231. Labour's struggle for economic vision and Haiti on the brink

What's happening in Haiti? Why is Keir Starmer getting dragged into culture war politics? Is Rachel Reeves' economic plan for the country "underwhelming" or "thoughtful"? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. TRIP ELECTION TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Nordstrom Rack is celebrating 125 years of Nordstrom with 125 of the best deals, up to 65% off in stores and online. They're only here while supplies last, so shop today. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.

• 1:32Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:34Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And we're going to kick off, Rory, talking about Labour on the back of Rachel Reeves doing a pretty big speech on the economy last week. I think we have to cover perhaps the most ludicrously largely-covered non-story of recent history. The flag on the back of the England football shirt. And maybe a little bit as well about how the media have dealt with Kate and her illness, or certainly the build up to her illness, the announcement of her illness. Big foreign stuff this week, not least the Middle East, the United Nations Security Council resolution. But we're going to focus more on Haiti, where there's some pretty horrific stuff going on, which we haven't really had time to talk about.

• 2:18Alastair Campbell?

  And then maybe if we get time, a bit of Senegal and also Ireland, where both those countries have now got very young, new leaders. Let's start with Labour, Rory. What do you think, what do you make of Rachel Reeves' speech?

• 2:31Rory Stewart?

  Well, so Rachel Reeves gave this lecture called the Mace Lecture, and it's become a real institution in British policymaking, I guess. It's traditionally was held at what used to be called the Cass Business School, and I think now called the Bayes Business School. And previous people giving the lecture include Tony Blair, Michael Heseltine, Nigel Lawson, George Osborne, et cetera. And it's really seen as the big moment to lay out a grand economic vision. So if you're, you know, Martin Wolf from the Financial Times, who's going to be writing a column about it this coming week, or other commentators, they look at this as being the big moment where Labour will define what its economic policy is.

• 3:15Rory Stewart?

  And I was very interested in a number of ways. I mean, I watched the speech, read the speech, and I also thought it was interesting to compare it to the speech that Tony Blair made in 95, that George Osborne gave in 2010, and that Rishi Sunak gave three years ago, to get a bit of a sense of who our new Chancellors likely to be. So Rachel Reeves, just sort of a bit of background, she was a Bank of England economist. Her sister is also a member of Parliament. Quite interesting the way that Parliament sometimes becomes a kind of family business. She is very much seen as a safe pair of hands, and a lot of the speech was about stability and reassurance. Let me maybe hand over to you. I mean, I was, I was honestly pretty underwhelmed.

• 3:59Rory Stewart?

  I thought it was a real missed opportunity. But I guess in terms of disagreeing agreeably, I'm going to hand over to you to maybe make the positive case for the speech.

• 4:07Alastair Campbell?

  First of all, before I do that, what were the comparisons you, you felt with Tony Blair and Lawson and Sunak and some of the others that you saw?

• 4:16Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think that the first thing is that it just... Didn't really get off the ground properly. I mean, you'll remember obviously very well Tony Blair's giving this speech in May nineteen ninety five because it was very dramatic. It was the moment leading in. So of course, this is Blair leading opposition going into the ninety seven election. And he used the speech to mark a very, very dramatic shift from John Smith. So the way it was reported, at least, independent at the time, for example, is that it was a shift from Labour's focus under John Smith on full employment to Tony Blair embracing a focus on low inflation. And it also had some pretty radical things in it, including hinting at autonomy for the Bank of England. So that when you came in in ninety seven, that was your great surprise. You announced an independent Bank of England.

• 5:00Rory Stewart?

  And again, with George Osborne and Rishi Sunak, they are much clearer speeches. Whatever you think of the content and the policy, they started with clearer opening lines. They had pretty clear structures. So George Osborne launched his with, I believe that in the end, all elections are about a choice between the future and the past. So pretty clear opening statement. She really sort of rambles into her speech. She starts by thanking people, then she says, you know, this is about how to appreciate how the change confronting policymakers have changed over time and how in important respects they've stayed the same. So one of the things that defines her speech is that

• 5:43Rory Stewart?

  Matthew Paris wrote a pretty, pretty brutal article in Times about this. She's endlessly saying one thing and then undercutting it in the next sentence. So her style is, you know, stability was a necessary, but it's not a sufficient condition. Challenges have changed over time. They've stayed the same. We need to balance between energy transition and economic constraints. AI can lead to improvements, but they can also lead to disruptions. I'm hearing on même temps. Yes, although interesting, exactly, which is your friend Macron's great phrase. But with Macron, he navigates the centre ground by making much more radical statements on either side. So his technique actually is to really offend people on the right and then offend people on the left.

• 6:24Rory Stewart?

  So, you know, classic move would be to say, France needs to apologize for It's colonial history. It's disgusting what we've done in Algeria and that will offend everyone on the right. And then he'll say, en même temps, you know, we need to recognise that there's a real problem with immigration and the undercutting of the French Republic. And that will then offend everyone on the left. So he manages to do it while sounding radical. You know, again, Osborne, whatever we thought about him, if you read his speech, he sets out eight benchmarks and then he really digs into them. So he's got, you know, four or five indicators on each benchmark on which he wants to be judged. She, on the other hand, sort of, it's more of a kind of, it's feels like a kind of essay. There's a lot of name dropping. So she'll put in names

• 7:07Rory Stewart?

  like Poliani and Bernard Williams and Danny Rodrick, but these, these names sort of drop in and out. And she sounds like she's sort of commentating on British economic policy over the last 40 years, but it's very difficult to get a sense of what she's really doing. Anyway, over to you.

• 7:22Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Yeah, I think you are being harsh. And I thought Matthew Paris's judgment was way over the top. And I'll, I'll come on to, I'll come on to why I think that might be. What I'll tell you first of all, you, it's interesting. You mentioned Tony's speech. I'm, I can't believe it was back in 1995. It's interesting. You've, you, you've sort of seen some of the coverage from the time and read the speech and seen it as a big shift. I'm not sure it was seen as such a big shift at the time. And also, I can remember from that time, we put a lot of work into that speech. But actually, it didn't really land as a big thing at the time. The bigger economic sort of framing stuff, I think, came a little bit, a bit later. So for example, as you say, there

• 8:05Alastair Campbell?

  was drop, a drop of a hint about greater autonomy for the bank. But it wasn't really until after we won the election that that thing was rolled out and people fully grasp what we were trying to say. What I, I'll tell you the first thing that I liked about Rachel Reeves' speech is that I thought it was a serious piece of work. What you say, you know, you thought she was being like a commentator. I actually quite enjoyed some of her historical analysis. I was pretty pissed off that the advance briefing was all about how she was going to sort of, you know, pack Thatcher. And I thought, what is this about? And in fact, it's quite a repudiation of Thatcherism. And it's a very specific repudiation of Lawson's approach where she talks about him being wrong in theory and wrong in practice.

• 8:50Alastair Campbell?

  She's slightly critical of New Labour, says that we've got lots right, but lots wrong. Very critical of Osborne and Cameron, both through austerity, and then the kind of all the instability that has flown from in recent years. And so I thought that analysis was actually quite interesting. And then I think in terms of, you talked about reassurance, I think it is still in that that phase where Labour are hitting the reassurance message harder and harder and harder. But I did think she was beginning to lay down some quite interesting lines of change. So her big message at the top, and you know, let's be honest, Rory, George Osborne saying elections are a battle between the future and the past, it's not the most insightful, particularly for an Echolobes lecture.

• 9:31Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. But then he goes on to

• 9:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:34Rory Stewart?

  benchmarks and he wants to judge. It's just that it was at least the first line. I mean, she doesn't really have a first line. If I'm going to, again, sort of push this a little bit further, I think the problem may be that because Keir Starmer's isn't a sort of magical charismatic communicator, and she really isn't either. I mean, that is a, you know, she doesn't seem awfully confident on the stage. She doesn't dominate it in any way. It's a bit different from what you had maybe with Blair and Brown, where you've got Tony Blair being charismatic and clear on policy, and then you can have the slightly more Dour style of the Chancellor behind.

• 10:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, although Gordon was also a great orator. I mean, they're both of them could make a big speech.

• 10:18Rory Stewart?

  What he's doing the last couple of weeks, he's been incredibly, I mean Gordon Brown's been incredibly funny too. And so I guess the issue here may be that she's sort of reinforcing the slightly underpowered style. I mean, I was looking for something, a beginning at least, the line, something that one could remember.

• 10:37Alastair Campbell?

  Let me, let me give you my best guess as to what it was meant to be is where she said, my argument today is this, a new model of economic management is needed. So that's setting up.

• 10:45Rory Stewart?

  No, can I just stop, stop you on that? Sorry, I'm being petty, but I'm not sure you need to say, my argument today is this, a new model of economic management is needed. She's got a very kind of wordy prolix sort of, and she's often choosing complicated words when she could choose some words. I mean, she's basically saying it's a time for a change, right?

• 11:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think you are being very, very harsh here. We always, if you go back to Tony Blair's speeches, there would virtually always be a line where he would say, my argument is this. And that is a way of, that is a way of saying to the media, this is the bit where you start to listen.

• 11:23Rory Stewart?

  You pay attention. Yeah.

• 11:25Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing I think, I, I think the fact that, you know, you, fair play, you've been back through some of these speeches. I think the fact that her team and she, when they clearly did read up on a lot of these kind of, you know, former past speeches of the May's lecture. I did think her analysis of Thatcherism and of Lawson, I thought he was quite compelling. And you're right that Matthew Paris said it was terrible. And I, my theory is that I'll probably be very unfair to Matthew here. I think he absorbed the briefing that it was going to be a sort of peon of praise to Thatcher with whom he worked very closely. And then of course, it was anything but, it was a repudiation of Thatcherism who wasn't even mentioned, but it was a repudiation of Lawsonism.

• 12:08Alastair Campbell?

  But then, if I go to another commentator, whose piece was overwhelmingly positive, was Will Hutton.

• 12:14Rory Stewart?

  Tell us a bit about Will Hutton, because he was very, he wrote this book, didn't he, The State We're In, which was very important in defining the intellectual parameters of Blair, right?

• 12:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Will's a very, very clever guy. His background's in, you know, in economics as more than politics. He's actually written a new book called This Time No Mistakes, which I think is his way of say, we didn't listen closely enough to last time where he wrote The State We're In. But I enjoyed it, and I've, I've, I know you've got an advanced copy as well, and I've read it and enjoyed it. And I've done a conversation with him for the audible version of the book, which is going to go at the top. And what I really enjoyed about it is that he too is absolutely scathing about Thatcherism. He essentially blames Margaret Thatcher more for the state we're in, to use that phrase, than any other individual.

• 13:04Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that goes to part of the speech that, that Rachel made, where she talked about Lawson sort of promoting this boom, which was then followed by, by recession. Look, I, I guess where you and I might agree, I actually thought it was a much more serious and thoughtful and interesting speech than you're giving credit for, because I think she was laying down some pretty clear parameters. There were some changes, and I think, I think Will, Will Hutton in his, I think it was in The Guardian or The Observer, he wrote a piece, he pointed to some of these, he, he basically says that this was the beginning of her setting out the parameters of what he calls a public-led investment surge. His big thing with Thatcher is that the, the investment when, you know, comparison

• 13:47Alastair Campbell?

  with Norway, where we had the same sort of oil revenues, and they turned it into this amazing sovereign wealth fund, we sort of, you know, wasted it. And also that she is kind of challenging market fundamentalism. So the only real reference to Thatcher, or the only resonance with Thatcher was where she talked about this being a kind of economic inflection point. So I actually, I actually think it was a, a more interesting and thoughtful speech.

• 14:12Rory Stewart?

  It was fascinating, actually, reading Will Hutton's piece. And it reminds me a little bit of the times when, when When I was trying to campaign on a particular issue often in foreign policy, I'd get unbelievably excited by some speech given by a British Prime Minister or an American president, and I'd try to write an article saying, ah, you know, this person's been listening to me, they absolutely get it. And then often that, I fear for Will, may lead to disappointment when he realises that she may not be quite going quite as far as he is. So here, let me be mean and turn around and say, okay, what is her economic policy really? We've all read the speech. What does it come down to? How would you actually explain to a voter what she's actually going to do?

• 14:54Alastair Campbell?

  So, okay, if you were asking me to say, well, what's she trying to say? She was trying to say that if we are going to grow the economy, which is Labour's number one mission, we have to focus on three things. Stability, and that is about things like, you know, keeping the Chancellor in place, not having this endless change of personnel, just having one single budget a year and not all these fiscal events. Secondly, investment, and that's about, you know, basically public surge of investment, and that which hopefully then is bringing in more private sector investment and foreign direct investment and so forth. And then the third area is reform, and she's clearly putting an awful lot of the burden on that, on planning reform, but also she says some interesting things in relation to climate as well.

• 15:40Alastair Campbell?

  Where I think there was a gap, she mentioned the Brexit deal, having sort of taken 4% out of the economy. She talked very vaguely about sort of closer relations, but I think actually if we are going to meet this growth mission, then there has to be something far bigger in relation to Europe. But I think, though, I think if you go through it line by line through the speech, once you've got through all the sort of the history and the rest of it, I think she is saying some quite interesting things about those three pillars. Stability, how you get it, investment, how you get it, and reform, how you get it.

• 16:10Rory Stewart?

  Okay, let me, let me push back on that. Right, so let's take them one by one. Absolutely on stability, and that's, you know, who's going to disagree with that? But that isn't really an economic policy. That's saying, we're going to try not to change our Prime Ministers and Chancellors, which would be a great help. But on its own, stability is not going to deliver growth. We've had stability before, and it didn't really deliver growth in other, other periods.

• 16:32Alastair Campbell?

  But we've had instability, and it has been a counter to growth.

• 16:36Rory Stewart?

  As she says herself, it's necessary, but it's not sufficient, and it's not really an economic policy. So then the more interesting stuff is around investment.

• 16:46Rory Stewart?

  And the question there is where on earth is the money going to come from? So she's completely right that investment would make a huge difference and Britain underinvests, but that's the theme going back with all these chancellors. So one of the weird things about reading all these speeches going back to the 1990s is they keep banging on about investment. So Gordon Brown bangs on about investment, Tony Blair bangs on about investment. And George Osborne effectively starts by saying, my major benchmark is getting investment up as a proportion of GDP and the problem with Britain is we don't have enough investment. And she obviously is tempted by a sort of Bidenomics. She likes the fact that in America, there's this extraordinary investment package happening. But the problem is there's no money. I mean, she can't borrow money, she can't put taxes up.

• 17:30Alastair Campbell?

  I wonder if there might be a bit more borrowing.

• 17:33Rory Stewart?

  Well, she could borrow a little, but the room for borrowing is, you're right, she's changed the fiscal rules a bit, but she's also, you know, having to deal with the fact that understandably, she's talking about the fact that the NHS is in trouble, education's in trouble. And, you know, Will Hutton would add, you know, he wanted to hear more about child poverty. He wanted to hear more about education and training. He wanted more money for universities. He wanted more money for local authorities. So the problem is that Britain is simultaneously too big and too small and has been in a real trouble since it's left the European Union. It just cannot do the kind of stuff the United States is able to do, and it isn't in the structures of the European Union.

• 18:14Rory Stewart?

  So where I would want to really lean in is if they want a big idea that could turn things around. It's not just about signalling being close to the European Union, it's formally joining the customs union. I mean, actually being able to say, we're now in the customs union. And at that point, I think the whole world would look at us differently. It would affect imports and exports, but just psychologically, symbolically, it would be a huge change.

• 18:40Alastair Campbell?

  So for example, where she talks in the speech, she talks about a new British Infrastructure Council, which they've set up in shadow form. Now, imagine if Labour in government, imagine if this wasn't an opposition leader, me, an opposition shadow chancellor making the speech, if this was in government. That'd be quite an exciting thing to do. Likewise, I thought it was interesting that on the back of the speech, one of the first visits that Keir Starmer made on the back of it was in relation to this great British energy, which would be, you know, again, would be a combination of of public private. But it's basically, you know, this is a pretty piece, big piece of public ownership that's happening. And so I think these are things which, on paper, in opposition, actually, you know, you can say, well, you know, people

• 19:23Alastair Campbell?

  have been saying that for for years. But actually, I think they're the beginnings of actual ideas for institutional change, which could make a difference once they're in government. And we'll have to see.

• 19:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, we'll have to see. And remember, of course, that the Tories also, you know, Cameron and Osborne set up a National Infrastructure Commission.

• 19:43Alastair Campbell?

  Sure.

• 19:44Rory Stewart?

  There's been a huge amount under Michael Gove on local industrial strategies, which is where where she's going.

• 19:50Alastair Campbell?

  Her point is there've been too many of them.

• 19:52Rory Stewart?

  Yes. And then, of course, she then says, on the one hand, there's too many of them. We need to be more centralised. And then she says, on the other hand, we need to decentralise and industrial strategies can't be run from the centre. So I think that the truth is, if you were to, well, let's see how serious economists respond to this over the next.

• 20:11Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think it's been.

• 20:12Rory Stewart?

  Because I think Will Hutton is clearly on one side, Matthew Paris is clearly on another.

• 20:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:17Rory Stewart?

  But my sense, talking to big, grown up, serious macroeconomists, is that there is no new plan for growth here. They understand that need growth and the most, the biggest case you can make for them is planning reform, and that's what people are going to be looking at hardest.

• 20:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. In the reform section, maybe we should close on this before moving on to the ridiculous flag. The, you know, reform of planning system, that is one of those things that I think they are signalling very, very hard because they've already worked out how hard it is going to be to do. And that's why they they have to be clear that they have, if they get a majority, they've got a mandate for some pretty difficult changes to make there. And she describes the planning system, this is quite a dramatic thing to say, the single greatest obstacle to our economic success.

• 21:04Alastair Campbell?

  But then she was also talking about planning of reform of public services, of the labour market, of the way we do government. And again, these are easy things to say in opposition. But I think if you take them at face value, there is the beginnings of quite a major plan of reform, and that's what's going to be needed. So I actually think, I'm not beginning to claim that it was, you know, speech that we'll be talking about in, you know, thirty, forty, fifty years' time, but I think it was a more serious and thoughtful speech than you're giving it credit for. Very good. Okay, tell us about the flags. Oh, Rory, this story has, you mentioned child poverty a minute ago, okay. So last week, we had some absolutely horrific figures on child poverty. It soared in this country.

• 21:50Alastair Campbell?

  And the Roundtree Trust put out a statement, and there was official Department of Work and Pensions figures showing a huge rise in child poverty, which you would have thought might have been a pretty important debating point and something for the media to chew over. But we seem to have a sort of news blackout on child poverty in this country. Meanwhile, a story about a sort of, it's not even a flag, it's like a sort of little fashion thing on the back of the England, it's not even on the front of the shirt, it's on the back of the England shirt, where the red of the flag of St George has been sort of made into a kind of mushy, bluish, redy thing. And you've had Rishi Sunak comment

• 22:31Alastair Campbell?

  on it and say it's wrong, Keir Starmer comment on it, Ed Davey comment on it, Reform, needless to say, comment on it. And are they all saying the same thing? They're all saying this is bad and they should stick to the flag of St George. It's not even on the front of the shirt. And here's the other thing, Rory, that just absolutely does your head in. A soldier, somebody who serves in the military, you know, for King and Country and all that, posted a picture. Of the Union flag on the back of his uniform, which is coloured khaki. Nigel Farage, the logo of his, one of his many parties down the years, has been a purple Union flag. When we competed in the Olympics in 2012.

• 23:14Rory Stewart?

  Just take us back to the beginning. So for people like me that don't know anything about this, what actually was this thing supposed to look like on the back of the shirt?

• 23:22Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's a cross. It's a cross. It's a very small cross. And it's just on the, on the neck of the, of the England shirt. The real scandal, by the way, is the cost of these bloody shirts. But anyway, so Nike, Nike is a massive global private company, which sells a lot of football shirts. And they, they probably can't believe their luck that they do a minor tweak to the shirt.

• 23:45Rory Stewart?

  And the tweak does what? It changes the colour. It goes from red and white to something else. Is that what happens?

• 23:49Alastair Campbell?

  Rather than being the flag of St George or the red bit of the flag of St George, it goes to red, blue. That's it.

• 23:55Rory Stewart?

  I got you, got you, got you.

• 23:56Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. And it's not even, it's, it's about the size of your thumb. Okay. It's so not a big deal. It's beyond belief. And yet it has had more coverage than the child poverty statistics. Probably had more coverage for the days that it was running than Gaza.

• 24:12Rory Stewart?

  But it's so fascinating. So, so, so, so we've got Keir Starmer, Labour leader, called for England's new kit for the Euros to be scrapped, following the decision to swap in a multi-coloured St George's cross. Starmer said, we just need to be proud of it. Think they should reconsider. Not even sure they can explain probably. Now, you're a real football fan. So I guess these politicians think they're appealing to people in Britain who really care about football. But even you, as a real football fan, don't really understand what they're all banging on about.

• 24:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I, I sort of understand it, but they're, they're only banging on about it because they're falling victim to this culture war nonsense. Now, on the right, you know, we've talked about Trump and Biden. And I always say that one of the things I really like about Joe Biden is he doesn't let Trump inside his head. Trump's not controlling Joe Biden's mind. I think that this sort of right wing culture war stuff, I think, is too much inside the minds of both Tory and Labour. I actually think the best way to have dealt with this, let's say Keir Starmer or Ed Davey or Rishi Sunak was out doing an interview and then somebody said, and what do you think about the controversy over the, the revamped flag of St George?

• 25:21Alastair Campbell?

  If I'd have been them, I'd have said, well, look, you know, I can see why people might find it a bit odd. But frankly, I really have got bigger and better things to worry about than the design of a New England shirt. And if people have criticised him, fine. Now, there will be people who will say, well, what he's doing from a, Keir Starmer's doing from a defensive perspective. One of the big things that was always said about Jeremy Corbyn is that he wasn't, you know, Labour under him wasn't patriotic, didn't understand love of country, flags, all that stuff. So he's kind of neutralising it, I get that. But I just think that, you know, we've talked a lot about how we hope that Brexit was our peak populism. But this makes me think, no, maybe we're still in it.

• 26:01Alastair Campbell?

  Because it is such a, it's such a, if, if it's so bad to change a flag, why wasn't there a, a total outcry when Stella McCartney produced the kit for our athletes in London 2012, which was a sort of bastardised version of the Union Flag? Which, by the way, is one of the flag, the Union Jack is one of the most powerful aspects of our soft power. Because I would say after the Stars and Stripes is the most, probably the most, is, somebody once who works in fashion told me, it's the most fashionised flag in the world. And yesterday I was going around, I noticed Marks and Spencer shopping bags that was the Union Jack made out of different fruit. Okay, now, are we gonna, are we gonna boycott Marks and Spencer?

• 26:46Alastair Campbell?

  Because they, they bastard, they've dared to change our Union Flag. It's utter lunacy, this stuff. I'll tell you what the problem is, Rory. This is my firmly held view. We have a, a media which infects our politics through this populism stuff. And it means that all too often, we care too much about things that just don't matter and we don't care about things that do. And the flag v child poverty, to me, sums that up 100%. I couldn't give a damn about this flag.

• 27:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and then the, I guess the other thing that's been all over the British news recently has been the Princess Wales and her photo that was released, which she'd Photoshop edited, and then her statements, really shocking statement, that she's been undergoing chemotherapy in as a very young mother with children.

• 27:37Rory Stewart?

  Has cancer and has to cope with that, break that to her children. I mean, a lot of this presumably, I mean, I don't want to compare the two because that one of them is a really sort of horrible, really horrible health tragedy for a young mother. And the other is your flag issue, but they're both ways in which I guess social media plays a huge part of this too, doesn't it? It's about what's catching people's attention on on social media.

• 28:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, the thing about the, you know, we've talked before about the the royal family. I'm I'm always amazed at just how much coverage anything they do or anything they're involved in gets. And of course, I think post Diana and post Levison, there's been a little bit of change in the media culture. The media argue there's been a lot of change. I'm not convinced of that. I remember when I interviewed Prince William for G Q, it's some years ago now. But I remember at the end of the conversation, we were just chatting away and he was telling me some of the things that the press get up to in terms of finding out where they're going and where the kids are going. And, you know, in a different world, you'd call it industrial espionage that goes on.

• 28:45Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, what our newspapers say, oh, well, that's all done for the foreign market. But if you're one of the kids, you don't know the difference as to who that guy in the motorbike is.

• 28:52Rory Stewart?

  I had an extraordinary anecdote from a friend of mine who used to be a, I think still is, but a very close friend of one of the royal family. We're now going back to the 1980s and he'd been on holiday with one of the royal family in the Caribbean and he got back to his home in London. And a Daily Mirror journalist was there and shouted through the letterbox that he'd pay him half a million pounds for a photograph. So my friend, who was really angry and sort of off balance and wasn't expecting this, you know, very pompous, he said through the letterbox, I wouldn't sell you a photograph for 10 million pounds. At which point the Daily Mirror journalist said, how about a fish dinner? Which I thought was, was, was, he, and he came, he came out of it feeling that maybe the Daily Mirror journalist had actually behaved with more humour and more grace than he had in this entire sketch.

• 29:36Alastair Campbell?

  That sounds to me like the late James Whitaker, who would not have had half a million pounds to spend, I can tell you that, but might have been trying it on. I, I, I thought the, the Kate. Video was pitch perfect. I thought when you think that she'd had weeks of conspiracy theories, was she dead? Was it about this secret illness that they didn't want to tell us about? Was it about their private life falling apart? It was all this stuff doing the rounds. And of course, some of it getting picked up. And I remember when I was in Australia, I mean, you know, you go into the newsstands and there they are, they're on the magazines, they're they're huge kind of media commodities. And I think what happened to Diana in particular,

• 30:21Alastair Campbell?

  I think that with her, the media reached a point, and you know, I freely accept that I was part of this culture, where basically, they reached such a level of fame that you you stop really thinking about them as human beings at all. They're just kind of objects. And and I think what the Kate video did was bring it home to people that, as you said earlier, this is like a human being dealing with an illness in with this kind of stuff going around her all the time. I mean, and the thing I didn't really get terribly worked up about the photoshopped Mother's Day photo. I couldn't give a damn whether she sort of touched it up a bit, or, you know, moved the sleeve. I mean, again, we had sort of thousands of words written about, you know, where these changes were. And I just think

• 31:06Alastair Campbell?

  that people, back to this point I made earlier, we caring about the wrong things.

• 31:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Alastair Campbell?

  So I but and even after she did the video, I my reaction on Twitter was, you know, this will keep the trolls quiet for at least two minutes. And of course, you know, within a within no time at all, they're they're on to new conspiracy theories. And I do think it's fair to to say that the mainstream media, I wonder if they had a tip off. I think I wonder if they had a sort of quiet word from the palace, because I got the feeling that they they calmed down for a bit. I suspect because they knew something was coming by the way of the the announcement that was finally made. But I do think that the the royal family have a, you know, I'm not not remotely a monarchist in the way that you are. But I do think that they have an awful lot to deal with when it comes to managing the media.

• 31:53Rory Stewart?

  Speaking of serious, then, I think after the break, let's let's take a quick break and then come back to Haiti, which is really a

• 31:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:59Rory Stewart?

  A very, very serious situation.

• 32:01Alastair Campbell?

  Great.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Nordstrom Rack is celebrating 125 years of Nordstrom with 125 of the best deals up to 65% off in stores and online. We're talking incredible savings on brands you love like Vince, Sam Edelman, Rag & Bone, All Saints and more. They're only here while supplies last, so shop today. Join the Nordy Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite Rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you Rack.

• 32:40Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 32:42Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart. We've just done a great interview on Leading with Anthony Gormley, who is an amazing British artist and sculptor. And I think, again, it's us going a little bit outside the barriers by not interviewing a front-ranked politician. But I thought it was magical. I just think he's so smart and so thoughtful. And he was great on Labour, he was great on cultural policy, but he's also just great on art and creativity and being human. And I just, I enjoyed it immensely. You?

• 33:16Alastair Campbell?

  I did. I mean, you go on about Alan Milburn being your favourite of our Leadings. I think Anthony Gormley gets close to the top of my list. One, he's got a wonderful voice. Two, he speaks very, very clearly and colourfully. And I actually thought the political stuff was very, very interesting. I shared his anger about the Arts Council recently, sort of, you know, warning people off being political. I actually thought his assessment of Keir Starmer was more compelling than a lot that I hear from Labour MPs talking about Keir Starmer. It's part of their job to say how great he is. I got a lot of, I mean, this feedback on social media was great. And I got several messages from people yesterday saying, you know, several people saying they thought it was the best one we'd done. I thought it was great.

• 34:00Rory Stewart?

  Do people who aren't doing so subscribe to our separate feed, which is called Leading? And we're having a fascinating time because obviously we interview big frontline politicians, you know, people like Hillary Clinton, we interview people like Bill Gates, but... Interestingly, some of our real breakthrough successes recently have been with people who are less household names, your friend Scaramucci.

• 34:20Alastair Campbell?

  Robert Sapolsky.

• 34:21Rory Stewart?

  Our expert on baboons, and I think Anthony Gormley too. So I think hopefully leading's got something for everybody. It's got something for the hardcore political geek, but it's also got some amazing voices from around the world coming in.

• 34:33Alastair Campbell?

  And we should let, we should maybe let people know, particularly our, our friends in the intelligence communities around the world, that coming up soon, ex MI6 chief John Soars with ex MI5 chief Eliza Manningham-Buller, which we recorded the other day, and I enjoyed that one as well.

• 34:52Rory Stewart?

  Great. Now Haiti. Haiti is a country which is very, very central to America's foreign policy debate, but gets very little coverage in Britain. So little explainer on Haiti. Haiti, country of about 12 million people. It's part of an island which also has the Dominican Republic on it. It was in the 18th century, one of the richest countries in the world, but a very, very unequal French colony that produced sugar and had a lot of slavery, and in fact was richer than the United States was at the time, and was famous because in the aftermath of the French Revolution during the period of Napoleon, it had its

• 35:34Rory Stewart?

  own revolution where the black slaves rose up against the French and massacred thousands of people. I mean, it was a real extraordinary atrocities came, came out of it, what today we might almost call a genocide of the white French population. Women and children murdered and eviscerated and disemboweled and won their independence. And they became the second only republic founded after the United States. They became the first independent black republic, the first slave revolt to work. And that then was the beginning of an extraordinary history, which included becoming an American colony, effectively, time of the First World War. So for almost 20 years, the US occupied Haiti, 1915 through to the 30s, and a classic

• 36:18Rory Stewart?

  story of that kind of period of colonialism where the Americans would say that they really invested. And building roads and bridges and they built schools and they developed the rule of law and sorted out the tax system. And the Haitians would say it was a racist colonialist situation that left very little behind when the Americans went and they didn't manage to develop a proper local elite to maintain any of this stuff. It then came into the world news again with Papa Doc Duvalier, who became their dictator in the 1950s. He was a man who in his earlier life was a sort of almost seemed to be an almost saintly figure. He'd been a highly educated black doctor who'd done a lot of work in rural health clinics. But once he became dictator, ruled over extraordinary atrocities. He embraced voodoo.

• 37:03Rory Stewart?

  He managed to get an agreement with the Catholic Church where he became the head of the church in Haiti and had his own Lord's Prayer, which was, you know, our father dictator. And don't forgive the trespasses of any of the enemies of our father.

• 37:19Alastair Campbell?

  This is why he was called Papa Doc.

• 37:20Rory Stewart?

  Papa Doc, yeah. And he, you know, he, the atrocities were amazing. There's a very disturbing book, but gets a real sense. The culture of people want to follow up Graham Greene's book, The Comedians, had this militia group called the Tonton Mercut, about 300,000 people who were implicated in these atrocities. And then his 18 year old son took over when he died, who was called Baby Doc. And Baby Doc initially managed to convince the international community that everything had changed and there was an upsurge in tourism and international aid. But of course, he actually perpetrated a lot of the torture and the terror. He went in the eighties, there were then a series of unstable governments.

• 38:00Rory Stewart?

  And then again, in the 1990s, basically a full scale US invasion was basically put together by Clinton, where 20,000 soldiers were deployed. It was going to be the largest airborne mission since the Second World War. At the very last moment, the man who'd thrown the military coup stepped down. So the Americans didn't quite have to storm the beaches, but they effectively took over and ran the country again in the nineties. And again, there was a huge optimism, billions of dollars came in, enormous amounts of reform. And it just didn't work. And we, you know, we can talk about why these interventions don't work, but it then went through a series of tragedies, hurricanes, earthquakes.

• 38:42Rory Stewart?

  So the horrible earthquake, which killed 200,000 people, partly because the planning was all screwed up and the houses were no good. Then there was the deployment of UN peacekeepers and the UN peacekeepers managed to not follow basic sanitary practices in the way that they disposed their feces and brought a cholera outbreak into Haiti. It's a place which 60% of its income comes from internationally. There are more than 10,000 NGOs on the ground. And now, yes, over to you for what's just happened most recently.

• 39:08Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we had 2021, middle of 2021, president assassinated. And then that really was the, the key to the door of this kind of unrest and gang violence, which has now reached levels that are, I guess, closer to anarchy now than anything we've, we've seen in that long and difficult history you've outlined. And at the heart of this was the busting open of two big prisons, letting four and a half, nearly 5,000 prisoners run free, run riot. And then these gangs that have sort of, essentially, there was a guy called Ariel Henry, Henri, Ariel Henri was the sort of not self-appointed, but he became

• 39:49Alastair Campbell?

  the prime minister, went to Kenya to try to get help for an international security plan. And even though there was a recognition that they needed security, the thought of getting them from abroad carried even further instability. They then blocked his plane from landing. And right at the heart of this is the guy who's, whose nickname is barbecue. I'll come on to explain why. Guy called Jimmy Cherizier. And he heads this, they call themselves the revolutionary forces of the G9 family and allies, G9 for short. This is a grouping of about, around about a dozen of the big gangs who are based in Port-au-Prince.

• 40:29Alastair Campbell?

  He is reckoned to be called barbecue by some because he used to enjoy, it is said, setting people on fire during massacres. He denies that. He says he's called barbecue because his mother used to sell fried chicken. But when he was a, he's a former policeman, police officer, and he's alleged to have taken part in some pretty severe massacres. And they were behind, the G9 were behind this massive jailbreak, which led to them laying siege to the airport, openly saying that this was about taking power. And eventually the prime minister announced, Henri announced that he's, he's standing down. So as things

• 41:07Alastair Campbell?

  stand, no real government and also a very, very, very small police force looking after or trying to look after this state of absolute chaos and anarchy and hard to see how it gets resolved. And, and also hard to see how the international community gets involved because they don't seem to be doing much right now.

• 41:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's just step back for a moment and just, just look at Haiti in terms of a lot of the stuff we talk about in the podcast. So it's got a population about 12 million, which puts it almost bang in the middle of countries in the world. I mean, it's slightly in the larger half. There are a lot of small countries in the world. So it's a country, you know, larger than Belgium, Jordan, Sweden, Portugal, Greece, Israel, Hungary, all of which we've been talking about quite a lot on the podcast recently. And it's of course twice the size of other countries we talk about, like New Zealand, Norway, Denmark, Ireland. It's a country where the narrative in explaining its problems is colonialism, racism, and racism not just of the colonial occupiers, you know, the French against black slaves in the 18th century or Americans there in the 20s and 30s, but also racism

• 42:12Rory Stewart?

  within. So we talked about this a little bit when we talked about Liberia, which is a group called the mulatto who were lighter skinned Haitians, created an almost apartheid state in which there were tiny gradations of skin colour.

• 42:26Rory Stewart?

  Govern the country after the colonial powers went. An enormous amount about how foreign companies exploited it in different times. Environmental degradation. So this very, very fertile island, essentially by cutting down trees, managed under baby dock in the northwest particularly to end up with a kind of barren desert. Whereas the Dominican Republic, which is part of the same island, has done much better on managing its natural resources and is much lusher. So I guess to cut to the chase, it's really a story about government because the unfortunate truth is, of course, many, many other countries in the Caribbean had similar sorts of histories, had colonial

• 43:08Rory Stewart?

  legacies, had slavery, had exploitation, but have ended up much more prosperous than Haiti. So for example, you know, Martinique, which is a didn't gain independence from the French, is far wealthier than Haiti that did gain independence from the French. And of course, many of the other Caribbean countries doing much better, including the Dominican Republic, which is, we talk a bit about East and West Germany, North and South Korea. This is another one of those examples. Two places, basically, almost identical land, very similar population, very similar, but simply a slight difference in history and government. And one place ends up much more stable and prosperous than the other.

• 43:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I was just, I mentioned the, the, there's somebody from, who's, who's on the ground from UNICEF, who said that it's been, it's like living in a post-apocalyptic film at the moment, because these gangs are literally just kind of able to do what they want. So I'm just looking up, in the UK, we have more than 170,000 police officers. Now, we often complain that we don't have enough police officers, right? So we're, so Haiti's population is about a sixth of ours. They have 9,000 police force, 9,000 strong police force in a country of 11, 12 million inhabitants.

• 44:20Rory Stewart?

  And a country with incredible violence and poverty. Yeah.

• 44:23Alastair Campbell?

  And also you have, because of the violence has been going on in recent weeks, the schools have had to close, most of the hospitals have had to close, judges have had their, have been attacked. 3,000 pregnant women have given birth without any maternity care.

• 44:37Alastair Campbell?

  Whatsoever. And of course, the other thing that's happening is the, and I mean, it was pretty appalling. I saw yesterday Elon Musk was sort of, you know, talking about the need for Trump to win and what have you. He also recently, he shared a video which he said was from, or the, the, the video was said to be from Haiti, and it was of cannibalism. It was of an act of cannibalism that was said to be taking place. And it turns out it was several years ago. It wasn't in Haiti. It had nothing to do with Haiti. And there's this guy Elon Musk, sharing it and saying, this is what happens when law and order breaks down.

• 45:12Rory Stewart?

  On the subject of Musk, he's also got really into this thing called the great replacement theory, which is part of the populist narrative, which is about the idea that white populations are going to be replaced, particularly in the US, by Latin American populations coming cross border, or indeed Haitians getting on boats, which was one of the reasons that Bill Clinton got involved in the first place. And we should talk about it a little bit more because firstly, historically, it's bizarre, because of course, in some ways, white Americans are themselves great replacements of a population that existed before they arrived. But, but also, I think Haiti is one of these real challenges to our attempt to imagine a more prosperous, stable world. We live in a world where there's still a lot of techno optimism. There's still a lot of people saying, everything's getting

• 45:56Rory Stewart?

  wealthier, everything's getting better, technology's changing our lives, AI is going to change our lives. But Haiti is, is one of those things where in the nineties, as Clinton intervened, was seen as being, you know, could have been, in the way they wrote about it, almost like Bosnia or Kosovo, a sort of liberal humanitarian intervention, state building, governance, money was going to come in, everything was going to be fixed. And it catastrophically failed. And it now finds itself in a group of countries, of which the Central African Republic, or the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where the international community almost gives up. You know, there are these UN missions that come in and out, tens of thousands NGOs on the ground, huge amounts of international aid, but nobody really believing

• 46:39Rory Stewart?

  that they know how to, how to help. And, and so I think a new generation needs to emerge with some ideas and some optimism, because otherwise, we're back into the horrible world of the nineties, where we just decided that, you know, nothing could be done in the Balkans, nothing could be done with South African apartheid, nothing could be done in Northern Ireland, etc.

• 46:58Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, talking of the future, new generation.

• 47:03Alastair Campbell?

  Two big changes this week in two very different countries. We talked a few weeks ago about the election in Senegal where the outgoing president, Mackie Sal, was trying to, it seemed, trying to, he postponed the election and people were thinking that's because he wanted to set it up for his own successor. But the opposition have won, and not just won, this guy Basiru Diame Faye, who's in his 40s, has won with more than 50% of the vote in the first round. It's a French-type system where you have lots of candidates. I think there were 19 candidates in total. So it's an absolute rout which

• 47:43Alastair Campbell?

  does signal very, very, very big change in Senegal. And of course, the other new leader, even younger, youngest ever Taoiseach of Ireland, Simon Harris, following the rather surprising departure of Leo Varadkar.

• 47:57Rory Stewart?

  Just quickly on Varadkar, have you got any more thoughts on this? I mean, just again, for listeners, this was very, very surprising. I mean, we've interviewed Leo Varadkar, and you can get a sense of him if you want to listen to it on the on the leading feed. But he basically stepped down in an instant. And it's something we've seen with Jacinta Radden, it's something we've seen with Nicola Sturgeon. But and it may just show something that's changing in politics all around the world, but it's very strange. I mean, there's no precedent really in British or American history for someone just to suddenly wake up one morning when they're the head of head of government and just say, actually, that's it, I'm out and I'm resigning. And with Nicola Sturgeon, of course, you know, somebody like me thinks that it may be that she was aware that there was a scandal coming

• 48:41Rory Stewart?

  down the line and it was better she got out of the way because the SNP's had a lot of issues around donors and police and things. What are the stories? And are you getting any sense from people on what they thought was going on there?

• 48:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I, as it, on the day that he announced it, I was actually in a cab on the way to the Irish Embassy to have lunch with the ambassador. And they were completely taken aback. I don't think there was any whiff that this was coming. And I think If people do listen to the interview with Leo Varadkar, you weren't, I did that, I remember in Dublin, you were online. And in the margins, as they say, we were talking about, you know, this, that and the other. And I always got the feeling with Leo Varadkar, that he didn't, he didn't enjoy the stuff that goes with being a politician, and particularly goes with being a very high profile politician. So I wonder if he just sort of, a bit like Jürgen Klopp at Liverpool, the Liverpool manager, just decided, I wonder if he's just decided he's had enough. That being

• 49:35Alastair Campbell?

  said, there is also a buzz going around as to whether he might be, have his eyes at some point on one of the big international jobs, be that within the European Union or whatever it might be. But I get the feeling that he's just sort of had enough.

• 49:49Rory Stewart?

  It's very, it's strange though, isn't it? Because as we've said, in some ways, Ireland is one of the great success stories.

• 49:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but he just had that failure with the referendum, Sinn Féin on the rise, election looming. Does he just sort of think, well, maybe, maybe it's better somebody else takes over?

• 50:05Rory Stewart?

  It's so weird though, isn't it? Because, I mean, maybe this is just me talking too much about myself, but I've always thought that really, that the job of a politician really makes sense when you are the Taoiseach or the Prime Minister, the head of government, because you can really get stuff done. That's when you're really actually able to change. And you go into politics, hopefully to change things. That's when you actually have the power to change things. That you can understand more easily why people step down when they failed. But to, he must have had programmes he wanted to push through, stuff he want, I mean, you would never have imagined Tony Blair suddenly announcing midway that he really wanted to step down and leave, because presumably he was actually finding it very fulfilling, having his hands on the keys to power.

• 50:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think it's fair to say that Tony did announce that he was stepping down halfway through, but that happened to be his third term. And I think he would very happily have stayed for a fourth or a fifth or a sixth.

• 50:52Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. And it wasn't done in that way. It was done because he felt he needed to give Gordon Brown a go, rather than that he didn't, didn't want to continue.

• 50:59Alastair Campbell?

  Of course, there is this, this sort of strange, well, strange to us, setup in Ireland, because it's essentially a coalition, where you've got the two main parties have sort of swapped Taoiseach. You had Mihal Martin, then you had Varadkar, now being replaced by, by Simon Harris. And it would be very, it's a huge step up for him, because of course, he's, you know, he's been a politician, he's been an MP since he's, since he was 24, been a member of the Doyle since he was 24, he was a councillor at 22, he's a kind of absolute. Very ambitious, very full on politician, but he now has to step up because of course he takes on all the international stuff as well and that's going to be a very, very steep learning curve. But no, I think, I think it's, I think what's happening in

• 51:43Alastair Campbell?

  our politics is that in lots of these countries, leaders are becoming leaders younger and that means that they're leaving younger.

• 51:49Rory Stewart?

  And also, I'm afraid the unpleasantness of it. I mean, I couldn't quite get Veradca to be as frank about the unpleasantness of politics, which you understandably want to resist because you're trying to encourage young people to go into politics, but I suspect that must be part of it. Listen, just a final shout out then, because you raised Senegal to what Macky Sall has done, because Senegal has had a couple of, couple of stages where it really did look as though it could go in the wrong direction. And of course, it's right up there in Francophone Africa, near those seven countries in the Sahel which have gone through military coups. And yet it's remained surprisingly stable. There've been a couple of dangerous moments before Macky Sall took over. It looked as though his predecessor

• 52:31Rory Stewart?

  was going to try to stick in his son. That didn't happen. And then, as you say, there was a moment where Macky Sall seemed to be flirting with going for a third term and delaying elections, but he hasn't done that. He's stepped down and he's, and they moved very quickly, he and his candidate moved very quickly to congratulate the opposition.

• 52:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, even before all the results were in.

• 52:53Rory Stewart?

  Despite the fact they were in jail only 10 days earlier. So I think, I just saw a man called Mo Ibrahim for dinner on Friday, who's an amazing, very wealthy, successful African businessman who set up the Mo Ibrahim Prize, where if an African leader rules reasonably well and then steps down peacefully and does a peaceful transition, Mo Ibrahim's foundation gives, I think, $5 million to them so that there's no incentive for corruption and they can set up a new life. And I think Macky Sall has probably deserved it and I think has really saved his reputation in the last few days. And it's a great, great sign for Senegal, which is becoming a bit of a beacon in the region.

• 53:31Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there you go. So we've covered or talked about most of the big elections, and there's one that's happened fairly peacefully, fairly smoothly, and now with a pretty radical change of direction. And by the way, in relation to dynasties, you mentioned earlier Duvalier. On the back of our discussion recently about Putin's daughters, Rory, had a very interesting email from a guy who lives in Switzerland, who worked out there for a very, very wealthy Russian family, who tells me that Putin's sons went to the same school. Hmm, there we are. So there are sons growing.

• 54:14Alastair Campbell?

  Good, right. On that note, see you soon for Q and A. See you soon for Q and A. Bye bye, Alison. Bye.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 54:42Speaker 04

  We assess Prime Minister, with high confidence, it was Russian.

• 54:49Speaker 05

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 54:51Speaker 06

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 54:54Speaker 03

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, do you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 55:07Speaker 07

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 55:18Speaker 05

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 55:23Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 55:25Speaker 05

  New from GoLhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 55:29Speaker 08

  You're my soldier, are you Sergeant Tom McDuff, Duffy?

• 55:33Speaker 05

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 55:35Speaker 08

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 55:39Speaker 05

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

• 55:43Speaker 08

  We have two tight friendly key.

• 55:44Speaker 05

  Where Britain plays its strongest hand. He's the best. Against its strongest foe.

• 55:52Speaker 05

  Bear Hunt.

• 55:54Speaker 05

  Available now wherever you get your podcasts.