251. The Infected Blood Scandal

Could the bill for the infected blood scandal fall on Labour? What makes politics so bad for mental health? Could Benjamin Netanyahu be arrested for war crimes? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ 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. TRIP ELECTION TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:13Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:15Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:17Alastair Campbell?

  Back from your retreat.

• 1:19Rory Stewart?

  Back from my retreat, yep.

• 1:20Alastair Campbell?

  Did you get lots of good feedback about David Gork in your inbox?

• 1:23Rory Stewart?

  I definitely did. My mother was very, very impressed by David Gork. Not surprised, obviously, as you know, David Gork is my great hero.

• 1:29Alastair Campbell?

  Is he your mother's hero as well?

• 1:30Rory Stewart?

  She should be. I mean, the amount of time I've told her that he's the saving grace of British politics.

• 1:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he was a very, very good stand-in, but it's very, very good to have you back. We'll maybe talk in the Q and A about, we've got a few questions about your retreats. We should do that in the Q and A.

• 1:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 1:42Alastair Campbell?

  Look, today, we're going to talk about the infected blood scandal, which is absolutely horrific. I want to talk about MPs and mental health. I think on the day you got back, there was a very good Radio 4 documentary about that, which I think you would have found interesting, had you been able to listen to it in your retreat. Then lots going on in relation to Iran with this helicopter crash, in which the president and the foreign minister have died, and also Israel. First signs of really quite deep cabinet splits. And then into the mix, this report by the International Criminal Court prosecutor, suggesting that not just the leaders of Hamas, but the leaders of Israel as well, could be indicted for war crimes. And then also, I think we should have a little chat about the Mexico presidential election, which is, I think, the first of the big elections in June,

• 2:27Alastair Campbell?

  but probably worth getting in ahead of the game on that one. So listen, on the infected blood scandal, I'm digging through the research on this, Rory. I discovered a question in Parliament in 2015 by none other than the right honourable Rory Stewart. This is almost a decade ago. One of the most disturbing scandals has been the infection of thousands of people across the nation with HIV and hepatitis C through contaminated blood. Today, Lord Penrose publishes a report that follows nearly 25 years of campaigning by members on both sides of the House to address the scandal. Will the Prime Minister, as the last act of his government, ensure there is a full apology, transparent publication, and above all, proper compensation for the families terribly affected by this scandal? And David Cameron goes on to say yes to all three.

• 3:11Alastair Campbell?

  And yet, yesterday, we had his successor, but for, Rishi Sunak, standing up and issuing what essentially was an apology on behalf of the state. But it just underlines, your question underlines, I mean, even you were talking there about decades of campaigning. Sunak talked in his statement about Diana Johnson, the Labour MP, who's been banging on about this ever since she's been in Parliament, really. So what did you make of yesterday? And what are your memories of the debate when you're an MP?

• 3:41Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's just step back for a second to remind people of the horror. So from the 1970s onwards, so for 50 years, the people who've had blood disorders have been receiving transfusions or plasma through the NHS. And since the 1970s, for almost 50 years, a lot of this has been imported from the US and Austria particularly. And it turned out that it was infected. So people were having, injected into their bodies, people who needed blood, blood disorders, found themselves injected with blood that contained AIDS, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis C.

• 4:24Rory Stewart?

  And it went on and on and on and on. And the evidence of what was happening was pretty clear well over 40 years ago. You were beginning to see the first clear signs that people had got AIDS, had got Hep A, had got Hep B, had got what we now know as Hep C, what was then, I think, called non Hep A, non Hep B virus. And There was the most colossal combination of arrogance, cover up, incompetence and insults to these people. So, you know, we're often very nostalgic for the governments of the past. We often talk about the idea that somehow everything went wrong with Boris Johnson

• 5:05Rory Stewart?

  and that before then it was all lovely. Basically, our governments in the seventies, in the eighties, in the nineties and the two thousands continued to participate in the most monumental consistent injustice. And there's so many things that could have been done. We could have been much more careful about the blood we brought into the country. We could have developed our own blood banks properly in the United Kingdom, so we didn't need to import blood. We could have had proper screening of the blood we put in. We could have made sure that sometimes people who need to be given blood, who were given blood, we could have followed up much more quickly when we heard that there were bad case. We did none of those things.

• 5:40Alastair Campbell?

  There was a very interesting interview yesterday, this just underlined how far back it goes. So David Owen, most people know David Owen as one of the founders of the SDP, Social Democratic Party, and also as Foreign Secretary, but he was also a Health Minister. And he was talking about how he, as Health Minister, had tried to set up one of the things you've just mentioned, which was our own blood supplies, our own plasma.

• 6:00Rory Stewart?

  And this is in nineteen seventies?

• 6:02Alastair Campbell?

  This is in the nineteen seventies, yeah, when he was Health Minister. And it's interesting, this thing, because what Brian Langstaff in his report, and I think I've ever seen a report which has led to a standing ovation from, and it was almost like watching a rally at points. They were clapping when he really came out with a strong point, they were clapping, there was a standing ovation at the end. And then I think led to this moment in Parliament. And I did feel, watching Rishi Sunak, I thought he did do very, I thought his statement was very, very well measured and very, very well judged, and as was Keir Starmer's reply. But it was interesting this morning to hear one of the the affected, you talk about the infected and the affected, the affected, this was somebody who's who lost somebody, saying, and this goes back to your question and Cameron's answer, they've sort of heard it so many

• 6:47Alastair Campbell?

  times. And she was making the point that we're now in an election year, they say they're going to sort it out, the compensation, are they really? And so I think if you've been, if you maybe felt that sense of betrayal on so many different occasions and being gaslit and being abused and being insulted. Maybe that even now, they can't really, can't really believe it.

• 7:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and just to run through the figures again, I mean, well over 2,000 people killed and and infected with AIDS, infected with Hep A, B and C. I mean, a very, very serious.

• 7:16Alastair Campbell?

  At a time when that led to, because of the debate around AIDS at the time, newspapers talking about gay plague and all that stuff, a lot of abuse and stigma and taboo and shunning. So we're talking about layer upon layer of suffering here.

• 7:30Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, directly impacted. And then, as you say, on the back of those tens of thousands directly impacted, hundreds of thousands impacted through families, through bereavements, through works. So whole experience. One thing, though, that I think is worth looking at is this, this, the politicians bit. But unfortunately here, there is the NHS bureaucracy. I mean, the NHS bureaucracy here is so much to blame. Massive arrogance from the clinicians, who basically didn't give a monkey for patient safety, didn't give a monkey for patients' autonomy. In other words, they weren't interested in consulting them or listening to them, demanded what they call full clinical autonomy, which basically meant the doctors could do whatever the bug of the hell they felt they liked to do. And then whenever there was any moment

• 8:13Rory Stewart?

  when it looked like they were going to be caught out, massive defensiveness and ultimately lies. And it really is kind of incredibly revealing.

• 8:20Alastair Campbell?

  And a lot of lost documents. Owen was saying that he's never seen the papers from his time as health minister. Andy Burnham has said the same.

• 8:27Rory Stewart?

  And remember, we think understandably, rightly, generally about doctors as great saints and heroes. But in this case, some of the biggest villains of the whole thing were arrogant doctors who drove ahead with this, weren't careful enough, didn't care, didn't respond when people tried to complain, and did completely unnecessary things. So when people came back and said, oh, I've got AIDS, the response generally from the doctors were, how can you prove it was from the blood transfusion? And when they said, well, is there a risk that I could get it? It's not about risk, it's about proof. You prove that it's from blood transfusion? And of course, how are you supposed to prove?

• 9:01Alastair Campbell?

  And I guess that led to, one of the politicians who I suspect will be feeling very sore today is Ken Clark. And of course, Ken Clark massively popular, right across the political spectrum. In fact, Kwasi Kwarteng, when we were talking to him, was talking about his admiration for him. And I think David Blunkett was as well, you know, he's just one of those people that people in politics like. So he had this line, essentially, there was Thatcher's line that they had the best possible treatment. Then Ken Clark's line that there was no clear evidence that this was doing any damage to people. And he's had that pretty much thrown back at him. But I've been trying to work out what happens inside government that something like this can happen and it doesn't get unpicked. So David Owen, back in the seventies, there is a problem here.

• 9:46Alastair Campbell?

  I don't like this. Why can't we do something about it? Ends up admitting he didn't do anything because he was sort of not blocked, but you know, other things to do and.

• 9:55Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So just on that one. So what he was trying to do, I think, is to set up a proper national system so that we could have enough blood. And really, that is perfectly doable.

• 10:05Alastair Campbell?

  But he said it would take three years.

• 10:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Got a country of 70 million people, or whatever it was then, 50 million people then. All you had to do was organise blood donors and the storage of the thing properly. But in fact, what got in the way is just bureaucracy, fragmented systems, different trusts. One thing going on in Scotland, different thing going on in England, not the proper facilities, not the proper storage things. And in the end, the government thinks, well, easier and cheaper just to bring it in from Austria and the US.

• 10:29Alastair Campbell?

  Or they're focusing on other priorities.

• 10:31Rory Stewart?

  High risk people sadly in Austria and the US providing the.

• 10:35Alastair Campbell?

  Prisoners.

• 10:36Rory Stewart?

  With a very high incidence of AIDS and various forms.

• 10:39Alastair Campbell?

  I think the other lesson out of this is about that dangers of marketisation. You know, the fact is that we made ourselves dependent on a supply of blood that was utterly being driven by an American market and a very, very different healthcare system.

• 10:52Rory Stewart?

  And then it becomes very uncomfortable, doesn't it? Because if you then got your civil servant in and said, well, I'm not really very sure about this American blood that we're bringing in. Couldn't we have our own blood? And the civil servant says, well, Minister, you know, it's going to take three years and it's going to cost X hundred million to sort out. And really, there's not much evidence that there's any difference between American blood or British blood. I mean, are you racist about American blood? What is it about American blood that you don't like, right? And then the question, I guess, this is a question for the minister, and we saw this with the post office scandal. How much do you get down to details? But, but, but, but, but, but you must. And that's the great thing about, actually, when it works well, the constituency MP, the local constituents coming to you and saying, oi, this is an injustice and not being fobbed off by your civil servants. I mean,

• 11:37Rory Stewart?

  you need to get the heads of the campaigning organisations in your ministerial office with you, with the civil servants. So when you get someone to the NHS saying, no, I admit there's no evidence at all, really, this, you can have the person next to you saying, oi, that's not true. All this is happening.

• 11:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Andy Burnham, who had been a Treasury Minister and also Health Secretary, and he effectively has been saying that he was lied to. He asked for evidence and was told there wasn't, and he asked for reports and told they weren't there. He's talking about criminal prosecutions in relation to this, feeling that's the only way to go.

• 12:09Rory Stewart?

  But then who's lying to you? Because in my experience, usually the person who's briefing you doesn't necessarily know the truth themselves. They've been briefed by someone, they've been briefed by someone else. And what sort of lie is it? I mean, it's probably not that there's some evil cackling person saying.

• 12:24Alastair Campbell?

  No, you've been given a report and you believe it.

• 12:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and it's sort of, and it's also that even the person producing the untruth in the first place is probably, what they're really saying is, well, yeah, there's not real proof. We're not sure about this. I mean, uncomfortable to change it. I mean, it's not quite that they have seen black and white. We know for sure that we're killing these people and we're going to cover it up. Cover us up some more weird than that, aren't they there?

• 12:48Alastair Campbell?

  No, a cover up is like a conspiracy where people know something is bad and they do what is necessary to stop that reaching public view. What Langstaff has been describing is what he says is something more chilling, which is where, in a sense, the truth gets hidden because people aren't looking and don't want to look. And those who ask to look. Like Burnham, like David Owen, like no doubt other ministers through this period, or other senior civil servants possibly, they don't have the wherewithal to go drill right down into the detail.

• 13:17Rory Stewart?

  And when I think about, just very quickly to be self-centered about this for a second, I mean, I had a small example of this in government. I became concerned that we, the British government, were providing funding to local councils in North West Syria in areas controlled by Al Qaeda-linked groups. In other words, our money would be going to terrorist groups. And I called in group civil servants and I said, how can we be sure that the money we're giving is not ending up in the hands of these Al Qaeda groups? And they said, well, we've got, you know, all the right monitoring and evaluation processes in place. So I said, look, have you ever been to Syria? No. Do we have anybody on the ground in Syria? No. So I said, well, look, I have been to Syria and, you know, I've worked in Iraq, I've worked in Afghanistan, I can tell you how this happens, I can describe this to you.

• 14:02Alastair Campbell?

  Were you at Difid at this point, or?

• 14:04Rory Stewart?

  Oh, is it then Difid? Difid, so this was Difid money going. Yeah. And I said, look, I saw this in Iraq. I promise you, the money we're spending at the moment here, buying this generator for this hospital, almost certainly was the same generator that was stolen from the hospital yesterday, and that we've just bought back again from the bloke that stole it. And that these councils are controlled by people in masks with Kalashnikovs. So I want to stop this. It then became clear that nobody really wanted me to stop this, and I couldn't find out in the government whose decision it really was. So I ended up in a completely surreal world. One point I was told it was a US decision, so I had to find my way on my own dime to Washington to find a guy called Brett McGurk, who I knew from Iraq, who was Trump's senior person on this.

• 14:48Rory Stewart?

  And he said to me, no, no, Rory, not my decision, I think you're probably right, probably it's North West Syria, it probably is run by Jihadi groups. So I come back to Britain. And then it turns out there's something called a small group. So I say, can I meet the small group of civil servants directors? No, you can't, politicians are not allowed to meet them. So I have to meet them individually. So I have to go see, I can't meet them as a group, but I can see them all individually.

• 15:06Alastair Campbell?

  Is this Les Truss's deep state at work?

• 15:08Rory Stewart?

  Right. Well, then finally, I end up saying, okay, I'm sending a note up to the Prime Minister. And even as I try to get the note up to the Prime Minister, different notes are going at it. In the end, the whole thing only stopped. Five months in because finally a YouTube video was released showing one of the people who received money from us on a platform with an Al Qaeda guy with an Al Qaeda flag. But even when that happened, they just came in and said, okay, Minister, we're shutting down the programme. But there was no acknowledgement that I'd been right, no acknowledgement that they'd been wrong.

• 15:40Alastair Campbell?

  But did you, did you, did you end up assuming, as I do, listening to your story, that within that, the security services or the special forces were running some kind of asset that they didn't particularly want to have you meddling with?

• 15:54Rory Stewart?

  No, my conclusion was that the ambassador responsible for Syria wanted to be nice to the Syrian opposition groups by providing support for them and didn't want to look too closely at the allegation these opposition groups might be connected with Al Qaeda. And basically, they thought ministers can bugger off, he's not a specialist, the ambassador wants to do this. I mean, I found this again and again. I mean, even on Afghanistan, where I did feel I knew a little bit more about Afghanistan than the civil servants were briefing me, many of whom had not been to Afghanistan, didn't speak an Afghan language, hadn't lived in Afghanistan. Even then, basically, the assumption is the minister cannot know more than the civil servants. The job of the civil servants is to know more than the minister. The minister can sort of say yes or no. But if you really try to dig deep, you get accused

• 16:37Rory Stewart?

  of bullying, you get accused of harassment, you get accused of that. I mean, it's, it's a very uncomfortable situation. And I can understand why the civil servants feel like that, right? Because ministers are recycled all the time. Most of us have no idea what we're doing. You can't cope with a system where every year you have a new idea come in, new minister. But boy, oh, boy, if you really want to get to the bottom of something. And I could, I could give, you know, the whole book is sort of, I cut out maybe forty five examples of this because Shashana, reading it, was like, Rory, we do not need the story of you trying to stop the programme in Yemen and the story of you trying to stop the police funding in Afghanistan and, you know.

• 17:11Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Rory, having written eight volumes, you could always have a follow up. I think on behalf of doctors and civil servants, I will just point out that a lot of them are very, very good people and they weren't all have been as described by Rory in the podcast so far. But there is something really systemic about this because the fact is just in recent times, Grenfell, you get the feeling that terrible things happen, people say that everything's going to be done and then is it all done? Hillsborough, I mean, literally decades of people fighting for things that should have been available to them right from the word go.

• 17:53Rory Stewart?

  Bloody Sunday.

• 17:54Alastair Campbell?

  Bloody Sunday, another one, yeah. I think that, and interestingly, yesterday.

• 17:58Rory Stewart?

  The Post Office that we've done a lot of.

• 17:59Alastair Campbell?

  Post Office is an absolute classic of its kind. But I was yesterday sort of ringing around people that I worked with in Number 10, just to get a feeling, like for example, one of our researchers who used to prepare Tony Blair for Primus's Questions, how often did this come up? Couldn't remember it, couldn't remember even if it did. I've been trying to rack my brains as to whether it ever came up in one of my briefings. And it may have done, and there may be a transcript somewhere that it did, but I don't recall it as something that was coming in the whole time like a big thing. And of course, what's happened now is it's almost like a dam has burst. Now, I think that's a good thing. Sometimes you need that. But then if you look back through how often, I mean, John Glenn, the Cabinet Office Minister, is going to be standing up to set out the compensation scheme today.

• 18:43Alastair Campbell?

  And I saw Steve Brien, who you will know, is now Chair of the Health Select Committee, a Tory MP, and he was on the Newsnight last night and he said, if I hear one more time, we must learn the lessons, you know. Because it's almost like there's a formula, there's a formula to the inquiry and then there's a formula to the response and then stuff doesn't change. And that's what has to change.

• 19:05Rory Stewart?

  Two quick things. Sometimes, of course, we feel that the problem in our society is that we've all become so suspicious and hateful towards the establishment, the elites, and we've gone completely overboard with social media and transparency. But this is the countervailing example. This is a real argument for why transparency matters, why accountability matters, why you can't just trust the good old boys to get on with stuff. Second thing, the compensation. The thing that, of course, also has to be talked about, and I don't think we're very good at talking about, is an enormous injustice and then ten Billion pounds of compensation, ten thousand million pounds of compensation is being asked for.

• 19:45Alastair Campbell?

  It's a lot of money.

• 19:46Rory Stewart?

  It's an eye-watering amount of money. To put it in context, the entire police budget is seventeen billion. This is, that, that is.

• 19:52Alastair Campbell?

  The UK or England or Wales?

• 19:53Rory Stewart?

  That'd be probably England, Wales, but that is more than half the entire budget for the entire policing for the entire country.

• 20:00Alastair Campbell?

  Which needs more money as well.

• 20:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, where, where we're trying to get more police officers in it. So, you know, I, I, when I turned up Minister of Justice, we were renting out two floors of our office to try to save ten million pounds. That is one one thousandth, one one thousandth of what they're talking about here, right? So you can also see a really big public policy issue. Does the government say this injustice that we have perpetrated on people since the nineteen seventies is so horrifying that it's worth us basically, and this is about what it'll come down to, right? Not having two thousand more police officers over the next ten years.

• 20:36Alastair Campbell?

  And people will say we want both. And one of the criticisms that Langstaff made yesterday of the current government is that the compensation scheme that's being announced today could have been announced last week and Diana Johnson.

• 20:46Rory Stewart?

  And presumably could have been announced in twenty fifteen when David Cameron was promising.

• 20:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And David Owen was saying that even back then, they, he, he said there were two world in action programmes done about this. World in Action was a programme that sadly no longer exists.

• 21:00Rory Stewart?

  Seventies.

• 21:00Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. Two world in action programmes in which he participated, warning that something very wrong was going on. There was a report even before this from an American, an American who wrote to the British Blood Supply Authority saying, this stuff, you shouldn't touch this stuff. So we've had this whole thing right through and, you know, we've talked about the blood. We haven't talked about it that often, but when we have, it's, we've talked about it largely because Diana Johnson has prompted us to do so. And I've been several times have said I'm worried. That the government has been trying to just drag this out until there's a change of government. And I do worry whether they might try to drag this out in a way that it fall, the bill falls on the next government.

• 21:41Alastair Campbell?

  And even now, they're saying, oh, well, you know, we'll try and get this off one of the, one of the budget, one of the programs that doesn't necessarily affect plans for tax cuts. Well, as you say, government ultimately is about choices and the prime minister said yesterday, whatever it takes to give people compensation. So it is, it is going to be one of those stories that I think will, I mean, he, he, he said it will shake the nation to its core. Whether it's done that, I don't know. He said it was a moral failure, definitely. He said it was a terrible day for the British state, definitely. And I, I think that part of it is this sort of inbuilt defensiveness drawn from the fact that most of the time governments spend their time being attacked. And they have to defend themselves. So they have these lines to take.

• 22:24Alastair Campbell?

  Um, I was an architect of a lot of the lines to take that we had to defend ourselves with. But I think it would be far healthier for all of us if even inside government, essentially you became the campaign of the things that you believed in. And that's the kind of mindset that's got to change.

• 22:39Rory Stewart?

  To, to put a final bit of context, if you were to cut the basic rate of tax today by one pence, you would currently get six billion. So.

• 22:48Alastair Campbell?

  You're talking a one and a half penny off income tax, on income tax.

• 22:50Rory Stewart?

  And imagine you're the, the chancellor going out and they decided they wouldn't do that cut in income tax, which they would have been tempted to do because they couldn't afford ten billion. And now they can do it. I'm not saying that this shouldn't happen, but to, you know, I, I don't want to be silly about this, but it's also now becoming clear that since the nineteen fifties, the UK, the US and others, the US particularly, through nuclear testing, probably two point two million people have been prematurely killed by the fallout of nuclear tests. And whether governments are going to be compensating them, again, I don't know.

• 23:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Just on, finally on this defensive point, you see. I would argue that the way that the government responds to questioning at the moment about Rwanda, about Brexit, about some of the big issues where they've entrenched into these incredibly defensive positions about Covid corruption. I think these are things which ultimately, there will ultimately have to be an inquiry, I think, into the way that Brexit has been done and the damage that has inflicted upon the economy. There will probably at some point be an inquiry, involving the police at times, I think, into the whole Covid corruption thing. There will be an inquiry, there is an inquiry, there are inquiries going on into Granville. But what happens is that the government sets a position and then cannot bring itself to

• 24:05Alastair Campbell?

  admit, mm, yeah, you might have a point. And eventually, they have to admit there's a point because the evidence becomes overwhelming. And then we end up with this process. Now, I'm not equating any of these with the infected blood scandal. I'm simply saying that for all the fine words yesterday, it's the mindset that has to change.

• 24:20Rory Stewart?

  Because there's not much incentive, is there, for the government to announce an investigation into itself, ever?

• 24:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but there's always an incentive, I think. I think the public are far more tolerant and forgiving of governments that get to the right place, even if it takes a bit of time, even in this crazy social media, here and now world. So I think it's the mindset that needs to change, both of ministers and of civil servants. Now, MPs and mental health, did you hear this, Radio 4?

• 24:45Rory Stewart?

  No, I didn't.

• 24:46Alastair Campbell?

  So I'll just tell you briefly about it. It was on a half hour. It was presented by a woman called Jennifer Nadel, who co-founded Compassion in Politics. So she's coming from a place that says, a bit like your book does, that politics is a kind of, a bit of a sort of laboratory for mental ill health. Now, some very moving interviews, a guy called Elliot Colburn, who I don't know, who talked about a time when he was actively suicidal and talked about, he was 28 when he was elected, he's now in his early 30s, made the point, which I thought was really interesting, he says that the public look at MPs and don't imagine that they've actually allowed human emotions like the rest of them. He said when he finally spoke about it in the Commons, he got a really warm response. Keir Starmer went over to him, Rishi Sunak called him in.

• 25:29Alastair Campbell?

  But then, he said privately, eight MPs came to him and said they had been in exactly the same position, but none of them felt able to say so publicly.

• 25:39Rory Stewart?

  And we have talked about it before, haven't we? I mean, I talked about the fact that there was a member of Parliament who, when I came in, threw himself under a train.

• 25:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 25:46Rory Stewart?

  And wasn't particularly reported at the time. Part of it is that the, I, I think there are many things that make people deeply, deeply unhappy. But for me, the big thing is that the whole job is a sort of fraud. When you're a minister, you are pretending, in my case, that you are a full-time constituency MP in Cumbria, that you're a full-time legislator voting in Parliament three hundred and fifty miles south. And you're also a minister responsible for programmes in Pakistan, Nigeria abroad, right? And it's a lie, right? And my goodness, in the world of social media, your constituents are very good at saying, oi, you know, I've noticed it's six days since you were up in Penrith. Why weren't you up, you know, opening the, um, the hospice, right?

• 26:29Rory Stewart?

  Uh, and at the same time, other people, I noticed you missed the vote on, you know, it could be a really important thing. Could be contaminated. Why were you not in the contaminated blood vote? You know how much that matters to me. And at the same time, you're supposed to be visiting your programme in Nigeria, right? So that's the first thing. Second thing is, of course, the portfolio itself. As you know, you're reshuffled in the modern world every year, but even if it's every two years. And most MPs don't know anything about their portfolio. It's complete nonsense. Coming to something, you're made the China minister, never been to China in your life. Standing up at the dispatch box, you're lying. I mean, it's a complete fraudulence. And people are saying, oh, really, you know, with the, I don't know, the right honourable minister, you know, confirmed that the latest investments in Chengdu province in China reveal the increasing corruption of Chinese Communist Party. And you have to be like, I don't know what Chengdu province is, I don't know, okay.

• 27:15Rory Stewart?

  And so there's that.

• 27:16Alastair Campbell?

  You don't, you stand up and you read the line of state that's been given to you.

• 27:18Rory Stewart?

  Right. And you're pretending with your civil servants that you know what's going on. You're pretending with the public and then you're taking responsibility, you know. Who will take responsibility for what happened in Liverpool, President, oh, I take responsibility? Well, sort of, yes, but also where's the, there's a sort of arrogance and madness. I don't know, really, did I do what, I mean, so the whole thing is not normal.

• 27:36Alastair Campbell?

  There was, there was an interview with somebody who had been a minister recently, um, who didn't want to identify himself and who, so his voice was, somebody else read out his words. Um, and he made a very similar point. He said that you come into Parliament. You've made all sorts of promises to your constituents. You have no real capacity to get much done as a backbencher. You then go in to be a minister, which he was, and he said he found that those same frustrations and he ended up having a breakdown. And so he talked about that. We had Kim Ledbetter, sister of Jo Cox, talking about, you know, who followed, Jo Cox was murdered. Kim followed her into the seat and talking about just how, again, this is the theme of

• 28:16Alastair Campbell?

  your book, just about how kind of crazy the place is and, and, and how, but also that all of them talking about how social media has made a difference in terms of volume of work, but also abuse and how that affects them. So it was a very, it was quite moving at, at, at points. Anne Milton, the former mental health minister, she spoke, she said she'd been in the Whip's office and she could see how the Whip's office actually was a kind of a negative impact upon the, the mental wellbeing of MPs. And, and sometimes it's like related to specific policy outcomes. So the Welsh Transport Minister, Lee Waters, was the guy who brought in the 20 mile an hour speed limits in Wales, which had become incredibly unpopular.

• 28:58Alastair Campbell?

  And he spoke on the programme just about the level of abuse and online hatred that he was getting and how it really, really started to affect him very, very badly. And both he and, and Kim Ledbetter made the point that if we're not careful, the sense of the life of a politician is going to become so relentlessly negative that nobody in their right mind is going to want to be a politician. That is dangerous. But as you said in, in the interview we did with Kwasi Kwarteng, you know, you say to the public, oh, woe is me, I'm an MP and my mental health's a bit wobbly. The public's just not going to be very, very sympathetic. I think if more of them talked about it though, they would be. I think that the MPs as a whole, I think a new generation of MP has to come in and be more open about this stuff.

• 29:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think the public can be sympathetic for a bit, but then as soon as something goes wrong, they'll be pretty angry again.

• 29:46Alastair Campbell?

  All right, well, I'm not happy, no, let's take a break.

• 29:48Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  The Great Game, strategic struggle between Britain and Russia.

• 30:08Speaker 03

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

• 30:15Speaker 04

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• 30:17Speaker 05

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• 30:20Speaker 02

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• 30:33Speaker 06

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• 30:35Speaker 02

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• 31:36Alastair Campbell?

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

• 31:38Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 31:40Alastair Campbell?

  And before we get on to discuss Israel, Iran and Mexico, just to alert listeners to the fact that the Kwasi Kwarteng interview on The Rest Is Politics leading is out. Part one was out last week, part two is out now, and it is quite a listen. I was really quite taken aback by how many OMG messages I got yesterday from people.

• 32:00Rory Stewart?

  It was astonishing, wasn't it? I mean, you know, on the one hand, the big story is this is the guy that crashed the economy. And how do you, just kind of as a psychological... Fact, deal with the fact that you have crashed the economy, totally destroyed your reputation, blown up your, you know, he'll be remembered forever in this this. But there's also an amazing story about the child of Ghanaian immigrants with a brain the size of a supercomputer, rising effortlessly up through the British establishment, becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer. There's a man who is very, very fluent, very historically informed, but also, I think, incredibly strangely naive in his endorsement of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss and Brexit. And what did you think, thinking about it?

• 32:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I thought, I thought when David Gort was standing in view, I thought his use of the word glib. I thought there was something very glib about the interview. He kept laughing at points when we were trying to talk about, you know, the effect on people and so forth. And I found the most astonishing thing was essentially that sense he gave of standing at the dispatch box, kind of knowing that it was all a bit nuts. Anyway, for those who haven't listened, here's a clip.

• 33:08Alastair Campbell?

  When you were making that statement, standing at the dispatch box, was there part of you feeling, this is nuts?

• 33:14Speaker 08

  It was kind of, at the end, I just thought, hmm, let's see. That was what I would, because I just thought.

• 33:20Alastair Campbell?

  And what were you, what vibe were you getting from across, from Labour and from behind you?

• 33:24Speaker 08

  It was kind of, they were kind of quite surprised. I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was a real, and again, it was the sort of style that we, you know, it was a very, very bold statement and people were like, really? Wow. Oh, God. That was the reaction.

• 33:38Rory Stewart?

  But why didn't you, why didn't Sir, I'm being a bit mean here, but, but you knew Liz Truss very well and I knew her very well. Why couldn't you see what I could see very clearly in 2016, which was that she was silly? She wasn't a serious person.

• 33:49Speaker 08

  Well, look, I think, I think, I don't agree with that. There were definitely.

• 33:51Alastair Campbell?

  Did you agree with the unsuited to be Prime Minister?

• 33:53Speaker 08

  I don't think she had the right temperament for it. You know, when, when things, and things do go very badly wrong, you need to keep an even, an even temper. And what I've learnt is temperament is probably the most important thing. It's more important than, almost than experience, actually.

• 34:12Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, that's Quasi. What about Bibi?

• 34:15Rory Stewart?

  Well, okay, so there are two things on Israel. One of them is some splits within the Israeli Cabinet, which we can talk to. The second thing is that the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court has now issued an indictment against the Hamas dealership, but also against Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, and the Defence Minister. This is big news. So just very quickly on that, to remind people, people want a bit more detail on this. The prosecutor, Karim Khan, is British. And something I think we should be really proud of in Britain, actually. He's a really serious, thoughtful, pretty much by-the-book lawyer, absolutely follows the evidence where it led. I think, first thing to understand, he won't have done this without an incredible amount of

• 34:58Rory Stewart?

  research and work. And he also will have been calling in a lot of other people, people that you and I know actually have been in consulting with him, looking at this evidence with him, documents with him, making sure this is all squared away. So he will have put forward something that he's pretty confident about. It's now going to go forward to another panel of judges, but the chances are overwhelmingly that they will approve that it moves forward. It's a prima facie case for investigation. We studied the ICJ ruling on genocide earlier, and at the time we explained the difference between the International Court of Justice, which did the genocide ruling, and this thing, which is the ICC, International Criminal Court. It's a court which Israel is not a signatory to.

• 35:35Alastair Campbell?

  And nor is the US.

• 35:36Rory Stewart?

  And nor is the US.

• 35:37Alastair Campbell?

  We are.

• 35:37Rory Stewart?

  But 123 countries are, a whole of the European Union is, Britain is. And this means that if the Israeli Prime Minister or the Defence Minister were to visit our countries, we are under an immediate obligation to arrest them and deliver them to the International Criminal Court. This will mean that they will be unable to visit most of the countries in the developed world now.

• 35:59Alastair Campbell?

  It was, I don't know if you saw Karim Khan's presentation, he had two of his colleagues behind him. For those who haven't seen it, we should put the photo in the newsletter, because they they really looked brutally serious. It looked like the most terrifying episode of The Apprentice that there has ever been. And I think what the attack upon him, and it's been quite personal. From Israel and from Netanyahu in particular, essentially is how dare you imply moral equivalence between us and the genocidal terrorists of Hamas. And of course, what he is doing is, having been asked to do it, is taking two sides from essentially the same set of events, but it is not moral equivalence, because he's

• 36:44Alastair Campbell?

  not saying they're charged, he wants to charge them with the same things, the different things. So, for example, the Hamas leadership, he wants to charge them with crimes against humanity, including rape and other sexual offences used as instruments of war. With Israel, he wants them charged with using starvation against the civilian population as an instrument of war. These are different things. And, you know, the point you're making, though, about what happens in these, we're seeing this, this is a consequence of populism undermining the institutions which hold them to account. I think the difficulty with having put the two together in the same presentation is it did give the Israelis that opening, and Hamas, they both said the same thing, how

• 37:28Alastair Campbell?

  dare you put us in with them. And, and that has led, within the Israeli context, I think possibly to this, for the short term, helping Netanyahu's political situation.

• 37:39Rory Stewart?

  And what would, what would happen if he'd, could he have just sort of done it on the same day but split it into two indictments?

• 37:45Alastair Campbell?

  I think he could have done that, or he could have actually split them up time-wise, but then that would have been very, very difficult. He probably just thought, look, I'm, I'm looking at both at the same time, therefore I'm going to present the case at the same time. And as you say, it's then up to a panel of judges, they're not judges, these people, they're prosecutors, advised by a panel. I mean, you couldn't, you really couldn't make it up that Amal Clooney is, is part of it and Helena Kennedy, and so these are people we know who have clear, you know, they're serious legal people, that's the point.

• 38:13Rory Stewart?

  And, and they've decided this prime face evidence. Now, this doesn't mean that these people are guilty, remember.

• 38:18Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, absolutely.

• 38:19Rory Stewart?

  What it's saying is that the prosecutor thinks that there's a case to be looked at.

• 38:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 38:22Rory Stewart?

  Evidence to be heard and a court should rule.

• 38:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and that nobody should be above the law.

• 38:26Rory Stewart?

  Now, another thing is, so firstly, defending international institutions, International Criminal Court, something we've been talking about since the nineteen 1930s, finally managed to set up a great dream since Nuremberg. So we should be supporting it. It's a great symbol of international law. It's outrageous that the Republican Party is talking about taking sanctions against the International Criminal Court. This is a crazy thing to do.

• 38:48Alastair Campbell?

  Biden has also been critical of this of this judgment. And Andrew Mitchell, speaking for the British government, a little divide opened up yesterday between the Conservatives and Labour because Andrew Mitchell was pretty a bit equivocal and just disappointing and unhelpful and so forth was was David Lammy did a very, very strong, you know, do we believe in international law, don't we? So I think there's a that the politics are tough on this.

• 39:12Rory Stewart?

  Now, remember that all Israel needs to do, because there's something called coprimaritarity, is to start its own independent investigation. If it does, this whole thing falls aside. Happened many, many times before, happened in El Salvador, happened elsewhere. If Israel is prepared to say, listen, we are completely innocent, but we're starting an internal Israeli process, using Israeli law to investigate whether or not we are guilty of these things, the ICC will step aside. That's all that needs to happen.

• 39:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Now, the other big news out of Israel in the last few days was Benny Gantz, who is not naturally a friend of Netanyahu's, but is part of the war cabinet.

• 39:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and just to explain, so he general pretty much represented what's left of the kind of centre centre right, I suppose, in Israeli politics now. There's not much of a left left in Israeli politics, who only came into the cabinet following the October massacres in Gaza and now saying, yes, that he wants to see a post-war reconstruction plan.

• 40:07Alastair Campbell?

  If unless Netanyahu starts to focus upon the day after and what's what what governance for Gaza will exist post any military operation, then he's going to pull the plug.

• 40:18Rory Stewart?

  And that's quite an admission that seven months in, he's implying that the Prime Minister is simply not focusing at all.

• 40:24Alastair Campbell?

  Well, if you follow the Israeli media, particularly those parts of the media still critical of Netanyahu, there seems to be a sort of drumbeat from the military saying they they don't know what the long term strategy is.

• 40:33Rory Stewart?

  It's inconceivable what the strategy is, but it just doesn't make sense. I mean, I was talking to some senior special forces officers who were saying if they were teaching in staff college and a student had presented this military plan that Netanyahu is doing in Gaza, they would have failed the course. It doesn't make any sense. I mean, it's not getting the hostages back. It's completely failed in terms of getting hostages back. It's not eliminating Hamas and making a positive comeback. I mean, what is it doing? What's the point of it?

• 41:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's, it, it, no, it's eliminated parts of Hamas. Other parts of Hamas have simply moved. So now having done the north, they've now focused on the south and now they're popping up again in the, in the north. And it goes, this is what a lot of people said. You, you can't sort of obliterate an ideology. But I think that the, the other thing that's, that's coming out of the States is, and I think this must be what Jake Sullivan, Biden's security advisor and Antony Blinken have been trying to get across to them. There's so many lessons, we talked in the, the discussion about infected blood, the whole thing about lessons learned, but there's so much kind of work done on post-conflict resolution, learning from past mistakes. You go through Somalia, ninety-two, Haiti, ninety-four, Bosnia, Kosovo,

• 41:41Alastair Campbell?

  Afghanistan, Iraq, two thousand and three. And it's the, the, the Americans have, I think, have been trying to get them to focus on some of these questions. And Netanyahu is so fixated upon, we are going to eliminate Hamas. It's almost as if to admit there is to be that discussion is to accept that that battle is already won, when he's of course saying it's not.

• 42:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. I mean, even with seven months of preparation, post-conflict reconstruction tends to go wrong. I mean, the, the places where it's gone right, Bosnia and Kosovo are the exceptions. Iraq and Afghanistan are catastrophes. Haiti has been a catastrophe, right? So the chances are it's going to be a catastrophe. But you need to begin by working out what needs to be done. The entire infrastructure of Gaza needs to be rebuilt, the entire water supply, the electricity, the buildings. I mean, you're talking about a hundred billion dollars and upwards worth of investment would need to go into rebuilding. You'd need to work out how you rebuild every hospital, every school, how you get municipal services going. What is the interim government? Is it presumably Israel's not interested in it being a Hamas government, but. How's the Palestinian Authority going to operate?

• 42:44Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but then this is why it goes back to politics in the end, because the hard right that Netanyahu is dependent on, Ben-Gavir and Smotrich, they see no role for the Palestinian Authority. The Americans are absolutely clear that there's got to be some sort of international operation in there, but it is going to have to include elements of the current Palestinian Authority. And so these are huge questions, but it strikes me that for his own internal political difficulties, Netanyahu feels unable properly to confront, and what I think Gantz is doing is basically calling time on that approach. But even because of Yehud Galat, the Defence Minister is also part of this ICC case that's been put forward by the prosecution. This is what I meant when I said that I think for short term, this may have helped Netanyahu

• 43:27Alastair Campbell?

  because this has become the focus and it's caused so much anger amongst the Israeli cabinet.

• 43:31Rory Stewart?

  So Iran.

• 43:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:33Rory Stewart?

  Well, Iran, really big news since the last pod. Ibrahim Raisi, President of Iran that we've talked about a great deal, who was a cleric, who was seen a bit in line of succession, potential future Supreme Leader, central to the regime really since the 1980s, was on his way back from a visit in Azerbaijan and his helicopter crashed. First very striking thing is the incredible self-discipline of the media in Iran, because Iran is absolutely the centre for conspiracy theories. So what you would expect to happen immediately is people suggesting that Israel took down the helicopter or someone else took down the helicopter, but they actually from the very beginning played it very straight. This is weather, this is spare parts, just went wrong and sanctions meant we couldn't fix the helicopter.

• 44:16Rory Stewart?

  There's now going to be a period of mourning and then there's going to be an election, which adds really in significant terms to our year of elections. We had these parliamentary elections in Iran just passed where we talked about very, very low turnout.

• 44:29Alastair Campbell?

  Lowest ever, I think.

• 44:30Rory Stewart?

  And it's not, you'll hear people out there saying, doesn't really matter what happens. That's not true. Of course, it's right that whoever comes like through is likely to be from the more conservative side, but we've seen huge differences between people like Ahmadinejad, who you remember, and Ibrahim Raisi. And within these conservative factions, their connections, the revolutionary guard or not, Connections to Supreme Leader or not, their views on sanctions, their views on the West, their views on Israel, their views on Syria. All of these things can change. And even though the president no longer controls everything, because foreign policy is now run by this Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Supreme Leader seems to be more and more involved in domestic stuff. I think it's going to be really critical and really worth watching. And thank goodness, thank goodness, at least as far as we can tell,

• 45:15Rory Stewart?

  it wasn't some other state that blew up that helicopter. Otherwise, we really would be in in all hell.

• 45:20Alastair Campbell?

  It was it was interesting to see who who was first out of the traps to express condolences. It was Russia, China, Modi, Turkey. A couple of days later, Charles Michel from the European, on behalf of the European Union.

• 45:34Rory Stewart?

  Well, we should have expressed condolences immediately.

• 45:36Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure, I I I'm.

• 45:37Rory Stewart?

  I mean, you don't you think we should express condolences immediately?

• 45:40Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not even sure that we did at any level. And I'm I'm surprised that didn't fuel the.

• 45:46Rory Stewart?

  I think that's a bit odd. I would have thought however much.

• 45:48Alastair Campbell?

  It was very, I think in the first twenty four hours, there was nothing from American.

• 45:49Rory Stewart?

  However, much you dislike your enemy, when somebody's killed in a helicopter crash, you probably want to come out and express condolences to their family immediately, don't you?

• 45:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think the Americans may have put that in a very, very bland statement, but the first thing I saw from a UK perspective was your friend Tom Tugendhat, the security minister, quote tweeting Charles Michel. Some of the lies that Raisi's regime has murdered thousands at home, targeted people here in Britain and across Europe, I will not mourn him. Not that diplomatic. But I I think the other thing to to say to people is that president, in all these elections, we talk about this year, when we talk about president, we're usually talking about the person right at the top. But of course, in Iran, the person right at the top is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. But this guy was very powerful, was a hardliner,

• 46:38Alastair Campbell?

  helpfully described by most of the tabloid media around the world as the butcher of Tehran because of he was he authorized a lot of the killings of protesters in the past and including the recent protests over the the killing of a young woman. So now I think you're absolutely right that they understood straight away, particularly after the recent skirmish in Damascus and the response that they did to that, which then they clearly wanted to draw a line. They realized straight away this could escalate very, very, very quickly. We do not want it to. But now they will be wanting to use this election coming up. To cement the support that they have. There was lots of stuff. It's very, very hard to find out. I mean, you know, it's so difficult to cover these places, but lots of people saying that on social media,

• 47:20Alastair Campbell?

  insofar as before it was taken down, there was lots of celebration. So, you know, people celebrating the death in parts of, parts of Iran. But yeah, I mean, you couldn't, honestly, it's just like, and the scene, did you see the scenes of where the helicopter came down? You sort of wonder how, they were so remote and these Red Crescent people sort of struggling to get up there.

• 47:40Rory Stewart?

  I walked through those areas for, I, I spent three months walking through Azerbaijan, Khari, on the Iranian, Azerbaijani border. And it's a very odd territory because it's not just very mountainous, very remote, high altitude, it's also at odds with the regime often because it's predominantly Sunni, not Shia, predominantly Azeri Turk, not Persian in cultural language. It's a scenario which Saddam tried to play with and poor people over on. Anyway, I think we should really lean into this. The other one I think we were gonna do, but maybe we can do in question time is the Mexico elections coming. And, and we can have a first go. Am I asking you what you think about it? Maybe we can have another snap at it when the election actually happens.

• 48:19Alastair Campbell?

  Cool. Let's do Mexico in question time tomorrow.

• 48:21Rory Stewart?

  Great. Look forward to it. Thanks again. Bye bye.