The Real JD Vance: How Trump Ditched Ideology (Part 5)

Does Trump already see himself as America’s king? Have he and Vance swapped ideology for a medieval approach to politics? Will reality finally catch up with the MAGA coalition? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer questions exclusively from members of The Rest Is Politics Plus. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Join with a FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com, for exclusive bonus content including Rory and Alastair’s first ever miniseries The Real JD Vance, early access to Question Time episodes and live show tickets, ad free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit GetFuse.com/Politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Producer: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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 Creve 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 already 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/rusthispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rusthispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:35Speaker 03

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• 1:46Speaker 04

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• 1:52Speaker 05

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• 1:56Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:59Speaker 05

  I'm not the first man.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 2:12Alastair Campbell?

  Hi there, Alastair Campbell here. What you're about to hear is a very special Q and A. This is not to be confused with Question Time. This week's Question Time episode dropped yesterday, as per usual. This special Q and A is all about the mini-series that Rory and I have done on American Vice President JD Vance. And all of the questions that we're answering, there are some of the many, many questions that have come in from members of Trip Plus who have been listening to the series. Now, to round off this mini-series, in addition to today's Q and A, next week, we're going to be speaking to somebody who knows JD Vance well. In fact, was once, you could say, his boss. That's David Frum,

• 2:53Alastair Campbell?

  the former speechwriter to George W. Bush. These days, one of the most clear-eyed critics of the Trump administration and the Republican family more generally. He will help us really try to get right under the skin of what Vance represents more broadly in US and therefore global politics. So if you want to hear the mini-series in full right now, just head to therestispolitics.com for a free trial. You'll get access to this mini-series. We've already started thinking, by the way, about our next one, and you will get access to that. And you'll also get our monthly bonus episodes, completely ad-free listening, Members Chat Room, and much, much more. Anyway, enough for me for now. Hope you enjoy this

• 3:37Alastair Campbell?

  special Q and A, which has been made by you. Welcome to a Rest Is Politics special Q and A about our mini-series on JD Vance. Thank you for all the very kind comments about it, and one or two unkind, but, you know, take the rough with the smooth. We've done four episodes now. This is our fifth in the mini-series on JD Vance. But the difference with this one, it's not just me and Rory talking, it's you. It's members of Trip Plus giving us their questions about what they've heard so far. Rory, let me kick you off with this one. Jacob Wilkie King, who's a member from London, did the Democrats pave the way for J D Vance's appeal? And Brian's out to say this, J D Vance's background of incredible social distress, feeling

• 4:21Alastair Campbell?

  separated from the upper class, very similar to the story of many Labour MPs. How much responsibility do the Democrats have in failing to appeal to traditional working class voters? What do you think?

• 4:32Rory Stewart?

  I think that's firstly a really interesting observation because of course, if you were looking for people in British politics who've come from a social background like J D Vance, you might be looking at somebody like Angela Rayner, who came from a very, very difficult, troubled background. Naturally, in British politics, that would draw you to the left because you would have experienced poverty very directly, you would feel a very unjust, unequal society, and you would be very, very focused on social justice. And you would perceive the ruling elite as stacking things against you, and you'd believe passionately that if you could just get rid of these people and bring in people like you, you could create a much more just, equal world. And I think that that was the sense I get interviewing Anta Rayner, when we interviewed

• 5:17Rory Stewart?

  on leading Rachel Reeves or Richard Phillipson. There's this very, very strong sense that their class backgrounds drive, you know, what makes them Labour MPs.

• 5:29Alastair Campbell?

  When you were an MP, did you have any Tory MPs? I think of John Major, who came from a pretty tough background. But did you have any MPs in your intake that you would say came from identifiably J D Vance type of background?

• 5:41Rory Stewart?

  We had a lot of MPs who came from much tougher backgrounds than people at Knowledge. I mean, you know, Patrick McLaughlin, for example, had been a coal miner. There were many, many people in my intake who'd come from very poor backgrounds, grown up on housing estates, come out of poverty, but none of them, I think, to be fair, quite the kind of extreme type of poverty and domestic violence and abuse that Vance is talking about. But many of them also were people who had felt that their lives had been turned around. For example, in some cases, narratives about how their family had been benefited by Thatcher selling council housing and how they'd been able to buy their own council house. Many of them had been small business people. So there was that different tone which

• 6:23Rory Stewart?

  you sometimes get in British politics of people saying, I came from a very tough background. I pulled myself up. Other people can do it. And so you'd have these people talking about how angry they felt going on to housing estates and seeing people's curtains drawn at 11:00 in the morning when they were up first thing in the morning working. And that produced, I think, quite a sort of brusial, uncompassionate attitude towards people on welfare because they had come from those backgrounds and felt that they got away from them. Whereas strangely, often the kind of more privileged, more Tory wet lot come from more privileged backgrounds and felt how lucky they were and didn't feel that people living in poverty were there because they hadn't worked hard. Now, just to come back to you on that, because there's a lot in Hillbilly

• 7:07Rory Stewart?

  Elche Vance's book where he sounds a bit like some of those conservative colleagues of mine, where he really is pretty contemptuous

• 7:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Rory Stewart?

  of a lot of the people he's growing up around. He blames them for not working hard enough, not sorting out their addiction, not sorting out in a way that someone from the left wouldn't. Anyway, I just be interested in how you kind of reconcile this odd thing that he comes from a kind of anti-rene background and the result is he goes to the right.

• 7:30Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I think what's interesting in the question is partly answered by the interview we did recently with your friend Congressman Seth Moulton, because he basically says that the answer, how much responsibility do Democrats have in failing to appeal to traditional working class voters? His answer is a hell of a lot. He basically says that the Democrats genuinely lost contact with the values, aspirations of traditional working class voters. Now, he pins it, a lot of it on the minority issues. I mean, it gets identified as woke, but I think what the right did very, very well, and this is a big part of JD Vance and a big part of MAGA, is the weaponization of woke as to mean anything that isn't sort of very traditionally almost nativist

• 8:14Alastair Campbell?

  American. I think there's a lot in what Jacob is saying. I think it's why You know, when you look across the European perspective, it's why I think the left has got to think really, really carefully about how they handle this sort of wave of the rise of the populist right that seems to be happening. I agree with you, by the way, in reading, re- re- reading Hillbilly Elegy as I did. The more I looked into it, the more I felt he's actually really contemptuous of these people. The thing about John Prescott, when he was in the Labour Government and Angela Rayner now, you have a really real sense that their role and their position in the government is really to fight for the people and the places that they came from. You don't get that feeling with Vance at all. He's fighting for ideology more than anything.

• 8:56Rory Stewart?

  One thing that I loved about that leading interview with Angela Rayner, which I still think is one of the very best leading interviews we've done, is that there's an enormous amount of compassion and good humour in the way that she talks about her family background, a real compassionate understanding towards her mother.

• 9:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 9:13Rory Stewart?

  Who, you know, you could have been very, very angry with, because basically she says, my mother didn't love me, she was obsessed with my father and she made no real effort to look after me. But she's sort of processed it and she isn't, in the way that Vance is, driven by anger. I mean, I think anger is a really important theme that we kept referring to in those four.

• 9:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Rory Stewart?

  Whereas Angela Rayner has come through that. She isn't actually somebody who sees herself as a victim, really. She seems to have quite a sort of realistic, nuanced, good-humoured attitude towards it, quite a sort of practical sense of solving it. Whereas Vance's anger, but also oddly, although he hates the idea of victimhood, there is a sense of victimhood. That he hasn't quite processed this thing in the way that someone like Angela Rayner has.

• 10:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And the other thing I'd say that's really interesting about Angela is that, oh, you saw this in particular when occasionally she stood in for Keir Starmer at Primus's Questions, particularly with Boris Johnson. Where she sensed that they're thinking she's really gonna have to try a lot harder than I have to try because she doesn't come from my sort of really clever background. And she's standing there basically, listen sunshine, you're gonna take me exactly as I am. Whereas actually you have a feeling with Vance that he's constantly becoming a slightly different thing. I mean, I thought the most interesting thing, given that we went through this series almost chronologically through his life, is you felt like you were talking, I think with Andrew Rainey, you're always talking about the same person. John Prescott, the same, you're always talking about the same person. With Vance, I always feel I'm talking about a different person at various stages of his

• 10:47Alastair Campbell?

  life. And I think if he does become president, he'll have another persona that he kind of peels off and that becomes it. Let's go to this one from Ben Kelly. This is about the discussion we had about the influence of Peter Thiel and Curtis Yavin. So Ben Kelly says this, is J D Vance's positioning behind Trump comparable to that of Octavian behind Caesar in the allows the latter to destroy the republic and then goes on to rule akin to a monarch? Is that placing too much of a Machiavellian level of intelligence and ambition on J D Vance? That's a great question.

• 11:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, this is such a rich seam that we haven't really even begun to get into. But Yuval Noah Harari, who we've interviewed, I think now twice on leading, said to me this morning, actually just before we're talking, that one of the things that strikes him about the monarch thing is that it's all about the personal. So one of the points he makes about watching J D Vance, Zelensky and Trump together is that it isn't really the American government dealing with the Ukrainian government, it's Trump dealing with Zelensky. And when you question Trump about the fact that Putin has broken every deal that he's done before, again, it's like a medieval king thinking just in personal terms because

• 12:02Rory Stewart?

  his reply is, yeah, he broke a deal with Obama, he broken a deal with Biden, but I'm different, I'm Trump. And the implication of that is He can make a deal with Putin and it will last as long as he's in. And when he's no longer president, the deal's not valid anymore because it's not state to state. It's person to person. His final point, I'll come back to you on this, which I thought was, you know, kind of really revealing. It's a sort of crazy idea, but it shows something about the world we're in that you can sort of imagine a world in which Trump kind of marries Baron Trump to Putin's granddaughter and gives them Crimea as their territory and that that would sort of somehow resolve the situation. Anyway, back over to you.

• 12:44Alastair Campbell?

  We're recording this around the time when Donald Trump, this thing he does of surprising journalists by phoning them up and giving them an interview. And Gary O'Donoghue of the BBC gets this interview. I don't know if you've heard it yet, but it's really good. Gary O'Donoghue starts asking about, you know, the state visit that's coming up to. And he says, you know, there seems to be this discussion about whether they should recall Parliament for you to address it. And I'm thinking, oh God, here we go. This is going to be a nightmare for Keir Starber if he says, yeah. And he says, no, no, no, if they're on holiday, that's fine. Let's say, you know, why? Because he wants to be at Windsor Castle. And he says, what are you looking forward to? And he said, I'm really looking forward to having a good time and being nice to the king because he's such a great gentleman. And that's your point. It's king to king.

• 13:30Alastair Campbell?

  And in his head, he won't care what you think and what I think. I mean, he may or may not know there are millions of people who think like we do, but he's going to be on the level with the monarch. I think what's really interesting though about Ben's question, is the monarch the right word for Trump? I'm afraid it's not. The word is authoritarian autocrat. The thing about the monarch, our monarch today, unlike the monarchs in the days when they were sort of using marriage to carve out territory. And by the way, I think you put a horrible thought out there, which somebody will tell him. I mean, that was a good idea. I think it's not that he's a monarch. He'd love to be a monarch. But what Thiel and Curtis Yavin want, and I think Vance and Musk, when he was in the tent as well,

• 14:15Alastair Campbell?

  is a sense of powerful politicians who are not beholden to politics. And in a way, that's what true monarchy really is.

• 14:23Rory Stewart?

  Yes, absolutely. I think this is the most interesting point. We haven't done enough on this because a traditional dictator from the 40s or 50s was connected to the fact that they were a communist or a fascist. And that constrained them to some extent. I mean, if you were Stalin, you still had to talk a bit like a communist. A king can completely flip day to day their entire, there's no ideology. If you're Trump or you're Vance, there isn't actually an ideology. I mean, that's one of the things I think our mini series is all about. And this is your chameleon point, that he's a different thing every week. And kings can do that because in the end, all the loyalty isn't to their programme or their policy or their manifesto, it's just personally to them. It's the cult, they are a messiah. So they can flip completely, it doesn't matter.

• 15:08Rory Stewart?

  You know, one moment we're putting tariffs on China, next minute we're not. One moment we're saying we're not bombing Iran, next minute we are. Doesn't matter. And in that sense, Vance and Trump are not in the same world as Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer is very constrained. You know, he can't do certain kinds of things on welfare because in the end, he's a Labour Prime Minister, he's got a Labour Party, he's got Labour MPs. And they're going to say, we're about social justice, you don't get to cut welfare like that. Trump and Vance aren't constrained in that way at all. They've broken free of parties, of ideology, of institutions and made it personal.

• 15:44Alastair Campbell?

  Throw me a question.

• 15:45Rory Stewart?

  Well, okay, here we are. Diana Brockelbank, Norfolk. Trump's policies over the coming years will make the rich richer and the poor poorer. How can this possibly sit with J D Vance? We know he blows with the wind, but his base won't be able to handle the ever increasing wealth divide. Over to you, can he reinvent that far or are there limits even to what he can do?

• 16:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think it's a very good question because I think one of the reasons that Trump's ratings are actually not as good as he pretends they are, is that I think a lot of people have realised, hold on a minute, your big beautiful bill is really helping rich people and it's not going to do that much for me. In fact, you might be taking my Medicaid away and all the other stuff that we know about. So I think it will increase inequality. Why do I think that? Because that is what it is designed to do. This goes back to the monarch thing. The billionaires, the trillionaires, as they want to be, they have probably more economic and political power than business people in the American system have ever had. And they see Trump as one of them, and to some extent, Trump is one of them. So he doesn't care about the inequality.

• 16:52Alastair Campbell?

  How does this sit with J D Vance? And would he be able to handle the increasing wealth divide? Yes, if he changes. And of course, what he'll do, the reason why I think he's very Machiavellian and he's sort of playing quite a canny game. He knows that Trump, or I guess he could get rid of him up to a point. He could do what he's doing with Jerome Powell now and try to make his position untenable. But Vance is elected just the same as Trump was. I mean, okay, it's a ticket and they were voting for Trump. But Vance is there, he's the second most powerful person under their constitution. So he's there. However, if Trump does go, say, doesn't stand for a third term. If Vance does stand for the Republican Party and does win, these are very big ifs, by the way. He can then change.

• 17:36Alastair Campbell?

  Why? Because one, we know that that's what he does. Two, because he can say, I was the loyal number two. Now I'm the number one, I've got my own agenda. Here's where I agreed with the previous administration. But these are the challenges now, and we've, we've seen wealth inequality rise, and I'm going to bring it down again. He can actually turn it to his advantage.

• 17:55Rory Stewart?

  Yes, I mean, there's an interesting question maybe here, just for you, before we move on to the next question from a listener, which is, do you think that we've entered a world where, in a sense, reality doesn't necessarily catch up? I mean, when we're being optimistic, we keep hoping that in the end, these guys get undone by reality. But it's possible that when you've entered reality TV, they can keep spinning. They can keep blaming other people, whatever happens, they can keep distracting, pushing. So that actually, maybe one of the reasons one needs to organise and push against them is that you can't sit back and say, in the end, they're going to get undone by reality. They're only going to get undone by really fierce opposition.

• 18:34Alastair Campbell?

  I would argue that Boris Johnson got undone by reality in the end. And it wasn't the reality of the issues on which he had been truly terrible. He was actually a sort of tipping point issue at the end. I think Putin might in the end be undone by reality, but we, you know, I don't know. He's an amazing survivor. Netanyahu is an amazing survivor. The reality surrounding Netanyahu, he ought to have been destroyed many times over, but he hasn't. Trump is a bit like Putin in that he's created an unreality and he's made people feel, those people who are part of it, he's made them feel that they belong to something really, really important and that makes them feel good, even as their lives are not good. Now, that is an amazing piece of political communication, conmanship, call it whatever

• 19:16Alastair Campbell?

  you want. I still hold out hope that eventually reality will catch up on these guys, but I agree with you, you can't take it for granted.

• 19:23Rory Stewart?

  Mandelson.

• 19:24Alastair Campbell?

  Lord Mandelson.

• 19:26Rory Stewart?

  Lord Mandelson, Lord Mandelson, former First Secretary of State, etcetera, Commissioner Lord Mandelson. I saw an interview with Peter Mandelson at the weekend in which he said Vance was much more thoughtful and nuanced in private than in public. Does he really believe that? Or is that the kind of thing ambassadors have to say?

• 19:44Alastair Campbell?

  That's from Florence Hobson. That's a very, very good question. I saw one of his fellow ambassadors in Washington recently, and I won't do the accent because it will give away the country, who basically said, "I really enjoy Peter Mandelson's low-profile approach to the, to his ambassadorship." And I said, "Yeah, really?" He says, "Yes, I read about it in the Financial Times."

• 20:10Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Peter was talking about it in the Financial Times. Anyway, I did see parts of this interview, I think it was the Sunday Times, and they put some clips out on social media, and in one of them he did say that. He was sort of hanging out of what looked like a sports car being filmed. And he said, "Trump is really good fun. Vance is, as Florence said, very thoughtful, much more nuanced." So does he really believe that? Or is it the sort of thing ambassadors have to say? Well, it is certainly the latter. Whether he really believes that, Peter may well believe that. Peter does like really interesting, complicated, difficult people. He's interested in them and he will have no doubt at all, he's enjoying being

• 20:52Alastair Campbell?

  surrounded by very interesting, difficult, complicated people and then having to deal with another set of difficult, complicated people back in London. I think he'll be quite enjoying that. But Florence, that is a very, very good spot, very, very, very good spot.

• 21:09Rory Stewart?

  I just put a small qualification in my two cents worth, which is, of course, ambassadors don't quite have to say that. I mean, that that isn't the way that Kim Darick spoke about Trump. There is another way of being an ambassador, which is more the Angela Merkel, which is that you're pretty dignified, you're pretty restrained, but you don't go overboard on the praising.

• 21:27Alastair Campbell?

  I actually met a group of ambassadors as well about one of them who was no longer in the US but was there for Trump's first term and said that they had got to the point where they were no longer putting down in their telegrams, their reports back to the Foreign Minister. They were no longer putting down what they actually thought on a lot of occasions because they were making assumptions that, you know, walls have ears and all that, and that they were finding other ways to communicate really what they thought about things. That's dangerous.

• 21:55Rory Stewart?

  So just to remind listeners, Kim Darick, who was our ambassador to the US, there was a leak of a telegram that he had sent back to London, very critical of Trump. A classified telegram was leaked and Trump basically demanded that he be sacked and the British government went along with it and fired Darick.

• 22:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Johnson went along with it.

• 22:17Rory Stewart?

  Johnson went along with it and fired Eric. Johnson has a double problem. I mean, you know, we talk a lot about truth and if you can't be honest in secret telegrams from an ambassador back to headquarters, you're in real trouble. Johnson's other problem, which I saw again and again, is, and this is true, I'm sure, in the Trump administration, is that he didn't want to read anything that was uncomfortable. So that every telegram began to go, another win for global Britain. It was all kind of boosterish, optimistic, because Johnson would get angry if an ambassador wrote back saying, actually, Britain doesn't have very much power in this country, the US has more influence, or India has more influence, or China has more influence. He wanted to hear that we were the centre of the world. So.

• 23:01Alastair Campbell?

  Of course, Tom Fletcher, former ambassador, who's now doing a brilliant job at United Nations, speaking up for refugees. I think that there is something, I think, really important in all of statecraft about ambassadors, the old cliche about you're sent abroad to life for your country. And it is a cliche, but there is, there is also sometimes a little bit of truth in it. Peter's job is to project the interests of Britain and the British government. But at the same time, you have to operate according to the politics that you're, that you're swimming in. It's the point that, again, to quote Seth Moulton, he said that when he's on these trips with Republicans and they will say privately things about Trump, but he says they're terrified about getting it back to him

• 23:43Alastair Campbell?

  because he will hold it against them. I think there will be a little bit of ambassadors doing that as well. And that's really bad for the foreign policy debate right around the world.

• 23:52Rory Stewart?

  It's kind of weird, isn't it? Because what you're talking about there is the sort of corruption of institutions. Oddly, so much of what's going on in the world, I think, is genuinely about social media and what's happened to truth and what's happened to journalism. But that's a little bit different. That's about weird forms of almost tyranny and corruption. It's that sense in the American government that you can't really be an FBI agent doing your job anymore without risking being fired.

• 24:20Alastair Campbell?

  On that, I don't know if you noticed that recently there was a story in one of the American papers that in the FBI now, they're doing lie detector tests on the staff. And one of the questions before they do the lie detector is have they said anything critical of Cash Patel, the new politically appointed head of the FBI? I mean, that is nuts. I would quite often go home from work with Tony Blair and say, if you had a God, what a few was a fucking nightmare today. Christ almighty, why did you do this? What are the, right?

• 24:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Alastair Campbell?

  So does that mean if I'm doing a lie detector, have you ever criticised Tony Blair to any of your friends or family? Well, the answer is yes, occasionally.

• 24:53Rory Stewart?

  So this is very weird too, because the standards that we're now asking of people, these completely unrealistic standards are actually making our institutions worse. The example that we were talking about a couple of days ago, which I've been interested in, is that there's now this new letter from the BBC that came out on Monday requires journalists, anyone narrating, you have to go back through all their social media.

• 25:17Rory Stewart?

  To be absolutely certain that they are completely impartial on an issue before they can present. On the surface, it sounds like that's going to make things better. But actually, it's a massive drop because you're

• 25:30Alastair Campbell?

  It's terrible.

• 25:30Rory Stewart?

  Suddenly ruling out almost everybody because almost by definition, somebody presenting on a subject has firm views on it. Let's imagine the BBC thought it would be fun for you or I to do a programme on Trump, right?

• 25:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 25:44Rory Stewart?

  Well, suddenly they go through our social media, they conclude, we don't like Trump, so we can't present on Trump. The only person who could present on Trump somehow is somebody who's never expressed a view on him. But somebody who's never expressed a view on him over the last five years would be somebody with no interest in contemporary affairs.

• 25:58Alastair Campbell?

  It's utterly absurd.

• 25:59Rory Stewart?

  What's so odd here is that the BBC has been driven almost in this Cash Patel direction of this sort of very strange idea that the only people who can function are people without opinions.

• 26:12Alastair Campbell?

  Really interesting example. There was recently on a thought for the day, I actually most days can't stand thought for the day on the BBC Radio 4, but there was an amazing one.

• 26:21Rory Stewart?

  You'd be brilliant at it, Alison. I can just see you as

• 26:23Alastair Campbell?

  The producer's just tasted great stuff, but can we link this back to Vance? Right, I'm going to try and link this back to Vance. So this links back right to J D Vance Rory.

• 26:32Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 26:34Alastair Campbell?

  Because these are people who say that they believe in free speech, but of course they don't believe in free speech. They actually believe only in those voices being articulated that echo what they say, think and do. But just briefly, if I may, on the BBC point. So Rhydian Brook, the author, did a brilliant, brilliant thought for the day the other day about Live Aid, where his message, his thought for today, was basically just weaving together lyrics from some of the most famous songs ever written. It was an incredible piece of work, okay? And I did a tweet, I just said, best thought for the day in ages, well done, Rhydian Brook, using the message of Live Aid and the genius of songwriters to say something powerful and worthwhile. And then I thought, I don't really know much about this bloke,

• 27:17Alastair Campbell?

  I'll follow him on Twitter. So I went over to Twitter and his first tweet was a reposting about the quotes, the persecution of Francesca Albanese.

• 27:29Alastair Campbell?

  He reposted a post where somebody said the real Nobel Prize candidate, a picture of Francesca Albanese. Now, I hope I haven't damaged Rillian Brooks' relations with the BBC in saying that, but that illustrates the utter madness that you've just called out. Utter madness.

• 27:43Rory Stewart?

  Let's bring it back to Vance. I'll do, I'm a nimble mental gymnastics as we go down. Went down a little rabbit hole there, but I do think it does connect because what we're talking about here is attitudes towards freedom of speech. What do we mean by freedom of speech? And Vance is right at the heart of this. You pointed out that his whole Munich speech, J D Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference, which, as you said, went down like a pail of cold sick in front of the European leaders, was a speech in which J D Vance fundamentally says there is no free speech in Europe. And what he means by that is people are imprisoning Tommy Robinson, or they're trying to stop a far-right fascist party basically stealing an election in Germany.

• 28:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Rory Stewart?

  And then he goes after, he's, J D Vance is very much at the heart of the chasing of these Ivy League universities. Whatever his experience was at Yale, some level, he's going after Columbia, Harvard and the rest. And again, it's this story about free speech, but what it really means is not what liberal free speech meant in the past, which was pluralism, tolerance, a democratic society, society where we accept that we all have different values, we all have different views and we let them out. In this case, it's policing it. I'm going to set up for Columbia University, a panel that will assess, are these people saying things which are moving from critical of Israel through to antisemitic? I'm going

• 29:12Rory Stewart?

  to shut down demonstrations. I'm going to fire faculty. That's his idea of freedom of speech. In other words, I think it's the point you keep making. Basically, he thinks free speech somehow. And I'd love you to sort of get into this a bit more because you made the point, but it's just so paradoxical and difficult to understand. He somehow has convinced himself that free speech means. Being able to say very powerfully and loudly what he believes and stopping people saying things that he doesn't believe.

• 29:39Alastair Campbell?

  Correct, that's exactly what it means. And, you know, we talked in one of the episodes about, I sent you those videos of this guy who's a psychiatrist who analyzes these politicians in these rather impressive YouTube videos that he does. And he did one recently about the cruelty, he called it the cruelty of the Trump administration. He focused on Trump, Vance and Musk. And you said earlier about the point about Musk's anger. And this psychiatrist basically says that we had quite a lot of questions actually asking whether people thought that Vance was a woman hater. Now, he parades around with his wife and it seems to be a genuine marriage and all that, but he does come across slightly, as I said in one of the episodes, as, you know, a captain in the Handmaid's Tale.

• 30:21Alastair Campbell?

  It's like women are there to serve and men are where the power should be and what have you. And the anger, of course, comes from a mother that didn't love him and then these sort of, this utterly chaotic upbringing.

• 30:31Rory Stewart?

  More than didn't love him, they'd actually tried to kill him.

• 30:34Alastair Campbell?

  Tried to, tried at one point to kill him. And at one point, as he says in his own book, that he wished she was dead. The point that he makes about the cruelty is that it's about understanding, and this is maybe where Vance is clever, in a kind of really horrible way. So basically, they have one power, in large part by persuading working class and middle class people that he, Trump and Vance, are for them, okay? What does for them mean? What does make America great mean to those people? It means make America like it used to be. And like it used to be essentially means that people like them, the white working class, they had the power. They were the most important people in the country.

• 31:17Alastair Campbell?

  They now see all these kind of university educated and immigrants and black people rising up through the system and they don't like it. And so the cruelty... Is a way of saying to those white working class people, even though their lives aren't necessarily getting any better, these guys are having it a lot worse because we are giving them hell. And that's why the performative stuff with immigrants, which he defends, all the eating the dogs, and never forget, he was the one who started all that nonsense. It's performative to make people whose lives are not actually improving feel that actually, well, at least we're doing better in the hierarchy.

• 31:54Rory Stewart?

  Nikki Joyce is one of the people who's asking that question that you've just raised, who's a Trip Plus member on Discord, where she says, to what extent do you think that sexism, or misogyny feeds into J D Vance's developing views? And is he the same or different to Trump and MAGA more broadly in this? Again, without sounding like I've been completely taken over by the woke mind virus, it's very striking how gender and race are at the heart of a lot of what's going on. That, as you say, Vance and Trump are trying to return back to some American past. A pretty extraordinary move back. I mean, fluoride was introduced to drinking water in the 1940s. Vaccinations were sort of stuff the 1940s.

• 32:38Rory Stewart?

  A lot of the environmental protection on air quality was sort of 1970s. They're trying to reverse all of that. They're trying to get back to sort of something which is well before.

• 32:47Alastair Campbell?

  Journalists were more subservient.

• 32:48Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, that's absolutely right, yes. Do you have something to say, Mr. President? Yeah, exactly, that sort of stuff, yeah.

• 32:53Alastair Campbell?

  Hollywood was John Wayne rather than woke sort of films about equality, Harvey Milk.

• 33:00Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, exactly. So gender and race is really interesting here, that it's partly a story of male white anger. But there is something in all the pushes against minorities and all the kind of dismantling of liberal democracy, seems to be something about silencing the voices of non-whites and of women. And my goodness, that's powerful, my goodness. It seems that he's able to draw on something in the American psyche or the male psyche that really seems to respond to this kind of very simple misleading idea of what society. I mean, because we're in a very modern society, it's completely changed. It's not the 1940s anymore.

• 33:43Alastair Campbell?

  Totally.

• 33:44Rory Stewart?

  But you know, half the workforce are women. Civil rights has been completely transformed, sexuality's been completely transformed. So it's very weird because you're not being somebody from the 1940s in the 1940s. The genie's in a sense out of the bottle. You're trying to be someone from the 1940s. In 2025, and that's even stranger in terms of the way that plays out.

• 34:03Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not convinced, though, that Vance can do this without Trump. I could be wrong, and I floated the idea that the Trump that Vance might relate to is Don Jr. And that that might be the ticket that they try to get. Where you and I agree, and I think we agreed again on this with Seth Moulton, is we shouldn't just see Trump as a, as a unique one-off, couldn't be repeated again, because he is the head of a movement. These are trends that are very, very powerful. I'm not yet convinced that Vance has the political and communication skills to do it, do what Trump does as well as Trump does it. So he has to become something different.

• 34:39Rory Stewart?

  Right. Now, I wonder whether we could finish with a kind of more positive question from Maggie Whitman from Colchester. Listening to your series on JD Vance and the associated link to Trump leaves a feeling of despair about the worldview of these people, little feeling of hope. Where do you see hope coming from?

• 34:56Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. His ratings are falling. You made a point on the main podcast recently about how the markets have almost baked in some of the kind of economic chaos. It's this acceptance that a lot of it is performative and therefore it doesn't necessarily have any sort of lasting impact. And that's a kind of optimistic view. The other place where I see hope, because you have to, is even though I would like the Democrat Party to be showing more signs of deep analysis and an understanding of how themselves got themselves into this mess, I'm seeing enough of it to think that they'll do reasonably well in the midterms. I think to really damage Trump, they've got to do very well. But let's say they do reasonably well, I see hope in that.

• 35:39Alastair Campbell?

  I see hope in some of the leaders that have stood up against some of this nonsense. Fair play, Keir Starmer, you know, he's, he's done, he gets a lot of criticism for a lot of things. And a lot of people, particularly on the Labour side, probably think he's been far too sympathetic to Trump and not called him out enough. But actually, I think he's pursued the national interest quite well. And he was one of the few people who actually did straight out call out Vance on this free speech thing. He did it in a very polite way. But when Vance was raising the issue of free speech in the, in the Oval Office when Keir was there, he called it out and they moved on. And so I think leaders are getting a bit more confident about calling this stuff out when they can. So, and I find hope as well in the, to be absolutely frank, I find hope in the fact that.

• 36:24Alastair Campbell?

  So many people, maybe outside America, but certainly in Europe, so many people kind of thought, well, we've got to give this guy a second chance. And they've actually thought, no, this isn't going to work. And I think that does damage Vance. So my hope is that actually, he won't, he won't become president. He won't become president, provided the Democrats get their act together and find a decent leader.

• 36:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think hope has to be hope in each of us being active, you know, whether it's what you and I do for a living, or what citizens do for a living, or what political people do for a living. That's the sense that we can't do it all, right? We're not superheroes. But equally, we can't just complacently sit back and expect reality to somehow right itself.

• 37:07Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 37:08Rory Stewart?

  And what are the areas that we need to focus on? One of them, I think we've talked about is social media and AI. And here's some hope. Peter Malnourskas regulating social media in Australia, I think is a huge step in the right direction. I think some of the stuff that the European Union is doing on regulating data, AI, algorithms, trying to develop a more sensible European architecture.

• 37:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 37:38Rory Stewart?

  Which really relates to trust, truth, facts, the facts in our world. The area where I think we're weakest is filling the gap that's emerging in international stuff, conflict, war, this rules based international order. I mean, I think the next real challenge for our citizens and politicians to start rebuilding what we do about this culture of impunity, what we do about a world in which rich countries with technology, Israel, the US, appear to be able to just do whatever they want, whenever they want, with no consequences.

• 38:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 38:16Rory Stewart?

  And then the final thing, I think, is this, is can we have hope about rebuilding this sort of very unfashionable thing, which is institutions, trust in human institutions? What would it mean to really reinvigorate?

• 38:30Rory Stewart?

  Systems, get away from where we began, which is Trump trying to be advanced, trying to be a personal monarch, this kind of medieval idea of monarchy that my friend Yuval Noah Harari keeps talking about, this kind of idea that we're going back into the Middle Ages. What would it mean to all of us get behind institutions, say, actually, we believe in civil services, judges, elected politicians, parliaments, prime ministers, parties? What kind of reform would you need to do to make that more credible? How would you make those institutions better? And then how would you get people to believe in them? So that instead of just putting all our trust in either algorithms or monarchs, we can

• 39:14Rory Stewart?

  get a bit of trust back in democracy.

• 39:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I saw an interview that Ursula von der Leyen, so where do you get hope? This gave me a bit of hope, actually. She did an interview with Die Zeit, the German newspaper. Just listen to this. Europe is still a peace project. We don't have bros or oligarchs making the rules. We don't invade our neighbours and we don't punish our neighbours. On the contrary, there are 12 countries on the waiting list to become members of the European Union. That's 150 million people. In Europe, children can go to good schools, however wealthy their parents are. We have lower CO2 emissions, we have higher life expectancy. Controversial debates are allowed at our universities. This and more are all values that must be defended and which show that Europe is more

• 39:58Alastair Campbell?

  than a union, Europe is our home, people know that, people feel that. Now, I wish she'd got up when Zelensky was in Munich and said that to his face. Now, I think he's got the message in that since then, because a lot of leaders had said that. So I guess that's, yeah, let's finish on that, because we started really in the political side of him taking on Europe. That's when he, that's when I think he broke through as a global figure, by the way, that speech. Speeches still really, really matter in politics. If Vance becomes president. People will talk for the rest of time about Vance's Munich Security Conference speech. It was really consequential, very significant. That was where a bit of a mess slipped, the real Vance sort of came out. He will try to become a different Vance, to become presidential candidate, and he'll

• 40:43Alastair Campbell?

  be become a different Vance after that. But I thought, well done Ursula, sehr gut gesprochen, as we say. There we are. I hope our listeners have enjoyed us. We're also going to do a chat with David Frum about Vance, because, of course, he, we've interviewed David, and he was, we used some of that interview in the, in the series. But David is somebody who knows J D Vance a lot better than, than we do, to some extent, used to be his boss. So we're going to do, that will be our final take in this mini-series, will be a chat with David Frum. But I hope you've enjoyed everything so far.

• 41:13Rory Stewart?

  Thank you very much indeed.

• 41:19Rory Stewart?

  That was great. I loved your message of European hope. I'm sorry you don't have your bagpipes to play To Joy, but that was a great moment. And I wish we had a little bit more of that.

• 41:28Alastair Campbell?

  I've got a chanter.

• 41:29Rory Stewart?

  A bit more of that optimism, because this...

• 41:36Alastair Campbell?

  So tell people what that is, Roy. Tell them what it is.

• 41:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that is, that's, well, there's the chanter. So it's, it's the bagpipes without the bag, and that's him playing Beethoven's To Joy, which is European national anthem. I just wish we could hear more of that, because there's so much sort of despair and self-hating in Europe, and a sense that we're falling by hind economically and in productivity. And we're forgetting that our public education system and our public health system is far better than that of the US.

• 42:01Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 42:02Rory Stewart?

  And that if you were poor, you would much rather be living in Denmark or Sweden than you would be living in Mississippi. So.

• 42:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Rory Stewart?

  Let's not beat ourselves up too much, and, and let's try to get the hope from individual people in Britain and Europe, rebuilding a world of trust and human institutions.

• 42:19Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. See you soon. Just before we go, I hope you enjoyed that special Q and A off the back of our mini-series on J D Vance, with questions from members of The Rest is Politics Plus. If you want to hear the mini-series in full right now, you can enjoy a free trial at therestispolitics.com. You get access to the one we've just done, you'll get access to the next one, which is already in the planning, you get monthly bonus episodes, completely ad-free listening, our members chatroom, and much, much more. Hope you enjoyed it. All the best.

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