401. Trump’s Corruption Machine, Israeli Settlers, and the Rise of Reform UK

How has Donald Trump transformed his political power into a money-making machine, and what does it mean for American democracy? How did Israel's settler movement shift from the extremist fringes into mainstream politics? Why does Nigel Farage always evade real scrutiny, and will he replace Keir Starmer as Prime Minister? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to Question Time episodes to live show tickets, ad-free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit GetFuse.com/Politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producers: Evan Green, India Dunkley Video Editor: Joshua Smith 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?

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• 2:54Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:56Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Roy Stewart.

• 2:57Alastair Campbell?

  So we're going to kick off with Israel. Grim, grim, grim stuff going on there. And I suspect Netanyahu is doing what he's about to do because Trump is about to go. And he's really pushing the limits on that. Then I think we should talk about Trump and corruption. I think it's one of the least covered aspects of the many aspects of Trump right now. And I think we both agree, Rory, maybe we should have done an emergency podcast on the local elections.

• 3:21Rory Stewart?

  Should have done.

• 3:22Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe I was being a bit tribal, getting my head under the covers and saying, let's not go.

• 3:26Rory Stewart?

  It's interesting, you know, you're right. You're right. If I was going to be your therapist, it's possible that you weren't that excited by the local election results. Doing an emergency podcast on Nigel Farage triumphing in the local elections wouldn't have been your favourite.

• 3:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, my sister, who I saw at the weekend, said, if the Tories are still going in power and they'd had local elections as bad as that, you and Rory would be right out of the traps.

• 3:47Rory Stewart?

  And I did meet a man running yesterday who was running down my street and stopped and said, where on earth is your local elections podcast? I've been forced to listen to Nigel Farage all morning. So there we are. So we need to remember that.

• 4:00Alastair Campbell?

  And then maybe, yeah, there are quite a lot of elections this week we could talk about. We'll do Australia and the local elections.

• 4:05Rory Stewart?

  And let me just sort of brief spoiler alert, because obviously we'll do this after the break. But it is really interesting because the broad story is that in Australia and Canada, the sort of soft left incumbent parties who'd been in government actually triumphed.

• 4:21Rory Stewart?

  Because what seemed to happen is Trump totally discredited the right. Oddly, in Britain, the local election story is different. And in fact, the the right wing party, the more Trumpian party Reform triumphed and and the conventional parties really suffered badly. So getting into this strange question of how Australia, Canada and Britain, which in many ways have a great deal in common, ended up with different results, is the thing after the break.

• 4:43Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm hoping the difference is the general and the local, but we'll see. Right, Israel. So Cabinet meeting, Netanyahu comes out and says that they're on the eve of a forceful entry to Gaza, as if they've not been very forceful up to now. And it sort of feels to me, and I know you've watched the, I said I'd watched the Louis Thure documentary on the settlers last week, and you've now watched it as well. I've been really interested in your take on it. But I sort of feel we're at that point where the Ben Gavir, Smotrich, the real hardline settler movement is absolutely winning on the rampage. And you get the feeling that after all the Gazans have been through, now to be told that they're going to be moved from north to south, having moved backwards and forwards. And with the sense that Israel's

• 5:26Alastair Campbell?

  basically saying, well, they'll move in, they'll take over the land and kind of indefinite as to when they take it back.

• 5:31Rory Stewart?

  Couple of quick things. One is to remind people that what happened after October the 7th and the terrorist attacks was a very, very large bombing campaign, which slowed towards the end of last year and was then replaced when Trump came in with what was supposed to be a peace deal, which was going to have three phases. And the second phase was meant to be the return of all hostages and Israel withdrawing its troops. And the second phase never really got off the ground with a lot of recriminations on both sides about why that didn't happen. And instead, what's happened is that Israel has imposed a entire blockade on food, water, humanitarian assistance, which is now in its 63rd day.

• 6:16Rory Stewart?

  And during this period, we have had the extraordinary horrible killing of aid workers, very well documented, and then buried in shallow graves. And we've had criticisms, very strong criticisms from Tom Fletcher, who we interviewed on the on the show, who's the UN boss, Medsane Saint-Franier, very strong in its statements about what's going on, because it is an extraordinary. Situation because of course Gaza has been pummeled, well over forty thousand people killed and now it's it's facing this blockade. And as you say, Trump is about to turn up on his visit to the Gulf, to Saudi, to United Arab Emirates, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and to Qatar.

• 7:00Rory Stewart?

  And part of that is supposed to be discussing Gaza and peace. And at this point, when the majority of the Israeli population in the latest Times of Israel poll are very much in favour of stopping the fighting, bringing the hostages back, moving to peace. Instead Netanyahu is pushing ahead with a policy basically that seems to be really driven by Smotrich and Ben Gavir, who are the extreme far right settlers who have only got ten percent in the last election but are a key part of his coalition. And we can get on to that, this weird maths of how people who get ten percent in an election end up driving stuff. Are saying hostages are not the priority. The priority is to, in their words, eliminate Hamas, whatever they think that means.

• 7:43Alastair Campbell?

  I just saw this thing on social media this morning. Smotrich was asked what he thought about Ben Gavir's proposal to prevent all humanitarian supplies to Gaza for good. He answered, quote, "I do not disagree with him morally, but practically the world is not going to allow us to starve to death two million people in Gaza." And Ben Gavir was in the documentary, the Louis Theroux film, where he said, "We have to encourage Palestinian immigration and win." And win, it seems to me, from the point of view of the settlers that you saw in that film, does mean this Greater Israel, where the West Bank and Gaza become part of Israel, which then begs the question, well, where do the Palestinians go? And if you have, as you had in that film, people who basically say, "Well, I don't

• 8:26Alastair Campbell?

  really care because they're not the same as us," where you have rabbis talking about them as savages. I think this is, and we're in a horrific place on this. And there was an interview I saw on the television yesterday with the Norwegian, the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council. And he made a point of saying, if this goes ahead, and bear in mind, part of this new plan is that Israel takes over the humanitarian project, not the international organisations that are there now. And he was saying, if this goes ahead, and he named three countries, he said the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. He named those as the three countries that he felt could have some influence over this. And yet, I just feel that the international order has sort of given up.

• 9:08Alastair Campbell?

  When was the last time we heard a, a kind of international, like we have in Ukraine now, Macron, Starmer come together, push Europe. When, when was the last time we had any sense of that happening? We had it a little bit when Trump came in.

• 9:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:21Alastair Campbell?

  We had it a little bit with some of the Gulf states. But it seems just to have faded away. And I saw a picture yesterday of a girl, a young girl, who was holding her phone and showing a picture of herself a few months ago as this sort of lively, vibrant young, young girl. Now ribs coming through the skin. You see the pictures yesterday of people queuing for the limited food that was there. And it was children screaming and climbing over each other with these little pans to try and get some food into it. And I don't know, I just, I just feel, and I, I, part of me feels that we've been too fair, actually, you know, because we have constantly tried to put both sides. But I just think this is now beyond the pale. I think it's utterly unacceptable. And yet, we seem to be accepting it.

• 10:06Rory Stewart?

  The story in Israel is a story of two very, very different countries. It's a story of this extraordinary economic success story, this tech capital, a country which often when I go to visit friends in Israel, uh, feels dynamic, peaceful, sunny, beautiful. You know, I travel with family in Israel and you, you can go to the beach, you can go to amazing restaurants, um, and barely be aware uh, that the war's happening even now. And it's a country where even in that, uh, Saru documentary, you saw the voices of liberal Jews. So we saw a Jewish NGO trying to help a Palestinian get the olive harvest in. You saw that the national

• 10:50Rory Stewart?

  security chief had said that the settlers were an existential threat, basically. But there's another very dark story here, um, which has been going on much longer than we've wanted to really focus on enough in the West. And I, I want to get to you on this because the settler movement obviously begins after sixty seven, when Israel occupies, uh, the West Bank and Gaza. And in the seventies, it's still a slightly fringe eccentric thing, often.

• 11:21Rory Stewart?

  The cliche would be, you know, American Jews from Brooklyn with strange religious nationalist ideas, trying to put tents on bits of territory that they claim they're allowed from the Bible, but in the middle of Palestinian territory. But it's as early as the late seventies that it actually becomes more and more part of formal Israeli politics. And, and I think this is where we need to be sort of clearer, because in, I, I remember this as the Middle East Minister in Britain, you know, we talked very clearly about occupied Palestinian territory, about illegal settlements, you know, illegal under an international law, two-state solution. And Israeli interlocutors were polite and didn't point out, of course,

• 12:05Rory Stewart?

  that a lot of these settlements are not illegal under Israeli law, they're illegal under international law, and that they don't see this as occupied Palestinian territory, they see this as Israel. We saw this in one of the soldiers in the documentary through says, I'm not in Israel, am I? And the guy says, yes, you're, you're in Israel, right? Under the right-wing governments, under Likud governments, and the Labour governments, it went on, big push with Sharon, really, leading the settlement process in the eighties. The Labour governments tended to, and for this, I'm, I'm very grateful to Chris Doyle, you know, who, who was talking to me about this yesterday, that the different settlement panel, Labour basically was trying to take twenty-five, thirty percent of Palestinian territory by building settlements around the edge of Israeli settlements, you know, Jordan Valley, edge of Jerusalem. Likud, the right,

• 12:50Rory Stewart?

  was literally trying to put settlements on hilltops right the way through the territory to make sure they broke up the territory strategically. And that's what we were seeing a great deal of here. But, but I suppose what I want to say to you is to sort of finish this long ramble, is when you were in government, ninety-seven onwards, Tony Blair was often seen as being quite sympathetic to Israel, and he then went on to be the Middle East envoy. How is it that you reconcile yourself to the fact that on the surface, the story was international law, occupied territories, illegal settlements, but in practice, all the Israeli governments that you were dealing with were facilitating the building of illegal settlements again and again and again, despite the criticism from the international community?

• 13:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's a very good question. And I think the answer is that we did think, I remember we went, we made a big trip to the Middle East. Including Israel, not long after the Good Friday Agreement. And I can remember our media, we were having to calm our media down because there was a sense of, oh, pulled off the Northern Ireland thing, so maybe the next one will be the Middle East. And I think because the American administration at the time was still so focused on this idea that we can build the two-piece, the two-state solution, that I think some of these things that were going on wasn't just a question of reconciling ourselves to them. It was slightly pushing them away from our minds because they weren't in that big picture that we were pursuing.

• 14:13Alastair Campbell?

  So you would say, you know, we're worried about the settlements, we've got to be careful about the settlements. But meanwhile, they were just growing and growing and growing. And then I think when Tony went on to be the Middle East envoy and with a particular focus on the economics of Palestine, although he was, he was seen as very pro-Israel on one level, but also he was spending most of the time working with the Palestinians. But I think that that is a very, very fair question because when I was looking back through some of the history of the settlements and as early as 1967, the legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry wrote a legal opinion to the Israeli Prime Minister. My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Geneva Convention.

• 14:57Alastair Campbell?

  And this is about where you're, you know, the impact upon civilian life, even though it's been occupied militarily. And then the American government said the same. So the Israelis, we're going back to this point, and this relates to what's happening now, where the international order and the sense that we all have shared rules that we, we agree with and relate to is broken down. So what the Israelis, as you just said, the Israelis say, well, it's not in contravention of Israeli law. Indeed, it is Israeli law that turns outposts, when they set up a settlement, into a settlement through which Israeli law is effectively pipelined. And you know, you look at some of these places, it didn't really come through in Louis Theroux's film

• 15:40Alastair Campbell?

  because he was very much focused on some of the individuals. But you're talking about settlements that have grown into towns of thirty, forty, fifty thousand. Cities, really, yeah. Effectively small cities, yeah. And then you had that lady Daniela Weiss, who's one of the kind of leaders of the settlement movement, saying, back in the nineties, my vision is for one million and then two million. And then, of course, what you've got now with Gaza, there've been these international criminal court cases and... There's now this argument, which I think is going through the court at the moment, about whether starvation is being used as a weapon of war, which again is a war crime. And yet, the posture of the Israeli government is, well, it's not. We're not starving them. Indeed, look at this new offer. We're saying that we'll take over the feeding of these people.

• 16:25Alastair Campbell?

  There's no reason for them to go hungry.

• 16:26Rory Stewart?

  And this offer is one that has really troubled people at the UN, because it's essentially saying they will use American military contractors to deliver aid only to vetted people. So one of the principles of humanitarian assistance is that it needs to be neutral and impartial. You don't really get into the game of saying, I'm going to interview you before I decide whether I'm going to feed you. I was talking to an Israeli general, and he was being surprisingly honest and thoughtful about his experience when he was a commander in the West Bank of settlers coming to see him. And this is even ten, fifteen years ago. Saying, we want you to designate our outpost as being vital to national security.

• 17:09Rory Stewart?

  Because if you do that, then we can get the army in, we can get legal recognition. And he would say, no, you know, you are massively undermining security here. You're alienating the population, you're creating violence by doing this. At which point, they'd say, well, we'll go over your head. And he would turn up then in Netanyahu's office, Netanyahu in first time. And he would suddenly see leaders of the settler movement sitting in Netanyahu's outer office when he turned up to try to have a formal conversation about this. And it would be made very clear, and Daniel Weiss said this about having Netanyahu's aides on speed dial, that he would then be under enormous pressure, political pressure. So the settlers are very, very good, despite their relatively small size,

• 17:53Rory Stewart?

  at leveraging political contacts and leveraging this sort of strange marginal thing you have in coalitions. Israel, though, is still a country that feels like it's incredibly polarised. You know, you've got these religious nationalist settlers who threw documentaries about. You've got secular liberal Israelis who are committed to the idea of the state of Israel, but don't buy into the religious nationalist settlement stuff. And then you've got the ultra orthodox communities, some of whom live in settlements, some who don't, but who really don't get involved in the violence and who don't really buy into the state of Israel at all, because they actually believe that you can't have a state of Israel until Messiah comes. And these three groups are then made even more complicated by this massive wave of

• 18:35Rory Stewart?

  emigration from the former Soviet Union, from places like Ethiopia, from the Middle East, which have brought whole new voter blocks in, some of which radicalised, but some of which are just going into the settlements because it's cheap housing.

• 18:48Alastair Campbell?

  The state spends more on the people living in the settlements than it does on people living elsewhere, a lot of that through security, of course. And one of the most interesting things in that film is where Louis Theroux was being shown around one of the settlements and the guy said, don't film over there, that's where the army are based. So there's the army surrounding them. And I don't know if you saw that what the guy, the Palestinian who was showing Louis Theroux around Hebron, where what you got a sense of was just a sort of buggeration of daily life, going through turnstiles and no, you can't walk past that zebra crossing because that's only for Israelis. But that guy since has been, had his home raided, has been abused by settlers. I mean, there's a lot of kind of violence goes on and psychological violence goes on as well.

• 19:31Rory Stewart?

  And Louis Theroux didn't get very much there, partly because one got the sense that a lot of the settler community is very wary of being interviewed by international media.

• 19:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 19:40Rory Stewart?

  And don't want it to come through. But I had a friend who was in Hebron recently, he was an American Jew who had grown up in a very, very strongly pro Israeli family, was thinking of working for Netanyahu's government and then walked through Hebron with a Palestinian friend, walked through the settlements and saw the settlers screaming incredibly violent abuse at this Palestinian woman, children chucking stuff at them and just came back completely shaken, saying, and this is another thing, that the sense that you can live a life in Israel where you're not aware of this, where you can become a really strong supporter of Israel and not concentrate on what's going on. And he totally came back, whole mind changed, because his experience of these settlers

• 20:25Rory Stewart?

  in Hebron was so vicious.

• 20:26Alastair Campbell?

  But there's that film, there was footage of the guy, the settler, shooting a Palestinian. I didn't get, he didn't kill him, but he shot him and you could see the guy go down. And then Louis Throu just said in that very matter of fact way that he does, you know, he, he had his, his gun licence taken away, but that was it.

• 20:44Rory Stewart?

  Two final things before we move on to Trump. Um. One is how central the entire narrative of terrorism is. I mean, again and again, if you were sympathetic to what Netanyahu's government is doing in Gaza, what you would say, listening to us.

• 20:59Alastair Campbell?

  Is that we're not talking about what type of saying, we're not talking about Hamas.

• 21:02Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, you know, and that Louis Throu showed nablas, but he didn't show the, what they would call terrorist nablas. And that this entire thing that they're doing is about protecting themselves from existential threats. And you saw this with the Texan settler, who just keeps this story, these people are genocidal death cult. They want to wipe every Israeli off the face of the earth. They, they're engaged in an antisemitic death cult. We have no alternative other than to do this in order to survive as a nation. And I think that's deeply embedded. And so this sense of trauma, which is partly historical connections, you know, the horror of the Holocaust, the experience of, of, of the wars in the Middle East, the experience of October 7th is right at the heart.

• 21:45Alastair Campbell?

  Um. But Alex Younger, we interviewed Alex Younger, former head of MI6 on Leading this week. And he made the point that if you were living in Gaza and what is happening to you is happening to you. And Hamas is the only kind of other voice that you can, you can hear and see and as, as an opposition to this. Don't be surprised if people go towards it. And likewise, he also said, this related to when we were talking about Afghanistan. He made the point that it would seem that Israel only has a security response to this. It doesn't have a political response because it doesn't recognise the, the, the politics of the other side.

• 22:24Rory Stewart?

  And I think to finish on very dangerous territory, um, traditionally we draw a very, very clear line between settlers and other Israelis. But of course, there is a connection. Which is that at the heart of the project is it's a nationalist project for a homeland for the Jewish people and it's based on historical claims that 2000 years ago, this was the state of Israel and secular Jews after 48 may have accepted the particular configuration of the bit of the Middle East that they got, but the argument of settlers that Hebron or Nabloes or these places in the West Bank where Abraham died or where

• 23:08Rory Stewart?

  Joseph was born, that the idea that the Bible is your land right to this territory is very, very central to even most liberal secular Israeli views. And therefore, one of the things that settlers can exploit, and I think Weiss makes this point in the documentary, is that they're pushing the boundary of something which still reflects the basic idea and which at a fundamental profound level doesn't want a state with full Palestinian rights, because if it was a state with full Palestinian rights, it wouldn't be a Jewish homeland. And that national project of protecting Jews in this particular

• 23:50Rory Stewart?

  bit of Middle Eastern territory would collapse. So what I suppose I'm saying is that the complication here is that the whole project touches on the edge of settlements.

• 24:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, listen, let's turn to Trump. So he's going there and it'll be huge, huge news, because pretty much everything that he does is huge news. And I think one of the hardest things with Trump at the moment is to work out what is significant, what isn't. And the last few days have thrown out some interesting stuff on that. And I particularly want to talk about corruption, because I think a lot of these things are a way of disguising the corruption. I think corruption is a huge thing now. When you have his meme coin, you have these literally vast sums of money without any tracking going into him.

• 24:30Rory Stewart?

  Just quickly to interrupt on this, just as a brief explainer, and I'm not the world's biggest expert on this, but a meme coin is not Making the kind of normal claims that things like Bitcoin make. Bitcoin is really posing as an alternative currency. So Bitcoin limits the number of coins that are issued. Very expensive to mine and it tries to present itself as something that can be used in transactions. A meme coin isn't like that. A meme coin is basically initially a joke. It's a token issued and there was something called, and not surprisingly, a Doge coin. Yeah, that's where the name from. Must love promoting and going up and down on it. And there's no limit to how many of them you can issue and they're basically completely unregulated. An equivalent are NFTs.

• 25:15Rory Stewart?

  There was this weird thing called the Bored Ape Yacht Club that I remember seeing very, very wealthy Hollywood actors buying. In fact, I sat with one of them and he'd just bought one and he bought it for three hundred thousand dollars and was showing off to me. What is it? It was a cartoon picture of an extremely ugly ape, a digital picture that you got on your phone. And how is that worth money? Well, so I said, this is ridiculous. What do you have, is it worth money? And he said, well, because I've bought it, you know, it's now gone up to five hundred thousand dollars, a well-known Hollywood actor. So I said, it's a Ponzi scheme, isn't it? And he said, no, no, no, no. And he tried to make this very complicated argument for why it was actually a valid investment. Sure enough, you know, a few weeks later, the thing collapsed down to being worth almost nothing at all. Because obviously it was a really ugly picture of an ape on your phone, which couldn't be worth anything at all.

• 26:00Rory Stewart?

  Now, meme coin operates like this and the Trump meme coin. And Melania. These things are issued. They are traded in an obscure Chinese trade. He doesn't declare any of the money that comes in. He doesn't declare any of the revenue he gets out of it. But what it is, as you've pointed out, is an amazing way of making campaign contributions. And in fact, we can see this because some publicly listed companies have started making, buying the meme coin. And if you're publicly listed, you have to tell the Stock Exchange Commission why you're spending your money. So Javier Selgas. Who runs a shipping company based in Mexico, has just spent twenty million dollars of the money of his publicly listed company, which you might be lucky enough to own shares in, buying this meme

• 26:45Rory Stewart?

  coin. And in his S E C filing, he says, this is a sensible business decision because it's advocacy for the, you know, the business interests of my company for a free trade deal between Mexico and the United States.

• 26:58Alastair Campbell?

  Right, and he has to declare it, they have to declare it. But if you're the leader of one of these Gulf countries that is, uh, Trump's about to visit, and you think, well, what would be a nice way to set up the visit is to bung a bit of, either to get the boys out, Eric and Don Junior, who are out doing these big deals, and saying that the fact that they're called Trump has nothing to do with the fact that, you know, Trump is the president of the American state, the United States, because they're now running the business side of things. There's no way of knowing who's paying that money. And Trump is the guy who's in charge of the regulation of the Bitcoin meme coin, the whole damn shooting match.

• 27:31Rory Stewart?

  So it's incredibly straightforward. It's essentially a transfer directly to Donald Trump's bank account from any foreign dignitary businessman in the world. And we can already see that when you make these transfers, court cases disappear, contracts are given. There's a wonderful speech by Chris Murphy, Senator from Connecticut, stands up in front of a flipboard and takes you through all the corruption of the last hundred days.

• 27:54Alastair Campbell?

  We should put it in the newsletter, actually, because, and in fact, he posted a picture on, on social media of this sort of graph going through day by day by day through the administration. And there's kind of something every day. So whether it was getting rid of the regulators, whether it was getting rid of the ban on accepting gifts, or going straight into lobbying in and out of government, even the thing about the employment of Musk, they had to kind of get rid of some of the old rules governing government appointments to allow him, allow him in there.

• 28:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, the corruption of Trump is beyond imagining. I mean, it's so staggering that we can barely keep up with it. And it is so disgusting. Corruption is obviously, I think, defined as using public office for private benefit. And it's unbelievable. It's absolutely off scale.

• 28:36Alastair Campbell?

  He's got 500 million, apparently, into his political action committees. This is for somebody who, under the constitution, isn't going to be campaigning again. So what's a political action committee if it's not to try and get you in for another term? So where's that money going?

• 28:49Rory Stewart?

  So you can give him cash directly. You can pay, it appears now, between 1 million and 5 million dollars.

• 28:56Alastair Campbell?

  The dinner at Mar-a-Lago.

• 28:57Rory Stewart?

  Dinner at Mar-a-Lago or a meeting with him.

• 28:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 28:59Rory Stewart?

  As you say, the Trump children have been travelling around just before the president visits. Coincidentally, all the countries the president's about to visit, Saudi, UAE, Qatar. And as Eric Trump said, it's amazing how quickly they get to yes. And all these countries are literally announcing, you know, billion-dollar deals as he's turning up again and again. The other countries, of course, they've been visiting, not surprisingly, are the far-right populist countries, New York, Hungary, Serbia, et cetera.

• 29:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 29:27Rory Stewart?

  Where they're doing deals there.

• 29:29Alastair Campbell?

  And by the way, Don Trump Jr. apparently is also doing it as part of what he calls a speaker, a paid speaking tour. So you go along, you make a speech that we can't criticise on that front, Rory, but you make a speech, you then meet the heads of government and you meet the the big cheeses. And then, lo and behold, there's an agreement that, yes, you can build a new waterfront properties all around Gaza.

• 29:51Rory Stewart?

  And the paid speaking thing is interesting too, because there's no limit to how much you could pay, in inverted commas, for a speech. You're apparently paying for a speech. But of course, the amount of money you could pay, it could be hundreds of thousands of dollars. And Trump, of course, is, unlike other presidents, not setting up proper blind trusts. He's not distinguishing himself from the family. So the income just rolls in. And we've seen other examples. He used the White House to strong-arm the main golf association into accepting him and his Saudi partners. And PGA has agreed very reluctantly that they'll do their tours.

• 30:23Alastair Campbell?

  His live, the live tour.

• 30:24Rory Stewart?

  On on Trump's golf courses, which massively drives up the value of Trump's golf courses.

• 30:28Alastair Campbell?

  I've got to say, we're going to talk about Labour in a bit, but if it's true that the Labour government is trying to get the British Open to be played at Turnbury, because Trump has a hotel there, then. I might be joining the protests at that one, Rory, and I'm not a natural protester myself. But then there's the whole thing about, you know, this guy that got pardoned after donating 1.8 million. He's sort of, it's just, it's off the scale. And I, and I think these other things that we spend so much time talking about. So if you just take the last 48 hours, we have the thing with the Pope. Now, I'm not a Catholic, I'm not anything, I'm an atheist. But given that the Pope, Pope Francis is, you know, dead just a few days. For Trump to go out and first to all do an interview saying, I think I'd be a great Pope.

• 31:10Alastair Campbell?

  And then to, on his Truth Social and on the White House social media channels, have this picture of him as the Pope, dressed as the Pope. And then last night, because there's been a bit of backlash from Catholics, say that he, he knew nothing about it. It's on your effing Truth Social. And, and then to say that it's, why can't people take a joke? And this is how they do it. Farage does this as well, where you sort of, you say something over the top, but then you say, well, it's just a bit, bit of fun. Why haven't people got a sense of humour?

• 31:41Rory Stewart?

  So it's interesting that.

• 31:42Alastair Campbell?

  Deeply offensive.

• 31:43Rory Stewart?

  I, I found it really offensive, really peculiar. And of course, immediately the bad boys of Brexit come in and attack me and said, I have a sense of humour and what's your problem? And actually, some of my more left-wing Tory friends said, Rory, you mustn't rise to this because if you react to their jokes.

• 31:59Alastair Campbell?

  That's what they want. I agree.

• 32:01Rory Stewart?

  That's what they want.

• 32:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, of course, then the next day, you had Alcatraz. You had two things, tariffs on films and Alcatraz. Now, there is somebody, somebody said to me today that apparently in Florida, there's a TV channel that, in where Mar-a-Lago is. And they play the, the film that was showing that night, on Saturday night, was Escape from Alcatraz, right? So people are thinking now, did Trump sit down and watch this film and thought, you know, we've got to reopen that place? You know, he suddenly throws out, we're going to put 100% tariffs on film, on foreign films. And this Alcatraz thing. So yesterday, as I was driving back from the north, the lead story was tariffs on films, the second story was Alcatraz.

• 32:44Alastair Campbell?

  I would put my life on it that neither of those things will happen. Just as he's not going to become the Pope. However, we've spent, we the world, spent forty eight hours talking about it, during which we're actually not talking about Trump and Israel, not talking about Trump and corruption, not talking about things that really, really, really matter.

• 33:01Rory Stewart?

  So let's get back to corruption then, just to just finish, so we don't fall into the trap. Um, so, um, corruption is something that's been around in the US, and indeed all our democracies long time, but the US is pretty dramatic. In the nineteenth century, unbelievably corrupt. Big move to clean it up, obviously through the twentieth century. But still some pretty strange things that we've been talking about. We talked about Buddy Cianci in Rhode Island, taking cash. We talked about, you know, senators with gold bars.

• 33:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and also even the fact that they can get insider information and trade and all that.

• 33:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, we took Nancy Pelosi, talking about these amazing FBI stings in the eighties, which found congresspeople and senators, including one of them, the law, federal lawmakers, saying, when the FBI agent tries to say, you know, you're going to take a bribe, he says, you don't need to talk to me, I'm as bent as they come, right? However, the real change is Chief Justice Roberts in the Supreme Court, and the fallout from Citizens United. So Citizens United allowed this horrible campaign financing situation, where, under essentially an idea that this is a part of liberty and freedom, suddenly, these incredible, you

• 34:14Rory Stewart?

  know, hundred million dollar funds are able to, often with dark money, finance bits of campaigns. And following on from this, there's been a massive retreat even before Trump in prosecuting American politicians from corruption. So Chris Christie's team was found, get this, in order to punish somebody in New Jersey who wasn't with them, they were creating traffic jams in New Jersey by fiddling around with the traffic lights in order to undermine their opponents. That was cleared. The governor of Virginia, who with his wife, was found taking tens of thousands of dollars in cash and gifts, again was cleared. There's been an amazing investigation in Ohio into the Speaker of the House, who had a, you know, genuine kind of guy who modeled himself in the Sicilian mafia and whose dad

• 34:59Rory Stewart?

  was a mafia enforcer, who killed himself by a pond and who, the FBI was all over this. And then we come to Trump. And, and the protections that the US set up to try to deal with this are, of course, laws. Which Trump has suspended. So there are laws of Foreign Agents Act, which was about trying to prevent, you know, Russian agents or Cuban agents paying American politicians. That's been paused by Trump. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, that's about companies going abroad, paying bribes. Trump has frozen that too. Consumer Protection Acts, frozen by Trump. Procurement, the State Department has coincidentally just issued a $400 million contract to buy

• 35:42Rory Stewart?

  armored Teslas from Elon Musk. And no proper procurement process has followed. In fact, contracts offered to Musk's rifles, $2 billion contract after Verizon, has now been annulled. And it looks like Musk is now going to get that contract, again with no due process at all.

• 35:59Alastair Campbell?

  This is the story. And to be fair to the, our friend and colleague, the Mooch, he is, he said this right from the word go. While they're creating all these sort of, you know, distractions, left, right and centre, the real big story here is about kind of, you know, personal enrichment and enrichment of his friends. People should just look out for that guy, Chris Murphy. Follow him on social media if you don't. He, he really is on to this. And Bloomberg, by the way, they've done a, I don't know how they know, because the crypto world is so secretive, but he reckons that their crypto, the Trump family crypto scheme is now worth about somewhere close to a billion dollars. Okay, right. It's been depressing so far. Let's have a break.

• 36:33Rory Stewart?

  Yes, it was depressing. But after the break, we'll be back and we'll be looking at some really, really interesting electoral results around the world, some of which, Australia, for example, show a great deal of kind of optimism and hope and different directions. Trump isn't taking over the whole world. And there are different currents moving in other directions. So a bit of optimism after the break.

• 36:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, I'm glad you can see the sunny side of life, whatever happens, Rory. We'll also talk about the local elections in England.

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• 38:51Rory Stewart?

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

• 38:54Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alice Campbell. So Rory, why don't you, you said you were going to start on an optimistic note. Why don't you tell our international listeners how the local elections went?

• 39:03Rory Stewart?

  Well, listen, just to frame it for everybody, British and international, there are two totally different stories happening in the world. There's the story of Canada and Australia, where being associated with Trump damages right-wing parties and allows center-left governments, who often were in pretty bad trouble and were seen as pretty useless and looked like they were going to lose elections. So they suddenly won these elections, largely thanks to the fact the right wing has been discredited by Trump. And then there's the other story, which we're seeing in Romania, which we're seeing in France, which we're seeing in Germany, which is actually right-wing populist parties. Topping the polls and that oddly is what happened in Britain and why oddly? We'll get on to that in a second because in many ways you would expect actually Britain to follow

• 39:49Rory Stewart?

  Canada and Australia, not what's happening in Europe. Anyway, the British results were astonishing because it was totally unprecedented historic success for Reform. And John Curtis and all these. This is the optimistic bit.

• 40:08Rory Stewart?

  So Reform has managed to do something amazing. Reform, just to remind people, is this party set up by Nigel Farage. It was a relatively marginal party, a pretty new party in a country dominated, of course, by a two-party system for over a hundred years, where if you go back to the sixties and seventies, Labour and Conservatives getting well over ninety percent of the vote. And very difficult for a new party to break through in British politics. The Lib Dems keep complaining because we've got a first past the post system. But this time, they managed to break through to thirty-two percent potentially of the vote, up from a twenty thirteen figure of twenty-two percent. And because of the way first past the post works, there's a tipping point you can reach,

• 40:52Rory Stewart?

  which could mean with thirty-two percent of the vote, you end up with forty percent of the seats. And Labour and Conservatives hit very hard. So quick figures, Reform took six hundred and seventy-seven council seats, two mayoralties, took a parliamentary seat by a tiny six-vote majority. It won the popular vote in fifteen out of twenty-three local authorities. Labour lost two-thirds of its councillors, including Doncaster, which was the only council that it had up, which was controlled. It's got the lowest vote share for forty years, so it's gone from thirty-four percent of the vote in twenty-four to nineteen percent of the vote in twenty twenty-five.

• 41:31Rory Stewart?

  Uh, but it did end up by very narrow margins, holding a mayoralities in Doncaster and Western England. Now, the Conservatives lost all previously held councils. I mean, it went from. Sixteen councils down to zero from having most votes in five additional ones to only having the most votes in two additional ones. And this is for Labour and the Conservatives, the worst vote share for forty years. So I guess the question is, what on earth do we make of this? In some ways, I mean, you know, for once in our lives, we predicted it like half the world. You know, we said we thought Reform would do very well. We said that we've entered a world which is much more fractured, fragmented, because there are more parties in play. The Lib Dems did quite well, not not in vote share, but

• 42:14Rory Stewart?

  in the way they allocated their votes as part of their trick. They don't necessarily get a huge amount of vote. They got maybe sixteen percent of the vote, but carefully targeted it. So we're going to enter a world more coalitions, more fragile, more anti-incumbency, Reform doing very well. But what do you make of it all?

• 42:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I certainly don't find it optimistic. If you go to the betting shop today, which I never do, but I'll tell you the odds. Most seats at the next election today in the betting shops, you get six to four Labour and six to four Reform. Now-

• 42:45Rory Stewart?

  So the betting markets at the moment think that Reform have a pretty good chance of basically getting majority in Parliament, being the next government.

• 42:53Alastair Campbell?

  Not necessarily majority, but they're reading this as a significant change. And I think it is. And I think that the Labour government, if I'd have been them on Friday morning, I wouldn't have come out and said the sort of things they said. I would have come out and said, this is a real kick up the arse, and we've got to listen. I said to you last week, I've been talking to people, been campaigning, and the winter fuel allowance was coming up again and again and again and again. Now, that's not something that's been in the media much. You've got a situation coming up where the the welfare changes. And I see Eleanor Morgan, the First Minister in Wales-

• 43:28Rory Stewart?

  Who we interviewed on Leading?

• 43:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, where Labour are going to be coming up for election next year.

• 43:34Rory Stewart?

  And where Reform is doing very well in the polls again.

• 43:36Alastair Campbell?

  Reform are doing very, very well.

• 43:37Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 43:37Alastair Campbell?

  And she is making clear that she is going to speak out against some of these changes. I was talking to an MP in Wales who reckons that something like two thirds-

• 43:50Alastair Campbell?

  Of his constituents will be affected. Now, the point is, if you've been elected on a slogan of change, which Labour were, and I can point to, as I have on the podcast, lots of changes that they've made that I support. But if the changes that they've made that have connected with the public, not people like us who sit and talk about politics all day. What do the public know about what the government's done? They know about winter fuel, they know about farmers, they don't much like that. They know about national insurance on business and they don't much like that. And they know about PIPs. And the thing about PIPs, the personal independence payments, they haven't even happened yet.

• 44:26Rory Stewart?

  And the PIPs is payments for people with disabilities.

• 44:28Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 44:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 44:29Alastair Campbell?

  I've had quite an interesting weekend because I went to Burnley. I went, then I went to see my sister over in Redford. And I was in Doncaster, I was in Manchester, yesterday I was in the Peak District. And there is still, but they've got to be really careful because this will run out pretty quickly if they're not careful. There is still a desire that the Labour government does well. But what I heard again and again was, this is just not what Labour government should be doing. Taking money away from pensioners, taking money away from the disabled, whilst not fixing the, the kind of big stuff of inequality and the, you know, and we can maybe talk about Europe because I still honestly do believe one of the reasons why Farage

• 45:11Alastair Campbell?

  is able to get away with morphing from one sort of character into another, whilst constantly being described as authentic, is because the things that he's done in the past have never been pinned on him. Why was he allowed to get away from the Trump shadow? Answer, because he decided, I'm not, I'm going to play down the Trump thing. And he never talks about Brexit, he plays down these things.

• 45:34Rory Stewart?

  Is it also that the Labour government doesn't want to complain about Trump? Because they are worried that they'll annoy him, so they didn't want to pin Trump on.

• 45:43Alastair Campbell?

  Possibly, but which is, I kind of understand, but let's just, you know, it didn't stop him coming out of the weekend and talking about the film tariffs. Which is like, you know, the UK is one of the hardest hit in that.

• 45:54Rory Stewart?

  Just to, just to sort of stop for a second on that. We really need to focus on that because we talk a lot about what could generate growth in the UK.

• 46:02Alastair Campbell?

  Creative industries, one of them.

• 46:03Rory Stewart?

  And creative industries and media and film has been the most incredible success. And actually, to give a little bit of credit to both Gordon Brown and George Osborne. They put a lot of stuff in place, which a proper industrial strategy.

• 46:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, big studios and tax breaks.

• 46:20Rory Stewart?

  Studios, tax breaks, and it actually worked. And actually, if we're looking for industrial strategies and growth, for the other things that we often talk about that Britain's good at. You know, life sciences, AI development, the film industry is a really good model. But my goodness, it's a disaster if the big Hollywood studios.

• 46:36Alastair Campbell?

  My point is that.

• 46:38Rory Stewart?

  Can't make in the UK.

• 46:38Alastair Campbell?

  So you mentioned Carney, you mentioned Canada. So as you say, Albanese and Carney both won from left of centre perspectives at a time when people are saying that incumbents are dead. And you can't win from the progressive left, right? They've disproved that. I think it's less that the Keir Starmer government is worried about upsetting Trump. Too often, the arguments are taking place on kind of accepting Farage's premise about the country. No, we can't touch Brexit. Yeah, the country is a bit broken. Yeah, the immigration system is a disaster. And what I said last week, attack him where he's weak and stop attacking him going from where he's strong.

• 47:18Rory Stewart?

  What does that mean in practice? Not not attacking him where he's strong, attacking him where he's weak?

• 47:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, immigration has to be fixed. Immigration is a real problem. But if you come at immigration from the perspective that says, we're going to do this because this is the way that we that we take on Farage, or this is the way that we shore up our vote in the Red Wall, or which is how they breathe this stuff out the whole time. Fix the immigration system because the immigration system has to be fixed. The fact that he could go through, Farage could go through the last few weeks where all he does is campaign. He's a campaigner, right? I remember he once said to me, he said, I'd be hopeless as Prime Minister. I'm a campaigner. I'm a communicator. I'm out there. And he's very, very good at it. So the fact that there was a poll last week, who do you blame for Brexit? Okay?

• 48:02Alastair Campbell?

  Farage was, he was way down the list. He was one of the big drivers of it. But if the Labour government decides, as the Tory party has done, let's not talk about Brexit, don't be surprised if he gets away with it. We should have had, the Trump thing should have been pinned on him day one. No, Keir Starmer can't do it for the reasons you say. But let me tell you, yesterday in Paris, Macron and Von der Leyen were there. Macron stood in front, in Paris, in front of a slogan in English. And the slogan said, choose Europe for science. And he and Von der Leyen announced 500 million euro scheme to attract American scientists to Europe.

• 48:43Alastair Campbell?

  And she said, it is the most disastrous miscalculation to turn against science. He said, did we ever in our lives imagine that one of the great democracies of the world would turn against fact and turn against science? You don't have to. Now, is that going to affect Trump's impression of Macron? I suspect he will, he will get told about it, think, oh, got to watch out for him as he's done with Carney. Mark Carney's going to be seeing him today. We'll see. But I'd be very, very surprised if Trump does his 51st state thing. So I think it's about, look, I'm reluctant to sort of, you know, I, if I say to you, Rory, I don't want to become the Roy Keane of the podcast world. Do you understand what that means?

• 49:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I get that. He's grumpy, he's grumpy and complains since it's the corner.

• 49:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but also he basically says, Man United was a lot better in my day and this lot aren't quite up yet. And I don't want to be that person who says, but I heard one of them in the aftermath, part of the line of defence was, well, this stage of the government, governments have always struggled and we didn't. And they actually compared it to 1997, you know, the Blair government had all those problems with Bernie Ecclestone and blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, we did have lots of problems.

• 49:53Rory Stewart?

  But you weren't punished like this.

• 49:54Alastair Campbell?

  We were talking the polls in the first year and we didn't lose a by-election for, I think, the first six years. So if you start from this defensive mindset, and I just felt the response was too complacent, is take it as a kick up the arse and say, You know, because what you say, what they're saying is we're going to go faster, further. But on some of these things, the change that's been offered is not change that people felt they voted for. And if you, if you've campaigned on change,

• 50:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 50:20Alastair Campbell?

  don't be surprised if people then say, I don't like the change, that they think, who else is offering change? And I don't know if you've ever looked at reform in the dictionary. It means change.

• 50:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, no, it's, it's amazing. Danny Finkelstein, who I, I saw at the event that we did for presents, the, the twinning project, has this great line that Labour's slogan is Britain is broken, let's do nothing about it. And, and I, I think there is, there is, you know, I said to you before the election that it was difficult to put a cigarette paper between Starmer and Sunak on almost any issue. They sounded identical on immigration, identical on tax, identical on welfare. In fact, it was impossible to see what policies Labour had up its back pocket, which was going to make it any different. They felt like they were an austerity like party that were going to come in. And it's very difficult to see what they do that'd be any different.

• 51:12Rory Stewart?

  And, you know, even on housing policy, health policy, a lot of the stuff that Labour was talking about is exactly what Sunak was talking about. Now, the answer then was.

• 51:20Alastair Campbell?

  I could push back about that.

• 51:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you could push back a bit, but anyway.

• 51:23Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not going to bother, I'm grumpy.

• 51:24Rory Stewart?

  You're grumpy, exactly. Anyway, the answer broadly, you know, I might be exaggerating, but I probably am exaggerating. But, but the, the answer then was, well, you know, they've got to win this election. So they don't want to go too much on the policy difference. They'll just let the Tories lose because everyone hates the Tories. And then, once they're in, you know, the mask will come off. And then the policies will be revealed and then the radicalism will unfold. It doesn't feel like that, I'm afraid.

• 51:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, what we both said during the campaign was that the scale of challenge that the country faced was not being met by the scale of policy response. No, they would probably say, and I I was talking to a minister last night who said, look, you know, we've still got a bit of time. And I said, listen, you will be amazed how little time you've got. And once people start to settle on a judgment. And this is what I heard. Listen, I met loads of people who voted Labour and I met loads of people who didn't vote, who said they might come back. Okay, but I also met this couple. Who said to me that of the any conversation, as you know, that starts with, I've always voted something is always followed by a but.

• 52:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 52:30Alastair Campbell?

  And the but that this guy gave me was this thing is that I didn't vote Labour for this. I didn't vote Labour to lose my winter fuel. I didn't vote Labour to see my. The, you know, my wife's benefits cut. I didn't, you know, you've, so what is the, and and I keep obsessively going on this thing about what is the national story? And so like Farage does have a national story and the trouble is it's the same as. To some extent, it's the same as what Labour's Britain is broken.

• 52:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 52:58Alastair Campbell?

  Farage went round the country saying Oxford is broken, Stafford is broken, Lincoln is broken, Durham's broken. Right. Now, I know and you know, he does not have a clue about how to fix it. But what is the Labour? National story? What is, if you say to the Labour people? What, give me the, give, tell me what Britain's going to be like in 10 years. What's the change? Now, I, I honestly, right now. Can't give. An answer to that. So that's me. So and I'm obsessed with this stuff.

• 53:28Rory Stewart?

  Um. So I I had dinner with your friend Gordon Brown this week.

• 53:32Alastair Campbell?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:33Rory Stewart?

  And.

• 53:34Alastair Campbell?

  So when's he coming on the podcast?

• 53:35Rory Stewart?

  He, I did, I did ask him that.

• 53:37Alastair Campbell?

  And he said, he said, I'll get back to you.

• 53:38Rory Stewart?

  Said, well, I don't, don't really have much, much to say. I'll come on. I have something to say. Now, he does have a lot to say, it turns out. And of course, I, I, I don't want to, you know, put him on the spot because we were having a, a nice dinner conversation, but. Fundamentally, he would, I think, say, a much more radical, ambitious economic policy and, and a policy that addresses society. And a whole new economic model. And he would describe what that was. And let's get him on the podcast. To try to explain that, but yeah.

• 54:03Alastair Campbell?

  When I heard on the, the morning after the election, Ellie Reeves, party chair. Was, was doing the rounds of the studio. I know it's difficult. You've just had a big hit. And you know, you've clearly lost and you you go out and you've got to say something. But she kept saying about Runcorn and the by-election, which was caused because that guy thumped somebody and but they lost the majority of fourteen thousand seven hundred. Okay, it was only by six votes. And if it had gone the other way on the recount, we wouldn't have talked about it so much, but it's a huge swing against them. And she mentions, she kept, she kept mentioning, you know, we've got to get our message out better about the things that we've done. For example, we've just delivered four new breakfast clubs in Runcorn, right? Now, I've got nothing against the four new breakfast clubs, and I think food poverty is a terrible thing.

• 54:47Alastair Campbell?

  But I was actually thinking about Gordon as she was saying that because Gordon would wouldn't have talked about breakfast clubs. He would have talked about our ambition to end child poverty.

• 54:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 54:57Alastair Campbell?

  He would have taught, you know, what what they're not doing to my mind is setting this stuff in this, as I say, a national story. Where is the country going?

• 55:06Rory Stewart?

  So.

• 55:07Alastair Campbell?

  Breakfast clubs are great. They are not a national story.

• 55:10Rory Stewart?

  Final point, I mean, I've been very struck with our conversations with David Blunkett, with our conversations with Alan Milburn, this dinner I just have with Gordon Brown, that they must have been difficult figures to manage, to put it mildly. Gordon Brown can't be an easy person to to manage, but my goodness, the sense of intellectual confidence is, you know, it it's it is a form of charisma and it's just astonishing, his certainty, his vision. And I'm struggling a bit within the Labour Cabinet to see people with that kind of degree of kind of raw. And I I guess, you know, I don't know, as you say, we don't want to make you sound like Roy Keane. Before we go on to Australia, let's have a little chat about the Tories.

• 55:55Rory Stewart?

  I was actually talking to Luke Trill from More in Common.

• 55:58Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he's been doing these focus groups that he says are the worst he's ever heard.

• 56:01Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely unbelievable. Um, so the Tories, I think, are in unbelievable trouble. So this is me speaking.

• 56:07Alastair Campbell?

  Now you're cheering me up.

• 56:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so this is this is me speaking as a former Conservative Cabinet Minister, somebody who may be pretty unpopular in my party, but I can assure you, this is unimaginable, the mess they've got themselves in.

• 56:21Rory Stewart?

  We are now, I think, in a situation in which it's not inconceivable that Reform could actually replace the Conservative Party as the major right wing party. We've seen it. In France, Les Républicains vanished. It can feel like what happened to the Liberal Party in Britain. Just remind people, you know, Liberal Party, yeah, nineteen oh five, they win this enormous majority, figures like Lloyd George, Asquith. After the First World War, the Liberal Party vanishes and is outflanked and replaced by this new thing called the Labour Party. And we go from one type of two party system, Liberal against Tory, to a new type of two party system, Labour against Tory. And I think Reform is doing very well at hoovering up Tory votes. And they're reassuring people. You know,

• 57:06Rory Stewart?

  you can see now quite a lot of my former Conservative colleagues saying, well, you know, Farage, not exactly Trump, is he? A lot of what he says is the sort of stuff that mainstream Conservatives agree with. And remember, of course, Farage himself came out to the Conservative Party, basically. He founded these parties for Brexit Reform because he wasn't really given an opportunity within the Conservative Party. So I think she is in real trouble. And above all, I

• 57:31Alastair Campbell?

  Think she's done, you think she's finished?

• 57:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, I cannot understand, honestly, why she's not out there speaking. She keeps saying, well, nobody will listen to me. Maybe a bit of truth in that, you know, I'll give her that. I need to develop policies. I don't want to come out and just talk nonsense. But it seems to me it cannot be right. You have to dominate the airwaves. You have to get attention. You can do it through speeches as much as policy, and you've got to make the call. Now, my call, my advice to Ken, not just not to listen to me, apart from come on the podcast, you know, if you're not feeling your voice is being heard, here we are, millions of people will hear you directly.

• 58:04Alastair Campbell?

  Let me tell you, Kimmy, we made the same offer to Pierre Poilievre and to Mr. Dutton in Australia. Their opponents came on and won.

• 58:12Rory Stewart?

  Yep. So it is, it's a chance to get your voice out. And I would say that if I were the Conservatives, you've got two strategies. You've got the trying to imitate Reform, which I think is a disaster.

• 58:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's what they've done, and that's why they're in the mess. That is why I've said, and I'll say it again, I said it last week, if Labour honestly think that the way to deal with Reform Is to be a bit more Farage on policy. Absolute nonsense, absolute nonsense. The way they have got now to give a sense of a Labour government doing things that the people who voted for them expected them to do, and that is what they hear and know about. And forming a big picture that paints a proper story of where we go.

• 58:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and the Tories, of course, what they should be doing is trying to present themselves as the serious, mature party of government and change. They should exploit people's uncertainty about Trump. They should exploit the fact that the Labour government seems a bit inept, that the growth isn't really coming, the economy isn't really taking over. And they should be really leaning in, I suppose, to figures like Mel Stride, the Shadow Chancellor. And producing a sense that this is going to be the safe pair of hands and they're going to rebuild that brand. That's not easy because they had fourteen years of discrediting that.

• 59:24Alastair Campbell?

  I think if they had a leadership election tomorrow, Jenrick would get it and that would be a complete disaster because he'd just try and sort of be Farage. It's not serious. I think the other thing that was interesting about the Australian election. We talk about winners and losers in elections and obviously Dutton was the big loser, they even lost his seat. But I think the other loser is Murdoch. You know, the Murdoch papers did what they do, they threw everything. Uh, and I think that one of the reasons why Albanese won. And by the way, this was spectacular. We said when he did the podcast interview with us that we both thought he felt very confident. But I think even he did not think it was going to be quite as good as this. It was a swing towards Labour. And it's very much his victory because if you're being written off.

• 1:00:09Alastair Campbell?

  And maybe this is the thing that can give Keir Starmer a bit of hope. If you're written off a bit. And you then turn it around, then he has remade himself. And he's done it. Remember I said to you what Fiona, my Fiona said about the interview? We were going down through France and listening. She said, he's a bit dull, but he really sounds like somebody who's got conviction in principle. I really like that. And I think ultimately in these volatile times, there was one of the Australian columnists said that, you know, in the end Australians decided which of these two would I want to look at my tax returns and do it right? And it was Albo. It's that sort of sense of decency actually came through.

• 1:00:45Rory Stewart?

  Well, let me, I've been trying to think this through because I think it's so interesting. Um, so if you were a political scientist, you would say that. Britain, Australia and Canada have an enormous amount in common in the structures of their political systems, which should mitigate against populism. So constitution, Western style parliamentary democracies, strong party discipline, variations on first past the post, although obviously preferential in Australia. Two parties dominant in all these three countries, divided basically between conservatives and sort of third way centrists in a similar kind of welfare state commitment. Strong similar institutions, all three countries, common law, public broadcasters, which literally, comically are called ABC,

• 1:01:29Rory Stewart?

  BBC and CBC, unions, civil service, and also the sort of national character. These are countries which often about incremental change, institutional stability, big consensus around NATO, foreign policy. So you'd really provide quite a good explanation on why you'd expect those three countries to be similar, unlike the US or Europe, which have very, very different systems. So what went wrong? And this is my attempt to try to answer this.

• 1:01:55Alastair Campbell?

  What went wrong for whom?

• 1:01:56Rory Stewart?

  What went wrong, I guess, for the right wing in Canada and Australia?

• 1:02:01Alastair Campbell?

  You could, by the way, you could, I mean, most people in Australia and Canada won't know that much about our local elections. So they actually might be looking at Australia and Canada in the same prism, in that Labour won a landslide a year ago. You see, and what I thought, I remember, remember I said to you what Francois Hollande said to me? He says, listen, you guys are lucky because you've had your populism with Brexit. So I think actually there's a, but anyway, carry on, because I think you're right. They've done something different.

• 1:02:25Rory Stewart?

  They've, they've done something different. And Britain, of course, these local elections remind us that in, and this is something Gordon Brown pointed out to me, that populist parties, far right populist parties are now leading in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Slovakia, Italy, Hungary.

• 1:02:41Alastair Campbell?

  And we've got this election in Romania at the weekend, where the election having been ordered for a rerun because of Russian interference.

• 1:02:49Alastair Campbell?

  And the former candidate not being allowed to stand, the guy that was closest to him politically is now taking the lead and is going into the runoff with a very, very big lead.

• 1:02:57Rory Stewart?

  Exactly.

• 1:02:57Alastair Campbell?

  Could lose.

• 1:02:58Rory Stewart?

  You would have thought therefore, as you say, anti-incumbency, you know, Covid screwed up economies. Growth was pretty anemic in places, that it was pretty easy to beat centre-left parties in Australia and Canada. And the Australian, I just want to push into the Australian narrative a bit. So as you've pointed out, this is the biggest election victory on some numbers since the Second World War. In other measurements since the sixties or the seventies, unbelievable. Number of seats exploded, very, very unusual. Normally governments do slightly worse on the second time. It's a massive explosion. And in both countries, the leader of the opposition lost his seat, Poliav lost his seat, Dutton lost his seat.

• 1:03:38Rory Stewart?

  Their story, four months ago, seemed pretty straightforward. And I, I produced this, their great slogan.

• 1:03:44Alastair Campbell?

  Weak won't go broke.

• 1:03:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's how it sounds brilliant, you know, weak on national security, a little bit woke on the voice referendum. Sending us broke. Well, Australia's going from having had a great budget surplus, going to deficit, deficit stretches into the future.

• 1:03:58Alastair Campbell?

  Can I just say on the, on the woke bit there? So the, I, I thought that both of their speeches, Dutton made a very, very gracious concession speech. He said, he says something very nice, actually. He said to to Albanese, your mum would be really, really proud of you. And then he spoke about the woman who'd beaten him in his own seat. He'd also, she'd lost a son. And he spoke very kind of warmly and movingly about her and how he'd like to help her. And I was watching, thinking, why were you not a bit like this before? But one of the things, the, the culture war issues that Dutton got involved in the campaign, he suddenly said this thing about, we're going to get, you know, when you go to Australia, as you know, and Every time you do a meeting, they say, you know, we we honour and pay tribute to those,

• 1:04:43Alastair Campbell?

  the original owners of the land, et cetera, et cetera. And he said he was going to cut all that down. And I think he did that because he was such a big player in the voice referendum. But what Albanese did, he lost the voice referendum, but he didn't then trim his views on it. So when he made his acceptance speech, one of the loudest cheers was when he said, and I want to pay tribute to the original owners of the land and da da da. It was it was a way of saying, I'm not moving off that because actually we've still got problems on that to fix. So I think that's the point I was making about principle and conviction. You stick to the big things that you believe in.

• 1:05:15Rory Stewart?

  I I was, uh, when I was in Canberra, I saw Simon Birmingham, who was the on the on the Conservative side. He was the sort of shadow foreign minister and he just got in touch trying to reflect on how his party, Dutton's party, was trashed in this election. And he actually quoted Theresa May.

• 1:05:33Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, the nasty party.

• 1:05:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he said, our base is too narrow and so occasionally are our sympathies. You know what some people call us, the nasty party. And he said that actually Dutton came across as too grudging, too intolerant of freedoms. And actually, there was a narrative, you know, and it's the narrative that I would suggest the Conservatives need to find in Britain. That you could have had a narrative which said, you know, we are in favour of enterprise, innovation, mutual respect. We're comfortable in the modern world, but there's place for a party that isn't too owned by the unions. It's surprising, actually, in some ways Albanese's party is quite old fashioned when it comes to unions. There were quite a lot of scandals that could have been used and somehow fizzled out scandals around Qantas Club, around what was having Victoria with the Labour unions, scandals on, you know, cliff top houses.

• 1:06:19Rory Stewart?

  None of this really mattered in the end. They weren't able to land any of this, were they?

• 1:06:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. Albanese was lucky in having the opponent he had. But listen, anyway, you you did say at the uh uh before the break that we're going to cheer ourselves up. Australia has cheered me up a lot because I think it shows, you know, decency. He came, I think that's the thing that came through in our interview with him. He came over as a really kind of decent sort of bloke, who is in politics for the right reasons. He was almost crying when he won because I think there must have been times when. He thought he was in trouble.

• 1:06:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, I mean, it's amazing, isn't it? And let's just finish on this note of optimism. So, you know, we were setting up as we came out of a year of elections where incumbents were losing all the time. A world in which it was likely that most of the big countries in the world were going to give up on sort of left wing social democracy and embrace the right. And only Starmer would be allowed out there as the outlier. And actually, the Trump effect has pushed in due direction. Some countries more populism, but in Australia and Canada, really astonishing, has given a new lease of life to these centrist parties, turning people like Albanese and Carney into incredible heroes who've done things that sort of almost unprecedented in political history.

• 1:07:30Rory Stewart?

  I mean, Carney's even more dramatic, and let's just finish by paying tribute to him and reminding people we've done a couple of leading interviews with him. And I just got a nice, nice message from him. We should get him on again, but he took what was a twenty point lead against him. A liberal party that really would have been perceived in Canada as weak, woke, sending us broke. Turned it all around at a moment where his economy is under huge pressure from Trump, uh, standing up for values that we need to somehow rediscover in Britain. And if Labour and Conservative don't rediscover them in Britain, we're going to be in real trouble.

• 1:08:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely right. Final election that took place last week, Singapore, my friend Lawrence Wong, great win, great win. Why are you laughing? He increased the vote.

• 1:08:12Rory Stewart?

  This famous liberal democracy.

• 1:08:13Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's it's a strong democracy, that's for sure. But anyway, he did bloody well. But again, Trump was a factor. I think people who were thinking about not voting with these status quo decided, hmm. And as I said to you before, his speech about Trump and the tariffs was.

• 1:08:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, when do we get him on? You want to get him on?

• 1:08:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we'll definitely get him on, don't worry.

• 1:08:30Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Okay.

• 1:08:31Alastair Campbell?

  Take care.

• 1:08:32Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 1:08:56Speaker 07

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 1:09:02Speaker 08

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 1:09:04Speaker 09

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 1:09:08Speaker 10

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister! You've done nothing!

• 1:09:21Speaker 11

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 1:09:23Speaker 10

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 1:09:32Speaker 08

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 1:09:36Speaker 10

  Yes.

• 1:09:38Speaker 08

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• 1:10:03Speaker 09

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• 1:10:05Speaker 08

  Bear Hunt. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.