239. The Rwanda ruling, Trudeau in trouble, and The Rest Is Politics: US edition

What is the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda? What will happen next after the US Congress approves aid for Ukraine? Is Justin Trudeau’s future as Canadian Prime Minister in danger? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. Pre-order Alastair's new children's books: https://lnkfi.re/sJJcp0 TRIP ELECTION TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] 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. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

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• 1:56Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:59Rory Stewart?

  And me Rory Stewart.

• 2:00Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, we've finally got this Rwanda bill through Parliament. We'll talk about that. And I think the other thing to talk about probably is Rishi Sunak's recent speech on welfare reform. If I can put my view straight out there, I think both represented a certain form of performative cruelty. You've just been in Vancouver in Canada, a place that I know reasonably well. And I think we should maybe take a rare deep dive on Canadian politics because there's a lot of very interesting stuff going on there. And then maybe after the break, the pretty big events that happened over the weekend in the US Congress with this bill in support of particularly of Ukraine, but also Israel, Taiwan and other places finally getting through and now on its way to get signed by the President.

• 2:45Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely.

• 2:46Alastair Campbell?

  So Rwanda, how do you feel Rory? If you'd have been, let me ask you this. If you had been still in Parliament with this bill going through, would you have felt comfortable in voting for it?

• 2:58Rory Stewart?

  I think I probably would have felt pretty uncomfortable. Just to step back a second. If you're a Conservative MP voting for this, you will be getting mailboxes full of people often complaining. You will probably have family members saying, how can you be voting for this bill? But at the same time, on the other side, you'll have huge pressure for loyalty, pressure from the whips. You'll be aware that the Prime Minister has made this one of his five pledges and that therefore you need to deliver it. And you'll also be aware that the whips will be saying to you, well, there are much more right wing positions. So the Suella Bravman and others over on one side saying this bill isn't tough enough on Rwanda.

• 3:38Rory Stewart?

  And you will have the Attorney General and others who are very much in the kind of sensible centre of the party reassuring you that what's been done is legal. So I imagine the majority of Conservative MPs go through feeling loyalty and obedience, but probably a little bit of misgiving.

• 3:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I mean, Andrew Mitchell, who we both know and like, and has now been promoted to this position of Deputy Foreign Secretary, as well as Overseas Development, was doing the rounds yesterday promoting it. And I mean, he did a, from the perspective, as you say, of collective responsibility, you have to sort of toe the government line. He kind of did okay, but I sensed discomfort. The thing that really sort of troubles me about the whole thing, as well as the the obvious, which we've talked about before, and you you talked on the podcast last week about, you know, some policies are cruel, but they're effective. Some policies could be, you know, that that that sort of this feels like it's cruel and ineffective and won't necessarily work just because they're going to get the odd plane off the ground at enormous expense.

• 4:38Rory Stewart?

  I think your big insight, which is almost all anyone needs to know about it, is that he should never have made this pledge in the first place. I mean, it's completely daft because he was setting himself up from the beginning for something that was going to be incredibly expensive. So I think you've pointed out, it's going to cost £350 million at least.

• 4:56Alastair Campbell?

  We're already, I think, at half a billion. And by the way, I didn't realise, on the back of the bill finally going into law, Kagame, leader of Rwanda, they pick up another £50 million. And added to which, a lot of the housing isn't necessarily still there. And I just think, just imagine if the government had put the amount of energy and time and money that they put into this, into sorting out food banks, or sorting out child poverty, or reopening libraries, or something that really would give people a sense of, oh, these guys are on my side, they get what I'm what I'm about. I just feel this has consumed so much time, so much energy, so much money. And deep down, I thought Alex Carlisle, the former Liberal Democrat MP who's now in the House of Lords and who's

• 5:41Alastair Campbell?

  knows this world inside out from some of the jobs that he's done in the past. And he made the point that we're actually passing a law to say something that is not true is true. And we haven't really got away from that fundamental, you know, that a law says a certain country is safe.

• 5:57Rory Stewart?

  Well, there's a very impressive man called David Anderson, who I know about, who was the big reviewer of terror legislation, who was essentially the last man standing in the House of Lords, trying to insist that there needs to be a committee to assess this. I also was one of the people who signed a letter pushing hard for an amendment to exempt people on the Afghan resettlement scheme for being included in this. I worked with Dan Jarvis, who's a Labour veteran and mayor, an MP on this.

• 6:24Alastair Campbell?

  Andrew Mitchell was pushed very, very hard on that. And he kept claiming that the existing safe routes.

• 6:32Alastair Campbell?

  Allows for those people to come.

• 6:34Rory Stewart?

  That's a very weird one. So just to explain that. So essentially what he's saying is, well, we don't need this exemption.

• 6:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 6:40Rory Stewart?

  Because they have other routes coming and they have to get on a boat. But it's a classic example of something where the whips are in a very difficult position because if I'd been an MP, I would have been saying, well, why not just put this in for safety's sake?

• 6:52Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 6:53Rory Stewart?

  Well, you know, just in case someone didn't make it through the safer. And of course, the reason they don't want to accept the amendment is largely, and this is true for a lot of government bills, they just want to get the legislation through. Final thing, you said, imagine if they put the energy into other things. I think that there's also the point that you can see why the government wanted to get control of people crossing in small boats. We're talking at a moment where five people, including a seven year old child, have just died crossing the channel. And there's clearly something mad about the idea that France, which is a safe country, is providing people coming into Britain. And I think we said before that in the end, it doesn't matter whether you're talking about the US or Europe, we need to think about how to identify people who are genuinely at risk in the countries

• 7:36Rory Stewart?

  from which they're coming, rather than allow these informal crossings. But the biggest problem is that it turned out to be a really ineffective, incredibly inexpensive thing that just doesn't remotely achieve its objective. So I mean, regardless of what you think about the thing, it's just not remotely going to stop those boats.

• 7:56Alastair Campbell?

  And also, on the one hand, the whole premise is based on the idea, this entire legislation, that Rwanda is a safe country because they say it is. And yet, on the other hand, the argument why they need this, why they need this entire scheme is so that it's a deterrent. In other words, nobody would ever possibly want to go and be sent to Rwanda. So how have the wild had visited this great place that the houses are lovely and everything's going to be nice? And unlike the previous people who went there from Israel, they won't be desperate to go back to their own country. And yet, at the same time, the whole point is that it's a deterrent. Also, sorry to quote him for two weeks in a row, although he just writes some very interesting stuff. Peter Kelner, pollster, has sent round a thing on Prospect this morning, essentially showing that the debate on immigration is actually changing in favour.

• 8:42Alastair Campbell?

  Of immigration. Now, not necessarily people sort of, you know, coming in illegally and so forth. But I think this whole policy is predicated on a belief that there are squillions of votes to be won by saying we're going to be very tough on immigration. Peter makes the point that the anti-immigration majority, which was two to one at the time, just after the Brexit referendum, is now level pegging.

• 9:07Rory Stewart?

  Which is fascinating because it's at a time when we've had an incredible amount of immigration. I mean, the absolute numbers have been much higher than

• 9:14Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 9:14Rory Stewart?

  Before Brexit. I mean, I think the total numbers, if you take out people leaving the country, was something like 1.2 million. And even if you insert people leaving the country, it's about 700,000 came in. And from a much, much wider variety of non-European countries, huge numbers have come into Britain now from Nigeria, from India, from Bangladesh, Pakistan. And it is very interesting that the absolute numbers have gone up steeply. But public sentiment isn't that. I mean, can you explain that? Why do you think people are less concerned about it?

• 9:43Alastair Campbell?

  I haven't had time properly to read Peter's stuff, but if I had to guess, I think I had to go into a hospital the other day for some tests. And you do notice the, you know, last time I was in hospital, I can remember making a list of all the different nationalities that were sort of involved. And a lot of them were European Union people. I think what's happened is that post Brexit, there's been a sense of public service. You had all that stuff recently about Italian restaurants can't find Italian waiters. And added to which, another very interesting piece of polling this week that I saw basically showed that there is a growing antipathy to this anti-woke stuff and to the culture wars generally. And I think you're seeing that, I think, in, I don't regularly watch Question Time, but I did watch it the other day.

• 10:27Alastair Campbell?

  I'm talking about the BBC Question Time. And it seems to me that the mood within those audiences has changed, that when the Tories or the right wing commentators come up with their sort of usual kind of anti-woke, whatever it might be, they're just being met with kind of groaning and head shaking.

• 10:41Rory Stewart?

  There's something very interesting here because this means that Britain feels a little bit like an outlier because broadly speaking, if you were looking at populist and

• 10:52Rory Stewart?

  Right wing movements in most of Europe going into the European elections in June and in the US. These issues, particularly around immigration, are absolutely front and centre. I mean, you know, if you're looking for an explanation of why the moderate centre party is going to get crushed and punished in the European elections, it'll be because they haven't come up with credible policies on immigration. And voters right across Europe are really think that their politicians don't have control on this.

• 11:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:19Rory Stewart?

  In Britain, it seems to be different. Any ideas on why in Europe people feel their politicians haven't got a control on this and are very angry, but in Britain it's less of an issue?

• 11:28Alastair Campbell?

  We're discussing this based on the fact that Peter Kellner has sent me this one piece of polling or this polling analysis. Would you and I still be able to go out today and find people who really did feel fired up about this? And so I think we probably would. But I wonder if it goes back to the point that François Hollande made, that Europe has yet to catch up with our peak populism. And so Peter's analysis goes as follows. The debate is now less about scroungers and more about workers, more attention being paid to the economic and social impact of immigrants. Notably, those, this is what I said, notably those who work in hospitals and care homes. Also, eighteen months ago, Ipsos and other pollsters found widespread support for generous allowances to fill vacancies in a whole range of jobs,

• 12:12Alastair Campbell?

  including construction, which has been badly hit, hospitality and fruit picking as well as the NHS. So I think it's sort of more awareness of why we do need a kind of steady flow of people coming in.

• 12:24Rory Stewart?

  Let me suggest one more thing, which may be daft. It's possible that the government's rhetoric around this means that unlike in a lot of European countries, the public perception isn't that politicians are denying it. The public perception may be that politicians are tying themselves in knots unnecessarily to try to address it. And of course, Keir Starmer hasn't really distanced himself from Rishi Sunak much on this immigration stuff. So maybe actually the perception is that the Conservative and Labour parties are projecting in a way European countries are not, that they're tougher on immigration, even if the numbers are going up all the time.

• 12:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think there might be something in there. I mean, Labour have said they will. Dump this Rwanda plan, but I think the the other point that Peter makes in analysis is that Labour may have to move in the direction of identity citizenship cards type approach to this, which I've not really heard much on that. But anyway, it's an interesting piece which we should put in the in the newsletter. Shall we just talk a little bit about the Sunak's welfare speech last week, which again I felt fell into the performative cruelty

• 13:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Alastair Campbell?

  side of life.

• 13:25Rory Stewart?

  I mean, so for people who haven't picked up on it, and you make a point which we'll get to when we get to Canada, which is the fact that politicians get to a stage where nobody's listening. And I'd be interested to know actually how many people really picked up on the speech or paid much attention to it. Anyway, four days ago, it was a big speech from his point of view, and it was trying to attack essentially the sick note culture. So it was a speech where he begins with very sort of reasonable sounding language, saying how proud he is of the welfare state and safety nets. And then he goes on to say, but there are eight hundred thousand people fewer in work and a lot of them are young people and the number of people being signed off as sick has massively increased. So he says a figure, I think

• 14:05Rory Stewart?

  that gone from being, you know, less than twenty percent in twenty eleven to sixty percent now getting sick notes and that this is a real problem. And he tries to say it's a problem, not just for the economy, but for the individuals who would be better getting into work. And then he comes up with his solutions and his solutions seem to be firstly, much tougher assessments on sick notes. So taking it out of the hands of GPs and setting up some new agency that's going to assess people sanctions. So if you are recommended to go back into certain kinds of work and you don't do it in twelve months, your benefits will be cut off. Much more attempts to try to challenge statements around mental illness, et cetera. I mean, a couple of things on it. I disagree with this way of looking at welfare. I think it's

• 14:49Rory Stewart?

  actually missing the point about most of the people who are on welfare. And, you know, we can talk about that a little bit more, but I guess it'll be, you know, just very quickly on that. Certainly in my experience, in my constituency or travelling around, I don't come across many people who are just idle. I mean, it's not a phenomenon I see. There may be people, but it's just not something I see much of. It's much more about the fact that people are really struggling. I mean, they're struggling to get NHS appointments, the care system's broken down. And also the nature of the new economy, kind of gig economy is really brutal.

• 15:21Alastair Campbell?

  I think the pandemic has also been a factor. I mean, you talked to whether it's The fact that people's working habits changed, or it's long Covid, or I think the pandemic has had this pretty deleterious impact. I really didn't like the way he talked about mental health, though. I felt that we were going back a decade. I feel that at least David Cameron and Theresa May seem to me to understand that mental health was a real challenge and that these were real issues. And the way he talked about it, you know, half of all people saying they've got depression and anxiety, but, you know, and the doctors just sign them off. Well, we're going to put these kind of, you know, you call them health and work professionals. Well, I don't know what a doctor is. So I felt it was almost like othering. It was like the small boats thing hasn't worked. Let's find a new

• 16:03Alastair Campbell?

  target to other. Let's go for the sick and the disabled. I really didn't like it.

• 16:07Rory Stewart?

  And a bit like the small boat stuff, there's also, just to step back, the practicality to the whole thing. I mean, how on earth are you going to do it? I mean, you've got five months before you get booted out of office. This is a massive reform. I mean, setting up this whole new agency, doing the completely different forms of assessments. I mean, it would take years, realistically, if you looked at the problems that we have with universal credit.

• 16:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I don't believe he's doing it to do it. He's doing it as with the small boats, because he's got this constituency that he thinks this is appealing to. But I wonder if it has got to a point where maybe it is effective. I feel both of these policies actually are damaging them politically. I could be completely wrong, but I really feel that.

• 16:46Rory Stewart?

  A little shout out to a friend of mine called Hillary Cotum, who's written a book called Radical Help, and is now working on a new book, who's the best analyst I know, on saying some pretty bold and difficult things about welfare reform. But she would say that what we need to do is follow the Swiss model, which is sit down with employers and say, okay, you have a problem. You don't have enough workers. And then sit down with people who are not in work and work out where the gap is and really try to work together and work out how you can produce. Decent, attractive work for people who are struggling to get into work and good workers for employers and that she would argue, and I direct people towards her book, that the Swiss are actually pretty good at doing this and that that's the way to think about it, rather than this kind of sanction culture.

• 17:30Alastair Campbell?

  Interesting. So should we go to Canada? There is sort of reverse parallels going on, I think, that you've got a liberal centrist government, Justin Trudeau on his third term as Prime Minister. You've got a Conservative Party opposition led by this pretty populist guy Pierre Polievre. And Trudeau seems to be in real trouble. They've just had a budget, which I think a lot of people in his party see as the sort of last big chance to move the dial. But there's a growing chat that, you know, maybe Trudeau's days are numbered. And will the Liberal Party actually think, you know, we need to give him the heave ho before we get to an election campaign next year?

• 18:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, as you say, I've just come back from Canada and Canadian politics is really interesting. I mean, on the one hand, it's a parliamentary democracy that in many ways resembles Britain. It's there in North America. The first thing that you really notice is that the span of Canadian politics in terms of ideology is really, really narrow. You know, I had a friend who said that the whole of the Canadian politics from right to left would fit into the sort of centre of the Democratic Party in the US. And I was trying to push this because I've got a lot of friends.

• 18:40Alastair Campbell?

  Quite right.

• 18:42Rory Stewart?

  No, I've got a lot of friends who are in Canadian politics. I had a friend, well, Michael Ignatieff, who we interviewed, who ran to be, then became head of Liberal Party. And I had another friend who ran to be head of the Conservative Party. And we both know Mark Carney, who I think would be a really strong candidate now for the Liberal Party. But when I tried to get into the question of what are the splits within the Liberal Party? Because, you know, that's how I think as a British person, the Tory Party tearing itself to bits and Labour Party being Blair right against Corbyn. Everyone's completely baffled. They're like, well, there aren't any ideological splits within the Liberal Party. We're just a centrist party trying to... Literally, it's really odd. I kept trying to push and say, well, surely there are kind of disagreements, I don't know, about Gaza or about, you know. They're like, no, not really.

• 19:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I think this is why in the end, it probably is all going to come down, as it did with Johnson and as it did with Truss, to the Liberals saying to themselves, is this guy still a winner? So Trudeau, he's now in his early 50s. His first win in 2015 was an incredible success. I think it was the biggest ever increase. So he went from third to first. It's the only, of the three wins, it's the only one where he's actually, as it were, won it, been in the lead. Since then, he's run a minority government. He's been in, had this sort of confidence and supply arrangement with the new Democrat Party, which is really the one that's closest to the Labor Party here, is to the left of the Liberal Party. And you don't have, here, you've got Tory MPs openly

• 20:08Alastair Campbell?

  talking about, shall we get rid of Sunak? There, I don't think you do have them openly talking about it, but I think that, I don't know if you've picked up on this, but I think behind the scenes, there is a lot of, you know, is just then done.

• 20:19Rory Stewart?

  He's in real trouble. I mean, the figures are terrible. I mean, he seems to be, you know, maybe as much as 20 points behind in the polls.

• 20:26Alastair Campbell?

  When you look at the polling trends, it's almost a mirror image of what's happening here. You just cannot seem to close the gap. And the budget is probably the last chance.

• 20:34Rory Stewart?

  It's interesting trying to work out what he's done wrong, because, again, there aren't sort of big things. It's not like Britain where you would say, oh, it's, you know, the Tories were wrecked by austerity, or they were wrecked by Liz Truss's budget or party gate. Trudeau hasn't done that. He's a very interesting figure. So a very sort of quick explainer for international listeners. I mean, Trudeau took over a Liberal Party, which had essentially been the great ruling party of Canada, but had collapsed. And he came in and people were a bit doubtful, because he's a very, very, as people will have seen, incredibly kind of good-looking glamorous man, whose reputation was based

• 21:14Rory Stewart?

  on the fact that his father, Pierre Trudeau, was the most famous kind of Canadian statesman, this kind of very glamorous, slightly womanizing, wealthy intellectual.

• 21:25Alastair Campbell?

  I think Slyly's doing quite a lot of lifting there, Rory.

• 21:30Alastair Campbell?

  And Justin, we should just say, Justin, he really broke through. Obviously, look, he was as a baby, he was born when Trudeau was Prime Minister. There's an amazing old clip of Richard Nixon paying tribute to them having this baby and saying, I bet he'll be a future Prime Minister.

• 21:46Rory Stewart?

  Yes, right. He toasts him as the future Prime Minister of Canada, doesn't he?

• 21:49Alastair Campbell?

  But when he was 28 and Pierre Trudeau died, Justin Trudeau made this amazing eulogy, which of course it was a state funeral, it was live on television. That's when he really broke through. Until then, nobody has thought he was going to go into politics.

• 22:01Rory Stewart?

  And it's very interesting. I'd love you to see if you can think of any British politician who's like this. So Trudeau is almost exactly my age. So I sort of get a sense of tracking him because, you know, I left school and I went into the army very briefly. And then I obviously went to university, then I joined the Foreign Office, I served in an NGO in Afghanistan and stuff. And during all this period, right the way through, in the same age as me, through to his early 30s, it's very difficult to know what he was doing. He was a snowboarding instructor. He was a reserve teacher for a little bit in some private schools. He appeared once in a CBS mini-series. But basically, the attempts to profile him from his teens through to his early 30s, nobody can really find out

• 22:46Rory Stewart?

  how to profile him because they just kind of interview the guy who used to be a snowboard instructor with him and they shared a couch in a Canadian ski resort. And they're like, yeah, he was quite a wild skier. And so obviously, when he entered politics, therefore, people thought he's a bit of a lightweight because he really hadn't done, a kind of rich young man who hasn't really done much of his life. He then proved to be far tougher and far more on message when he came in as Prime Minister. And he runs a very tight ship. I mean, I think one difference in Canadian and British politics again seems to be the party discipline is extreme. I mean, they really, everything is a three line where there's no question of leaking to the newspapers without losing your ministerial job.

• 23:26Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think he's ever been as skillful as some of his predecessors at managing that, managing the people that you have to keep on board. You're absolutely right. I don't think people really, Nixon, when he was a baby, notwithstanding, I don't think many people thought this guy's future is necessarily going to be in politics. But then he has this great, when he did some pretty big things as well, you know. Legalizing marijuana, one of the first to do that. He was pretty good on the foreign policies. I think it really benefited him as being the not Trump person in North America for those four years. And maybe it's just a time thing. Of course, you know, you go back to the two world wars. There's a guy called William Lyon Mackenzie King. He led the Liberal Party from 1919 to 1948. That's 29 years. And he was Prime Minister for

• 24:11Alastair Campbell?

  almost 22 of those years. Now, unless you're a dictator like Putin, is it just impossible now to last much more than a decade? So Trudeau's coming up to his ninth, 10th year?

• 24:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 24:23Alastair Campbell?

  Is that maybe the limit that we get?

• 24:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's interesting, isn't it? Because it also sort of brings us to your friend Macron. Because in the early days, I think people did draw analogies between them. They both seemed to be this very glamorous, young, dynamic people. And, you know, Trudeau would be, I remember definitely back in eight, nine years ago, he was sort of regularly, if you were looking for some, a politician to admire around the world, and you were a kind of liberal progressive type, Trudeau would be the natural person you look at. And now, when I say to people, I was talking to someone who's in his cabinet, and I was saying, well, what's wrong with him? What's he done wrong? And their response was, well, he's just too much. And I was like, what do you mean, he's too much? And he was like, he's just too much. I mean, you know, he's just done a feminist budget, and I'm a woman, and I don't even understand what a feminist budget is. And the sense is, the impression

• 25:07Rory Stewart?

  he's giving, and it may not be his fault, is that he's just, he's just too gorgeous, thinks he's very beautiful, is quite woke. People are getting fed up with his tone of voice. They're just kind of bored of him. I mean, it's just not working anymore.

• 25:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And of course, I do think that, you know, it must have affected him quite deeply that his marriage broke up.

• 25:27Rory Stewart?

  But he's, boy, he's been tough on that. So his wife, you're right, has left him for another man, and has moved in with him in Ottawa. But there is a toughness to Trudeau, which you might not have suspected when you saw him as a kind of snowboard instructor.

• 25:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I wonder, I mean, I just, I just wonder how, what effect that has on you. And this thing about whether he's going to go, he did an interview recently. Where he said these words, I think about quitting every day. Well, look, I mean, I know I wasn't Prime Minister, but I was in Downey Street and I know from my own experience, I think once you start thinking about quitting, you basically quit.

• 25:58Rory Stewart?

  We've never got quite to the bottom of the Taoiseach of Ireland stepping down and what happened. And this pattern actually of these, of a number of politicians, you know, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, et cetera.

• 26:10Alastair Campbell?

  Did you get a sense, if I had to put my life on it, I think he will step down.

• 26:14Rory Stewart?

  My guess is he's gonna hold on because I think he's competitive with his father. His father didn't manage four terms and generally politicians need to be pulled kicking and screaming as we see with Biden out of office, even if they're not a great thing. No, let's just quickly touch on Mark Carney though. So Mark Carney is this Canadian who was governor of the Bank of England, governor of the Bank of Canada. Well, we've interviewed him on the podcast if people want to follow up and is somebody who could be really interesting as a potential replacement for Trudeau and potentially as a candidate to lead them into the next election. Just what's your instincts on Mark Carney? I know you've been watching football with him. What's your sense of him as a person?

• 26:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he's a very big Everton fan and he and I went to the Burnley Everton game together.

• 27:01Rory Stewart?

  Who won the game?

• 27:02Alastair Campbell?

  We don't need to talk about that, Rory. We're doing better now. We're doing much better now. When I watched him from afar, when he was, I was vaguely aware of him when he was in in Canada. And then of course he came over to here and was a very high profile figure in the UK because he was governor of the Bank of England at a very particular time. I always worried about whether he had that kind of what we call the retail political skills. I think he does have them. Having got to know him a bit and having sort of seen him with people, seeing him, how he manages people, how he talks to people. I think he's got a very, you know, you think governor of Bank of England, governor of Bank of Canada, you probably think Trudeau style silver spoon. That's not his backstory at all. Actually comes from quite a very ordinary background.

• 27:46Alastair Campbell?

  And the thing is, you and I talked yesterday to, just as preparation for this, we had a very interesting call with a guy called Bruce Anderson, who's a Canadian pollster and strategist. And you said to him, you know, but I can't imagine how somebody could come in from the outside like this in in our system. And he was making the point, which I hadn't really thought of, but it goes back to the point you made earlier, is he was saying that the thing about the Liberal Party, and this made me think of our of the Conservative Party here, they're just pretty ruthless about power. I mean, the other thing, I guess, maybe if they are thinking of sort of, you know, making a last minute change, might want to reflect on the last time something similar happened. 1993, Mulroney, very popular Prime

• 28:27Alastair Campbell?

  Minister for quite a long time, but then slipping in the polls and they got rid of him. And he was replaced by Kim Campbell, the only ever female Prime Minister of Canada. She lasted 130 days, and the party got completely wiped out, literally two seats. They're reduced to two seats. And eventually, they didn't exist. The party was replaced and became today's Conservative Party. So there might be some of them who think they have to be careful what they wish for. And if they do start to think, you know, Justin's had it, the only people that might, there's the Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, who's also the Finance Minister, who's just done this budget aimed at young people, the three or four other ministers that would be in with a shout. But

• 29:11Alastair Campbell?

  they're all very, very, very associated with the government that's being rejected. So maybe they will say, do you know what, we need to go right outside and bring somebody in. And the system would allow it.

• 29:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, the system also allows people to sign up new members, which does give you a bit of an edge. I thought about this when I was trying to run for leadership of the Conservative Party. It's not possible in the Tory Party. So I thought, you know, maybe what I can do is get people to sign up to be Conservative members because they're on my side and then vote for me. And in the Canadian system, that is possible. And the people you sign up can vote, whereas in the British system, people who signed up very recently can't vote. They're trying to prevent you coming in from the outside in that way.

• 29:49Alastair Campbell?

  The other point, of course, that Bruce made was that you can become leader without being an MP.

• 29:54Rory Stewart?

  But equally, I guess I'm probably right, that there will be a lot of pretty cross MPs who feel we've put in the years. We spent a lot of time delivering leaflets. This is quite a grand person coming in from the outside. He hasn't won his, you know, he hasn't, and I think that will be the thing that he really needs to challenge, which is people will say you haven't put in the hard yards. You've not been standing in the ridings, you've not been, you know, standing on rainy days, pushing leaflets through doors. Certainly that would be the response in Britain, wouldn't it?

• 30:23Alastair Campbell?

  Let's just talk very briefly. We've mentioned it a couple of times on the podcast before, but let's just talk briefly about the guy who's leading the Conservative Party. Pierre Polievre, forty-four, he's been an MP since the age of twenty-five. Quite an interesting backstory, which I think doesn't help Trudeau, because Trudeau is trying to portray this guy as the friend of the Uber rich. He was adopted as a baby, his mother was sixteen, his father, his adopting father later came out as gay. He's worked in politics all of his life. What he has done very, very well, this does relate to the populism in other parts of the world, including here. He's absolutely gone for Trudeau over his proposals on the carbon tax and really played into that quite well. He's got some quite populist positions, defund CBC, the Canadian broadcaster.

• 31:06Alastair Campbell?

  He's not a Trumpian. I mean, he doesn't sort of go hell for leather on immigrants and that sort of thing. It probably would backfire if he did. But he's got a populist feel to him. But the other thing that's, that's happening, and again, a bit of a mirror image of us, he's not really getting tough scrutiny. I think there's just the feeling he's, you know, well, he's, you know, we can probably live with him kind of thing.

• 31:26Rory Stewart?

  He's also not laying out a platform or manifesto. I mean, that again echoes, echoes a little bit of the Labour Party in Britain. He doesn't feel he needs to.

• 31:34Alastair Campbell?

  I beg your pardon, the detailed policies that have been put. Have you read the base lecture?

• 31:38Rory Stewart?

  Well, yeah, exactly. Polievre is a little bit of a Ming Vaz strategy. He doesn't feel he needs to completely tell everyone what he's doing. He's relying on the fact that Trudeau is so far behind. He's also made a reputation as a real attack dog. And the guy that kind of gets the zingers off and Canadian quid pro quo to Prime Minister's questions.

• 31:55Alastair Campbell?

  I wonder, by the way, whether this is a deliberate strategy that he's running. Because he thinks maybe Mark Carney will come in. He's very big. He's actually said that if he becomes Prime Minister, he won't allow any of his ministers to go to Davos. The World Economic Forum is a terrible thing and it's sort of anti the people and so forth. So I wonder if that's if Mark Carney does go in, that maybe he'll try and present him as the sort of, you know, the ultimate globalist Davos man kind of thing. I think Trudeau is really in trouble. And I think, you know, I could see Mark Carney as a politician. I really can.

• 32:29Rory Stewart?

  And obviously you and I are going to try to get behind the Mark Carney team if he runs. We'll move to Canada and yeah.

• 32:35Alastair Campbell?

  It's a nice place. Nice place, Canada. It's a bit cold at times, bit cold.

• 32:40Rory Stewart?

  Oh, Vancouver was so beautiful, so beautiful, right there on the sea and incredible conifers.

• 32:46Alastair Campbell?

  What was this restaurant? You did a tweet saying this is the best restaurant I've ever been in in my life.

• 32:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Taru Sushi in New Haven. It's under a, it's under a car park on the edge of a highway. I couldn't believe it. It's this tiny little Japanese restaurant and you sit at the bar and these very, very serious Japanese men hand you one by one these incredibly delicious, perfectly chosen bits of fish on rice. I thought it was incredible.

• 33:10Alastair Campbell?

  Wow.

• 33:10Rory Stewart?

  But it's quite difficult to find or get into because it's tiny and under a car park.

• 33:14Alastair Campbell?

  It sounds like a Rudy Giuliani press conference. But anyway, there we are. Take a break.

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• 34:36Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics. From me, Rory Stewart.

• 34:39Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 34:40Rory Stewart?

  And Alistair, listen, I'm not going to let you get away with this because you have yet again been writing books. You never stop writing books. So while I've barely managed to get out one book in four years, you've written another two books, which I can see vaguely on the edge of the screen. Tell us about your two new books.

• 34:57Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the first one, Rory, I'm older than you. I don't have that many very young children in my life, but this is the first copy of book one.

• 35:06Rory Stewart?

  Oh, lovely.

• 35:07Alastair Campbell?

  Why Politics Matters. And it's for basically primary school children. So I'm going to give, I'm going to dedicate the first one to your two sons.

• 35:16Rory Stewart?

  Oh, thank you.

• 35:17Alastair Campbell?

  And I hope they'll like that.

• 35:18Rory Stewart?

  I'll read it with them. That's lovely.

• 35:20Alastair Campbell?

  So this is part of a series called Little Experts. Deborah Meaden's doing one on money. I'm doing this one on politics. And it's essentially just trying to explain how our political system works. Very, very simple. Lots of pictures, lots of illustrations. And they both arose from the last book because the publisher came to me and said, I really like, but what can I do? But you should really be doing these books for kids. And so the second one, where I'm wearing, as you can see, this extraordinary pink jacket.

• 35:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Why pink? Why have you gone pink?

• 35:46Alastair Campbell?

  Because the publisher said it's the only color they could find that didn't have an automatic party political association. I, of course, wanted red or color and blue for Burnley, but I was banned from that. So this is aimed at teenagers and young adults. It's called Alastair Campbell Talks Politics. And it's basically just saying, If you lot don't get involved, then our politics is in such a mess. And so I'm trying to inspire and motivate Rory, the younger generation to really to get stuck in. And I think you should do one as well. I think you should find a way. Maybe you should do Rory Stewart talks abroad, or Rory Stewart talks development, or charity, or whatever. I think you should do one of these books as well.

• 36:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, okay. Thank you. Well, I'm really looking forward to that. I also think it must be quite a discipline, writing for younger readers. There's a lovely, there's a guy, you know, the famous American Nobel Prize winner Feynman, he was asked by one of his colleagues to explain a particular formula, scientific formula. And he said, oh, I'll, I'll go away and I'll write a very simple lecture for young people on it. And then he came back two weeks later and he said, um, I couldn't do it. And you know what? That means that I don't understand it. And if I don't understand it, nobody else understands it either.

• 36:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. No, it's what's been really good. So the Emma, the person who's been kind of, you know, pushing me the whole time. Her basic role has been to make sure that a child of six could understand this one, and a child of 14 could understand this one. And both of us try to talk in a way that's kind of accessible to people. But we do, you're bound to use jargon or words that you assume that there's knowledge about. So it has been quite, quite tough to do that. But so I genuinely do think unless we re-motivate a younger generation to understand that politics matters and that it's important and that it's for them, then I think we're in real trouble. And we're just going to get, you know, really bad people constantly going into politics. And it's, so it's coming out

• 37:43Alastair Campbell?

  end of August, you can preorder now.

• 37:46Rory Stewart?

  Yep, preorder now.

• 37:47Alastair Campbell?

  And also Waterstones have signed up to get, I've got to go in and sign loads of them at Waterstones and you can order them through that. And we're going to put the link in the episode description box. Plugging over.

• 37:57Rory Stewart?

  Congratulations. Right. Now, big news, apart from the books, is that the US has finally passed this $60 billion package, which got stuck in Congress for support for Ukraine and other places, including Israel and Taiwan. And that of course brings the focus back on the big question, what is this money for? Right? Why is the US sending $60 billion to Ukraine? And and what's the big objective? What are they hoping to achieve now? Because the offensives didn't work last year, didn't manage to break through the front lines, Ukrainians didn't break through and retake territory. Russia is now on the offensive back. They took Avdeevka. They feel much stronger

• 38:40Rory Stewart?

  and more powerful. They're firing five to 10 times as many artillery missiles as Ukrainians is going back. They're beginning to mount airstrikes. And the question is, what's the big idea? And I wanted to just quickly just sort of maybe answer that question in my own terms, then give it back to you.

• 38:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Rory Stewart?

  I I think the criticism probably of the way the US and others have played it is that we've been quite risk averse and we haven't provided the support ever as quickly or in the scale that Ukraine has needed. The the the pattern that you will remember is that Zelensky goes out and says, I need this particular bit of kit. And Germany or the US or whoever says, no, no, no, you can't have that. It's not suitable. And then about nine months later, finally provides it. And and the reason for this is the US and and here I'm I'm again in the episode description box, there's a guy called Jack Watling at Rusi, who is the most unbelievable British expert on Ukraine and flies all the way around

• 39:43Rory Stewart?

  the world advising the US government and others. And so I was just just chatting to him on this. And he says that the problem is that the US government has basically had three objectives. And objective number one was they don't want to escalate this into a war between the US and Russia. Makes them very cautious. Second is they want to keep the NATO coalition together and do deterrence. And number three, but very much far down the list, was protecting the territorial integrity of Ukraine. And this has meant that there's been a lot of slightly risk averse, half hearted measures, which have really meant probably that Ukraine's never going to be able to break through. Oh, sorry. Well, I'm not I'm not quoting Watling there. I didn't think you'd say that. But but but that's my instinct. Yeah.

• 40:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, it has been, you said at the start, you know, how has this sort of taken so long? Well, part of the reason, Mike Johnson, the speaker, the Republican speaker in Congress, he got a lot of credit and a lot of praise, rightly. For sort of staring down the sort of pro Putin Maga people, but he did take six months.

• 40:48Rory Stewart?

  Because Trump was against, I mean, that's the basic story, isn't it?

• 40:50Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 40:51Rory Stewart?

  Trump was mobilizing Republicans against it.

• 40:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and Johnson went to see Trump. Trump seems to have moved a bit, which I think has emboldened Johnson to face them down. But it has taken a long time. And during that period, the Russians appear to have taken advantage. And look, we've talked often about the difficulties in the imbalance between the speed at which democracies can work against the speed that dictatorships can work. So as you've said before, Russia has become very much a kind of defense military economy. Europe and America are trying to step up in terms of production and so forth, but it's a lot slower. And so this has taken month after month after month after month. It took a lot of quite clever politics and quite dangerous politics from Johnson's perspective. He did this thing where he separated all

• 41:39Alastair Campbell?

  the issues out. He allowed people a little bit of sort of pick and mix of what they could, what they could vote for, what they could vote against. But it is still quite alarming, I think. You know, 112 Republicans voted against this and 101 Republicans voted for it. So to get it through, Biden had to rely on the Democrats and 101 Republicans. But there's a very interesting piece we should put in the newsletter from a guy called David Frum, who I knew a bit because he was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. So he's a kind of Bush Republican, as it were. He actually said that he felt the two big losers out of this, one was Putin and the other was Trump, because what this showed was that maybe there is a growing body of Republicans who are not just going to take the sort of

• 42:24Alastair Campbell?

  whatever madness Trump comes out with as their instruction. And you have to ask yourself, what, you know, the party of Reagan, the party of Roosevelt, the party of Eisenhower. So essentially, standing up, that Marjorie Taylor Greene, I mean, they're now starting to call her Moscow Marjorie, she almost echoes a lot of the talking points that come out of the Kremlin. How the hell has that happened?

• 42:47Rory Stewart?

  No, it's amazing. I'm here in Yale and one of my colleagues sits down the corridor from me is a man called Tim Snyder and there's an amazing clip.

• 42:54Alastair Campbell?

  Oh God, Rory, Rory, you're living next to Tim Snyder?

• 42:58Rory Stewart?

  I am.

• 42:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he's one of my heroes and we have to get him on the podcast. He is the man.

• 43:02Rory Stewart?

  I'm having a cup of tea with him this afternoon, so I will say, I will say that.

• 43:06Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent.

• 43:07Rory Stewart?

  Get on. Anyway, he was up against Marjorie Taylor Greene and, and he is, as you know, the great expert on Ukraine.

• 43:13Alastair Campbell?

  This is, this is when she basically was trying to sort of suggest that the Ukrainians were Nazis and that Zelensky was corrupt and all the usual stuff. And he basically just sat there and barreled out the facts of history. And then it was a very good Democrat, I didn't catch his name, there was a very good Democrat who came in the back of him. And I mean, it really put her in her place. But that party is not the party of those leaders that I mentioned. But this does indicate that maybe Mike Johnson feels more confident that he will have Democrat support if there's a move against him. And that would, that would maybe keep him there.

• 43:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, let's just look at the strategic bit for a second. So what, what are they trying to do? They're basically trying to buy two things. They're buying artillery and they're buying air defence. They're buying artillery because if they can't get the artillery shells, they're dependent on pushing their soldiers forward with small arms and they end up losing an enormous number of soldiers. So they need the artillery barrages to try to stand back and, and save their soldiers from close quarter stuff.

• 44:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Rory Stewart?

  The air defence stuff is that the biggest threat to Ukraine now is the Russian air force. There's a lot of problems with the Russian air force, but if they can begin flying medium altitude and dropping bombs the way that they did in Syria.

• 44:33Rory Stewart?

  Ukraine will be in real trouble at the moment because of their air defence systems. They've been able to make them either fly very, very low, in which case it's difficult to get accuracy, or fly very high and fire from a long way away. Similar problem. But they're just beginning to break through at kind of medium altitude. So they need the air defences. But this stuff, artillery and air defences, is about trying to defend. It's about protecting their front lines. And the question is, are they going to be able to use the next year to be in a position to mount an offensive in 2025? Nobody thinks now that Ukraine's going to be able to recapture territory this year. Will they be able to spend six, nine months rebuilding, recruiting, training for these

• 45:17Rory Stewart?

  very complex combined arms operations? We're going to get David Petraeus on them, on on leading, the American general, to talk about the details of how this is done. But this is something we've talked about, where you've got to coordinate all the different arms of your military, all the way from the cooks and logistics at the back, right the way through to your armour, your tanks moving forward and your your air all happening at the same time. It's not something that Britain has done in practice for a very long time. So countries need to work to train and support and recruit. And if we're talking about next year, the big question is Trump. Because this this money might get them through the next few months, but they're going to need a colossal amount of money in 2025. And it's

• 46:00Rory Stewart?

  not likely that Europe is going to step up enough to fill the hole if the US steps back. So there's a loss of pretty uncertain variables, which makes me a bit doubtful about whether Ukraine will be able to do this in 2025, including the fact that the Russians keep getting stronger in some ways.

• 46:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think that I think there is a slight problem with the the extent to which the expectations have ramped up so high on the back of this. When you saw the American congresspeople waving Ukrainian flags and Zelensky obviously welcoming this. And, you know, I think it's important to be realistic. This is going to get them back in the game. It doesn't mean that they're going to necessarily be set up to. You know, to make to make the sort of advances they were talking about a year ago. And the other thing I saw that was quite alarming, actually, was there was a line came out of the Kremlin on the back of this, essentially saying that, you know, that they need to, they need to be targeting now the supply of these weapons, because, you know, there's a lot of talk about, a lot of this stuff is already in Poland and in Germany in particular.

• 47:01Alastair Campbell?

  So are they talking there about, you know, once they know what sort of weapons they're talking about, whether they can somehow find out the transportation and take them out? I don't know. I just thought it was quite, quite creepy. And Steve Rosenberg of the BBC, he put a very interesting post out this morning where he was going through today's or yesterday's Russian newspapers. And, I mean, God, they were going for Mike Johnson in a big way. This is obviously gone, goes without saying, gone down very, very, very badly with the Russians. They will use that for their own, for their own narrative. But I think we're, you're right to be cautious about suggesting that this is going to be a kind of, you know, a massive, immediate game changer.

• 47:40Rory Stewart?

  And you've also put your finger on something that I think people haven't made enough of, which is, the Russians, of course, know that the number one fear of the US is that this could escalate into a bigger conflict. Which means that Russia has every reason to signal that they might turn it into a bigger conflict. You know, that, as you say, they might go after the supplies in Europe, that you might get them talking again about tactical nuclear weapons, because Russia can't allow the idea to get out that America can do whatever it takes without escalating into a bigger conflict. And final thing, I think, is, is, you know, what's the end state? Well, obviously, the end state is not that anybody now seriously believes

• 48:23Rory Stewart?

  I'm afraid that Ukraine is going to be able to retake eastern Donbass. So these Russian-speaking, more now largely ethnically cleansed, more Russian areas of eastern Ukraine, which were taken in 2014. Those, those bits, I'm afraid, nobody thinks that Ukraine's going to be able to retake. Crimea may be, but again, pretty unlikely because it's a very, very Russian cultured peninsula. So what this is really about is increasing the leverage and negotiating position of Ukraine when they go into a negotiation and That will be from the Ukrainian point of view, yes, a settlement on territory, you know, Russia giving a bit, Ukraine giving a bit and some settlement.

• 49:07Rory Stewart?

  But guaranteeing Ukrainian independence, because what the Russians are trying to say is, yeah, well, you you can join the EU if you want, but we're going to essentially have a Russian puppet government in Kiev and we're going to keep all this territory.

• 49:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. My final point, we've we focused on Ukraine, which was the biggest part of this this package that went through the House of Representatives. There was also more support for Israel, also commitment to something we talked about last week being ignored. So thanks, I think we should acknowledge that they also recognize the need for more support for Sudan, humanitarian in Gaza and Haiti as well. And there was also another measure about sort of, you know, trying to stop TikTok having such an influence within the the American debates. It was a pretty, it was a pretty, pretty significant day all round.

• 49:56Rory Stewart?

  Good. Well, I I'm here in the US and I'm and I'm also here in Yale, where the students demonstrating in solidarity with Gaza occupied the the centre of the university over the weekend and were cleared by police yesterday morning. And you you can feel here in these universities, maybe less so in Yale, it's been more extreme in in Columbia and Harvard. But just, just how raw these issues are. So you had, you know, I went, I went down to see, see the demonstrations that the pro Gaza demonstrators here, many of them are masked because they're worried that they're not going to be able to get jobs afterwards if their faces are seen. Then you've got counter demonstrators who are more pro Israeli, who are coming filming,

• 50:40Rory Stewart?

  trying to capture social media footage of people making antisemitic statements. And then, then obviously you've got this question of whether the university does or doesn't send in the police to get classes started. Columbia cancelled classes, Yale decided they want to go ahead with classes.

• 50:54Alastair Campbell?

  Jesus. So it's even, is, is, is, I know you've been away the whole week. Have you followed this situation of the, this guy Gideon Falter, who runs something, the campaign against antisemitism?

• 51:06Alastair Campbell?

  And the story of this police sergeant who used this phrase openly Jewish. And I was really pleased today to see Mark Rowley, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner. The Met has apologised for the guy using that phrase, but I was pleased to see Rowley standing up for the police officer. Because the truth is that when you see the whole footage, you see a police officer, I think, trying very hard to keep calm, a situation that risks getting out of control. And I just, I just think that the policing, you've just given some of the reasons why policing is becoming so difficult at these protests because of everybody carrying a

• 51:48Alastair Campbell?

  mobile phone, people trying to get the police to overreact, people trying to provoke certain situations. So I actually thought it was, it was a story that on first flush, looked really, really, really bad for the police, but I'm glad that Rowley stood up for the guy and didn't bow down to this sort of shouting against him, let alone these ridiculous calls by people like Braverman for Rowley to be sacked, absolutely ridiculous.

• 52:16Rory Stewart?

  Well, I mean, there's the slightly sobering notes to end on, but, but since we've been discussing the US Biden and funding for Ukraine, there is something pretty exciting which is going to be happening on the Rest Is Politics for the six months running into the US election. So let's just check if our friends on the other side of the Atlantic are ready.

• 52:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, we are very excited about two people about to join us. They will be revealed in a moment. See you in a minute.

• 52:47Alastair Campbell?

  So as Rory says, we've got some very, very exciting news in the build up to the US presidential election. We've been very keen to bring you a lot more American political coverage, as well as our usual Rest Is Politics episodes and leading interviews.

• 53:02Rory Stewart?

  We have indeed. So from now until the US election, we're introducing a third episode of the podcast with two people we both know and who we hope will be able to bring us some really great analysis from inside Trump and Biden's inner circles, while also looking at US politics and society more broadly.

• 53:19Alastair Campbell?

  Given that his appearance on Leading was so popular, Mr Anthony Scaramucci, would you like to tell those of our listeners who've never heard of you, who you are? Just wish I was a sir, it would have been really.

• 53:35Speaker 05

  Better for me if you'd said like.

• 53:37Rory Stewart?

  We can sort that for you.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  Sir Anthony Scaramucci would have, I would have felt so much more important. Lord Mooch. Lord, how about, how about Lord Mooch? Could you imagine that? I mean, that would really, you know, I mean, we wouldn't even understand it here in America. So it wouldn't matter as much to us. But, uh, so I obviously am the former White House Communications Director, fired after 11 days. Okay. Or you could say 954,000 seconds. Sometimes I say it that way to my therapist. It makes me feel better. But, uh, prior to that, I was, uh, on Wall Street for 30 plus years. Uh, got a 36 year career on Wall Street now. I run a company called Skybridge Capital, uh, but have been very active in politics, particularly the last two presidential campaigns. I'll turn it over to, uh, Katty Kay.

• 54:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, just quickly before Catty comes in. So any of you who've watched the BBC's US political coverage over the years will be very familiar with Katty Kay. She's a British broadcaster based in Washington DC. She was the BBC's main anchor on the last two US elections. So Kathy, would you like to quickly introduce yourself? Tell us a bit more about Trip US?

• 54:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, um, I'm somebody who doesn't need to be a lord or a sir, uh, and will wonder how I'm going to wrestle with Anthony's healthy ego over the next few months. I have been in America for more years than I can count covering American politics. And we thought, look, if you're ever going to launch a show about US politics, this is the year to do it, right? Where we have a president who is 80 years old, the oldest ever, another guy running for president who Anthony knows all too well, who's now sitting in a courtroom up in New York as the first guy to run for president, actually under criminal indictment and on trial. With so much going on, it seemed this was too good an opportunity to miss. So the show will, will come out every Friday morning on the Rest Is Politics feed. And Anthony and I will try and give you a look behind

• 55:25Speaker 06

  the curtain. So I always have this sense that people think they understand America, but they don't really. So we'll give you what's in the news, but we, we're also both of us very keen to give you a kind of. A take, an insider and an outsider's take on what makes this extraordinary country tick.

• 55:41Alastair Campbell?

  It's great to have you both because we, we thought about doing this ourselves and Rory and I, Rory spends a lot of time in the States and I like to think I understand the US reasonably well. But I think you're right, Kathy. I think that even people who follow this close, this stuff closely, I think you guys will be an absolute boon to our listeners in terms of understanding what's going on. And, and Anthony, your friend Donald, Jay Trump, currently in New York, I quote something you said on our podcast endlessly. You said, there is no way this guy can win the upcoming election. Do you still stand by that?

• 56:16Speaker 05

  Not, not, you know, I, I, I'm choking because when you think about, you know, when you think about him winning, I think about myself living in Rory's basement.

• 56:24Alastair Campbell?

  It's a nice basement.

• 56:24Speaker 05

  For four to six years or for forever, maybe. But no, I don't think he can win. And I think that this is the first big blow to him, this criminal indictment and the trial that he's facing right now. But there's other blows coming. This would include the documents case, the insurrection case, and even the election interference case, all of which may or may not come by the election. But these court decisions that are coming, I don't, I don't think the Supreme Court of the United States is going to rule that he has absolute immunity. The betting markets in the US, something that we all track in the hedge fund community, now has Biden pulling ahead slightly. And I think that's where it will be as we get towards the end.

• 57:07Rory Stewart?

  Anthony, I'm really looking forward to having you in my basement. Can I just sort of follow up, maybe throw at you and Kathy? Because we had Arnold Schwarzenegger on leading, we interviewed him, and he didn't want to be drawn at all on Donald Trump. Kept, kept saying, well, I don't think he's really going to be the candidate anyway. It won't really make it through. What's going on there? And would it make a difference if a big Republican figure like Arnold Schwarzenegger came out clearly against Donald Trump? And why do you think he's been a little reluctant to do it so far?

• 57:37Speaker 06

  I don't know that it will make a difference because you've got two parties, right? You've got the Donald Trump party and then you've got the rest of the Republicans. And you speak to people who do focus groups here all the time. I'm thinking of somebody called Sarah Longwell, who we should get on, Anthony, because she's great. And she focus groups Republicans all the time. And she says, okay, if Donald Trump were not the head of the Republican Party, who do you want? And their answer is Tucker Carlson. The party of Mitt Romney, John McCain, Nikki Haley, that's gone in terms of the Republican Party for the foreseeable future. I think he's reading the winds in terms of where the Republican Party is going. This is just, this isn't a party that's going to allow for somebody who we would think of as a regular, small C conservative politician.

• 58:22Rory Stewart?

  Would it make a huge difference, do you think, if really big Republican figures came out highly critical, would they be able to move voters against them or is it too late?

• 58:31Speaker 05

  No, I think they could. I think they could dent the system. But remember, you know, this is a system of increments. You get two to three million voters that switch sides away from Trump in the swing states, it's over. He's never gotten above 50%, never will get above 50%. And he's an unpopular figure in America, but he's managed to win the presidency one time through the process of the Electoral College.

• 58:58Speaker 06

  You can make it even smaller numbers than that. I mean, you get 10,000 Arizonans to switch against him, 10,000 Georgians to switch against him, and that swung the election as well. So all you need is a big figure in one of those states to make a difference. But I'm not as sure as Anthony is that Donald Trump doesn't win this just because of the quirkiness of America's Electoral College map. And all he needs is just to get to that magic number of 270. And the path for him at the moment is as clear as it is for Joe Biden.

• 59:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, it's absolutely fantastic that you are now part of the Trip team. That's all we've got time for today. We're going to be back tomorrow with Question Time, and you're going to be here with the first episode, first ever episode of Trip US on Friday.

• 59:39Rory Stewart?

  Hugely exciting, and I could talk to the two of you forever.

• 59:42Speaker 06

  See you on Friday.

• 59:43Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 59:44Rory Stewart?

  Thank you.

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