95. Question Time: Combatting Andrew Tate, crisis at the Met, and Johnson standing again

Could Boris Johnson lose the Tory whip? Why are we paying so much for gas if wholesale prices are back to normal? Why did Joe Biden remove classified documents from the White House? Rory and Alastair answer these questions, along with systemic problems within the Metropolitan Police, misogyny in schools, the future of Labour, and Suella Braverman's latest controversy. Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] 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.

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. Rory, I think we were quite pressed for time last week. We didn't do as many as we liked to because we had that wonderful interview with Michael Heseltine, the first in our leading series. So let's crack through as many as we can today.

• 2:03Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Okay, well, here's a question for you then. Ellis Davis, could Boris Johnson lose the whip? What would be the likely fallout if Sunak were to remove the whip from Boris Johnson? And here, Alice, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna call on you to, to stop your relish, try to be realistic. If you were actually, for some bizarre reason, advising Rishi Sunak, would you ever advise him to take the whip off Boris Johnson? And what would happen if he did?

• 2:26Alastair Campbell?

  Wow. Well, it's an, it's interesting because it's like a mirror of Keir Starmer with Jeremy Corbyn, isn't it? Successor, the leader, the former leader is still around and still sort of has the capacity to cause difficulty. I think that would be a pretty nuclear option. I wonder whether Rishi Sunak is hoping. I don't know. I don't know what his relationship with Johnson's like. I wonder whether he's hoping, whether this Privileges Committee actually does come out very, very strongly against Johnson.

• 2:54Rory Stewart?

  Just quickly to interrupt, I think his relationship with Johnson is terrible because I think Boris Johnson and Boris Johnson supporters blame Rishi Sunak for toppling Boris Johnson. Remember, the reason really, in the end, the thing that did for Boris Johnson was Rishi Sunak's resignation. That's what triggered those 52 ministerial resignations that brought him down. And that's why they all got behind Liz Truss.

• 3:12Alastair Campbell?

  Did I see something the other day of where, where Sunak or somebody close to Sunak was saying that was, quotes, confirming that Johnson is going to stand again in Nuxbridge?

• 3:22Rory Stewart?

  I, well, I think Boris Johnson himself has said he wants to stand again.

• 3:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he definitely wants to stand again. There's all these stories about him going to try and find a seat that's a lot safer than Nuxbridge. He is, I've said this before, I'll say it again, he is the turd that will not flush away.

• 3:38Rory Stewart?

  And he still has a pretty disturbing degree of popularity, which is why it probably would be more dangerous.

• 3:44Alastair Campbell?

  Do you really think he does?

• 3:45Rory Stewart?

  I'm afraid he does. I mean, I, obviously, I really dislike him, but I think the reason why you might be a bit reluctant to take his whip away. Is he probably is the only conservative politician that has a real personal following as opposed to a party following?

• 4:01Alastair Campbell?

  He definitely has personal recognition and he has he has some people, Nadine Dorries, Lee Anderson, all these sorts of people who absolutely think he sort of walks on water. I think the public have in the main have absolutely had it with him. Look, and I always do try, like, you know, I was up in Burnley at the weekend and I always have a little wander around and I talk to a few sort of people that I always keep the finger on the pulse and some of them were Johnson supporters. I didn't get any sense of people thinking this was even serious to be contemplated.

• 4:30Rory Stewart?

  Pretty amazing, isn't it?

• 4:31Alastair Campbell?

  Now, here's one for you. Given her abhorrent comment to the Holocaust survivor Joan Slater, this is from somebody called Simba Steph, and we've got a lot of questions about this. I think this and Nadine Zahawi were the two, by far, the two most asked about subjects. Given her abhorrent comment to the Holocaust survivor Joan Slater, why hasn't Suella Braverman been arrested for hate crime? Now, I think that's a bit strong, I have to say, but maybe this is this is more relevant. Spacey Carey, is it ethical or even legal for the Home Office to post tweets about the video of Braverman at a constituency meeting, basically demanding it be taken down? Is there any precedent for something like this? I don't know if you follow this, Rory, but a Holocaust survivor called Joan Slater stood

• 5:13Alastair Campbell?

  up at a constituency meeting with the Home Secretary and really quite movingly spoke of her own story, but then said, you know, do you have no regard for the consequence of the sort of language that you use when you're talking about immigration? And Braverman replied and said, no, she was not going to apologize for the language she used and not going to apologize for what she was trying to do. An edited version of this video is then posted online and the Home Office on Twitter put out a statement demanding it be removed.

• 5:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it was, it's an interesting one, isn't it? For listeners who are real super geeks on this, it's worth looking at the question because it's quite an interesting one. So if you want to see the edited version, go to Owen Jones on YouTube, who plays the clip that went viral, which is a kind of clip that went out from this campaigning NGO, which is about 45 seconds long. And what it does is it goes from the Holocaust survivor saying, you know, won't you apologize for this language, and then cuts immediately to Suella Braverman saying. I'm not going to apologize. And in fact, it makes her seem unbelievably rude, lacking in empathy. And then look at the three and a half minute actual full recording of what happens. And it's very interesting. I mean, I think you can disagree with Suella Breivman

• 6:32Rory Stewart?

  very strongly and say that I certainly feel that she should apologize for using that language. That's bad language to use. But actually, her reply over three and a half minutes begins with her saying how much she values asylum, how her own father came over from Uganda, how proud she is of taking in Ukrainian refugees, of which 150,000 have come to Britain, how proud she is of taking Syrian and Afghan refugees, and trying to say her specific point is about people crossing the the Channel in boats. So it's a it's a thing where I'm a bit divided. On the one hand, I really dislike the way Suella Breivman talks and thinks. But equally, I've got some sympathy with people who say that the way that video

• 7:17Rory Stewart?

  was cut was deliberately designed to make her seem far more kind of rude and lacking in empathy than she actually was at the moment.

• 7:23Alastair Campbell?

  Although Joan Slater, the woman concerned, the Holocaust survivor, she was she was obviously there for the whole episode. She was really, really unimpressed and quite shocked, I think, by the response that she got. And what do you think of this thing about the Home Office, an official government Twitter account, dealing with something and demanding something be removed from Twitter, at what was this was not even a government meeting?

• 7:48Rory Stewart?

  It's an interesting question for you, if you'd been so it's a big scandal. She's the Home Secretary, and this appears to be her formal statement on immigration. So what happens in the way that that's cut is that it goes from her saying, I'm a strong supporter of asylum. I welcome Syrians, Ukrainians, Afghans. I welcome the fact that Ugandan Asians were taken into Britain. Britain should be very proud of taking people who are fleeing persecution. But we have a serious problem that we need to be honest about with 45,000 people crossing the Channel, and turns it into her effectively saying, I'm not going to apologize for sounding like the Nazis. So I guess if you were a government communications person, you'd be pretty angry about that.

• 8:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Rory, I've just realised I've been calling her Joan Slater. Her name's Joan Salter. Very good. So listen, loads of questions. We had lots of questions about Zaha, with lots of questions about, which we talked about briefly on the main podcast, lots of questions about Braverman. I think the third most asked about subject was probably Labour and Brexit again. Okay, go on. Give us your views on that then. Well, let me just give you some of the questions because their views are quite interesting. And Greensmith, why does Keir Starmer persist with the nonsense about making Brexit work? It's absolutely infuriating, brackets, I'm a longstanding Labour member. Berk Siga, is Sadiq Khan's questioning of Brexit Labour's way of testing the waters for a more honest conversation about the damage it's done, is doing and will do? Seems to me that London would be a safe place to try this out, and Khan is well placed, he's outside Parliament.

• 9:16Alastair Campbell?

  Jockey Fox, genuinely concerned that Keir Starmer is alienating younger voters in trying to win back Redwall seats. I've actually written my new European column this week all about this. I still think that Labour can afford to be much, much, much more aggressive against the government. Even on the Laura Koonzberg interview at the weekend, Keir didn't want to answer the question directly, yes, when he was asked whether the economy was worse off as a result of Brexit. He wanted to focus on, you know, we're going to make it work, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I said to you before, Rory, I understand why he doesn't want to make it the centrepiece of the next election. But I think it's becoming pretty much accepted wisdom that the thing is a dud, that there's lots of things that have got to be done to change it. There are lots of things that can be done to change it without necessarily going back even into the single market, let alone the European Union.

• 10:02Alastair Campbell?

  And I think Labour do underestimate how many people there are on the pro-European side of the argument who just want to hear that. They don't, people are ready for him to say, look, this is such a divisive issue. We've been through all that. We're not going back on it. It's least for a generation, whatever it is he wants to say, but then we've got to fix it. And I think when he keeps saying make Brexit work, people get the sense of, oh, well, he means that he thinks it's going well. Fix the mess, I think, is a far better line because there's no doubt in my mind Brexit is now an absolute catastrophic mess.

• 10:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, do you think it's possible? I mean, obviously, presumably part of his calculation is that he's so far ahead in the opinion polls that he doesn't want to take any risk. And he hopes that if he just keeps starm on issues like this, and as you say, avoids being dragged into the tiger traps that the his opponents can be digging for him. Do you think there's a chance that he can make it through and then change his mind on these issues? Or is the problem, if you put in your manifesto that you're not going to rejoin the Customs Union in the single market, you're a bit stuck and it's not actually possible for you to change when you're in office?

• 11:03Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think you can you can veer wildly from your manifesto. I mean, look, the Johnson government gave up any sense that the manifesto mattered a damn. But I think a part of restoring decent government is actually to say the manifestos do matter. But the other point, just imagine for a minute if this was like a Tory opposition and a Labour government that had won an election on a whole set of promises which turned out to be bogus, where there was massive economic damage being done as a result of what they'd delivered, the Tories would never, ever, ever, ever stop going on about it.

• 11:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'm with you. And I think there will be people, certainly around Jeremy Hunt, the Chancellor, who desperately looking for something to bring growth, will be very tempted to think like you and me that part of the answer is much better trading relationships with Europe.

• 11:51Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 11:52Rory Stewart?

  Particularly as we're disengaging from China, because I think, as we talked about before, one of the fantasies of some of the hard Brexit tears was that they could, and this is going back to 2015, 16, that if they left the European Union, they'd have this wonderful bonanza of trading with China. But as we are disengaging from China on security grounds, as China's economy struggles, there's more and more reason to be more closely integrated with the European economies again.

• 12:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Now, as you rightly point out, Rory, I do usually have a few cheap shots at Tory MPs and I regularly take down Tory MPs. So I'm going to make an observation. That all of the questions, and there were quite a few of them, that we got about Chris Skidmore's report on net zero were broadly positive.

• 12:35Rory Stewart?

  Oh, that's very good, very good.

• 12:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And also, I must admit, I've not read the whole thing. I do intend to at some point. But the coverage I saw of it suggested to me that it really was a genuine deep dive with, you know, quite a lot of very, very interesting ideas and proposals. And the question now is whether the government will pick it up.

• 12:56Rory Stewart?

  So Chris Skidmore's an interesting figure, somebody who joined Parliament with me, real intellectual, wrote serious books on medieval history. He's somebody who was also very much thrown to the side by Boris Johnson and everybody coming in around that. Rishi Sunak's brought him back, I think, to chair this net zero report. He actually signed the net zero legislation into Parliament. So he's an example of maybe half a dozen quite sort of bright, interesting Conservative MPs who were really thrown sideways by Boris Johnson and who are now having a sort of partial restoration under Rishi Sunak.

• 13:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I'll just give you a couple of the questions we've got. Matthew Knight, the Skidmore review demonstrates net zero is a win-win for growth, opportunity and climate. Energy industry businesses, local authorities have known it for ages, desperate to get on with delivery. Why is it taking so long for politicians to catch up? Mark Morris, now that Chris Skidmore's tour de force report into the UK's position on net zero has been published, his recommendations are many onerous and necessary. Do you think the current UK state machinery is capable of addressing them? Well, the answer to that, I think, is yes, probably, provided there is the political leadership behind it. But I don't know about you, Rory, but I will at some point, some point read it.

• 14:11Rory Stewart?

  I think maybe also, he's a very good writer. He's written these biographies, people like Richard III. And I wonder whether it's not a help with this report that he's somebody who writes well, writes quite clearly and powerfully, which is unusual sometimes with government reports.

• 14:23Alastair Campbell?

  Francis Hind, you are not entitled to comment on Harry's book Spare if you have not read it. Discuss.

• 14:30Rory Stewart?

  Oh, blimey, well, I read a bit in the airport.

• 14:32Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, did you? You said you weren't going to read it.

• 14:34Rory Stewart?

  No, I got, I was in Sydney last week, where incidentally, I was stopped by no less than six fans for the podcast in Sydney.

• 14:41Alastair Campbell?

  No fewer, no fewer.

• 14:43Rory Stewart?

  No fewer, grammar trouble again. And I wandered along the Sydney shoreline, thinking about the teal independents, those women who were elected to parliament.

• 14:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Rory Stewart?

  I talked a bit to an Australian minister, who's from, obviously from the Labour Party, who's wondering whether actually these independents are going to get re-elected again, because it was easier for them to run against the right-wing government than it might be for them to run again when Scott Morrison's government's not there.

• 15:06Alastair Campbell?

  And also because Albanese seems to be going down pretty well at the moment.

• 15:09Rory Stewart?

  Seems to be doing, doing pretty well, yeah. Despite the fact that I was pretty shocked during the election campaign, that he seemed to be completely unable to give any figures on Australia's GDP, its growth, or the most basic kind of economic statistics, but maybe that's not a requirement. Okay, Mars Pioneer. Gas prices explained by something other than Ukraine. Wholesale gas prices are now below where they were when Russia invaded Ukraine. Can you explain why we're still paying through the nose on our bills? Do you want me to have a go on that?

• 15:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, definitely, definitely one for you.

• 15:40Rory Stewart?

  All right, so the, the answer there seems to be that absolutely right, wholesale gas prices coming down, but the UK is in real trouble. The UK's in trouble firstly, we didn't store enough gas, so Boris Johnson's government in particular was very, very reckless in storing gas. We were only storing 10 terawatt hours of gas, when the Italians, the Germans, the French all got, you know, 10, 15 times as much in storage. We also use much more gas than other countries. We're having to import LNG and we're competing with Asia and we had a very cold winter. So all of that means that the gas prices sadly are not coming down quite as steeply as the wholesale prices are coming, although they will come down and that will help the government a little bit in its economic calculations.

• 16:25Rory Stewart?

  They're not going to end up having to pay quite as much on trying to follow through on the minimum pricing.

• 16:30Alastair Campbell?

  Good. Colin McQuaid. In normal times, a politics show would not top the UK podcast charts, obvious charms notwithstanding. Do you think the success of The Rest is Politics and other unnamed, more frivolous rival podcasts reflects the dearth of quality of political analysis on the mainstream media? P.S. Give me a shout out, it's my birthday. So happy birthday, Colin.

• 16:54Rory Stewart?

  Happy birthday, Colin. Well, I wonder whether part of the reason we're doing well, without us being too smug, is that we do find a way of disagreeing and having quite strong opinions, which is probably a bit more difficult for the BBC, isn't it? Because they've got to worry all the time about impartiality, whereas you and I are able to fight, argue, have strong views, in fact, sound more like normal people talking about politics than maybe conventional media is able to.

• 17:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but we are, I guess in this context, we are both presenter and interviewee. Whereas I think maybe what the question's getting at is that when the mainstream media, broadcast media, set up discussions and debates, it's usually done with the view to finding the conflict rather than finding the agreement. I wonder if that's what he's saying.

• 17:40Rory Stewart?

  And also, you're an insider, and maybe both of us in small ways are insiders, which maybe gives us, you know, we can talk about, you can talk about being Tony Blasgum and I can talk about being an MP, and maybe that gives it a little bit of an edge. Anyway, we mustn't get too smug, we're going to go for the break.

• 17:53Speaker 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.

• 18:06Speaker 03

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

• 18:12Speaker 04

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

• 18:16Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 18:19Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 18:20Speaker 03

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

• 18:30Alastair Campbell?

  So, welcome back to the Rest is Politics question time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 18:34Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart. So I found there was quite a niche one, but I thought rather a nice one, from the Gambia. George Close came across this week something about the 7th anniversary of Embrema Solosandings, he's a former opposition politician in Gambia, his murder. Sounds like a very interesting courageous man, wondering if either of you encountered him in any of your many foreign engagements.

• 18:56Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I didn't, so I'm assuming you did.

• 18:58Rory Stewart?

  No, I didn't, but he is, there's a lovely, if people are interested in following up, it's rather wonderful, seven years after he was murdered, he's been honoured with a state funeral in the Gabias, a lovely piece about him on the BBC. And he essentially is a real example of the kind of incredible risks that many people in the world take around politics. We complain a lot about British politics, but I was in Qatar recently and was talking to Bilal Butt, who's the Pakistan Foreign Minister, and of course, his mother, Benazir, was killed. His grandfather was killed. And there are many countries where it's still the case that for all the things that we say about politics, people are showing very, very considerable courage. I was talking about President Hamid Kazai remaining behind in Afghanistan, or the Afghan

• 19:43Rory Stewart?

  female lawmaker who was tragically killed just two days ago. So I think worth remembering, and if people want to follow up, nice article about standing on the BBC.

• 19:52Alastair Campbell?

  Another example of somebody who can continue to inspire after death and also continue to be honoured after death. I went to see the film Till at the weekend, which I really strongly recommend.

• 20:06Rory Stewart?

  What's it about?

• 20:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's about a young boy called Emmett Till, who was abducted and tortured and lynched and dumped in a river in Mississippi by racists, young black boy. And the star of the film, the main focus of the film is his mother and her kind of never-ending fight to get justice, which she doesn't get. The two guys who had finally charged with his murder, they get off with an all-white jury. But she keeps on campaigning, she gets involved with the kind of civil rights movement and so forth. And then just last year, Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Law Bill.

• 20:48Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 20:49Alastair Campbell?

  So, and I just thought it was a wonderful story. There's, you know, he, obviously he died aged fourteen, she died some years ago, and yet, here we are, twenty twenty two, new American president, and he makes a law making hate crime a federal crime.

• 21:04Rory Stewart?

  Here's a, here's a question for you. We didn't get on to it in the main pod, which is around Joe Biden and his papers. So Joe Biden's been found, it appears, to have also taken classified papers out of the office in the same way that Donald Trump was discovered by the FBI to have done so. And it's been a real shock for many of my friends in the US because when Donald Trump was found doing it, the assumption was this was an incredible sort of more evidence of just how evil and irresponsible and corrupt he was. And now Joe Biden appears to have done the same thing. I thought, even when the Trump story came out, I hope I reflected this on the podcast, that I was a bit cautious about saying that Trump had done this purely out of kind of evil

• 21:46Rory Stewart?

  and corruption. I think there's a lot of carelessness and vanity and casualness that goes on with the way that elected politicians often treat classified papers. You remember Hillary Clinton got in trouble, for example, about using her Gmail account. And I think it extends to most of us. Top secret papers are different because we have to see them in special locked rooms and we can't take them out. But papers of lower classification, I think politicians should be pretty wary about going around attacking other people about it because I think there's a lot of there but for the grace of God go I. But I don't know where you, where you fall on this.

• 22:16Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think, I, I think you're right. I mean, I, I was always struck, working in Downing Street. I mean, we were pretty, I'd say we were pretty tight most of the time. But, you know, you did often just see stuff kind of sort of lying around.

• 22:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, particularly stuff that wasn't top secret. I mean, the stuff they're getting in trouble for, and this is true of Trump as well as Biden, is a couple of classifications down. It's not revealing the names of agents.

• 22:38Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, it's hard to know without knowing what the papers are and also what reason they gave for it. It was interesting that Biden, as I understand it, as soon as he realized he was, they were there, he fessed up, as it were. And I don't, I think you're right though about the looseness of it. The other thing I was always very surprised is that, you know, when Tony Blair became Prime Minister, and like, you know, he's busy and he's got tons of stuff to do. He wasn't really given that much of a briefing about all that sort of stuff about, you know, I think that people just make assumptions that everybody's going to be very, very responsible.

• 23:11Rory Stewart?

  One hundred percent right. I've always been struck by that, how little briefing there is. And it's particularly true when people take over, you know, for example, as Defence Secretary, there have been some pretty, you know, Defence Secretaries, many Defence Secretaries in Britain who've had absolutely no experience of defence or the military until the day they actually walk into these, these offices.

• 23:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:30Rory Stewart?

  It's taken for granted, I think, partly because soldiers find it very difficult to imagine that somebody doesn't know the difference between a harpoon and a javelin, or the difference between a Challenger tank and an Apache helicopter, because these things are things they've taken for granted for ten years. And civil servants, the same, because they've all been trained on classified documents. It's difficult for them to remember that the person they may be dealing with may have been, three years ago, a local councillor or local businessman, local teacher, and have had nothing to do with these kind of documents before.

• 23:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you mentioned, you mentioned Challenger tanks there. Nathan Orman, what do we think about the UK's decision to send Challenger two tanks, tanks to Ukraine? What does this mean for the UK's defence capability? Will it encourage Germany to send leopards?

• 24:12Rory Stewart?

  Well, I mean, I think the first thing to bear in mind is that the UK has been pretty shamefully getting rid of its tank capacity for a long time now. So really, from the late sort of 2000s onwards, Britain had decided that there wasn't going to be another war in Europe. I remember when I was a very young soldier, I'd, I'd join the army on a short service limited commission in 91, so just after four of the Berlin Wall. We were still doing Russian tank identification and thinking about how we were going to fight on the German plains. But by, you know, 10 years ago, we'd gotten to a situation where everybody thought there wasn't likely to be another European land war. Everything was moving towards cyber or counterinsurgency campaigns in places like Afghanistan, and

• 24:55Rory Stewart?

  that meant that we were getting rid of our tanks. So we've really run down our armoured capacity, haven't really invested in renewing them. I'll be a bit. Concerned about actually what state these vehicles really are in that we're sending to Ukraine.

• 25:08Alastair Campbell?

  And how many do we have left?

• 25:09Rory Stewart?

  Very, very few. We dropped down to one of the lowest levels compared to countries like France. I can check the figures for you.

• 25:15Alastair Campbell?

  I give you permission to look at your friend, Mr. Google.

• 25:18Rory Stewart?

  Thank you very much. I'm guessing that we're down in the hundreds, but I will I will check for you. And France, on the other hand, decided to try to keep much more of a capacity. So the UK has a total fleet of 227 tanks, which is just absolutely tiny compared to the US or Germany.

• 25:35Alastair Campbell?

  How many thousand of the Russians got?

• 25:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, the Russians, I think, have got 22,000. The United States has got 8,725. And we've got 200 and whatever, to put it in context, yeah.

• 25:46Alastair Campbell?

  Global Britain.

• 25:47Rory Stewart?

  Global Britain, there we are. You'll see that places like Greece and Jordan are well ahead of us. Eritrea is well ahead of us. Azerbaijan's got more than us. Lebanon's got more than us.

• 25:56Alastair Campbell?

  We should talk, by the way, we should talk soon about Azerbaijan and Armenia because what's going on there is pretty extraordinary as well.

• 26:02Rory Stewart?

  Can I ask you this question because I think you might have more to say about it than me. Heather Butler, can you reflect on the reforms required in the Met Police in the light of today's breaking story? Read David Carrick and previous scandals.

• 26:14Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I listened to an interview this morning with the Met Police Chief, Alex Rowley. And I did so in the company of my daughter, Grace, and Fiona, her mum, my partner. And I am a pretty strong defender of the police.

• 26:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you're always defending them, even when I'm quite critical. In fact, I think we had a big, big argument about this where I was trying to be a bit tough on them.

• 26:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I can, listen, I can criticize all sorts of things about the police, but I I in general think we're pretty lucky to have a in the main, pretty good consensual policing around the UK. But this was just horrific. And listening to Alex Rowley, it's the fact that this guy's sort of been there for so long and getting away with so much. And going through vetting systems at the same time. So clearly, there is, I think we have to accept some sort of cultural issue. Rowley was talking about there being now 800 cases that they're looking into. Well, that's a lot of, that's a lot of policemen, policemen and women. I think in the main it will be men.

• 27:16Rory Stewart?

  And there was a big report, wasn't there, a few months ago by somebody who'd worked, I forget her name, but she's a lady, is it Louise Casey?

• 27:23Alastair Campbell?

  Louise Casey, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 27:24Rory Stewart?

  It was quite a disturbing, bigger report about some of what she sees as the structural failings that still exist in places like the Met. And a lot of this seems to be about a real reluctance to investigate senior officers. I mean, I think it's understandable in a way, but it's also, in the end, it's wrong. It's a sense that people don't go after their own, they're trying to cover up. And particularly David Carrick, I mean, he was part of this real elite, which you and I know quite well, which is the diplomatic and protection officers, who are really the sort of, you know, part of the cream of the cream. And he was able, I think, to use that to really intimidate people. So there are some questions, I'm afraid, around the police, which maybe we need to get into.

• 28:02Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, no, listen, there, there, and I think the other thing that makes this, in a way, particularly shocking is, is just, it's not that long since the Sarah Everard case. It's not that long. And the sense you have is that there've just been too many of these for you to think there isn't some sort of systemic, broader cultural problem there. Now, Alex Rowley did what Cressida did before him. He said, you know, that he's going to spare no effort, he's going to do everything necessary, he's going to change it, you know. My sense of him is, I think he comes over pretty well.

• 28:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Louise Casey, back in September, was saying, the force has allowed abhorrent officers to stay in its ranks. There's too much misogyny and racism. And I guess she was, she was coming after the Sarah Everett case. But more than half of the Met officers found guilty of sexual misconduct over a four-year period up to 2020 kept their jobs. So I'm afraid what she's trying to argue, with more than 600 sex and domestic abuse allegations against officers being investigated by the Met, is that this isn't just a single bad apple, that there's a problem there that needs to be dealt with.

• 29:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Let me, let me focus this question on, which is about a single bad apple. Rosie W., many schools are now choosing to tackle Andrew Tate and misogyny directly. In lessons and assemblies, what else can we do to help our young boys and men avoid falling into his kind of rhetoric?

• 29:20Rory Stewart?

  Can you remind us a bit about who Andrew Tate is?

• 29:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'll be honest, I knew very, very little about him until he got into a Twitter spat with Greta Thunberg, when he was boasting about how many massively expensive sports cars he has. And she did a very, very, very, very amusing tweet about, which was sort of broadly related to her, her assessment of the size of his penis.

• 29:45Rory Stewart?

  He's a kind of, I mean, he's a kind of kickboxer who wears kind of shades and a leather jacket and smokes big cigars and is a TikTok star.

• 29:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he first, I think, became broadly, you know, fairly well known as a contestant on Big Brother. He's currently in a prison or a police station in Romania.

• 30:01Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 30:02Alastair Campbell?

  He proudly calls himself a misogynist. A lot of the stuff that he puts out on his, on his videos, and I think he's banned on quite a lot of platforms, but an awful lot, if you talk to teachers, an awful lot of young boys follow this guy.

• 30:17Rory Stewart?

  But part of it seems to be completely artificial. So his videos have been watched 11.6 billion times, which even you asked, so his bit of social media star has got to admit it's a lot. But a lot of that seems to be to do with him using allies to manipulate the algorithms on TikTok.

• 30:34Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 30:34Rory Stewart?

  He's done an amazing sort of attempts to create copycat accounts and play with the algorithms to make himself millions of pounds. He's got 127,000 members in what he calls his Hustler University, paying £39 a month.

• 30:47Alastair Campbell?

  Hustler University.

• 30:48Rory Stewart?

  £39 a month, that's pretty serious.

• 30:51Alastair Campbell?

  What degrees do they give?

• 30:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, exactly, that's what you want to know, don't you? Yeah.

• 30:54Alastair Campbell?

  I just thought he was one of these kind of, you know, people to be ignored. But once he did become much better known as a result of Greta, and I did talk to a couple of people, one was a head teacher, one's a teacher, who said they really are, you know, having to struggle with the kind of, you know, very misogynist, he's also bizarrely got sort of strong views about Iran, presumably because of their, you know, approach to women's rights. Anyway, he's now, he's now being investigated for all sorts of allegations of trafficking and abuse and all sorts of stuff.

• 31:27Rory Stewart?

  So it turns out if you sign up to Hustler University, you can earn up to £10,000 a month through lessons on crypto investing and earning a 48% commission for each person you refer. There we are.

• 31:38Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, okay. Let's close on this one then. I know what the answer will be from you Rory, because you're in Jordan. Although maybe you can get it there. Jan Hutchinson, are you watching Happy Valley? Do we need more straight talking in government in the style of Sarah Lancashire's character Catherine? I'm assuming you're not watching Happy Valley?

• 31:56Rory Stewart?

  It's very sad actually. I don't know, somebody, this is a question for listeners. Why does the BBC make it so difficult to watch BBC stuff overseas? I don't really understand that in a world where Netflix makes it possible, Amazon makes it possible. I can't even pay to watch this stuff.

• 32:11Alastair Campbell?

  Is it because they're selling it to foreign broadcasters? I don't know.

• 32:13Rory Stewart?

  I don't know what the problem is. Anyway, what's your answer to the question? Because I haven't seen Happy Valley.

• 32:16Alastair Campbell?

  I am watching Happy Valley. Sarah Lancashire is brilliant, probably because she's married to a Burnley fan. I think that's a big, big, big part of her success. And she's a, she's a police officer. It's a kind of combination of a police drama, but it's also about her, her past and her, and her background and her family. The dialogue is brilliant. The other thing I think was you'd like, Roy, and I really do like, is that they have quite long scenes of dialogue. There's a wonderful scene with her sister the other day, and you kept thinking, God, how long are they going to let this run? Because you know, most, a lot of television now, it's just a zap, zap, zap, and on to the next thing, on to the next thing. So yeah, I'm watching Happy Valley and it's great. And we have to wrap.

• 32:59Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Well, I'm going to wrap with a cheeky final plug for Good Luck to You, Leo Grande with Emma Thompson.

• 33:05Alastair Campbell?

  What's that about?

• 33:05Rory Stewart?

  It's, it's about Emma Thompson plays an older woman who hires a young male lover. And it's a, it's a wonderful, it's dialogue. It's two people in a room.

• 33:13Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, I see, I see, I see, I see.

• 33:15Rory Stewart?

  It's rather, I think it's rather wonderful. Anyway, that's my, that's my recommendation of the day.

• 33:20Alastair Campbell?

  Well, final, final, final, cultural recommendation Rory. If you can get Disney, Mary McCartney's documentary on the history of the Abbey Road Studios, absolutely brilliant. All part of the musical education that I insist that you have.

• 33:33Rory Stewart?

  Thank you very much. Well, it's goodbye from me.

• 33:35Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

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