was absolutely clear about that. He was going to go the day he resigned.

• 25:06Rory Stewart?

  Okay, here's Catherine Adams. What do you think about the four day working week? All my white collar colleagues are agitating for it. I get the benefits. But what about public sector workers, NHS teachers, council services, et cetera? Seems unfair if it's just the corporate sector. We've got a lot of questions about the four day week. Have I missed something? Why is everyone excited about the four day week?

• 25:25Alastair Campbell?

  There was a report a couple of weeks ago. Now, if I get this right, we should put it in the newsletter. But essentially, it said that it was this experiment that was done with some pretty major companies. And there was an interview with one of the guys who ran this big company. And he said that productivity had gone up, the workforce were much happier, the whole thing had been a total success, and they're not going back.

• 25:46Rory Stewart?

  And they pay them the same, is that right? It's crucially no loss of pay. So you get paid the same for four days that you used to be paid for five days. But it doesn't fit with you, Alistair. You work like a seven day week. I mean, the notion of you on a four day week is a bit difficult to get my head around.

• 26:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, no, and I probably, I think there are, I think you're a bit like that, aren't you?

• 26:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think it is difficult at a senior level not to be working most of the time. If you're in a responsible job. The idea that you can ever really turn your phone off or take a weekend off is quite tough, and I definitely don't think you should afford a four day week.

• 26:17Alastair Campbell?

  I think the answer on the the possible clash between private and public sector workers is that you change the culture. What I enjoyed about our chat with Bernie Sanders was is kind of, you know, yeah, this stuff's really, really difficult, but you've got to do some big, bold, difficult stuff. And I think this is a debate that's coming.

• 26:34Rory Stewart?

  Can I just get into that because this is question time. Paul Hilda, what did you make of at Bernie Sanders on his recent visit to the UK?

• 26:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, apart from the fact that he did far too many interviews, but apart from that, I thought he made he made a very positive impression. And, you know, our interview obviously will be the best of all the interviews that he did. I think we can be very, he actually said that himself, didn't he?

• 26:57Rory Stewart?

  He did indeed. And he went straight from us, I noticed, to your old friend Jeremy Corbyn. They had a lovely photograph together and he said how much better the world would have been if Jeremy Corbyn and he had been ruling the world.

• 27:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, I guess that, although I think he's, I mean, just read his book. I don't, I think he's, I see the similarities with Jeremy Corbyn, but there are also an awful lot of differences.

• 27:15Rory Stewart?

  I did, so we've not talked much about Jeremy Corbyn. Have you known him forever? Was he like a big figure in the early 80s?

• 27:21Alastair Campbell?

  He wasn't really, no. He was, he was around and people were aware of him. And he was a very good campaigner and he could get noticed and he made quite telling contributions. But no, I don't think he was, I would say he was a, he would have been seen as a big player on the political landscape back in the day, no.

• 27:37Rory Stewart?

  Just on this, because I never fully understand this, we never get into this much, but there was a battle in the Labour Party, wasn't there, throughout the 80s, which in a sense you, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were part of. And Jeremy Corbyn was on another wing of the party. That was like a, well, he was, presumably Jeremy Corbyn was no great fan of Tony Blair, to put it mildly.

• 27:54Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think he'd personalize it in those ways, but he was no fan of what we were trying to do to the Labour Party. But I think that battle in a way had already been fought. And when Neil Kinnock took on militant and, but certainly Jeremy Corbyn was.

• 28:09Alastair Campbell?

  He was well known within the Labour Party, but I think he had his key issues that he campaigned on, that he fought on. He was very associated with the Irish Republican cause, for example. He was very associated with Israel Palestine, as he is now, and always, I mean, I live not far from his constituency, always, I would say, seen as somebody that, within his constituency, very, very hardworking, popular, et cetera. But no, was he somebody that when we were planning big things and big changes, were we thinking, well, how is Jeremy Corbyn going to react to this? No, he wasn't. So I think I've said to you before that even the day that Ed Miliband resigned, when I was actually in a radio studio with Jeremy Corbyn, talking about the fallout

• 28:52Alastair Campbell?

  from the election that led to Ed's resignation, I honestly think if I'd have said on that day, Jeremy's going to be the next leader of the Labour Party, I'd have been, you know, bundled off in a, in a white van with the men in white coats.

• 29:03Rory Stewart?

  The other, the other person we don't talk about much, but who Bernie Sanders reminded me of a bit, was Michael Foot. I mean, they both had that sense of a kind of highly sort of, quite a sort of professorial, serious, serious manner.

• 29:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think that's a better, I think that's a better comparison, because the other thing I'd say about, about Sanders compared to Jeremy, and, and this definitely comes through in his book, Jeremy is very much a campaigner and I think a politician of protest, whereas Sanders is very much about trying to get stuff done. I'm not saying Jeremy Corbyn doesn't care about what gets done, of course he does. And I'd say the same about Michael Foot. Michael Foot was somebody who had huge experience in government. Michael was also an intellectual, he was a great writer, he was one of the most prolific readers ever. He, again, lived very near to us and we were very friendly with him right to the end. And, and when he died, a few of us were given the opportunity to go around to his house and

• 29:59Alastair Campbell?

  just take whatever books we wanted of Michael's vast, vast library. And the thing you could tell, you know, when you go into somebody's, see their bookshelves, you can tell whether they're really a reader or not. And these were books that were, you talk about Marc Francois with his red stickers on his page, you know, these were books that were properly read. So I think that is, that is maybe a better comparison.

• 30:21Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, I think we're coming towards the end, but have you got a last one that you want to finish on?

• 30:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, talk about is another one about books, Rory. Jam Norman, you often talk about books you've enjoyed. Do you both always plough through a book even if you don't connect with it? Or is there a point where you just put it down and say it's not for you?

• 30:39Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I give up very, very quickly.

• 30:41Alastair Campbell?

  So do I. So do I. What about Shashana? Is this a man, woman thing? Fiona, I have sort of seen Fiona torture herself by reading books that after five pages, she said, this is really crap. And then days later, she's still reading it. And I'm saying, why are you reading a book? She said, because if I start a book, I have to finish it.

• 31:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, no, I'm completely unlike that. I think I've got at the moment, something like 1700 books on my Kindle.

• 31:07Alastair Campbell?

  I've got about 11 by the bed.

• 31:09Rory Stewart?

  My can't, the Kindle saved me. I used to travel with 20 books in my suitcase, because I couldn't trust not to hop between them.

• 31:18Alastair Campbell?

  But how does that, how does that fit with your only ever take hand luggage, which is a rule of life that must be obeyed by everybody?

• 31:25Rory Stewart?

  It's incredibly important rule, and it's become much easier since I moved over on to Kindle. Right, now, we were just going to finish with book and TV recommendations. So Sarah McCabe asked for some Jordan book recommendations, following last week's Israel book recommendations. On that, I would actually suggest, weirdly, that one of the things to look at if you're going to Jordan is books by and about the royal family. So Abi Shlaim's Lion of Jordan, which is about King Hussein, is worth reading. But actually, the book by the current king, King Abdullah, Our Last Best Hope, which focuses on the Middle East peace process. And perhaps to put in a plug for another Jordanian prince, Prince Ghazi, His Thinker's Guide to Islam. So there we are, there are three, three Jordanian recommendations for me.

• 32:07Alastair Campbell?

  The King Hussein book, I do, his funeral was one of the most incredible events I ever went to in my life. And he did, he really, I mean, as you know, I'm not much of a monarchist, but he really did seem to have something very, very special that held people together.

• 32:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's get a recommendation for you. What have you been watching or?

• 32:26Alastair Campbell?

  I'm reading a book called Life in the Balance by Jim Down, who is an intensive care unit doctor. And it's, it's his stories of life in intensive care, including looking after Alexander Levinyenko, including dealing with victims of bombings, but more, that's the kind of dramatic, high-profile stuff. But actually, it is really interesting about. The kind of emotional and sometimes moral dilemmas that doctors have to have to live with and also the fact that he's somebody who gets very anxious about stuff as well. And, you know, having have it just sort of, it's just, it's a very emotional account of what it's like to be an intensive care unit doctor.

• 33:08Rory Stewart?

  Oh, good. I'll look for that. I've also been watching on Netflix. I know whether people enjoy watching foreign language stuff, but I've been watching Sacred Games, which is Hindi series, a crime series.

• 33:21Alastair Campbell?

  Have you finished Only Murders in the Building?

• 33:23Rory Stewart?

  You know, I really liked it and then my mother and Shashana got completely fed up with it and refused refused to keep watching it.

• 33:30Alastair Campbell?

  That's interesting because I got fed up with it. If Fiona's sticking with it and she's now into the second series, I got fed up with it. I found it very funny to start with. I quite enjoyed it, but I, a bit like some of the books by my bed, I gave up after about four episodes.

• 33:44Rory Stewart?

  Well, the other thing I've been stuck on Twitter on is a huge conversation about the Marvel multiverse and people trying to tell me which of the 24 to 26 movies starring Iron Man, Thor, and the rest I should be watching. But my recommendation this week is Sacred Games. So it's on Netflix and it stars a slightly overworked Sikh policeman in Mumbai. And it's sort of strange, kind of half thriller, half mystery, but also quite a sort of gritty portrait of change in Indian domestic life from the 1970s through. And I also enjoy trying to get my Hindi Urdu a little bit better because it's got subtitles.

• 34:25Alastair Campbell?

  Very good. Very good. Well, you're obviously not working hard enough. You've got time to watch all these television series.

• 34:31Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. 100%.

• 34:32Alastair Campbell?

  I've just, I've just been working very, very hard and I've not watched anything.

• 34:34Rory Stewart?

  Well, you're a much more serious person than me. That's the main thing to conclude this question time on. Right. Thank you very much.

• 34:40Alastair Campbell?

  Right. I'm going to have my, I'm going to have my turnip on toast for lunch now.

• 34:43Rory Stewart?

  Turnip on toast and read a bit of Hegel for lunch.

• 34:46Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent.

• 34:46Rory Stewart?

  Excellent.

• 34:47Alastair Campbell?

  See you later.

• 34:48Rory Stewart?

  See you later. Bye bye.

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