29. Heatwaves, semiconductors, and Johnson's return?

It's the hottest day of the year so far, but Rory and Alastair are still managing to disagree fairly agreeably! Tune in to hear them talk heatwaves, climate change, leadership debates, food shortages, semiconductors, Thatcher and taxation, China, Joe Biden, Boris Johnson's return, and more. Plus, stay tuned for a special guest episode later this week too... Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve, 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/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Hello and welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:49Rory Stewart?

  We're recording this episode on the hottest day of the year, but hopefully we'll still be able to disagree fairly agreeably all the same. How are you anyway, Alistair? What are we going to kick off with?

• 1:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think we have to kick off with the heat. It is, I know, I mean, I'm getting really bored with talking about how hot it is, but it is bloody hot. I'm actually sitting in a very, very hot and steamy office somewhere in SW1.

• 2:15Alastair Campbell?

  I also, just on heatwaves, Rory, I read an extraordinary piece. As you know, I'm quite big on the mental health agenda. I know you are too. And I read a piece on the conversation by a couple of professors, one from Oxford, Lawrence Wainwright, and one from Zurich, Eileen Neumann. And it had some horrific stats about the impact of heatwaves on people's mental health. Including, for example, every 1% rise in monthly average temperature leads to a 2.2% rise in mental health deaths. And the other thing, as you know, my brother had schizophrenia, spent a lifetime on antipsychotics. And the other thing is that antipsychotics are very dependent, lithium is the same for bipolar, they're very dependent upon the body temperature.

• 2:59Alastair Campbell?

  And one of the side effects of antipsychotics is that people, it decreases your thirst. So it stops you feeling the need to drink. So it was just a fascinating, you know, I think we all sort of see the stuff of, you know, people frying eggs on the pavement and are we going to, is the planet going to self-destruct and all that. But then you just realise that even something like mental health has this sort of, you know, pretty stunning impact of the current heatwave.

• 3:25Rory Stewart?

  So one of the things, I've just been out on the west coast of America and one of the reasons I'm sounding a little croaky is I think I've been travelling for something like 32 hours with two, two small children. I just, just, just basically got off my last easy jet plane and into this conversation. But one of the things that's very striking there is that essentially there is now a drought stretching from Colorado to California. And California produces.

• 3:52Rory Stewart?

  About half the fruit and vegetables in the United States. And of course, we're seeing the same in the Horn of Africa, we're seeing the same in Italy. And I think this is probably the first time that we're really seeing very, very clearly the way that climate change is going to feed into economic recession and feed into problems of supply chains. I think this is the year where that's really going to become most obvious.

• 4:16Alastair Campbell?

  And do you know what, I don't know if you were able in your travels to catch up with the Conservative leadership debate last night, but it's just extraordinary that the whole debate was on climate change. Well, it wasn't really a debate about climate change, it was how do we best avoid having to talk about climate change? And I mean, there is such a kind of gap, it seems to me, between the world as it is and the problems that we face and the way that politics is facing up to them. And I mean, how has climate change become just another sort of issue of polarisation, where if you're very right wing, you basically say it doesn't really exist?

• 4:52Rory Stewart?

  So I think that's an extraordinary question. I mean, and I think that started in the United States, and one of the problems is the way in which right wing discourse imitates in some strange way what happens in America. But it's also remarkable how quickly it's happened in British politics, because whatever you think of David Cameron, Theresa May, and actually Boris Johnson, I have basically nothing good to say about Boris Johnson, but he was at least interested in the environment, something that is one of the few things that he actually has consistently cared about. And it was so central to what David Cameron was trying to do, was to try to lean in, in his case, to international development, but also into climate. And of course, it was Theresa May who set this target, and the Conservatives tried to

• 5:35Rory Stewart?

  be proud of that target, recently as 2019. So it's very dramatic how quickly that's changed. And of course, one of the big reasons it's changed, and I was feeling this in the United States, where this is at a much more extreme level, is because what's happened with Russia, Ukraine, and the problems with people's fuel and energy bills.

• 5:57Rory Stewart?

  Has really made people feel the economic consequence of the transition, the energy transition in a way that they hadn't before. And I think we're just seeing the very beginning of this. I think there is now an enormous political opportunity for politicians all over the world to campaign against environmental policies because increasingly ordinary people are going to be feeling the pain in their pockets.

• 6:20Alastair Campbell?

  But that says to me that the real political leadership then is about confronting people with those realities. And I mean, I thought, I find this whole Kemi Badenoch thing, I find it really baffling because I've now watched her very closely in two of these debates. I'll be honest, I didn't know that much about her beforehand beyond what I'd read. I cannot, if there is a sort of superlative for underwhelmed, that is what she inspires in me. I see literally nothing that makes me think this person is a leader. And yet I then look at the sort of public polls and they say basically they thought that she and Liz Truss were the weakest of the five.

• 7:03Alastair Campbell?

  And then I look at the Conservative Home stuff and all these kind of right wing, you know, instant surveys that are done. She seems to be the darling of the right. And as you said last week, Michael Gove in there running her campaign. But she really said, you know, we can't, she basically said, I mean, I'm slightly, I hope I'm not overly misrepresenting this, but she basically said, we can't, we can't really tackle climate change because it's going to cost people and we've got a cost of living crisis. I mean, it's the sort of looking at the short term without any fixation on the, on the long term is the worst sort of leadership.

• 7:35Rory Stewart?

  And, and most of the candidates, we're now talking about, about the ITV debate. Most of those candidates were very, very close to saying that, weren't they?

• 7:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. And that's because, and that's because it's the member, that's what the members think. I mean, there's a survey in The Times today, it's number 10 of the issues that they think the Tory leader should be tackling.

• 7:52Rory Stewart?

  Not just the members, unfortunately. I think the problem is that the Russia-Ukraine situation has demonstrated to people what the energy transition is going to feel like. I, I, I think I've said before, my really starkest memory of this is when I was running to be Mayor of London and a very senior member of the cab drivers' union said to me, I can tell you how you're going to win this election. And I said, oh, brilliant. How are we going to win the election? He said, what you've got to do is you've got to go to out of London and point out to people that Sadiq Khan's congestion charge is going to cost them sixty five pounds per family per week to run their old car and you'll win this election. Now, obviously, I wasn't prepared to do that, but I glimpsed there why people do this.

• 8:37Rory Stewart?

  If you really believe this is what's going to win your election, of course, one of the things he was pointing to here, and I think this is something that we should all be more self-reflective about, is that the cost of the climate transition falls very, very heavily on low-income households. Because often we're paying for it by putting levies on people's fuel bills. We're not paying for it out of general taxation. It's not, it's not that the wealthy, as, as should be the case with income tax, are paying higher rates of tax towards the energy transition. You're hitting the very poorest because you're taxing their cars, you're taxing their fuel bills, you're taxing them at the pump.

• 9:11Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, what, just on your point about the drought in America, what did, what sense did you get about, because the other debate that is just not happening here, it seems to me, is the debate about future food security, which we've talked about once or twice. But with all that's going on in Ukraine, with the great, the grain problems that are now being very successfully exploited by Putin, I would argue, he is deliberately now kind of creating food supply problems, famine problems in different parts of the world. What sense did you get of, of whether that is just going to become another sort of Republican Democrat polarised debate about, you know, it's woke to say that we're going to, you know, run out of food if we're not careful?

• 9:52Rory Stewart?

  What, what struck me in the United States is that they're in a very different position to Europe, and I'd forgotten this, that, of course, they are much more self-sufficient than we are with all their problems. They, you know, Britain or Finland, for example, I was talking to a Finn, I think Finland grows about fifty percent of its own food, Britain probably about sixty percent. And of course, the United States can insulate itself if it wants. It is entirely energy self-sufficient if it wants to be, it's entirely food self-sufficient once, but it's just a very, very, very big country. And we're not in that situation in Europe. And I think one of the reasons why an asymmetry, or we're going to end up with a different long-term reaction to Russia-Ukraine, and almost certainly a very, very different

• 10:34Rory Stewart?

  reaction to what would happen if China invaded Taiwan, is that The United States is able much more confidently to say, fine, we'll build our own semiconductor chips, we'll grow our own food, we'll have our own fuel. They can become protectionist with less extreme costs than Europe can.

• 10:50Alastair Campbell?

  They're very worried about the semiconductor situation, though. I mean, you've got this situation where they're desperately trying to get, they've got the Taiwanese, I think, and the Japanese on board for this chip four thing that they're trying to get going. But they're still sort of working on the South Koreans. And I think I'm right in saying America's only got 10% of the semiconductor production market, Chinese way ahead, Taiwan not far behind. And I hadn't quite realised until recently, Biden actually signed an executive order recently with a big review of the policy on this. I hadn't quite realised how central it is to their kind of growth strategy because of AI and quantum computers and all this stuff.

• 11:34Rory Stewart?

  Honestly, I mean, just to take listeners back to the fundamentals, as we've said in the podcast before, Taiwan produces 50% of the world's semiconductor chips. But more importantly, Taiwan produces 92% of the world's advanced semiconductor chips. And we haven't, nobody, I mean, this is very, very weird. Nobody in the United States or Europe has actually begun to really think through the worst case scenario. So if there's a chance, we don't know what that chance is, but let's say 20, 30% chance that Xi Jinping decides that in the next five years, he wants to go after Taiwan. And by doing so, we end up sanctions against them, counter sanctions, and we end up cut off from those chips. The

• 12:19Rory Stewart?

  consequence is beyond imagining. The advanced semiconductor chips are obviously the things that you need to run advanced military equipment, advanced jets. But ordinary semiconductor chips will also become in very short supply. Now, the US is going to be in a better position again than Europe on this. I cannot begin to tell you how bad it will be because, let's say 50% of the world's semiconductor chips, ordinary ones, are suddenly removed from production.

• 12:48Rory Stewart?

  There will be a frenzied bidding war, which will make the bidding war about vaccines seem tiny. The rich countries will try to buy every last semiconductor chip in the world. And places like Africa, basically their telephones will collapse.

• 13:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:03Rory Stewart?

  Their distribution systems will collapse. So you think about it, everything now depends on semiconductor chips. Every supermarket, the barcode reader depends on semiconductor chips, the just-in-time delivery systems depend on semiconductor chips. Our vulnerability to this is extraordinary. We've created a world in which we have created an almost complete dependence on these things to run our basic life support systems.

• 13:24Alastair Campbell?

  And it is hitting all of those American industries as well, which is why they're worried about it. But again, it underlines just the sort of the paucity of the debate in this Conservative Party leadership. I mean, they're all having a debate about the economy that it's the same debate that we had with Margaret Thatcher was about. It's about taxing, it's about cutting taxes, it's about a bit of spending here and there. None of them have anything that you could define as a strategy for growth, none of them that I can see.

• 13:47Rory Stewart?

  So actually, yes, so very interesting watching that debate. One of the things that I think was going on there, I don't know what you felt about this, is that basically they're trying to paint Rishi Sunak as the continuity Boris Johnson candidate, they're trying to land on him. And that's including people like Liz Truss, who've been sitting in the cabinet with him for the last two and a half years. But the whole tone of that debate was to try to make Rishi defend what the government was doing. And he did a reasonable job, but the risk is he ends up sounding like a sort of boring status quo, well, we've got to be thoughtful. And he sounds like the Treasury man, doesn't he? And Liz Truss is obviously channeling a radical pseudo Thatcherite view.

• 14:30Alastair Campbell?

  With the bow, with the little bow on the first debate.

• 14:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and the first debate, she literally dressed as Mrs Thatcher, which was very peculiar, like sort of Barbie doll of Mrs Thatcher. But I think there will, there's something going on there, which I don't know whether you will have picked up as much as I do as somebody who was a Conservative, that what Liz Truss is saying will be deeply, deeply popular with many, many Conservative voters. It's not that... They necessarily have very detailed views on where the deficit or debt is, or even very detailed views on what the drivers of inflation are. But their basic belief is that you need to deregulate, you need to cut taxes and you need to generate growth. So what she's doing is she's presenting herself as that person and she's presenting

• 15:15Rory Stewart?

  Rishi as the, as the sort of wet consensus, no action person.

• 15:22Alastair Campbell?

  Just so listeners aren't confused by anything that may have happened since we recorded this, we are Monday evening, one of them is going to drop out tonight. My money's on Tom Tugendhat though, I think actually it should be frankly, any one of them. And we are basically digesting the fact that so bad have these debates been for the Conservative Party that the powers that be have basically pulled the plug on them and told them they can't debate anymore with any cameras there, which now that says to me, Roy, what is probably the least democratic way of choosing a prime minister anyway, has now become profoundly more undemocratic, when you can't even have a debate on TV.

• 15:59Rory Stewart?

  And those debates were pretty depressing. I mean, you can see why you don't want a third in a way. I mean, what new are we going to learn? There's not much truth telling going on, is there? I mean, when people, when people were asked about Brexit, basically, nobody mentioned Northern Ireland, the Northern Ireland Protocol. That's a very, very odd thing, isn't it?

• 16:20Alastair Campbell?

  Or they, they, they talk about these fantasy economics figures without mentioning that the, you know, it's taken forty, four percent out of our GDP. And I think your point about Sunak though, I think Sunak, look, I'm not a fan of Rishi Sunak at all, but I, I think of the five of them, he's the one who's coming over as kind of, you know, a bit of a grown up. He's trying to give some, he's trying to sort of give some sort of message that's rooted in the real world. Liz Truss strikes me as somebody, as you say, she's channeling Thatcher, she's speaking, even the thing about the question about the pay rise for the public sector, it was very kind of, you know, don't be irresponsible. It was a message that they will want to hear. I think that Tom Tugendhat, I've got to be honest, I found very disappointing.

• 17:05Alastair Campbell?

  Somebody in the swimming pool yesterday, yesterday said to me, Rory, that he was a poor man's Rory Stewart. I don't know whether you're going to take that well or badly.

• 17:13Rory Stewart?

  Just after you told me he's been disappointing.

• 17:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that was, that's me say that, the other person didn't necessarily. But I think what they meant by that was that he was the sort of the guy who was coming out of nowhere, but you actually came out of nowhere and made a bit of an impact. I don't feel he's made any impact whatsoever.

• 17:30Rory Stewart?

  One of the interesting things what he will have been thinking about, and I'm fond of him. But I think he concluded that I was too outspoken and too clear. So, for example, if I had been answering on Brexit, I would have said front and centre. This attempt to rewrite the Northern Ireland Protocol is a disgrace.

• 17:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Rory Stewart?

  And he didn't do that. He's obviously, he's obviously decided that he needs to try. He's been quite practical. He's decided he needs to win over the Conservative MPs and the party members. And to do that, he's not prepared to go out on a limb on any of those things, really. He's also, and I think the other difference, me and him, I was narcissistic me to think about this. But I was more on the Rishi side. I was more on the sound money side. I was trying to say that I wouldn't cut taxes. I didn't think the economy allowed us to cut taxes. In fact, I wanted to increase spending on public services. Tom has very much been going for more cuts, cuts to national insurance, cuts to fuel duty.

• 18:29Rory Stewart?

  And that worries me a bit because it, I mean, I think the big difference, they're sounding Thatcherite. But if I was going to be unfair, I would say that the, the point about Mrs Thatcher is that, yes, she believed very much in cutting taxes and she believed very much in deregulation. But she also believed in sound money. She wasn't trying to do it in, at a moment where you've got a debt to GDP ratio of about a hundred percent.

• 18:58Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing, Roy, you've got to say about Margaret Thatcher is that she's sort of spoken big, bold brushstrokes. This lot has been so. Piddling, I mean, you know, and the fact that, just as I don't get the Kemi thing, I don't really get the Penny Mordaunt thing, to be honest. I find this whole sort of shtick of her, you know, being a naval reservist, and there's been quite a lot of stuff about, well, is she really, and has she really served, and all this sort of stuff. And the trans debate, which, I think it's just, like, the trans issues are serious, but the way that it's just become the kind of one thing that they're trying to, every time that Kemi Badenoch speaks, it's almost like she wants to get at, or I've got to get at Penny over

• 19:41Alastair Campbell?

  the trans issue. And I've just found the whole thing so, so depressing. I mean, the idea of one of these five being prime minister as a result of this process, I mean, admittedly, they're replacing the worst prime minister in history, but it's not impossible that they'll be in pretty much the same league quite quickly, with the possible exception of Sunak.

• 19:59Rory Stewart?

  So it's interesting, the tone change, too, looking back at that 2019 debate, where we had the same number of people up. So 2019, it was Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Jeremy Hunt, me, Sajid Javid. One big change, of course, is it's gone from being a bunch of, I would guess, overconfident white men, except for Sajid, to a much more diverse group, but also the nature of the debate has changed. If you watch those two debates, you realise that, I guess, Michael Gove, love him or hate him, is an incredibly hyper-articulate speaker. You know, every one of his one-minute, one-and-a-half-minute interventions were very, very carefully crafted, full of little jokes and references. These debates feel

• 20:42Rory Stewart?

  much less energetic, probably less aggressive. I mean, it doesn't have that kind of energy going on.

• 20:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, last night was aggressive, between Sunak and Truss in particular, I felt very little love lost there. But also, it's the way they, when they get their minute, Rishi suddenly goes into a sort of, I'm going to push my hands out in front, and I'm going to, I'm going to really be energetic, I'm going to look straight at the camera. Liz Truss has the most bizarre hand movements, so the hands sort of move, they can't move separate from each other. Badenoch, she's sort of, this, this, this thing about, you know, she couldn't get Her tooth mended for god knows how long it was. You just think, this isn't real, this isn't real. She's constantly talking about flipping burgers and that's, you know, forget overlooking the fact that she worked at one of the richest banks in the world and all this stuff.

• 21:27Alastair Campbell?

  They've all just got their little stories. Tom, if Tom, if Tom Tugendhat says one more time, we need a clean start, we need a clean break, a fresh start. And did you know he'd been in the military, Rory? He'd been in the military, you know? Oh my god, has he been in the military? Honestly, it's just awful.

• 21:42Rory Stewart?

  So, so there's something going on there, isn't there? There's something about backstories.

• 21:46Alastair Campbell?

  I'd like to see a forward story.

• 21:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, look, look at the, anyone on Twitter, look at Rosie Holt's amazing spoof campaign video, which I just think is just beautiful. She, she begins sort of blinking into the camera saying, I'm here on this housing state where my grandmother was born. She was a working class lass and she had her struggles and then she married my grandfather. And then she shows a picture of this incredible upper class guy at the Monocle. And then she says, and I'm sure he had his struggles too.

• 22:18Alastair Campbell?

  You know, Rosie Holt, she gets loads of people abusing her because they really think she is a Tory MP.

• 22:25Rory Stewart?

  It's so close to it, isn't it? She's got the tone so, so right, hasn't she?

• 22:29Alastair Campbell?

  And did you see as well, the other thing, some, the, the, this thing about how these people who are barely known by the public and barely known a lot of them by the, the membership. So, somebody put out, did a survey asking whether people, the, the Conservative members, whether they felt they knew a lot, they knew a good deal about the, the candidate, the contestants. And three of them, I think it was Tugendhat, Badenoch and might have been Morden, can't remember. No, no, it was one of the ones who was Braverman, beg your pardon, Swallow Braverman, before she pulled out. They were on five percent. Five percent of members thought that they knew a reasonable amount about these people. Somebody called Chris Stewart. No relational, and the reason is no relation is because the name was invented.

• 23:14Alastair Campbell?

  There is no MP of that name. There is no contestant of that name, but he was on 6%.

• 23:20Rory Stewart?

  That's good. That's good. I suppose they should invent, invent people more. That's very good. It's a good way of getting at that, isn't it? Um, listen, let's just, just to round off this question on, on the Conservatives. So I think the next stage, obviously, I think everybody presumably is beginning to sense this, is beginning to become a standoff between Rishi Sunak on the one side and a more right wing candidate on the other.

• 23:43Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's going to be Liz Truss.

• 23:44Rory Stewart?

  I thought her performance, I mean, I, you know, I'm not a, not a fan, but I thought her performance on Sunday was much stronger than it had been in the previous debate. She, she, I, I believed her. I, I disagree with her, but I recognized in the way that she was speaking, the kind of person that I worked with in government, and she somehow found a tone to say things that she clearly believes in. And I think she does believe in cutting taxes and I'm sure she will cut taxes and she will deliver in that way. Yeah. So I think she is, she managed in that debate on Sunday night to make herself look like the key standard bearer against Rishi. Do you agree?

• 24:19Alastair Campbell?

  I thi- I think she was certainly stronger than she was in the first debate and she was speaking absolutely directly to the electorate. She was speaking to the members. Every, every little sort of drum that she was beating was aimed at them rather than the public. I don't think she cares about the fact that the public don't like her very much. I thought Penny Mordaunt was weak on both the debates. I think she just comes over as a bit kind of not standing for very much. I think she's trying to sort of be too clever by half in, in saying this is not the place to say what we want to do and set out budgets and so forth. And so I, I think it is coming down to Sunak against Truss. And I, I, you know, you know, the Tory party membership better than I do, but I think there is a very strong, any, any bit of a Sunak thing going on.

• 25:05Rory Stewart?

  So just to finish on this because and to pay a bit of a tribute to Tom Tugendhat because I think he is the guy who deserves huge credit for standing up against Boris Johnson for not being a minister in his government. I think he's been a really impressive. He's made something of being chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee. I mean, one of my experience.

• 25:27Alastair Campbell?

  I agree. I wouldn't disagree with that. I don't think he's been very good as a campaigner in this election.

• 25:31Rory Stewart?

  He was quite good in the first debate, I guess. He had a certain kind of presence and confidence in the first debate.

• 25:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think he got a bit smug in the second one and I think he got too fond of his little one liners. I don't know, it struck me as it just felt like it was all a bit of a game, the whole thing. I could be completely wrong and I may be maligning him unnecessarily, but I wasn't impressed in the second debate. Shall we take a break, Rory? We talked enough about these people.

• 25:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, let's take a break.

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• 28:00Rory Stewart?

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

• 28:03Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And you're doing very well Rory, considering that you've been travelling for god knows how long with two small children.

• 28:09Rory Stewart?

  We'll be pleased to hear. I'm eating a shortbread biscuit to try to keep me going. True Scottish thing. So while I eat my biscuit, Alistair, go on, give us some thoughts on the world.

• 28:19Alastair Campbell?

  Thoughts on the world? First of all, let's just stick with, you were talking about Taiwan and during the break, I was looking at an email. And I think we can see this as kind of live journalism. Dear Mr Campbell and team, I think that means you Rory, I think your name is my team. I'm a journalist at Commonwealth Magazine, known in Taiwan for its in-depth reporting. We are currently working on a short documentary about how the global trend towards populism has manifested itself in Taiwan, both in the failed KMT leadership contender Han Kuo Yoo and certain elements of the incumbent Democratic People's Party. Inspired partly, they're reading the right books, by Moises Naim's recent book, The Revenge of Power, about which, as you know, I'm obsessed.

• 29:02Alastair Campbell?

  We're looking to make this a comparative piece and situate Taiwanese populism in its proper global context. And therefore Rory, he goes on, as an avid listener of your podcast, I know that you both have excellent expertise and relevant first experience with the rise and fall of Boris Johnson. Not only this, but it's clear you have a keen interest in Taiwan and the Taiwan-China issue. We would be honoured if you could join us for a short interview to share some of your insight into these issues. So look Rory, why don't we use this as the press office function? We don't have time to do the interview, but Rory is now going to give you a few words about populism in Taiwan. Go.

• 29:36Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, here we go. So firstly, for listeners who've...

• 29:42Rory Stewart?

  I haven't been following assiduously every second as Moses Naim, who is Alastair Campbell's great hero of the moment, comes up with three Ps, which Alistair will remind us are populism,

• 29:51Alastair Campbell?

  polarization.

• 29:52Rory Stewart?

  post-truth and post-truth. Yeah, populism, polarization and post-truth. And actually, this is really becoming a very interesting framing. I saw the president of Colombia recently, and that was the current president, who's just coming to the end, about to be replaced by a left-wing populist. And that was absolutely what he said to me. He said, the one thing you need to understand about Latin America, he didn't credit Moses Naim or Alastair Campbell, but he produced the three Ps. Populism, polarization, post-truth. And I think that that what's happening in Taiwan is simply must be part of a much, much bigger global phenomenon, because it's obviously no coincidence that it happens in Brazil and India and Poland, and in its own way in Britain and in Trump's America and right up and down Latin America.

• 30:35Alastair Campbell?

  And by the way, Imran Khan, his party had a bit of a big electoral success this week. There was a big regional election, which he did really well in.

• 30:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, we've been warning about, haven't we, on the podcast? So it's one of the things we talk about, that people think that you can simply get rid of these guys and they go away. And this is one of the things that I'm slightly neurotic about with Boris Johnson. You think, and I think this is the best case scenario, that he's going to go off and just try to make some money giving speeches and writing a useless book on William Shakespeare. But I think, I almost said Winston Shakespeare, that's putting his two books together, isn't it? But I think there's a risk, actually, for him, as for all these characters, that they try to fall back on a particular base that believes they've been wrongly treated. You can see him, even in his speech today, we're speaking today on Monday evening, where he's just given this big barnstorming speech.

• 31:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I didn't see it. Did you watch it?

• 31:30Rory Stewart?

  I caught bits of it. I mean, it's him in his full barnstorming kind of rhetorical behaviour. And I think what is interesting is that obviously, we all see on television people being interviewed, and we meet people, I just met someone in Cumbria, who very much felt that Boris Johnson had been badly treated, and he'd been betrayed by his MPs, and he was their guy. And I am very worried that he may try to feed off that narrative and he may try to have that his competitiveness may drive him to try to come back into British politics in the way that Donald Trump and Imran Khan do.

• 32:03Alastair Campbell?

  He may even fancy a new a new party, which would be quite good. It'd be good if it was the right that split with all these parties rather than the progressive left. But I also don't even think, Rory, that the people will however be so last in the TV debate, the ITV debate, Julie Ettingham asked them all to put the raise their hand if they would put Boris Johnson into their cabinet and not one of them would. Now, there will be people who say that's just disloyal and et cetera. But what does it say about this point? They also she asked them whether they would call a general election and they all said no. But they're basically running on a ticket that says we've had a terrible government and a terrible prime minister. And I'm going to change it all. But I don't think I should put myself before the British people. It should only be decided by these

• 32:48Alastair Campbell?

  aging Tory party members.

• 32:50Rory Stewart?

  That's true. Although, as we said, I think in last week's episode, it is remarkable that it's the exception rather than the rule of people actually coming in under a general election. Remember, Gordon Brown came in in the same situation. Gordon Brown taking over from Tony Blair, same thing. Came in midway through.

• 33:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he did come midway through, but he came through with Tony Blair's support. This lot are all now distancing themselves from the guy that very recently they were sitting around the cabinet table laughing at all his jokes and saying that everything he did was wonderful. So listen, just briefly, you've been in the States. What's your what's your sense on where we are in US politics at the moment?

• 33:25Rory Stewart?

  So what one, I think, one statistic that's very interesting, support for Trump amongst Republicans a few months ago was 90%. Shocking that 90% of Republican voters supported Trump. It's now down to 60%, but that's still a very, very big number.

• 33:41Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think this is because of the hearings, which have been pretty horrific for him?

• 33:44Rory Stewart?

  They have been unbelievable, absolutely unbelievable. He, being the narcissist he is, is now saying, trying to disrupt the midterms by threatening to announce that he's going to run as president, which will be actually damaging for the Republicans. So they're begging him not to. And he's trying to what he essentially does is he sits in Florida, as we know, watching television. And his price for not saying that he's going to run again before the midterms is to have all these candidates out there saying nice things about him on television. So he keeps sending them texts saying. You weren't nice enough about me on telly. Maybe I'm going to go out and announce that I'm going to run again before the midterms and then they. So essentially, yeah, he sits there eating burgers, watching Fox News and wants everybody to get out there and defend him.

• 34:29Alastair Campbell?

  Of course, it's a riff. Fox News has been a really malign influence on the planet, I would say.

• 34:34Rory Stewart?

  Yep, I'm with you on that. Okay, now, here's the big thing that I came with. I now think that we are going into a 1970s style global recession. In other words, a decade of lost growth. And I think a lot of things are coming together. One of the things is something we talked about, which is the heat wave. Because actually, climate change is going to cause big, big problems on supply of food. I think the security crisis, obviously in Ukraine, is driving up the cost of fuel. The security tension and food, security tensions with China will drive more and more people to try to onshore. There's going to be more and more protectionism as they disentangle the global economy. And of course, the reason we haven't

• 35:16Rory Stewart?

  had any inflation for 40 years is a large part not to do with the genius of the Bank of England, which is what Rishi Sunak was saying. But it's a great deal to do with the fact that China has been producing incredibly cheap goods. China has basically kept inflation under control. Add to that demographics. Our populations are getting older. Add to that, we're less and less keen on immigration. So we're not bringing in enough young, talented people. So rising cost of production, climate change, older population, not enough young immigrants coming in. And add to that, I think that we're going to go into a world of cyber warfare. And finally.

• 35:51Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, I talked earlier about the heat wave having a deleterious effect on my mental health and the other mental. This is not helping. I'm going to come on to, did you see that the latest growth figures from China were an absolute car crash, 0.4% in the second quarter, which is the lowest since records began in 1992, apart from the 6.9% contraction at the start of COVID. And a lot of that, and they're still doing the COVID, zero COVID strategy, they've still got this massive property slump. Shanghai GDP is down 13.7% year on year.

• 36:31Rory Stewart?

  It's unbelievable.

• 36:32Alastair Campbell?

  And they've got a 5.5% growth target, which they now reckon is impossible.

• 36:39Rory Stewart?

  And of course, the only way in which they have been achieving it is by extraordinary weird bits of financial management, weird bits of debt. I mean, one of the things that I think none of these candidates are grappling with, and no politicians really grappling with, I mean, I saw, I saw quite distinguished Democratic congressmen in states yesterday. They are absolutely.

• 37:01Alastair Campbell?

  You love, you love the distinguished adjective, don't you? You love a distinguished.

• 37:05Rory Stewart?

  Well, I keep referring to being on the podcast with this distinguished former communications director.

• 37:09Alastair Campbell?

  No, you don't. That's a lie.

• 37:13Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, you tell me what the distinguished.

• 37:15Rory Stewart?

  Does it sound better in French? Can I say distinguished? Does that sound better in French?

• 37:18Alastair Campbell?

  Distingue? No, it doesn't really. It doesn't. It sounds elitist. So tell me what this distinguished congressman said.

• 37:24Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so distinguished congressman said, is, of course, their biggest issue is inflation, cost of living. And he says they have to own it, but the problem is, how on earth do they own it if they don't have a solution to it? So owning it means at the moment trying to blame Russia and Ukraine for the cost of living crisis. But all that will do is that will create huge opportunities for any entrepreneurial politician to say, well, in which case we should let Putin have that bit of Ukraine if it's causing this economic crisis, just in the same way as I was saying. Any entrepreneurial politician will take advantage of the cost of trying to do climate transition.

• 38:03Alastair Campbell?

  What was your sense in the States? There's, there's a lot of kind of commentary around Europe, I would say. And I've seen a little bit in America, but you'll have been closer to it, that the idea that Putin is sort of quite happy with where things are at the moment.

• 38:17Rory Stewart?

  I think that the Americans, the American national security establishment remain very convinced that if they can get enough weapons and the right kind of high quality weapons to Ukraine.

• 38:30Rory Stewart?

  Ukraine can push back hard. Now, that may just be that the generals are constitutionally incapable.

• 38:38Rory Stewart?

  Of not being optimistic. So their optimistic story is that Ukraine is better at mobilizing manpower and it's got better equipment and that the sanctions are beginning to hit Russia. Their high tech equipment can't be maintained or replaced.

• 38:54Rory Stewart?

  The United States, the amount they've shipped in there is beyond imagining. People now estimate that they've provided fifty billion dollars worth of assistance to Ukraine.

• 39:03Alastair Campbell?

  But hold on, I thought, I thought Liz Truss was single handedly phasing down Vladimir Putin. I'm shocked that the Americans are also involved.

• 39:10Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's, it's extraordinary, isn't it? Whenever you go to the United States, you suddenly discover that, uh, having believed that Britain was doing everything on its own, that somehow the Americans are spending ten times as much as we are, and they hadn't really noticed that we were doing quite as much. But the, the, um, no, the fifty billion dollars is extraordinary. Fifty billion dollars would be enough in direct cash transfers to lift about half the population of Africa out of extreme poverty this year.

• 39:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:32Rory Stewart?

  I mean, that is a lot of money.

• 39:34Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, no, listen, I, I don't think Joe Biden gets nearly enough credit for what he's been trying to do. He had a very tricky trip to the Middle East. Um, and there was, you know, we talk about the way that the world has changed. To, for, for an American president to go to the Middle East and the Israel Palestine question, yes, he addressed it to some extent, but it was so far down the agenda. His big thing was actually trying to repair some sort of relationship with the Saudis, uh, in order to try and drive down the price of fuel. I mean, we're back to the cost of living.

• 40:03Rory Stewart?

  And, and this, and it's really difficult, isn't it? Because we, since the early nineties, have had a vision that we can, uh, build a coalition of democracies. And of course, we failed to do that. What we've got is a situation in which if the world is getting into great power confrontation, many of the allies that we need are not democracies. And that's going to be very uncomfortable. And it, it also is, is, I think the other thing that the United States is deeply critically aware of at the moment is that they fear they're losing legitimacy, that the world increasingly sees them as, as hypocrites. I mean, it's been very, very traumatic for the Biden administration to see how brutal Pakistan has been in its refusal to join on, well, I think.

• 40:47Rory Stewart?

  Somebody produced statistic that eight out of 10 of the most populous countries in the world refused to back the United States on Russia.

• 40:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. We kid ourselves that the world is united against Russia. It just hasn't happened. I was at Sandhurst Military Academy this week, Rory, with the Army Leadership Centre. I'm sure they'd welcome you there as well. And I was, I was reading later the latest iteration of the, of the Army Leadership Doctrine. And it's very heavy on values, standards, ethics, and integrity. Now, I was very careful not to be too political down there. I'm well aware that you can't really do that when you're with the military. But they had, this document had a wonderful page on what it called toxic leadership, which

• 41:36Alastair Campbell?

  it defined in this way: autocratic, narcissistic, manipulative, intimidating, overly competitive, and discriminating. I am recommending that this book is read by whoever becomes the next Prime Minister.

• 41:50Rory Stewart?

  Well, and I'm with you. I mean, I think, and this is one of the reasons why it's been the soldiers, why it's been Tom Tugendhat and Tobias Elwood and Johnny Mercer, who were quite quick to call out Boris Johnson. I mean, they particularly are incredibly sensitive to this and are most likely to be disgusted by this stuff because it's absolutely driven into people that you follow leaders who you admire for their integrity and their honour. And you don't follow people that you think are...

• 42:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Now, listen, we, we, should we, should we try to close with a few questions? Francesco, Francesco Papalia, I like this one because she takes you to task over something. What do you make of Draghi's attempt at a resignation last week? And what are your more general opinions on Italian politics? And Rory, it's Lake Como, not Kuomo. There is no U after the C, okay?

• 42:38Rory Stewart?

  That's really good. I somehow, I think I got the governor of, governor of New York in there, didn't I? That's what's going on there, yeah.

• 42:44Alastair Campbell?

  So Lake Como, yeah. But it was fascinating. There's old Draghi. He gets, no pun intended, dragged in to be Prime Minister of a sort of, you know, a kind of managerial, technocratic government. He does a pretty good job. Italy's reputation seems to be growing. And then he has this, because we're back to the thing about the populist virus, the five star movement... They they they won't support him on a major part thing that he's trying to do. And he goes to the president and says, I'm resigning. The president says, no, you're not.

• 43:14Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary, isn't it? It's no, it's mesmerizing. Well, thank you all so much for listening and we've got a very special guest coming in. So we're going to who we find out more about shortly. So we're going to finish this episode, but thank you so much. And it's goodbye from me, Rory Stewart.

• 43:28Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. See you soon.

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