341. Biden vs. Trump: A fight for the future of Ukraine

Is Biden’s move on missiles too little too late for Ukraine? Who will be in Donald Trump’s White House team? Why are business leaders growing tired of Labour? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy, a green electricity supplier powering homes across England, Scotland & Wales. Use referral code POLITICS after signing up to win a TRIP merch bundle. Learn more at getfuse.com/politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley + Evan Green Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 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.

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• 2:28Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:30Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 2:32Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, I think we should talk a bit about Ukraine. We should talk about these appointments by President-elect Trump, some of which are truly mind-boggling. And then I think we should have a bit of a deep dive into Britain for a while.

• 2:43Rory Stewart?

  Good.

• 2:44Alastair Campbell?

  We haven't really talked much about Britain.

• 2:45Rory Stewart?

  Good.

• 2:45Alastair Campbell?

  With all the Trump stuff going on.

• 2:47Rory Stewart?

  Well, it must be. This is an interesting thing. Let's just sort of quickly before we get on. I mean, presumably if you were at number 10 and you're thinking about this, you must be a bit frustrated because they had quite a lot of momentum coming out of the budget. But since then, a lot of the focus has been on the US election and now in fact even on things like a sister dying domestically.

• 3:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Listen, I think they feel that they're doing lots. They're doing lots of stuff and it's getting out there. But I still think they struggle to kind of land a narrative. And that's maybe what we'll talk about in the second half. You and I did some events last week where I was struck by one in particular where the business audience was just wasn't angry, wasn't sort of wholly negative. It was just a bit sort of underwhelmed and feeling there wasn't enough engagement going on.

• 3:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, we'll do that in the second half. But let's just start with Joe Biden. Here we are, Rory, thousandth day of the Ukraine war. Not a bad time to take stock, but also we had this quite big development from Joe Biden. Big, big shift in terms of the missiles that the Americans will allow the Ukrainians to use.

• 3:47Rory Stewart?

  That's right. So Joe Biden has now approved the use of ATACMS, which allow the firing of missiles much deeper into territory and particularly into Russian territory. And this will then unlock other missile systems, including the UK Storm Shadow system, which was being delayed by the White House. The context of this is that the Russians have been making pretty steady advances over the last few weeks and months. On average, about 100 metres a day. We can talk a little bit about why they haven't broken more dramatically through the frontline. But basically, the war is not going well for Ukraine. Russia's making advances. Russia has many, many more people than Ukraine. Ukraine's struggling to recruit.

• 4:28Rory Stewart?

  And a lot of the central systems that Russia uses to attack Ukraine are based quite deep into Russian territory and can't be accessed by most of Ukraine's weapon systems. But what was your first thought before we get on to the what's happening in the frontline? Your thought about what this means Biden announcing something that suddenly that he's been delaying on for almost two years?

• 4:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, my first thought was, given that he just had the meeting with Donald Trump in the White House, where, you know, to be fair to Joe Biden, he did the constitutional thing, he was proper, he was polite, he did all the things that Trump didn't do when he lost. It's hard to imagine that they didn't discuss Ukraine. They had an hour together. It's hard to imagine that didn't come up. So my first thought was, well, this is Joe Biden, but he's not going to be there in January. Is Trump involved in this in any way? Is Trump even aware? Trump, I don't think has said that much, but Donald Trump Junior has put out something basically saying, why are they doing this without even giving my father the chance to go and make peace and save lives?

• 5:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, let me push that for a moment, because I think the Republicans, last thing I want to do is end up becoming too much of an advocate for Trump. But I guess.

• 5:34Alastair Campbell?

  It's unlikely.

• 5:35Rory Stewart?

  I guess if Trump had done this, you know, in the last dying six weeks of his presidency, made a massive defence foreign policy decision, which he knew his, the person who was coming in as president was going to reverse, probably there would be enormous media outrage, because it's a pretty good argument to say Biden is more than a lame duck at the moment. And we know that Trump's policy is absolutely opposed to continuing to provide more lethal support for Ukraine, and Biden's just done it. So presumably Donald Trump Junior's got a point here, which is, this is a pretty peculiar thing to do. You'd be pretty annoyed. Let's say you were an incoming Labour government and the Tories, because there isn't a transition, it's less likely, but suddenly did something in the very last few days that completely

• 6:19Rory Stewart?

  poisoned one of your central policy planks. You'd be pretty angry, wouldn't you?

• 6:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think you would. That being said, what you said earlier about the state of play in the war itself could underline why an American president feels this is the right time to do this.

• 6:35Rory Stewart?

  The more mysterious is the question why the hell he didn't do it before, because the normal criticism from is that as usual Biden is too little, too late. The pattern for almost a thousand days is

• 6:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I know.

• 6:46Rory Stewart?

  A request for a big weapon system.

• 6:48Alastair Campbell?

  Delay.

• 6:48Rory Stewart?

  The US saying, no, no, no, we can't possibly provide it. And then eventually they provide it by which time the need for it has gone.

• 6:53Alastair Campbell?

  The bit that you missed in there, and the Russians meanwhile saying that if you do, that's going to provoke, I think their phrase yesterday was a, an appropriate and tangible response. They've got various formulations to make people think that one day Putin's going to fire off the nukes. I think the other thing it does bring home, so there's Keir Starmer at the moment at the G20 with, you know, lots of other world leaders around the place. It does, as you say, bring into sharp focus a big decision for Britain as well about the Storm Shadow missiles. And my sense is that Starmer is pretty hard over on this.

• 7:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, this is something I'd really like to get your instincts on. So this unlocks Storm Shadow from the UK, it unlocks German missile systems, it creates the whole possibility of a new stage in the war, which would be allowing the Ukrainians to suddenly strike all these different Russian ballistic cruise missile drone systems which are located in Russian territory. Till now, they've only really been able to strike them with drones. And the problem with drones is the drones are not going fast enough and they can't carry enough of ammunition load, so they're not inflicting the damage, the Russian supplies that these things can do. So in the dream scenario for Ukraine, this is now the possibility, not just of weapon systems, but a full, joined up,

• 8:08Rory Stewart?

  coordinated response to this Russian aggression. But if Trump, as seems likely, pulls back, is the UK going to step up? And there are a lot of people in Europe who hope the UK will step up because a lot of Keir Starmer's statements to European leaders have been pretty bold on Ukraine. And I think if you were Poland or the Baltic States, you might see the UK as an absolutely critical ally. Putting a bit of lead in the German pencil and pushing forward. Problem doesn't come cheap and the UK Treasury presumably would get the heebie-jeebies about the idea of Britain getting involved in a massive ramp up of defence spending if the US remove fifty billion dollars.

• 8:48Alastair Campbell?

  It also plays into this extraordinary kind of geostrategic conundrum that Trump's reelection has posed. So I was on the tube this morning and the guy next to me was reading the Daily Telegraph and the story down at the bottom, it said that Jonathan Reynolds essentially saying, you know, we've got to be very careful not to disrupt the already disrupted trade with the European Union, which the Daily Telegraph interpreted as the government being ready to appease Europe following the election of Donald Trump, trying to frame this as a kind of either or. And I think we said last week, the statecraft challenge for Labour right now is to resist

• 9:31Alastair Campbell?

  the blunt choice and try actually to even to restore our role as a kind of something of a bridge. But I think if Kirsten was out on his own, because Trump does go down a path that he might, Trump, by the way, has been a bit less hard over, say, than his nominee for Defence Secretary, this guy Pete Hesketh, who is a real kind of, I don't even know how to put it, I mean, he talks about, you know, he's very, very critical of European defence. He's not a supporter of further support for Ukraine. Now, of all the many underqualified nominees, he's right up there, so he may not survive.

• 10:09Rory Stewart?

  Well, we'll come back to it in a second half, where we can do a bit more of a deep dive, but let me put you on the spot again. So let's say Trump does decide that he's going to stop support, so there isn't another fifty billion dollars forthcoming from the US. In order to fill that gap, there's a big, big problem for Europe. It's not just UK and Europe, it's not just a financial problem, so it's not just finding fifty billion, it's actually massively ramping up production capacities, starting new plants to manufacture missiles that we're not currently manufacturing.

• 10:39Alastair Campbell?

  This could become part of the growth plan.

• 10:41Rory Stewart?

  Could become part of the growth plan, but it would involve a huge amount of money because. The US can afford to get away with only 50 billion because they've got quite large production capacities and all they've got to do is guarantee to buy one year's production. If Europe tried to do it, they'd have to spend much, much more because they'd have to open new factories and guarantee years of purchases or provide state guarantees. So let's say for the sake of argument, Europe needed to find twice that amount of money with the UK. Is your sense of British politics, German politics, French politics, Polish politics, that they would be up for doing this if the US suddenly stopped writing? Is the appetite there to spend 100 billion euros doing this?

• 11:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I don't know what the numbers would be. I would argue Poland, yes, Britain probably, France, very tricky, but Macron definitely, French politics tricky, and I would argue Germany is going to depend on the election.

• 11:32Rory Stewart?

  And just to understand that, so some of these far-right groups in Europe basically don't like this Ukraine war. So politicians in France and Germany-

• 11:39Alastair Campbell?

  They're basically pro Putin.

• 11:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So politicians in France, Germany, Austria and elsewhere are having to decide what to do with maybe 20% of the population that really does not want to spend any more money on Ukraine. And is that sort of growing so much that centrist politicians are inclined to say, well, that's a fight I don't want to have. So actually, we're not going to up spending on this stuff?

• 11:59Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, let's just take Germany. Germany's really interesting at the moment. So in fact, one of the big things in relation to Ukraine this week was Scholz, Chancellor Scholz, phoning Putin.

• 12:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Alastair Campbell?

  First time they've spoken for two years.

• 12:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 12:13Alastair Campbell?

  Zelensky very unhappy about it, talked about it opening a Pandora's box. This is kind of a weak signal, et cetera.

• 12:19Rory Stewart?

  And an odd timing because he called him after Trump's election.

• 12:22Alastair Campbell?

  Very odd timing, also because he's now in this political crisis at home.

• 12:27Rory Stewart?

  He's a sort of Biden, isn't he?

• 12:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Is he doing it for electoral reasons? So he got quite a lot of criticism at home.

• 12:32Rory Stewart?

  So just to remind listeners, he's a Biden in the sense that his polling rating is terrible. There's likely to be an election in January. He's likely to lose that election.

• 12:39Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there is going to be an election early in the new year. If you look at the polls, he is probably going to lose it. I think the SPD's only chance of turning things around, and even then very difficult, is actually to put the very popular Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, in charge. Scholz is not going to do that. The party probably wouldn't wear it. So Meitz is going to be chancellor.

• 13:01Rory Stewart?

  The leader of the centre, right?

• 13:02Alastair Campbell?

  The CEO.

• 13:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:04Alastair Campbell?

  So I think you probably will end up with some kind of grand coalition, which is probably more likely to commit to more long term support because they'll then manage to keep out, as it were, the fringes.

• 13:13Rory Stewart?

  But back to the phone call. So Schulz, in a slightly lamed acquisition, who may well not be in office in a few weeks' time, calls Putin shortly after Trump's election. Zelensky is angry. Donald Tusk, the Prime Minister of Poland, also angry and took to Twitter, saying, look, he called and then Russia mounted some of its biggest assaults ever. This proves that calling Putin doesn't do any good.

• 13:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:31Rory Stewart?

  What happened in that phone call? What was Schulz trying to achieve?

• 13:34Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, the briefing that came out from the Germans was, you know, pretty firm. You know, they have to stop this war. It was sort of putting it on to them. But of course, what the Russians did essentially was project it as they're all ready to negotiate. You know, they're all looking for a deal, but we're going full on.

• 13:51Rory Stewart?

  And I guess if you'd been advising Schulz, one of the first things you'd point out is regardless of the content of the call, Russia is going to spin it as

• 13:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:59Rory Stewart?

  weakness in negotiation.

• 14:00Alastair Campbell?

  I think the Germans then sort of tried to say that Schulz had been planning this for weeks. He'd been talking to other world leaders and it was done almost like he was speaking for them. But that didn't really hold water. I mean, interesting how the other governments didn't really row in behind that. So I think it was a bit of a freelance operation. And of course, the reason he's ended up being attacked for it at home is because people are saying, look, this is a bit desperate. You're in political trouble. Therefore, you're trying to signal that you're the great peacemaking chancellor. So I'm not sure that it achieved his purpose. And the position of, imagine being Zelensky right now. He's having to do what other world leaders are doing in terms of sort of, you know, we welcome President Trump and we had a very constructive discussion of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he probably is there, sitting there thinking, what does Trump mean when he says he's going to sort it out in 24 hours?

• 14:44Rory Stewart?

  Right. So let's

• 14:45Alastair Campbell?

  So here, and here's one for you. Do you, obviously, he's not going to sort it out in 24 hours. It is a sort of Trumpian figure of speech. Do you have any confidence that Trump could lead the way to a deal that doesn't involve, one, Ukraine having to cede a considerable amount of territory, and, two, the rest of Europe becoming more alarmed about the extent of Putin's power?

• 15:06Rory Stewart?

  No, frankly, because there are two problems. One is that even if he had the outlines of a deal and we don't really know what this deal is, he doesn't really have the team to do the detailed work to deliver it. I mean, one of the tricks of making these kind of deals, as you lived through with the Good Friday Agreement, is that it's not just about the boss having an idea that they want to deal. It's an enormous amount of very, very detailed work on the ground, which he doesn't seem to have. But the second problem is that there's no incentive for Russia at all. Russia is currently advancing. Now, they've got a bit of a problem and I don't want to sound like I'm a kind of enormous expert on Ukraine. For that, again, I encourage people to read Jack Watling's work with Rusi. But what seems to be happening is they're punching through and then they're having difficulty of reinforcing in order to exploit their breakthroughs.

• 15:51Rory Stewart?

  But there's no doubt they're making steady progress. If a negotiation started and I were Putin, I would simply keep delaying and keep making advances while the negotiation continues. Ultimately, why would Russia stop? You know, what's the deterrent? If they sense that Trump doesn't want this war, doesn't want to fund Ukraine, doesn't want to provide missiles, what's to stop you just pushing, pushing, pushing? And you could keep saying in international forum, we're having an interesting conversation with Donald Trump, there's some details still to be worked out, you just keep pushing.

• 16:18Alastair Campbell?

  I think that is the fundamental weakness of the position that Trump set out. If you're Putin, you're sitting there, okay, Trump wants to enter this war, we know how he operates, we know what he likes, he likes the big dramatic move. I'll say a few words that look like we're heading in that direction and I just keep going. That is a big problem for Europe then.

• 16:35Rory Stewart?

  And then there's the other issue, which is that some people in the Republican Party think that the answer is to put in a pro-Putin puppet in Kiev and then Putin will stop. But it's not an America's gift. I mean, Ukraine is an independent country and you can't just announce to the Ukrainian parliament, oh, by the way, we're getting rid of Zelensky, we're bringing in someone from the pro-Russian party. So I think Trump is in a very weak position. He's in a weak position towards Russia, he's in a weak position towards Ukraine. But then, before we leave, I'm just going to flip it back. I'm getting the impression that you think it's unlikely that Europe and the UK are going to be able to make a massive heroic 100 billion euro lift next year if the US pull out.

• 17:14Alastair Campbell?

  I think if they did that without the Americans being involved or the Americans moving in diametrically opposite direction, I think that's going to be very, very difficult. That's why Trump's position is so important. Shall we flip to the, let's talk about his appointments, because I think it relates to this.

• 17:29Rory Stewart?

  I think this is a really good way in because in the end, the reason why we care about who Trump appoints is the US president is in charge of these unbelievably consequential decisions, of which Ukraine is just one example. So you started on the subject of the Secretary of Defence nominee, Hesketh.

• 17:44Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think Hesketh is the the most bizarre appointment, or do you think there are more bizarre ones?

• 17:48Rory Stewart?

  There's a more bizarre appointment, which is Matt Geitz, the Attorney General.

• 17:52Alastair Campbell?

  But is, do you think, do you think he's sitting there just carrying on the campaign strategy of owning the libs?

• 17:57Rory Stewart?

  Or trolling people?

• 17:59Alastair Campbell?

  Trolling us?

• 18:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just, I think.

• 18:02Alastair Campbell?

  But they are, but he is determined to get these people. I don't buy this idea that he's basically, you know, say, well, if I throw in 10 names and the Senate kicks out three, I'll still get seven. I don't buy that. He's going for, he's going for the lot.

• 18:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Big context for people who aren't following micro minute by minute, his appointments. The first thing to understand is traditionally, American cabinets, unlike in a parliamentary system, often have quite a lot of heavyweights at these senior positions. And so even under Trump I, he brought in a Secretary of State, a guy called Rex Tillerson. He brought in his Secretary of Defence, Jim Mattis, who was a four-star Marine Corps general. And Mattis, because he'd been in the military for 40 years, brought in staff around him that he knew from years of administrations. Even, even Trump's first Attorney General appointments were very, very long-serving establishment members of the Republican Senate. So there's Jeff Sessions and then Barr came in. And, and that I was always.

• 18:58Alastair Campbell?

  Who plays the back parts, by the way.

• 18:59Rory Stewart?

  Who plays the back parts. You know, I, I see a little bit of this because when I was at the Harvard Kennedy School, you would see a lot of these people rotating through. There's a sort of whole US system where the sort of elite, which goes all the way back to Kennedy. They often go to fancy schools. They often get Rhodes scholarships or Marshall scholarships. They often work in think tanks. Then they go into government and they go into the business and they come back into government again. Richard Holbrook would be kind of a classic example. So that, that's the norm. And Trump 2016 was still doing that. And I remember thinking then, what a contrast with Britain. Because, you know, we've got Gavin Williamson as our Defence Secretary, who was like. Like a fireplace salesman, they've got this four star Marine Corps general, right? They've got Liz Truss as our foreign secretary, right? And they've got somebody who's got, you know, forty years of serious international experience.

• 19:43Rory Stewart?

  Trump has now gone full Truss. I mean, this now feels as flimsy as a late Boris Johnson Liz Truss cabinet. The people that are being brought in are all about loyalty over competence, atmospherics over expertise and have nothing to do with maturity. It's to do with.

• 20:01Alastair Campbell?

  Or capacity or ability. I mean, you go through some of them. And the other thing he's doing, of course, is that this thing called recess appointments, he's trying to get them appointed without having to go through all the approvals. He's also cutting out the FBI from doing the usual checks.

• 20:15Rory Stewart?

  And recess, just to remind people again, in the US system to become a cabinet minister, unlike in the UK system, traditionally you have to be approved by the Senate.

• 20:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly. The one bit he's lost, by the way, was the Senate leader. He wanted somebody that did not get selected and they got this guy, John Thune, who's not really a big fan. I mean, just going through some of them. So you've got Elon Musk, he's running this thing called the Department of Government Efficiency. Now, it is not a department and only Congress can create new departments. So that may be less effective than we think. Musk merrily talks about two trillion dollars. Let's see. And also let's see whether the Trump Musk love in isn't already. Looking at the body language in some of these pictures that Musk keeps tweeting out, I get the feeling Trump is thinking, listen, mate, you've had your fun now. Just get back to where you've come from.

• 21:03Alastair Campbell?

  So you've got Musk, you've got Robert F Kennedy, the, and he's, he's actually, on the one hand, completely crazy, anti-vaxxer. Covid was all about, you know, killing different sorts of people and what have you. But he's also very anti-big food. And I saw one of the other pictures that came out this week. And you saw the one with some hilarious beeps about it. Trump on the plane, Trump. Musk, Kennedy, Donald Trump Junior and Johnson, all with the table covered in McDonald's food.

• 21:34Rory Stewart?

  So that's his nomination for Health and Human Services. Then I think the more dramatic ones, Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence, who very popular on Russian state media.

• 21:45Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. That should be, that should be a sacking offence already that she's welcomed by Russia and she's somebody she, she basically, she bought into the line that Ukraine was, the war in Ukraine was a result of the West NATO expansion, which is Putin talking point. She had a meeting with Assad during the whole, and came out saying very nice things about, about Syria. This also poses a problem for Britain, by the way, and for the so-called five I's, the whole intelligence sharing thing. You're basically talking about people here who we would identify as kind of enemies of the state, or certainly friends of our enemies. So what about the CIA guy Ratcliffe? He's, he's maybe less bonkers.

• 22:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think there's two categories here. So broadly speaking, there's the slightly less eccentric appointments. So State, which is Marco Rubio, he's a relatively conventional right wing Republican politician in, in a normal Republican administration, wouldn't really raise eyebrows. Interior Doug Burman, who's the governor of North Dakota.

• 22:41Alastair Campbell?

  He's a billionaire.

• 22:41Rory Stewart?

  Billionaire, but not particularly controversial. Lee Zeldin at EPA, maybe. Mike Waltz, National Security Advisor, I, I know a bit. So he's somebody that I've known for a few years. He's very approachable, charming, wasn't very much part of a Trump camp, but what he has in common with Rubio and a lot of the other appointments is very, very much a China hawk. Really Cold War with China, ran a congressional committee on China. You know, I've been in rooms with him where he's standing up, talking about Chinese human rights abuses against the Uighur, TikTok, Chinese infiltration, Chinese threats in Taiwan. I mean, he really sees China as the number one.

• 23:17Alastair Campbell?

  Which is, you know, fair enough. And there's an interesting sort of paradox here, though, is a paradox or contradiction that on the one hand, so we talk about this kind of axis that's developing between China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, the kind of autocracies. And yet you look at this team, particularly on the foreign policy and intelligence side, and they're very anti-China, but actually quite pro-Russia.

• 23:36Rory Stewart?

  Which I think is a Fox News staple. I think a lot of these people, and actually three of them are big Fox News commentators, their story is we've been distracted by Russia, Ukraine. Our real enemy is China.

• 23:48Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 23:48Rory Stewart?

  And we can tilt back towards China. So we talked about two categories. So there's the people who are relatively conventional and then there's the eccentric people. And the eccentric people are an energy secretary, Chris Wright, who is the CEO of a massive.

• 24:01Alastair Campbell?

  Oil and fracking company.

• 24:03Rory Stewart?

  Oil fracking company, right.

• 24:04Alastair Campbell?

  And that is a major troll.

• 24:05Rory Stewart?

  And who says there is no climate crisis, there's no energy transition. Tulsi Gabbah, we just talked about, director of national intelligence, popular Russian state media. The ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who

• 24:14Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my God.

• 24:14Rory Stewart?

  Denies the existence of Palestinians, refuses to accept any two-state solution, says they're not settlements, they're perfectly legitimate.

• 24:21Alastair Campbell?

  There's another thing to add on him. He's a really big evangelical and attached to that sort of wing of the evangelical church that sort of believes that the whole land that is defined by Jews as Israel has to be taken over because that's preparation for the second coming. Now, of course, we thought that Trump was the second coming, but in fact, it turns out it's Jesus Christ. So and he believes in a one-state solution. And it was interesting even to see the words that he used in taking the job, like no real mention of Palestinians at all. So that I think that one's pretty horrific.

• 24:54Rory Stewart?

  Can't you sort of try to see if we can bring European or British listeners to try to understand what the analogy would be with these kinds of people. So Defence Secretary Pete Haxeth is like a MAGA pinup, big, muscly, major in the military.

• 25:09Alastair Campbell?

  Good hair.

• 25:10Rory Stewart?

  Good hair. I mean, this is very unfair to Johnny Mercer, but in some sense, he's like a good-looking guy who went to war but was not a particularly senior officer when he left the military. Matt Gaetz, the

• 25:22Alastair Campbell?

  Just one more of him, though. There's been some sort of pictures of him topless and he's got a lot of tattoos, some of which are white supremacy.

• 25:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so one of them is a big thing that says Deus Vult. And Deus Vult is a Latin phrase used by the Pope to launch the first crusade.

• 25:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 25:41Rory Stewart?

  So it's a subliminal message to Christian crusaders.

• 25:46Rory Stewart?

  And and

• 25:46Alastair Campbell?

  And it was a reason why he was not allowed in his former job to be part of one of the in the parade for the president.

• 25:55Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 25:55Alastair Campbell?

  When Biden took over. Because of his his his extreme tattoos, yeah.

• 26:00Rory Stewart?

  And then Attorney General Matt Gaetz was the most

• 26:03Alastair Campbell?

  We've only got sex offences and drugs on him.

• 26:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so he was a really chaotic, outspoken, crazy, media grabbing congressman who was on the verge of being expelled from Congress for allegations of drugs, sex, etc. And what would be the equivalent in the UK of a kind of Defence Secretary who was a massive, popular tattoo wearing Fox News commentator and a really outrageous, right wing Member of Parliament who was on the verge of being expelled? I mean, I think that's what we have to sort of bring across the sort of tone of this whole thing.

• 26:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I wish you'd given me advance warning of that question. I think it's very, I can't think of any off the top of my head. I guess Boris Johnson and Liz Truss becoming Prime Ministers. The obvious parallel in terms of, you know, utterly unqualified, but they did at least go through the quite detailed sustained process over many, many years. No, I think maybe it says that there's more madness in Trump world than there is in UK politics, whatever, however depressed we get about it.

• 26:59Rory Stewart?

  It's got a bit of the Liz Truss feel in the sense that it's sort of shock jock, provocative, not very serious, loyalty over competence, no expertise.

• 27:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 27:07Rory Stewart?

  Raging against the deep state, but it's a sense of both what Liz Truss has, which is seeing the whole thing as a game, utterly superficial, I don't really care what people's competence are, presumably because Trump and Truss simply don't believe in the bureaucracy or the system of government at all.

• 27:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, deep state. Well, a lot of these guys are sort of, you know, they they believe that there is a deep state that tries to sort of take out people who don't conform to the mono view. There's another one that caught my eye, Brendan Carr.

• 27:34Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 27:35Alastair Campbell?

  Who is going to be the head of the Federal Communications Commission. Bear in mind that Donald Trump said he actually had nothing to do with the Project 2025 stuff. Brendan Carr wrote the chapter on the future of the Federal Communications Commission. Just one hour after he got, he was appointed, or the nominated, he did a tweet, he said, "We must dismantle the censorship cartel, restore free speech rights for everyday Americans." And who was one of the first people to give their backing to that? Mr Elon Musk. And bear in mind, this is a guy, this is kind of not just off gone, this is a guy who will be in charge of decisions which, upon which will depend levels of subsidy to some of Elon Musk's companies.

• 28:19Alastair Campbell?

  So this is kind of, to me, this reads like potential for corruption.

• 28:23Rory Stewart?

  And also, for those of us who feel that one of the reasons why politics has become very polarised, why populism's taken off, is because of the social media ecosystem, and have been trying to push since 2016 for more regulation, looking at these algorithms, working out what you can do to stop this fueling extremism. We've got with the FCC appointment, somebody who's going to very much go in the other direction. If anything, social media will become more unbounded, more polarised, more extreme, less regulated, under a Trump administration. Because I guess, for obvious reasons, it sort of benefits him, doesn't it? I mean, in a way, he will see his victory as being...

• 28:57Alastair Campbell?

  But how does free, how does this sort of thing about free speech, and we've got the thing going on here at the moment, this, I don't even fully understand this Alison Pearson thing, but it looks part of the same sort of ridiculous nonsense where the right, they love free speech, providing it's their free speech. And yet you've got Trump saying that he wants this guy to come in and sort of start shutting down TV stations. Now, we'll see how that goes. So I think the free speech argument is so kind of, they've weaponised it from a very, very particular perspective. There's one other sort of moderately, possibly quite sensible appointment, which you may not have seen, that's the White House Counsel, is a guy called William McGinley, who was an adviser to Trump first time round, who people said, I don't know, but people said was kind of not crazy.

• 29:42Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 29:43Alastair Campbell?

  So he's going to be the main, his main legal guy in there.

• 29:44Rory Stewart?

  I've just been reading three books on the Trump administration, and one of the things that's at the core of all this is, how does this all work? If you appoint these kind of people? How does the machinery of government respond? How does the civil service, the departments, respond? And there are very, very different ways of dealing if, like Trump, you have an obsession with the deep state. You can bring in people who are real inside players. Bolton maybe was a bit of an example of this, who are trying to achieve a massive cultural shift. Or you can bring in very organised people who force through an agenda but don't try to change the system itself. Or you can have people who make a lot of noise and just preside over a system that refuses to cooperate with them.

• 30:26Rory Stewart?

  And I guess a lot of what will determine the future of America and have a lot of consequences of the world over the next four years is, are these people going to be able to achieve the effect? I mean, if a Liz Truss figure is put in charge of a department, how much damage can they do? How much can the department resist them? How much can they change policy?

• 30:42Alastair Campbell?

  I think these heads of department in the States have more power than secretaries of state because the, you know, the fact that the president appoints them, they can make considerable numbers of appointments. If you think about the fuss there is here about a cabinet minister appointing a handful of special advisers, but they will, I think, have considerable power, particularly in this first two years before the midterms and where Trump has this sense of the mandate. By the way, we should point out, on the mandate, he's now below 50% on the popular vote. And when you dig down to the numbers, it was way closer than even you and I felt on the night. But they're, you know, forget that, they're going to operate, this is going to be like Brexit, 52%. They are going to operate like they have got absolute power.

• 31:26Rory Stewart?

  And then to finish, I guess, as we go into the break, policy. He has signalled mass deportations, big tax cuts, drill, drill, drill on the environment, tariffs against the rest of the world, 10% against the rest of the world, 60% against China, and a big shift on Ukraine. And a lot of these appointments, I guess, are about reinforcing that policy agenda.

• 31:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And maybe to find on this, the one thing I did see about Ratcliffe, the CIA guy, this relates to what you said earlier about China. He has likened the the countering of China's rise to, he says, on a par with the defeat of fascism and bringing down the Iron Curtain. That is his big focus. I think where they could get, he could get tricky on this, though, is with this woman, Gabbard. She's, she's, she is attacked. See, I think Trump does this deliberately. He's putting people who are going who are going to fight because he likes the chaos and he likes being the person on top of the chaos. But Gabbard, one of her more colourful quotes about Rubio, who she said represents the neocon warmongering establishment. So there's going to be tensions in this top table.

• 32:30Rory Stewart?

  So the director of national intelligence is commenting on the incoming set of state.

• 32:33Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 32:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So a lot of these Trump books that I've been reading exactly show what you're talking about. He seems, a lot of the scenes in them describe him sitting there, sort of playing his advisers off against each other, mocking them, humiliating them.

• 32:46Alastair Campbell?

  And his family.

• 32:46Rory Stewart?

  And be like, I forget you, you're a globalist, you can go. And they literally have to go and sit in the corner of the room on a sofa. And then he listens to the other one. And then he brings the other one in. And then he's, and and his response to tweets, how often he sees something on social media or Fox News, he's like, that's the guy we want. I love that guy. And here's my little reading list, if people want to be honest, that I've been looking at.

• 33:04Alastair Campbell?

  Just on this, Roy, you say you read three books. Do you actually, no, I know they're on your Kindle, I can see them. But when we say, we need to define reading. Have you read them all from start to finish?

• 33:14Rory Stewart?

  No, I've skimmed them. And I'm often.

• 33:17Alastair Campbell?

  So how long did it take to read Fire and Fury?

• 33:19Rory Stewart?

  I've been, Fire and Fury, probably two and a half hours.

• 33:23Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, okay.

• 33:24Rory Stewart?

  So Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff.

• 33:26Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 33:26Rory Stewart?

  Bob Woodward, Fear.

• 33:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I've read the first one, not the second.

• 33:29Rory Stewart?

  John Bolton, The Room Where It Happened.

• 33:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 33:32Rory Stewart?

  And there I read first two chapters, and then I skipped forward to when he actually became national security adviser, because there was a lot about him trying to get appointed and getting frustrated.

• 33:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Rory Stewart?

  But the best of them, I think, is Maggie Haberman's Confidence Man.

• 33:43Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 33:44Rory Stewart?

  Which is just an extraordinary. So she was a New York.

• 33:46Alastair Campbell?

  She doesn't like him.

• 33:47Rory Stewart?

  No, but she'd known him forever. She covered the Trump beat for decades before he became president.

• 33:53Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, when he was in business.

• 33:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So she really knows how his father did dodgy deals with the Democratic Party in Brooklyn in the 50s and got taken out of federal contracts for overcharging in the 60s and this kind of stuff. And then the other thing I've been reading, which I'm afraid to say is incredibly engaging, amusing, light reading, is Trump's Art of the Deal. And sort of suggests some of the charisma and appeal of him.

• 34:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, the fact that you read it is one up on Trump.

• 34:21Rory Stewart?

  He hasn't read Trump.

• 34:22Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think Trump's read Trump. He just he just knows that it's the greatest book in the world apart from the Bible. That was his that was his quote on that one.

• 34:30Rory Stewart?

  OK, well, listen, much more to be done on this, but it's a it's as usual with Trump. We're still on that funny oscillation between buffoonery and threat, taking seriously his appointments and his policies, and at the same time, accepting that some of this is just trolling the world.

• 34:46Alastair Campbell?

  One thing we do know, Rory, is that Project 2025, which we've read, is now being rolled out.

• 34:53Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 34:53Alastair Campbell?

  Take a break.

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• 36:46Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back. The Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 36:48Alastair Campbell?

  And with me, Alice Campbell. And a bit of plugging, if we may. Murray Black, the current leading interview, I thought was brilliant. It's funny, when I'm doing the interviews, I don't always get a sense of what they're like as interviews, but I thought she was terrific.

• 37:04Rory Stewart?

  You get it more when you listen back.

• 37:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 37:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's difficult to judge how their voices are going to come across.

• 37:08Alastair Campbell?

  And also, because you concentrate on the interview, you don't necessarily absorb what they're saying. If you hadn't listened to it walking over the heath, and she had to stop because she was laughing so much about Murray Black saying, of course, you shouldn't speak ill of the dead, before absolutely putting the boot into Ali Savard, who had just died. But I think it's really, really sad that she's left politics, or left Parliament.

• 37:31Rory Stewart?

  I've been really enjoying some of our recent leading interviews. I also loved Kim Ledbeater, who we've just done, who's another example of a really talented woman who's come into politics with a slightly quirky outsider's perspective. And I obviously relate to them because, like me, they see the whole thing as an unbelievable horror show fiasco.

• 37:52Alastair Campbell?

  And the reason we're talking to Kim, of course, is because she's bringing forward this private members bill on assisted dying. So that's going to be out on Monday. And the other one we should alert listeners to, coming up, very excited about this, Rory. Do you remember who was topping my list when we had a target list of interviewees?

• 38:08Rory Stewart?

  I mean, Maradona's dead, so I think it must be the other M. And it's not my correct, it's Angela Merkel.

• 38:13Alastair Campbell?

  Coming up soon. So there we are. Now, shall we talk about the UK economy?

• 38:16Rory Stewart?

  UK economy. Well, we did a thing. Alice, let me put you on the spot. You did one of the things. We were talking to a group last week, and you mentioned the missions. And I slightly cheekily said to this room of nearly 300 business people, have any of you heard of the five missions? And I think there was like two hands out of 300 went up. That's a bit problematic.

• 38:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I think the question, a fairer question, Rory, would have been, have you heard of any of the missions?

• 38:42Rory Stewart?

  And just remind remind remind us what these missions were and when they emerged. Are they still what's guiding the, is the government still guided by these missions?

• 38:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, they they, well, they they are.

• 38:54Rory Stewart?

  And this was something they did in the election campaign?

• 38:56Alastair Campbell?

  They did it before the election campaigns.

• 38:57Rory Stewart?

  And would they have expected me to know what the five missions are by now?

• 39:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yes.

• 39:01Rory Stewart?

  Okay, and what are they?

• 39:02Alastair Campbell?

  Growth.

• 39:03Rory Stewart?

  Growth, yeah.

• 39:03Alastair Campbell?

  And not just growth, but the highest growth of any G seven country.

• 39:07Rory Stewart?

  Got you, yeah.

• 39:07Alastair Campbell?

  I'll come back to why that's a problem.

• 39:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 39:09Alastair Campbell?

  Getting the health service back on its feet, green energy.

• 39:11Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 39:12Alastair Campbell?

  Safe for streets and smashing the class ceiling, which is all about aspiration, education, et cetera. So they're the five missions. I think they are still driving government agenda. But they've not been communicated as such. And I think that's because some of the work is still being done on what the policy solutions are.

• 39:26Rory Stewart?

  And sorry, just just remind me, if you were in number ten in your old job. Those five things would be up on your wall and you'd also presumably be communicating in cabinet. And through the special advisers and to all the departments, the things that the prime minister really cares about are growth, health.

• 39:45Alastair Campbell?

  Crime.

• 39:45Rory Stewart?

  Crime.

• 39:46Alastair Campbell?

  Energy.

• 39:47Rory Stewart?

  Energy and smashing the glass ceiling.

• 39:48Alastair Campbell?

  And education and aspiration, yeah.

• 39:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Alastair Campbell?

  And in fact, what Kia said recently was that his two big things were economy and immigration, got to sort out immigration.

• 39:58Rory Stewart?

  Well, that wasn't in the list of five.

• 39:59Alastair Campbell?

  No, I know. So that's that's where it gets a little bit confusing.

• 40:02Rory Stewart?

  Again, presumably if you were a brutal business person, you'd say having a list of priorities also tells you what you're not prioritising. I mean, otherwise it's not a priority. You have to be honest about it. Okay. So what is it that they're not prioritising that another government might prioritise implicitly in those five? Because education's not listed.

• 40:20Alastair Campbell?

  Aspiration, that's about education.

• 40:22Rory Stewart?

  So if aspiration just includes everything, then it's not really a list of priorities.

• 40:25Alastair Campbell?

  No, but I think the the point about the missions is is that they will cover different policy areas from different departments.

• 40:31Rory Stewart?

  So it's not a priority list, really?

• 40:33Alastair Campbell?

  No, the five mission led government is just a different way of thinking about government. And I think one of the key people on this is Pat McFadden, who's working away putting this together now. So I don't think we've we've definitely not heard the last of the missions.

• 40:43Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 40:44Alastair Campbell?

  The point you were making, if let's just take the first one. And the other point that came from our meeting with these business guys was that they they didn't love the budget. Um, and I think that it's interesting to me the way that the farmers, um, and we said right on the day, didn't we, that, you know, this farmers thing could become problematical. Big campaign going on that. But actually, I think in terms of business, the national insurance. Changes are provoking, it seems to me, quite a lot of angst and grief. But just on the growth mission, Rory, so we had these figures last week. The, basically, the economy grew by naught point one percent over the first three months of a Labour government. You can't blame Labour for that, that's taking on the economy. However, when you look at the current figures, this is about global kind of stagnation, not just the UK.

• 41:30Alastair Campbell?

  Of the seven G seven countries, US is top, naught point seven.

• 41:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Alastair Campbell?

  France, naught point four, Canada's in the kind of naught point two five, Germany, naught point two, Japan, naught point two, UK, naught point one, Italy, zero. So that indicates the scale of the challenge.

• 41:46Rory Stewart?

  And I've always thought the big challenge is, given the last ten years, in which basically the US has gone from being almost on par with Europe in terms of its GDP and its GDP per capita, to now being certainly twenty five, thirty percent larger. The real challenge is how are they really expecting, if they're going to be the fastest growing G seven, to be growing faster than the US economy with everything we know about? US natural resources, US taxes, US entrepreneurial ability, US Silicon Valley concentrations, et cetera.

• 42:14Alastair Campbell?

  Rachel Reason, when she did the budget, she called it a budget for growth, okay? But actually, what did most of the people in that room understand about the budget? It was the taxes were going up to pay for the health service.

• 42:24Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 42:24Alastair Campbell?

  Now, the health service is one of the missions, okay? So I think there was an understanding, the health service needs more investment alongside reform, so they get it. But I think that what I'm hearing more and more is actually they want to see the detailed plan for growth. Which is, is that about innovation? Is that about AI? Is that about planning? Is that about infrastructure?

• 42:44Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, and this is something we've talked about a lot. And this is where, without getting too much into micro detail, I think one way of framing it is that the Tony Blair Institute, Tony Blair, spent almost three years before this election, writing their sort of project twenty twenty five, their kind of manifesto for a new Labour government. And the way that Tony Blair would imagine growth happening, which oddly is actually not very different from the way William Hague would have seen growth happening, is huge emphasis on technology and AI. And so they celebrated Rishi Sunak's investment in supercomputers. Money for batteries, et cetera. Secondly, more globalization, they would have been much more in favor, certainly Tony Blair, of more movement of people between the EU and the UK, closer links with the European Union.

• 43:28Rory Stewart?

  And he's also very interested, Tony Blair, in the ways in which you could get the economy going by freeing up the rules around things like pension funds to provide more investment into startup British companies and create more of a risk appetite and more energy, British investment, et cetera. Now, against him is this man who has now taken over as the chief of staff. And the interesting thing about the new chief of staff that

• 43:50Alastair Campbell?

  Morgan McSweeney?

• 43:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, who you

• 43:52Alastair Campbell?

  Against us.

• 43:54Rory Stewart?

  You pull, you pull, I mean, interesting, you pulled me off this. I was talking about Morgan McSweeney with this large group and you said to the group, how many of you here have heard of Morgan McSweeney? And almost no hands went up. So we can't assume

• 44:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Rory Stewart?

  even amongst our listeners, everybody's got it. But just to remind people,

• 44:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 44:08Rory Stewart?

  this is the guy that pushed out Sue Gray, who was the chief of staff, and this is the guy who basically ran the Labour campaign. He's from a political side. He did this stuff, for which I keep praising him and barking, and he's now right at the centre of it. Now, he is seen as more of a kind of centrist, old fashioned, blue collar Labour guy, who has expressed some frustration with the more new Labour globalization tech stuff, which he sees as a little bit maybe out of touch with the real concerns of Redwall voters.

• 44:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I think, I'm not sure that's right. I think he understands that this, the reason why Peter Carl was given this job of technology AI, and I think we'd like to hear Morgan Peter Carl, we're talking to him soon, is because they do understand the importance of AI to growth. And AI, by the way, is also inside the health mission. Very interesting, by the way, I think we've got Google coming up as a sponsor and I'm just reading up on them. So here's, this is interesting. Google's innovation are already demonstrating the use that cases of AI in addressing challenges, including delivering on the government's five missions.

• 45:09Rory Stewart?

  There we are.

• 45:09Alastair Campbell?

  And wider policy goals across the UK. So they know what the five missions are.

• 45:13Rory Stewart?

  They know what the five missions are.

• 45:14Alastair Campbell?

  So I think that's, you know, that's a good sign, Rory, that's a good sign.

• 45:17Rory Stewart?

  Let me make a kind of boring policy point here, which I guess I've made before, but I just want to reinforce the problem with relying on technology. AI, robotics, nanotechnology to transform government is that it's not just about what the technology can do, it's about the many ways in which the system will resist it. The classic example of this is there's basically no reason why we should have any drivers on our tube trains go around the world. There are underground systems that don't have drivers. Why do we have drivers on tube trains? Not because the technology doesn't exist, because the unions rejected it. Another example, I remember in Cumbria trying to convince GPs to use video conferencing in order to see patients who were elderly and wouldn't move in and GPs responding, it's

• 46:01Rory Stewart?

  just as easy for us if the patients come into the clinic. And then I said, what?

• 46:05Alastair Campbell?

  Covid has changed that.

• 46:06Rory Stewart?

  A bit, but not completely, as you will have discovered, right? I mean, again, you know, when I say to doctors, they often say, well, we've embraced the telephone. Well, that's been around since the 19th century and they've embraced it relatively recently. So the point I suppose I'm trying to make is that we underestimate the fact that often the barrier to the adoption of technology isn't what the tech can do, it's the willingness of institutions to accept it, legal barriers to taking it up, people being concerned, sometimes unnecessarily about risk and health. So there the question is, do you think this is a government that is going to take risks, be radical and force tech through when there's opposition?

• 46:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, if if they don't, then they're not going to succeed. And if they don't succeed, that is going to be a big, big, big deal because where does the country go if a Labour, progressive Labour government doesn't succeed? Does it go to Kemi Badenoch or does it actually go to something even more extreme? And the one thing I think Morgan McSweeney absolutely does understand is that the policy has to meet the scale of the challenge. And if you take things like the challenges facing health and the cost and the choice that you have to make between whether everybody can have everything or whether you have to make really, you know, blunt, difficult choices, I think he definitely gets that. And I think they do have a sense that AI, the tech stuff, I get, I take your point

• 47:29Alastair Campbell?

  about the tube trains, but I think you're looking here at some, you know, really big changes that can be delivered across the health sector and across the education sector. So that's the kind of stuff they have to be looking at, which I don't think is yet a big enough part of the debate. Rachel Reeves did, I don't know if you read her Manchin House speech. Now normally a Mansion House speech, you remember we talked a lot about her May's lecture, but the Mansion House speech kind of came and went.

• 47:54Rory Stewart?

  And they're usually very big deals. So to remind people, the Chancellor turns up, everybody wears white tie and tails.

• 47:58Alastair Campbell?

  They won't wear, that's been.

• 48:00Rory Stewart?

  That's been stopped.

• 48:00Alastair Campbell?

  Eighty six, thank God.

• 48:01Rory Stewart?

  But I, I remember.

• 48:02Alastair Campbell?

  The Chancellor did not have to wear white tie and tails.

• 48:04Rory Stewart?

  Didn't have to wear white tie and tails. Gordon Brown's Mansion House speeches were very, very famous.

• 48:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 48:08Rory Stewart?

  Just remind us a little bit about how big they were, because I seem to, you must have been involved in the way in which they were publicised and written up.

• 48:13Alastair Campbell?

  The thing is.

• 48:13Rory Stewart?

  George Osborne's were quite famous too.

• 48:15Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. If you, if you were the Chancellor, the, the May's lecture has become a big thing.

• 48:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 48:19Alastair Campbell?

  The budget is obviously a huge thing. The spending review is a huge thing, but the Mansion House speech is a very, very, very big thing. And it's where you set strategic course. Now, the big news in Rachel Reeves' speech, I think, was this, what she called the biggest pension reform in decades. And you were saying recently, you don't have a sense of which countries this government is looking at.

• 48:39Rory Stewart?

  Are they looking at Scandinavia or whatever?

• 48:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, she very specifically said, we want to follow what has been done in Australia and Canada, where these pension schemes have been brought together and made into mega funds. So we have eighty six in this country, local government pension pots, which she wants to bring together in six, which can then invest far more on a bigger scale, hopefully in our economy. But so for example, she pointed out, but she pointed out that some of the biggest, just, just, just last week, Canadian Pension Fund, the Public Sector Pension Investment Board, bought for one and a half billion, the company that owns Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton airports.

• 49:23Alastair Campbell?

  The Ontario Teachers Pension Plan owns already Bristol Airport and Birmingham Airport. Um, so you, you know, you, the, these are, these are pension funds from Canada, Australia, that are basically buying up huge chunks of British infrastructure.

• 49:39Rory Stewart?

  It's amazing. I mean, I, I, I remember when I first met those Canadian pension funds and teachers' funds in particular, how they come. I mean, it's extraordinary. You, you suddenly find in these financial meetings in London, you will have found us too. Along with the guys from Blackrock and famous hedge funds, one of the smartest, most powerful people in the room. Will be the guy from the Canadian Teachers Fund.

• 50:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 50:00Rory Stewart?

  Now, so that that that will be interesting.

• 50:01Alastair Campbell?

  So that so that and again, that will be, will that be challenged? This can, she's bringing forward a pension reform bill.

• 50:08Rory Stewart?

  So the the the problem on it is this, that in effect, for understandable reasons, government made pension investments in the UK pretty risk averse. And the idea was that they would only go into instruments which were going to be pretty low risk, low return.

• 50:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, part of her message is that we've become too risk averse.

• 50:28Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. So Conservative government's talked about, but never achieved the idea that these pension funds can take more risk and invest more in equities in particular. More upside, more downside. And the argument is that because it's a twenty, thirty year investment you're making off of the pension fund, you can afford to take more risk because the equities market's sort itself out. But they never really got it done. And they never really got it done because you can imagine the counter argument, which is a risk averse argument about pensions. So let's see, if she does it, that will be really interesting because it's something that the Tories talked about for fourteen years and never managed to do.

• 51:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Jeremy Hunt talked about it in his last Mansion House speech.

• 51:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 51:05Alastair Campbell?

  What does it say about our kind of culture and the media landscape? Is it because we're all talking about Trump the whole time at the moment? But I I find it really interesting that the the speech came, it was live on the news and all that. But I think if we were to do another business audience today and say, what was the big news out of Rachel Reeves' Mansion House speech? I think we'd get a pretty low turnout.

• 51:25Rory Stewart?

  Maybe your so comms problem, maybe to be honest, the way in which she speaks, the way in which the speech is delivered and the way in which it's communicated may make it more difficult to land it. So remember, the the point is that you would have had a comms challenge here. However important changes to the rules of how pension funds operate at the margin and whether they can put point five percent into equities or four percent to equities, sounds pretty obstruse and boring if you're running a television news item or a newspaper item. So you presumably.

• 51:52Alastair Campbell?

  Big deal though, it's a big, big deal.

• 51:54Rory Stewart?

  Very, very big deal, but unless you get the comms right, it could sound a bit boring.

• 51:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 51:58Rory Stewart?

  So the question is, is the number ten machine good enough at saying, listen, this sounds quite boring, but this could change an enormous amount. And the way you do it. You'd say, listen, if I was pitching it, I'd say, we developed amazing things in UK universities from graphene through to AI and they've all gone off to Silicon Valley and all the money's being made in the West Coast. Because in the West Coast, there are venture funds that take risk. And the problem in the UK is we're far too conservative and we're not taking risk, we're losing business. So Britain could be, the pitch would be, leading the world in tech investment if we free up these pension funds. And then I think you pitched the story around the tech, not around the real pension.

• 52:37Alastair Campbell?

  And then you make that part of, and this is where this is all heading in a way, and I think this will come. You make that part of your big 10 year growth plan. And that, I think, is what business wants to hear. Because at the moment, they're a bit pissed off about national insurance, they're a bit pissed off about the workers' rights stuff, both of which can be defended, but they've got to keep making the argument as part of long term plan for Britain.

• 52:58Rory Stewart?

  Well, great. Well, so many other things to talk about, but people who are interested, the next episode of the podcast will be Question Time, and in it, we'll be able to get more into farmers and agriculture. And we'll be able to talk about Keir Starmer meeting Xi Jinping at the G20. So some really exciting issues for people who want to listen to Question Time, where we're going to focus on China, farmers and much more.

• 53:15Alastair Campbell?

  See you tomorrow.

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