38. Amnesty International, cabinet duels, and fuel poverty

Join Alastair and Rory as they discuss lame ducks, Amnesty International’s Ukraine report, politicians’ holidays, energy prices, fuel poverty, George Canning, Nancy Pelosi in Taiwan, the wildfires and US Climate Bill, Boris Johnson’s dancing, and The Rest Is Politics bingo. Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, 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] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: 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. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Right, welcome back to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alistair Campbell.

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:48Alastair Campbell?

  And we've got lots to talk about, Rory. We've got the economy, Gordon Brown is back across the airwaves.

• 1:53Rory Stewart?

  This is interesting. You didn't say Gordon. Normally you say Gordon. What happened there?

• 1:57Alastair Campbell?

  Gordon Brown. I'm referring to him by his full name because this is the pompous introduction of the podcast. And thank you for interrupting me. I also want to talk about politicians and holidays. I want to talk about Ukraine. And I know you're interested. We haven't really talked about Ukraine much in recent weeks. And I was fascinated by the Amnesty International report and the fallout from it. You and I want to talk about the Biden administration.

• 2:19Rory Stewart?

  This is the first real US climate bill that's ever been passed in only 55 years of talking about this.

• 2:24Alastair Campbell?

  It's about much more than climate, though, isn't it? This is about dealing with inflation. It's about getting the economy going. It's about healthcare, it's about corporation tax. I mean, there's a big, big, big, big package.

• 2:33Rory Stewart?

  100%. And then I think you want to do China, Taiwan with us?

• 2:36Alastair Campbell?

  China, Taiwan, a bit of Colombia as well. The new president Petro is saying that the war on drugs has failed. And I think if we've got time, we should have a little go at Party Gate and the pathetic attempts by Decker and Dorries to help Johnson get out of the legitimate inquiry into the fact that he's a liar. And also, I think we'll do a little bit of The Rest Is Politics Bingo, a wonderful new game that's been invented by somebody called James Thomas. Now, I don't even know this. We started the podcast. Do you remember when we started the podcast?

• 3:04Rory Stewart?

  We started the podcast in March, didn't we?

• 3:05Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. And we've said probably too often, because we don't like to be smug, but we have emphasized fairly often that it's been a bit of a hit. It's still number one in the charts. And I think we've both been, we've both been surprised. Let's be honest, we have both been surprised.

• 3:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, no, astonished. I had no idea at all that the two of us would work in this way.

• 3:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, whatever the recipe, we are keen to give people more of it. And that's why today we are launching something called The Rest Is Politics Plus. It's a subscription service that gives you the ability to support what we're trying to do directly, but also gives benefits as well.

• 3:43Rory Stewart?

  If you sign up, you're going to listen to it through the subscription ad free forever. That includes the full back catalogue. You'll also get early access to the Question Time episode and the first option on any tickets for live shows. More on that in a minute.

• 3:58Alastair Campbell?

  And it's very, very easy to sign up. You go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. It takes less than a minute. And once you've done it, the exclusive members only podcast feed sits inside whatever app you usually use to listen to us. So you listen to us exactly the same way you always have, but without any ads and with early access to Question Time to listen to at your leisure.

• 4:22Rory Stewart?

  So in other words, if you want to pay, it's going to cost £3.49 a month, you will get it without the adverts. But very important to emphasise that if you don't want to sign up, the pod will always be available for free, as is now. You might just have to put up with some of our beautifully read adverts.

• 4:38Alastair Campbell?

  Now, part two of our exciting announcement before we get on to the guts of today. We are doing our second ever live show. We are finally going to be again in the same place at the same time. And the place is none other than one of my favourite venues on the planet. Many happy memories of political party conferences, the Winter Gardens Blackpool.

• 4:59Rory Stewart?

  Brilliant.

• 5:00Alastair Campbell?

  Saturday, the 8th of October at 8pm. Now, tickets go on general sale next week, but if you do sign up for The Rest Is Politics Plus, you're going to get them today with a 10% discount, which pretty much would cover your first month's membership anyway. So if you want to grab those live tickets today, this is Blackpool, Saturday, the 8th of October, 8pm, and it's going to be part of the Festival of the North, a new spoken word and written word festival organised by my wonderful friend Elaine from Silverdale Books. And you can sign up at therestispolitics.com, that's therestispolitics.com. And now Rory, I think it's probably time to get on with the podcast.

• 5:40Rory Stewart?

  Lovely.

• 5:41Alastair Campbell?

  Let's kick off with the economy then. You convinced that we're going into a 10-year global recession, and William Hague and I were both depressed by your relentless predictions about that last week. Can you explain to me what's going on? That we do have a Prime Minister across the airwaves, talking about what we need to do to try to deal with this cost of living crisis. But the Prime Minister left office 12 years ago. And we do have a Chancellor talking about these things. But it's the Chancellor who is the same person who left office as Chancellor 15 years ago, whereas Boris Johnson and Adim Zahawi vanished off the face of the earth.

• 6:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's a real problem, isn't it? I mean, it's partly a problem of classic lame duck problem, isn't it? I mean, how on earth are Boris Johnson and Adim Zahawi supposed to lay out any economic policy when they know they're going to be out in three months? So it's a really dangerous time. I mean, and of course, this is one of the many arguments that Boris Johnson tried to use to stay in was to say it's a difficult time. He tried to say it by talking about the Ukraine war, but he would have been. Actually had a better argument to say, look, we are going into this very, very difficult economic condition. We need a bit of stability and predictability. And I think if you're the markets looking at Britain at the moment, you simply don't know what's going to happen. And it's very odd for right the way through for the next few weeks, people will not know are taxes going up or taxes going down, is borrowing going up or is borrowing going

• 6:57Rory Stewart?

  down? Are they going to try to get a real radical quick grip on inflation? Or are they going to let it run? Are they going to control public sector pay? Or aren't they? I mean, these are such fundamental questions at a time when the whole global economy is juddering.

• 7:11Alastair Campbell?

  But Rory, you talk about the lame duck thing. And there's Johnson, who, I mean, I think it underlines what a terrible mistake it was by the cabinet to force him out, but at the same time, allow him to stay for his taxpayer funded holidays and weddings and all the stuff that he's been doing. But Mario Draghi is also a lame duck. And yet Mario Draghi is on a day to day basis, trying to address some of these issues as the outgoing Prime Minister of Italy. Just because the Johnson is not going to be there beyond September the 5th doesn't mean he can do nothing. And likewise, Zahawi, I mean, I know you take, you keep talking about Zahawi being a friend of yours and a very distinguished, distinguished member of the Conservative Party. But Rory, he came up with the most extraordinary phrase

• 7:55Alastair Campbell?

  the other day. He said, he's not on holiday, but he's with his family as they have a holiday. Now, I can't even begin to unbundle that one. I've been on working holidays.

• 8:05Rory Stewart?

  All your holidays are working holidays, aren't they? Basically, you're actually technically on holiday at the moment, aren't you, Alistair?

• 8:12Alastair Campbell?

  Technically, yes.

• 8:13Rory Stewart?

  So presumably, he's taking an Alastair Campbell style holiday.

• 8:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But what is he doing about the economy? And honestly, when you read, the thing about, say what you like about Gordon Brown, I know you've said before that actually you think you really admire the way Gordon Brown has conducted himself in his kind of post prime ministerial life. But I really do recommend that people dig up the whole piece that he wrote in The Observer about the current situation. And he's giving sensible ideas. He's basically saying, look, okay, you've got the Conservative leadership election going on. That means that either Truss or Sunak is going to be Prime Minister shortly. They need to sit down with Johnson, with Sahawi, with the Bank of England if need be, and work out a strategy to deal with this.

• 8:56Alastair Campbell?

  Because if not, we are talking about fuel poverty statistics in our country in a few weeks and months' time that are utterly terrifying. Fifty percent of children are going to be in poverty.

• 9:07Rory Stewart?

  It's horrifying. And some of the recent estimates, I mean, typical bill, three thousand eight hundred and fifty pounds a year is the current projection for typical bill. So remember, what's happened is the government's put in a four hundred pound discount, one hundred and fifty pound rebate, six hundred and fifty pound payment for low income households. But it looks as though what's happening to typical bills is going to go so far beyond any of the measures the government's yet taken.

• 9:30Alastair Campbell?

  It's not going to cover the rise at all. And if you've got kids, I mean, some of the universal credit figures for a family with young kids, you're talking about two pounds sixty a week per child.

• 9:43Rory Stewart?

  So we're talking about fuel, but inflation rises, probably thirteen percent is the latest estimate. That means obviously everything that you're buying goes up. Food prices are going to soar, clothes prices are going to soar. So anybody frozen on a low income is going to be in a tougher and tougher situation. But part of what's happening here is that, as we saw in those debates, there is quite unusually a very, very clear economic divide between these two candidates. We don't know, actually, unless we are confident this trust is going to win, what economic policy is coming out of the end of this. We know what both their economic policies are, and they are very, very different. This trust seems to be, very unusually for somebody who's meant to be from the right wing of the Conservative

• 10:25Rory Stewart?

  Party, basically going for more debt, higher deficit, higher public spending and lower taxes. Whereas Rishi Sunak seems to be going for the more traditional, fiscally conservative move of trying to balance the budget. He doesn't want to rack it up, debt and deficit, and he will do those things by actually raising taxes, classic treasury move, and reducing public spending. So getting to the bottom of this is going to be critical, and it's a big gamble either way.

• 10:53Alastair Campbell?

  The point that Gordon Brown, the point that Gordon... Gordon Brown has been making is that that's all fine and that's all the politics and the economics to come in related to this legislation. But literally within a matter of weeks, millions of families are going to be tipped into poverty. And that is going to have to be addressed before Liz Truss manages to get her tax plans through as well. One of our listeners made the very interesting observation, I thought. They define Liz Truss's economic approach as a pound plummeting strategy and suggested that this was maybe all being manipulated by the disaster capitalists who stand to make another killing like they did on Brexit. And I'm afraid I'm beginning to think that. I do think these people are just disaster capitalists. This, have you been following Rory?

• 11:38Alastair Campbell?

  I tweeted something this morning, somebody has posted, somebody called Matt Prescott has posted on social media, all the plans for all the different free ports and charter cities and so forth. I mean, they're taking up a very, very large part of our country where they're going to be freed from the laws of the land. I'm afraid this is the sovereign individual Brexit revolution going on here, Rory.

• 12:01Rory Stewart?

  I mean, they're not freed from all the laws of the land. You can't go around murdering people there, right? The point is that they are freed from some of the economic restrictions.

• 12:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, okay, okay. I accept that was over the top. I should also say, Rory, as you've reminded me of my, my, my non perfection on the factual front, I've got to give a bit of rebuttal here just to show that we, we're, we're prepared to take it. I said last week that if Liz Truss became Prime Minister, it would be the first time in our history that the monarch and the Prime Minister would have the same first name.

• 12:31Rory Stewart?

  And you remember what I said? Do you remember what I said?

• 12:34Alastair Campbell?

  I remember you said, I bet you'll find a George somewhere. Well, within, literally within five minutes of this bloody podcast going live, Robert Shrimpsley of the Financial Times sent me three, not one, but three examples of Prime Ministers who shared the name of a monarch.

• 12:53Rory Stewart?

  And what were they?

• 12:54Alastair Campbell?

  You were right, George Grenville. Was the Prime Minister between 1763 and 1765, at the time that George III was in, was king, George Canning. Now, why is George Canning a historical footnote, Rory?

• 13:09Rory Stewart?

  Because the duel, great duel that he fought with Castle Ray?

• 13:12Alastair Campbell?

  No, George, George Canning is a historical footnote in this context because he was the shortest serving Prime Minister ever, 119 days, he became very, very ill. He was the Prime Minister at the time of George IV in 1827. And the third one that the wretched Robert Shrimpsley dug up was William Lamb, aka Lord Melbourne.

• 13:35Rory Stewart?

  Ah, god blimey.

• 13:35Alastair Campbell?

  And he was there at the time of William IV and subsequently of Queen Victoria.

• 13:41Rory Stewart?

  Ah.

• 13:41Alastair Campbell?

  And he was, by the way, the last British Prime Minister to be dismissed by a monarch. He was sacked by his namesake, but then came back under Victoria. So, thank you, Robert Shrimpsley. Yes, you are very clever. Yes, go to the top of the class. Well done. Isn't the Financial Times a great paper?

• 13:56Rory Stewart?

  Brilliant. And let's just do a little shout out for George Canning. So, just to remind people, I, I'm a bit fuzzy on my history, but my memory is that in 1809, the Castle Ray, who I think was the War Minister, and George Canning was then the Foreign Secretary. So, it would be like Liz Truss and Ben Wallace at the moment, got in a row.

• 14:14Alastair Campbell?

  So, hold on, this is, this is, this is, this is 18 years before he became Prime Minister. Is this right?

• 14:18Rory Stewart?

  Uh, yeah, I guess so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Long, long way back. Yeah. So, these two are an absolute standoff in what's going on, and they end up getting into a duel. And the, it happened 6am on Putney Heath. Canning had never fired a pistol in his life, so George Canning, much more sort of, not, not a grand aristocrat in the same way. Robert Stuart Viscount Castle Ray, of course, you know, very fond of him because, of course, he's a relative of mine, had been doing quite, doing quite a lot of dueling in the way that, dueling that aristocrats did. He'd managed to try to shoot, shoot, shoot a girl's guardian in Ireland. They end up on the lawn, firing at each other. And one shot hit a button

• 15:03Rory Stewart?

  on Castle Ray's coat. Castle Ray second struck Canning in the thigh after the first two missed.

• 15:09Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, how do you know this?

• 15:10Rory Stewart?

  I try to look some of this stuff up occasionally.

• 15:12Alastair Campbell?

  But, but, hold on, hold on, no, hold on a minute. How, why did you look up George Canning?

• 15:16Rory Stewart?

  Well, I'm fascinated by these people. I mean, I think it's absolutely extraordinary that they got, managed to get in a, I mean, two Cabinet Ministers in the same government.

• 15:24Rory Stewart?

  Going out on the lawn to shoot at each other.

• 15:26Alastair Campbell?

  But did you know that I was going to raise George Canning? Did I tip you off?

• 15:29Rory Stewart?

  No, you did not tip me off that you were going to raise George Canning.

• 15:31Alastair Campbell?

  So you've just got this stuff in your head. I'm sort of blown away by this.

• 15:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's very sweet of you. I mean, the truth of the matter is that it's a bit fuzzy. So what's going to happen is Robert Shrimps is going to come back and say, no, you were wrong. It was Putney Heath in 1808. And actually, it didn't. Anyway, I think one or other of them then committed suicide eventually.

• 15:49Alastair Campbell?

  I've told you before, you can't say commit suicide. He ended his own life. It's no longer a crime. I guess back then it was a crime. Maybe back then technically you're okay, but.

• 15:57Rory Stewart?

  Now, you wanted to bring us on to Ukraine from one sort of violence to another.

• 16:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'll tell you what, I just think is, you know, last week, we got, we actually got, I was a bit worried about it. And I know, I think you were as well about the fact that the way that we talked about terrorists and you need to understand that they're, you know, they're not all stupid and they're not evil and they're not all cowards and that, you know, that there's something going on there. And I actually was quite pleased that a lot of people said it was the first time they'd heard a sort of fairly nuanced discussion. And I just had a similar reaction to some of this stuff that's been doing the rounds about Ukraine and this Amnesty International report. Because the Amnesty International report on Ukraine has had a lot of coverage, a lot of coverage. And the headline in their, in their press release was Ukrainian Fighting Tactics Endanger Civilians.

• 16:44Alastair Campbell?

  Military bases set up in residential areas, including schools and hospitals. Attacks have been launched from populated civilian areas. Now, it then says, such violations in no way justify Russia's indiscriminate attacks, which have killed and injured countless civilians. Now, the person who heads the Amnesty International operation in Ukraine has resigned. Amnesty International has been absolutely savaged by the Ukrainian government and others, and indeed by media around the world. And the problem I have with this is that how are we? Of course, we've got media there and media can do their best, but you know, media can't really get to the truth of these stories, particularly, I think, in wartime.

• 17:29Alastair Campbell?

  How are we meant to judge these situations and how are we meant to know what is actually going on? We know we can't trust what the Russians say about what they're doing. So I sort of, I felt, I'm probably going to get absolutely savaged by this in certain parts, but I felt a little bit sorry for Amnesty International. It struck me, we're trying to do the job that they're meant to do, which is judge the behaviour of governments against accepted international standards. And they've done that and they've been absolutely savaged for it.

• 17:58Rory Stewart?

  Well, before we get on to the arguments against, because you're completely right, it is worth exploring why people are so angry, but also thinking about what it must have been like for the boss, I guess, at Amnesty International to make that call and how difficult that would have been. So your Ukrainian country director is going to resign. You know that when you put this report out, you're going to be condemned around the world. You know that, because you're not naive, that the Russians are going to immediately use it. The point is, the Russians have spent the last few months saying whenever they've bombed a hospital or anything like that, it's because the Ukrainians are using them as forward operating bases.

• 18:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 18:36Rory Stewart?

  And yet you put it out. And I think that if nothing else, there are principles there and there's courage there. Now, what's the argument on the other side? The argument on the other side is that the problem with the report is it seems to be blaming the Ukrainians for the fact they're being shelled. And there is nothing the Ukrainians are doing which is breaking international humanitarian law. So if you're from the Ukrainian's point of view, you're defending your own territory, you're looking for spaces to put stuff. Often actually, unfortunately, places like schools, hospitals are very good places to garanest your soldiers when you're trying to defend a town. And you're being blamed for the fact that the Russians, who've got far more artillery than you are, are shelling you in your own town, in your own country.

• 19:20Alastair Campbell?

  But the very, the very first paragraph of the Amnesty International press release says, "Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harm's way by establishing bases and operating weapon systems in populated residential areas, including schools and hospitals, as they repel the Russian invasion that began in February," Amnesty International said today. "Such tactics violate international humanitarian law and endanger civilians as they turn civilian objects into military targets."

• 19:45Rory Stewart?

  So that, that isn't true. It doesn't violate international humanitarian law. So is he kind of trying to be a bit pompous here? Um. International humanitarian law does not actually require the defender to set up their artillery positions outside a civilian residential area. And that's particularly not a requirement on somebody who's defending their cities from invasion. So that that's amnesty overstepping.

• 20:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's a very, very, in which case, Rory, that's a very, very big thing for the Amnesty International to do. The quote then from the Secretary General, Anas Kalamar, is being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law. So they are being absolutely clear that in their view, this breaches international humanitarian law.

• 20:26Rory Stewart?

  There's obviously a big disagreement here because the UN have come out and said, or a UN spokesman has come out and said that in their view, it does not break international humanitarian law.

• 20:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:37Rory Stewart?

  So there's obviously some big, I mean, the problem with international humanitarian law is that there aren't, it's very difficult to get to the bottom of because it doesn't operate through courts in exactly the same way as our domestic law does. Um. Listen, Ukraine, just going forward for a second. So the summer is going to be vital, the next few months, because this is when we're going to expect Russia to do assaults on the south east and when we're going to expect Ukraine probably to do counter assaults, take stuff back. Two things which maybe have been reported a bit in the media, but maybe not enough, which worth thinking about. One of them is the Russians have put one of their really big bases, not actually in a residential area, a school or a hospital, but in their case, in the largest nuclear plant in Europe. So that's the Zaporizhzhya plant.

• 21:21Rory Stewart?

  And that is really, really dangerous because there is a serious possibility through something going wrong that we could end up with a Chernobyl times three.

• 21:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:31Rory Stewart?

  Um. Fifteen, twenty thousand Russian soldiers being killed, probably eighty five percent of their field army deployed. So the big thing to look for is, is Putin going to call out a draft? At the moment, he's trying to fight it all with a volunteer army. They're very, very overstretched. If he's really going to try to take Kiev and push back into Ukraine, he's going to have to do a conscription, which so far he's been reluctant to do because he hasn't wanted to say that it's any more than a niche special military operation. On the other hand, as I keep saying, I don't think we should underestimate the Russians. I don't think we should get too complacent about any of this.

• 22:06Alastair Campbell?

  Just one final point on the amnesty thing. I I I was so fascinated as I went back and read. Amnesty reports about Ukraine prior to the invasion.

• 22:16Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 22:16Alastair Campbell?

  And they and they were pretty negative.

• 22:18Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 22:19Alastair Campbell?

  Impunity for torture endemic, gender based violence widespread, homophobic attacks by groups advocating discrimination. I just wonder if there's a bit of history here that I just don't know, but I I I think it's a really, really interesting story, but it sort of just troubled me that we don't, because I look at Amnesty International a little bit as well. I know they've got a, you know, small P political agenda and but at the same time, you do kind of, I I sort of do trust them and I want to trust them.

• 22:45Rory Stewart?

  Well, I I think that, I mean, they're incredibly important, useful organisation. The other one, of course, is is Human Rights Watch.

• 22:51Alastair Campbell?

  You must have had huge experience of these guys when you were at the Department of International Development.

• 22:54Rory Stewart?

  And and in Afghanistan. And actually, I was, I ran a centre on human rights in Harvard. So Amnesty and H R W are the two really big,

• 23:04Rory Stewart?

  the kind of big, big players in the human rights field. And they have to do a very difficult job because they are often relying on people who who maybe some of them are ex journalists, stringers, NGO activists to get into very dangerous areas of countries in order to produce these reports. I and sometimes they get it wrong. One of those organisations produced a report on Western Afghanistan. And and again, the reason I was so angry about it, it was a huge attack on the governor of Harat in Western Afghanistan, accusing him of being responsible for a whole series of atrocities. They got it wrong. They got it backwards. A lot of these atrocities have been done by his opponents and their report was used as an excuse

• 23:43Rory Stewart?

  to topple him and create what I thought was a very dangerous new move towards a centralised state and I thought provided space for Taliban. But they are in a very difficult situation and they just, I think, I suppose, maybe this is where you're coming from. They have to put those reports out without worrying too much about the political use to which they could be put, because of course, everything they produce is put to a political use. They just have to make sure they've got their facts right.

• 24:07Alastair Campbell?

  But when you go, when you go, so there there are reports for twenty twenty one. Lots about torture, gender based violence and domestic violence remain widespread, support services survivors and measures to combat domestic violence remain insufficient, no progress made in ratification of the Council of Europe Convention on combating and preventing violence against women and domestic violence. And it it also. You know, this is what I think happens in our, the way that we now debate things and the way that conventions and views, conventional wisdoms become form. So in our part of the world and in the States and in most of Europe, Ukraine have become the good guys about everything and we want to do everything for Ukraine.

• 24:51Alastair Campbell?

  But then when somebody stands up and says, for example, well, hold on a minute, like Macron, for example, in relation to the European Union, you know, they've still got to go through all the processes. When you then read this kind of stuff, not looking at it through the prism of the current conflict, but looking at it through the prism of a pre-conflict lens, you maybe get a slightly different take.

• 25:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, that's of course one of the reasons why Vladimir Putin was much more confident when he went in because Ukraine had a very bad reputation in a number of ways, you know, as you say, those things and the general sense of corruption and oligarchs. And of course, he did all this polling where he convinced himself the government was unbelievably unpopular. Yet again, I think you are right that Amnesty, Human Rights Watch have to be able to put out these reports without seeming to influence politics. I mean, of course, that brings us to what's been happening in Gaza recently because of course, nobody gets more fire than these organisations when they try to report on fights in Israel-Palestine. So for example, in the recent conflict in Gaza, there's been another outbreak, probably

• 25:56Rory Stewart?

  the worst outbreak of fighting for more than a year now. If people haven't been following it, we've ended up with a situation which I think 40 have been killed and of those, probably a dozen of them are children.

• 26:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 26:06Rory Stewart?

  In the fighting. And yet again, you know, it's you, in all these conflicts, you're into, were they co-located with Islamic Jihad fighters, Palestine Islamic Jihad fighters? Were some of them killed by misfiring weapons fired by the people in Gaza or were they killed by the Israelis, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? But I think this reporting has got to keep going. And there was some great reporting done actually against us in Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to total up the number of casualties in those places. And we have to look at that stuff and take it seriously. I also got in real trouble with your friend Johnny Mercer and others for trying to support investigations into what our soldiers were accused of doing in Iraq.

• 26:48Rory Stewart?

  Again, that's very, very sensitive. People feel, you know, our soldiers are out on the ground, they're making difficult decisions and here are a bunch of human rights lawyers pursuing them for what they're doing. But I was dealing with the fact that I had Iraqis that I trusted coming to me and describing very, very clearly and very credibly that they felt that they had been assaulted by British troops. And I felt that it was absolutely right for those things to be investigated, justice, because otherwise, everything we do is a hypocritical mess. You get, I mean, I found this in Iraq. I found myself standing up, saying to Iraqi policemen who'd been torturing people, "We don't torture." And then they come back and say, "Well, look at what you're doing in Abu Ghraib."

• 27:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. No, it's, but it is this sort of lack of nuance. And I do think one of the downsides of the extent to which in recent years, there has been this sense of we care a lot less about human rights than we did, we care a lot less about the rule of law than we did, is it does, it deamplifies our voice when it comes to actually trying to get other governments to be better than they are and operate in the way that we might want them to do. But I think the other, the other sort of, you're talking there about the nuclear annihilation point, which I think I agree is quite, is very, very, very scary. But the other, the other situation now, that I think is developing into something

• 28:10Alastair Campbell?

  where really you do worry about whether a misunderstanding could just tip into something terrible, and that is Taiwan. Now, we talked last week about Nancy Pelosi. I think we were talking on the morning that she arrived, since when there've been these extraordinary military maneuvers by the Chinese, which I think they said they were going to go in for a few days, they're carrying on. And I still can't quite get to the bottom. I've seen nothing that helps me get to the bottom to answer the question, whether this was genuinely a freelance operation by Nancy Pelosi. Or whether Joe Biden is-

• 28:47Rory Stewart?

  Had signed off on it. Well, maybe, maybe that's something to, to, we'll do something unusual and maybe go into the break now and return to a bit of China, Taiwan in a second.

• 28:55Alastair Campbell?

  Cool.

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• 29:25Speaker 05

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig-

• 29:29Speaker 06

  On October 2nd.

• 29:30Speaker 05

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 29:35Speaker 06

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

• 29:42Speaker 07

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what-

• 29:46Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 29:49Speaker 07

  I'm not the first then.

• 29:51Speaker 06

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only appears October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 29:55Speaker 07

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 29:58Speaker 08

  It's me, the-

• 29:59Speaker 07

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 30:01Speaker 08

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• 30:02Speaker 07

  What about a third time?

• 30:04Speaker 08

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

• 30:11Speaker 07

  Seems like they decided.

• 30:13Speaker 08

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• 30:17Speaker 07

  Time to be the tagline.

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• 30:20Speaker 07

  Priceline.

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  Please stop.

• 30:22Speaker 07

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  Touche.

• 30:24Speaker 07

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• 30:25Speaker 08

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• 30:27Speaker 09

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• 30:57Rory Stewart?

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

• 31:01Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And we were talking about Taiwan before the break.

• 31:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so just on that, I mean, if people want to get a sense of quite how strange what the Chinese are doing, there's a really good illustration on the New York Times website, 3rd August, which shows the approximate missile paths. And what you can see is these Chinese missile batteries, of which there are thousands upon thousands, firing from the land. Two of them right over the top of Taiwan and falling straight, I don't think, five missiles straight over the top, falling in the sea behind it. And the others bracketing it on the north and the south. So a very, very clear reminder of the reality, which is that China could, I'm afraid, destroy almost all of the infrastructure in Taiwan with those missiles if it wanted to.

• 31:49Rory Stewart?

  And it's just illustrating it with its attacks.

• 31:51Alastair Campbell?

  One of the things they presumably are trying to do, I've always found this whole thing about military maneuvers, I've never quite understood, it's a very, very expensive way of registering you're disquieted or something. But it's also showing, is it meant to show that their conventional forces are overwhelmingly superior to Taiwan? Even though Taiwan's pretty well armed for a relatively small place.

• 32:15Rory Stewart?

  I think it's pretty, I mean, it's absolutely terrifying.

• 32:18Alastair Campbell?

  But it's also meant to tell the Americans that you should be terrified as well because, you know, you're going to come near and you're going to be right within our range.

• 32:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and they dropped them pretty close. I mean, you know, these are within a few tens of miles of the edge of the Taiwan coast on each side. You would have seen them splashing into the water around. I mean, it's, it's, the other thing is that China has now put new bans on exports to Taiwan. So they've banned the export of sand, which of course is completely vital for concrete cement building. And if you look at the geography, it's very, very difficult resupplying Taiwan.

• 32:51Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing they've done, of course, is to, is to announce that they're no longer going to be cooperating in the same way on matters to do with military and climate. So that's why I kind of am a bit puzzled as to whether... I know Nancy Pelosi has got these very longstanding views, but she's also quite close to Biden and it just seems strange that this should have happened in the way that it did. So is it like just a sort of swan song as she's kind of saying farewell to the international stage? Or is Joe Biden kind of tacitly saying, this is okay, I just can't work it out?

• 33:26Rory Stewart?

  It's very weird because the Biden administration has been briefing very, very clearly that they warned her against it. But she did arrive in a US military jet. So, and she thinks it's all about expressing solidarity. The other thing that's happening, which we've talked about in the past, is the way in which global conflict now feels more and more 19th century. In other words, as a system dominated by the United States begins to disintegrate into a system with many powers, you see these very strange ambiguous relationships and Ukraine and China are of course the things that are driving some of this. So you can

• 34:06Rory Stewart?

  see Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, being very mild in his language towards China. Why? Well, understandably, because he desperately relies on China to maintain economic sanctions against Russia and he's terrified that they're going to ease up. Turkey, on the other hand, Erdogan has put himself back in the centre of things because against all the odds, I didn't think he could do it, I was proved completely wrong. He managed to negotiate safe passage for grain out of Ukraine with Turkish ships. He has now again done another very interesting move where he was blocking the admission of Finland and Sweden into NATO, but he now seems to have dropped that objection, which he would have thought would

• 34:48Rory Stewart?

  irritate the Russians. But at the same time, he's just had his second meeting with Putin in a matter of days, where he seems to be rebranding himself as creating a kind of land bridge to Russia. So these, these different players, and this will be repeated, we're just talking about Turkey, Ukraine, but it'll be repeated 50 times around the world as different people end up with these strangely ambiguous relationships. What do we do with the US? What do we do with Europe? What do we do with China? What do we do with Russia? Often contradicting themselves.

• 35:14Alastair Campbell?

  This is the sort of foreign policy landscape that Donald Trump was desperate for, was basically strong guys sitting down and You know, carving up the world between them and deciding the fate of smaller countries. That's what that's what it's all about.

• 35:24Rory Stewart?

  We're so unsuited to it, well, I'm so unused to it. If we're going to return to this world, we will have to, Britain, countryside Britain, will have to basically double the size of the Foreign Office. The French Foreign Office is about twice the size of the British Foreign Office in terms of core diplomatic staff. Because suddenly you have to have a really serious embassy in these places to try to negotiate as all these different countries are cutting deals in seven different directions. How do you think about your own commercial interests? How do you work the alliances? We didn't have to do that in the past because in the past we could easily line up behind the United States and Europe with a pretty clear, single vision. This world, this multipolar world is now really showing its teeth.

• 36:06Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think one of the other many depressing things to be coming out of this Tory leadership election is the the absence of any sense of a clear post Brexit foreign policy that actually maximizes Britain's strengths. And I know you keep banging on about the the sort of slimming down of the Foreign Office, but it it really doesn't matter. And you see, particularly now, when we are going to be needing to build these alliances and we just don't have the wherewithal to do it. You, you, I'm sure, speak to lots of current ambassadors. I mean, most of them are tearing their hair out about how much they have to do with the limited resources that they have. By the way, just on China, Rory, there was another really interesting thing I saw. And I can't remember where I saw it now, but there was a piece I read about where

• 36:47Alastair Campbell?

  on quite a lot of criticism of of the of Xi Jinping for not doing more on Taiwan. Now, whether that's being allowed by the censors as a way of sort of ramping the pressure up, but there was a whole theme of sort of, you know, this guy talks too much, but he doesn't do enough in relation to Taiwan.

• 37:05Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's very, very, very, very dangerous, isn't it? Because if they're allowing that, that's usually being allowed as an excuse to get going, isn't it? That's a classic move from all authoritarian regimes. You create a sense that there's a groundswell of demand. I think Vladimir Putin tried to do quite a lot of this in relation to Ukraine, which is to get this illusion that there's a groundswell of demand to act, and then you have to act. On on the Conservative leadership, very, very interesting. I mean, very interesting, firstly, that a YouGov poll suggests that. Boris Johnson is still ahead of Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak in terms of people's views on who they think would be the best to take on Keir Starmer.

• 37:44Alastair Campbell?

  So people, people or members?

• 37:46Rory Stewart?

  No, this is the general population, general population, so not not Tory members. Twenty eight percent of the general population think Johnson would be the best to take on Keir Starmer compared to slightly less for Truss and Sunak. Actually, I think it's twenty eight percent for Truss, twenty seven percent for Sunak. But it's also fifty three percent of Tory voters still think it was wrong to get rid of Boris Johnson and only forty one percent think it's right. So that's more than half the Tory party, at least in this YouGov poll, thought that getting rid of Boris Johnson was wrong, whereas, of course, sixty percent of the voters in the country thought it was exactly the right thing to do. Final one, sixty percent of Tory members think that twenty fifty target on carbon neutral should be pushed back compared to only twenty seven percent of the general population.

• 38:29Rory Stewart?

  So again, the way in which the Conservative leaders decide to appeal to their right wing base is going to be very important in determining things like climate.

• 38:39Alastair Campbell?

  I thoroughly enjoyed, well done those demonstrators who got into the Liz Truss meeting and disrupted it. I think we need a bit more of that. Leadership is meant to be about confronting the people who follow you with the real challenges and how to meet them, and they're not doing that. They're telling these golf club boars who make up most of the audience and most of the membership, they're telling them what they want to hear. I mean, have you seen this ridiculous, utterly ridiculous social media video that Sunak has posted today of him shredding all the EU legislation, literally putting thousands of pages into a shredder to the sound of, to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory? I mean, it's the most pathetic populist bullshit.

• 39:20Alastair Campbell?

  And I actually think, I had a bit of respect for Sunak, and I think you did at the start when he was actually presenting himself as the guy who was going to call out the hard truths. He's just stopped doing it now. He's just pandering in the same way that... That she is. But the climate stuff's terrifying. I mean, I'm in France at the moment. And we were out the other night talking to these local farmers that we know who do the vineyards and the olives and what have you. They were saying that they've never, ever, ever known this place so dry. They've never been so scared of forest fires. And one of them was saying that he doesn't think he can last another year. He doesn't actually think he can make a living off the land for another year.

• 39:58Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I think people in Britain are beginning to feel this. You very kindly came up, took photographs of some trees when he was staying with me and when we were looking at.

• 40:06Alastair Campbell?

  It wasn't the only reason I went out. I didn't, you may have said that I went to your place to take pictures of your trees.

• 40:12Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, the sad thing is that some of them have died. I mean, the scorching that came out of that very, very extreme temperature has of course been bad, even up in Scotland. And in the United States, for the last five years alone, I mean, this is one of the reasons I think that the climate bill has finally got through. The wildfires that everybody's been reporting a great deal and the crop destruction, which maybe has been reported a little less, there's basically now a drought extending from Colorado to California.

• 40:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Rory Stewart?

  Are really making people begin to feel, there's an estimate, I think, that the last five years have cost the US economy $800 billion in terms of climate-related disasters.

• 40:54Alastair Campbell?

  I do, I do. One thing, just before we leave the Tories, I'd like to point out that I thought Mark Drakeford showed real class when Liz Truss, having slagged off Nicola Sturgeon as an attention seeker, then said that Mark Drakeford was like a low-energy Jeremy Corbyn. I thought, why is she sort of going around the United Kingdom just insulting people? So of course, next day, the Welsh media asked Mark Drakeford what he thought of the leadership contenders. And he said, I have nothing to say about either of them. They haven't already said about each other.

• 41:27Rory Stewart?

  Very good, very good. No, you're right. Well, there's been all this stuff on Twitter, isn't there? It's one of the things that goes wrong in these leadership things, which is that both of them are doing so much to attack each other's records and attack each and attack, in fact, the economic policy of the government for the last three years. Yeah, there are these brilliant things on Twitter where people keep sort of putting forward the leadership candidates as the Labour Party political broadcast against them.

• 41:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 41:53Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so Alastair, just to finish this off, I know you wanted to take us into the bingo, which I'm still looking forward to finding out what the bingo is.

• 42:03Alastair Campbell?

  I think our bingo, you're going to find out in a minute about the bingo, but I think our bingo players are going to be a little bit disappointed today. You haven't said a lot of the things that you normally say. We did Taiwan, you didn't even mention the semiconductors.

• 42:14Rory Stewart?

  The advanced semiconductor chips, that's the key thing. Key thing to remember, 95% advanced semiconductor chips. Somebody's going to suddenly work out that I've got massive share holdings in some advanced semiconductor chip industry.

• 42:28Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, God, Rory, you can't say that. We'd have to declare that. Oh, I know. I've now remembered what I was going to say. Boris Johnson and the dance. If you were getting married at his age, I mean, that dancing, did you see it?

• 42:39Rory Stewart?

  Fortunately, I don't watch Boris Johnson dancing. That's really not my thing.

• 42:43Alastair Campbell?

  It was all over the interweb.

• 42:45Rory Stewart?

  Is it a bit like an elephant in a tutu?

• 42:47Alastair Campbell?

  No, he was always a one-armed dancing. He was sort of a very, very, very, very bad attempt at being John Travolta. And then Carrie brought the sun in to kind of try and alleviate the embarrassment.

• 43:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'm not sure you're really selling this. I'm not sure I'm going to go straight online to have a look at that. Anyway, tell us about the bingo, Alastair.

• 43:08Alastair Campbell?

  So the bingo, this wonderful, wonderful innovation by somebody called James Thomas. Basically, he's got a little chart and he's posted it on social media and he's suggested to people that they tick off in each episode whether these things come up. So, for example, porridge and bagpipes is up there. Your ring, your wedding ring is there. Me speaking German is a good one. ABBA is another good one. Rory describes something as extraordinary.

• 43:39Alastair Campbell?

  Alistair mentions private schools. Alistair mentions the new European. Rory's special technique for finding things that is mentioned. Me banging on about Nolan principles. And this one Rory, I just want to come back to this one thing. That's one from you. This me mentioning populism, polarisation, opposed truth. So Rory, not only did we have about 700 questions this week, we also had more than 100 suggestions for Rest Is Politics Bingo. And what is fascinating is how they're basically, when it's about you, it seems to be about what you, how you say things. With me, it's much more about the things themselves.

• 44:22Alastair Campbell?

  So for you, for example, lots of people saying distinguished has to go on the Rest Is Politics Bingo. Let me push back on that for a minute. Let's come back to that if we may. Let's dig into that a little and let's lead into that one a bit more. Whereas me, it's you not plugging the podcast, Northern Ireland Protocol, slagging off Eton, Burnley Football Club, Elvis Presley, and where is Grace performing?

• 44:52Rory Stewart?

  So the interesting question is, why are they not picking up on your phrases? I mean, you also have distinctive phrases, but they clearly don't seem to drop into people's minds quite as much as.

• 45:03Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe you're a better communicator than I am Rory, maybe that's the thing.

• 45:06Rory Stewart?

  Maybe you're just much less cliched than me. Maybe you just have a freshness of speech which doesn't involve returning to the same phrases.

• 45:12Alastair Campbell?

  I do, I do try that. I do try that. But I, I think it's really, really interesting. I would have picked up with you. Definitely I'd have picked up on distinguished. I think I definitely, somebody has pointed out you saying something nice about Theresa May, but then also me saying something nice about Tony Blair. But I, I just think it's, it's brilliant. Our listeners are now listening so intently that they can do Rest Is Politics Bingo and enjoy it.

• 45:35Rory Stewart?

  And I'm going to add in the word definitely from you. I want them to count how many times you say definitely.

• 45:40Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, definitely. Hundred, hundred percent, hundred percent is another one I say a lot.

• 45:45Rory Stewart?

  So, well, thank you very much for that extraordinary bingo interlude. Thank you. Very much for listening to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 45:52Alastair Campbell?

  That's the very distinguished Rory Stewart and me, the Elvis Burnley supporting, German abbot singing Alastair Campbell.

• 46:01Rory Stewart?

  Definitely.

• 46:01Alastair Campbell?

  And just to take you back to the very beginning, when we told you about the new Rest Is Politics Plus, you can sign up to that at therestispolitics.com.

• 46:11Speaker 05

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

• 46:21Speaker 06

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• 46:28Speaker 07

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 46:32Speaker 06

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 46:35Speaker 07

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• 46:37Speaker 06

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