104. Ukraine: one year on, the fall of Nicola Sturgeon, and Sunak's biggest gamble

Who will be Nicola Sturgeon's successor as First Minister of Scotland? What does the future hold for Russia's relationship with the West? Is Boris Johnson staging a comeback? Alastair and Rory look at these topics, plus the role of biodiversity in ecological policy, the Northern Ireland protocol, China's role in bringing peace to Ukraine, and how relevant a politician's religious views are to their campaign. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, 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. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen 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/rustaspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustaspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. And looks like you're back in London, right?

• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

  And so are you. And yet we're still not able to get in the same room.

• 1:54Rory Stewart?

  It's because you don't believe my hand luggage only rushed through Heathrow Airport. You didn't think I'd make it here on time.

• 2:00Alastair Campbell?

  I know. And I was very, very worried about not being able to get to Millwall against Burnley tonight. By the way, I'd probably get you a ticket, Rory, if you fancied it.

• 2:08Rory Stewart?

  That's really, really kind of. Apparently Millwall, very welcoming, friendly crowd.

• 2:12Alastair Campbell?

  They love old Etonias. They sing about them all the time.

• 2:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's gonna be great. What do you want to talk about this week?

• 2:18Alastair Campbell?

  Well, we've got loads to talk about, haven't we? I mean, I, you and I were both away last week when Nicola Sturgeon announced she was stepping down. And I think quite a lot of our listeners thought we should have done an emergency podcast. We should explain, one, I was recovering from my hypothermic attack and you were trying to have a few days off. So I think we've both got an excuse, but we're obviously going to talk about the aftermath in Scotland of Nicola Sturgeon announcing that. I think we also should talk about the protocol and the politics around that. And I think obviously with the first year anniversary of Putin's invasion of Ukraine, I tortured myself this morning by watching his speech.

• 2:55Rory Stewart?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:56Alastair Campbell?

  Which was pretty grim, to be absolutely frank. And then I know you also want to talk about biodiversity, so I've been mugging up on that as well.

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  Very, very good. Okay. So what do you want to start with? Start with Scotland or start with Ukraine?

• 3:08Alastair Campbell?

  I think start with Scotland. What did you make of it?

• 3:10Rory Stewart?

  Again, my daft role as summariser for the listeners in the Leeward Islands. Nicola Sturgeon stepped down. So she's been First Minister of Scotland for over eight years, which is the longest tenure of anyone. Her predecessor, Alex Salmond, did seven years. She came in after the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, which is when Alex Salmond stepped down. And she has been a really dominating figure in Scottish politics. And so much so that now that she's stepped down unexpectedly, and maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the things she said in her resignation speech. Most people, I think, even the keen listeners on this show are going to struggle to know the people that are standing up as her potential successors, unless they follow Scottish politics very, very closely.

• 3:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And one of them, who I, I think when I was asked on the Rest is Politics WhatsApp group, who do you think will take over? I think I did say Kate Forbes. But I think she's kind of crashing and burning.

• 4:06Rory Stewart?

  Just a little bit on Kate Formsthen. So she's fascinating. She's from a wee free background, so Free Church Scotland. Her father did medical work in India, I'm guessing was a medical missionary in India. She went to school in India as a young person, and then again, I think later on in life, and also went to a Gaelic language only school. So very unusual education, both in India and a Gaelic language school. She seems to be incredibly bright, but of course, her religious views have become very, very relevant because the last big push which Nicholas Sturgeon was associated with was to try to get this transgender recognition bill through Scottish Parliament, something we've talked about, which included dropping the age down from 18 to 16, and which was overruled by

• 4:48Rory Stewart?

  the UK government on the grounds that they thought that it was interfering with something it should have been a UK government policy. And she said in interviews that she wouldn't have voted for gay marriage, although she would have accepted a vote on gay marriage and wouldn't overturn it. Anyway, your thoughts on why she's crashing and burning?

• 5:03Alastair Campbell?

  I think because she is so already quite a significant number of, some of the better-known ministers, MPs and MSPs and members have said that in the light of her recent interviews where she's made some of these views explicit, they've said that they can't vote for her. Now, it may be, her line is that this is all a sort of Twitter thing, and that out in the real world, members are much more sort of understanding and tolerant. And I think what it's showing is this incredibly interesting, and it's probably why I did, when I did say it, "We don't do God." I was not sort of there saying, "I am an atheist." I was basically saying, "I think politics becomes very, very

• 5:48Alastair Campbell?

  difficult when you, when it's thought that you're mixing it with religion." Now, I watched whatever interviews this morning where The headline was that she's now come out, as it were, against sex outside marriage or against children being born outside marriage. She didn't quite say that, but I think the reason why I feel it feels to me like it's crashing and burning is that it's all getting focused onto this issue of her faith. And where I think it's a little bit unfair, I don't know how devout a Muslim Humza Yousaf is, who I think is probably going to win in the end.

• 6:20Rory Stewart?

  That's a good question, because he, I mean, he was, I think, the first person in the Scottish Parliament to take the oath in Urdu. I think he took it first in English, then in Urdu. He was somebody who did a lot of fundraising for Islamic relief in his youth. I think he chaired at university, I think, a Muslim Students' Association. So I think he's made no secret of his faith, and I imagine it would be interesting to know what his views are on gay marriage as well.

• 6:43Alastair Campbell?

  But it's, well, and my understanding of that is that he wasn't there for the vote when the final legislation was passed, but he had been supportive prior to that. That's my kind of sense of it. But I guess the point I'm making is that, obviously, it's absolutely blatantly clear from everything that she's said in recent days, her faith is incredibly important to her. Is that the reason why she's being asked about it? Or is it the fact that it's, to some extent, become a strange thing in our politics to be, as it were, a devout believer?

• 7:16Rory Stewart?

  It's interesting, isn't it? And you're, to move on to you and maybe a slightly more personal, I mean, Tony Blair is quite a believer, isn't he? He's now, he's now a Catholic, is that right?

• 7:26Alastair Campbell?

  He is, yeah, yeah.

• 7:27Rory Stewart?

  She's tried to say in a lot of these interviews that she's concerned that it's becoming more and more difficult for people with strong religious beliefs to be involved in politics. I sort of quite liked her formulation when she said that she personally would have voted against gay marriage, but she would have been happy to accept the democratic view of the parliament. But it's difficult for a politician to say. So, for example, I and many others, you know, voted for Remain, but then said that we would accept the result of the Brexit referendum, and people never really trusted us to accept the results.

• 7:58Alastair Campbell?

  I think also what happens, she's been the Finance Secretary, so she's been in a very, very significant senior job within the Scottish Government, obviously trusted by Nicola Sturgeon, otherwise she wouldn't have had that such an important job. Incredibly young, thirty two, I'm literally more than twice as old as she is. Terrifying, horrible thought. But I wonder whether it's, that's part of the, the equation as well, is that people perhaps have just been a bit surprised that somebody of that generation should come along with, with views that do feel out of step with where I'm sure most young people are on gay marriage, on, on the gender recognition, on abortion, on other issues that she's talked about.

• 8:37Alastair Campbell?

  And I, but, but I did, I felt a little bit sorry for her in the way that everybody seemed to be gunning in on those points. Whereas with

• 8:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Alastair Campbell?

  Humza Yousaf, not so much. Now, maybe that's, maybe that's because they know he's not, I, I sort of feel you either have a faith or you don't.

• 8:53Rory Stewart?

  I was obviously really won over by the fact that she spent three years, I think from twelve to fifteen, in a school in, in UP in India, near Missouri, in a place I know, where she would have studied Indian dance and classical music. And I thought that was a really interesting dimension. Now, just to loop back for a second though, um, let, let's just get back to Nicholas Sturgeon stepping down. So, she stepped down with a really striking, brutally honest and quite short resignation speech. And, um, you know, I teased you slightly on, on WhatsApp about this, that sometimes when you're feeling that you're more tribal, whenever a Tory steps down, you tend to call it a chicken run. But when someone from the left steps down, you tend to be more sympathetic towards the trials and tribulations of being a politician.

• 9:33Rory Stewart?

  I did think though, that there is a sense in which, I don't know whether it's that modern society, puts more of an emphasis on a more balanced life, or whether politics is just getting more brutal. But the number of people from Just Intraden, through to Nicholas Sturgeon, who are saying, very, very frankly, this just doesn't work for me. It's brutal, there's no privacy, I don't get to see my family, I don't get to go out for a cup of coffee, I have no time to myself, I'm under attack all the time. And actually, I'm going, basically, I'm, I'm going loopy. And I don't think I can keep doing this for more than a few weeks and I better step down now.

• 10:07Alastair Campbell?

  I've said to you before that I always seem to get, this, the, she talked, she talked about how she'd become such a polarizing figure. And obviously, if you're at that level of politics, anywhere in the world, you, you're going to have some people who really like you and some people who don't. But I thought there was something really quite odd. About the reaction in many, on many levels to her announcement. You had, on the one hand, people who are very, very supportive of her, who basically, they were talking as though a combination of Mother Teresa and the Queen had just announced that they were no longer going to be in public life. And then on the other side, you had people saying that, well, she's achieved absolutely nothing. The health service is in a mess, schools are in a mess, drug deaths, that was her big thing. It's gone backwards and all she cares about is destroying the country. Okay.

• 10:52Alastair Campbell?

  And there wasn't much in between. And I tried, I, I just, I, I, I was actually like you, I was abroad and I, I got lots of phone calls saying, what do you do? I didn't do any interviews, I didn't, I'd, I'd sort of thought the story's big enough and it just sort of takes care of itself. I didn't need to kind of insert myself and I didn't feel that need. So I just did one tweet and I said, um, that I, I watched her statement, I watched it back in full and I watched the press conference. And I said, whatever your party or whatever your views are on independence, you have to recognise that she is a formidable politician who always speaks with great clarity and has strong values of public service. And honestly, I got messages from some of my Labour friends, which was literally like, you know,

• 11:36Alastair Campbell?

  what is it with you and Nicola? Have you got something going on with Nicola? You know, it's like, I just felt it sort of, it underlined that sense of, of polarisation. The question now, I suppose, that these candidates, Ash Regan is the third. Yep. Um, and, and people are describing Humza Yousaf as the, as the kind of continuity candidate. Ash Regan, I don't know much about her. I think as I, as I read it, she's the one who thinks that the next election should be a referendum on independence. Um, now I think that may have been one of the factors that led to some of the mounting criticism against Sturgeon internally. I think now, will it change the dial on independence? Short answer, I don't know, but I think it might.

• 12:21Alastair Campbell?

  And I thought it was, it was just one of those curious pieces of timing. That it happened on the, at a time when the Labour Party Scottish Conference was going on and Keir Starmer went up there and made his, his big speech and it was, it was a pretty direct pitch to people who currently support the SNP to, you know, take another look at Labour. Um, and I think if you think, as you said, Salmon formidable politician, Sturgeon a formidable politician, they have both pressed pretty much every button going to try to move the dial on independence. They've had the benefit of Brexit, they've had the benefit of Boris Johnson being absolutely despised by most Scots. And it's still not really feeling like it's a done deal in public opinion. And I suspect this will set it back.

• 13:03Rory Stewart?

  It, it's barely moved, has it? I mean, it's, it's, um, it's extraordinary. And, and that I suppose is going to be the difficulty for Nicola Sturgeon's legacy. But Nicola Sturgeon, I mean, I've had a number of interactions with her. I, I debated with her on things like Question Time. I cross questioned her in Edinburgh when I was on the Foreign Affairs Committee about her plans for Scottish independence and their foreign service. But she definitely is a more guarded, less outgoing figure. She has a tight inner circle, which her husband's clearly a very important part of. And, and some listeners will be aware that there's been some questions about why her husband, who's chairman of the SNP, decided to just lend a hundred and ten thousand pounds to the SNP at exactly the moment when the SNP

• 13:45Rory Stewart?

  has been under investigation for whether they misspent six hundred thousand pounds during the independence campaign. So there are a number of things going on in the background which must be adding to her stress and I think also adding to the reaction to her, her departure.

• 13:57Alastair Campbell?

  I had a fair few dealings with her over the years. And when I last saw, I would know that actually when I did an interview with her for GQ magazine and I asked her if she remembered the very first time that we met. And she did. And it was a bike, we were both on a charity bike ride. And I said in my diary that I found her unbelievably cold. And she said, when I recall this is, well, you've got to remember back then I was just the sort of, you know, nobody's ever heard of you. You were this sort of fearsome beast of Downey Street. And I was just sort of petrified as to what would happen. And thereafter, I did find her actually quite warm. I'll be getting yet more messages saying, why is it with you and Nicola? But

• 14:41Alastair Campbell?

  you've got to speak as you find. And I think it's possible that when we talk about disagreeing agreeably, look, you are very, very passionately anti-independence. I am moderately passionately anti-independence, but I have a better understanding of their argument. Or I'll put it this way, I, I get their argument better, I think than you do. And I have more, maybe more sympathy towards it. And nobody can dispute that when she is driven by the independence cause as she is, that it comes from a genuine place. It doesn't mean she doesn't want to sort out the health service, sort out the education system, probably wishes that they'd done it better. But I think that this, this is what I mean about when politics becomes so

• 15:24Alastair Campbell?

  polarized, that because somebody is trying to do something that you don't believe in, somehow you cannot sort of even say anything vaguely positive about them. And I just find that a bit sad.

• 15:34Rory Stewart?

  One of the beneficiaries potentially of this is going to be Anna Sawa, who we've spoken about, Libra, the Labour Party in Scotland. Grace opportunity for him now to really begin, or certainly from my point of view, to make the unionist arguments more strongly, to not just talk about booting the Tories out of Westminster, but really think about how to find common cause between cities in Scotland, cities in England.

• 15:56Alastair Campbell?

  Also, Rory, to take the debate from away, because this is what Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have done very, very well. It's been in their political interest to have this debate focused so much on, on the independence question. And actually, I think it also gives Anna an opportunity to take it away from that. But it will depend on who they elect as the new leader and the extent to which that person then wants to keep pressing the same buttons on independence.

• 16:18Rory Stewart?

  Very interesting, too, if we have Hamza Yousaf become the leader of the SNP. Because Anna Sawa also comes from a, he comes from a Pakistani family. I think Hamza Yousaf comes from a Muslim family that comes from, from East Africa. But Anna Sawa's father, Mohammed Sawa, you'll remember, was a Labour MP and then became the 31st and the 33rd governor of the Punjab. So he showed it was possible to be both a British politician and a Pakistani politician at the same time.

• 16:46Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think our listeners know enough about the not doing God thing? I mean, I've talked about this a lot. I don't know. I can't remember if we've done it on the podcast before, but just so people, because I think it does get misinterpreted. I just think it's always very, very tricky for politicians to talk about their faith. It's not like America. I think it's very tricky. And I think that's where maybe Kate Forbes is finding this quite, quite difficult.

• 17:07Rory Stewart?

  We're not a very religious society, are we? I mean, I don't know whether it's still true, but the urban myth when I was growing up is that when Britain did its census, more people registered as having the religion of Jedi and registered as being Church of England. I think we're one of the most secular societies on earth, aren't we?

• 17:22Alastair Campbell?

  You'll be fired to hell for saying that, Mr. Stewart.

• 17:25Rory Stewart?

  Now, a place where that isn't always true, of course, is what we're talking about next, which is Northern Ireland. So I wondered whether you'd let me do just a quick minute to try to summarize where we are with the Northern Ireland Protocol and then let you come in because you've got much, much better understanding of the personalities. The Good Friday Agreement, we're both, you're very kindly invited me along to Belfast, where an anniversary is coming up. But are you happy for me to do just a brief attempt?

• 17:49Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 17:50Rory Stewart?

  Okay. So fundamentally, the genius of the Good Friday Agreement was that by using the fact that the United Kingdom as a whole was in the European Union, there was no need to have a border either between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland or between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. And that allowed effectively nationalists, Republicans in Northern Ireland to very much feel that they were part of Ireland because there was no border between them and Dublin, but equally Unionists to very much feel that they were part of the United Kingdom. And that came under threat as soon as Brexit happened. And there were three possible solutions to this problem. The first solution, which was Theresa

• 18:30Rory Stewart?

  May's, was this dreaded thing called the backstop. So she tried to propose that effectively Great Britain itself, England, Scotland, Wales, would remain in the European

• 18:41Rory Stewart?

  Union, customs union in effect. So there wouldn't need to be really much of a border between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and certainly not between Northern Ireland and the Republic. But that was deeply unpopular with the right wing, the Conservative Party, and Boris Johnson rode to power basically on ripping up that backstop. And he instead signed a deal with the European Union in which he said, England, Wales, Scotland want to diverge, or he wanted them to be able to diverge very dramatically from the European Union on a whole series of things. Northern Ireland would remain very closely integrated with European Union and the Republic, and therefore there was going to be a border in the Irish Sea.

• 19:19Alastair Campbell?

  The border that he said would be at one stage built, laid down over his dead body.

• 19:24Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. No sooner had he done this than coming into power, he then tried to reverse the whole thing and he tried to pass a Northern Ireland Protocol Bill, where Britain was going to unilaterally kick out the agreement they'd made with the European Union and effectively say that they weren't going to keep the border in the Irish Sea and the European Union could go stuff it and decide what they wanted to do about that. He then was toppled and Rishi Sunak's come in. And Rishi Sunak is trying to do the almost impossible task of squaring the circle. And he's trying to square the circle for a couple of reasons, because the unionists are deeply in Northern Ireland, deeply, deeply unhappy about this border in the Irish Sea. And he's trying to get the institutions in Ireland up and running again. Currently, there's direct rule from London.

• 20:10Rory Stewart?

  And he's trying to do it in a way that also doesn't create a border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. So the way he's doing it is he's trying to get the European Union to soften that border, make it easier to get goods from Great Britain into Northern Ireland. But this is not remotely popular with the ERG and the unionists who are pushing to say the border, basically, the border needs to be between Northern Ireland and the Republic. And they, you know, Bernard Jenkins on the record saying it's going to be a sort of invisible border or a soft border. And Simon Clarke, who was, um, Liz Truss's great confidant, who's in the media a lot recently, great stand up bearer of this, he says, we won't sign up to anything that doesn't have the unionists with us. And that means that Northern Ireland cannot be part of the single market or the customs union.

• 20:54Rory Stewart?

  In other words, the border would have to be on the island of Ireland. Right. Enough from my explainer. Over to you.

• 20:59Alastair Campbell?

  I thought it was very good explainer and I think that this all flows from a reality that many, many people, among them John Major and Tony Blair. Pointed out during the referendum campaign, got a lot of abuse from the Brexit campaign for their troubles. And this, it's also something we talked about in our leading interview with Michel Barnier, that the European Union was clear that they were going to protect the single market. And protecting the single market threw up a very, very big problem because you have these clashing objectives. As you say, through the Good Friday Agreement, there can be no hard border on the island of Ireland. And I think even the most extreme Brexiteers kind of got

• 21:43Alastair Campbell?

  that one. No customs border in the Irish Sea, and that's where Boris Johnson sold out. And also, and this is where your friend Theresa May felt she had no option, but I wonder whether actually she did, no British participation in the single market and the customs union. And the reason why those objectives are clashing is because you can't have all three. It's impossible. And that, as you say, is the, the problem that Rishi Sunak is still wrestling with. And my sense of how he's trying to resolve it is twofold. One is through straightforward mood music diplomacy. He's been much more serious. He's been much more respectful. He's been much more polite than either Johnson

• 22:25Alastair Campbell?

  or Truss. He's not playing stupid games too often through the media. And the second thing is, as you say, a kind of watering down. And put simply, that you'd be able to get goods that are going from GB to Northern Ireland in faster, with fewer, and hopefully no checks than those that are going through the Republic, and they would go through, as it were, a different process. And then the big thing about whether there's a role of the European Court, that is sort of staved off somewhere down the track.

• 22:52Rory Stewart?

  And just sorry, just quickly, again, as a little bit of an explainer, at the moment, the European Court of Justice has to rule on any breach of single market rules. So so long as Northern Ireland remains in the single market, the ECJ has this role. And the hope is, I think, from Rishi Sunak, that you could fudge that in some way. So maybe it would be that the Northern Ireland courts could look at it in the first instance before it was referred up to the ECJ. But this is all still red rag to the bull to the unionists, because what What will happen over time is if Northern Ireland remains in the single market, as Europe and Britain diverge, and they will inevitably diverge, you're going to end up with a situation where Northern Ireland is following the European Union and England, Wales and Scotland are not.

• 23:34Rory Stewart?

  So an example of that's a tiny example at the moment, but it's the first one that's come through. Is the EU's just banned a food additive called titanium dioxide, which is in a whole lot of sweets. And that is now legal in Britain, but it's illegal in Northern Ireland. And as time goes on, you'll get more and more of those things. And the heart of the unionist statement is, is it's not really practical. It's profoundly sort of passionately emotional. We are part of the United Kingdom. We're an integral part of the United Kingdom. We're not going to be governed by European Union rules while the rest of the United Kingdom does something else.

• 24:10Alastair Campbell?

  That's right, that's that is the argument. And I think, I think fudge is the right word. And I don't, I don't mean that disparagingly because I think actually this is going to have to be resolved to some extent with a bit of political good faith. I think it's going to be very hard to square that circle in a way that satisfies the likes of. I mean, I hear, I don't know if this is true, but apparently Braverman, Suella Braverman threatening to resign, et cetera. I'll tell you one thing I do think is quite interesting is that Steve Baker, the self-styled hard man of Brexit, and Chris Heaton Harris, who's the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, they're both ministers in Northern Ireland.

• 24:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I could be wrong, but I've not heard a peep.

• 24:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 24:47Alastair Campbell?

  Of opposition. I'm assuming that they know what's planned. I'm assuming that, I would hope so.

• 24:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Alastair Campbell?

  So is this in the end going to be the point at which the Conservative Party sort of buries its kind of ideology on this? And also stops allowing itself. There was a reason why Theresa May was held over a barrel by the DUP. It was because of the numbers.

• 25:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Alastair Campbell?

  Rishi Sunak doesn't have that problem in relation to this issue because Keir Starmer has said that Labour will support a sensible outcome.

• 25:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, he also doesn't have to bring it to a vote. And, and it may be a bit dangerous to bring it to a vote because if he brings it to a vote, Keir Starmer would love to step in and, and save the Conservative government on this issue. And it would be the right thing to do. But I think it would be very, very difficult for party management for Rishi Sunak if he took the thing through on a Labour vote and didn't have the majority of Conservative MPs with him.

• 25:38Alastair Campbell?

  The Parliament would find a way of having a vote on this, I think. I think, look, I, I actually do, honestly, I, I really do believe that Rishi Sunak would do himself a lot of good if he called these people out. I thought it was very interesting. George Osborne was on television the other night. And he was, I wish he'd been as scathing about Johnson during the referendum as he was in this interview. He basically said Boris Johnson is intervening this not because he cares about the issue because he cares about Boris Johnson. He wants to bring down Rishi Sunak and that's what this is all about.

• 26:08Rory Stewart?

  It's completely horrifying. I mean, it's totally horrifying. I mean, the fundamental point here is that this is the very recently ex-prime minister. It's been barely, I don't know, 120 days since this guy was prime minister. And he is flying out to Ukraine. He's interfering in British defence decisions on supplying jets to Ukraine. He's getting involved in the most politically explosive issue of the day, directly undermining the Conservative Prime Minister on the issue, the most important issue in British politics at the moment, which is the Northern Protocol. It is disgusting. I mean, I cannot think of any previous Prime Minister who behaved like that. I mean, Ted Heath was grumpy

• 26:48Rory Stewart?

  when Mrs Thatcher took over, but this is beyond imagining. I mean, I don't think any US president would ever contemplate doing this, particularly not someone from their own party. I mean, this is a madness.

• 26:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Trump might, Trump might, I guess. But, no, I, listen, you're right, but the other thing is Liz Truss made a speech yesterday, was barely tweeting out her, she'd just been to Japan to make a speech about this thing called Economic NATO. She thinks she would have done Economic NATO. And I thought there was, there was a pretty obvious irony in that one. But then she was, then she gets on the plane, flies back, goes straight into the debate on, on Ukraine. And he's standing there telling Rishi Sunak, he's got to, he's got to give the Ukrainians these high-speed jets. And you just sort of think, why, where is, for both of them, where is the humility, the self-awareness, the ability to understand that every time either of them speak at the moment, yes, they'll have some followers, Simon Clarke loves Liz Truss,

• 27:44Alastair Campbell?

  Nadine Dorries loves Boris Johnson. For most people in the public, sorry, mate, you've had your chance, shut up, go away, let this guy try and sort it out.

• 27:52Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's awful. And for Boris Johnson, it is fundamentally a game. He's playing tricky games. What he really wants to do is destroy Rishi Sunak before the next election. Get himself hoovered in pretending that he's the only person who can win an election for the Conservatives. And all the stuff that he, you know, he talks a lot about classics and he's studied classics. But the stuff that he loves about classics is the horrible kind of politicking of the late Roman Republic, where everybody was stabbing each other in the back and changing their positions and whipping up mobs and crowds. I mean, he's absolutely, you know, he sees himself a kind of horrible, people like the Grackie, these tributary people who are going to bring down the Prime Minister from Hoover himself in again. So I think it's disgusting.

• 28:35Alastair Campbell?

  Don't you think that Rishi Sunak should call it out? I mean, I know that it will, people will say, well, that will just make the division sort of out there in public. But I think Sunak underestimates how much strength you have by dint of being Prime Minister. And he's established himself as trying to do this, he's sorting it out. And I think he could just sort of stand up and say, look, okay, ERG, you're entitled to your opinion, but you don't run the party and you don't run the government. And I've got these other things that I've got to sort out. This is my best bet on how we do this. I'm very grateful if Labour are going to help me get through it. I'm very grateful for that. And now let's get on and do other stuff. I think you should call them out.

• 29:13Rory Stewart?

  So just on that, just to emphasise, I think it's a bold concept. I think you could do it. It's going to feel to him like a big gamble because what it's going to feel like at the moment is endless MPs coming in at the moment, daymarching it, his chief whip saying, we've got trouble here. Here's another 20 MPs coming in saying they're going to kick off if Northern Ireland doesn't go right. You've got people who were in the Cabinet, you know, 60 days ago, out there on the record attacking him. You've got the DUP whipping stuff up. You've got Boris with an amazing reach into the media. So I guess he, he doesn't know, and this is the, this was the problem that has been true for David Cameron, it was true for Theresa May, right the way through, what you can do. But my instinct is you're right.

• 29:57Rory Stewart?

  And actually, it's your instinct, it's also George Osborne's instinct. You can't placate someone like Boris Johnson.

• 30:02Alastair Campbell?

  No, you can't. And to be fair to Osborne, he said that it's a mistake that he and Cameron made, that they they took Johnson at his word. They thought he was taking the issue seriously. He wasn't. He was just playing a game the whole time. And he will always be like that. I mean, I think the thing about Johnson, you've known him a long time. Anybody who's known him a long time knows that that is not going to change. Short of him, you know, having some kind of religious experience, which I consider highly unlikely, I can't see that changing. And I think if Sunak doesn't do this, I think he's going to have this, these groups coming in to see him. They will feel they have power over him.

• 30:42Alastair Campbell?

  He will be feeding them that power. And I would even, I think I would even go so far at some stage as to find something like Johnson did when he threw you guys out, to find something that says, right, if you don't like this, it means you don't want to be part of this Conservative Party that I'm leading. I see it as a vote of confidence and actually kick some of these people out.

• 31:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, the, oh, God, it's such a, yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. I think he's got to do something. I mean, meanwhile, just to, just before we go to the break, we're in a position where he's trying to fudge something that feels very loose, loose. At the moment, problems are emerging, genuine problems between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. You have to fill in a customs form at the moment. You send a package to Northern Ireland. It's going to become difficult taking your pets to Northern Ireland. There's this famous thing called the sausage conundrum. Which is the EU won't let children processed uncooked meat in from Britain and Northern Ireland. There's the ECJ oversight. And on the other hand, there's the fact that the Good Friday Agreement, that you were very, very closely involved in, wasn't just about the borders. It was also about the political arrangements,

• 31:43Rory Stewart?

  getting power sharing. And at the moment, that's not happening. The unionists are just not participating in power sharing. And the fundamental political glue of the Good Friday Agreement is in trouble.

• 31:53Alastair Campbell?

  I'll tell you what, though, Roy. Last time I was in Belfast at a meeting with a lot of business people, they were pretty happy with the protocol. They were basically saying, this is pretty good deal for us because we can do business both ways more easily. And the other thing they were saying is that for God's sake, well, these politicians, please understand they're meant to be politicians. That actually means running the place. And you've got so many decisions that are not being taken because the politicians aren't even taking their seats. And, you know, they've already had the sort of, they're already in the Guinness Book of Records for one of the longest periods ever of a place without a, without a functioning political government. So I think they've got to sort it out. And then the other thing, I'm going to Dublin tomorrow and I'm actually going

• 32:35Alastair Campbell?

  to be seeing Bertie Ahern, who, Bertie's launching a podcast, by the way.

• 32:39Rory Stewart?

  Oh, my goodness, there we are.

• 32:41Alastair Campbell?

  He's doing a podcast about the Good Friday Agreement. So I'm going out for that and I'm going to be talking to him about stuff. And I think that the other thing I think is the mood in Ireland, I think is, is hardening. I think, I think there was a feeling that Ireland would feel kind of so inferior to what was happening within British politics. And I don't think they do. I think they've, they've been really impressed by the extent to which the Europeans have stood by them.

• 33:05Rory Stewart?

  Been remarkable, hasn't it?

• 33:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, we shall see. But I think if, if I were advising Mr. Sunak, I would say, call them out, show them up for what they are. You'll feel emboldened, you'll feel strengthened, and the public will respect you for it.

• 33:19Rory Stewart?

  Very good. There we are on a set. Time for a break.

• 33:23Speaker 02

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

• 33:34Speaker 03

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 33:47Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 not a minute without parent.

• 33:53Speaker 05

  Espolone Tequila. Balanced. Delicious. 100% agave, 0% ego. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. For real margarita. Ride the rooster.

• 34:04Speaker 03

  Espolone Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Canadian, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.

• 34:17Rory Stewart?

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

• 34:20Alastair Campbell?

  And me Asda Campbell.

• 34:22Rory Stewart?

  And one of the exciting things that's happening this week is we did a great interview with David Lammy, who's the Labour shadow Foreign Secretary. And I thought somebody who you felt really impressed you. You said, actually, you hadn't been that wild when he'd been a very young Member of Parliament, came in, I think, at 26 or something, but like Hamza Yousaf that we were talking about before the break, very, very young politician, Cape Forbes too.

• 34:44Rory Stewart?

  But that he's just really grown in that role and you felt that he was expressing himself a lot of confidence and you were impressed, right?

• 34:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it was interesting, the reactions as well, that I was both looking online, but also people who were kind of sending me messages. I kind of saw a slight divide. And I'd be interested to know what sort of feedback you had. But I felt that the people who were very, very, very, very Labour, like, you know, tribally Labour activists and so forth, they were sort of saying, oh, God, I wish you'd been a bit harder over on Brexit. I wish you'd committed. Why didn't he do the 0.7 on GDP on international aid and development? And then people who are not as plugged into the political world were much more on the sort of said, God, I really liked him. I thought he was really interesting and I thought he answered your questions. And I thought you both gave him a bit of a hard time at points,

• 35:34Alastair Campbell?

  but I thought he sort of stood up to it really well. And one person said to me, he sounded very governmental. And of course, often that would be seen as a criticism.

• 35:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'd really encourage people to listen and maybe, you know, get back in touch with us and tell us what you think. I thought it was probably the most interesting interview we've done with a serving politician. We normally, I normally try to avoid them because I think they're usually pretty boring, stiff shirts. I'd love to know what people think about the combination between somebody with such an amazing fluency. He's, he's good at being self-critical, he's funny, got this extraordinary backstory. He's quite blunt and direct. But equally, on the policy stuff, of course, I was less happy. I wasn't that comfortable with him refusing to really come out and say anything on the European Union. I mean, he's gone on an enormous journey. I found myself stuck in the middle. I was trying to,

• 36:25Rory Stewart?

  you know, I'd voted Remain, tried to argue for a soft Brexit, and David Lammy was one of my big opponents at the time, but he was on the other side. He was on the second referendum side in those days. Now he's gone right past me and, you know, here am I still plugging away for a customs union and he's rejecting it out of hand. Yeah.

• 36:39Alastair Campbell?

  So it's not going to happen. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, it was interesting, but I think the other thing that, you know, I read a piece the other day, I can't remember who wrote it, I read a piece about how often the real kind of reforming leaders like Thatcher and Tony Blair and so forth, a lot of the things that they do are not things that they necessarily talked about much beforehand.

• 37:00Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 37:00Alastair Campbell?

  Mrs Thatcher didn't really bang on about privatisation much in opposition. Tony Blair didn't really bang on about public service reform too much in opposition.

• 37:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Alastair Campbell?

  And, you know, so I suspect that what David is trying to do, what they're all trying to do, is to give a sense of, you can trust us. And what he was trying to say to you, I think in particular, was, look Rory, I'm not going to make that commitment here and now, right now, but I want you to, I want you to read the view of Zeke, I want you to look at my eyes, I want you to read my body language, that's the direction I want to go in when we get in.

• 37:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I think that's right. I think that's right. Well, it was a very, very polished performance and would love to hear what people think of the interview with David Lammy.

• 37:38Alastair Campbell?

  And meanwhile, a year on from Ukraine and the special military operation, which, if you had listened to Mr Putin's speech, was all the fault of the West, it was all the fault of these Nazis in Ukraine, and there are Russians in there fighting for the human rights of people who live there.

• 37:57Rory Stewart?

  It's astonishing. So just to take it back, 14 months ago, really, nobody expected this to happen. Very senior people, ex-heads of the British Secret Service, former US national security advisers, were out just in January of last year, saying they couldn't imagine Putin marching on Kiev. Even as the troops were massing around the borders, people still couldn't quite believe it was going to happen. And it has happened, and my goodness, what a horrible thing. I mean, it's hundreds of thousands of people killed. Hundreds of billions worth of damage to the Ukrainian economy, lives wrecked. But more fundamentally, this really is the moment at which all the assumptions that

• 38:40Rory Stewart?

  we carried out of the Second World War about global order, about borders, about respect for other nations' independence has been challenged. And you know, it's something that I felt very, very strongly in Africa, where, as you know, everybody has a potential claim on their neighbor's territory. And many African leaders have come out and said, the problem with what Putin is doing here is that all this stuff about saying, you know, X hundred years ago, Ukraine was or was not part of some greater Russia, takes you down a very, very, very dangerous path, right the way through Africa, right the way through Central and Eastern Europe. I mean, if you think about the Hungarian populations in Romania, et cetera, et cetera, where does this stop, right?

• 39:23Rory Stewart?

  And the the convention since the end of the Second World War is we didn't do this stuff. We accepted the borders.

• 39:29Alastair Campbell?

  No, and that's why you have, you know, we talked recently about about Moldova. And as I must say, we talked about Maya Sandu, the president who went to the Munich Security Conference. Have a look at her Twitter feed. You talk about being busy on the diplomatic front. She was meeting everybody that she could to to make the case that, you know, Moldova needs to have support. I'll tell you who I've been really impressed with in this entire, the last 12 months has been the Prime Minister of Estonia, Kaya Kalas. She's extraordinary. She is really tough and she's very, very clever. I think Estonia, by the way, have given more military aid per head of population than any country in the world. It's a small country.

• 40:10Rory Stewart?

  But they're right on the front line, as you say. I mean, I went, I went to Estonia quite a lot, and partly when I was chairing the Defence Committee, because they were the first people to really start calling out and saying, we feel there is a danger that Putin could invade us.

• 40:25Alastair Campbell?

  And and she was told to sort of stop being silly.

• 40:28Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. Documenting back in the day, these incredibly aggressive cyber attacks the Russians were mounting against them. And of course, at that time, successive British governments, and I'm afraid it started with Blair and Brown, but it accelerated under Cameron and got worse under Theresa May and and even worse under Boris Johnson. Basically dismantled the British capacity for conventional war in Europe because we thought that kind of stuff wasn't really going to happen. And the Estonians have been saying, and I think they're totally vindicated. It was almost, in a sense, an accident that, well, not an accident, sorry. In some ways, it may be a credit to NATO and the UK and the US, who actually in the end did start to put troops into Estonia, that he went into Ukraine and not Estonia first.

• 41:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. She made a number of pretty powerful interventions at the Munich Security Conference. And I saw, so she was on a panel with David Miliband, and they were both talking about this issue of impunity. And I thought, I thought it was really interesting as well that Kamala Harris, when she was there, and of course, Joe, we'll talk a bit about in a minute about Joe Biden's pretty extraordinary trip to Kiev. But I thought that was interesting that Kamala Harris, the line that she was pushing very, very hard was that Putin is guilty of crimes against humanity, and that he will have to be held to account. And Kai

• 41:50Alastair Campbell?

  Akalas said the same. And I just wonder how that would happen, whether that is just part of kind of rhetoric at the moment, or whether actually there is a way that Putin, Lavrov, and the rest of them can be properly held to account. Because if they are, how do they come to Putin's the only person who can actually bring this to an end at the moment?

• 42:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, your friend, who you've talked about on the podcast before, and I encourage people to follow up on this, Sir Geoffrey Nice, has just been interviewed by Kay Burley. It's an amazing interview, if people want to catch up on it, where he talks about this question of war crimes and prosecution of Putin and others. It's a lovely interview because he is, I hadn't realised until I watched him, he's a very sort of old fashioned, Donish figure, talks like a very serious lawyer. And he's, he's sitting perched on this amazing kind of red Austin Powers style Kay Burley sofa. It's an amazing kind of contrast between, and she keeps saying, so are you going to, you know, are we going to prosecute Putin? He'd say, well, if you don't mind me saying so, I'm not sure that's quite the right question. And then there's a huge pause. And then she says, well, what

• 42:52Rory Stewart?

  is the right question, etc. Anyway, so just, just, just on the Munich Security Conference, other thing that came out of it, do you know the Munich Security Conference well?

• 43:00Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 43:00Rory Stewart?

  No, okay. So Munich Security Conference, I don't know it well either, is this big event all the world leaders go to. It's, it's almost like Davos. There's almost nobody who isn't there every year. Used to do a lot about Afghanistan in the days in which I was connected with it. But now it's been the forum for China announcing that they think they're going to bring together a peace proposal for Russia, Ukraine. And the Chinese Foreign Minister has been meeting with Russian equivalents. And there's also been stories that China may start supplying Russia with weapons.

• 43:29Alastair Campbell?

  That came that came from the Americans, didn't it?

• 43:31Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. And the Chinese haven't really gone into question whether or not they were proposing to supply weapons, but they've said very clearly that it is an incredible insult to have the United States lecturing them on where they should or should not sell weapons. And I guess their point would be the US seem happy to send weapons to their allies all over the world, and they can't see why they couldn't do the same.

• 43:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. But if we all accept that Putin is guilty of crimes against humanity, and these are tried at the International Criminal Court, but that court can't arrest suspects, it can only exercise its jurisdiction in countries which have signed up to the agreement, and Russia is not one of those. So I don't quite see how it happens.

• 44:09Rory Stewart?

  And it doesn't happen, and it's not really very helpful. And actually, famously, the President Sudan was convicted by the International Criminal Court and continued to rule for many, many years afterwards, and in fact, continued to visit other countries in Africa with impunity. So I don't think that will. I mean, my fear at the moment on this, and I'd love to get your take, is that I'm increasingly convinced by the interview that we did, which is coming out this coming week with a great British American expert on Russia, in which Fiona Hill says that she thinks this will drag on like the Iran-Iraq war, in other words, for eight years. And what was striking about the Iran-Iraq war is that Iraq was a much smaller population than Iran, so, you know, like Ukraine in relation

• 44:50Rory Stewart?

  to Russia. But it had the technology and more supply from the West, and Iran had the people. And it makes that sort of grinding conflict of Russia mobilizing another 500,000 people, while the Ukrainians deploy the greatest high technology in the world. And this thing never ends.

• 45:08Alastair Campbell?

  But do you think that the democracies that form the alliance, and led, obviously led by the United States, and I don't think Joe Biden could have been any clearer in his commitment by literally landing there as the sirens were blaring and announcing another half billion of military support, do you think that public opinion will keep holding through another grinding year? And then, as you say, or Fiona Hill says, and then possibly more to come after that, and more to come after that? I think it gets very difficult and that's what Putin's banking on is that is time.

• 45:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, there's some interesting things happening, aren't there? I mean, I think as Europe becomes less dependent on Russian gas, it's possible that, and obviously there are not European lives being lost on that, sorry, by European, I mean, non Ukrainian lives being lost on the ground. So it is something where you could imagine it continuing for some time. I also think there's, there's a very interesting change in the way in which the world economy is shifting in relation to Russia, Ukraine. Before this war, so if we go back just 14 months, Russia was doing almost twice as much trade with the European Union, the US and Japan, as it was doing with Turkey and India and China. And in just 12 months, that's all flipped around. It's now doing nearly twice as much with those countries. And at

• 46:28Rory Stewart?

  the same time, the predictions on what would happen to the Russian economy have proved to be, and this is what I remember in 2014 on Crimea. I remember being in meetings with people on the National Security Council predicting that the sanctions we imposed in 2014 would bring Russia to its knees. We had the same predictions this time. Back in January, people were saying it's going to be a 10% contraction on the Russian economy. And that sort of got whittled down in May to sort of 6% contraction. It's turned out there's only been about a 3% contraction and it looks like the Russian economy is going to be growing next year.

• 46:58Alastair Campbell?

  And also Putin in his speech said that the sanctions are doing as much damage to the people imposing them as they are to us, which is, I'm sure, just another piece of propaganda. It wasn't, it wasn't, even by his standards, the propaganda levels were pretty, pretty high, but that is a fair point. Just on a lighter note, Rory, in relation to President Xi.

• 47:16Rory Stewart?

  Oh, very good. Very good, yes.

• 47:18Alastair Campbell?

  One of, one of the, one of my favorite responses to our podcast last week when we talked about my mispronunciation of President Xi was from a former diplomat who said, one of my favorite ever FCO telegrams was the two pager from Beijing after Xi became leader, entirely focused on how to pronounce his name. It was written by a man called Peter Wilson, who was then Deputy Head of Mission. Latterly Boris Johnson's PPS in number 10, post Partygate. And Peter's eventual verdict was Xi.

• 47:51Alastair Campbell?

  And you're also, here's the key Rory, you are meant to smile when you say she, because that extends it and softens the shu.

• 48:00Rory Stewart?

  That was beautiful. So Peter Wilson is, is a really impressive diplomat. We've been praising other diplomats, speaks beautiful Chinese. His father, David Wilson, was the governor of Hong Kong before Chris Patton, another very, another diplomat. Peter, somebody who I hope one day is probably going to be our ambassador in Beijing, but he will be very impressed that you got the rising tone right there on the she.

• 48:25Alastair Campbell?

  My, my, my, my little mole says the telegram ends with a slightly passive aggressive comment along the lines of, this man's going to become the most powerful person in the world. So I suggest we take the trouble to get his name right.

• 48:39Rory Stewart?

  That's very good. Good on the British Foreign Office. That's what we like.

• 48:41Alastair Campbell?

  President Xi, and it's the smile, you just go Xi.

• 48:44Rory Stewart?

  Xi, I think that'd go up. Okay. So finally, just before we close, I did want to talk a little bit about biodiversity. So there's been a very interesting week, actually with the UK playing quite a role in all of this. So there was a new global biodiversity framework, which has just been negotiated in, in Canada. And the King, King Charles, has just hosted a big global biodiversity lunch at Buckingham Palace.

• 49:12Alastair Campbell?

  Were you there?

• 49:13Rory Stewart?

  I was not there. No, I was not there. I was jumping out of a helicopter, in fact, at that very moment.

• 49:17Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, were, were those two events related?

• 49:20Rory Stewart?

  No, they were not related. But I'm sure my jumping out of a helicopter was probably not very good for biodiversity.

• 49:26Alastair Campbell?

  No, I would have thought so.

• 49:27Rory Stewart?

  And, and DEFRA, which is the British Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, managed to get 15 environment ministers flying in for an event they're organising with the CEOs of HSBC, Lloyds and others to talk about biodiversity. So biodiversity has often been the sort of poor cousin, biodiversity in other words, being nature, the poor cousin of the debate about the environment. Because along with the question on climate, is the question around species of all sorts, plants, animals, of which there has been a catastrophic drop in places like Britain. We have lost an incredible amount of our biodiversity. Well over half of it in the last few decades and biodiversity is threatened all over the world. And we we see images famously from Bolsonaro's Brazil, but it's a global phenomenon. It's driven partly by climate, but it's mostly driven by us.

• 50:12Rory Stewart?

  It's driven by us, our farming practices, our pesticides, our fertilizers, which, and of course, it comes back to bite us because these things are lost forever when they're lost.

• 50:22Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. What, when you said you wanted to talk about it, I did a little bit of research and

• 50:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 50:28Alastair Campbell?

  I found this, I strongly recommend the Royal Society website.

• 50:33Rory Stewart?

  Oh, good.

• 50:33Alastair Campbell?

  Has the Royal Society actually got anything to do with the royal family? Because the Royal Society is just a sort of science body, isn't it?

• 50:38Rory Stewart?

  It's just, yeah, it's it's nothing to do with the royal family, just a science body, yeah.

• 50:41Alastair Campbell?

  So, but I must admit, to my terrible shame, I assumed that the, I was aware of the crisis facing biodiversity and the thousands of species that are being lost and the impact that has on all ecosystems, including, you know, humanity. But I'd assumed that climate change was the big thing. And according to the Royal Society, the main direct cause of biodiversity loss is land use change, primarily for large scale food production. And they they say that's about thirty percent to blame. Second factor is over exploitation, too much fishing, too much hunting, too much harvesting for food, medicines and timber, that's twenty percent. Climate change is the third most significant direct driver of biodiversity loss,

• 51:23Alastair Campbell?

  which together with pollution accounts for fourteen percent. And it does say that, you know, as the climate crisis worsens, that would obviously pick up. So it is, as you say, primarily this is something about farming and how we farm and how we feed ourselves.

• 51:39Rory Stewart?

  Which is also the most amazing subject because we don't know exactly how many species there are on earth. I mean, we we guess there are something like a hundred million different species, but but famously in nineteen eighty, when scientists were peering at a forest in Panama, they looked at nineteen trees. And eighty percent of the beetles they found there, they found more than a thousand beetles there, were previously unknown to science. In other words, they found eight hundred new beetle species just looking at nineteen trees. So we don't really know how many species we're losing all the time. Or gaining, or gaining. Or potentially gaining, there we are. I think there's generally a net loss, generally assumptions. Oh, yeah, sure, yeah, sure.

• 52:21Rory Stewart?

  So we're generally assuming we're losing about ten thousand species a year. But it's also true that, you know, there have been mass extinction events in the past. I think almost ninety-nine percent of the species that have ever existed are now extinct. But the difference here is that this is within our control. I mean, we are now so dominant as a species on earth that we have the ability to save many more species than we're currently doing. And of course, each one lost is lost forever. And we feel this with iconic things like the wild tiger, cheetahs, which are, you know, really at risk at the moment, partly because of the fact they don't seem to be very good mothers to their children, slightly absent minded mothers. Rhino.

• 53:01Rory Stewart?

  The rhino or the panda on the WWF website. But it's, and the rhino, I mean, I managed to, very privileged when I was the environment minister, and then when I was the different minister, I got to meet the last two northern white rhino in the world, these funny hairy lipped rhinos that were in Kenya. But they were unfortunately both women, and they're trying very, very hard to impregnate them with semen from a male rhino that they, before he, which they'd extracted before he died, but I don't think they're having any luck. Anyway. So that was, so they will be extinct? So they will be extinct, the northern white rhino, I'm afraid, will be gone. And those extraordinary sort of lovely hairy lipped creatures will not be around anymore. Anyway, the point is, I guess, that once they're gone, they really are gone. And getting

• 53:46Rory Stewart?

  the world more focused on what needs to be done for biodiversity. And for me, that's not just about rewilding, which is something we talk about a lot, but also about mixed farming practices, working out how we do much more nature based farming. I'd love to see a landscape in southern England, which is much more mixed, where there are more trees, there's more woodland edges, there's less intensive use of fertilizer. I bumped into Ben Goldsmith. Ah, yes.

• 54:13Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, brother of Zach.

• 54:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, big rewilding guy, yeah.

• 54:18Alastair Campbell?

  Big rewilding guy. And he was, he was sort of telling me, you know, that I need to get with the programme properly on rewilding. And, and then he said, you know, Rory's kind of, he's all right on this, but he's not really in the right place. I said, what is the difference? And he said, oh, Rory's more conservative. Rory's, Rory's much more with the king. He's much more conservative about these things. I want proper rewilding. He was talking about sort of, we need wild boars and wolves wandering around the place.

• 54:41Rory Stewart?

  So one of the things, my last concept with your friend Ben Goldsmith is that.

• 54:45Alastair Campbell?

  I didn't say he was afraid. I said I bumped into him.

• 54:47Rory Stewart?

  Well, so his, his impact on me is, is under his driving beavers have now been released in Scotland. And I went down to, I got this little tiny little ditch at the bottom of my hill next to my house in Scotland, which you saw. And they'd come along and they'd felled these 200 year old oaks along the river. So I, I contacted Ben and I said, look, your beavers are felling my oak trees. And he said, well, you've just got to get used to it, you know, in Norway, there's a much more diverse scrubland landscape and something else. And, and then he said, um, and anyway, Rory, um, you know, it's sometimes good for farming activity. I said, this is my septic tank ditch. They've just. Eventually, at huge expense, somebody trapped these beavers and have moved them off to Cornwall, where they're presumably munching their way through somebody else's trees.

• 55:30Alastair Campbell?

  Is it right to say that he is a more radical re wilder than you?

• 55:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, the big disagreement here is whether you go for what I'm in favour of, which is I'd like to see the whole of the United Kingdom with much more nature rich farming, or whether you go for what I would characterise, Ben Goldsmith or George Monbiot's solution, which is areas of complete wilderness and areas of intensive agriculture, which strikes me more like the United States. We have a difference in Kansas and Alaska. Whereas I think the genius of Britain is actually that you should bring the things together in the same fields and in the same areas.

• 56:05Alastair Campbell?

  There's one sentence on the Royal Society website, which I've been sort of grappling with all day. It's been estimated that unidentified species account for around 80% of species.

• 56:14Rory Stewart?

  That's very good. Oh, good. Oh, that's very nice. Some statistician needs to help you with that one. That's nice. I like that. I really like that.

• 56:23Alastair Campbell?

  We are currently thought only to know about, actually, there's a split infinitive here. I'm not even going to read it. We're currently thought, I will correct them, to know only about 1.6 million species with around 18,000 previously unidentified ones being added to our catalogue of life annually.

• 56:38Rory Stewart?

  Right. So of the 100 million species that I claimed was around there, we actually only know about 1.6 million. All right. Okay. On that lovely note, thank you very much. That's lovely to see you.

• 56:48Alastair Campbell?

  All the best.

• 56:54Speaker 02

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

• 57:03Speaker 03

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

• 57:11Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You start, you freeze again, that's what.

• 57:15Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 57:18Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 57:24Speaker 05

  Espolone Tequila. Balanced. Delicious. 100% agave. 0% ego. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. For real margarita. Ride the rooster.

• 57:34Speaker 03

  Espolone Tequila. 40% alcohol by volume. 80 proof. Copyright 2026. California, America. New York, New York. Drink responsibly.