161. Question Time: Rebuilding the Tory brand, Macron’s successor, and the militarisation of Mexico

Is the Tory brand damaged beyond repair? Does Macron have a succession plan? What tempts governments to bring in the military? Listen as Rory and Alastair answer all these questions and more on this week’s episode of Question Time. 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, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. 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 Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And 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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• 1:56Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics, it's Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:59Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 2:01Alastair Campbell?

  I love this question, and I don't quite know what I'm going to say in answer to it, so I'm going to just bounce it on you. Rowan Wilkinson, "The role of ego in political decision-making has recently been clear to see with the rise of populism, politicians like Trump and Johnson." One, "Did you have any personal checks or balances you would put on yourself to make sure you were making decisions based on what was right for the greater good and not your own ego?" Two, "Were you always able to get out of the way of yourselves, or are there examples of when, in retrospect, you didn't?"

• 2:33Rory Stewart?

  I think it's a really good question. I think it's one of the things that makes politics so dangerous, that it's horrible. I mean, it's very damaging, I think, particularly modern politics, that the politics of 24-hour campaigning, the permanent campaign, social media, is very damaging for your mind, your body, your soul, and it does very weird things to your ego, because you are in a weird situation where, on the one hand, you are absolutely the centre of attention. One of the things that surprised me oddly becoming a politician is just how much time newspapers and television devoted to politics.

• 3:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 3:08Rory Stewart?

  Given that many of my voters weren't very interested in politics, I was rather surprised how much time newspapers and television did on it. And you are in this very insecure situation where you oscillate between sometimes being treated with incredible deference, put in a ministerial car, put in a sort of enormous office. My ministerial offices were about 10 times the size of anyone else's office, and people bringing in cappuccinos for you and calling you minister and bringing briefing packs to you on aeroplanes. Going from that to then getting on the tube and people coming up and screaming in your face and calling you every kind of word under the sun and issuing threats on Twitter. So it produces a very odd lurch between politicians sometimes feeling all-powerful and a lot of the time

• 3:52Rory Stewart?

  feeling completely incapable of doing anything, totally powerless. And I think you need very, very unusual people who can survive that. And my experience was I wasn't very good at getting that right. Probably 90% of my colleagues in the House of Commons, I felt were really damaged by the profession. It's not a healthy thing to do. It's a bit like, I don't know, working, cleaning up Chernobyl. It's something that may need to be done for the public good, but it's not really good for your health.

• 4:19Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Lord, that's very negative. I think the key in answer to question one, did you have any personal checks or balances? I think the key to those are the people that you put around you. And I actually think we were in the Blair era, pretty good at that. I think Tony Blair was very good at surrounding himself with people who were not yes people. We always challenged him. We always recognised that he was a formidable political talent, that he was the boss and all that. But there were quite a few of us who would always, he saw our job as to challenge him. And I think I did the same thing within my own team. And also, I don't know, but I get the sense with you and your wife, Shoshana, I always did feel that Fiona was an incredibly, and the kids when they grew up, were an incredibly

• 5:00Alastair Campbell?

  important sort of leveler. You know, you just don't get above your own station and call you out. You have to have people who call you out when they think that thing is happening. Because the truth is, you do need a big ego. You know, you have to believe that people really care what you think and what you say. Otherwise, you're not going to go out and think and say it.

• 5:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And I think the great weakness of Boris Johnson, the striking difference from Theresa May to Boris Johnson, is she went from a cabinet of some pretty powerful, outspoken people who challenged her strongly in the cabinet room. And Boris Johnson, very much with people like Dean Doris, was bringing in his own very marginal fan club, which he used to make humiliating jokes about all the time. He, you know, he'd make open jokes to people about the fact that his supporter base was a pretty peculiar group of Johnson worshippers, which I think stopped him getting a lot of these calls right. I mean, I think it's what tempted him down to develop a lot of the worst aspects of his personality. He did better, I think, as London mayor, partly because he had a guy called Simon, who was

• 6:00Rory Stewart?

  his chief of staff, who was much better at standing up to him. And I think when politicians lose that, I mean, you can see that with Trump, that anybody who stood up to him was immediately swept aside. And with Mrs Thatcher, I think one of the ways in which things began to go badly wrong after seven or eight years is she lost her ability to listen to challenge. People haven't listened to the John Major leading podcast. He's really interesting on the way in which she took or didn't take challenge.

• 6:25Alastair Campbell?

  Now, we don't talk enough about Mexico. Santi has asked this question. What do you think of AMLO? That's President Obrador. What do you think of AMLO's increasingly close relationship with the Mexican military? Is it a rare good example of politics and the armed forces working together? Up to a point, Lord Copper. Do you want to take that one on? Then I'll come in.

• 6:44Rory Stewart?

  I think first thing to bear in mind is, is Mexico very unusual in Latin America? Because it's one of the very, very few countries in Latin America where the military's traditionally been quite weak. And there haven't been any threats of military coup. Look at a map of Latin America. Most of the landmass was at one time or another ruled by military governments. And that wasn't true in Mexico. But over the last few years, he's using them for more and more. He's using them to run airports. He's using it to build train lines. They now control the whole customs of the country. He's bought the national police under the military. He started defending some pretty peculiar senior generals and defence ministers against drug smuggling scandals, corruption scandals.

• 7:26Rory Stewart?

  And all of this coming from somebody who was famously sort of from the political left, from the populist political left and who started his career being very sceptical about the military. What's your sense of what's going on?

• 7:37Alastair Campbell?

  Well, in 2019, Obrador actually was campaigning on a pledge to get rid of the army. And now, as you say, they're absolutely... If you fly into the main airport in Mexico, Mexico City, you will see uniformed Marines who are in charge of immigration, customs, looking after the security in the terminal. And they're doing that right across the civilian airport network. They're running the ports, two new train lines, as you say. And the policing has been militarised. So the National Guard Force, which is over 100,000 officers, which replaced the federal police there, and they've now been moved under the Defence Ministry by presidential decree.

• 8:21Alastair Campbell?

  The Supreme Court, we've heard a lot about Supreme Courts recently. They decided that move was unconstitutional. But we're into this kind of, you know, back to the Trumpian theme of the age of impunity. The government has yet to act on that. And of course, what some are worried about is that Obrador is not going to be there forever. He obviously sees political mileage in, you know, it's a bit about Mussolini, the myth about the trains running on time. Apparently, security is better at the airport. There is less corruption, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But what it leads to is a strengthened military, as you say, in a part of the world where, once the military gets stronger and stronger, they do tend to use political power. The other fear that people have is whether

• 9:05Alastair Campbell?

  this then goes into other areas of the national life. So, for example, he's been there for six years, and in that time, there have been 155,000 murders.

• 9:16Rory Stewart?

  That's unbelievable.

• 9:17Alastair Campbell?

  And 43,000 disappearances, a lot of it related to drugs.

• 9:21Rory Stewart?

  Disappearances, I guess, will also likely, many of them, to be murders, too. I mean, it's absolutely beyond imagining to live in a country where nearly 200,000 people have been murdered or disappeared during. Totally, totally staggering. And it's sort of unimaginable in somewhere like Britain, where you're looking at numbers in the hundreds, rather than the numbers in the hundreds of thousands. One thing, I suppose, which we often get questions on, is the general question of where you bring in the military and where you don't. So you had experience of this, I guess, during Foot and Mouth. What is it that tempts governments when you have a civilian emergency, like Foot and Mouth, and nothing to do with anybody invading, it's a bunch of livestock getting sick? What tempts people to bring in the military to fix things?

• 10:04Alastair Campbell?

  Reputation. And even though, as you say, in Mexico, defence spending has been historically very, very low, and yet, when there have been civilian crises, such as natural disasters and so forth, the military have come in and done a pretty good job. So I think reputation is part of it. You know, we've talked about the Foot and Mouth thing before. It was just, the system was breaking. The system wasn't capable of... Addressing the scale of the crisis. And it was only when, I remember that guy Burt Whistler, when he came in, that was when we started to get a grip of it. So I think it's that feeling that the military, that's what the military do. But I think that's very different in a system like ours than a system like Mexico, where it does appear now to be used for pretty clear political effort.

• 10:44Rory Stewart?

  In Britain, the very, very clear guidelines around, we, of course, when I was flooding minister, brought in the military to help with the floods, Cumbria, Yorkshire, 2015, 2016. And there, I think, it was a reminder of the fact that the civil service, normal civilian government, doesn't have sort of standing people in reserve. Everybody's already working at their desks. You don't have any slack capacity. What the military provides you with is thousands of people who can be deployed to come in and sort stuff out.

• 11:12Alastair Campbell?

  Well, though, as Ben Wallace said, when he was announcing his plans to step down, and he had a little dig at Swella Braverman, I think you've got to be very, very careful, because as our military gets smaller, which I'm afraid it has, then there's less slack. And I think there is a danger that governments think, oh, we've got a crisis, let's bring in the military. Now, as you say, we did it from time to time. We did it with the fuel protests, we did it with the foot mouth, as you say, the military were very involved in security around the Olympics and all those sorts of things where you bring them in. But I think you've got to be very, very careful. And what you're seeing in Mexico is almost like they're becoming like an enterprise.

• 11:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's fascinating, isn't it? I mean, it is amazing what happens when they begin to take over. And we've seen historically Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, how quickly militaries can get involved in running businesses, how corruption takes over, and how often actually they turn out to be quite bad at running countries. They're very good at responding to the emergency. So they think we can come and clean things out and run the country well. And it turns out often that they're not awfully good at that. Right, another question for you. Alan Salazar, can you give us an update on political conditions in France and Macron in particular? And I believe, judging by your relaxed look, you may be actually in France as we speak.

• 12:26Alastair Campbell?

  Oui. Current poll of polls on Macron, 65% disapprove, 32% approve. Okay, so that's not good.

• 12:36Rory Stewart?

  Just to understand that, I never understand these polls and net approval ratings and this, that and the other. And how does one know what's good and what's bad with these things? What would be a good figure?

• 12:47Alastair Campbell?

  A good figure for a French, it's pretty rare for the French that they get above forty, fifty percent.

• 12:52Rory Stewart?

  Got you.

• 12:53Alastair Campbell?

  Since Macron was re-elected, he's never been above forty percent. He's been close a couple of times, but he's actually on the up. He's at the lowest point was during the whole sort of pension reform thing. He was down as low as twenty-seven percent on the poll of polls. So he's now up to thirty-two. If you look at the national party polls, and these are always a bit silly because, you know, the question is if there was an election tomorrow, of course, there isn't. But at the moment, looking at trends, the left, Mélenchon, he's doing pretty well. They're up at twenty-five percent. Le Pen's lot, the RN, they're on twenty-four percent, just below. And Macron's party is on twenty-two. And then Les Républicains, the sort of Tory party, they're down eleven, then you're down to the ragbag down below.

• 13:38Alastair Campbell?

  And again, that trend, that suggests Macron's slightly on the up, his party is on the down. They've gone from twenty-six back in November down to twenty-two.

• 13:48Rory Stewart?

  And the reason that matters is that he's not allowed to run again.

• 13:51Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 13:52Rory Stewart?

  What does this mean, Alastair, for the forthcoming election and when is it?

• 13:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you're not going to have an election for some time, but before that, you're going to have European elections, which are pretty important in the French context. In fact, Macron did a big interview at the weekend. I thought it was quite interesting. He made his assessment of his opponent's views on Europe a big part of what was clearly, I think, the beginnings of the contours of that campaign. He basically was saying that you can't trust Le Pen on Europe, she used to be in favour of taking us out, now she's not. You can't trust Mélenchon on Europe because nobody really knows what he stands on it. But I think that there's something very strange going on in French politics at the moment. If you look at the facts of France, got GDP growth that's going faster than either the

• 14:36Alastair Campbell?

  UK or Germany, got unemployment lower than it's been fifteen years. But he is still struggling to connect and it's this sort of this perception of arrogance has really kind of stuck through. But the problem for him politically is that, in a way, he's been a victim of his own success. His rise was such a sort of phenomenal thing that he completely destroyed the old left-right party system. And the mainstream left and mainstream right parties haven't really recovered. So what he's finding himself, he's up against these extremes without... Any sense of where the succession plan is going to come from. And I think that Obama, for example, his legacy was tainted by the fact that Trump followed him.

• 15:18Alastair Campbell?

  And I think Macron really worries that his legacy gets tainted if Le Pen follows him. Now, I still think it's not probable, but it's more possible than it was last time. And the other massive problem he's got is that because he lost, his party lost the majority in the assembly at last assembly elections, if you remember famously, he had to use this forty nine point three article of the constitution to get stuff through, which essentially is basically saying the government can pass a bill without a vote, which is not very democratic. He may have to use that again and again and again. And whether that sort of, you know, further weakens him. I think it's very, very hard to call, a long way to go. But I think that French politics is really going to be worth watching in the next, in

• 16:03Alastair Campbell?

  the next period. So I think let's take a quick break.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.

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• 17:24Alastair Campbell?

  Right Rory, this is definitely one for you. Ian McCullough. People always say be true to brand values, but I struggle to understand the brand values of the Conservatives compared to the clarity of previous years. What is today's Conservative brand and what do they stand for?

• 17:38Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's a hugely important question. It's not the brand that I cared about when I was Conservative. For me, being a Conservative, the brand was about, supposed to be, people disagree, but supposed to be about fiscal prudence, being careful with money. It was supposed to be about respect for tradition. It was supposed to be about a cautious incremental approach. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And for me, also, respect for landscape, history, traditions, the military, the monarchy, all this sort of stuff was bound into the Conservative brand.

• 18:11Alastair Campbell?

  So here's one for you. If in the very unlikely event that I was actually doing this podcast with Suella Braverman, not with you, what would her answer be to that question about what the brand is?

• 18:21Rory Stewart?

  So I think she'd say that she's on the side of small business people, low taxes, smaller state, getting on your bike, reducing the amount of immigration coming into the United Kingdom, being hard-headed and practical about money and costs on families, I guess, would be her pitch.

• 18:40Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think they're values or are they just sort of political postures?

• 18:43Rory Stewart?

  No, I think that they are values. I mean, I think there is a voter group. I mean, famously, a lot of the people who voted for Mrs Thatcher voted for her because they felt that she was going to cut their taxes, it's going to be smaller government, and it was going to give more opportunities for them to make money, buy their council houses, etc. And then I guess people who voted for Boris Johnson, Suella Braverman in 2019, particularly Red Wall voters, liked the idea of sovereignty, control over immigration, getting rid of Red Tate, challenging the elites in Westminster. So I think that there's a constituency for it.

• 19:18Alastair Campbell?

  All the things that they haven't been able to do. Did you see the footage of the first arrivals onto the barge at Portland?

• 19:25Rory Stewart?

  No, tell us about this.

• 19:27Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I thought it was pretty horrible. And I'd love to know She actually would think as she watched it, whether she'd actually think this is a moment of triumph. Because there we are, live across all the channels. These bedraggled people walking up the steps onto this floating barge. And there to be incarcerated till God knows when. You know, when actually surely what they need to be doing is investing in sorting out the backlogs and actually getting a a system that works. So I just think there's a kind of performative cruelty to her that I don't really like, and I certainly don't understand it.

• 19:58Rory Stewart?

  Here's one for you, Colin Jeffrey. Do we need a citizens' assembly for renewables? Listening to the discussions surrounding the need for electric grid infrastructure to support the transfer to and connection of renewable power sources. The issue of nimbyism quickly raises its head. Is this not the sort of issue where the use for citizens' assembly would be very useful to inform policy? Why do governments not rely on this option more to de-politicise issues and find consensus across parties and communities? So I'm a huge, huge supporter of this. Citizens' assembly is just quickly to remind people. This is where you get a randomly selected group of people meant to represent different demographic groups across the country. Like a jury, like 12 randomly selected people on a jury, in this case might be 300 people. Sit them down for two, three days with an expert.

• 20:43Rory Stewart?

  And the experts brief them and they get into the details of an issue and they make a recommendation. And it worked very, very well in Ireland as a way of resolving abortion issues. I think it could have been very powerful in finding a middle way towards a soft Brexit if we'd been brave enough to do it in Britain. And I think it's a very good thing to do on renewables because there's people who listened to yesterday's podcast will have picked up, we're in a world in which you have these two strange views. One of them is that it's easy to get to net zero and we don't need to worry too much about the politics. I agree, there are very few people who think that, but there are people who seem to suggest that. And then there are people who suggest that the end of the world's going to come. And of course, what the citizens' assembly, I hope, would reach is a compromise position which says, yeah, it's tough, but it's eminently doable. It's not as expensive as people think and these are the steps we need to take.

• 21:27Rory Stewart?

  So any views from you on citizens' assemblies?

• 21:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the other one that's happening, I think, still going on here in France, is the Citizens Assembly on assisted suicide. And interestingly, I mentioned the interview that Macron did with Figaro. He announced what he called, he loves these big things, he announced a grand scale political initiative. And I wonder whether this is going to be more citizens assemblies, because he said he wanted to work more closely with those who wanted to move forward in issues like climate change, public services, security, progress and immigration. There might be that he's just trying to sort of, you know, reach out to different parts of the parliamentary system. But I wonder whether on some of these issues where he's going to have real difficulty, for example, he is bringing forward an immigration bill. And the right are already up in arms about it because he wants to give an automatic leave to stay

• 22:14Alastair Campbell?

  to illegal immigrants who are working in sectors that are hit by labour shortages, which of course the right don't like. So whether actually he's going to try and, you know, bring the public into that. I think it would be a good idea and I wish that we use them more. Now, Michael Freeman, what do Rory and Alice to think about Canada's new bill, C eighteen, due to take effect one hundred and eighty days after June the twenty second? And how it could affect tech, news and politics worldwide. Are you across this one?

• 22:38Rory Stewart?

  No, tell us about it.

• 22:39Alastair Campbell?

  Canada's got this bill called C eighteen and it became law in June. And essentially, it is saying that tech companies have got to compensate those media organisations whose product, whose, whose content they use. And this is aimed directly at Google and Meta. And Google and Meta is very interesting. If you Google the issue, Rory, which you're probably doing right now. Don't be put off by the fact that the first sort of twenty things you'll see will be Google's, Google's own reaction to it. And why Google hate this. This is an argument that's been going back for years about how Google and now Meta, they just use all this stuff that local papers, regional papers, local television, you and I, they just will take stuff and put it onto their platforms. And this bill, this law now,

• 23:23Alastair Campbell?

  is going to make it impossible for them to do that without paying something to the people whose content they're using. And as a reaction, Google say they're just not going to be putting Canadian stuff on there.

• 23:35Rory Stewart?

  Huge issue, isn't it? Because these companies are making tens of billions, literally tens Of billions of dollars profits every year. And many people would suggest they're doing it basically by stealing our stuff. That they're stealing our data or they're stealing our news or they're stealing content produced by other people. And then making enormous amounts of money repackaging without paying the content producers. But obviously, that's their entire business model. So if we were to get rid of that in the way that C A team's trying to do, it is an existential threat to the profitability of Google and Meta. And to the whole way in which the internet basically works, which is generally open source. And in fact, the entire way that chat G B T and A I systems work, which is them being able to access this stuff for free.

• 24:19Alastair Campbell?

  If you look at the strike that's going on with, I mean, it's called the Hollywood strike, but it's going right throughout the creative industries at the moment in the United States. And you've now got individuals suing organizations because, for example, they're taking their books, their acting, their scripts. And they're feeding it into these large language models. And so basically, the owners of that work are saying, you can't do that. Now, when we talked to Paul Nurse, the head of the Crick Institute, if you remember, he said that, you know, with A I. We've got to get on top of this in a early in a way we failed to do with regard to social media. And I think this is another one where we saw the problems as Google was sort of, you know, conquering the world. We saw the problems.

• 25:01Alastair Campbell?

  I can remember talking to people in newspapers saying this is going to destroy us because they're, you know, their business model is going to destroy our ability to attract readers and advertisers. And to some extent, that has happened. So now the Canadian government is trying to, quotes, do something about it. Google is reacting very, very aggressively, as you would imagine. And meanwhile, the politics around this, the populist Canadian leader that we've talked about, Paul Evarra. He is running the line that this is all about Justin Trudeau trying to bring an Orwellian approach to news. And this is nineteen eighty four in Canada. So I think it's a classic example of where a genuine issue, we're addressing it too late.

• 25:42Alastair Campbell?

  And whilst we address it too late, it's so drowned in the politics of business and the politics of real politics. It's very, very hard to see how this is going to work.

• 25:51Rory Stewart?

  And of course, a real example of the limits of the power of an individual sovereign state unless you can get international cooperation. Because in the end, Canada doing it on its own is not going to be able to swing it. Britain doing something like this on its own can't swing it. And this is why cooperation between US and China is going to be vital if we're going to do anything around these really big issues around social media, tech, AI. Because at the moment, Google and Meta can just respond by shutting off all its services in Canada and not carrying Canadian news.

• 26:20Alastair Campbell?

  And that's what they're talking about doing. Very grateful to the person who asked the question because I think it's something that I've not seen much about in certainly in the UK media. But I think it's a massive issue this, and it's one that other governments are going to have to address sometime.

• 26:33Rory Stewart?

  Linda Rae, I've started to read Ian Dunst's book, How Westminster Works. Would be interested in Rory's comments on the privatization of the probation service. Finding it all so immensely disturbing and shocking that I'm not sure I'll be able to finish the book. So Chris Grayling decided to privatize half of the probation service in Britain, which is obviously the service that looks after offenders and people who've been released from prison.

• 26:58Rory Stewart?

  And it was a very interesting example of extreme private sector mentality applied to government. In theory, it sounded fine. The theory was that nearly 60% of people on short term prison sentences re-offended within a year of release. That there was a lot of evidence out there on how you could reduce re-offending through getting the right interventions on housing, on employment support, on mental health support, addiction support and other forms of support. And the idea was that if you set up the right financial incentives for charities and private sector companies in which you would pay them if they reduced re-offending and they would pay you if re-offending went up, you could get them to do it more efficiently and in a more focused way than government had been able to do.

• 27:42Rory Stewart?

  So this was all launched and the idea was that if these companies who bid for these contracts got and reduced re-offending, they would make, let's say, a hundred million pounds. And if, on the other hand, re-offending went up, they would have to pay the taxpayer fifty million pounds. Fast forward to the time at which I ended up in the Ministry of Justice, responsible for probation. And we were in a situation in which re-offending was soaring through the roof. The companies were exploiting loopholes in the contracts to say that they weren't even obliged to meet released prisoners because they were allowed to innovate to reduce reoffending. They were doing it to cut costs. And when we finally came to them and said, okay, could you please pay us the tens of millions of pounds that you owe us?

• 28:24Rory Stewart?

  They declared bankruptcy on their UK subsidiaries, despite the fact they were owned by massive international companies that could have covered the costs and simply walked away, forcing David Gork and myself, when we were in there, David Gork was my boss, to effectively renationalise the entire probation service and take it back into government hands.

• 28:44Alastair Campbell?

  A very nice plug for Ian Dunn's book there. Emily Maykirk, have either of you been to see Barbie or Oppenheimer? We need your thoughts.

• 28:52Rory Stewart?

  Answer from me, no. Over to you.

• 28:54Alastair Campbell?

  Answer from me, no, but I am definitely going to see them. In fact, Fiona and I are desperately trying to find a cinema where either or both will be showing, but what we don't want is dubbing. I can't stand watching films if they're dubbed. I don't mind if there are French subtitles on, that's fine, but I can't stand watching films that are dubbed. And I have to say, I really want to see both these films. When the whole Barbie hype thing started, I thought this is ridiculous, what this is all about. But everything that I've heard and read about it means that I really, really want to see it because it strikes me that it's actually very, very funny, but also a very, very important film. So I am definitely going to see Barbie and I'm definitely going to see Oppenheimer. Will you? Are you a cinema person, Rory?

• 29:35Rory Stewart?

  I love cinema, absolutely love cinema, yeah.

• 29:37Alastair Campbell?

  So will you go and see them?

• 29:39Rory Stewart?

  I will go and see them and I'm also extremely keen to see the new Tom Cruise Mission Impossible.

• 29:43Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Lord. I don't know if I want to see that. I'm not really into that sort of stuff. Although, talking of missions impossible type films, the other thing we're watching at the moment on Netflix is the three-part series on Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 29:55Rory Stewart?

  Oh, you'd like that, wouldn't you?

• 29:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we watched the first part last night. I didn't quite realise, one, he's got an amazing story to tell from his childhood, really troubled relationship with both his parents, troubled relationship with his brother, who later died in a car crash and that sort of obviously had quite a big effect on him, and had this feeling when he was growing up in Austria that actually he was American. Just always watching. But the whole story of, I didn't quite realise that bodybuilding was such a big thing. Some of the shots of the bodybuilding stuff are just kind of mind blowing. We talked about Trump on the main podcast and you can run for office for president from prison, you can do it with all sorts of bad stuff against your name. There are only four qualifications to be president. One of them is you have to be

• 30:39Alastair Campbell?

  born in the United States. I reckon Schwarzenegger, if he hadn't had the misfortune of being born in Austria, I think he could make a go of it. He comes across so well and he's a great storyteller. So I do recommend that if you haven't seen it yet. It's three hours worth of anybody's time. Very good. Okay. Well, thank you and look forward to speaking again very soon. Speak soon. All the best.

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