82. Keir vs. peers, George W. Bush, and $580k in a sofa...

Join Alastair and Rory as they discuss Gordon Brown and Keir Starmer's latest proposals, the post-presidential life of George W. Bush, why so many MPs are standing down at the next election, and the mysterious story about South African President Cyril Ramaphosa's sofa... TRIP Plus: 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/restorspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restorspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. And loads to talk about Rory. Labour on the constitution, quite a few Tory MPs jumping ship, strikes growing, cost of living crisis growing as it gets colder, gets colder, even colder in Ukraine.

• 2:04Alastair Campbell?

  And I know you want to talk about Ghana, and I've got an interest there too. But also, I'm fascinated by this story in South Africa with President Ramaphosa in real political trouble, it would seem, due to somebody finding half a million dollars down the side of his sofa. But you look to me like you're in an airport again.

• 2:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so I'm calling with huge apologies. And actually, Alistair, for those of you listening, is being incredibly patient. I've cancelled his training this morning. I've delayed this by about an hour and a half while I've been fighting with tickets and passports. And I'm trying to get to Doha to take my kids to watch, inspired partly by Alistair. We're going to go and watch the game between Japan and Croatia this evening. So maybe just quickly, before we get on to serious stuff, what's your tip for Japan-Croatia?

• 2:50Alastair Campbell?

  They're both pretty strong, actually. That's a hard one to call. I think we could be into our first extra time game, actually. And even penalties, you might have a late-night Rory pretending that you like football.

• 3:01Rory Stewart?

  Very good, okay.

• 3:02Alastair Campbell?

  Taking a seat for one of those Japanese fans who can't get in tonight. I hope you feel guilty.

• 3:09Rory Stewart?

  Well, Alistair, tell us a little bit about what you think. So for listeners who maybe haven't been following every detail of this, Gordon Brown was commissioned to come up with a series of quite bold constitutional changes for Labour. And Keir Starmer is a bit ambiguous. On the one hand, there are a lot of headlines today saying he's embracing them. And on the other hand, it seems as though he's not quite committing to take them on until he's consulted.

• 3:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think, do you know what I think has happened? I could be wrong about this, but my sense of how this has gone is that Labour understand, I think, that the constitution is in pretty serious need of change. He's asked Gordon to do it because Gordon has got a big restless mind. And I think what's interesting, what I've seen about the coverage so far, is that it's being very much linked to the economy, to the fact of the need to regenerate the nations and the regions and make people feel that as the economy hopefully gets into some sort of recovery, the whole nation benefits. And I think what happened was this, that Keir

• 4:14Alastair Campbell?

  Went along to brief the House of Lords, the Labour peers, about some of the content. Some of them very unhappy at the idea that their perks and privileges might be removed in a sort of abolished House of Lords. So I think the whole thing was kind of briefed out as if that was the only thing in this and that was the only thing that really mattered. And I think what Keir is trying to do today, I just heard an interview that he did this morning where he's trying to kind of say that it's about much more than the House of Lords. And at the same time, I think this is quite sensible actually because I know what Gordon's like. Gordon will have absolutely put huge amounts of change into this. It's what he used to do when he did his own reports about.

• 4:57Alastair Campbell?

  Gordon was always brilliant at the politics of wanting something to happen and then he'd get a report commission, that the report would be big and bold and then he'd sort of, he'd end up by taking bits and leaving other bits and doing what he wanted to do in the first place. And I think what Keir's doing, I think quite sensibly actually, is saying, well, we do now need to go and discuss this because I said to you last week, when we reformed the House of Lords, it was incredibly difficult once you got into the detail. But I think there's a lot in here that you should like because it's about more power to local government, it's about more power to elected mayors, it's about a big programme of devolution. And I think that there's a, you know, it will be, the devil will be in the detail. But I don't buy this idea that it's sort of the store, the big story out of this is

• 5:41Alastair Campbell?

  will Keir accept it all or not. I think it's a, I think it's a very big step in the right direction.

• 5:46Rory Stewart?

  One of the things we'd love to see, of course, is whether he'd ever be prepared to look at electoral reform, which is the way of unlocking the question of how to get new parties into parliament and open up, take off some of the death grip of Labour and Conservatives. As we've talked about previously, I'm increasingly convinced that the real problem with these parties is the way they select their MPs, the kind of way it works at the local party association level, the kind of killer stranglehold they have on people who can actually make it through. And I'm, for some reason, a lot of friends of mine are running to be Labour MPs at the moment and are finding it very, very difficult to make it through these local associations.

• 6:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but there's a reason for that, right? You know, you, I, look, I agree with you. I think the parties are a big part of our problem. But I think there's a ruthless edge to Keir Starmer, and he's getting a lot of criticism, particularly from the kind of hard left of the party. Because he is taking quite a keen interest in the sort of candidates that are being selected. But I think it's, this is Labour being mindful of our history, our very recent history. Where, you know, a lot of candidates got elected that in part led to Jeremy Corbyn. Whether, you know, although I think Jeremy Corbyn is, you know, does have many, many political strengths, but leading the country was never going to be one of them. And it, it, it helped contribute towards that sort of terrible mess of 2019, and he's trying to fix that.

• 7:03Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I agree with you. I would love it. I mentioned last week, I was actually got a message saying, you know, you know that thing where people say things which never happened? And I mentioned this 27, 27 year old who'd been trying to get a seat who couldn't, and this, and I said, what do you mean it never happened? Well, you didn't say his name. So I'm going to say his name. His name is Josh Simons, and I hope he gets a seat somewhere. And Mette Coben, another one that, who, who, who's a social entrepreneur. He founded this wonderful organisation, My Life My Say, which if you'd have been mayor of London, you'd have had a lot to do with. And they're really about engaging young people and so forth. He's just failed in a bid to get a seat in Kensington. So it doesn't mean that the other candidates hopefully aren't good, but I, I agree, it's very, very hard to work through.

• 7:48Alastair Campbell?

  The kind of who you know, how long you've known them, how long you've been around. And I just think our politics needs more young people.

• 7:54Rory Stewart?

  A lot of it seems to be with both parties, and actually with the Lib Dems as well. A real testimony to how many years you've spent trudging the streets. There's often a big advantage if you've been a local councillor. If you've spent 20, 30 years in the machine, many of these people were politicians at university, where streeting, for example, was a politician at university. Therefore, it's more difficult. There's a lot of talk about how we'd like MPs who've done other things, have more experience of the world, to come into politics. But it's surprisingly difficult to do because in a sense, it is a sort of profession. It's a profession where often you need to put in. Many, many years of hard work pushing leaflets through doors to have a chance of actually getting selected.

• 8:34Alastair Campbell?

  You you want to mix, don't you? You you want people who've been around the block. You want people from different backgrounds. You want people from different parts of the country. You want people with lots of different experience. I do think there's something a little bit identikit about, you know, you you you look at, you know, if you say a classic Labour MP, you know, most people probably look at that and think, you know, male trade union background or whatever, but I think that's changing.

• 9:01Alastair Campbell?

  And I likewise, I do think that, you know, in the in the time that you came in, I do think that Cameron did, David Cameron did try to bring in a kind of broader range of candidates. But I do, I really do think that I saw that the Conservative Party line on Keir Starmer's thing was to say, oh, while the country's worrying about cost of living, he's tinkering around about with things that people don't care about and aren't important. But the sort of politics we have and the sort of government we have and the sort of country we are, I think people are, you know, I'm not saying it's like as important as the cost of living or as important as health or whatever. But getting a sense, I mean, I I actually do think a lot of people, the thing I hear more and more now is people saying the country doesn't work anymore. It doesn't, things aren't working.

• 9:44Alastair Campbell?

  And that is about the, sometimes that's about the machinery of government. If you look at what's happening in Manchester, what's happening in, you know, and I would say Andy Street in Birmingham, I think has done a, you know, a pretty good job. I think some of these elected mayors have really made a difference.

• 9:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think that's one of the most exciting things. And that's one of the ways that we're a long way behind a lot of our European, you know, allies. I mean, France has got so strong and vigorous a tradition of local democracy with mayors at a local level. That also brings us to these MPs who've announced they're stepping down. So we're losing a lot of big Labour beasts, aren't we, now coming up? So Harriet Harman's announced she's going. Margaret Hodge is going. Rosie Winterton's going. Alan Whitehead's going. Ben Bradshaw's going.

• 10:27Rory Stewart?

  So it's an interesting, it's going to be an interesting shift. That's going to be certainly the parliament that I joined, it will feel very different after the next election with particularly a lot of those senior Labour women leaving.

• 10:38Alastair Campbell?

  Are we still in the era of gallantry where we don't sort of refer to women's age? But I think age is a factor there. I told you, I was at Harriet's, the event at the Speaker's House for Harriet's, the celebration of Harriet's fortieth year as an MP. So we're talking about age there, but I do think, look, you have to have some churn. I think without churn, you just get the same old tired faces and people get fed up of it. But I think on the Tory side, I think, I saw you did a very sympathetic tweet about Sajid Javid, suggesting that his departure was a further sign that politics is so difficult and what have you. I really do think Sajid's sort of thinking, well, I helped Sulek stab Johnson in the back and get rid of him, but I walked out with him and I'm not in the cabinet, we're probably

• 11:22Alastair Campbell?

  going to lose the next election. I see the FT said he was already in talks about some big job. But the one that I found really interesting was the Bishop Auckland.

• 11:30Rory Stewart?

  Dehenna Davidson.

• 11:31Alastair Campbell?

  Dehenna Davidson, whose nickname apparently up north is ABBA, anywhere but Bishop Auckland. But she's not even 30 yet, and she's gone in, she's been described as a rising star, and she's now leaving. And I wonder if that's because she's decided that, either she's decided she's not going to make the top level, or she's decided that she's going to lose her seat, or she's decided that she's going to do a media career.

• 11:56Rory Stewart?

  And of course, as an MP, as an ex MP, and I'm having a lot of difficulty getting this across, it's amazing if you look at the Twitter feed when I say that one of the major reasons people are leaving, and this will apply also to some of the Labour MPs who are stepping down. I mean, they're not all, they're not all old, the Labour MPs who are stepping down. Ben Bradshaw maybe has been in a bit of a time, but we're losing John Cruttus, who you wouldn't have thought would need to leave. Paul Bloomfield just got in in 2010 at the same time as me, Sheffield Central stepping down. But the basic truth is that it's a brutal profession. And Twitter is unbelievably violently unsympathetic. And one of the reasons why it's such a brutal profession is the hostility towards MPs is beyond imagining. I mean, if you look through the feed.

• 12:39Rory Stewart?

  Everybody assumes that the reason that Sajid Javid is leaving is because he's made either, it's actually very confused, very muddled, it's not quite clear whether they're saying it's because he's making so much money as an MP and it's such a cushy job, or because somehow having become an MP is suddenly going to allow him to make an incredible amount of money in his future career. The case of Sajid, that's absolute nonsense. Sajid's a really remarkable story. You know, famously, his dad came to Britain with a pound in his pocket, was driving buses. He went on to be the Asian manager for one of the largest banks in the world out of Singapore. He took a 98% pay cut to become an MP. Whatever he was doing, it's not about money. And it's very, very odd that everybody wants to somehow reduce people's motivation to money. That obviously, in the case of Sajid Javid, cannot be true.

• 13:20Alastair Campbell?

  You know him and I don't know him well at all, but look, I think there's, it's a perfectly human calculation to make a political calculation. I imagine, look, if he, if the Tories lose his seat, they really, really, really are in trouble. But I think that there must be Tories who are sitting there thinking, I just can't put up with this anymore. And it's not, it's not, I don't think it's because of the hate. I'm sure that's a factor. But I just think if you're a Conservative MP at the moment, I don't know, I suspect it's simpler than any of us are giving credit for. I think he probably just says, I think, I've done this long enough, I've had enough of it, I want to get out. And I don't blame him for that at all.

• 14:03Rory Stewart?

  Well, I don't know, my sense is, and I was actually talking to somebody who's married to someone on the Labour front bench recently, who was just talking about how unbelievably unpleasant it was, very, very senior Labour MPs, family just talking about how much they hated the job of being an MP. And I think many, many MPs are under huge pressure from their families to say, why on earth are you doing this? You're working very, very long weeks, you're getting abused all the time, doesn't matter whether you're Labour or Conservative, everybody thinks you're an incompetent, inept... Corrupt so and so who's idling in your constituency, nothing you can do can turn that around. And families are going to say, why on earth are we putting up with this? Not because they're looking for a cushy life, not because being an MP allows you to get a better life, but many of these people genuinely had decent jobs before they entered and can

• 14:47Rory Stewart?

  get decent jobs in their own merit when they leave, and they can't understand why they're putting up with the abuse.

• 14:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think, well, I think that you're still, but back to the point about the candidates, you've still got more people who want to do it than than their vacancies. It's a question, the question is whether we're getting the right people. Look, I do think this, I'm not under my, I'm not underestimating the significance of all the the abuse. And maybe I'm, I'm lucky in that I, you know, I've said to you before, I genuinely don't care what somebody whose view I don't have a reason to respect, i.e. somebody that just sort of I think is, I always imagine somebody sitting in their underpants on their mother's sofa, firing off abuse, or it's somebody doing it for political reasons. And I get why people get hurt by it. But I do think if you're in politics, I'm afraid you do

• 15:34Alastair Campbell?

  have to develop a, a bit of a thick skin for that stuff.

• 15:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's, but it's, I think that's right. But some of these people have been in touch, both Labour and Conservative MPs, because I've left politics to ask whether I think they should stay. And it is often difficult to cheer people up, because it's not just the abuse on Twitter. It's a relentless job. It's a job which, you know, however much people assume that it's unbelievably well paid, it's paid roughly what a GP or a head teacher is paid, slightly less actually than some GPs and head teachers. And I think that it's sad in a way, that, that, that in, in the old days, people really saw this as a lifetime of public service. And now people are struggling to feel that.

• 16:18Alastair Campbell?

  But, but Rory, you, you mentioned GPs there. I mean, GPs get tons of abuse, which they never used to. And I think that's worse in a way, because I think that, you know, if you're a politician, I think there's always been through history before social media, you know, you have robust debate. But I, I think the abuse that I see now being channelled, which I, I think is largely media driven, with a bit of encouragement from government. But it's disgusting, because these are people who are literally who, you know, who we need to keep us well, to keep us alive. And there's so many of them are being put off by this relentless. Abuse and that's not social media, that's mainstream media, I think.

• 17:01Rory Stewart?

  It's a lot of that, isn't it? And even face to face, if you're a teacher. Now, could we take a break there so that I can get on to the next stage of this flight? And then just pick it up in three minutes, please.

• 17:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, okay.

• 17:12Rory Stewart?

  Thank you. All right.

• 17:14Speaker 02

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• 17:24Speaker 03

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• 17:30Speaker 04

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• 17:34Speaker 05

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• 17:38Speaker 04

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• 17:39Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17.9 minutes without parent.

• 17:51Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the most difficult to record episode of The Rest Is Politics we have ever had with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 17:59Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart, and Alistair showing an extraordinary patience, which he's not often famous.

• 18:04Alastair Campbell?

  You haven't seen me when you've been at the various stages in between our recordings.

• 18:09Alastair Campbell?

  We started, let me, let me just, if I can use one of your favorite phrases, if we just loop back a bit. So it started with you in, was it Amman Airport?

• 18:18Rory Stewart?

  Yep, Amman Airport.

• 18:19Alastair Campbell?

  Amman Airport. We started, we got through a bit there, that was fine. And then the next thing I saw you in a rather crushed economy seat on a flight. And we gave that a go for a few minutes. And now I think you're in another airport lounge in Doha.

• 18:36Rory Stewart?

  No, in Doha. Yeah. And the reason for this comedy is that I got to the boarding gate with my two little kids and my wife, only to find the three of them were allowed to board and I wasn't allowed to board because some amazing app from the Katri government collapsed in my hands. So I saw my three family members take off and I thought I'm going to get killed by Alistair because now instead of landing and doing the podcast, I'm going to be faffing around in the airport when I should have been doing.

• 18:59Alastair Campbell?

  Oh my God. So it's actually, you're making me feel it's a little bit like Home Alone with Macaulay Culkin. You were padded to bear last week. Now you're Macaulay Culkin.

• 19:08Rory Stewart?

  The whole thing was very embarrassing. Anyway, thank you for your patience. So you were just taking us into Nardim Zahawi, his defence of policies on nurses and strikes and Putin.

• 19:17Alastair Campbell?

  I think it was the thing that was most asked about was his extraordinary interview where he basically said that, you know, the nurses and others shouldn't go on strike because. It will give a big boost of Vladimir Putin. I mean, Putin is sitting there thinking, hey Boris, come and tell me what has happened in the RCN ballot. I mean, this is, I mean, do they, do these people really think we're just stupid? And you keep, Rory, you keep telling me this guy's clever, that he's a friend of yours.

• 19:45Rory Stewart?

  I keep saying that I like him very much. Yeah, it's a very, very difficult thing when you leave politics. So there were very few MPs that I liked, and I've talked about some of them on the show. And many of them, I thought, were absolutely awful. But Nader Zahawi, I travelled with a bit in the Middle East. I thought he was a very, very cheerful, good tempered, patient companion, great kind of breadth of experience. I love his personal story, came from Kurdistan as a child, and I travelled with him through Iraq. But you're absolutely right, this was not, not his greatest moment.

• 20:13Alastair Campbell?

  And we've now, we've now got the, even the, I say even, but the people who are working at Shelter, the housing charity, the talk of a strike there because they say they can't, they can't afford to get a house. This is bad, bad, bad. And I don't get the feeling that the government really understand it. I was with a council leader, George Gool. I went skating yesterday. Rory, if you'd wanted to see me embarrassed in a sporting context, then you should have been at Somerset House yesterday because it was awful. I just couldn't do it. But George was, George was saying that, and I think this is a story that's echoed by MPs and by councillors, and that people are now coming in with literally, particularly now it's getting a bit colder, it was freezing in the Lido this morning, that they're coming

• 20:56Alastair Campbell?

  in with real, stories of absolute heartbreak. The old cliche, heating or eating, it is happening now for an awful lot of people. And the government don't seem to me to get a grip of it at all.

• 21:05Rory Stewart?

  I think there's a couple of problems on that. I mean, firstly is that the rise in prices, the inflation is crazy. And of course, when we talk about whatever the headline figure is, and every month maybe shifts from seven to nine percent, it doesn't capture the fact that many important bits of someone's life can be going up much more. Certain kinds of foods can be going up much, much more steeply than that. And of course, if you're on a low income, food is a much higher proportion of your, your monthly expenditure if you're on a higher income. So people are really suffering. But at the same time, of course, the government is under huge pressure not to increase wages more because they're worried that will fuel inflation even more and create even more problems next year and we'll get back in the same cycles we were in the 1970s. So they are trapped and this is going to be one of the contributing factors to why the

• 21:50Rory Stewart?

  Conservatives are likely to lose the next election. They're trapped in a situation where they are forced all the time to look as though they are cruel and uncaring. But part of that, and obviously people listening to this may think that simply is because they're cruel and uncaring, but part of it is also they'll be under pressure from the Treasury and the Bank of England to try to control rises in wages to stop inflation.

• 22:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. While you were on the second, between the second and third stages of our podcast recording, I used the time to, I read a bit of, I read Der Spiegel and the, one of the stories there was that the UK, which was fifth in the list of German trading partners, has now fallen out of the top 10.

• 22:31Rory Stewart?

  Extraordinary. And it was tweeted out by the German ambassador. It was in a very striking way. It's fascinating.

• 22:36Alastair Campbell?

  I didn't see that. I didn't see that actually.

• 22:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. The first news of this, I think, came from the German ambassador sending it as a tweet. A real sign of how increasingly embassies are being quite provocative and cheeky on Twitter.

• 22:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'll tell you, I'll tell you another thing that I think does relate to Brexit. And one of my favorite questions that we got this week was whether there will ever be an episode of the Rest is Polities where I don't at some point bang on about Brexit. And the answer is probably not. But I think the other thing that's, that's related, do you not think that when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister, when Tony Blair was Prime Minister, that if the first state visit to an incoming United States president was one of the French president, that there would have been absolute meltdown in our diplomacy, in our media. And yet it happened. Last week, we had Macron going to see Biden.

• 23:28Alastair Campbell?

  And Biden, you know, being pretty flattering to the old French. And yet, I, and I do think, I think there's no getting away from it. We are now, if the fact that they haven't, it wasn't even in the debate about, oh, shouldn't it have been the British Prime Minister? Wasn't even in the debate because we've chosen our own decline.

• 23:46Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's, and it's interesting how much US perspective on this has been shifting for some time now. Paradoxically, there was a small boost with Donald Trump, who, along with his many other strange views in the world, remains a very pro-British and anti other European countries. So there was a little sort of delayed moment, but definitely.

• 24:06Alastair Campbell?

  Hold on, he was, he was vile to your friend Theresa May. He was utterly vile to our ambassador, who, thanks to Johnson, got sacked. And he even tried to walk in front of her dearly beloved, departed Her Majesty the Queen, which you do not do.

• 24:21Rory Stewart?

  All that's true. Nonetheless, he managed to keep a sort of slightly artificial position for Britain in relation to other European countries and Washington. But I noticed that, I talked a lot to Hillary Clinton's team when they were running against him. And I remember them already very clearly signaling, I guess that's 2016, that they no longer saw Britain as their key ally in Europe. They were actually much more focused on Germany. I remember the head of her foreign affairs team, who was going to be their Secretary of State, saying that they were going to focus on making the first state visit Germany.

• 24:54Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, you saw that with the relationship that developed between Obama and Angela Merkel. It was pretty spiky, though, the Biden-Macron meeting at points, because Macron did not hold back in saying that this huge Inflation Reduction Act, which is going to put billions and billions and billions of dollars into environmentally friendly industries, with a pretty much leaning towards American industries. And Macron, which is causing a lot of consternation in Europe. And Macron just called it out and said, listen, you know, you talk about partnership, but this is going to undo it. And we need to use the word resynchroniser. I love that word, resynchronise. And Biden said they would kind of, they would look at it and

• 25:38Alastair Campbell?

  they would see if they could tweak it. So it was one of those things that was full of the whole, you know, state visit of the pomp and the showbiz and the all the food and the fancy clothes and all that stuff. But there was some pretty tough politics going on as well. But I just think it's sad that we, you know, we're not even considered in those discussions at the moment.

• 25:56Rory Stewart?

  It's also worth bearing in mind, there's a small thing in the background too, which I remember diplomats racing with Liz Truss, British diplomats racing with Liz Truss, when she was in the States at the same time as I was on one of her early visits as Foreign Secretary. And remember that France felt very, very bruised because Britain and the United States and Australia had pushed them out.

• 26:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, workers, yeah.

• 26:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, pushed them out of this submarine deal. There was a real concern even then that America was going to bend over backwards to try to prioritise its relationship with France over Britain to try to compensate for what had happened there. Another thing that was interesting, Macron, which obviously goes to the heart of a lot of our conversations, is that he pushed hard in that meeting with Biden to say that any new security architecture in Europe, any new sort of post NATO way of thinking about security in Europe, must take into account Russia's security concerns, in particular where nuclear weapons are positioned, how close NATO gets to Russians' borders. And in that, you can see Macron still remaining

• 26:57Rory Stewart?

  very, very distinct from the US, UK and most of the rest of the European positions, still, you know, as you pointed out in previous pods, calling Putin, looking for common ground. And it'll be interesting to see where we get there, because in the end, it all depends on the US. It's the US that's funding the whole thing, putting in nearly five times as much as everyone else combined.

• 27:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he's getting, he did a big interview on French television last night, and he's getting quite a lot of bad press at the moment. I'm actually going to Paris on Thursday, I'm doing an event for Portland with Gerard Arol, who you may know, who's the former French ambassador in Washington. And he had some very interesting comments about the visit. He said that basically, for all the warm words, what Biden is talking about in this Inflation Reduction Act is a form of reinforcement of protectionism. And also on the security, I think there is a bit of irritation. You know, we had this a lot during during Iraq and Afghanistan that, you know, even though I always felt we got a lot of the political heat, the truth is that the bulk of the funding and

• 27:59Alastair Campbell?

  the military supply was coming from the United States and and that remains the case with with Ukraine. But Macron was getting a pretty bad press in France this morning from his comments about this new, what they call this, why, why, there was one, one of the editorialists saying, you know, why is he talking about new security architecture when Ukraine feels like it's on the front foot right now?

• 28:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, it is. It is interesting. I was, I amongst all this comedy of travel, I was in Washington two days ago and I was at a dinner and on the stage was George W. Bush. And I'd love, I'd love to get a little bit of of your reflections on him. He struck me as very, very interesting. So obviously he's, he's well retired. I obviously have a lot of chips on my shoulder about him in relation to the Iraq war. But he had a very interesting approach to things like Ukraine. So he was challenged directly from the room. Somebody said, you know, how can we continue to provide support for Ukraine when Americans are hurting at home? And he said, sure, Americans are hurting at home, but Ukrainians are hurting

• 29:00Rory Stewart?

  a lot more at home, which I thought was a really, a kind of really deft way of articulating it, which I hadn't seen done well by other politicians.

• 29:08Alastair Campbell?

  I trust, Rory, that you went up to him and said, oh, by the way, I do a podcast now with Alastair Campbell, who I'm sure you remember from your time alongside working with Tony Blair. We'd love to have you on the podcast. I'm sure you did that, didn't you, Rory?

• 29:22Rory Stewart?

  I, I, Alistair, I did not, and I must, I'll try to find a way.

• 29:25Alastair Campbell?

  So you were in the room, you were in the room with George W. Bush.

• 29:28Rory Stewart?

  And I heard him do an Elvis impersonation too, which is like you.

• 29:32Alastair Campbell?

  I've got to say, look, I get, I get, I didn't know you were going to ask about George Bush and I get battered by my North London friends whenever I talk about George Bush because I found him at the human level incredibly likeable. And also I found him

• 29:49Alastair Campbell?

  So much more intelligent and thoughtful in private discussions about foreign policy than he was whenever there was a TV camera there, whenever there was a TV camera there, he sort of turned into this kind of cowboy mode. He could be, he could say some pretty crazy stuff, but I think at the human level, fun enough that the, and I've finally submitted the manuscript of my book to the publisher this weekend, that this is now going to the copy editor, but I've talked about Bush because I talked about him in the context of teamship, which we were talking about with Helen Clark, about the importance of teamship. And one of the impressions that Bush made upon me was the, he always, when you're walking around the White House, or you're walking around with his team, and of course they have a

• 30:34Alastair Campbell?

  vast team, you know, the security, the aides, the, it's ridiculous how large that kind of American motorcade is, that go with the president at all times, you know, doctors and ambulance drivers and all that stuff. And he sort of, he knew everybody. And it wasn't just that he knew everybody, both he and his wife Laura would, they'd always sort of, they'd know what was going on in their lives. So there'd be like a waiter or something who'd sort of put a plate down on his table and he'd say, how did your son's driving test go? And that would probably because the son, the guy mentioned it a month ago or something, you know, and he had that humanity. Now, was he the, was he a kind of, did he have Clinton's oratorical skills? No. Did he have Lincoln's amazing leadership? No. You know, was he the brightest president that's ever lived? No. But I, in terms of,

• 31:17Alastair Campbell?

  you know, we talk about wanting our politicians to be authentic and human. And I think the fact he's now gone away and he basically just paints all the time. I think it's sort of, I think that's to his credit.

• 31:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he's incredibly, incredibly comfortable in this skin. I mean, I don't know any British politician who would be so good at taking the piss out of himself.

• 31:32Alastair Campbell?

  I was very good at that.

• 31:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So he'd turn up and he'd be like, don't listen to me. I just ramble. I'm 76 years old. And then they'd say, well, we're not just here to pay on it to you, we're here to honour Laura Bush. And he'd say, I don't blame you. And then they'd say, then they'd say, do you have any piece of wisdom for the room? And it's said, yep, never pinch your wife.

• 31:53Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, he was, he did, he was, he was very self-deprecating. And I think he, he had a sense of, of people thinking that his, his father was better at the job, but it didn't seem to bother him at all. I think he's one of those guys who's just not chippy about stuff.

• 32:07Rory Stewart?

  So I think the thing that

• 32:08Alastair Campbell?

  I'm gonna get lacerated for this, Roy.

• 32:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, not as much as me, I'm praising him too. But I, I, so put on the record, I very much think that what he did in Iraq was a massive mess and a massive mistake and did a lot of damage. But there is something that I think he does deserve a lot of credit for, which maybe he doesn't get as much credit for, which is his PEPFAR programme. So he introduced the big legislation for the US to come up with as support with entry retroviral drugs on HIV AIDS.

• 32:34Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:35Rory Stewart?

  And over the last 20 years, the US, largely through its own effort and energy, saved 20 million lives, mostly in Africa. And it did it completely cross-party. It was a brilliant thing, brought together both houses of Congress. And it's a kind of example of America having sometimes the energy and the ambition to do things that other countries wouldn't do to think on a bigger scale.

• 33:00Alastair Campbell?

  No, I would, I would, I want to switch to another politician we dealt with back in the day, but one who is still very, very much on the scene and an active politician. And that's President Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa. Because he, if you remember, he was a, he was quite an important player in the Northern Ireland peace process, because along with the Finland Prime Minister, Atisari, they were the two guys who were taken when it came to decommissioning weapons. They were the guys. We don't know where the weapons were. And actually, they don't, because they were sort of taken from pillar to post. And the, but they saw the IRA armstashes. So he was a big part of that whole process, partly because he was one of the few people that we could find.

• 33:46Alastair Campbell?

  Who was trusted by most of the main players, including Shin Fain.

• 33:50Rory Stewart?

  And why was that? Why did Shin Fain trust him? What was the deal?

• 33:53Alastair Campbell?

  I think because of the shared sense of struggle. They obviously had relations, they had relationships that had developed. But also Attisari really liked him as well. Attisari really valued him, valued his judgments.

• 34:04Rory Stewart?

  Attisari was the Finn, right?

• 34:05Alastair Campbell?

  He was the Finnish, former Finnish Prime Minister who became the kind of main go-to guy when we came to to the decommissioning process, which was probably the most, along with prisoner release, was probably the most, one of the most fraught issues through the whole thing. So we had to get credible people who were respected, trusted, dare I say distinguished, and who would then, and that we would trust to go into this process with the IRA, who would be taking them to show them where these weapons were, what they were, and also that they would be set up a process so that if they were revisited, even though they didn't know necessarily where they were,

• 34:45Alastair Campbell?

  they could tell whether they've been used or tampered with. And so that was him then, and now he's the president. And he's, he actually became president because Zuma, his predecessor, was seen as pretty corrupt and Ramaphosa wanted as, you know, he's going to clean up.

• 35:02Rory Stewart?

  And everyone was hugely, hugely relieved because at the time, people weren't sure that he'd be able to put it off. They thought Zuma had stitched up the ANC with his own allies and he'd never let Ramaphosa come through. So there was a huge sigh of relief. And of course, Sir Ramaphosa just did a state, we're talking about state visits, first state visit to Britain with the new king, right?

• 35:17Alastair Campbell?

  He did, and he went, he had these red sash on alongside Prince Charles's blue sash and Camilla with her crown behind them and all that. And now he's kind of, I think as we speak, the ANC are having a two-day meeting to decide what to do because this, what happened was a former spy chief made these accusations against Ramaphosa that he'd covered up a burglary at his own house from which the accusation was two million dollars were taken. It turns out it was over half a million dollars. There's been a pretty heavy, and it seems fair, it looks like it's not been sort of tampered with these, this legal inquiry, and they've come out and they've basically said they,

• 36:00Alastair Campbell?

  they've pretty made clear they don't believe the stories about where this money came from. Ramaphosa said it came from the sale of buffalo on his ranch.

• 36:08Rory Stewart?

  And he doesn't seem to have paid tax on it as part of the problem. It doesn't seem to have gone to any normal accounts.

• 36:13Alastair Campbell?

  It's down the side of the sofa. I mean, how do you put that when you have tax returns? But it's sort of, now, even if you accept that there's a history of corruption, as there was with Zuma, but even so, this feels like, and it feels very, very bad for the ANC, because the ANC has been in power since Mandela, succession of presidents of varying abilities and varying success. But this feels, I don't know, he says he's going to fight it through, and he says this report's unfair, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But it doesn't feel good for South Africa.

• 36:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And meanwhile, South Africa economy has really been struggling recently. Covid was very, very bad for it. Economic growth down. I think it's, for a country that's meant to be one of the great wealthy success stories of Africa, still about a fifth of the population living in extreme poverty and the number rising, bad debt position. I mean, this is something also, maybe when we have a bit more time to talk about, because many, many countries in Africa have racked up a lot of debt recently. Ghana at the moment is nearly 40% of its government revenue is just paying off debt.

• 37:21Alastair Campbell?

  You mentioned Ghana in one of our WhatsApp exchanges, and I was reading up on it. I mean, it's pretty horrific WhatsApp. I hadn't realised it was quite as bad as it is. And this is all because the Chinese have basically, China's got them over the barrel on debt.

• 37:33Rory Stewart?

  Yes. Well, so China's been lending, often quite cheap terms, to many African countries. But of course, a lot of it has been on flexible interest rates, which people can't now service. And it's very difficult getting to the bottom of what's going on. So Ghana, again, was meant to be one of the great success stories of Africa. It was a place about which people felt optimistic. Small comical anecdote for the show. I sat with President Nana, who was the Ghanaian president, and Theresa May in a meeting in Downing Street. And it was lovely to see the tables turned. It was like the reverse of what you normally expect between a British Prime Minister and a Ghanaian Prime Minister, because Nana from Ghana leant over and said, "Prime Minister May, I am wondering if there is anything that I can do to ask you to reconsider your views on Brexit. I would like to counsel you to be

• 38:17Rory Stewart?

  more cautious and thoughtful." And I thought it was absolutely wonderful, because it's what we do, go around the world lecturing everybody else on how to run their own internal affairs. And it was he turning it around.

• 38:27Alastair Campbell?

  There you go. And sadly, she was unable to listen because of the power of the ERG at the time. Now Rory, the other thing, let's wrap up because you obviously have to get to a very important football match. And I know what a massive football fan you are. By the way, it's the round, the ball's round. I'll explain the offside rule by WhatsApp, okay? And if the referee keeps running to watch your television, he's not watching your television, he's consulting the screen with the video assistant referee.

• 38:56Rory Stewart?

  He's not trying to catch up on neighbours.

• 38:58Alastair Campbell?

  You've got that, you've got that. Now, while you were on the plane, I was trying to get, I was ploughing through Gordon Brown's report on constitutional reform. And I think you'll be very, very interested in this bit. We think it is right for the Scottish Parliament Government to have greater powers to promote Scotland across the world, both to represent Scotland as a nation and to promote economic and social interests. We therefore propose the Scottish Government, with approval, blah, blah, blah, should be able to enter into agreements with international bodies insofar as they relate to devolved matters only. I find that very interesting.

• 39:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I wonder what that would mean. So what do you think that might mean signing up to, I don't know, a UN environmental body or an ocean body or?

• 39:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, it says, he actually lists examples would include UNESCO, the Nordic Council, or if the EU were willing to agree, even the Erasmus scheme for student exchange.

• 39:50Rory Stewart?

  Ah, no, we like that, we like that very much.

• 39:53Alastair Campbell?

  But Gordon has always had this, I think it's fair to say, obsession with how Scotland can stay within the UK, but have a sense, a deeper sense of its own identity and its own politics. And I think, I'm really pleased when I read that, I thought, you know, at least he's thinking of that. I mentioned earlier, I think he's thinking about the economic consequences of devolution.

• 40:14Rory Stewart?

  He has to be right, he has to be right. And of course, in many ways, his speech was incredibly important in that, in the referendum. And so this very, very powerful emotional speech. When David Cameron was struggling to hit a really high emotional note was hugely important. I think he's got to be right that the only way of imagining Scotland inside the United Kingdom is to really celebrate it as a nation, celebrate its distinctiveness. But I also think, and I'd like to see what Gordon Brown's done in more detail on this report on this, but devolution needs to happen in Scotland too. It's not enough just to centralise all the power in Edinburgh. And there is a bit of a tendency towards that. There's now a single Scottish Police Service. There's a lot of curriculum being micromanaged. The border's very different from where your father came from.

• 40:56Rory Stewart?

  And I think it would be good to have a lot more devolution within Scotland as well.

• 41:00Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, listen, we now have to wrap this up because we are, in order for you to get to the game on time, we're going to do a very, very short question and answer session. But thanks for now and we'll speak again very, very shortly.

• 41:12Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.