322. Israel vs Hezbollah: Iran’s next move

What does the killing of Hezbollah’s leader mean for the Middle East? Who will be Labour’s next cabinet secretary? How did the far right win in Austria? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy, a green electricity supplier powering homes across the UK. Use referral code POLITICS after sign up for a chance to win a signed copy of Rory and Alastair's books with personalised messages. Learn more at getfuse.com/politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley + Becki Hills Video Editor: Josh Smith Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen + Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 2:11Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:13Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:15Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to go around four countries today Rory. Lebanon, well Lebanon, Israel, Yemen and Regent. I think we should talk briefly about the UK, both in terms of what's happened to the government, but also the Tory conference going on, in case people didn't know. And then I said last week that it's almost a year since Millet took over in Argentina. He won the election in October, then I think finally took power in towards Christmas. So we talk about him and how he's going, very, very mixed picture. And then also the Austrian election, which happened at the weekend where the far right have won. So shall we kick off in the growing cogmire that is the Middle East and Lebanon?

• 2:53Rory Stewart?

  So very, very quick reminder for people. The attack on October the 7th against Israel, almost exactly a year ago now, was launched by Hamas, which was a group that crossed over mostly from Gaza, and they were mostly Sunni Muslims. There is a different group, which was not part of the October 7th attack, which is based in Lebanon, called Hezbollah, much, much larger group, traditionally seen as having over 100,000 missiles, tens of thousands of fighters. And that is a Shia Muslim group that emerged in Lebanon in the early 1980s and was a major player in the resistance to Israel.

• 3:34Rory Stewart?

  Israel occupied southern Lebanon from the early 80s till 2000, and then attacked again in 2006, and a big player in the civil war. So when Netanyahu was addressing the UN, he gave a very, very aggressive speech that maybe we could touch on briefly, in which he basically described the United Nations as a sort of source of anti-Semitic bile, and made some very aggressive comments about Hezbollah and Iran. And it seems now clear that he had by then authorised the latest stage in a series of attacks which have happened over the last few weeks.

• 4:07Alastair Campbell?

  Just to show their confidence in what they were doing, they released a picture. The Israeli press service released a picture of Netanyahu on the telephone from their office inside the United Nations. Nations saying that was the moment at which he authorized the attacks on Lebanon.

• 4:22Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. So the big story is that Hezbollah has been a major threat to Israel for at least eighteen years, if not almost forty years. And at certain times in history, they've lived in a kind of uneasy sort of rules of a game. So there was a moment, for example, in the nineties, where you could see Israeli and Hezbollah leaders saying about particular attacks, that was according to the rules of the game, or that wasn't. And in particular, Hezbollah was focusing on attacking military targets for a period, not civilian targets, although they're also a group that's conducted terrorist attacks against civilians. For the last eleven months, they have been absolutely central to the picture for two reasons.

• 5:03Rory Stewart?

  Firstly, because by firing missiles into northern Israel and saying that they were going to continue doing that until there was a ceasefire in Gaza, so they were doing it in solidarity with Gaza, they ended up with tens of thousands of Israelis being displaced from northern Israel and a big, big push from the Israeli government to get Israelis back into northern Israel. The second reason, though, that they've been important is that the United States and its allies and everyone have been begging Israel and Hezbollah not to up the ante and go to war with each other because the fear from the very beginning was there was going to be a broader regional conflict. There were people in Netanyahu's cabinet who wanted to launch strikes on Lebanon almost immediately. There were people I remember saying in the region to me, Israelis saying, it's unfortunate we were

• 5:48Rory Stewart?

  attacked by Hamas, Hezbollah is the real enemy, we need to swing this around and go after Hezbollah. And that's been a lot of the effort of Antony Blinken and Joe Biden saying, don't do that, because they didn't want to draw Iran, which is Hezbollah's big backer, into this conflict. So Hezbollah, which has had well over a hundred thousand missiles, many of them precision guided, has held back from firing salvos of thousands of missiles a day into Tel Aviv, which they had the capacity to do. And they partly were holding back because they believed that if they did it, it would up the ante and provoke a massive response from Israel, instead of which they had been dropping fewer missiles, evacuating northern Israel and had killed a few people. That was a big problem for Israel, but from the point of view of the people trying to keep a lid on things,

• 6:33Rory Stewart?

  they thought that a lid was being kept on things. And then there's been an escalation, the escalation, I'll stop talking now, but the escalation very quickly is, as listeners will remember, killing of Iranian diplomats in Beirut, the killing of the Hamas chief in Tehran, the blowing up of pagers, blowing up of walkie talkies, followed by significant airstrikes where hundreds of people have been killed and culminating in the killing of Nasrullah, who since the 1990s has been the leader of Hezbollah. Over to you.

• 7:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think this, let's just start with this escalation point because I think that ever since October the 7th, I think Joe Biden in particular has been trying to trade absolute support of Israel and Netanyahu, even though they don't really get on with influence. And the influence that they've been speaking to is to try not to let this thing spread so it becomes a regional conflict. And I do think the image of Netanyahu launching this, as it were, or authorizing this from the United Nations in the United States, where he's just delivered this really aggressive speech, as you say, and where lots and lots of diplomats from other countries walked out in protest. I think that was pretty deliberate.

• 7:43Alastair Campbell?

  He essentially seems to be saying that he kind of feels empowered and able to take this wherever he thinks the Israeli government feels that it should go. Interestingly, you mentioned at the start, right at the start after the October 7th attacks by Hamas, Gallant, the defence minister, I think was in that camp that said, the real enemy is Hezbollah, let's go for that. At that stage Netanyahu was saying, no, we focus on Hamas and the war aim is to take out the entire leadership. Now, the war aim now, as you say, in relation to Lebanon, the war aim there is to create the conditions for these 60, 70,000 Israelis who had to be evacuated to get them to go home.

• 8:27Alastair Campbell?

  In that, I think a tacit admission that the war aim in Gaza has not been fully met. In fact, the guy who masterminded the October 7 attacks, he's still at large, they still haven't got him. But they have got, as you say, Hassan Nasrallah, who's 64, led this organisation for three decades, took over from a guy who was killed in an attack on his helicopter, and who is a massive, massive, massive figure in Lebanon. This is a guy who, you see his face everywhere, you don't see him everywhere because he kept very, very low-key, secure bunkers and all that. And the thing about this bombing, seems that they've taken out, some reports say four, some reports say six,

• 9:09Alastair Campbell?

  apartment blocks in order for these 2,000 pound, they call them bunker buster, these bombs to get underground and take him out. Now, that is an incredible success story for the Israelis and it's a huge blow to Hezbollah. The next step, the reaction from them and from Iran will decide where this thing goes next.

• 9:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, it's amazing looking at the coverage and how difficult, I mean, we often talk about how polarised and sort of post-truth all these discussions are, and my goodness, people are struggling to work out how to talk about this. So I was just spending quite a lot of time listening to a Times of Israel podcast and reading some of their reporting. And of course, their reporting focuses on this as a moment where Israel has rediscovered its faith in the military and security forces.

• 10:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yep, and Netanyahu to some extent.

• 10:02Rory Stewart?

  And Netanyahu to some extent, just before the 12 month anniversary. So, so that's one way of looking at it, which is Israel totally bewildered, horrified by those people killed on October 7th and felt completely let down by Israeli intelligence military because they thought they had penetrated, Hamas knew what they were doing and they had apparently no warning of this attack. Now they've just seen this attack, which is very, very sophisticated. So we talked about it a little bit, but it's now clear that the page is blowing up with just the thin end of the wedge because Israel was also gathering enormous amount of metadata on his. Hezbollah. So if somebody in Hezbollah was killed fighting in Syria and that was posted on Facebook,

• 10:43Rory Stewart?

  then anyone who looked at the Facebook post would then be followed up by Israeli intelligence. They would be hacking into the mobile phones of people's wives, into the odometers of their cars, and finally getting to killing Hassan Nasrallah, who Israeli intelligence and military have been trying to assassinate for decades now.

• 11:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Rory Stewart?

  So that's one story, which is the sort of technical admiration of the tactics, the military tactics.

• 11:09Alastair Campbell?

  And just on that, Roy, it's not, it's not just him they've taken out. They've now taken out most of the leadership. They took out his, his main kind of right-hand man. They took out the leader of their southern front. They took out the head of his security unit. So this is something where, you know, we're talking over a dozen key, key people who've been removed from the leadership of Hezbollah. And the point about Israel, where Netanyahu is, if you remember, we had the whole sort of Supreme Court protests. We've had massive protests because of his failure to bring back the hostages. And you're now seeing, there's still plenty of people who really don't like Netanyahu and think he's handled this terribly. But you're now seeing this as a, as you say, as a cause of, almost of celebration. Well, it is a cause of celebration for a lot of Israelis.

• 11:50Alastair Campbell?

  This is them feeling that, having been on the back foot for a year, they now look like they're back in charge.

• 11:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. The second dimension which has been striking is of course, although Hamas has tacit support from quite a lot of the Arab world, Hezbollah, because it's Shia, in other words, it, they're co-religionists with the Iranian regime, is very, very unpopular with a lot of the Arab world, and in particular with Saudi Arabia. And in fact, Mohammed bin Salman, the leader of Saudi Arabia, essentially forced the Lebanese premier to resign because of his rage at Hezbollah participating in the Lebanese government, and has very much seen Hassan Nasrallah as one of his major adversaries. So that by attacking Hezbollah, Israel has created a situation where much of the Gulf isn't quite sure how to respond.

• 12:39Rory Stewart?

  Because they don't like Iran, they don't like Hezbollah. Equally, they're obviously troubled by Israel mounting this attack across the border there. Concerned about further escalation and many of these regimes would have been critical if it hadn't been an attack on Hezbollah.

• 12:53Alastair Campbell?

  You're talking there about the lack of popularity in the broader region on the political level. Somebody who works in the Middle East, who works in polling, sent me some stuff. I don't know if you had time to read it. I sent it on to you, but it's from this thing called the Arab Barometer, which surveys opinion in most of the Arab countries. And this was carried out earlier this year, before the October 7th attacks, February and April 2024. The way that a lot of people who don't necessarily follow this very closely, almost assume that Hezbollah is like the government of Lebanon. Hezbollah is Lebanon in terms of as a political entity. This survey found that when the Lebanese people were given a list of all the political entities, which did they identify with?

• 13:33Alastair Campbell?

  12% said they identified with Hezbollah. Shiites were the only sect that actually went above 1% in relation to people liking them.

• 13:44Rory Stewart?

  Just to come in on that, one of my colleagues, who was the Conservative Minister for Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, got in trouble saying that she discovered that all Catholics seemed to vote for one party and all Protestants seemed to vote for another party.

• 13:57Alastair Campbell?

  Karen Bradley.

• 13:58Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. The same is true in Lebanon. So there are a few Christians, this particular Christian sects, that have sometimes allied with Hezbollah. And there was a moment when the Druze had an alliance during the civil war, but fundamentally it is Shia. And the Shia have always been both in Lebanon and to some extent in Iraq and certainly in Saudi and in Bahrain, often marginalised, often impoverished, often very unpopular, perceived by Sunni Muslims as almost heretics, too superstitious. And so getting a clear picture on who Hezbollah is, is very difficult because its connection and legacy of terrorist attacks and hostage taking and bombs.

• 14:41Rory Stewart?

  But on the other hand, there was a moment when it was surprisingly popular in Lebanon because it was seen as the group that drove Israel out. So Israel occupied southern Lebanon from the early 1980s, right the way through to 2000. And it was Hezbollah that really got the credit, in a way the Lebanese army didn't and none of the other Lebanese factions did, for mounting the military attacks on driving out Israel.

• 15:02Alastair Campbell?

  They also, and this in a sense was Hassan Azra's real success, he He projected those as military successes. It wasn't just that they were given the credit, they took the credit and they shaped a narrative of giving them the credit.

• 15:15Rory Stewart?

  That was quite an interesting political moment because it was a moment where Israel through the 90s was saying, we will withdraw if attacks cease against us. So they were trying to demand the US and others would get guarantees of peace before they withdrew. And Hezbollah said, no, that's rubbish. Israel's not going to withdraw unless we keep attacking them. And most Lebanese agreed with Hezbollah, at least on that.

• 15:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 15:38Rory Stewart?

  And so there was a moment after 2000 where Hezbollah was quite popular. So another moment after 2006, which was more controversial, some Lebanese blamed Hezbollah for the fact that Israel invaded again in 2006, but others gave them credit for Israel then leaving. But the real problems started with the Syrian war. And that's the moment at which many, many Lebanese, including Lebanese Shia and many other people in the region, turned very, very anti Hezbollah because Hezbollah basically propped up Bashar al-Assad, the dictator in Syria, and they were the groups that led to his victory.

• 16:12Alastair Campbell?

  Although now you have people from Lebanon fleeing to Syria to escape what's going on here. Just to give you a few interesting findings from this survey, Rory. Nine out of 10 Lebanese people said they have not a lot or no trust in their government, the parliament, the president or the prime minister. Three out of four said they do not trust religious leaders. 65% said religious leaders are just as likely to be corrupt as political leaders. And then on the sort of, you said last week about, you know, what life is like there for people. Around 80%, and this is the highest of all the countries that were surveyed in the Arab world, 80% say that they struggle with the availability and affordability of food. 68% say they often run out of food and water, internet, electricity and healthcare, they

• 16:55Alastair Campbell?

  have the worst results in the entire region. So you're talking already about a place that is really, you know, suffering in terms of its sort of day to day life. And, you know, this is going to make it one hell of a lot worse.

• 17:08Rory Stewart?

  And you've put your finger on something really important here because the most optimistic supporters of what Israel have done, and I'm being attacked by a lot of them. On Twitter because they hate the idea that I'm suggesting this. This has contributed to escalation. They want to see it in very black and white terms. Hezbollah terrorist group, therefore killing him is great. And any questions about what comes next are disloyal and antisemitic. But the optimistic view is that by getting rid of Hassan Nasrallah, Lebanon is going to suddenly become this much more coherent, democratic, peaceful country. And the Lebanese army is going to take over the border. And Hezbollah is going to vanish and it's all going to be wonderful.

• 17:47Alastair Campbell?

  That's just naive.

• 17:49Rory Stewart?

  It's completely naive and a lot of it for the reasons you've just pointed out, which is that, as you've just pointed out, Lebanon is in real economic problems. It's politically very, very fractured. And of course Hezbollah's presence in Lebanon is part of this much bigger arc of Shia Iranian influence that stretches right the way through Syria into Iraq and to Iran itself. So Hassan Nasrallah was not just some sort of single evil genius who if you kill him, the whole phenomenon of militant Shia Islam somehow vanishes. There's no doubt that this has been a very, very serious military blow to Hezbollah. But I think we must assume that they will be trying to come back. And I think another thing, and maybe this is the thing I want to turn back to you on.

• 18:30Rory Stewart?

  I feel very, very strongly that Iran and Hezbollah will feel forced to respond now. From their point of view, I mean, you know, they're horrible people. So I'm not trying to put too much onto their point of view, but it's worth thinking about their point of view to understand what's happening. From their point of view, they feel that even though they did lob thousands of missiles into Israel over the last few months, they didn't kill very many people and that they feel they could have done a lot more. And they feel that they held back because the United States told them that if they held back, Israel wouldn't attack. And so now that they have been attacked in this way and totally humiliated. I mean, you know, the leader of Hamas was killed in Tehran at the inauguration. Israeli diplomats have been killed. Nasrallah has been killed. Pages have all blown up. I would have thought it's almost impossible now

• 19:14Rory Stewart?

  for Iran and Hezbollah not to respond. And of course, when they respond, Israel will say this is a completely unprovoked terrorist attack against us and will then respond even more aggressively back.

• 19:24Alastair Campbell?

  Just online, why it's naive to think that because you take the head guy out, somehow the whole thing is going to implode. I mean, this is, this is an organisation where there used to be people being killed. Nasrallah got the job because his predecessor, Massawi, who was one of his mentors, because he got killed.

• 19:41Rory Stewart?

  But by the Israelis.

• 19:42Alastair Campbell?

  By the Israelis. And they're already talking. The guy who made the first public statement for Hezbollah, who was the second-in-command Nayyem Kassim, he is clearly in the frame, possibly as a leadership figure. And so is Nasrallah's cousin, a guy called Hasham Safidini. This is an organisation that will, they will have people lined up. Now, the interesting thing about Iran, though, is, and again, you have to be very, very careful, necessarily taking all at face value. But the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, yes, he has called on Muslims worldwide to take revenge and side with what he calls Honourable Hezbollah. But he is also indicating that it will be Hezbollah, not Iran, that leads any response. And the new president, and we talked earlier about how the new president doesn't have much power,

• 20:26Alastair Campbell?

  but he is nonetheless a serious figure within the leadership. He's also calling for restraint. And don't forget as well, Rory, when Israel assassinated Ismail Hanaoui, the Hamas leader, Iran said there would be retaliation, but thus far, we've yet to see it.

• 20:43Rory Stewart?

  My worry is, you're absolutely right. But my worry is that, given that they said they would respond to that, given they said they would respond to the attack on their embassy, they're going to feel at some point forced to respond. Because otherwise, I think there's a real, I'm afraid, loss of face on their part. And that's one of the dangers. Now, it's also worth acknowledging that what has happened here has astonished the world. I mean, Israel didn't do this to Hezbollah for 18 years. I mean, these provocations from Hezbollah are not new, right? They had just as much reason to do it any time in the last 18 years. So why not? And probably the reason why not is that they believed that Hezbollah was this incredibly formidable force with over 100,000 precision missiles,

• 21:27Rory Stewart?

  and that it would be far too dangerous to do. They've just done it, and it's turned out that they haven't got the response that people predicted. And it's turned out that they were able to do far more damage to Hezbollah and with far less consequence so far for Israel than people predicted. So, you know, people like me who are calling for caution, and actually even the American diplomats who've been calling for caution, many Israelis are understandably turning around saying, "You were far too cautious. You know, we should have done this 18 years ago."

• 21:54Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe a final point before we go to the UK. The other interesting thing in this survey was marked a decline in support for the view of the United States. It was forty two percent of Lebanese people broadly supported the United States in twenty twenty two, and it's now down to twenty seven percent. So again, and remember, this is before October the seventh, so I imagine that's got even worse.

• 22:17Rory Stewart?

  Just to finish with a pretty obvious and pompous point, this is a military tactical success, but it is not a solution to Israel's situation in the Middle East, not political strategy. It doesn't deal with the problems in internal Israeli politics, it doesn't deal with Gaza, it doesn't deal with what the settlers doing on the West Bank, and it doesn't deal with the way that the region and much of the world perceives Israel. Israel remains in a very, very fragile situation. And this attack, although very, very successful, far more successful than people like me would have expected, is still a military victory that doesn't answer the long term questions.

• 22:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and meanwhile, Rory, literally as you were speaking there, if you remember Hezbollah have been persuaded that the Israelis are likely to launch a ground invasion pretty soon. Gallant, as we know, has been up in on the Lebanese border himself, talking to the troops. And it seems that the Israelis have told Joe Biden and the administration that they are planning, confirmed they are planning to launch a limited ground incursion into Lebanon. So I don't know if it's any surprise, however, it is an indication of the failure of the strategy to deescalate. And it's likely to make us even more alarmed as to what might happen thereafter.

• 23:40Rory Stewart?

  Yes, and I think it's a very, very significant change. Because many Lebanese who hate Hezbollah will not want Israel mounting a ground invasion into southern Lebanon. Factions of strong nationalist sentiment will play, and we've already got the Chinese government talking about attacks on sovereignty. I think this is Israel pushing it into increasingly Dangerous territory and I understand I'm somebody who cautioned against what they've just done, which they seem to get away with. But I think a ground invasion is very, very dangerous and in some sense is exactly what Hezbollah is looking for because Hezbollah has tens of thousands of fighters who are very, very accustomed to urban warfare, who've been

• 24:22Rory Stewart?

  fighting in Syria for many years. They may not be able to protect themselves from high-tech attacks, but my goodness, they have experience in fighting street to street against soldiers. And if they're defending Lebanese territory, remember Hezbollah are Lebanese, right? They're not foreigners, fighting for their own homeland and their own streets with experience going all the way back to the early 1980s. I think this, I am confident is a mistake.

• 24:46Alastair Campbell?

  Those numbers that I gave you from that Arab barometer survey of public opinion, I think a ground incursion by Israel will increase support internally for anyone who is responding to that. So pretty dangerous times, Rory.

• 25:02Rory Stewart?

  Very dangerous times, very, very dangerous times. Well, we've done quite a lot on that. Should we take a quick break and then come back on UK domestic and then Argentina and Austria?

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• 25:35Speaker 04

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• 25:39Speaker 04

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• 26:05Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 26:09Alastair Campbell?

  And with me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, as we speak, recording this on Monday, late afternoon, the Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, who I think you and I felt probably should have gone day one of a new Labour government, has finally announced that he's going.

• 26:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and I'm afraid of, I'm sorry, because it's sad not to be polite about someone they're going, but really, it's not been great. He was brought in by Boris Johnson. He was comparatively young and inexperienced compared to the traditional Cabinet Secretaries. He hadn't really done the kind of big jobs that the Burke trends and Robert Armstrongs had done. And he's had every kind of problem from the beginning. I mean, there's been this very humiliating thing about his WhatsApp messages where he was openly mocking the Prime Minister when, you know, whatever you think about Boris, if you're the Cabinet Secretary and he's the Prime Minister, that guy at least should be being polite, not making out that your boss is a buffoon every day.

• 27:04Rory Stewart?

  He's then been on medical leave. I don't know. I mean, it's very sad. I don't know what's been at the heart of that. And there's obviously been a very difficult relationship, I think, with the incoming Labour administration, a lot of rumours of tensions with Sue Gray. I mean, over to you.

• 27:17Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I think that given the build up to the election and given that the first stage of a government is very, very, very, very important. I think if you don't have very good and close relations between the key people in Downing Street and the Cabinet Secretary, it's a fault line. And it seems to me that that is what has been going on. And even though, I've said to you before, when we talked about leak inquiries last week, you can go insane worrying about who is leaking what. But I was generally of the view, most of the time with the several Cabinet Secretaries that we had, it wouldn't cross my mind when stuff was being leaked out. I mean, maybe once or twice you have the odd suspicion, but the idea that you'd be sitting there thinking, I can't talk to that guy because I'm worried he's going to be talking to the media.

• 28:00Rory Stewart?

  Even my friend Richard Wilson, who you didn't necessarily get on with.

• 28:02Alastair Campbell?

  I got on perfectly fine. I got fine with Richard Wilson.

• 28:06Rory Stewart?

  But you wouldn't have suspected him of leaking on you or anything like that?

• 28:09Alastair Campbell?

  No, no. And whereas I think the fact is that, you know, people inside Downing Street did think that was going on. And you have to be able to dispel that through building good, positive relationships. And look, I think, I hope, by the way, that this is part of a bit of a reset in terms of how the government machine is operating, because, you know, let's be absolutely frank about it. Whether you think about the Sue Gray salary becoming a big deal, whether you think about the way the clothes issue was handled and the so-called freebies, et cetera. Anything which takes attention away from the the policy stuff, the change that the government is trying to make, then you have to address that and you have to deal with it.

• 28:50Rory Stewart?

  Presumably, though, initially, their idea was that they would find their right candidate, get her or him all lined up before Case went. So it may be that Case under stress has left a bit more quickly than people were expecting.

• 29:02Alastair Campbell?

  Reading what the statement says, I think he's going to be staying a bit longer while they now find a replacement. But my point is, you know, you and I both said when Labour was still in opposition, that given the sort of aura or the the kind of problems that seem to emanate around this guy, then I think it would have been wise to have had that process well underway by the time they arrived. And look, it's very difficult with personnel, of course it is, you know, you're talking about human beings, you're talking about their families, about their lives, about their salaries, about their pensions and so forth. But you're also talking here about one of the key positions where the Prime Minister has to be able to depend on somebody of the top, top quality. That goes for the principal private secretary, it goes to the national security adviser,

• 29:46Alastair Campbell?

  it goes for the policy unit, it goes for the communications team, it goes for all the major departments of the government. The Prime Minister has to be able to have absolute total confidence in them. And it strikes me that in this he didn't.

• 29:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and when you see the incredible praise given to Jeremy Hayward, who was the Cabinet Secretary, who whose work stretched all the way from working for John Major through Tony Blair, through Gordon Brown, to David Cameron, the incredible sense that all those politicians had that Jeremy Hayward had made their lives easier.

• 30:17Alastair Campbell?

  I think they all, they all certainly said something about Jeremy when he died, but I've I've got a feeling they were all at his funeral, apart from possibly Tony, who was. Was overseas, but I know would have been there. No, I think we're talking about a different league and it is obviously very sad on one level, but it's also an opportunity now for Labour to get somebody into that position that's really, really good, isn't going to be in the papers.

• 30:39Rory Stewart?

  And how do you do that? Listen, I mean, if I gave you that problem and said, we've got to get a really good Cabinet Secretary, and I mean, short of persuading Gus O'Donnell to come back, it's quite tough, isn't it? Presumably, generally, you either go from somebody who's already a number 10, but I think there's actually number 10s a bit hollowed out. I think they're lacking at the moment to principal private secretary, the Prime Minister. So then they'd have to look from permanent secretary from another department?

• 31:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, or you, or you, that's where you start. But actually, I would come at this from thinking, you go and try and find the best person in the world that you think can do this job. I mean, Mark Carney became Bank of England governor and people thought, oh, that's a bit weird, isn't it, coming from Canada? There could be very, very good people in Scotland, there could be very, very good people in Wales, there could be good people in different parts of local government, people who have really done stuff. And in the end, you want somebody who is able to work hard, think well, lead a team, have a good relationship around the building and keep their name out of the papers. Look, I'm not saying it's easy, but it's not impossible. And the truth is that now that they know he's absolutely going, then it's a pretty urgent challenge.

• 31:42Rory Stewart?

  It's going to be interesting, isn't it? And this is just coming when Rosie Duffield, who's the Labour MP for Canterbury, has just announced that she's resigning from the Labour Party and her resignation letter has been all over the place. And one of the things she said in that letter, which we haven't talked about a bit, but you pick up a little from Labour backbenchers, is slight unhappiness about their sense that there's a bit of a sort of cosy clique around Keir Starmer and Sue Gray. And she even had a bit of a gibe at the fact that she thought that, I mean, we like these people and we rate them, but Georgia Gould, whose father was a very senior part of Tony Blair's government, a friend of yours, and Hamish Faulkner, whose father also was a Labour Cabinet Minister, very unusually when they came in as MPs, were made ministers immediately, rather than what's

• 32:27Rory Stewart?

  traditionally the case, which is you spend two years on the backbenchers. So I guess there's going to be a loss of people looking. I mean, I think that may be why they might be tempted to bring a permanent secretary out of another department, rather than be super imaginative.

• 32:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, although I have to say, I thought, I don't know Rosie Duffield well, and I know that she, she got a lot of kind of grief within the Labour Party over her very strong views on the, on the trans rights issue. I've got to say, I thought her resignation letter was kind of dripping with bitterness. I have to say that. I thought it was really over the top. And also, we're not that long since the election. If you look at all the things that have happened since the election, is there really been that much since the election? You can say you're not happy about the fuel payment, you can say that you're not happy about clothes and so forth. But have you really gone since the election where you fought on the Labour platform to this sort of level of

• 33:18Rory Stewart?

  It's very unusual, isn't it?

• 33:19Alastair Campbell?

  I think so, I think so.

• 33:21Rory Stewart?

  Very, very weird.

• 33:22Alastair Campbell?

  This morning, Leighton Andrews, former Welsh minister, he sent me his latest Substack and he made a very interesting observation within it. He put a little table, and I think this does explain why Labour has got into these difficulties that it's been going through recently. In 1979, when Geoffrey Howe was the Chancellor, the gap between the general election and the budget was one month, nine days. In May 97, when we won, the first budget from Gordon Brown was in two months and one day. When Osborne was Chancellor in 2010, one month and 16 days. Labour, having a budget on the 30th of October, that would be three months and 26 days after the election.

• 34:03Rory Stewart?

  That seems like a real error, and I wonder why they did that. You're quite right. I mean, given that the one thing that anyone is interested in is the budget, the only thing we care about is what are they going to tax? Where are they going to borrow? Where's the money coming from? In order to define the narrative, you can see why all those other Chancellors did it pretty quickly after the election.

• 34:19Alastair Campbell?

  And Gordon, of course, did it, having already on day one of the Labour Government made this massive change, which was then going to be legislated for in the King's Speech. I hadn't really thought of that, but I think that may be one of the reasons why all this other sort of frothy stuff has kind of come in and slightly filled a gap.

• 34:37Rory Stewart?

  All good points, good things think about.

• 34:39Alastair Campbell?

  We were, when we were sort of batting our WhatsApp messages backwards and forwards. We were going to talk about the Conservative Party Conference in the domestic section, but I think we should, we've had one or two questions on it. Let's do that in Q and A.

• 34:52Rory Stewart?

  Let's do that with our question time, which is the next episode coming. Okay. Now that brings us to Argentina and here again, something very interesting. So just to remind, remind people, Javier Millay is this extraordinary, peculiar, right wing populist, who like many right wing populists around the world, has an extraordinary toupee, seems to be par for the course. He's the guy who has cloned dogs, who he named after Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist. He's the guy who, in the election campaign, was to be seen with a chainsaw, saying he was going to hack into the government and he was ripping off the names of government departments of wars. And the conventional wisdom, I think, looking back 10 months, is this guy might win,

• 35:36Rory Stewart?

  but even if he does win, he won't really be able to do very much because he won't really control the parliament. He doesn't have that kind of party. The opposition will go for him. There's too much opposition in Argentinian society. And in that at least, conventional wisdom was wrong, was out of touch. He has pushed ahead. He has done incredibly dramatic cuts. He's generated a fiscal surplus. I mean, this is a guy for whom austerity, far more than for George Osborne, is absolutely front and centre of everything that he believes in in turn. And he's managed to get from a fiscal deficit to a fiscal surplus. And we can talk about the consequences of this, but boy, oh, boy, have people underestimated his ability to get stuff done. A lot of people thought he's going to be all talk, no action, he won't follow through. And his popularity ratings,

• 36:20Rory Stewart?

  still over 50% of the Argentinian people backing him, despite the fact the economy's in recession.

• 36:25Alastair Campbell?

  Can I do the however?

• 36:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, however, go on.

• 36:28Alastair Campbell?

  I think, I think the reason why I think he's been able to do a lot of the things that people thought he wouldn't be able to do is because he said he was going to do them. So he did say he was going to close all these government departments. He said he was going to end subsidies for transport and fuel. He said he was going to sack thousands of civil servants. And he has slashed the state. He has slashed state spending. There's no doubt about that at all. But if you focus there on, on the deficit, he argued that the big things he was Going to attack with inflation and growth and he has got public expenditure. Monthly inflation has come down from twenty plus to around four, five.

• 37:03Rory Stewart?

  Per month, though, that's the amazing thing. It's still forty eight percent a year, isn't it? Yeah.

• 37:07Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. But the annual rate, no, the annual rate is stuck in the plus two hundred plus. And the other thing is because they've had such trouble with their foreign currency reserves, he owes forty four billion dollars to the IMF. And this week, just this, just last week, they published new figures on poverty. And poverty, and bear in mind, it was a lot of poor people who voted for him, it is absolutely soaring. So the numbers who lived in poverty a year ago was forty one point seven percent. And it's now up to fifty two point nine six percent. And the extreme poverty rate, these are people who are living in kind of abject poverty. Has gone up from eleven percent to eighteen point one percent. And the economy itself has contracted by three percent.

• 37:50Alastair Campbell?

  And both in the informal jobs market and the formal workforce, they've hemorrhaged hundreds of thousands of jobs. So he has managed to achieve some of the things you said, you know, but I think the effect of it has been pretty grim.

• 38:03Rory Stewart?

  I mean, it's, it's mesmerizing and for you and me as kind of old centrist dads. It's a real argument for the dangers of populism, particularly in Latin America, but actually around the world. That you lurch from the Peronist government that was far over in an incredibly sort of corrupt. Lazy, overregulated, massive overspending to this man that is a sort of. I don't know, a fiscal hawk is sort of understating it. I mean, he, the centre of everything he believes in is austerity.

• 38:36Alastair Campbell?

  It's more than that. He, he believes that the state and government is a problem.

• 38:40Rory Stewart?

  And like, like some of the sort of far out of the Tory party under George Osborne, he has the sort of idea that if you can cut. The state sort of magically, the private sector and its sort of animal spirits will swing in and fill in the problems. But the problems that Argentina faces are so extraordinary. I mean, one of the problems is their exchange rate is still basically controlled. They've got important. Export taxes. They've got such weird labour regulations that seventy percent of people working in most of the major sectors are in the grey economy. Their pensions, they've got very, very generous, universal pensions, but nobody actually paying tax to contribute to keeping those pensions going. It's such a sort of powerful symbol of the way that economic

• 39:23Rory Stewart?

  mismanagement and corruption can go wrong, because Argentina, of course, famously at the beginning of the 20th century, you know, was one of the biggest economies in the world, one of the great economic success stories. It was the sort of equivalent to kind of, I don't know, Australia or Canada. And boy, oh, boy, is it in trouble. So anyway, let's watch what happens. And the question is, in a year's time, when we look at this, is the Argentinian economy going to be further in recession? Or is he going to have pulled off some miracles? It's going to be growing. Alison, just wanted to thank you. You put me in touch with America's Quarterly, and there's a great article to be read by all centrists, mums and dads, listening to the show, called Imagining a Centrist Revival in Latin America, which has been written by

• 40:03Rory Stewart?

  Mauricio Cárdenas and Eduardo Levy Yehati, who's a great Argentine economist, and who's

• 40:10Alastair Campbell?

  Mauricio Cárdenas, is he a Colombian politician?

• 40:13Rory Stewart?

  That's right, exactly. You knew him, you knew him.

• 40:16Alastair Campbell?

  We don't do enough about Latin America, because I actually, I do listen to their podcast, America's Quarterly, and they're, they're very, very, very, very good. But we have so many of our listeners saying, talk about Europe, talk about America, talk about Britain. But we should do more on it.

• 40:29Rory Stewart?

  We should do more. And I'd like to do a little bit on Peru and Chile and Mexico, all three of which are really interesting. So maybe in the next few weeks, we could, we could return to that.

• 40:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we'll definitely do that. We'll definitely do that. The other criticism of Millet is that he's, we've heard this about many leaders, he's surrounded by a very small, very tight clique. He delegates a lot of his decisions to his sister. He has a spokesman by the name of Manuel Adorni. And let me give you a quote from Manuel Adorni, explaining why Millet does all the things he does. "The government inherited a disastrous situation, the worst inheritance that a government has received in a democracy, perhaps the worst that a government has received in history." So that is, he's doing the old, the best we inherited strategy. The other thing, just to sort of say about Millet, his speech, you know, the United Nations General Assembly, I've been to a few of those, and, you know,

• 41:17Alastair Campbell?

  there's usually two or three really big speeches that people feel they have to watch. And quite frankly, Most of them are not worth listening to. Millet's was absolutely breathtaking and not for the reasons that I think will do his country much good. It was a full fronted attack on the United Nations. He was one of the few countries, along with Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, to vote against this thing for Pact for the Future, which is about climate change and sustainability. He says the whole argument about climate change is just the latest socialist lie. United Nations become powerless.

• 41:57Alastair Campbell?

  It's a multi-tentacled leviathan that seeks to decide what each nation state should do and how the citizens of the world should live. The same always happens with these ideas on the left. You design a model according to what human beings should do. When things turn out differently, you repress, restrict and curtail freedom.

• 42:15Rory Stewart?

  But you would presumably cheer up to discover that Elon Musk is a huge fan of his and is very keen to invest, invest heavily in Argentina.

• 42:21Alastair Campbell?

  Of course. The other thing, by the way, where he's absolutely creating a rod for his back and exacerbated, I think, by this extraordinary speech at the United Nations, is that one of the big problems he's inherited is they've got no real integration into the international financial system because they've, you know, so often they've sort of defaulted on payments. So these bodies that they're kind of dependent on at the moment, he's taking his chainsaw to them most of the time, which doesn't strike me as being very, very, very, very clever. I'd love to get his sister on the podcast. I think she'd be very interesting.

• 42:57Rory Stewart?

  Well, maybe we can get him on the podcast.

• 42:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he'd be good.

• 43:00Rory Stewart?

  Would we be allowed to do a trip to Latin America?

• 43:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:04Rory Stewart?

  At some point we could, we could go and see it because we also need to at some point tease you about the fact that you have many, many great successes in your life, but the Colombian referendum was not one of them.

• 43:13Alastair Campbell?

  It wasn't, but I was, I, I, I think it would be harsh based on the fact that I made a couple of visits to Colombia alongside Jonathan Powell to try to advise them about...

• 43:23Rory Stewart?

  To, to give you the full blame.

• 43:24Alastair Campbell?

  Dealing with FARC and, and, and also to, you know, winning arguments. I think it'd be a bit harsh to give, give me the blame for that. Now, how are you going to give me the blame for the? Fascist winning in Austria.

• 43:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, I mean, that that is extraordinary, isn't it? So Herbert Kiechel, who we've discussed on the show, and this is a proper far right party, extraordinary, people will remember who listened a couple of weeks ago, sort of back from the grave, there was this scandal where the previous leader was, you know, caught by what in Britain would be called a kind of fake shake, a sort of journalist pretending to be sort of Russian bribing him, and he was quite happy to take every kind of bribe in the world. And he went in the scandal. Kiechel came in. Kiechel is a really impressive communicator. We talked about some of his phrases. I mean, one of the things that you can see on big signs around Vienna at the moment is thy will be done.

• 44:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, thy kingdom come.

• 44:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly. Which, as you, being a German speaker, can explain, the word for kingdom in that context is the Reich.

• 44:24Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, yeah. And also, he basically thinks that if he does become chancellor, which, you know, he's won, he's come first in the election with 29% of the vote, there will have to be a coalition. And I know that if he does a coalition with the the sort of more conservative party, the OVP, they have been pretty clear they won't have him as chancellor. But he basically, if he is chancellor, and he's insistent one day he will be, he will call himself Volkskanzler, which of course is what Hitler called himself as well. And also, you know, the, just to give you another example of his rhetoric, the final rally before the vote, he basically spoke out against sanctions against Russia. And he then said that all the snobs, head teachers and the know it alls, the climate activists and the drag queens in the schools,

• 45:09Alastair Campbell?

  and the early sexualization of our children is being rejected. In other words, totally on that kind of Orban populist anti-woke agenda.

• 45:17Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I think he's saying things which go far beyond even what we tend to call the far right. I mean, he's, he's talking about repatriating Austrian citizens who aren't ethnically white Austrians. In other words, people with full Austrian passports, he's suggesting, should be expelled from the country.

• 45:36Alastair Campbell?

  It's interesting how many of the people who are there, who have come from elsewhere in the world, who are living there, have lived there for some time, but don't have a vote.

• 45:43Rory Stewart?

  Something like a hundred. Thousands of people.

• 45:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 45:45Rory Stewart?

  I mean, Austria is unusual because, as you know and have reminded listeners, this far right party has done well and has been in government a number of times, and he himself has been a minister before. And again, we've got to repeat slightly of what we found in the Netherlands, where Hildes got the most votes, but again, they maneuvered so that he didn't become the prime minister. But I mean, it is very worrying. By the time you're getting up to thirty percent of the vote, which is what you've got here, and which is what the German far right party, the AFD, just did in Turingia, you're getting out of the complacent story that we used to tell ourselves a few years ago, which is, oh, these parties get ten, fifteen percent of the vote, but they can't really, because they're now clearly coming first. And Austria, I mean, he's got more votes than any other party.

• 46:27Alastair Campbell?

  And the the social democrats actually had one of the, they were just over twenty percent. They had one of their worst results for a while. And the other thing to say about Austria is that it, a bit like Orban, I mean, you and I have both been fascinated, to the extent to which when we were in America, people wanted to talk about Orban. Austria is also one of those countries where the American, the sort of what I call the billionaire right, the kind of Koch brothers type, and the and the people who fund all these kind of dark money think tanks, and the people who were involved in Brexit as well, they are all over Austrian politics. And, you know, if you now have this little alliance between him, within the European Union, between him, between Orban, between Fico in Slovakia, you know, you're talking about this sort of little, this little kind of coalition around the East that will become

• 47:11Alastair Campbell?

  more difficult. And will he do what Orban does, which is sort of push the European Union, challenge the European Commission with some of the stances he takes and some of the decisions he makes?

• 47:20Rory Stewart?

  And as, as we've said before, that the really big thing that will determine this over the next couple of years is, does Marine Le Pen become president of France? Because the president of France really matters in terms of constitutional power, in terms of European foreign policy. And, and that's the moment at which Orban's vision of a world run by these kind of strong women and strong men really comes true. And that's the moment at which you might see Giorgia Maloney, the right wing prime minister in Italy, who has been relatively moderate, might begin tacking back towards the right. And then we have a very, very significant right wing presence in Europe. And that will begin to change. Yes, immigration policy, but yes, definitely European climate policy quite quickly, policy towards Russia, Ukraine quite quickly.

• 48:01Alastair Campbell?

  The numbers are quite difficult though, even though he won, it's like, so he got 183 seats in the parliament, so you need sort of 92 to get a majority. They got 57 seats, Conservatives 51, Social Democrats 41. The most obvious thing, actually even Conservatives and Social Democrats in a kind of grand alliance only takes you to 92. So you're looking probably, you could end up with Conservatives with the far right, that gives you 108, or they could be looking at trying to get some of the smaller parties and doing a kind of German style coalition, the one that Sholz is currently leading. But anyway.

• 48:36Rory Stewart?

  I think as we conclude, just in case everyone gets so sort of gloomy about this sort of apparently unstoppable rise of far right politicians, the American election is not over yet, and we would encourage people to listen to our sister podcast, Rest Is Politics US in particular, they're fantastic. Recent interview with the second gentleman.

• 48:55Alastair Campbell?

  He was very good, he was really good. I was a bit pissed off though, Roy. I think that, you know, this upstart podcast comes along. I think Doug should have been on our podcast, not theirs, don't you?

• 49:05Rory Stewart?

  I think that's a good, good point, yeah.

• 49:07Alastair Campbell?

  I just, I think I was just making, I'm making an executive decision here. If Kamala Harris decides to give an interview to any of the Rest Is Empire.

• 49:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, like the Rest Is Football, for example.

• 49:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, she might do the Rest Is Football, she might do the Rest Is Money, she might do the Rest Is Entertainment, but they are all banned even from thinking about it, and that goes for you, Scaramucci and Kay as well. But it was, by the way, a terrific interview, and their series as well on how Trump won in 2016 was bloody good as well.

• 49:36Rory Stewart?

  Right, well, Alastair, thank you. That was a lot of fun. And well, maybe fun is the wrong word, but it was a, it was a good session. I look forward to speaking to you.

• 49:43Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon, bye.

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