135. Spanish politics explained and a deep dive into AI

Artificial Intelligence: is it the future of humanity, or the beginning of the end? Rory and Alastair take a deep dive into the subject and the political complications of advancing technologies in the field. Plus, they have a look at the political parties operating in Spain, Alastair's court appearance this week, and rising inflation in the UK. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:32Alastair Campbell?

  So, welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:36Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:37Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, first of all, I want to say that I passionately disagree with you about something that you've been saying for some weeks now.

• 1:44Rory Stewart?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 1:45Alastair Campbell?

  Which is that Raphael Bear's book, Politics: A Survivor's Guide, is very, very good. I've read it. I've read it from start to finish.

• 1:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Alastair Campbell?

  I was struck by how much it crosses over with...

• 1:57Alastair Campbell?

  Some of the themes of my book. And then I also did an event with him at the Hay Festival, which was very enjoyable.

• 2:02Rory Stewart?

  So sorry, you're agreeing with me that it's very good or you're disagreeing with me?

• 2:05Alastair Campbell?

  I'm totally agreeing with you.

• 2:06Rory Stewart?

  Oh, good, good, good, good.

• 2:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. However, however, as I said to the several hundred people gathered in Hay, there is something on the front cover of this book that I have to rebut because on the front cover, it says, a great work of political analysis. I agree with that.

• 2:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 2:24Alastair Campbell?

  Underneath that great quote, it says Rory Stewart, dash, The Rest Is Politics, non-fiction book of the year. Now, when was The Rest Is Politics vote? When did this take place? That this book, published in the same month as my non-fiction book?

• 2:41Rory Stewart?

  Became, became The Rest Is Politics.

• 2:42Alastair Campbell?

  Became the book of the year. How did that happen, Rory?

• 2:44Rory Stewart?

  I, I don't know. I really don't know. I really don't know. But I imagine I probably said in a podcast some months ago, were we asked a question about our book of the year some months ago?

• 2:56Alastair Campbell?

  I think we said, we said that you said, you certainly said, because mine was Moises Naim, I think, Raja Power. This was your, this was your non-fiction book of the year. But if you look at that cover, Rory, anybody picking that up at the shops?

• 3:07Rory Stewart?

  Can I point, can I just say what the real non-fiction book of the year is then? Just for the record, it's But What Can I Do?, which is being confirmed as the number one bestseller in the United Kingdom.

• 3:19Alastair Campbell?

  I think we might be down to number five by tomorrow. That's still pretty good. But I do, I, I think what's happened there, Rory, is these, these bloody publishers, all it needs there is a few commas or semicolons or something. But anybody reading this book, that being said, I really, really, really enjoyed it. And I do think anybody who picks that up will, will enjoy.

• 3:38Rory Stewart?

  He's, he's a smart, a smart guy, isn't he? Smart guy.

• 3:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's also the fact that he weaves in his personal story about surviving a heart attack, his, his history, his family history, Lithuania, South Africa, and then weaves it around all this sort of stuff that you and I talk about endlessly. Now, today, we're going to talk about artificial intelligence.

• 3:58Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 3:58Alastair Campbell?

  You're still in Japan and you've been spending a lot of time talking to people who know a lot more about this than, than you and I do.

• 4:04Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 4:04Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to talk a little bit about the economy and inflation problems for Mr. Hunter, Mr. Sunak. We're going to talk about Spain. It's interesting, isn't it, how we very, very, we talked lots about France and lots about Germany and a fair bit about Italy. Very, very rarely have we talked about Spain. So we're going to do a bit of a deep dive on that. And following my court case appearance earlier in the week, uh, we're going to have a little talk about where we are on the, on the press and regulation, all that stuff.

• 4:31Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely, because you were testifying on Harry and Meghan.

• 4:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I wasn't. It was quite a strange, it was quite a strange thing, really. I was a witness in the case of Harry and others against Mirror Group newspapers. And I was called because I, it transpires that as part of the, the police investigation into a private investigation firm some time ago, they discovered all these invoices for stuff paid to an investigator for blagging my mortgage and bank account details. Around the time that Peter Mandelson was being forced to resign in the end over his mortgage details. So I was called as a sort of, I guess, a supplementary witness. I wasn't, I don't think Prince Harry's name came up once. It was just about, as it were, establishing that this kind of stuff goes on.

• 5:17Alastair Campbell?

  And, um, and it was, you know, and also the fact that what is clearly emerging in this case. And I saw one of the Mirror executives being, I think it was the finance officer being interviewed. And what's clear is quite a lot of disparity between what witnesses were saying to the Leveson Inquiry when they were speaking under oath, and actually what appears to have been the facts of the case. So I think it's one of those things that's going to, going to drag on for some time. But we'll, we'll talk about that a little bit, maybe in the, uh, later in the, in the programme. Let's kick off with AI.

• 5:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, let, let me first give my best attempt to try to give a posse history of where we've got to with artificial intelligence. The story is, and here, I, I would like to make a huge apology to a very brilliant man called James Manica, who has edited a brilliant journal called Deedless that has brought together the leading AI thinkers in the world. And James has been doing his best to brief me on this, but I will have got a lot of this wrong. So I would encourage, encourage listeners to go to the source and look at, look at James' papers. And I would also encourage them to read the latest book by Reid Hoffman, brilliant book by Reid Hoffman's just come out on AI. But the story essentially is this, that people started

• 6:32Rory Stewart?

  pushing ahead with artificial intelligence in the 1950s. And there was essentially a debate between people who said, what you need to do is try to build a logical model of thought in the hope that that's the way that human brains works. And you could create artificial intelligence, which would essentially reason its way through things against a second approach, which was about effectively learning through examples. And for a couple of decades, it was the first approach, the kind of logical reasoning approach that dominated. But what we found the breakthrough has come from is the learning through example approach. And that has happened very, very quickly. So again, if we just look at the last 20 years, we will have begun to get accustomed to AI through

• 7:15Rory Stewart?

  things like Siri on your phone, where you, you know, say, hey Siri, tell me about, you know, what's the exchange rate between the yen and the dollar. We will have been accustomed to AI getting into image recognition. But a lot of that stuff that was happening over the last 20 years was quite intensive in terms of the amount of computational power it used. And it often required humans to check those images, check whether it's a cat or not. The big breakthrough seems to have come in 2017 with a paper from Google. And this paper from Google, which was on, I think it was called the transformer paper. And what it basically brought forward is the idea

• 7:55Rory Stewart?

  that attention is all you need. And the notion is that by focusing the artificial intelligence on a particular field, it can learn what's important. So give an example here and then I'll start rabbiting on. If I said to you, Alistair, I was walking down the street and I suddenly got hit by a bicycle and I tripped over and I hit my head on the pavement and I broke my knee and I broke my neck. The key bit there is the computer needs to know to focus on broke your neck rather than the rest of the unit. I mean, obviously, it's working a much, much more sophisticated way than that. But that's the big breakthrough. It makes things much more efficient in computational

• 8:33Rory Stewart?

  And those developments, and there are three developments in particular, one of them is attention, the second is predicting the next token, so predicting the next word. So if I said to you, the cat sat on the, it trains itself to get to mat, the cat sat on the mat, but it then develops a whole series of other parameters which allows it to, in certain situations, work out that it's the cat sat on the house, the cat sat on the car. And the third thing is something called embedding, which is this creation of these very, very complex maps. So it's a map where love might be related to desire, but love might also be related for its spelling to the word move. We can also find chronological connections between things in time. All of

• 9:18Rory Stewart?

  this stuff, when it's run with a blank slate with 500 billion parameters unleashed on the world, on stuff, generally on the internet, allows it to learn very, very quickly and then produce the stuff that we're seeing in chat GPT. And the stuff we're seeing in chat GPT is only the beginning of it, because what we are playing with when we're playing with it is very, very guardrails. And frequently, it's still struggling to understand our prompts. Okay, over to you.

• 9:45Alastair Campbell?

  Isn't chat GPT, isn't, isn't the sort of basis of that, that it's essentially predicting the next word? It's literally just almost like filling out a puzzle.

• 9:54Rory Stewart?

  Exactly.

• 9:55Alastair Campbell?

  And it's constantly predicting the next word and the next word. But I, I listened to, David Runciman has this new podcast called Past, Present and Future. And this, well, last week, he was talking to a guy called Gary Marcus, who apparently is very high up in this AI world. And his other guest was John Lanchester, the novelist. And as I understood it, and I'm, I'm sort of really struggling with this. I'm struggling with the, with the concept and how it works. And I can't work out why people, people keep saying this is going to destroy humanity. But he gave a very interesting example. Of where actually it's about the weight of the data in there. So it said that it was asked, he asked this chat G P T thing. What was the most researched ever? I think it was economic document.

• 10:39Alastair Campbell?

  And it came out the most researched ever economic document was, and it gave a title. And then it gave two names and then it gave a subject matter. And actually, the one that it chosen didn't even exist. It had sort of mapped together a very common title, two guys who've written a lot of economic papers. And that is sort of, that is sort of summarized an economic theory.

• 11:00Rory Stewart?

  And hallucinates the reference.

• 11:02Alastair Campbell?

  That's a hallucination, yeah.

• 11:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, hallucination is very, very common. It hallucinates references. It hallucinates dates, it hallucinates numbers.

• 11:11Alastair Campbell?

  What's to stop you getting into hallucinating driverless car?

• 11:14Rory Stewart?

  Well, so the defenders of A I would say that these things do make errors. But in the case of a driverless car, it makes less errors than a human.

• 11:25Alastair Campbell?

  Fewer or a fewer, we had a question, we had a question this week. Could Alistair teach Rory the different, let me tell you, Rory, let me tell you, right, it's, it's less traffic, fewer cars.

• 11:36Rory Stewart?

  Fewer cars, okay, less traffic.

• 11:38Alastair Campbell?

  So it's the general and the specific, less is the general and the quantitative. And then fewer is the, is the specific.

• 11:45Rory Stewart?

  Okay, but you've just given an example of me making an error. So I suppose the defender of the A I would say, humans make errors all the time. The driverless car is already safer than the average human. Now, we're scared because they're not perfect. They can still kill people. They'll kill, what am I going to say here? Fewer or less people?

• 12:05Alastair Campbell?

  Fewer, fewer people.

• 12:06Rory Stewart?

  Fewer.

• 12:07Alastair Campbell?

  Less of humanity, but fewer people.

• 12:10Rory Stewart?

  Fewer people than the average driver.

• 12:12Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 12:13Rory Stewart?

  And it's also true that when a large language model is working its way through. I don't know, if, if you set it a task connected to a particular analytical tool to go through the American Veterans Database to look at health correlations.

• 12:32Rory Stewart?

  It will very, very rapidly come up with an answer and it will be generally more accurate than a human, but it can make errors.

• 12:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 12:41Rory Stewart?

  So ideally, what you want to do is use it as what people would call a co-pilot or a sort of additional assistant where a human then goes and checks it.

• 12:49Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 12:50Rory Stewart?

  You don't generally want to be in the situation of having to choose 100% between one and the other.

• 12:56Alastair Campbell?

  I see that Rishi Sunak this week was talking about looking at how this thing gets regulated. And one of the sort of big players in AI, Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, he's been making all sorts of threats in Brussels because the European Union is saying this is something that is going to have to be subject to regulation. And he's essentially, he seems to be saying, well, if the EU tries to regulate it in a typical sort of EU kind of way, then they would pull out of operating within the European Union. I don't know if that's right or wrong, but that's, I read that in one of the papers a couple of days ago. Now, I just wonder when we very, when the very first time we talked about this, if you remember, I think it was the first time that we sort of had a, you know, reasonable conversation about it.

• 13:41Alastair Campbell?

  And we did that thing about you, you were looking up, saying to ChatGPT, if, if I were to ask you for some Rory Stewart jokes, what would they be? And they were quite funny and we read them out and blah, blah, blah. And I wonder if there's a danger that at the moment, there, it's a bit like when social media first came on and we thought, isn't this amazing? We can all post pictures of our cats and we can all have a nice time chatting to our friends, et cetera. And before we know it, we're sort of saying, hold on a minute, social media is giving us Trump and social media is giving us populism and neo-fascism and all this sort of stuff. And I just wonder if this thing is, is going so, so, so, so quickly that by the time any form of regulation feels like it might catch up, it's already gone too far. And I just wonder whether we're, we're being played by the big players here.

• 14:27Rory Stewart?

  It, it's an amazing question and I think very, very difficult to answer. There are basically two schools of thought on this. One is that the engineering is ahead of the science and that's a way of saying that we still don't completely understand how these things are performing so well. Something seems to happen when you go to scale, which people were not anticipating when they looked at the underlying model, when these Google engineers wrote this paper in 2017. They didn't think that they had found something which was going to be able to perform in the way that it does. And what seems to happen is that when you get up to these huge scales, so when you're spending three hundred million dollars and you've got five hundred billion parameters

• 15:08Rory Stewart?

  being thrown at trillion units of information by these enormous computational power, you're getting these extraordinary results and they're about to do more. And nobody knows what's going to happen is whether it's going to continue to exponentially improve and get smarter and smarter, or whether we're going to start hitting physical limits on this. Now, that means that some people are tempted to say, look, the engineering's ahead of the science, let's be cautious. And to be fair to Google, one of the reasons they didn't release their AI search engine was that there were still many people, lawyers and Google engineers, who were saying, well, we'll hold a second, let's wait, let's not release it to the general public till we understand this thing properly.

• 15:53Rory Stewart?

  There are other people, of course, in Google who are saying, we were crazy because our model's very good and we allowed ChatGPT and OpenAI, which is, you know, you were just talking about Sam Altman, that's his stuff, to get out there and dominate the field so that people now all know about ChatGPT and don't know about the Google product. I think the political question, though, to you, so I'm now going to turn you into a Prime Minister, is if you hear that the engineering's ahead of the science and we don't fully understand this thing, on the one hand, but on the other hand, I say to you, look, we can't stop this, we can't be Luddites. If we don't develop it, the Chinese and many others are going to develop it and we're just going to fall behind. And the cat's out of the bag.

• 16:38Rory Stewart?

  You can't now pretend you're in a non-AI world and try to lock yourself away from it. And our best hope is to put our foot down on the accelerator for the United States and its allies to dominate this field, understand as much as possible about it and build defensive mechanisms using AI to protect against other people using AI. Where would you, as the Prime Minister, tend to come down?

• 16:58Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's one of those issues that's going to have to be resolved through international cooperation. I don't see how you can do this. You could go for the hard-edged economic approach that says this is going to change the world, there are going to be massive opportunities, we have to be in the lead of exploiting them. You could go down a sort of more political route and it's interesting how I was talking to somebody who who spends a lot of time in China who says that whenever he's in the West, he sees AI operating through a kind of vaguely liberal democratic lens. It's a very different feel when you go to China. So could you, is it even possible to think of America and China coming together to think we can put together some sort of international framework for how this thing develops? I think that's unlikely. But if I were the

• 17:40Alastair Campbell?

  British Prime Minister, I think you could put yourself maybe in a position of seeing whether you could broker something on that. And also, I think you mentioned the science, you keep mentioning the science and the engineering. They have to be fundamentally bolted into that discussion. They can't, you could, I don't think you can leave this to politicians. I think they have to be part of that discussion.

• 17:59Rory Stewart?

  No, and that's, I couldn't agree more, Alison. And one of the things that I've found has been a bit frustrating is that when amateurs like me, or indeed when US senators start raising concerns about it, there's a tendency slightly from the industry at the moment to turn around and say, well, what are you worried about? And so we kind of bluff our way to try to work out what it is we're worried about. And the engineers have a slight tendency to laugh at us and say, well, why do you think a large language model can do that? I think that's unfair. I think that's a bit like, you know, having cancer, going to see a cancer specialist and saying, what should I be worried about? And the cancer specialist turning it on you and saying, well, you know, what do you think you should be worried about? And then laughing at you when you get it wrong, right? I think

• 18:42Rory Stewart?

  it's incumbent on the engineers to say, as far as we can see, there are, you know, seven categories of risk. And these are what those categories of risk are. And this is why we think those risks are or are not manageable, rather than the politicians having to play a game of, you know, one American senator saying, well, what I'm worried about is AI working out how to imitate my grandmother's voice on the banking machine and another one saying, well, couldn't AI somehow hack the US military? And the engineer is saying, why do you think a large language model could hack the US military? And the answer is, obviously. I as the US Senator or I as Rory have no way of answering the question of how AI can hack. Maybe it's a stupid question, but you need the engineers to help you know whether it's a stupid question.

• 19:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, especially as they're going around the place saying that it can do extraordinary things for the good. You know, I told you about the guy who told me that eventually you'll be able to get a justice system delivered through AI. You won't necessarily need judges and you won't need juries, which, you know, a lot of people would find terrifying. But most countries at the moment with their justice systems in a state of collapse might think, well, that's a good thing. So if they can do that kind of thing, why can't they hack a government department?

• 19:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and on that one, again, the argument there is a very interesting one. What they're saying is yes, the AI may make mistakes, but it's likely to be much more reliable in many cases than a human judge. There have been these extraordinary studies by psychologists which demonstrate that it makes an incredible difference what time of day you go in front of a judge. You're more likely to get off before lunch than you are at three o'clock in the afternoon. And that's, and it's very unfortunate, but it's a massive statistical deviation.

• 20:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:22Rory Stewart?

  And the assumption would be that computers are not vulnerable to having, you know, feeling a bit sleepy after lunch and feeling a bit grumpier with prisoners.

• 20:29Alastair Campbell?

  When I was in court the other day, I was told to turn up at two o'clock. And there was a witness from earlier who was being cross-examined and then there was another guy. And so I probably was in there a lot shorter than I otherwise would have been. So these. But this is, this is the other point, this guy Gary Marcus kept making the point that the stuff that's being put into these things with this great computing power is being put in there. We're, in a sense, we're putting it in there. They, they don't, this idea of artificial intelligence, they're not necessarily thinking in a way that human beings can think. So you and I are talking now and I can, I can see you, I can see how you're reacting to what I'm saying. You can see how I'm reacting. Computers can't do that to each other.

• 21:13Alastair Campbell?

  So there's always this, a sort of element that I think is going to be, going to be missing. Or am I just being naive about that?

• 21:19Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, I think there's something. Missing, but it may not be missing in the performance. So if you think about the driverless car, you may be much angrier with a driverless car that makes an error than you would be with a human, even if the driverless car makes fewer errors, because you empathize with a human. You kind of understand with a human, oh, maybe they were tired, maybe they had a hard day, maybe they were distracted by something. Humans hold everyone, machines to a much higher standard, and probably actually other species, other animals to different standards, to the standards we own humans at. And what AI is becoming, and I think that I really do think there's no putting the genie back in the bottle. It does seem that, and this is a great analogy

• 22:02Rory Stewart?

  that Reid Hoffman uses, he says you need to think about it in the same way as you think about what Steam did in the Industrial Revolution to our sort of physical power. It's going to do that to our mental power. And quite quickly, it's going to do, you know, it's very, very close already. I mean, I've been looking at some of the more advanced models. It's very, very close already to being able to produce an essay answer, which is very, very good. I mean, it's scoring eighty five, ninety percent of the, in the New York bar exam at the moment, but it's very close. If you ask it, any of the kind of things we discuss on this podcast, it's going to be, already can produce a very solid, well argued, interesting response. Pretty

• 22:43Rory Stewart?

  soon, it's going to be producing original, creative responses, which will be better than you or me. But the question is, is that going to upset us? Because already, computers can play chess better than the two of us. And yet, as Reid points out, there are more humans than ever before watching humans play chess with each other. They don't watch computers play chess with each other.

• 23:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, they play against the computer. But also, the, I think I said, I've told you before about this guy, an academic, who says that they can spot the students who are using ChatGPT for their essays. And they then say to them, look, we're not convinced that you've written this. And then the guy goes away and he says, the next time he does the essay through ChatGPT, says, can you put in three spelling mistakes, two factual errors, and a really stupid opinion? So they could do that as well. And you mentioned that, you know, that Google had sort of held back a bit. And yet, it's the guy from Google, Jeff Hinton, who's made the biggest noise about having been on the inside of this, is now on the outside. And issuing some pretty stark warnings about his worries about where it's going.

• 23:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, let me just sort of finish because maybe we've been on this for a long time, but I think the one thing that we cannot get away from is the potential, the positive potential of this is staggering. The, the positive potential, for example, in medicine.

• 24:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Rory Stewart?

  If you were to let an AI system into a database with all the risks that that entails, you could end up with the most extraordinary results. They would begin noticing fields, correlations, relationships that no human researcher would be able to pick up and they would pick them up in an instant. You will suddenly start noticing that, you know, having kidney stones has a consequence on life outcomes that nobody had ever considered before, simply by these machines being able to, to tie a large language model to an analytical tool. Google Translate, you know, I'm here in Japan and for the first time on a foreign trip,

• 24:43Rory Stewart?

  I can go to a medieval Japanese scroll, point my Google lens at it and get an immediate translation. And the last one I did it on managed to produce the phrase, agree disagreeably.

• 24:55Alastair Campbell?

  Go on then.

• 24:55Rory Stewart?

  Which of course is the motto of our podcast.

• 24:57Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. And, and it is what?

• 24:59Rory Stewart?

  You want me to try to do that? You want me to try to do that in Japanese?

• 25:02Alastair Campbell?

  I'd like to hear it in Japanese.

• 25:03Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so it is. Wa mote do zazu.

• 25:09Alastair Campbell?

  Wa mote do zazu.

• 25:11Rory Stewart?

  And that's disagree agreeably. Sorry, I got it the wrong way around. I'm, I'm, it's, it's almost 10 o'clock at night here. Disagree agreeably. So it was, I was, I was in this beautiful room where a man was mating a very ornate, a bamboo tea whisk for the tea ceremony, this great sort of long Japanese ceremony. And I looked at the scroll, pointed my phone at it and suddenly found that the motto of the rest is politics was up on the Japanese scroll, thanks to Google Translate using a form of artificial intelligence.

• 25:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I can give you, because I did an interview about my new book, but what can I do with a Dutch newspaper and? If podcast met Rory Stewart heft als motto om het angeman onens. So angeman onens. We've got it in Dutch. We should probably collect, we should collect disagree agreeably in as many languages as we can. Somebody was asking the other day, how many countries you've been, you've actually recorded the rest is politics from. I think I'm about, I'm about half a dozen, but I think you're about, you're way past that.

• 26:08Rory Stewart?

  I think I'm maybe 20, maybe 20.

• 26:11Alastair Campbell?

  Good.

• 26:12Rory Stewart?

  Now, Alistair, should we get on to, should we get on to a little bit of Harry and Meghan before we get to our break and then get on to, to Spain and inflation? Tell us about, tell us about your court appearance.

• 26:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I, I don't quite know where it's going, but I did get the feeling just from dipping in and out of it. And I've been following, because I knew I was going to be giving the evidence, I've been following it a little bit.

• 26:31Alastair Campbell?

  I get the feeling that Prince Harry is absolutely determined to go the whole way. What the, what the newspapers are now trying to say.

• 26:37Rory Stewart?

  And what's he going the whole way on? I'm sorry. What's, what's his case about? What's he trying to do?

• 26:41Alastair Campbell?

  Essentially just about the, the levels of intrusion and the breaches of privacy and the, and the criminal activity that he believes has been waged against him and others. And there are other people involved in this case, Ian Wright, the former footballer, there are, you know, there are several people on this case. And then in the background, you've got lots of other people, I'm among them, who have also been shown evidence of criminal activity against them, who are all making up their own mind as to whether to take it further or not.

• 27:09Rory Stewart?

  Is this different from, from hacked off and, and all the stuff that was happening there?

• 27:14Alastair Campbell?

  Well, let's just wind back. So the phone hacking, and particularly eventually the phone hacking of Millie Dowler, murder victim, was what led to Leveson Inquiry. The Leveson Inquiry came up with all sorts of recommendations for press regulation, which have not been implemented. And in fact, the second part of the inquiry has not even taken place. So what I think a lot of people saw as an opportunity to get our press, you know, operating according to some sort of acceptable, agreed standards has fallen by the wayside.

• 27:42Rory Stewart?

  And were you in favor of Leveson? Did you think it was the right thing? Or did you think that was, like many journalists, that that was too much of a suppression of press freedom? I mean, the newspapers didn't like it, obviously, for obvious reasons.

• 27:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, of course they didn't. I, I, I, I agreed with David Cameron when he said that. As long as the ideas aren't bonkers, we should implement them. And they weren't bonkers, they were perfectly sensible. And I'm afraid that what's happened is that the government has become, as it so often does, scared of the media going for them and has bought all the sort of lines and says this is about press freedom.

• 28:11Rory Stewart?

  So Cameron and others just got scared, but they basically should have implemented Leveson.

• 28:15Alastair Campbell?

  I think it was your friend and heroine Theresa May who finally pulled the plug on it. On the second part, which was all about the criminal activities involving police and newspapers. And so what's happened is the news, so the news of the world got closed down. News Group, the Murdoch empire, were the ones that the rest of the media said that it was, do you remember their line was it was one rogue reporter? It turns out it was the whole culture inside the place. And now it turns out that there are lots of other newspapers involved as well.

• 28:46Rory Stewart?

  And if I remember correctly, Hugh Grant was a very active leader in gathering a group of people together.

• 28:52Alastair Campbell?

  That was the hat off campaign. Hugh Grant is now also, he's been given the go ahead to take, make a case against the sun. Because what the newspapers are now arguing is that a lot of these cases that are being brought forward are so long ago that they should be out of time. But the reason I think that the lawyers were interested in my case is because mine was one which actually didn't lead to anything being published at all. My mortgage details and my bank account details weren't actually published. But it doesn't mean that those same private detectives who were getting paid and their invoices were for inquiries relevant to Alastair Campbell and Fiona Miller. They, we don't know what other stories might have been coming that way. So the point is the point of principle about whether newspapers which have denied

• 29:35Alastair Campbell?

  being involved in any criminal activity, when that criminal activity is clearly exposed, what should happen to them? So this is a civil case, Harry and others. Meanwhile, these newspaper groups have been paying out lots and lots and lots of money to different groups of people and individuals to just settle out of court. And what Prince Harry is making clear, he is not remotely interested in that. He is going to, he wants his day in court, he's going to get his day in court quite soon. And he's going to set out what he says, he sees as a widespread criminal activity against him and his family.

• 30:09Alastair Campbell?

  Which explains, he would probably argue, this isn't a matter of the court, but I think probably he would think explains why they have become quite so vile about him and about Meghan. And I think he's got a point. I think he's got a point. And I think if he wins, it'll be a big, big moment in the history of our media culture.

• 30:25Rory Stewart?

  And so, so this court case moves beyond the newspapers doing a case by case out of court settlements with individuals that happened to spot it and will force them to come clean on, on everyone that they did it to and, and do a massive settlement to, to everybody?

• 30:43Alastair Campbell?

  It's very hard to know. It's very hard to know because of course they'll be terrified about the costs. I mean, they're, they've paid out, you know, seven, well into seven figures already. I got a payout from the, from the News of the World. Others have had far, far bigger payouts. The Mirror have been paying out to quite a lot of people. And this one literally just sort of, this is quite, you know, relatively recently, it's this year that I got informed about this one. And it was interesting giving evidence because obviously the Mirror group lawyers have to defend the Mirror, but I didn't feel I was given a very, a particularly hard time. I think it's quite, when you've got invoices alongside.

• 31:21Rory Stewart?

  And, and the, the irony here is that you, you, you worked for the Mirror, right?

• 31:25Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's one of the reasons why I was a bit, you know, loath to take action. But I think having taken action against the Murdoch group, I think you do have to operate on a basis of principle. And, and, you know, they've denied it so many times that they were indulging in criminal activity.

• 31:42Rory Stewart?

  Right. But it turns out the Mirror was involved as well.

• 31:44Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. And the other thing that, that he, that emerges is that, you know, Piers Morgan, who was the editor at the time, and his diaries are full of accounts of conversations with us. Now, I think he's admitted that his diaries are very much a sort of, you know, written after the event, as it were. But there's, there's such a discrepancy between the facts as they would now appear to be and the facts as they were being set out to us at the time and also in his, his subsequently published diary. And Sly Bailey, who was one of the, I think she was chief executive, she was giving evidence the day before me. And so I sort of kept an eye on that just to see if anything relevant came up. And I mean, it was a sort of combination of, oh, I didn't know anything and nobody told me.

• 32:27Alastair Campbell?

  And then the finance director was pretty much the same thing. I got the feeling that there was a lot of kind of, you know, Look over there. It wasn't me going on amongst all of them. And I don't, I believe, I don't think Piers Morgan is, I think he's decided not to give evidence.

• 32:39Rory Stewart?

  Wow, wow, wow, wow. Okay. Well, time for break and then we should come back on Spain.

• 32:43Alastair Campbell?

  Great.

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• 35:07Rory Stewart?

  So, welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 35:10Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, how are you feeling about your rare loss of temper?

• 35:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, rare loss of temper Jonathan Powell. Well, anyone who wants to see the rare loss of temper and actually some very interesting reflections on many aspects of government and peacekeeping. Jonathan Powell, who was Tony Blair's Chief of Staff, good friend of Alistair's, very much part of, with Alistair of the founding band of sisters and brothers that were at the core of the Blair Project, is out on The Rest Is Politics leading. So, search Leading Jonathan Powell wherever you get your podcasts if you'd like to hear Jonathan Powell, who then went on from the Black Gun and having done an extraordinary job in the Northern Ireland Peace Process, and where actually we interviewed him in Ireland, to do a lot on peace processes worldwide.

• 35:54Alastair Campbell?

  And another of our recent interviewees Rory, George Osborne, I see has been called to the Covid inquiry. I think we should send them our exchanges on austerity, but it seems that the inquiry wants to quiz him about whether his austerity policy had anything to do with the lack of preparedness for a pandemic.

• 36:13Rory Stewart?

  Ah, very interesting. We'll see how that comes out.

• 36:20Alastair Campbell?

  Now, it's quite rare that we get overtaken by events. We're normally quite prescient and on the button, but because Rory was in Japan, we actually recorded the podcast on Saturday. And we're going on now to have a pretty interesting discussion about politics in Spain. Very presciently, one of us, I think it might have been me, indicated that the regional elections taking place, what is now last weekend, but for the purposes of our discussion on Saturday was this weekend, have led to the man we've been talking about, Pedro Sanchez, the Prime Minister of Spain, or the President as they call it, calling a snap election. Because the elections that we talked about turned out to be really, really bad for him.

• 37:03Alastair Campbell?

  So, they're going to the polls on July the 23rd. And it's an interesting thing, which I think we should probably come back and talk about next week, because basically... Normally you would think, well, we'll have to keep going and try and sort of dig ourselves out of this hole. But he's basically said, no, we're going to have to go to the country now so that Spain can decide the direction it wants to go into. Now we can go back to Saturday and here's me and Rory talking about Spain back then.

• 37:27Rory Stewart?

  Now, you wanted to do a bit of a deep dive into Spain, and I think your idea was that we don't talk much about Spain.

• 37:35Alastair Campbell?

  We hardly ever talk about Spain, and it's quite interesting when you think about it. It's a, you know, a pretty major country within the European Union. Okay, it's not France or Germany, but, you know, it's in that sort of second order.

• 37:46Rory Stewart?

  Nearly 50 million people.

• 37:47Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. I mean, it's a, it's a big country. It's a, it's a reasonably prosperous country. And we've also got these, you know, major connections, not least the fact that obviously Brexit's sort of played havoc with this, but, you know, almost a million people living in each other's countries. It's almost half a million in each. So there's all that connection. And yet, you know, I think that if you went, I think, I suspect most of our listeners would without doubt be able to name the French president and the German chancellor. Would they all know that Pedro Sanchez was the, and they call him the president? That's the other thing. They have a king, just as we do.

• 38:24Rory Stewart?

  But nor, I think, will most of our listeners have heard of the great kind of dominant figure who created modern Spain. So the guy that from 1982 to 1996 dominated Spanish politics, which is Felipe Gonzalez.

• 38:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But they would be able to name Shirak, Gisgadestang, Helmut Kohl.

• 38:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 38:44Alastair Campbell?

  Ardnauer, Brand Schmidt. So just to give people a sort of sense of, of what's happening in Spanish politics. And we're recording this at the weekend where the Spaniards are going to polls in regional elections. And it's a very, it's become much, much more complicated than it was. Do you know how many parties there are in the Spanish parliament?

• 39:03Rory Stewart?

  No. What is it? Five?

• 39:05Alastair Campbell?

  Eighteen.

• 39:06Rory Stewart?

  Eighteen.

• 39:06Alastair Campbell?

  Eighteen. And Sanchez, the prime minister, he became prime minister on 24% of the vote, which gave him 34% of the seats. So he now has this rather strange coalition. So he's a kind of... You know, fairly pragmatic Labour leader, we would identify.

• 39:23Rory Stewart?

  Kind of new Labour-y type.

• 39:25Alastair Campbell?

  Well, probably less new Labour than he was because he's had to go into coalition. He said before the election that he would never be able to sleep in his bed if we went into coalition with Podemos, but he's gone into coalition with Podemos and.

• 39:37Rory Stewart?

  And Podemos are the sort of far populist left, yeah.

• 39:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And then there's another one even further to the left of them called Sumar. But his vice president, deputy prime minister, is actually probably the most left wing person in European government anywhere. She's a communist. And so he's got this pretty, and it's a minority coalition, by the way. He doesn't have a majority. The Tory party, the PP, they don't really recognise Sanchez in the way that may, they don't really see him as legitimate, partly because he came to power by losing his own position as Labour leader. He then did this rather effective campaign around the country, building his own profile up and storming around in his battered

• 40:19Alastair Campbell?

  old Peugeot. And then he came back and he forced a vote of no confidence against Rahoi, who was that rather kind of sort of intellectual looking bearded chap who was the Spanish prime minister for a while. And he won the vote of confidence, including with the help of parties that were, you know, it's a bit like, if you imagine Sinn Fein taking their seats to bring down a Tory government, it was that kind of thing where these Basque and Catalan parties were coming in on his side. So they got rid of the government, they got rid of the PP, Rahoi of PP. Sanchez becomes prime minister.

• 40:56Rory Stewart?

  And the PP just explained as sort of a conservative party, right?

• 41:00Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. And they, but they have been under massive pressure because of Vox, which is a very right wing party, populist right wing party.

• 41:09Rory Stewart?

  Okay. And sorry, I'm going to, I'm going to do my boring thing for listeners again, but my understanding situation, correct me if I'm wrong, because you know much more about this than I do, is that Spanish politics initially, so Franco goes, mid 1970s.

• 41:23Alastair Campbell?

  And everybody's heard of him.

• 41:25Rory Stewart?

  Yep. Democracy comes in, but Spain has Franco right the way through to the seventies. Democracy comes in, King comes back.

• 41:34Rory Stewart?

  Eighty-two Felipe Gonzalez, who's from the left-wing sort of Labour Party, gets elected, dominates to ninety-six, and then Conservative Party basically comes in in ninety-six, a man called Jose Maria Athna, who I guess is the guy that you were mostly dealing with when you were in government.

• 41:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

• 41:51Rory Stewart?

  And we then have what seems to be a sort of two-party system, so in British terms, the kind of Labour Party and a Conservative Party, but from two thousand and four onwards, it begins to splinter, and you end up effectively with five main parties. You have a sort of far-left party, you have a Labour Party, you have a centrist party, you have a Conservative Party, and then you have a far-right party, roughly, right?

• 42:14Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 42:15Rory Stewart?

  And somehow, what seems to have happened, unlike France, where these big parties, the traditional Socialist Party and the traditional Conservative Party, have kind of collapsed and disappeared, leaving only the sort of centrists and the far-right and the far-left. In Spain, the opposite seems to have happened. The more traditional left and right parties are a bit stronger than they were, and these far-left centrist parties are less strong than they were. Is that right?

• 42:41Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's more complicated than that. I think it's become much more atomized. And I think that we underestimate, because every country in the world was focusing on its own circumstances, out of the global financial crisis, I think we underestimate the extent to which Spain was amongst the most damaged in the world. They had, it led to a chronic housing crisis. You see these half-built houses all over the place now, banking crisis, and I think that's what allowed the kind of populist virus to come in there pretty strongly as well. And Vox has now become a very normalized part of the political landscape. It's not impossible to imagine Vox being the main party sometime down the track, depending obviously upon what happens now, but it's a pretty shaky coalition that they've got.

• 43:25Alastair Campbell?

  At the moment, these relations happening now will be very, very interesting.

• 43:28Rory Stewart?

  Vox again, very interesting because Vox is obviously the right wing party. So people would normally compare it to Le Pen, for example, in France. But again, it's got a different Spanish inflection because a Catholic country, it's got a bit of sort of conservative Catholic sentiment. There are some elements in it which are just sort of a bit soto voto, sort of pro Franco. But what it doesn't seem to have is the strong anti-immigrant feeling that you have in many other European countries. In part because a lot of the immigration to Spain is still Latin American immigration. And I guess religiously, culturally, that's been less threatening or disruptive to Spain.

• 44:09Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's changing. I think that's changing, Rory, I do. I would say that the Franco thing is not quite as soto voto as it was either. I think they're becoming much more emboldened. And they've got this very charismatic and rather sinister leader Santiago Abascal, who, you know, like a lot of these parties have, like Farage here or Vildas in Holland, you know, they do seem, populism attracts these kind of characters because they're people who are prepared to pretty much say whatever needs to be said in the moment to exploit the divisions that are there. But the divisions are now really real. And of course, the other big complicating factor

• 44:48Alastair Campbell?

  in Spanish politics is, I mean, okay, we have Scotland in the context of UK, but they have the Basques and the Catalonians. And they have their too. So if you take, for example, the, within the national parliament, you have the Catalans who are either far left separatists or centrist nationalists. What you don't have is anybody really sort of fighting for Spain, as it were. And then likewise with the Basques. There's something very interesting going on in this particular election with the Basques thing. There's this party called Bildu, which is, I guess, again, they would see themselves as a bit like Sinn Fein with the political wing of the IRA. This is the political wing of ETA. Which was the terrorist organisation in the Basque Territory.

• 45:33Alastair Campbell?

  They've disbanded, but seventeen of their convicted terrorists announced their candour in the regional elections. And this has created such an outcry that they've actually stood down, but their names are still on the ballot paper, including with some of them, their nicknames that were used as terrorists. And of course, the right wing, the PP party, they are basically, you know, even though they supported the peace process that led to the disbandment of ETA, they are now saying that this is all about Sanchez being in hoc to terrorists and so forth. So it's becoming a very quiet, febrile and populist debate. And where it goes in the next few years is frankly anybody's guess.

• 46:16Rory Stewart?

  Meanwhile, this question on Spain and immigration is very interesting. So, I mean, and actually, it's a reason why we should be cautious about demographic predictions. I mean, demography really matters. I'm speaking to you from Japan, which is facing a total existential crisis with its collapsing population. You know, couples are barely averaging one child at the moment in Japan. And there's no immigration in Japan, and growth has been stagnant now for over thirty years. And I'm talking into the tour guide that's showing me around. Her house was worth two million dollars in nineteen eighty-nine. It's a suburban house outside Tokyo and is today worth less than four hundred thousand dollars.

• 46:58Rory Stewart?

  But Spain, in two thousand, the population was projected to massively decrease, drop by ten million over the next fifty years. And that suddenly began to be turned around since twenty fifteen, when they started bringing in more and more migration. So in twenty nineteen alone, they brought in four hundred and fifty-three thousand people. That's similar to the five hundred thousand people being brought into Britain. With a smaller population. So it's one of these classic countries where it's getting older, where the percentage of the working age population is set to decline from kind of sixty five percent, sort of fifty percent, and where they're very, very heavily dependent on migration to try to keep growth going and keep people looked after.

• 47:42Alastair Campbell?

  There's another very big issue at the moment that is troubling people there, and that relates to the judiciary, because a bit like their system of judicial appointments is much closer to the American than ours. There is a political process. And so it means that when you have long periods of socialist party government, you tend to get more socialist judges and vice versa. What's happening at the moment, because of the makeup of the parliament, the PP are effectively blocking the judges that the socialists want to appoint to the court. And it means that there are all these vacancies, which means then that there's this huge, we're maybe getting back to AI here, there's this huge backlog of cases within the criminal justice system, which is creating all sorts of problems. And it

• 48:25Alastair Campbell?

  feels a bit like America, where the right just will not do anything to help the left.

• 48:29Rory Stewart?

  Yes, but also where the left seems to have been doing some pretty peculiar things on judicial appointments, which has led to Spain being downgraded, and some of the less on whether it's a full functioning democracy. And this judicial judicial appointment stuff also is obviously connected to some of the debates in Israel, right?

• 48:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think that's about the fact that they can't run an effective system because they haven't appointed enough judges, because the political deadlock is not allowing the appointment of the judges that they want to put onto the court. There's one other issue, Rory.

• 48:59Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 49:00Alastair Campbell?

  And that is, we've just, we've gone through the whole episode, I think, without mentioning the dreaded B word, Brexit.

• 49:06Rory Stewart?

  Oh, yes. Yes, we've got to get that in, yep.

• 49:08Alastair Campbell?

  Now, do you remember which was the first area to declare in the Brexit referendum?

• 49:14Rory Stewart?

  First, no, I don't. What was the first there?

• 49:17Alastair Campbell?

  It was Gibraltar.

• 49:18Rory Stewart?

  Gibraltar.

• 49:19Alastair Campbell?

  With ninety five point nine percent in favour of remain.

• 49:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And again, for listeners, and I know you're going to tell me, they all know this, but just to remind people, Gibraltar is not as many British people think, an island. It is a peninsula. It's part of Spain, which was a very, very important British naval base. In the nineteenth century, helped dominate the Mediterranean for the British, very important in the wars against France, which has remained attached to Britain, but is completely dependent on Spain for almost all its basic services, supplies, and where if Spain wants to play around on the border between Gibraltar and Spain, they can cause complete chaos for Gibraltar.

• 50:04Alastair Campbell?

  And occasionally they do. But here's one for you, Roy. So there's the Gibraltarians. They all vote massively in favour of remain.

• 50:11Rory Stewart?

  For that reason, yeah.

• 50:12Alastair Campbell?

  Now, guess which part of all the areas that were involved in voting in the referendum, guess which part has not been signed off under the Trade and Cooperation Agreement?

• 50:26Rory Stewart?

  I guess the answer is Gibraltar.

• 50:28Alastair Campbell?

  They're now going into the fourteenth round of negotiations on how to resolve this. And the problem, it seems, is that it's, as ever, a question of sovereignty. So the Spaniards sort of recognise the sovereignty on the rock. But where the airport is, they're not quite as sure.

• 50:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 50:45Alastair Campbell?

  And it looks like where these negotiations are heading, as we head through the fourteenth round into the fifteenth round, is actually about where the actual security is placed in the airport. So they're going to have to move an awful lot of fences and buildings.

• 51:02Rory Stewart?

  Very problematic.

• 51:03Alastair Campbell?

  And it's crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy stuff. I should say, by the way, I mentioned, and Raphael Bear, your friend Raphael Bear will bear me out on this. As you know, every audience I do, I ask for a show of hands for anybody who thinks Brexit is going well. And in the last few weeks, I've seen several thousand people, and hey, we finally had a hand raised for going well.

• 51:25Rory Stewart?

  Was it Boris Johnson?

• 51:27Alastair Campbell?

  He wasn't there. He was in America talking to Donald Trump about Ukraine because he's a serious global statesman. You probably know that.

• 51:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, the two of them together. It must have been a very serious moment. Hey, by the way, you followed that Elon Musk has now come in behind, tried to do an interview with Ron DeSantis on Twitter.

• 51:45Alastair Campbell?

  The technology, the technology worked about as well as ours has worked today.

• 51:48Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. The technology sort of collapsed, collapsed, collapsed all over the place. Anyway, let's, let's move on just finally, just to touch before we close on inflation. But the final thing before I do it is, you know, as I said, population is very difficult to predict. You know, you can predict in 2000, a country's population is collapsing and then in 2015, it's taking off again. But a UN report that's just been released is suggesting that Spain is one of the countries, along with Italy and Japan, that will see its population halve over the next 80 years.

• 52:16Alastair Campbell?

  Wow.

• 52:16Rory Stewart?

  By which time, one in 10 children born in the world will be born in Nigeria.

• 52:20Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Now, just before, just before we leave Europe, very, very briefly, I think we should mention Greece because the election there, this just shows you how electoral systems can do crazy things. Prime Minister Mitsotakis, the new democracy party, he gets over 40% of the vote. He's 20% ahead of his nearest rival and he's not able to form a majority. So they're going to a second vote on June the 25th because none of the smaller parties are willing to form a coalition with each other. And the other relation we should keep our eyes out for, our eyes on is Slovakia. Because what's happening there, you're looking at a pro Putin leader currently leading in Slovakia.

• 53:02Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 53:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I hope we've done, I hope we've at least done some justice to Spain. We've had quite a few Spaniards saying to us, you never talk about our country. So we have, and doubtless we'll come back to it. Now, shall we talk about the, we've talked about George Osborne's problems with the COVID inquiry. What about Jeremy Hunt's rather more pressing problems?

• 53:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, the, the fundamental problem in Britain is inflation, which of course is at the heart of cost of living. Cost of living is basically inflation combined with stagnant wages. And he's saying, he's signaling that he would support the Bank of England raising interest rates, even if it completely, you know, it might, might even drive the country into recession to try to get inflation under control.

• 53:40Alastair Campbell?

  Now, here's one for you, Rory. We talk a lot about how to handle difficult questions and manage the media.

• 53:46Alastair Campbell?

  He was in Washington, I think. Do you think he was just tired? I mean, I think he maybe gave that that situation more legs than he intended to. So he gets a direct question. So you're prepared to support them putting up interest rates further, even if it means driving us into recession? How would you have answered that? How would you have answered that?

• 54:02Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think now that I've been trained by Alistair and the Comms Director, I'd say we're very, very clear in the government that we are committed to growth and to reducing inflation.

• 54:13Alastair Campbell?

  And stopping the boats.

• 54:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 54:15Alastair Campbell?

  You wouldn't have said that, would you? But do you know what? I mentioned the Financial Times, which is the only paper ever in the last couple of days, and they track what they call core inflation, which is inflation which excludes energy and food prices. And they track it in 33 different countries in the world. And we are now right down at the, well, at the top, we're at the top of the inflation league alongside Argentina and South Sudan in terms of the increases that we're suffering.

• 54:40Rory Stewart?

  We can't quite be at the total top. Presumably, I'm hoping that there is, well, sorry, this is unfair to countries like Zimbabwe, but their inflation rates, I think, are completely insane.

• 54:50Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think we're talking about the rates. I think we're talking about the increases. And so, and the other thing that I think people should take a look at in the Financial Times is a piece by Helen Barnard from the Trussell Trust, which, you know, is a charity that supports food banks. And in fact, as we speak, Rory, Fiona is down at a food bank in Camden that seems to get bigger every single time we go, we go down there. And this piece quotes research by the Joseph Roundtree Foundation that between 2017 and 2019, destitution in the UK rose by 54%. And NHS bosses have now written to the Chancellor, warning the cost of living crisis is about to become a health service crisis because of the impact of poverty on people's health. And the point she's making is that this has been rising

• 55:35Alastair Campbell?

  steadily over several years now. And it does feel that it's, that there is a level of poverty now that she's saying the charities simply cannot, cannot deal with.

• 55:44Rory Stewart?

  That's a big, huge issue. Well, on that slightly depressing note, I think, Al, so we've been, we've done our time and we're coming towards the end.

• 55:52Alastair Campbell?

  I'm coming home, I've done my time.

• 55:54Rory Stewart?

  You're coming home, yeah. All that sort of thing. I must say, just a quick sort of finish, because I'm in Japan, this is the most extraordinary country. As I say, it's facing this unbelievable challenge of having no young people and 30 years of stagnant economy, but it is still completely astonishing. I mean, it's astonishing in terms of how wealthy it still seems despite not having grown in 30 years. And also how incredibly, I mean, you know, I consider myself a conservative interest and tradition, but I've spent the last two, three days going to sweet shops, meeting potters, meeting people making bamboo whisks, meeting people doing tea ceremonies, and in almost every case, people are saying to me, my family business has run for 400 years, I am the

• 56:39Rory Stewart?

  16th or 17th generation of my family to be making these pots. It is really extraordinary because I, very, very few countries, I don't think any countries in the world where you can imagine this, most of us, I guess, would feel that by the time we were the 17th generation of the family, we might go off and do something else rather than continue to make sweets or make pots or whatever everyone had been doing for the previous 16 generations. So, anyone interested in travel, I really could not recommend Japan highly enough.

• 57:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Lysiz, there's two weeks in a row you've mentioned potting. I think you're going to be a potter when you're growing up.

• 57:11Rory Stewart?

  You're right. I love you, Al, so you're absolutely right. It's the one thing I really, really want to do, and if I ever had time, I'd like to learn how to be a potter. Okay, well, thank you for your time.

• 57:20Alastair Campbell?

  Take care. Bye bye.

• 57:22Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

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