Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 55. The Kamikwaze budget, Iranian protests, and Italian 'post-fascists' About this episode It's been a quiet week in UK politics...
On today's (in person) episode Rory and Alastair discuss Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-budget, Liz Truss and her quest for growth, the protests in Iran and the far right's election victory in Italy.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:04 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
0:06 Alastair 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.
0:19 Rory 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.
0:42 Alastair 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?
0:49 Rory Stewart? I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
1:44 Alastair Campbell? Right, hello. Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.
1:47 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
1:48 Alastair Campbell? And we're together.
1:50 Rory Stewart? It's very weird.
1:50 Alastair Campbell? In person.
1:51 Rory Stewart? It is very weird. I'm actually literally looking at your face.
1:55 Alastair Campbell? As opposed to down Zoom.
1:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah, it may not be as good. I'm a bit concerned.
1:59 Alastair Campbell? We had a question about that, whether we felt it was better face to face or with Zoom. I quite like doing it on Zoom because you can interrupt each other with hands rather than... By saying, shut up, as opposed to interrupting, because I think people hate to.
2:13 Rory Stewart? And I can also cheat by looking stuff up on my phone without you noticing.
2:17 Alastair Campbell? I know you're doing it. I know you're doing it. But see, this is what I do, Rory. Look at the difference between you and me. Look at my notes. How many notes I've prepared.
2:24 Rory Stewart? And now when I get my phone out to be like, how exactly do I spell Georgia Maloney's surname?
2:30 Alastair Campbell? Our listeners, or readers, as you call them, all too often, they assume you have all this knowledge, but you just confess that actually while I'm talking.
2:39 Rory Stewart? I'm literally Wikipedia-ing stuff all the time. So I'm going to be considerably less informed this episode. Maybe I should do some prep like you.
2:48 Alastair Campbell? Now, what are we going to talk about? The Chancellor, Kwang Tung, he's had a mini budget that turned out to be absolutely massive. He's slashed taxes largely for the very well off, and in the process, the pound has absolutely tanked. We've got the Labour Party Conference, which for the first time in its history, opened with God Save the King.
3:08 Rory Stewart? Has it never done that before?
3:09 Alastair Campbell? Never, and it certainly would.
3:10 Rory Stewart? What's it normally do, the red flag?
3:12 Alastair Campbell? Uh, I don't know how it used to start it. No, the red flag used to be at the end, or was it Jerusalem? I can't remember. But no, it's never ever started with the with the national anthem. Uh, and it certainly would not have happened under Jeremy Corbyn, uh, because famously he did not sing the national anthem. Uh, in Italy, we've had the voting end of the most right wing government since Mussolini, and in Brazil, they may be about to kick out their right wing president, Bolsonaro. And in Iran, we should definitely talk about this. We've got significant street protests after the very, very, very suspicious death of a young woman arrested by the so-called morality police, or as the Iranians like to call them, the guidance patrol for not covering her hair. But Rory, I think we should kick off with, um, Hami Kwasi Kwarteng.
3:57 Alastair Campbell? You, I think, are on record as describing him as a friend of yours. I think you may also at one point have called him distinguished.
4:04 Rory Stewart? I don't know why they called him distinguished. I'll have to look into that. So Kwasi is a guy I've known for a very long time. I mean, as you keep pointing out, we went to the same school. So I knew Kwasi when he was a 13 year old. And I I played I played rugby against Kwasi, so.
4:18 Alastair Campbell? Did you call it rugby then or rugger?
4:21 Rory Stewart? And he, and actually he was very big even when he was thirteen, he's a big guy, I think he's probably bigger than you, right?
4:27 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I think he's bigger than me, yeah.
4:29 Rory Stewart? You're sort of six foot four, right?
4:31 Alastair Campbell? Three and a bit. Yeah, I think he is big, yeah.
4:33 Rory Stewart? So, he is somebody who I have always worried, particularly in combination with Liz Truss, as somebody with very, very strong views. And he, I remember even as a thirteen, fourteen year old, his catchphrase was always, "Don't be so ridiculous." He was always kind of sweeping things aside. I was, I guess, two, three years older than him, but he always sort of slightly talked to me as I was younger than him.
4:58 Alastair Campbell? We've talked about this before, I remember bumping into him during the whole people's vote phase, and him constantly saying, "Wasting your time, wasting your time, absolutely no chance, Brexit's done, done deal, done deal, move on, move on, nothing to see here." That's all he would say, he wouldn't actually engage.
5:12 Rory Stewart? Yeah, he doesn't engage, he doesn't engage. People say that if you, I haven't engaged with them properly in ten, ten years, which was actually sad for me in Parliament, because I remember talking about poetry with them when I was at school, and I thought we'd sort of start that friendship again. All I would ever get out of him was these small offhand, sometimes quite funny comments as he'd pass me, but never anything serious. When I wanted to sit down and talk about policy, I'd never get it. People say that if you can trap him for lunch, you can actually get him to concentrate for more than...
5:41 Alastair Campbell? Well, he seems to have had lunch with quite a few hedge funders and bankers and all that lot, which looked to me remarkably close to insider trading and shorting the pound. And I have to say, Rory, I think if that was a Labour government, the plod would be all over it by now.
5:55 Rory Stewart? Okay, let's, let's take it back to the basics. So, what on earth did he think he was doing?
5:59 Alastair Campbell? He's trying, and she's trying, there's several things going on here. The first thing is, they were saying it was going to be shock and awe. Why? Because they want to be able to play the same con that they've now played in three, three times in six years, to pretend that a new leader is somehow a change of government. And I actually threw things at the television yesterday when I saw him, "We've only been here for nineteen days. You've been there for twelve fucking years, Mr Quasi Quateng and Mrs Mary Truss."
6:27 Rory Stewart? So, first thing is, they, they wanted above all to seem very radical, so that people would feel it was a very new government.
6:33 Alastair Campbell? Big change, big change. And they wanted, bear in mind, she became leader by doing this Margaret Thatcher trickle-down tribute act. She now, and that won her the leadership election, she now thinks that can win her a general election.
6:45 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
6:45 Alastair Campbell? So they want to say you have low taxes with us and high taxes with Labour. They also, back to one of my big themes, do you remember, we might talk about this in relation to Italy, the three Ps, populism, polarisation.
6:58 Rory Stewart? Positively, yeah, yeah.
6:59 Alastair Campbell? The sovereign individual. Quasi Quateng is a true believer of the small state. Low tax, no regulation, all these investment zones. And do you know the best thing that's happened in the last few days to me? That this budget has radicalised the RSPB.
7:15 Rory Stewart? RSPB, which you don't want to radicalise. So let me play my boring role that I sometimes do of just.
7:19 Alastair Campbell? Being a Tory.
7:20 Rory Stewart? Of being a Tory. Now firstly, reminding listeners who may not be in the United Kingdom of what happened in this budget. So as you would have heard as loyal listeners to our podcast, Liz Truss had said during the leadership campaign that she was going to drop corporation tax and drop the rise in national insurance, which we were expecting. Although she didn't signal this very early, but later on it became clear that she was going to cap energy bills. So that was straight out of the gates. We were expecting a budget in which something like £60 billion was going to be spent on capping energy bills and where the Exchequer was going to lose a lot of the money that Rishi Sunak, the previous Chancellor, was hoping to bring in from these two sources of corporation tax and national insurance.
8:05 Rory Stewart? But what nobody was expecting was that they stood up and announced that they were dropping the top rate of tax from 45% to 40%. And it's that above all, I think, that panicked the markets. Because the markets presumably had priced in the other stuff because she'd been talking about it continually during the leadership campaign.
8:23 Alastair Campbell? Well, we talked about this last week. The markets have also been noticing the fact that they keep making these unfunded spending commitments. For example, 3% of GDP on defence, which is a massive commitment. And I think the thing that's truly spooked the markets, and this is where I think Quateng is just maybe not, frankly, politically and intellectually coherent enough to know what he's doing. He went on the television on Sunday and basically his big message was, don't you worry folks, there's more to come. That is what spooked the markets. We've already been sending the message, hold on a minute, we think your borrowing plans are out of control. And essentially, you've been banging on virtually every episode we've done about George Osborne and austerity, you need to get the debt under control, et cetera. A week ago, government could borrow at 3.2% for 10 years.
9:10 Alastair Campbell? It's now gone up since this new prime minister and this new chancellor, that has gone up by 1%, right, for the next 10 years. And they're going to be borrowing 200 billion this year, adding to debt that is already at 100% of GDP.
9:24 Rory Stewart? So I think this is a huge thing. So one of the things that Liz Truss and Quasi-Courting have done have completely destroyed the arguments that were made by the Conservative government from 2010 onwards. So you talked about austerity. Obviously, 2010, 2011, 2012, the whole Conservative Party was saying to the Labour Party, we cannot borrow more, we cannot spend more because it is absolutely vital to keep the confidence of the markets by reducing the deficit.
9:53 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
9:53 Rory Stewart? They also said to Labour, we're not going to be able to, as you suggest, create growth simply through generating demand, handing out money. They took on for 10 years an idea that the way to get out of a problem caused by borrowing too much and spending too much was to borrow more and spend more. And Quasi-Courting and Liz Truss have completely trashed that record. And that now means that the Conservatives are in real trouble in economic arguments because all the arguments they made against Labour for the last 10 years have gone out the window.
10:29 Alastair Campbell? But also, surely, we had a question, we'll do the Q and A later, but we had a question directed at people like you, Gavin Barwell, David Gork, Anna Subri. You can't possibly support this government based upon what you've said and done before.
10:49 Rory Stewart? No.
10:49 Alastair Campbell? Well, that must apply also, surely, to large numbers of the population.
10:54 Rory Stewart? Yeah, large numbers of population. And I think more Conservative MPs that will acknowledge it are terrified by this. I mean, remember, even Rishi Sunak, who's much more right wing than me, Gavin Barwell, David Gork, you know, he was a Brexiteer. Was on record two weeks ago saying if Liz Truss does what she says she's going to do, which is cut taxes at a time when borrowing is going up, she's going to provoke a run on sterling, she's going to bankrupt the country. And there was an article in The Spectator saying, this guy is a crazy fear monger, how desperate is this, Rishi Sunak's losing the leadership rates, now he's accusing Liz Truss of bringing in economic policies that are going to lead to a run on the sterling. Presumably Rishi Sunak is now sitting back
11:36 Rory Stewart? here with his head in his hands, thinking, this is unbelievable. Not only did she do what I feared she was going to do, but even worse, they added to this, this cut from forty five to forty percent, which provided the final panic at the tail of the markets.
11:49 Alastair Campbell? And when you look at the graphs of that map, I mean, I keep thinking, if this, let's just say this had happened under Gordon Brown or Alistair Darling, when you see that graph of the pound and its value against the dollar, and people are saying, the Tories are trying to say this is because of the strong dollar, it's also gone down against other currencies. We had that wonderful conversation last week with Eddie Rahm, the Prime Minister of Albania, we had a lot of love for him. If people didn't listen to it, they should, because I think it was probably our best.
12:16 Rory Stewart? It was beautiful, wasn't it?
12:17 Alastair Campbell? It was, yeah.
12:17 Rory Stewart? Really good. And I love, he's so reflective and kind of wise.
12:20 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, he's a very good one. But the pound today went down against the Albanian Lek.
12:24 Rory Stewart? And it's very good. And it's very good at your podcast, because we get a lot of Albanian Lek revenue, actually.
12:30 Alastair Campbell? From our two thousand two hundred regular listeners. But Eddie also sent me a, I think it was an article by Paul Krugman, which was talking about, saying that he never really expected the UK to go for zombie economics.
12:42 Rory Stewart? It's amazing.
12:43 Alastair Campbell? I mean, we're now seeing.
12:44 Rory Stewart? So Paul Krugman's zombie economist, Larry Summers said, we've, we're like an emerging market trying to behave as a submerging market. This is a great line. So here's, here's the thing. So let me now try to turn it around and put the other case, because we've made them out as being complete lunatics. And I'm going to try to make the case for Kwasi Kwarteng and Liz Truss and what on earth they think they're doing. Now.
13:04 Alastair Campbell? You don't think, you don't think I did a very good job? I think, well, shock and awe, definitely, and tax cuts.
13:11 Rory Stewart? And tax cuts.
13:12 Alastair Campbell? And hide the fact that it's actually about this whole sort of, you know, very, very right wing, sovereign individual vision, which Kwasi, I think, has always believed, by the way. Truss hasn't, but he does.
13:21 Rory Stewart? So they are betting on growth, and there is a small possibility. I think it's incredibly reckless, obviously. And it's a daft thing to do. And we can come back to actually what a better growth package would look like. But this is all a gamble on growth. And if for some miraculous reason, it may be nothing to do with them, they get growth before the next election, they're going to get the credit for doing this. So how could they get growth before the next election? What would be lucky? Lucky for them would be if for some reason inflation doesn't take off. If for some reason, energy prices fall. If for some reason, the Bank of England doesn't feel it's got to ramp up interest rates and put the brake on.
14:04 Alastair Campbell? There's a three big ifs so far.
14:05 Rory Stewart? Three huge big ifs. I think it's, I'd put a 5% chance on this. But if he manages to get those three things falling in his favour, he could get some growth and he could end up looking smarter the next election.
14:16 Alastair Campbell? That's why I thought Rachel Reeves' shuttle answer, her instant line was actually quite a good one, given she had to think on her feet, when she said, this is just a massive reckless gamble. It's not a strategy, because as you say, it's dependent on other things happening over which he actually has no control whatsoever.
14:31 Rory Stewart? And then, at the core of what they're going to try to do to drive it, is stuff which is going to be deeply offensive to many Conservatives. So, one thing that Liz Truss has done, which is perfectly rational, I mean, any economist would probably agree that it makes sense, but will be very unpopular, is she's going to bring in much more immigration. That's one thing that businesses have been crying out for, which is to have more immigration.
14:53 Alastair Campbell? And how does that fit with her? Given that she's there as a prisoner of the hard-right Brexiteers, how does that fit? Given that Brexit for them was a lot of it about immigration?
15:02 Rory Stewart? A huge problem, because sitting, I think, I'm trying to remember how the Cabinet table works, whether it's on her left or right, I think it's on her left, will be Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, who is completely against bringing in more immigration. So that's going to create a rift with the Brexiteers. The other thing is that the economists that are the moment, Gerard Lyons and people who are endorsing her, are Brexit cult economists.
15:25 Alastair Campbell? Minford, and who else, who else is there, pardon, who and Minford?
15:28 Rory Stewart? As far as I know, nobody. So it's a very, very weird thing, and I'm not even sure this is the kind of economics that they really believe in. It's somehow that Brexit has become such a cult, that even though they probably do think what she's doing is weird, and probably don't themselves back tax cuts at this time. I mean, let's actually, sort of take a second on tax cuts. How could it possibly make political sense to reduce taxes from forty five to forty percent? It doesn't actually, it's not actually a huge financial decision, about a two billion pound decision compared to the ninety billion pounds worth of decisions he made in other parts of the budget. So it's almost irrelevant to the finances.
16:04 Alastair Campbell? Isn't it five billion the top rate? I think it's five billion, but.
16:07 Rory Stewart? Okay, but, but in any case, it's much smaller.
16:09 Alastair Campbell? It's small compared to the, to the, to what they're racking up. No, it doesn't make sense critically.
16:13 Rory Stewart? So why, why is he doing it? Because remember, George Osborne was almost killed for reducing from fifty to forty five in twenty twelve. That was a very unpopular move that people thought was completely unnecessary. How can it make any political sense to do it?
16:25 Alastair Campbell? It doesn't, but that's why I say that they're, they're not doing it for reasons that we're sitting here discussing. They're, I honestly do think, I'm afraid, that they're doing it to reward the Tory donor sphere. I think they are, I, I, I really do think this thing about quieting his relationship with Crispin Odey, the hedge fund guy, on whose payroll he was, I don't know whether he still is, but he certainly was.
16:50 Rory Stewart? Reward stuff is interesting because I, I, I'm not sure that that five percent makes a huge difference to these decisions.
16:57 Alastair Campbell? They're lifting the lid on bankers' bonuses.
17:01 Rory Stewart? Yeah, but the bankers' bonuses, but I get, but.
17:04 Alastair Campbell? Yes, but, no, hold on a minute, that is then related to cutting the top rate of tax.
17:07 Rory Stewart? The five percent bit though makes Zippo sense to me in any way. I don't think.
17:11 Alastair Campbell? Well, I love the way you keep asking me to try to tell you what the thinking is behind Cammy Quasi's economic strategy.
17:18 Rory Stewart? Now, here we are. Now, this is an open goal for you.
17:20 Alastair Campbell? Okay, love those.
17:21 Rory Stewart? Okay, if you were the Chancellor, what is the single number one big decision you would make in order to generate growth in Britain?
17:28 Alastair Campbell? Now, today?
17:30 Rory Stewart? What would you do?
17:31 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think, you, you've got to think long term, which of course they don't.
17:34 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and in the long term, what would be great for immigration, trade in goods?
17:38 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think it might be to sort of rearrange our relationship with the European Union. I think that might be a sensible thing to do.
17:43 Rory Stewart? Four percent GDP potentially over the next seven years.
17:45 Alastair Campbell? Exactly.
17:45 Rory Stewart? Want to get that growth rate.
17:46 Alastair Campbell? But even if, even if you don't do that, which frankly, eventually we're going to have to do at some stage, and Labour are going to have to face up to that as well. Skills, productivity, education. We talked last week about the way education debates just vanish from our politics.
17:59 Rory Stewart? And, and in the very short term, not trashing the reputation of our financial institutions, not trashing the OBR, respecting their announcements, not trashing the Bank of England, not sacking the. Most senior civil servant in the Treasury at the moment that you take over.
18:14 Alastair Campbell? Well, this is what led to the Krugmans and the Larry Summers of this world saying what they said, because they see a country that they normally respect for the kind of strength of its political and economic institutions behaving like this. I talked to, as you know, because you looked at my telephone earlier, I do have some contact with some Conservative MPs.
18:33 Rory Stewart? It was the Pope that was talking.
18:35 Alastair Campbell? And I did have one who, now, I don't agree with this theory, okay, but I'm going to throw it at you to see what you think, who said, "The only logic I can apply to this," he said, this is a Northern Tory MP, "the only logic I can apply to this is actually, for whatever reason, they think the last, the next election is gone, they are going to do two things. One, look after their mates, get them even richer, and secondly, make the economic pitch so bad for Labour that Labour will only go for one term."
19:08 Rory Stewart? No, I don't think that's right.
19:09 Alastair Campbell? I think he was just in a very bad mood.
19:11 Rory Stewart? I think he's in extremely bad.
19:12 Alastair Campbell? Because he had had a weekend in a red wall seat being told this is a disaster.
19:16 Rory Stewart? I don't think that's right. I think, I don't think primarily, no, to defend them, I don't think that what's driving them. I think they're, I think they're ideologues. I think they're driven by a...
19:25 Alastair Campbell? What's the ideology?
19:26 Rory Stewart? So, the ideology is, is in a book, which I wouldn't recommend for listeners on this show to read.
19:32 Alastair Campbell? Britannia Unchained.
19:33 Rory Stewart? Britannia Unchained lays out all their views on this stuff.
19:36 Alastair Campbell? Britannia Unhinged is the new European book.
19:38 Rory Stewart? Very good, very good. And a bit like the last days of communism, as the system began to fail more and more, people became more and more extreme. As quite patently it wasn't working, they convinced themselves that it was, they weren't doing it properly. So, all the ideas from this particular group, which Liz Truss actually is part of, she's on the gentler end of this.
20:00 Alastair Campbell? Do you think she genuinely is part of it?
20:02 Rory Stewart? Very much.
20:03 Alastair Campbell? In her heart?
20:04 Rory Stewart? Oh, yeah, yeah. Because even when she was at DEFRA, basically, the stuff that she's doing now, which is apparently she's saying to every department, "There's only one question for you, there's only one thing that matters." How does what you're doing contribute to growth? And if it doesn't, why are you doing it? Which is a terrible question to ask about the environment. Terrible question to ask about many, many other things, right? In British society. But that was absolutely at the core of her. And I think what's happened is that they have an almost religious belief that cutting taxes always stimulates an economy, that there are these sort of animal spirits waiting to be released. And that if it hasn't worked under the last 12 years of Conservative government,
20:49 Rory Stewart? it's not that the model's wrong. It's that it wasn't done radically enough.
20:52 Alastair Campbell? So it's like the Benites in the days of the Labour Party, that, you know, we're not being socialist enough.
20:58 Rory Stewart? Exactly. And I think this is the last final absurd madness of what was always a fringe group in the Conservative Party. I mean, this is the group, I think John Redwood is very much part of this.
21:08 Alastair Campbell? Duncan Smith?
21:09 Rory Stewart? I think Duncan Smith maybe, although he doesn't talk that much about his economic policy.
21:12 Alastair Campbell? The Institute of Economic Affairs, the Tufton Street Law.
21:15 Rory Stewart? They will like this, yep. And there's been some endorsements from some of them around this stuff about enterprise zones, which, incidentally, you've talked about a lot. And you've raised on this, the sovereign individual stuff. But one problem that we haven't talked about on the show about these enterprise zones is that if you really feel that growth is being held back because of the wrong regulations, then what you should really be doing is trying to create a positive environment for growth throughout the country. Not just displacing it to some small area.
21:47 Alastair Campbell? And meanwhile, having funds over here where poorer areas have to just bid in for a bit of money to build a leisure centre or something. So these investment zones, I mean, it was a whole package of things that really set the RSPB off. But you, having been at DEFRA, can you see why these nature conservation bodies are so upset?
22:06 Rory Stewart? Well, so the fundamental thing is that for the last six years, people have been trying to think how to replace the European Union environmental payments. So when I was the Environment Minister at DEFRA, I oversaw 3.2 billion pounds annually of environmental payments. But my colleague, George Eustace, oversaw a huge amount, almost the same amount, of single farm payments. And single farm payments simply pay you by the acre. It doesn't matter what you did. You just got the money for having a farm. Maybe £160 an acre. And there was a fringe of the Brexiteers that were very, very powerful under Boris Johnson, led by people like Zach Goldsmith and his brother Ben Goldsmith,
22:52 Rory Stewart? who were Brexiteers and environmentalists. And they really believed that one of the problems with Europe was the common agricultural policy, that the common agricultural policy wasn't good for nature and the environment. And if they left the European Union, they could create proper environmental schemes, which would genuinely improve British nature. And this was driven ahead by Michael Gove, who was actually a surprisingly radical, pro-environment, defra minister. And then it was taken up strangely by the man that we really dislike, Boris Johnson. But the one thing that Boris Johnson was quite progressive on was environment. His father's a big conservationist.
23:32 Alastair Campbell? Wife.
23:33 Rory Stewart? His wife is very concerned about this. He's very close friends with Zach Goldsmith and Ben Goldsmith, whose thing this was, he in fact made Zach Goldsmith a minister in defra. So the end of the six-year period, a huge system was made, which farmers across the country were just getting used to, which was the Elms system. And the Elms system basically rewarded you for doing, using land in a way that benefited nature. Quite complicated, it was, you know, rewards you for peatland restoration, you could do rewilding schemes, you could do trees, you could do lots of stuff. But what Liz Truss has now announced is that she is intending, it seems, to get rid of that system and effectively return to the very worst bit of the European Union,
24:17 Rory Stewart? which was the single farm payment under the common agricultural policy.
24:19 Alastair Campbell? Presumably, presumably she having been Secretary of State at defra, presumably she understands that.
24:23 Rory Stewart? She absolutely understands.
24:24 Alastair Campbell? So why is she doing that?
24:25 Rory Stewart? Because when she was Secretary of State at defra, and she was my boss,
24:30 Rory Stewart? what was striking is David Cameron made her, David Cameron made her. The reason we have Liz Truss as Prime Minister is because David Cameron promoted her faster than anyone else, made her a Secretary of State when she'd only been in Parliament four years as a very young woman, and put her in charge of environment, food and rural affairs, when she frankly doesn't care deeply about environment or rural affairs.
24:52 Alastair Campbell? Why not?
24:53 Rory Stewart? Because she-
24:53 Alastair Campbell? You also said that when she was Foreign Secretary, she didn't care about Foreign Affairs. What does she care about?
24:56 Rory Stewart? She cares about radical economic reforms of this sort. She's an economist and a right-wing economist. And she loves the idea of sort of exactly the stuff that she and Kwasi Kwarteng are now doing. She doesn't, I remember her making jokes at the expense of colleagues with the green belt. She thinks the green belt gets in the way of economic growth. She would like to build over it. She felt that-
25:17 Alastair Campbell? Do you think she will do that?
25:18 Rory Stewart? I think she'd be interested in doing that. I think it'll be very difficult for her to do that. Because if she starts doing that, she'll lose every Conservative seat in the South of England, having just lost every Conservative seat in the North of England with her budget. So maybe a little bit difficult for her to do that.
25:31 Alastair Campbell? Do you think she's a Labour Party agent? I mean, I'd argue the war, but, you know.
25:36 Rory Stewart? So I think this goes to the heart of what we were talking about last week, which is that growth sounds popular until you start doing it. And the sort of radical growth that comes-
25:47 Alastair Campbell? But this isn't even clearly an effective plan for growth. None of the economists I've read, apart from you, say the Brexit cultists, have identified this as a good way to go.
25:56 Rory Stewart? The only bit of it that makes sense is the immigration bit.
25:59 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, which goes against their big project.
26:01 Rory Stewart? Exactly, yeah.
26:02 Alastair Campbell? But also, if she's this radical economic reforming, why was she in favour of Remain in the referendum?
26:09 Rory Stewart? Because she thought that Brexit, I remember her saying this to me, that she thought Brexit would be a waste of time, that we'd waste, and she's incredibly sort of, she sees herself as very efficient. So she said, I can see us wasting the next seven, eight years just banging-
26:25 Alastair Campbell? One thing she's ever got right.
26:26 Rory Stewart? Banging on and talking about Brexit.
26:27 Alastair Campbell? She didn't just do it because Cameron, that's what Cameron wanted, and he was the guy in power at the time.
26:32 Rory Stewart? I think that influenced her, but I think what really got her on board is she just thought it was impractical and would waste people's time.
26:38 Alastair Campbell? What happens now, though, because you said one of the big ifs is that the Bank of England doesn't rack up interest rates. I don't see any way that they can't, because as people keep saying, you've now got the worst of both worlds. We've got Kwasi with his foot slamming down on the accelerator, and Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, has got his foot on the brake. And that is going to carry on with this tension. As you said earlier, they've started to brief against the Bank of England, which I think is a lethal place to be. And I want to ask you about this shorting the pound thing. Because when George Soros made a fortune thirty years ago betting against our currency on bet for Black Wednesday. He was doing so as an economic analyst. He was making judgments based upon what he was assessing.
27:23 Alastair Campbell? There does seem to have been access to governments, to decisions and decision makers about what was coming. Some of it signaled, some of it signaled. That to me, I don't know, if you think about the days when Hugh Dalton had to resign as Chancellor because he sort of slipped a tip to the Evening Standard to say, yeah, that story's right, you can run it because it won't be in the papers on the streets until I've already delivered the budget. And he had to resign. And this lot are telling their mates what's coming up in the non-budget, mega mini-budget, whatever the words they wanted to put to it. I actually do think this is fraud.
28:00 Rory Stewart? I guess the problem here is they would say that they were not the government. This was their manifesto they were campaigning on.
28:06 Alastair Campbell? No, but there were these meetings, it seems, post Liz Truss becoming Prime Minister.
28:10 Rory Stewart? In which they brief stuff out.
28:11 Alastair Campbell? Which they seem to brief stuff out. I think that is very, very, very, very dodgy.
28:15 Rory Stewart? Here's a comment. I don't really understand this. This is my friend Felix, who's actually on his way to see us. But he says, and I thought it was an important thing to register because he's much cleverer than me.
28:25 Alastair Campbell? Cleverer than I.
28:26 Rory Stewart? Cleverer than I.
28:27 Alastair Campbell? Which school did you go to?
28:28 Rory Stewart? His grammar is probably better. He says, "The key thing to look at is the gilt market, which is much more important than sterling. And the gilt market took one look at this and said WTF. I'm not hanging around to see whether the signal has got anything sensible about it. I think I'd rather go and hide in US Treasuries for a bit. Hold me back after the party conference or whatever." Right. The breakdown in the gilt market, huge moves Friday in this morning, is different and much more serious than the currency markets.
28:59 Alastair Campbell? But it's all part of the same.
29:00 Rory Stewart? And could cause a major snafu. Moves of this magnitude in a highly leveraged financial system inevitably have the potential to throw up all kinds of unforeseen consequences.
29:08 Alastair Campbell? We're now, I can now tell our reader slash listeners that this is how Rory Stewart sounds so informed. He read that from his telephone.
29:17 Rory Stewart? I was quoting Felix.
29:18 Alastair Campbell? Yes, I know. You know, so we've now had, Felix would surely agree with me. We have now had one of the biggest devaluations in our history and it's been totally self inflated.
29:28 Rory Stewart? Yeah, I mean, well, look, politically, this is, I mean, let's even set aside the pros and cons of this move. And the reason, of course, that, that I think it's important to understand the reason this has lost me, David Gork, Gamba, well, if I can speak for them, I probably can't speak for them, but anyway, lost.
29:44 Alastair Campbell? I think you can definitely, from what I've seen, you can speak for them.
29:47 Rory Stewart? Lost, lost, the loss of what used to be the left central, the Conservative Party, is that it's totally blown to pieces what used to be part of our brand. Our brand was supposed to be, we were meant to be the fiscally prudent ones, the the cautious people.
30:03 Alastair Campbell? Well, that's why I had Rachel Reeves to stand up at the party conference and say what she did.
30:06 Rory Stewart? Exactly. Who didn't borrow too much, didn't spend too much. You know, even if people disagreed with the economic policy, there was at least an idea. We were cautious with our money, we balanced our budgets. And I think we've never seen a announcement by a Chancellor which has been quite so immediately catastrophic.
30:23 Alastair Campbell? Well, we had the Omnishambles budget.
30:25 Rory Stewart? But nothing like this.
30:26 Alastair Campbell? And this is, I do think this is, I mean, I'm very, very disappointed the way that the, the, the front pages have not just got, I think Cami Quasi would have been a perfect headline for all of them.
30:34 Rory Stewart? Cami Quasi.
30:35 Alastair Campbell? None of them went for it, pathetic. And the Daily Express today says, trust, promises world beating economy, every single day, whatever she says, she's just, and it's fantastic for the Daily Express because trust is exactly the same length as Boris. So now they've just got all the same headlines they had for Johnson and they just replaced Boris with trust every day.
30:52 Rory Stewart? They can also do something with her that they can't do with Boris, which is they can say trussonomics. Like abonomics, do you remember in Japan?
31:00 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, abonomics.
31:01 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, yeah, trussonomics.
31:03 Alastair Campbell? Reaganomics.
31:04 Rory Stewart? Trussonomics, Reaganomics, but you couldn't do that with Boris, could you? Borissonomics.
31:07 Alastair Campbell? Volkanomics, bullshitteromics, lionomics, law breakeromics. Shall we take a break? Shall we take a break?
31:15 Speaker 02 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.
31:19 Speaker 03 On October 2nd.
31:20 Speaker 02 Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me.
31:25 Speaker 03 Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the revenant.
31:32 Speaker 04 What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.
31:36 Speaker 03 With great power comes great deniability.
31:39 Speaker 04 I'm not the first then.
31:41 Speaker 03 Digger. See the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.
31:45 Speaker 04 Priceline Negotiator.
31:48 Speaker 05 It's me, the.
31:49 Speaker 04 Priceline Negotiator.
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33:17 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to a proper live, in-person edition of The Rest Is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.
33:22 Alastair Campbell? No, it's not live. Just because we're in the same room doesn't mean it's live. It's actually being recorded face-to-face, that's what you meant.
33:28 Rory Stewart? Oh, okay. So a recorded face-to-face edition of The Rest Is Politics podcast with me, Rory Stewart.
33:33 Alastair Campbell? You are Rory Stewart, and I am Alastair Campbell.
33:37 Rory Stewart? Very good. But the person who's not in the room with us at the moment is Ibrahim Raisi, the president of Iran, because he's got other things on his mind at the moment.
33:44 Alastair Campbell? Well, we didn't invite him, and I think there's a very good reason why he's a bit PNG at the moment. That's because his, well, his government is in quite serious difficulty at the moment, and a lot of it deserved, I would argue, because this young woman, Mahsa Amini, has become what her cousin, I saw his interview on Sky News yesterday, the voice of anger of the Iranian people.
34:09 Alastair Campbell? And it does seem true, she's dead. She died in custody, three days, within three days of being arrested for offending the so-called morality police, because there was a bit of hair showing from her hijab. But it does really, really, really seem to have kicked off protests that we haven't seen there for quite a while.
34:25 Rory Stewart? And, and part of this, of course, is how quickly social media works. So the Iranian state's trying to lock down WhatsApp, it's trying to lock down other sharing services. But it is amazing, and we've obviously known this since the Arab Spring, how a single event, so for example in Tunisia, that man immolating himself suddenly spread across the whole of the Middle East. And the same's happening in Iran. And on the Arab media, I've just landed from Jordan, you will see continual images. Some of them maybe not even true. You know, I was seeing stuff on my phone about this kid has just been shot by the Iranian police. This, I mean, incredible sort of brutal images all the time. But this is, has created, I think, protests now in over 80 towns and cities across Iran. This is the worst since 2009.
35:09 Alastair Campbell? And it's also spreading around the world. I mean, there were protests here yesterday in London. And there were some very, quite serious protests in some of the neighbouring countries.
35:20 Alastair Campbell? But I I think it's, um, I don't know whether they will really, really, really crack down. I mean, you're right, it's hard to find out exactly how many people have died, but you're talking dozens. Apparently, there have been four executions related to the nature of the protest. And our ambassador, the British ambassador, Simon Shercliffe.
35:38 Rory Stewart? Simon Shercliffe, my friend.
35:39 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, he was summoned to the Foreign Ministry and asked to to take responsibility and to shut down some of the Farsi media that is apparently being generated from London. So what you're seeing is, and the same happened to the Norwegian ambassador as well. So what you're seeing is that, and this is something we talked to Eram about, because he was in the middle of, when we talked to him in Tirana, of this massive cyber attack by the Iranians, because the Albanians look after quite a lot of Iranian exiles. So it does seem to be that this combination of this single event that has triggered incredible anger amongst an awful lot of people who up till now have been sort of just living with repression and getting on with their lives, that they're not putting up with it any longer. And then around the world, this sort of diaspora is supporting this.
36:24 Rory Stewart? So obviously, since the revolution, seventy-nine, eighty, till now, there have been many, many incidents where people have assumed that this was the end of the revolution, because there's something so fundamentally fragile about that structure, it seems, at least on the outside. But of course, consistently, people who've predicted the fall of the Iranian state have been wrong. They were wrong, and the so-called Green Revolution, George Bush got very excited back at the end of the nineties, early two thousands. It never happened then. I walked across Iran in the winter of two thousand. And what struck me then, and then I guess this sort of halfway between the revolution and now, is that what we don't
37:09 Rory Stewart? usually acknowledge in Iran, or what struck me, is that Iran is really two societies. There is the society of the cities, the society of people like Masha Amini, who tragically died. Highly educated, generally more liberal, more progressive, pushing to be a much more part of a contemporary world. And then there is a much more conservative world around. I walked through villages where sometimes I was stopped by different bits of the security state, five or six times a day, police intelligence, military intelligence, Basij militia, revolutionary guard, where every single mosque, where I slept in the mosques night after night, were
37:51 Rory Stewart? hung with martyrs in the Iran-Iraq war. And you can feel it right the way across Iraq now, the influence of the Iranian regime. You can feel it in Yemen, of course with the Houthis. And so it's a very, very strange moment. On the one hand, fragility, revolution. On the other hand, still a very, very strong state with a huge, deep rural conservative backing for people like Kim Raisi.
38:18 Alastair Campbell? And I think they will, I think the regime will be looking at, even though it has been a level of protest we haven't seen for a while, I think they will be looking at it at the moment and probably thinking it's containable, which we'll see.
38:29 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
38:29 Alastair Campbell? Another country beginning with I, Italy.
38:32 Rory Stewart? Italy.
38:33 Alastair Campbell? Now has the most right wing government since Mussolini. Giorgia Meloni, who's gone from four percent at the last election to twenty five plus this time, at the expense of the left, but also at the expense of Salvini of the Liga, who will be presumably part of any governmental reforms, and also the old Fox, who, Moises Naim, my three P man, he identifies Berlusconi as the first three P autocrat.
39:01 Rory Stewart? The first real proper populist.
39:02 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
39:03 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
39:04 Alastair Campbell? But basically, this is a, this is a, I mean, I, you know, this, when, any party that identifies, literally identifies itself as post fascist, I always think it's the post hyphen part of that word that counts for the most.
39:18 Rory Stewart? But Italy is extraordinary, isn't it? Because it's the most extreme version, I feel, as an outsider looking at it, of the tension between populism on the one hand, the kind of Berlusconi thing.
39:28 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
39:29 Rory Stewart? And on the other
39:29 Alastair Campbell? And Salvini.
39:30 Rory Stewart? And Salvini. And on the other hand, the very kind of high technocratic, austere tradition of these kind of central bankers.
39:39 Rory Stewart? Brussels bureaucrats, you know, Mario Monti was a great example of this. But it's gone on since then, of this sort of fight between, on the one hand, the kind of these grand Italians with that sort of sweeping white hair and their kind of amazing international lives, and then this, this thing which, which Giorgia Maloney represents.
39:55 Alastair Campbell? But she's, um, she, you know, she's done the same as Le Pen in France and Vox and the true Finns and the, and the Sweden Democrats of trying to soften some of the harder edges. But essentially, you know, we are talking about fundamentally Christian and, and, and as so many of the kind of Christians, particularly in America, identify themselves as that's as much about being anti-Islam as it is about being pro your own faith, family incredibly important, very anti-gay rights. And of course, it's going to be difficult for her because the, the COVID package that comes out of the European Union, I think they've got the biggest of the lot. So she's going to be very, very sensitive to, I don't think she'll want to upset the European Union too much, but she's definitely sort of pitching more towards, towards an
40:39 Alastair Campbell? Orban vision of Europe than a Macron shot.
40:41 Rory Stewart? Yes, so she's, she's, she's gone through a transition, hasn't she? And what one never knows with somebody like that is which one of her two identities to believe. So you're right, she had a complete Orban identity. And of course Viktor Orban, the Hungarian leader, uh, had a lot of extraordinary attacks on George Soros, which she loves to repeat.
41:02 Alastair Campbell? Yep.
41:02 Rory Stewart? He has something that I've noticed happening increasingly around the world, which is a, a policy of trying to increase your domestic rec population. It's a sort of anti-immigration policy where you're all about.
41:13 Alastair Campbell? Absolutely.
41:14 Rory Stewart? Big families, we've got to turn around, all gets population decline. And she, she congratulates Orban for having driven up the Hungarian population. She made quite pro-Putin comments a couple of years ago. So it really sounded as though she was fully kind of allied with the bad people and she was pretty extremely eurosceptic and she used to mock Angela Merkel and Macron. But now, suddenly, something's changed.
41:39 Alastair Campbell? Well, she's not, Salvini's right up Putin. She has definitely been a bit stronger on Ukraine. Um. But whether that's been for politics or.
41:49 Rory Stewart? So she's changed on Ukraine. She's now making pro-European things. Having said that she admired Benito Mussolini, she's now said, no, she doesn't admire Benito Mussolini. And she thinks he's a bad man. So whether that means that she's actually, like some of the populist leaders we've talked about show in Latin America, who actually became more moderate when they get in.
42:08 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
42:09 Rory Stewart? Maybe she will be like that. Another thing that makes her interesting is a bit like Liz Truss. And many of the other people that we've been talking about.
42:16 Alastair Campbell? Alone is the new Liz Truss, says Rory Stewart.
42:19 Rory Stewart? Well, and and and actually, you know, many of the young politicians we've been talking about on the show, she's part of this uh trend of extreme professionalism, which is part of the hidden story of populism. Now, it's not true of Trump, of course, Trump comes in having not been a professional politician, he's a much older man. But she became a councillor at the age of twenty one. She was a leading activist at the age of nineteen. She was, you know, a minister in Balascones government when she was incredibly young.
42:44 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
42:45 Rory Stewart? She she represents a type of politics which is more and more common, where people really have done nothing outside.
42:51 Alastair Campbell? Well, Jimmy Agerson, the Sweden Democrats leader, he's been leader of that party since his twenties. Well, let's talk about another one then, because we've got another huge election coming up, which is Brazil. October the second and then October the thirtieth. Uh. You can reach for your phone if you if you want, Rory, as I've got my six pages of research that I've done here. Uh. Did you know you like this?
43:12 Rory Stewart? Can can be reminded of where this is coming from. So one of our Brazilian listeners said that all that happens, and you notice this, is that I keep referring to Bolsonaro and we never provide a detailed analysis of Brazil.
43:22 Alastair Campbell? Which I thought was a fair point.
43:23 Rory Stewart? And you then said, well, you could easily give us five minutes on Brazil, but you had to go to the dentist. I thought you were bluffing.
43:28 Alastair Campbell? I wasn't bluffing. I've got a crown on, so you're there.
43:30 Rory Stewart? To give us five minutes on Brazil, at which point I backed down, and now you're going to give us five minutes on Brazil.
43:35 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, but and and I tell you what happened is my friend Kevin Keith, uh, who heard us have say this. He sent me a link and said, if you're going to talk about Brazil, you've got to watch this. And it turned out to be this documentary series about Bolsonaro.
43:49 Rory Stewart? Okay.
43:50 Alastair Campbell? And it's called The Bolsonaro Boys from Brazil.
43:53 Rory Stewart? All right.
43:53 Alastair Campbell? And I strongly recommend it.
43:54 Rory Stewart? So what's the first thing as for a non-Brazilian specialist, for our British audience, that they would notice about looking at the imagery of Bolsonaro, the communications of Bolsonaro, the way that he presents himself?
44:06 Alastair Campbell? I mean, his background is extraordinary. He essentially is one of the few politicians who, when Brazil ceased to be ruled by the military, who continued relentlessly to defend the military against the politicians. And he sort of still does. And the reason why this election is going to be so important, and the reason why the Americans are getting so agitated about it. They've even had the head of the CIA has been to see Bolsonaro's team. Because Bolsonaro keeps casting doubt on the outcome. He's going to do a Trump. He's basically going to say, he's actually said, if I don't get at least 60%, then there's something very abnormal.
44:49 Rory Stewart? And then there's something going on in the back of my mind. Supreme Court's accusations of businessmen backing coups.
44:57 Alastair Campbell? They've got, well, he's, he's still very, very close to the military because he always defended the military. And of course, his opponent, Lula, who's a former working class, started the Workers' Party, big trade union guy, Brazil's most popular ever president.
45:13 Rory Stewart? And presided over a period where it really seemed as though Brazilian growth was the future. I remember when I sat on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, we wrote a report on Brazil in 2011. In fact, a great way, if you're ever betting on the financial markets, as soon as the Foreign Affairs Select Committee decides to produce a report saying a country is going really well, you can absolutely guarantee it's finished. We did it with Brazil, we did it with Turkey.
45:33 Alastair Campbell? So in this film, there's this extraordinary clip of a big summit when Obama was president and all the kind of big world leaders are there. Lula arrives and Obama, with all the cameras there, says, ah, the most popular politician in the world walks in the room. I mean, he was like up there. Then, of course, he goes, you're only allowed to serve two consecutive terms. He goes, he's then replaced by Ruseff, and there's this massive corruption scandal emerges in which he is implicated. Goes to jail. Bolsonaro now, every time he's up against Lula, he just calls him the convict.
46:05 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, this is a pretty big deal. I mean, the president was, there was a big corruption scandal and the guy did go to jail.
46:11 Alastair Campbell? He did go to jail, but then the conviction was. No, I agree, and I suspect there's all sorts of stuff. But the conviction was quashed, which is what has allowed him to run again. He's way ahead, well, way ahead, he's about 10 points ahead in the polls. He's 76, Bolsonaro 67.
46:25 Alastair Campbell? The other massive issue is, of course, the Amazon. Bolsonaro has always been tear down the trees, dig up the minerals, that's what it's all about. And, you know, the rest of the world and all the smoke and everything you can bugger off.
46:37 Rory Stewart? Yeah, and just pause on that, just pause on that. I think one of the things that people maybe don't understand is that the Amazon is such an extraordinary percentage of the world's forestry cover. I mean, it, it, it, and the.
46:52 Alastair Campbell? If you were in Aman now, you'd be looking up the percentage.
46:54 Rory Stewart? Yeah, exactly, I definitely would. I'm sorry that I'm with you in person. I could give, give much better information to the listeners of the show, if only I was sitting in Aman, I'm not sitting with you, you're looking at my bloody phone. But if we were able to replant even those bits of the Amazon that have been cut down, because one of the terrible things is the Amazon gets cut down, then it is farmed, but the forest soils are often very, very thin and very easy to deplete it. So that a lot of Brazil is now composed of soil which is useless for farming, so useless for growing soy, useless for cattle ranching. And we need to find a way of getting trees back into it. In fact, one of the things I was trying to do as an environment minister, working with
47:34 Rory Stewart? the head of the US Forestry Commission, is if we could find a way of replanting half a billion hectares of cut down depleted soil in Brazil, we could make almost more difference to climate, air quality, pollution, carbon capture, biodiversity than any other single intervention.
47:54 Alastair Campbell? But the favourite fact I learnt about Bolsonaro in this extraordinary amount of research I did, Rory, is that he calls his three, his three older boys, Flavio, Carlos and Eduardo, he calls them by the number.
48:07 Rory Stewart? Number one, number two, number three.
48:08 Alastair Campbell? Well, actually, it's worse than that, zero one, zero two, zero three.
48:12 Rory Stewart? Ah, is that like a military thing? It's maybe a Brazilian military thing, zero one, zero two, zero three.
48:15 Alastair Campbell? And he got zero three when he was aged seventeen. He got him to stand in an election against his ex-wife to punish his ex-wife.
48:26 Rory Stewart? Very good. Who won, zero three or the ex-wife?
48:29 Alastair Campbell? The boy.
48:29 Rory Stewart? Zero three.
48:29 Alastair Campbell? Who then spent his entire time in the city council playing video games.
48:33 Rory Stewart? Quite right. Actually.
48:34 Alastair Campbell? It's not right, Rory. Honestly, you'd be very flippant here about it.
48:38 Rory Stewart? President Kabila of Congo, who I want to see in his palace in the jungle, was, is a big guy on video games. He does a lot of, spends a lot of time on video games.
48:48 Alastair Campbell? Well, anyway, so the boy, and now, the thesis of this film is that basically the only people who matter in Bolsonaro's life are his family. Eduardo, one of the other sons, is who he wants to line up as successor. If the polls are right, Lula's going to win. And that's going to be a very, very big change.
49:07 Rory Stewart? And then the question is, what are the military going to do? What's the Supreme Court going to do?
49:10 Alastair Campbell? And does Bolsonaro accept the, so this week, the Americans have put out a statement saying that they intend to recognize the government. They do not believe the electoral system is bust. They do not believe it's corrupt. They are going to recognize the results immediately.
49:26 Rory Stewart? Very good. And the European Union should do the same. And these are things that we are going to pursue in Blackpool.
49:32 Alastair Campbell? Blackpool, October the 8th, 8pm.
49:35 Rory Stewart? As you would say, very few tickets left, Upper Circle now, but some prime seating in the Upper Circle, looking down, isn't that?
49:41 Alastair Campbell? They can look down on us.
49:42 Rory Stewart? Yeah, that's the Winter Gardens.
49:43 Alastair Campbell? I'm sure the ones at the front will do that as well.
49:45 Rory Stewart? Yeah, that's fantastic, yeah.
49:46 Alastair Campbell? So if you do want to come and see us in Blackpool, Rory and I will be there at the Winter Gardens, 8pm on October the 8th. Google Winter Gardens, Rest Is Politics, or go to restispolitics.com.
49:58 Rory Stewart? Thank you all very much and goodbye.
50:00 Alastair Campbell? Bye bye.
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