48. Question Time: Parents, Austerity, and talking with hands

What’s more annoying, a stupid person pretending to be clever or a clever person pretending to be stupid? On an unrelated note Rory and Alastair give more reaction to Liz Truss taking over from Boris Johnson, and give an insight into their family backgrounds. Blackpool live show tickets: Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ 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 Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:14Alastair Campbell?

  So, welcome to another episode of the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:19Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart. And I'm a bit worried, Alistair, because you've been talking about how you want the first question, which is usually a bad sign.

• 1:27Alastair Campbell?

  I always, unlike you, Rory, I sit and go through all of them, even when they're in the thousands, because I think it's an important thing to do. But you've got a proper job now, so I accept you've got all that to get on with. But this is my question of the week. It's from Andrew McEwan. "Apropos of nothing," he says, "what is worse? An intelligent person pretending to be dim or a dim person pretending to be intelligent?" And if we don't get the point, hashtag Bojo Trust.

• 1:56Rory Stewart?

  That's good. It's good, yeah. I actually think it's quite an interesting question anyway, though. I'd like to think about that a bit. I'm not sure I've got a really good answer. I think different forms of authenticity are irritating in quite different ways. But probably a stupid person pretending to be clever is more annoying than a clever person pretending to be stupid.

• 2:14Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, okay. And do you, do you, do you think that sometimes Boris Johnson has pretended to be a bit of an oaf, or do you think he is a bit of an oaf?

• 2:23Rory Stewart?

  No, I think he's actually rotted his brain. I think he stopped thinking when he was about fifteen and has been coasting ever since. And I think the truth is that if you read his books and stuff, they're just, he can't string a proper sentence together, even when he's trying now. He, he, he did one last clever thing. He did a, a lecture on the Latin poet Horace about, I suppose, 12 years ago now, which was the last sign that there was something going on between the ears.

• 2:50Alastair Campbell?

  And what about Liz Truss? I, I think that Andrew McKeown is identifying Liz Truss as the dim person pretending to be.

• 3:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I don't think Liz.

• 3:02Alastair Campbell?

  Is that harsh?

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think that is harsh. I don't think Liz Truss is dim. I mean, she's, she's, I mean, as she keeps pointing out, she's a very able mathematician. She's also, you know, obviously, like you, Oxbridge educated, and as she points out, went from a comprehensive school to, to Oxbridge. I mean, obviously helped by the fact, I guess, that her father's a, a maths professor. No, she's not, she's not stupid. I mean, I think the, you know, she's not very comfortable giving public speeches. She gets herself into strange positions because I think she tends to make quite sort of, what's the word? She, she makes decisions quite sort of quickly and abandons them quite quickly. But it's not quite the same as being sort of, I think she'd do fine on an IQ test. I don't think that's the problem.

• 3:46Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think we should, do you think all prime ministers should have psychological assessments?

• 3:50Rory Stewart?

  Probably more important than the IQ test, but actually, if you come to think of it, I, I don't think being, I think judgment is really what you need. I mean, if you, if you think about Attlee, who was obviously a really, really great prime minister, he probably wasn't the cleverest person in the Labour Party, but he was by far, you know, his cabinet was full of people with enormous brains, but he was probably the best suited to be the prime minister, wasn't he?

• 4:11Alastair Campbell?

  Andrew Carver, Rory, this is one for you. Why can't Rory Stewart just accept that austerity was bad? It wasn't just bad in prisons. Surely all ministers would have thought, not in my area, please.

• 4:25Rory Stewart?

  Firstly, I'm a little troubled because my brother-in-law is called Andrew Carver, so I'm still trying to. Get my head around who exactly this Andrew Carver is. And he's also quite left wing. He was, um, he was.

• 4:38Alastair Campbell?

  Is it a brother in law? As just explain the connection.

• 4:41Rory Stewart?

  So he's no longer married to my sister, but he was, he was part of that revolutionary group in Cambridge. It burnt down a hotel in Cambridge in the late sixties.

• 4:50Alastair Campbell?

  Although I think, I think it's him. I've just, I've just decided that it's him.

• 4:57Rory Stewart?

  It probably is, probably is him. Um, so I think that reducing the deficit, reducing the debt was a smart thing to do. And had we not done it, we would have been in a much, much bigger problem now that we've shot our debt up with COVID yet again. I think the one bit where George Osborne was right is that you do need to try to mend the roof while the sun's shining. And if you just let your debt and deficit get out of control.

• 5:19Alastair Campbell?

  It would have been great if they'd done that. It would have been good if they'd done that. It really would if they'd actually mended the roof while the sun was shining. That would have been really good. Mark Jay, Mark Jay, this, I think, again, I think this is more for you than me. If you go from the Cameron Tories to today's Tories, do you think that those Tories that have been alienated during that process? And I think we'd have to include you in that, Rory, are closer to Keir Starmer's Labour than they are to Liz Truss's Tory party?

• 5:45Rory Stewart?

  Yes. I mean, obviously I'm, I'm probably that, that probably is true about me. Yeah. And I, I don't think anyone in Liz Truss's cabinet would question that. I think if you said to Quasi Corteng that I'm probably closer to Keir Starmer than I am to Liz Truss, he'd probably roar with laughter and say that you were right. Um, here we are. Jamie Dalrymple coming in with a question for you. Why is it that politicians all seem to adopt the same slightly unnatural position with their hands when making a point? Seems to be a closed fist with a thumb on top, which is used to point. I've never met anyone else who consciously makes this movement when talking. I think I, I've remembered Sajid Javid does it, doesn't he?

• 6:23Alastair Campbell?

  Um, Tony Blair did it. And I wonder why that's, that might be why a lot of people do it. I mean, it is quite a common thing. You put the thumb on the top like that and you do that. Liz Truss has very, very strange hand movements. John Major, I know, John Major used to use his hands a lot when speaking and still does, and he never separated the fingers.

• 6:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, that's interesting. So George Osborne is very, very odd. He would often.

• 6:48Alastair Campbell?

  Let's just leave it there. George Osborne is very, very odd. Full stop paragraph.

• 6:52Rory Stewart?

  If you watch his hands, they often sort of move sort of centrally in front of his chest. And David Cameron, when he was at the dispatch box. He'd sort of move very flat hands, float them over the top of dispatch box, almost as though he was moving steam over a magic potion.

• 7:10Rory Stewart?

  But basically, the answer is, British people don't know how to talk with their hands. It's not a culture like Italy where we actually understand how to use our hands when we're speaking.

• 7:18Alastair Campbell?

  I think, have you spent a lot of time with Tony Blair? I think, because he doesn't do that other than when he's speaking under pressure or in public. He does it a little bit, but not that much. I think it's a way of keeping his temperament under very, very tight control. I think he does it for that reason. And Bill Clinton was much more, Bill Clinton had amazing hand movement. And he used to sort of use his hands as part of his speech.

• 7:44Rory Stewart?

  I do a lot, I do a lot of hand movement. I love my hands when I'm waving them around when I'm speaking. I think there's some, I'm doing a DNA test and I'm hoping to find some Italian explanation for this.

• 7:57Alastair Campbell?

  I've done, I've done my DNA test and it's virtually all Scottish Irish with a bit of Scandi.

• 8:04Rory Stewart?

  That's my problem. I did it for me and my father. My father was something like 99% Scottish. And even worse, it was 99% from a very small area between Perthshire and Angus.

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• 10:06Alastair Campbell?

  We had a question KP from Sydney.

• 10:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 10:10Alastair Campbell?

  What were your parents like? I'm keen to foster an interest in my children, in getting them interested in the world and showing compassion for others. We've talked a bit about our parents. My dad was a vet from the Hebrides. My mother was a farmer's daughter and one of the happiest, nicest people that ever lived. Not that political, interested in politics, but not that political. So what about you? We've talked a bit, we've talked a fair bit about it. I've met your mum, she's a wonderful mum.

• 10:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think she's also actually, I mean, I think she is a remarkably happy person. She, um, my father was a much, I mean, I would have loved to introduce you to my father because he was a sort of big, quite macho, very opinionated Scot with, you know, with a Scottish accent in a way that I don't have a Scottish accent. And he.

• 11:01Alastair Campbell?

  Was it posh Scottish or?

• 11:03Rory Stewart?

  Posh Scottish, but, but there was an edge of a Scottish accent there. He'd never been south of the border until he was 18, when he went to, went to Oxford. So never, never left Scotland till he was eighteen. And then joined a Scottish regiment in the army, joined the Black Watch with his brother. What did he do to foster my interest in the world? Well, he was an amazing traveller and he was wonderful about taking me with him. Probably my most memorable trip with him was he, he took me to Myanmar, to Burma when he was eighty seven years old. And he stumped around. I mean, he, he wasn't actually physically that fit by that age. He was moving quite slowly, but every morning he'd get up five thirty in the morning and he'd go out and he'd find breakfast food off a stall in the market

• 11:47Rory Stewart?

  and a map and he'd come stomping back into our hotel room. We'd share a hotel room, little twin beds. And dump on my bed some extraordinary kind of sugary fried object that he'd found in the market. And then drag me out for a march around, which poking things with his stick. So anyway, that's, that's my father.

• 12:06Alastair Campbell?

  How old was he? How old was he when you wrote, you wrote the book when you were walking with him?

• 12:10Rory Stewart?

  So he, he was that, that, that, that age. I, I wrote it in with him in his late eighties and then in, into his early nineties and he actually died at ninety three. He would be a hundred if he was still alive today and I was with him when he died. I, I tried to resuscitate him unsuccessfully when he, when he died. But he went in the most wonderful way with so much courage. It was absolutely wonderful. I mean, he, he started having a heart attack. And he said to me, Rory, this is not good. And he pointed at a box of pills that I brought over. But I, just then and in the sort of half hour leading up to it, he just so, you know, I, I was so proud of him.

• 12:53Rory Stewart?

  And in an odd way, I haven't mourned him much because I loved him so much and felt that yeah, that, that, that him, him, him leaving in, in the right way was good. Tell me about your father.

• 13:07Alastair Campbell?

  He was also born in nineteen twenty two, born in Tyre, in the Hebrides, was left the island to go to school in his teens, went to Glasgow University, became a vet. My mum actually, I think I may have told you this before, my mum at one point broke off their engagement because he refused to countenance going to work in England. If he was adamant to be able to get, but actually there were, there was a dearth, a glut of vets in Scotland and a dearth of vets in England. So eventually my mum called it off and then, but they did eventually go to England and then he got a practice and, and he was, he was, he didn't

• 13:48Alastair Campbell?

  live as, as long as your, your dad, he was eighty two when he died. I regret the fact that I was with neither of my parents. I think I've told you before, my mum, I was in, I was in, I was actually where, where you live now in Jordan when my mum had her stroke and she was dead by the time I got home. I did have that sort of final conversation with my dad when I knew he was dying. And I do think those conversations are incredibly important, but I regret the fact that I, I never had that with my mum.

• 14:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Here's a question to try to get us off solemn subjects, because I'm beginning to worry, there's all these names coming in that seem sort of weirdly familiar. So somebody who calls himself Alan Duncan, maybe Sir Alan Duncan. Greetings from Addis Ababa, says, brackets, possibly Sir Alan Duncan. Do you think the exodus of international NGO personnel from Ethiopia as a result of the security situation will be good or bad for Ethiopia's development trajectory? Wow. Do you think that is Alan Duncan? The MP Alan Duncan? No?

• 14:48Alastair Campbell?

  I'm just going back to one, you, you had one called JB Dalrymple, the guy who trained, ran the training scheme on the Daily Mirror when I was there was called Jim Dalrymple. Maybe we're just getting all our yestersdays coming in here. I doubt that is Sir Alan Duncan. I hope the, I hope the answer to that question is that it'd be bad for the development of Ethiopia. Because if if if development could happen without these NGOs, then I'm not I'm not convinced by that. And and we've talked about Ethiopia recently, it is a it is a it is a mess.

• 15:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, we have. And I I want to put out an apology because I've been challenged by people and the Mail and the Mail on Sunday and people who are not my natural allies have been picking up on some of the comments I made about some of the things that I thought were wrong about international development. Just to put it on the record, I think that we should be increasing our development spend, that it's true that we have got a lot of things wrong. Of course we have. We spent £4 billion in Malawi and it's difficult to see over over 50 years and it's difficult to see what that did. But the truth is that I think we've got some amazing professionals and we need them. We desperately need people. We need people in the Foreign Office and what used to be differed in policy, thinking about some of the big issues on how

• 16:05Rory Stewart?

  to end poverty. And if I'm right, that cash is a big bit of that. Only one or two percent of the international development spent on cash at the moment, I think it should be nearly half spent on cash. But getting there is going to require some very smart economists and policy brains pushing that forward.

• 16:20Alastair Campbell?

  By the way, Roy, we had a few people say that they didn't think that we answered the questions, that sometimes that we got the questions, we debated them, but we didn't always answer them. I thought that was a bit harsh, but we should bear it in mind. James Peterson, we're not getting many questions from women here, but I'm going to stick with this one. James Peterson, I don't know whether that's the James Peterson that I went to school with. You rarely you rarely discuss the Liberal Democrats, but they could be kingmakers. It's true, actually, we don't talk about them much, do we?

• 16:52Rory Stewart?

  No, we don't talk about them enough, do we? And and that may be some horrible kind of Conservative Labour snobbery, that we never really take them seriously, we just talk about the big parties.

• 17:00Alastair Campbell?

  We talk about we, as we did in the in the interview with soon to be put out with Mark Drakeford, we did talk about, and he agreed, I think, that he felt that Labour and the Lib Dems should be working pretty closely together in terms of a general election strategy. But it's true, we don't. But I guess that's a consequence of them getting, you know, doing so badly at the last election.

• 17:19Rory Stewart?

  Hmm.

• 17:20Alastair Campbell?

  But we should, we should, we will take the point.

• 17:22Rory Stewart?

  We should talk about more and we should maybe get one of them on, maybe a not serving politician, get him to reflect on that. I like Paddy Ashton. The, I went to see.

• 17:29Alastair Campbell?

  We can't get him on because Paddy Ashton is our IP.

• 17:32Rory Stewart?

  She's not with us anymore, but I went to see Paddy Ashton when I was thinking of becoming an MP for the first time for advice. And his big bit of advice to me was, whatever you do, don't become a Lib Dem.

• 17:44Alastair Campbell?

  I'll give you, I've got lots of stories of Paddy Ashton. We, but when I was a journalist on the Sunday Mirror, I went to interview him down at his house in his constituency in Somerset. And I was quite a young journalist and I realised after the interview was concluded that I didn't turn my tape on. And I hadn't taken any notes. And Jane, his wife, just said, well, I think you should probably do it again, Paddy. Paddy won't mind. And yeah, that was nice.

• 18:17Rory Stewart?

  So Alasdair, I'm afraid we're going to have to wrap because you may be able to hear at the edge of this podcast that there is a steel band playing outside. I'm in Kampala, Uganda, and I've got 40 members of our charity from nine different African countries outside waiting to meet me who aren't going to be very amused that I'm on the podcast all the time. So last question from Ruth Wells for you. Do you two ever watch TV? I'm a priest in the Church of England who admitted loving the new season of Married at First Sight UK in my sermon to the congregation this morning, smiley face with tears. What are your go-to rubbish TV programmes? Over to you, Alasdair.

• 18:56Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I try not to watch rubbish TV, but I do like, we watched, we're watching Capture at the moment, which is a thing about deep fake technology, which is quite scary. We recently watched Blackbird, which was extraordinary. The guy who played Elton John, Tarane Edgerton, who's absolutely brilliant in it, playing an American, a former American footballer who becomes a drug dealer, gets into prison and gets offered the chance to go into what would be a kind of Broadmoor, to try to get this kind of psychopath guy to admit to previous offences. It is, it is so tense and absolutely brilliant. So, look, I don't

• 19:40Alastair Campbell?

  want, I don't watch telly, but I do watch a bit.

• 19:42Rory Stewart?

  So my recommendation for the moment, although I must confess, I just caught it on the plane flying to Kampala, so I didn't finish the movie. Great recommendation. But I thought mesmerizing was a film called The Contractor with Chris Pine in it because it was the most wonderful, at the beginning at least, examination of what takes people out of the military to become private security contractors.

• 20:06Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, wow.

• 20:07Rory Stewart?

  And the medical challenges they face and the murky world of security contracting. In his case, he gets dragged into kind of American black ops, at the moment at least, at which our plane landed.

• 20:18Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, couldn't you have just sort of said, look, I haven't finished the film yet. I'm a very important person. I don't know whether you're, Rory, should you really be admitting that you're watching films on planes? It's technically working, travelling to the places.

• 20:33Rory Stewart?

  Well, it is true. I just want to point out, it was economy class flight, central seat, lots of screaming babies all the way around me, and I had been working until then. Now, thank you all very, very much and have a lovely, lovely day.

• 20:46Alastair Campbell?

  All the best.