1. Putin in person, Russian money in British politics, and Bono vs Blair

What's Vladimir Putin like to deal with in person? On the first episode of "The Rest Is Politics", Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart tackle the latest developments in Ukraine, give their insight into the most effective next steps for NATO, explain how Russian money has affected British politics, and discuss celebrity activism. Follow us: Twitter Instagram Email the show: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Hello, I'm Rory Stewart. And I'm Alastair Campbell. Welcome to our new podcast, The Rest is Politics. Look, Alistair, we had grand plans for what we want to talk about. We were going to, I think, talk about our different backgrounds, our different political interests. We were going to talk about mental health. I was going to talk about Afghanistan. But we just suddenly found ourselves, I think, facing this insane situation in Ukraine, probably the biggest single thing since the Second World War in terms of European war.

• 2:08Alastair Campbell?

  I know, and it's just incredibly depressing. I'm sure I'm not alone in finding it very, very, very, very hard to sleep at the moment. I know we'll have lots of time, hopefully. Hopefully, this is the first of many. We'll cover all sorts of stuff on this podcast. But frankly, there is only one place to start. We're recording this on the morning, Tuesday, the 1st of March, so. How do we start talking about Ukraine?

• 2:32Rory Stewart?

  I think the first thing is is just the the scale of it. It it's almost unimaginable that for the first time since the Second World War, we're seeing an invasion of this scale taking place in Europe. And it undoes so many of the assumptions that people had since nineteen eighty nine, since the end of the Cold War. I mean, I remember when I was Chair of the Defence Committee and I was trying to argue for why we wanted to keep some troops in Europe and tanks in Europe and heavy bridging capacity. Essentially, people laughed at it and were saying, actually even quite recently, that the days of wars, land wars in Europe were over.

• 3:11Alastair Campbell?

  I think part of the problem is that Putin has been planning this kind of thing and building up to this kind of thing for some time. And at the moment, when you think about where it goes, he either retreats in humiliation, and I think the chances of that are negligible, or he just keeps going and going and going and going. And and I think part of part of Putin's modus operandi, particularly in the kind of the the second half of his of his rule, I think I think it's been interesting to watch him develop, but he he he doesn't stop. And we saw that in, you know, he's still in Syria. He exploits weakness wherever he sees it. And I think at the moment, he's seen an awful lot of weakness and he's exploiting it.

• 3:55Alastair Campbell?

  So it's very, very hard to work out where it goes.

• 3:58Rory Stewart?

  There is one big thing we can do, which will make a huge difference. But I mean, I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about Putin. But quickly, I think the one big thing is oil and gas. I think that is so central to the Russian economy. And it's going to be very costly for Germany and Italy, forty percent of their gas, more than forty percent in Italy's case, to cut that off and have an impact on the European global economy. But it can totally be done. There are alternative sources. People can convert to oil, they can bring in liquid national gas from Qatar, from the US. We need to do that immediately. That is the one thing that Putin assumes will not be done, and that's the one thing that will have a huge impact. But tell us, Al, so you've actually met the guy, which I haven't. What what what is your sense of Putin as a man?

• 4:37Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I saw him in various phases. We first, Tony Blair first met Putin before he became president. And I remember the Foreign Office being a little bit worried that we shouldn't be seeing him before he became president. But everybody knew that he was going to be president, and it was a little bit sort of, you know, trying to get ahead of the game in a way. And it's funny, I was looking at some of the news footage that they were playing on the BBC the other night. He looks completely different today to how he did then, and it's not just age. Because actually, he is de-aged with all his botox and his plastic surgery and all the rest of it. But he looked very, almost timid. Um, very slight, very small, very quite quiet.

• 5:21Alastair Campbell?

  And I think at that stage had decided that he was going to, if you like, look more favorably towards the West than historically maybe people like him have done. Um, and I think then the next phase was where he started to perhaps understand how difficult reform was in Russia, but also I think he started to feel his power. And I can remember, I think it was two thousand and three, and I left Downey Street in two thousand and three. So that probably the last time I saw him face to face. He was a completely different animal already. He phoned, the Russians got in touch with number ten. They invited Tony Blair out, it was literally like a day trip.

• 6:05Alastair Campbell?

  And we thought this might be a bridge building exercise. And we got there and we landed and we got flown to some place in the middle of nowhere, which is his vast dacha with swimming pools and stallions and butlers and all the sort of stuff you associate with, you know, newfound oligarchical wealth. And he proceeded to, I can't even, that humiliates the wrong word because Tony doesn't sort of lend himself to humiliation, but just to abuse him. And to shout and to, he was really, really raging about the Americans in every single aspect of foreign policy. And basically, he didn't say Bush's poodle, but it wasn't far off. And was he doing this on camera or he was just doing this privately? No, what happened was we got there, had a meeting.

• 6:50Alastair Campbell?

  Then there was a very short sort of press conference and he really laid in. I'll never forget, Trevor Cavanagh of The Sun was there. And I'll never forget the look on Trevor Cavanagh's face. He's sort of, I think they'd gone there thinking this was just a sort of, you know, going to be a non-event day trip. And he suddenly realised, oh, this is quite a big story here. And then we went into dinner and it was at the dinner that he really, really started to lay in. Um, and I remember coming out, David Manning, he was our main foreign affairs advisor. And he said, I've never, ever, ever seen anything like that. And I said, that's sort of the death of diplomacy. He said, exactly. Anyway, so that's two thousand and three. We're almost two decades on.

• 7:33Alastair Campbell?

  So if that was the change between ninety nine and two thousand and three, why should we think that he hasn't changed in many, many, many ways since?

• 7:42Rory Stewart?

  It's bizarre watching him too, isn't it? Because as you say, his um, his face has that very, very odd shape that you get from kind of billionaires who are using weird sort of, I don't know what they use, some unspeakable sort of treatment on their on their features. And it's um, and as you say, this insane table is extreme Covid regulations, the sense in the last televised event that the head of his Foreign Intelligence Service looks completely sort of paralyzed and terrified when Putin's talking. The the invasion Crimea was said in twenty fourteen was an all night event where he was consulting with these people, trying to convince them. This time, it seems as though he didn't consult at all. And that's actually what's made

• 8:25Rory Stewart?

  the really impressive achievement of American intelligence. Um, because really, they called the whole thing. I mean, it's the one big success. In fact, actually, we should. People sometimes ask what the use of intelligence is, but here, because the CIA basically found the entire invasion plan and then decided to go public with it three weeks ago and said, this guy's going to invade on this date, completely destroyed Putin's attempt to pretend it was a spontaneous reaction to, you know, genocide in Ukraine or some provocation to Ukraine, and actually gave the West three weeks to build up and also gave three weeks to a lot of people to embarrass themselves, saying, don't worry, he's never going to invade.

• 9:08Rory Stewart?

  The Americans are crying wolf. This is ridiculous, including actually, you know, the ex head of the British Intelligence Service saying, if anybody thinks this guy is going to roll into Kiev and try to occupy Ukraine, of course, that's not going to happen. So I I think it's been interesting that that it's probably the the biggest intelligence success in the last twenty five years.

• 9:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it's very hard to define it in those terms when you see what's actually happening now. It's all very well to know something is going to happen. It's what you do to prevent it.

• 9:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Alastair Campbell?

  And what do you do when it happens? And I think that's where at the moment we look a little bit, as you indicated earlier, like we're catching up after the event and we're. You do have a sense of, you know, we all feel powerless, but even the people in power, I think, are feeling quite powerless.

• 9:50Rory Stewart?

  And there's a lot of bluff, isn't there? There's a lot of people, you know, saying we're sending X amount of money and it turns out to be, you know, we're sending eighty million at the same time when yesterday, I believe, Europe transferred three hundred million to Russia to pay for oil and gas. So the kind of gap between what we claim we're doing and what we're actually doing is still very extreme.

• 10:12Alastair Campbell?

  But what what do you do? You you talked about bluff. What what when you have a situation where he's he he denies he's going to invade, but everybody knows that he is. And as you say, they the Americans kind of got it almost hour by hour.

• 10:26Alastair Campbell?

  I did feel a little bit worried that the the default position of most of the Western leaders as that was happening was essentially to say to their own public opinion. Don't worry, we will not be fighting him in Ukraine. Now, I completely understand why, okay? But if you're sitting there as Putin and your entire strategy is founded upon strength. Are you not seeing weakness that you think they can't come back from? He can come back from lies because that's what he does. He can say, I'm not doing something. He does it and he gives an excuse. They can't come back from that.

• 11:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Alastair Campbell?

  So.

• 11:02Rory Stewart?

  I I think one of the interesting things there is it is the dynamic that happens inside government, which is that these politicians will be sitting with their intelligence people and their generals. Who will be pointing out to them that they have very, very few military options. And this is partly because, you know, Britain, it's extraordinary what's happened to the British military, right? When British military went into Iraq, it was able to deploy two thousand and three. When he left down in Sweden, able to deploy nearly seventy thousand soldiers onto the ground. Today, the British military struggles to maintain three or four thousand soldiers in the field. And the entire size of the British army is now smaller than the amount that was deployed in in the in the Second Second Gulf War.

• 11:44Rory Stewart?

  And they will have pointed out that we don't have the tanks. We don't begin to match nearly two hundred thousand Russian troops. And they will also be falling back on all the hard-won lessons, the Cold War. And the central lesson of the Cold War was you do not go into a hot war with nuclear armed Russia in Europe.

• 12:04Alastair Campbell?

  But the the the point about when Putin comes out and says you'll face consequences like you've never felt before. And people think, oh, nuclear, and then he actually does the thing about, you know, putting nuclear forces on upping the alert and then that nonsense, you know, about blaming less trust and all this sort of stuff that they that they were doing. But I guess what keep what is keeping me awake at night, I think, is actually whether you think there is, whether we think there is anything that can be can be done beyond what is being done. Or are we actually, the minute you start to talk about no-fly zones and all the rest of it, are we literally saying, well, that's Third World War? Are we actually in the Third World War already? Which Fiona Hill, the I've just been reading an interview with her, American Russian policy expert.

• 12:49Alastair Campbell?

  She's basically saying we've been in the Third World War for some time because he has been waging it. She makes the point, people keep saying, would he use nukes, right? Well, she makes the point that he already has in terms of killing some of his dissidents. And what was it that was used to poison Litvinenko in the UK? What was, what is Novichok if not a kind of a weapon that you could, so I think that her point is that we keep wanting to believe that he won't go further and he'll go as far as he can get away with.

• 13:22Rory Stewart?

  So so then the big gamble that we've made, the gamble the West has made since nineteen eighty nine, has been to take a peace dividend. So we've obviously put an enormous amount of money into building our economies, building our social services off the back of dropping military spending. So France probably saving

• 13:41Rory Stewart?

  proportional terms, maybe spending a hundred billion pounds less a year than it would have been spending if it had kept up its old defence spending. And all of that in the UK and France, Germany has gone into building up our health systems or education systems. And what we have concluded is that that means that we have better, more resilient, more prosperous societies. And we need to make that count now. We need to show that it's not Putin that's the sleeping giant. We're the sleeping giant and that when democracies wake up, we can use the fact that our cumulative economies, Europe, United States, are twenty times the size of Putin's economy. And we have to use that.

• 14:16Rory Stewart?

  And that's why I think we must immediately stop the oil and gas imports and not worry about the fact that it will have an economic impact on us, because the economic impact it will have on us is tiny compared to what it will do with Russia. But I don't think it makes sense, honestly, to imagine that we are prepared to get into no-fly zones, because a no-fly zone is effectively aerial combat with Russian planes in a non-NATO country.

• 14:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. No, but by the way, Roy, I don't think you can get away. I don't know if you're still a conservative, if you still identify as a conservative, but all that stuff about we're spending more on health and social services, one of the reasons that our military has been cut to the bone was a decade of austerity. I think we just have to lay that on the record. And that was a political choice by the party that you so loyally served and campaigned for.

• 15:04Rory Stewart?

  That's absolutely right, Alistair. I'm with you on the austerity and the cuts, but we were spending probably five, six percent of our GDP on defence, and we now spend two percent is considered a stretch. And that was something that under Mr Thatcher, and under John Major, and under Tony Blair, and Gordon Ramsay, very conscious peace dividend, we don't need these big troops, we don't need to spend five percent of our GDP on defence. So we've made that decision, and let's now vindicate it. Let's justify it by demonstrating why economic strength actually counts and matters. And that's what we're not doing yet.

• 15:34Alastair Campbell?

  I did, I watched Scholz's speech in the Bundestag. I don't know if I told you, I'd become re-obsessed with the German language. During lockdown, I did a few Goethe Institute courses, and I now, I just watch the German news a lot to help my German. And what was really interesting about Scholz's speech, I mean, he's not a firebrand orator by any manner of means, but there were three points in his speech, it was about 25 minutes, half an hour long, there were three points where he got a kind of spontaneous standing ovation, okay, from pretty much the whole of the parliament, I would say. One was at the end, when he just said, we are fighting to defend our values, and, you know, that was obvious,

• 16:15Alastair Campbell?

  they got up for that. The other was a bit where I think he looked genuinely surprised at the level of the applause that he got, when he simply said, we should salute the courage of those people in Russia who were protesting against Putin's war. He called it Putin's Krieg, Putin's Krieg, Putin's War relentlessly. He barely said the word Russia. But he praised the Russian, the Russian people. But then the other bit was when he said, and he made this huge, for the Germans, this huge change, where he said, we are now, he, he committed to at least two percent of GDP on defence. And virtually the whole parliament, there were a few kind of heckles, but virtually the whole parliament got up and applauded that and thought that, that is a change.

• 16:58Rory Stewart?

  An incredible change because it will make Germany the military superpower of Europe. And they're talking about, you know, he's talking about spending a hundred billion almost immediately to upgrade their forces. That's, you know, more than twice the UK defence budget and the German economy is much bigger than us. So if they start spending two percent, we're going to end up with a very, very significant German military. And it, it's, as you say, it's not just, you know, change for Germany. It's a massive change for Scholz himself, for his political party. But it also cast Angela Merkel in a very interesting light. I mean, she's always been one of my real political heroes. She, I think she's extraordinary and she always seemed to me to be, I think she did brilliantly in the early days of Covid. I thought she was very brave, uh, in the way that she dealt with Syrian refugees.

• 17:39Rory Stewart?

  I think she was a very thoughtful, steadying politician. But her legacy is now going to be badly damaged by the way that she miscalculated Putin.

• 17:49Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Well, the other, the other former chancellor that was around in, in our time, of course, was Gerhard Schröder, who's, um, so, so in league with Putin that it's.

• 18:01Rory Stewart?

  That, that, that's bizarre. Can you talk, talk me a little bit about that? Because that, that is something, if I'm going to push back at the austerity thing, I might be pushing back at you. One of the things that, one of the things that always seems a bit weird from, from outside is that, of course, people, quite rightly have stereotypes of right wing people going out, making large sums of money with banks and things. But it's quite striking, uh, and it's not just true of New Labour. In the case of Schröder, he was a proper left wing politician from a working class background. And the guy decided to make tens of millions effectively working for these big Putin connected oil and gas companies in Russia. I mean, what's going on there?

• 18:37Alastair Campbell?

  I honestly don't know. I, I always liked Schröder. I thought he was a very impressive guy. I thought actually he did when we were doing that whole Neuer Mitter thing, you know, the third way. He was, I think he was genuinely trying to, to push on reform and it, and it felt very, very exciting what was going on there. But then I think once he lost power, I think there's no doubt he, he, he chose that route. And, um, it's very, very depressing to watch. He actually gets a lot less grief. Politically in Germany than you than you might expect. I think people know about the relationship, but he it's it's it's a very, very strange thing. He's not he's not perceived as I think he he would maybe particularly now. But look at the way that some of the British politicians, look at look at the way that Farage is rightly, in my view, getting it in the neck at the moment for some of the things he said in the past

• 19:22Alastair Campbell?

  about about about Putin. I can claim a little bit of credit for that. My very first ever interview with G Q I did was with Farage and and I didn't deliberately lay a trap. I just sort of basically asked him what he thought about Putin and he he started to wax lyrical about, you know, how much he admired strong leaders and and so forth. Alex Salmon did the same. I interviewed him as well.

• 19:44Rory Stewart?

  It's very weird that, isn't it? And it's also, sorry, again, look, I'm very interested in this too. What is it that's going on with bits of the old left which makes them instinctively so pro-Russian? I mean, you get a hint of it with Corbyn, you get a strong sense of it with George Galloway. What on earth is going on? Because it's as though communism vanished. So you can understand why there was a, you know, a good response to Russia when it was the great standard bearer for socialism. But what on earth leads people to still be sympathetic towards Putin's Russia?

• 20:13Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's part of a sort of romanticism. I think Stalin, you know, don't forget there are there are still Stalinists around who who think that that is. And if you go back to, you know, we talked about Salisbury earlier, just remember, do you remember how Corbyn, trying to get Corbyn, and I think Seamus Milne was the sort of big influence there, trying to get Corbyn just to sort of, it was almost like, you know, there are good people on both sides. It was it was like that was the, he couldn't quite bring himself. And as our security services came out and said, well, this, you know, we've got this, and we've got this, and we piece this together. And then it's, oh, yeah, well, you know, they're straight into what about, you know, what about Iraq and what about

• 20:54Alastair Campbell?

  this? And I don't know is the short answer. But I think it's, I think it's, I guess with somebody like Galloway, you know, I'll never forget Galloway, of course, with Saddam. He was, you know, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability. Um, they like the pa- they like the powerful people who are against us.

• 21:13Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 21:13Alastair Campbell?

  I guess it's as simple as that. I don't know.

• 21:15Rory Stewart?

  And and anti-American too. They like the anti-American bit.

• 21:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, the the American is the big bad guy and and we're too close to the Americans. That's the view. Um, and there's something though about about Putin. I was gonna say it was it was this is a very much a male thing, but then I saw I was watching a demonstration in um in Paris uh on the on the news and it was the it was the Gilets Jaunes. And there was a a young, uh, very French, very attractive young woman who was talking. And the the the and the needless to say, this was on R T, Russia Today. And the interviewer said, so but what do you want from Macron? What do you want in these protests?

• 21:59Alastair Campbell?

  And she said, we want him to be like Putin, looking after his people like Putin looks after the Russian people. It's incredible.

• 22:05Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary. But I I I remember when I first went to Iraq in two thousand and three, I took a taxi from Amman into Baghdad. And it was a long, long journey and we were going through Fallujah and it was quite dangerous. And talking to the taxi driver. And he said to me, Saddam Hussein is, you know, the most wonderful man. And I said, um, but but but, you know, we pass on these big palaces. What was happening? You know, these guys built these big palaces. And he said, no, no, Saddam has done so much for his people that he doesn't need to do anymore. He can now build big palaces for himself because everybody in Iraq is is so well off and it's so terrific. And then you got these little hints of these extraordinary moments. I mean, there was this um this great moment just before the invasion where there was a a a interview with one of the Iraqis.

• 22:49Rory Stewart?

  And um Saddam, I think, had just got ninety nine point nine percent in the election. And somebody said, is it really true he got ninety nine point nine percent? And the Iraqi said, perhaps even more.

• 23:02Alastair Campbell?

  Got the full under. Listen, there's been a lot, Rory, about around in our debate about the the influence of the sort of oligarch class and and and the, you know, obviously Abramovich, very, very high profile, Lebedev, very high profile. I mentioned all the the oligarchs up on Hampstead Heath and an awful lot of MPs, Tory MPs, who have taken money for their local campaigns from from Russians. And that, again, I think, has been part of this, you know, very long term strategic approach to subverting democracies. Did you ever, were you ever aware of that going on? And were you ever?

• 23:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So you're absolutely right. There was a lot of this going on. And I think in in my case, I had to draw lines between taking money between people who were oligarchs. But I did take a donation from a guy who was a Russian. He was a Russian who worked for an American bank, so he wasn't an oligarch. But it's it's interesting how even today-

• 24:00Alastair Campbell?

  Was that for your, as an MP or for your mayoral campaign?

• 24:01Rory Stewart?

  As as an MP. And it was very interesting. I've been trying to work your way through this. I mean, one of the problems, I think, in British politics is getting to the bottom of these questions of financing. When I was running mayoral campaign as an independent, I was running against people who were spending, and this is Labour and Conservative candidates, spending two, three million pounds in those campaigns. So the pressure, and I think this is why we need campaign finance reform, to take donations to try to get up to that. It's very difficult to make two, three million pounds.

• 24:30Alastair Campbell?

  Well, three, three million, three millions a period in modern Tory currency, isn't it?

• 24:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. But I think the, I think the, people are right to ask the question. I think I would say, in defence of myself and colleagues, it's important to differentiate between taking money from an oligarch who's close to Putin and taking money from somebody who's living in Britain, is British, works for an American bank, and happens to have a Russian surname.

• 24:55Alastair Campbell?

  Right. I mean, I think- Yeah, but an awful lot, a lot, an awful lot of these oligarchs were sort of, they they were helped to become. British in a way that very, very few of the Ukrainians currently fleeing war and persecution are going to be.

• 25:09Rory Stewart?

  So and and then the big question, I guess, in political donations, which which is what tried to guide me, is the question of is there a conflict of interest here? Is this person actually going to influence you to do something that you don't want to do? Is this person going to ask you to do something that you wouldn't do? And that for me was always the red line. I wouldn't take money from somebody if I felt they were going to put pressure on me or ask me to do something. Or if there was a conflict of interest, if I felt that by taking money from this person, I would be prevented from doing the right thing. And I think, to be fair, I don't really want to be fair to Boris Johnson because I think he's a terrible human being, terrible prime minister. But one hasn't got a sense over the last few weeks that this has prevented them from being pretty aggressive and challenging towards Putin.

• 25:50Alastair Campbell?

  Do you really think so?

• 25:52Rory Stewart?

  Do you do you feel he's been held back? Do you feel?

• 25:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I I feel that on the sanctions, they were pretty slow. I mean, it was it wasn't, as you said earlier, it wasn't as if people didn't know this was going to happen. There'd been lots of talk, you know, there was lots of talk, they're going to be the toughest sanctions package ever. I think we've been slightly dragged kicking and screaming in it. And I when you looked at the list, for example, of the the individuals who've been sanctioned by the European Union.

• 26:16Alastair Campbell?

  I think that was a far more comprehensive list and with far tougher sanctions. I just, I don't know. And I think it's also very difficult to know when. You say you wouldn't do anything with a conflict of interest. I I think I'd have been very suspicious, maybe wrongly, but I think I'd have been very suspicious about any Russian money.

• 26:34Rory Stewart?

  It it takes taking money from anybody with a Russian surname, regardless of what their job was?

• 26:39Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 26:40Rory Stewart?

  I mean, because that that's that's what we're getting into now, right? People are saying you've taken money from somebody who's of Russian ethnicity. They take no interest in what their actual job is. I mean, I think you've got to focus on who the person is.

• 26:49Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, okay. I I guess I'm thinking more about, I forgot the the guy's name who who donated money to over a hundred conservative parties. I don't believe he was doing that for the good of his health. I really don't. Um. Now, look, there are, I've donated to the Labour Party and, and, and I hope I haven't done it in a way of, if I was doing it to buy influence, it clearly didn't work because I got kicked out. But, um, I, I sort of, I, I think that, I don't know, I'd be, I, I do worry when I see some of the arguments that people like Dominic Raab have been making recently, who I know did take money from Russians, as did a lot. I think it's, you know, a substantial number of the cabinet had Russian money in their campaigns. I'm not saying, quotes, all

• 27:28Alastair Campbell?

  Russian money is dirty, but we did allow London to become, uh, the laundromat. That's what they call it.

• 27:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Alastair Campbell?

  And, you know, I just think it should make people very, very wary.

• 27:40Rory Stewart?

  I, I think we should be wary. I think we should be very wary of the way campaign financing works in general. I mean, it's a really big problem. It's a big problem, the amount of influence the trade unions wield. It's a big problem, the amount of influence wealthy people influence over the Conservative Party. And I think the way that we fund things is crazy. I think the, the best thing about British politics is the limits on the local constituency campaigns. The great thing about that is that when I was running, it was, I think we couldn't spend more than seventeen thousand pounds in the last few weeks of the campaign, which meant that that was something that you could raise from, you know, your own savings, from small donations locally. The problem is these big national campaigns, when people are spending millions, when the television stuff, it's not as bad as America, but it's bad.

• 28:22Alastair Campbell?

  It's nowhere near as bad as America.

• 28:24Rory Stewart?

  I think we should, we would be a much, much healthier society if we stop this. And I, I mean, stopping it all, stopping the trade union money pouring into Labour and stopping the wealthy money pouring into the Conservatives.

• 28:33Alastair Campbell?

  Right. But then the only way to fund political parties is through state funding. And given the reputation of politics, I just can't see the politicians being up for asking the public to fund it.

• 28:41Rory Stewart?

  Much better, though. Much better for our democracy.

• 28:44Alastair Campbell?

  All right, Rory, we're going to take a short break now. Uh, we hope you're enjoying listening to me and Rory Stewart, Pratley Way. We'll be back in a moment.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  We don't need the jingle twice.

• 29:29Speaker 02

  Stop it. This is about vacation inflation and how Priceline negotiates amazing deals on hotels, flights and rental cars.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I didn't mention that you can save up to 60% off hotels in the Priceline app. Fine. No one deals more deals than.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Please stop. Touche. Priceline.

• 29:57Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back. You're listening to The Rest Is Politics with Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart. Each week Rory and I are going to explore current affairs, both home and abroad. We're also going to reach back in time to recall the events we experienced firsthand when at the very heart of British politics. In my case, New Labour, Northern Ireland, Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin.

• 30:16Rory Stewart?

  And in my case, Afghanistan, the Foreign Office and my fight with Boris Johnson for the soul of the Conservative Party.

• 30:25Alastair Campbell?

  Which you lost. We want you to get involved. We want your questions, your observations, your opinions, sometimes even your corrections. Please follow us on Twitter at Rest Is Politics. Note no the. Now Rory, that was inevitably fairly heavy, fairly sad. So why don't we try and kick off part two by trying to think of something that cheered us up a bit or inspired us. And I'm going to start by telling you a little story about a recent visit that I made not far from where I am now in my house in London to Pentonville Prison. I know that like you, I spend a lot of time in prisons and I was with the mental health

• 31:08Alastair Campbell?

  team in Pentonville and I met this guy who's a three times murderer, been in prison for over two decades. And he was telling me about. Their experience during Covid. And the most moving thing that really sort of did inspire me, he said that once it was obvious that Covid was going to be absolutely awful for everybody, and that the the staff were worried and the governor was worried and the prisoners were worried and so forth. He said there was actually a sort of camaraderie. And he realised just how short-staffed the prison staff were. And once they heard about the Thursday night clap for carers, he said they organised it so that they were clapping inside their cells for the staff.

• 31:53Rory Stewart?

  That's great.

• 31:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it was quite a touch by that.

• 31:55Rory Stewart?

  That's great. So you asked me, I don't know whether you can hear in the background, but you can make faintly hear the call to prayer. And I'm I'm speaking to you from Jordan.

• 32:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 32:04Rory Stewart?

  I I live in a house literally underneath a mosque. So I get woken up at four in the morning. And I guess what's making me happy is I've got my um, my seven-year-old, my four-year-old, my wife here with us. We're working on a project which is working with Jordanians and Syrian refugees, mostly up in northern Jordan. But the real thing that's been making me happy is getting a chance to take my boys out walking. And we walked down and up these steep hills through the through the bazaar. And yesterday I

• 32:33Rory Stewart?

  took took both of them to a knife maker. And for ten pounds, you can commission a really beautiful knife. And Sasha, who's seven, sat there. And he was allowed to work on every detail of how you fit the wooden handle, how you carve the the metal wrapping around the scabbard, how you, in his case, blunted rather than sharpened the blade and whatever, a sharp blade he could poke his brother with.

• 32:58Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, if you were spotted doing that in your former constituency of Penrith, I think you'd be in a bit of trouble, not least with Priti Patel.

• 33:06Rory Stewart?

  I probably would, probably would. That's right. Well, the other thing that's, I mean, the other thing, I mean, it's such an amazing, I mean, obviously, it's a real privilege to be someone like this. But I was really struck that yesterday we we went in to to buy a pair of sneakers for for the four-year-old. And immediately, obviously, what happened is that the guy in the shoe shop had a big plate of chicken liver and bread out on the counter and he wouldn't let us look at the shoes until the four-year-old, the seven-year-old me had all stuck our hands into the chicken liver and got going before the shoes came out. It's, it's, it's, I think it's really good for them. I think it's, it's, um, it's, I think it's strange for children to grow up only in, in the Western world and I think it's great to, to be out and about.

• 33:48Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I can hear the calls to prayer now. It's a beautiful sound.

• 33:51Rory Stewart?

  It's very beautiful. He's got a very beautiful voice and, and actually, everything is around the city. Everybody starts at slightly different times, depending, I think, on when they see the sun cross the horizon from their minarets. So you'll now hear two or three different calls to prayer, but it's all starting at different times around this part of the city.

• 34:08Alastair Campbell?

  I've got some extraordinary memories of, of, of Jordan, good and bad. Uh, I'll give you, I mean, good is the wrong way to describe it, but one of the most extraordinary events I ever attended with, uh, with TB was King Hussein's funeral. It was absolutely extraordinary. Virtually every leader in the world was there and, and one of my abiding memories was of Bill Clinton boasting to Jack Shirak that he'd done more bilaterals on the stairs than he had, because Shirak insisted on sitting down to do all his bilaterals. Uh, and the sad memory is, is that I, I was, I was in Amman on the day I got a phone call saying that my mother had had a stroke and I, I never saw her alive again. So that, Joe, it's funny, isn't it, how places can have such meaning and so that you, you, you end up there and we're, we're talking about it and it brings back all

• 34:54Alastair Campbell?

  sorts of memories.

• 34:55Rory Stewart?

  That's awful. That's awful. And I, um, and I think, um, that sense, as you say, of not being able to be with your mother in her last moments.

• 35:01Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. It's pretty horrible. So what, what are you actually doing? You're obviously not going the David Cameron Greensill lobbying route. You're not going the George Osborne, let's have 15 jobs on different banks. You're going a very different route, Rory.

• 35:12Rory Stewart?

  Not, not even, so cheekily, going the Tony Blair advising the Kazakh route. Um, no, I, I'm, I'm working, working with a, a nonprofit, with a, a charity, uh, which is, um, working with Palestinians and Syrian refugees and particularly with craftspeople. So one of the things that happened with the Syrian war is that these incredible craftspeople who have been operating in places like Damascus and Aleppo suddenly lost everything, ended up in refugee camps, literally in tents or in the back rooms of people's houses. And they often were running quite big businesses, but they'd lost all their machinery, all their apprentices, all their market connections. And we've been working to try to rebuild it because. I think one of the things I learnt in international development is that it's great

• 35:54Rory Stewart?

  to have projects where people feel a real sense of positive pride, where people are not just feeling that they're sort of charity cases and that Brits or Europeans or Americans are coming in and saying, we're going to make you more like us, or you don't have all these things we have, but instead finding something which is really beautiful that the world wants to buy and rebuilding incomes, jobs, communities out of that.

• 36:19Alastair Campbell?

  I remember the trailer for this podcast, it said, I think it was, I used to be Tony Blair's spokesman, now my own, so I won't rebut your vicious attack on Tony Blair's excellent post-politics public service work that he does all around the world. But I will say, I think it's, I do think it's great that you've gone down that route, but does that mean, have you chosen to leave Britain behind? Are you trying to leave British politics behind?

• 36:48Rory Stewart?

  I'm definitely leaving Boris Johnson's version of British politics behind. I mean, it feels a bit, feels a bit cheap to be laying into him, and when I do think this Ukraine crisis is very serious. But there was definitely, I mean, I've become an independent, I've left the Conservative Party, and I have been very, very disturbed by the direction British politics is going. So yes, look, I, you know, I love Britain and I was a British civil servant for, I don't know, 20 years on and off. But I don't, at the moment, there's no real space for me and I feel I can contribute more day to day, working somewhere like Jordan, than I feel that there's space for me to do in Britain, because Boris Johnson is certainly not, not queuing up to give me anything to do.

• 37:33Alastair Campbell?

  I am, I'm a little bit like you. I've sort of laid off laying into Johnson too much in recent days with all this going on, but a part of me does think that he'll, a part of him will be sitting there thinking, ah, this is, I'm saved now, I can get through this. Nobody's, nobody's going to get rid of me while there's a war on.

• 37:52Rory Stewart?

  I think it's fascinating. I think that's one of the other things that Putin's done. I think Boris Johnson was in real trouble. Think the May elections would have finished him off. And it seemed to me inevitable to be gone. And my goodness, he is a guy with more lives than a cat. It's extraordinary.

• 38:09Alastair Campbell?

  He could, he could, he could still be gone. I still think, I still agree with you. I think he's, you know, it's terrible that we have him as as Prime Minister. I'll say the other thing that really has been getting my goat in recent days, if we just think about the British response on this, is that that you were Secretary of State for Department of International Development. Um, and I do think people can criticize Tony Blair all they want, but I do think that under his and Gordon Brown's leadership, Britain became a real, I hate to use the phrase aid superpower, but you know what I mean? And when you see us now scrabbling in the way that we are about whether Ukrainians can come and what the rules are, and that Immigration Minister talking about, you know, can they pick fruit and all this, it's horrible. And and I just, I just wonder what you feel in terms of thinking, well, you ran that big department

• 38:54Alastair Campbell?

  that in this situation would have had an incredible influence over what plays out, and it no longer exists.

• 39:01Rory Stewart?

  It's very, very sad. I mean, it's incredibly sad. I didn't think maybe people from the outside understood what DIFID achieved and how much respect it had around the world. It was absolutely not just one of the largest development agencies in the world, but it was seen as one of the smartest, most thoughtful. That wasn't perfect, but many, many projects that I won't see that disappointed me. But the quality of thinking and challenge that came out of DIFID was extraordinary.

• 39:27Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. And they won't, they won't, they won't have power within this new FCDO, they, they, they don't have the power. And you can see that from when you see Liz Truss and, and there's, there's no sense of it being a priority, development aid, it's just, there's no sense of it being a priority.

• 39:41Rory Stewart?

  But the budget's been cut and a lot of very talented people are leaving. They can't see the point anymore. It's very, very sad. Because they feel that they're being not taken seriously as professionals. I mean, your bigger point about Ukrainians and refugees is one also I really feel that Britain's missing a chance on. This is an extraordinary chance to step up and form a proper. Coalition for refugees, that's Afghans, that's for Ukrainians. And we've got really bad at it. I mean, actually, again, Ted Heath in the nineteen seventies made a big, bold, good decision on taking in Asians.

• 40:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 40:17Rory Stewart?

  Ugandan nations. It was a big decision and it was the right decision. And the United States made that decision on the Vietnamese boat people. Late seventies, early eighties, very, very similar situation to Afghanistan. Been fighting a war for twenty years. Huge obligations, a lot of people on the move. But now, really, only countries like Canada and Sweden have consistently been taking serious numbers of refugees. And I want, I want to have a target. I'd like to say that we should be taking point zero five percent of our populations annually. And that Britain should be making a coalition. That, that's a number just above what the US is taking, it's below what Canada's taking. But it's about double what the UK is currently taking, and this could be a chance to step up.

• 40:54Alastair Campbell?

  But it's very, but they're pursuing it. It's a very deliberate strategy. I mean, it's classic gaslighting. I, I saw an extraordinary quote from Johnson the other day, he said, uh, nobody can dispute that we are leading the way in our willingness to take people.

• 41:09Alastair Campbell?

  Not leading the way to take you, in our willingness. Now, whose willingness are we talking about? Um, and look, I do get that the politics of this are very, very difficult, and you've had a situation here where the whole Brexit thing was about quote, quotes, taking back control of our borders and they want to seem to be tough, et cetera. But I think that their whole Brexit strategy looks a bit odd as well, when you see the European Union. Um, after a pretty slow and sluggish start like everybody else, sort of getting its act together. And then you see Zelensky. One of his most important calls has been to say, you know, we want to be part of the European Union.

• 41:41Rory Stewart?

  And that's of course what, what in some ways triggered this. I mean, that's really what scared Putin in twenty fourteen. It wasn't NATO. He keeps talking about NATO. What really threatens him is the idea of Ukraine becoming a European Union member. The idea that a proper democratic prosperous country right on Russia's borders is what scares him.

• 41:57Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. What do you, how do you feel about, I, I, I wrote a piece a few months ago for the New European. I was sort of trying to be nice to some Tories. And I said that, I wrote this piece sort of putting together an alternative cabinet. Um. That was from the back benches. And there are some impressive people on the Tory back benches. Um. You know, when I, in fact, you were talking earlier about people saying we wouldn't, we'd never have another tank war. One of the things I watched the other day was that select committee liaison committee appearance of Johnson, where he had that. I don't know if you saw it, a pretty stiff exchange with Tobias Elwood.

• 42:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 42:28Alastair Campbell?

  Because Tobias Elwood was saying, no, you're cutting conventional defenses.

• 42:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:32Alastair Campbell?

  Far too, far too deeply. And so I, I, I listen to somebody like him, I listen to somebody like Tom Tugendhat, I listen to somebody like Johnny Mercer. I think even listen to Theresa May with all her experience. Um. You know, you, you sort of think, well, there's a lot of, there are a lot of people there that you could imagine in serious positions of, of government right now.

• 42:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 42:54Alastair Campbell?

  Whereas I've got to say, and I, I, you know, I, I hope, I, I really do think that when I saw Dominic Raab was on the media this morning and I just, he looks like a frightened rabbit. And then you've got, um, I mean, honestly, Liz Truss, I just, she really does seem to think it's about Instagram. She does seem to think the job is about Instagram.

• 43:11Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary.

• 43:12Alastair Campbell?

  Just, you know, you're the Foreign Secretary, for God's sake.

• 43:15Rory Stewart?

  It's completely mesmerizing. I think the, the other thing that's so striking for me is, is the sense that nobody really prioritizes foreign affairs or haven't for a long time in, in British parliament, British politics. I, I remember when I was running for the Foreign Affairs Committee as I started and then later to be Chair of Defence Committee, Liz Truss saying to me, I can't understand why you're obsessed with foreign affairs. I find it really boring. The last thing I'd want to do is to be Foreign Secretary. And I, I, actually, she was speaking for a whole generation. Right. All these people wanted to get on the Treasury Committee or quasi-quasi want to be on the Transport Committee. Nobody want to do foreign affairs and defence. Britain was already beginning to turn very, very inward. But you're right, there's a lot of talent there. And the problem is, of course,

• 43:57Rory Stewart?

  as soon as I start praising them, right, as an independent anti-Boris person, I destroy them. But. There's extraordinary people. Gillian Keegan's very talented. Alex Chalk's very talented. Victoria Prentice is very talented. There's a lot of people out there. A guy called Andrew Bowie, I really admire. But they're not being put in the cabinet. Ben Wallace, I think, is doing a good job. I think he actually has surprised people. I think he's been one of the real performers.

• 44:20Alastair Campbell?

  I love the way that you say, you know, I won't name them because it'll destroy their career. Then you name them. So.

• 44:27Alastair Campbell?

  But no, I do think, because I find myself in a position, particularly now with this going on. I mean, I've seen, you know, working with Tony Blair and with Gordon Brown, I've seen how hard it is when you get into these real international crises situations. So I don't want to just be sort of sitting here lobbing off potshots the whole time. But I do, it just drives me to despair when I see the, I don't know, I just, I can't, I can't detect what I would define as a foreign policy. I detect them doing stuff day to day.

• 45:00Rory Stewart?

  There's no vision, there's no serious vision of what Britain is outside. I mean, that's the real.

• 45:04Alastair Campbell?

  And actually, the point is that your point about why MPs should be much more interested, because whether we like it or not, Brexit notwithstanding, in fact, partly because of Brexit, in my view, we are, we are going to have to be much more interconnected in different ways. There's none of these challenges that we're going to meet on our own.

• 45:20Rory Stewart?

  No, no. And it's actually also a really sad, the way in which things have been run down. I mean, I,

• 45:30Rory Stewart?

  and actually, it started under you guys too. I mean, the Foreign Office was much, much smaller by the time, you know, David Cameron took over and is smaller still in relative terms now than when he took in. I mean, it's, we talk about global Britain, we talk about being the fifth largest economy in the world, but the French basically spend twice as much on their core foreign service than we do. And all these countries, France, Russia, China, America, have been increasing their spending on overseas broadcasting. And we've downsized the BBC World Service again and again. The British Council is a shadow of what it used to be. And as you say, diff has been cut down very dramatically. So I think it's very sad.

• 46:09Alastair Campbell?

  Would you, if you look at the five? Permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and you had to list them in hard and soft power rankings, where would you put them? That's that's us, America, China.

• 46:21Rory Stewart?

  Well, I'm afraid that this story is pretty depressing. I mean, I think America just is still at the top, but boy, oh, boy, have Trump and Biden done a lot of damage to that.

• 46:30Alastair Campbell?

  So China's China just behind them.

• 46:32Rory Stewart?

  Um, yeah, and I think, as you say, Obama's decision on Syria began to do a lot of damage. And I'm afraid if we look back, I mean, we're now going back a long time in history, but people forget that in Libya, we were in a very strange situation where Russia and China were prepared to support the intervention to protect Benghazi. And then Britain, France, United States effectively betrayed that deal and changed it into regime change. And that was the last time really that Russia and China have been with us on the Security Council. So people need to remember that these tricks that seem in the short term really smart in the long term, in looking 10 years forward, look pretty bad. Uh, then I'd put, uh, I'm afraid Russia is really throwing its weight around. I mean, in a horrible way, and I think in the end its bluff is going to be called, but

• 47:18Rory Stewart?

  certainly, you know, in terms of flexing international muscle, and then France in Mali displayed something that we're not really able to do, which is, you know, many things went wrong, but they could operate independently at a relative scale, which Britain struggles to do.

• 47:32Alastair Campbell?

  So you put Britain number five, UK number five?

• 47:35Rory Stewart?

  At the moment, yes. And I think the only way to turn that around would be to double the spending on our foreign service, really invest in our soft power through the World Service, the British Council, DIFID. But where on earth is the political party calling for that? Right? You know, you imagine going out to the electorate, saying, we want to double the spending on the Foreign Office. Everyone will be like, what are you talking about? You know, ambassadors sipping champagne in these outdated residences.

• 47:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but that's, that's part of the problem is that these mythologies have taken hold over decades. Um, and that, that, so, you know, and, and meanwhile, those that have been using their soft power assets against us, like the Russians most notably, we haven't really taken it seriously.

• 48:14Alastair Campbell?

  What did you think about the kicking them out of the World Cup? And I also, what's his name? Putin's been kicked out of the International Judo Association and he's been stripped of his Taekwondo black belt.

• 48:25Rory Stewart?

  That's very good. I like that. I like him being stripped of his Taekwondo black belt. Yeah. What did you think? I mean, so I put out a tweet last week suggesting that Chelsea fans might think seriously if they won the cup final about cheering for Chelsea and obviously got an enormous amount of abuse from Chelsea fans. What was your, what was your take on that? Do you think it's a very...

• 48:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you mean, you mean they shouldn't have supported their own team?

• 48:43Rory Stewart?

  They should say, well, I wonder whether they shouldn't be have a lot of Ukrainian flags and maybe make a bit of a statement at least against Abramovich.

• 48:49Alastair Campbell?

  They did a little bit of that. They, they, the Liverpool game, there was a little bit of pro-Ukraine thing going on at the start. But I'm afraid I do think it's one of those areas where we've just, we've just allowed this to happen and it's become so normalized. So I'm not sure that the geo... I was at a football match at the weekend, Burnley, Crystal Palace, and actually there were a few Burnley fans who had Ukrainian flags, but they were outnumbered by the Dutch flags to welcome our new striker. So I think, but, but I think that's why in the end, people say they want to keep sport out of politics. But the fact is Putin has used sport relentlessly as a political weapon, both in terms of his

• 49:32Alastair Campbell?

  personal image, the whole sort of, you know, bare-chested horseback, the fishing, the judo, this annual ice hockey game that he does with the top players where he always wins, always scores the winning... Do they call it a goal? I know they hit a puck, but, and then of course, the games, you know, getting the World Cup, getting Sochi. I think the fact that, for example, he went to the Beijing Winter Olympics and you had that show of solidarity with President Xi around a sporting event. And a lot of those people that you were saying, you said, oh, you'll never do this whole thing and never go the whole way. They were also saying, I think rightly, he's not going to do it while Xi's got his Winter Olympics on.

• 50:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. He'll wait to the end of the Olympics, yeah.

• 50:14Alastair Campbell?

  So they have used sport and I think it's, you know, FIFA have finally, you know, come kicking and screaming. They, they tried that sort of halfway house, that they'd have to play on neutral grounds. Again, I thought individual countries stepped up. I think it was Poland, Czech Republic, Sweden, they're the three teams that could play Russia in the World Cup qualifiers and they all said, we're not playing them.

• 50:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's difficult, isn't it? It's difficult working out what influence. Sport or music has on politics. I was I was really struck by a couple of things in terms of influences and others. One was, and I think it's partly about whether people are comfortable taking messages from a different area of life. So I remember a friend of mine was very proud that Victoria Beckham had tweeted out his book and said it was a great book. And I know she's got three million followers or something with an Amazon link. And he went on it a minute later, not a minute later, sorry, a day later, and found that only two people bought the book, right? So clearly the fact that Victoria Beckham, and I slightly felt the same with Stormzy and Jeremy Corbyn, that it was an amazing coup to get Stormzy to finally come out and tell people to vote Labour

• 51:16Rory Stewart?

  in the election. And at the time, everyone was like, oh, my goodness, this is going to totally change the election. This is such a big deal with young people. But I guess there's a level at which people think, well, you know, I love Stormzy and I love his music, but I'm not necessarily going to take his advice on which way I'm going to vote.

• 51:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I'm very surprised about the Victoria Beckham stat. And certainly whenever I have a book out, I do like it where people with lots of followers tweet the link and say, this is a great book. But yeah, I've always had an ambivalent view about celebrities in in public life. I look at somebody like Bono, and I see somebody, and you probably came, I'm sure you came across him in your diff work. And and I look at somebody like Bono, who used his fame to develop a platform from which he's become like quite a serious policy and political player.

• 52:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 52:09Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's very different. I think somebody coming out and telling you to vote a certain way, I think I see it as a sort of second, third order campaigning thing. I don't think we should overstate it, but I wouldn't understate it either. And I do think in relation to something like this, you know, the one I often think of, do you remember when the Boko Haram took those girls.

• 52:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Alastair Campbell?

  And like, it just became one of those things that everybody in the world, bring them home, bring them home.

• 52:37Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Alastair Campbell?

  You know, and then, as you say, after a few, after a while, it sort of goes away and we concentrate on something else. I think the ones that people, the ones that I respect are the ones that stick at it and stay engaged. And they don't just sort of rent a quote on everything, but they, they have a campaign and they get involved in it. So I, I look at something like Marcus Rashford, Rashford in relation to food poverty in the UK, in England. And, and, and, and I see him, you know, doing something worthwhile and good, which a politician probably wouldn't be able to do in the same way. And he's had an impact.

• 53:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Alastair Campbell?

  And he's sticking at it. I think that's very different to somebody saying, vote Labour or vote Tory.

• 53:13Rory Stewart?

  That's right. And I, I, I slightly feel the same with Bob Geldof. And I think one of the things that he brought is that he's able to talk in a way that a politician can't. And he can be much, much blunter, much more explicit.

• 53:25Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I can tell you a story about him and Bono in Cologne at a G eight, the G eight in those days, because the Russians were there. And the debt and debt write-off was on the agenda. And Tony was really out in front in terms of pushing for as much as we could get. But we didn't get everything that we wanted. And then we had this meeting with Bono and Bob Geldof in, back at the hotel. And Geldof was basically fuck, fucking this and fucking that, fucking this and fucking the other. And Tony said, at one point, he said, he said to Bono, he said, listen, you've just got to understand, we're climbing Everest here. We're climbing Everest, right? And we, we, we're up further than you thought we'd be. Well, we're climbing Everest.

• 54:07Alastair Campbell?

  And Bono said, Tony, if you look at Everest, you don't say that's a fucking big mountain, you fucking climb it.

• 54:16Alastair Campbell?

  So that was, yeah, they were, they were, they were pretty good at what they did and they're still doing it as well. That's what I mean about them. About them staying in. Well, listen, Rory, that is whizzed by. We've gone way over time. Obviously dominated by events in Ukraine. I'm sure we'll talk about lots and lots and lots of other stuff. We're going to be back next Wednesday. We hope you found it interesting. And if you've enjoyed it, we want you to get involved. We really do want to hear from you. And the easiest place is on Twitter, at Rest Is Politics. My Twitter handle is Campbell Clarrett and Rory's is Rory Stewart UK.

• 54:52Rory Stewart?

  And thanks again. And we'll hope to see you again next week and bye for now.

• 54:56Alastair Campbell?

  Bye bye.

• 55:02Speaker 03

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

• 55:11Speaker 04

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

• 55:18Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You start, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 55:22Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 55:26Speaker 05

  I'm not the first then.

• 55:27Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 and under 18 without parent.