40. Salman Rushdie, the energy price cap, and Afghanistan

Join Alastair and Rory as they discuss the one year anniversary of Afghanistan falling to the Taliban, the French withdrawal from Mali, the Wagner Group, how Gordon Brown lets his hair down, the Kenyan election, the cost of living, Keir Starmer's holiday, the energy price cap, Salman Rushdie, freedom of speech, and more. Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Blackpool tickets - Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport The New European sponsorship: www.theneweuropean.co.uk/trip Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think, are you not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this? Or should I say Fiona managed to do this?

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  I'm incredibly proud of you. That's a tech transformation. So to get the best discount off your NordVPN plan, go to nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/rustispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

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• 1:43Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:48Rory Stewart?

  So how are you, Alistair? I believe you've got a message for the listeners about Blackpool.

• 1:53Alastair Campbell?

  I'm sure the listeners are gagging to hear about Blackpool. And this is the news of our tickets. For our live show in Blackpool on Saturday, October 8th, now on general sale. And I'm very pleased, I know you are too, that we're doing our next live show in the north and it's a big venue. So we're hoping to sell a lot of tickets to the Winter Gardens. And if you Google Rest Is Politics Blackpool Winter Garden, then hopefully everything you need to buy the tickets will come up.

• 2:22Rory Stewart?

  And also, thank you very, very much for all of you who've taken up our new Rest Is Politics Plus service. If you are fed up with the ads and you want to sign up for ad free listening, get access to tomorrow's Question Time episode right now, just head to therestispolitics.com.

• 2:38Alastair Campbell?

  Easy. Now, let's get on with today's podcast. We're going to cover all sorts of stuff, elections in Kenya, Keir Starmer finally laying a marker down on the cost of living and the horrendous stabbing of Salman Rushdie, who I know pretty well. But Rory, I think we should start, we're one year on from the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan. A lot has happened since then, but I just wondered, you know, you know Afghanistan very, very well. You keep in touch with people there. What's your take on what's happening now?

• 3:10Rory Stewart?

  A couple of things. One of them is to take us back to the, the big story, which of course is that the United States, United Kingdom and its allies were there for 20 years, spent $2 trillion and something like 2 million servicemen, foreign servicemen passed through Afghanistan over that period. At any one time, we were up to nearly 150,000 troops on the ground, but also nearly 150,000 civilians. So it was an enormous presence on the ground. That in 2014, combat operations ceased and that the US and its allies returned to a light footprint, which meant they kept a few thousand troops in bases and that in

• 3:52Rory Stewart?

  that period, sort of 2016 through till last year, there were no British casualties. No Americans had been killed in 18 months. And effectively, they were containing a threat from the Taliban, who'd been this very, very dominant rural insurgency and of course, had been the government beforehand. And overnight in August, Biden decided to withdraw, that's a year ago today. And in deciding to withdraw, the country collapsed almost overnight and it drew huge problems, huge problems to the intelligence community that largely seemed to predict that the government in Kabul would be able to hang on much longer. I remember actually being with the president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, the last president,

• 4:34Rory Stewart?

  in his presidential palace, just a few months before the fall. And he largely spent the conversation talking to me about 19th century French poetry and showing me his library, when you could literally hear explosions outside the presidential palace. It was like a sort of, something out of an even war novel.

• 4:52Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's fair to say Rory, he was more cultured than some of the Afghan politicians that I met. I remember, I can't remember the guys, I remember one who came as part of a delegation to Downing Street once and he literally, he didn't seem to know how to use a fork.

• 5:12Rory Stewart?

  Well, no, no, that's, I mean, you're right. The Afghan government was completely divided between two totally different types of people. On the one hand, there were people who'd been fighting in the jihad against the Soviet Union and then against the Taliban for 20, 30 years, often from very straightforward rural backgrounds. And of course, in rural Afghanistan, you don't use a knife, you use your hands. And some of those people were from rural areas of Afghanistan where many villages I remember visiting in 2001, probably only one or two people in the village could read or write, and there's no electricity between her and Kabul. And they were then combined with these extraordinary, overeducated technocrats who were often Afghans who'd spent

• 5:55Rory Stewart?

  Twenty, twenty five years living in Germany or the United States. Halliway, is it possible to be overeducated? Well, certainly when you came to the president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, it was. He famously used to describe himself as the second cleverest man in the world. Oh, Lord. So he's just arrogant? So, well, he certainly had a lot of degrees. He'd been a professor at John Hopkins, the United States. He'd been head of social development at the World Bank. He looked a little bit like the boss in The Simpsons. You know, there's that sort of slightly creepy boss in The Simpsons. Who did he consider to be the cleverest person in the world? I never, never quite worked that out, but. For God's sake, Roy, ask the right questions. It is the key question, isn't it? We've got to get to the bottom of who he thought the cleverest was.

• 6:40Rory Stewart?

  But he totally, he was the darling of the international community, as you can imagine, because he'd sit there in meetings, talking about, you know, Max Weber. French literature. And French literature, that's right. And, and the ways in which Bismarck had unified Germany. And he wrote a book called Fixing Failed States. And he ran a very successful consultancy company that went around the world, going to Ethiopia and Nepal, telling them how to fix failed states. So he managed to become president despite having not really been in Afghanistan for twenty five years. On the basis that he was this genius who had a complete academic vision of how he was going to fix a failed state. And he could talk about statistics and the economy and corruption, all this kind of thing.

• 7:24Rory Stewart?

  But it turned out, of course, that it was totally out of touch and that that division that you've put your finger on. Nineteenth century French poetry on the one hand, and the guy that came to visit you in Downing Street, who'd not used a knife and fork on the other. Is a way of illustrating the incredible rift in Afghan society between these often, not just overeducated, but very, very overpaid. The World Bank would often pay these people fifteen thousand dollars a month.

• 7:52Rory Stewart?

  Or more to work in the Afghan government while there were other people out in rural areas barely getting by on a dollar a day. And the Taliban, of course, in the end was able to appeal, particularly in the south of Afghanistan, to the rural community. And in a matter of two and a half weeks, I mean, I remember being on the calls. I mean, it's actually extraordinary to think that it was a year ago. So traumatizing and it feels much longer ago. But I remember being in the call with our charity in Kabul, saying to people, um, oh, well, maybe the government's going to, the Taliban had taken a lot of rural areas and they were advancing on Kabul. And I said, well, you know, in the, the early nineties, the government managed to hold on for years in Kabul and they're very, very well equipped and it'll be difficult for the Taliban to take a major city.

• 8:36Rory Stewart?

  And somebody then interrupted me on the call, one of our Afghan staff and said, Rory, you're completely wrong. I just saw a Taliban truck roll past my window and within about four hours, they had the city.

• 8:46Alastair Campbell?

  What did you, I've been, I listened to, I'm going to give a shout out to the Zut Deutsch Zeitung. I was obsessed with Spiegel podcast for a while and now I've moved on to Zut Deutsch Zeitung. And they did a really good one the other day, quite short, but a really good one on the people left behind. And if you say it feels like a long time ago, but it's only a year that we were, you know, Western leaders, Johnson amongst them, Biden as well, all saying, we'll move heaven and earth, we'll do what we can to get all these people out that work for us. And so many of them are left behind and it must, I think it must be absolutely terrifying, both to be having, having been left behind and it's known that you work for the Brits,

• 9:28Alastair Campbell?

  the Germans, the French, whatever it might be, but also to know that you've frankly been abandoned, because I do feel that they have to a large extent been abandoned. Have you heard our foreign secretary in her many, many, many hustings? Have you heard her talk about her commitment to trying to help people of Afghanistan or to build long-term stability in Afghanistan? We've slightly turned our backs on the whole thing, I think.

• 9:51Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. One of the sad things is that there are very particular groups of vulnerable people. For example, women who were judges during the, during the previous government.

• 10:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Helena Kennedy, by the way, has been doing a great job getting some of them out.

• 10:04Rory Stewart?

  Yep, that, that, and well done Helena Kennedy, but it's something that Britain could have been taking the lead on. And there were really good ways of doing it. There were fantastic charities on the ground that had pulled together lists of human rights activists and others who are in danger. And the international community never really stepped up and worked out how to target the people who were genuinely at risk. At the same time as all these governments, Boris Johnson's government in particular, were complaining about the wrong Afghans coming to Britain and people coming in boats across the channel. They weren't making any efforts to make sure that the genuinely vulnerable, people like judges, people like former senior members of the Afghan government, were got out with anything like enough speed and effectiveness.

• 10:48Alastair Campbell?

  But also, Roy, the people, you know, the drivers, the security guys, the clerks, the reception, all the people who do the lowly jobs, they just get forgotten, they get left behind.

• 10:57Rory Stewart?

  It was also a big problem for things like the Gurkha Guards at the British Embassy, took a long time to get them out. Working for a charity in Afghanistan, I was very struck by the fact that strangely, security is now much better in Afghanistan. Lots of my friends have been in and out in the last few weeks, and you can now travel from one end of the country to the other. But it is now a very, very poor country. The economy has almost halved in size. There's some very interesting negotiations taking place between the Taliban and the Chinese, to return to one of the themes that we keep getting to. But the thing that's going to hit them hardest is that the $3.5 billion worth of Afghan money, so this was Afghan central bank money, which was lodged in the United States, which

• 11:42Rory Stewart?

  Biden promised to hand over, which he's now not handing over. And the reason he's not handing it over is because, of course, it turned out that Zawahiri was there, the number two in Al Qaeda, number one in Al Qaeda was there and was killed in Afghanistan.

• 11:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:58Rory Stewart?

  So the Taliban, I mean, everything that everybody said, which is, the Taliban are not going to be able to take the country, there's going to be no consequence of removing foreign troops, we don't need to worry about terrorism from Afghanistan anymore, 12 months has demonstrated all of that was false.

• 12:12Alastair Campbell?

  And also, of course, if people think back. That process that you just described with Biden led to the whole nine eleven post Afghan invasion in the first place. It was basically saying to the Taliban, unless you deliver up bin Laden, then we will have to take action. It wasn't done. And then they went. And so we've sort of come around full circle. But one of the things that was mentioned on this podcast was people basically really worrying about, and this is terrible when you think there's so many people who died on the way, is whether there's been any real progress at all. And there was a question, I know we're doing the Q and A tomorrow, but there's a question we had from somebody called Dr. Ellen, saying, we've probably seen reports of the horrific reports of what's going on inside Kabul children's hospitals. And it

• 12:57Alastair Campbell?

  was a very difficult question, which maybe with your Department of International Development hat on, you could think about, how does the international community best help the people of Afghanistan, other than just giving money directly to the government, which is now the Taliban? How do you support a regime like that?

• 13:15Rory Stewart?

  There are huge numbers of ways of doing that. One is that there are enormous number of very, very good charities, NGOs on the ground, organisations like Save the Children, who are running good operations, have had operations on the ground in Afghanistan for many, many decades. So you can do that. It's also true that actually the Taliban isn't so far, they don't particularly have a reputation for stealing international aid money. So I think it is possible to set up trust funds with the World Bank and the UN to make sure that the money is used to pay for teachers and doctors. And I think that's perfectly doable. And I think we shouldn't punish the people of Afghanistan in the belief that that's somehow going to change the behaviour of the Taliban government. I mean, this is

• 14:00Rory Stewart?

  a desperately poor country. And the more that Afghanistan suffers, the more that problem will spread, the more terrorism will spread, the more migration refugees will spread, the more the region will be destabilised.

• 14:13Alastair Campbell?

  Which is why to underline one of our repetitive strain syndrome points, it is why the decision to abolish Difid was such a bad one.

• 14:23Rory Stewart?

  Terrible one. Last one, just before we move on, because I know you wanted to get on to Keir Starmer, but strangely, today is also the moment where the last French troops have left Mali, which was the other intervention. So they've been there for nearly 10 years. And it's been a situation where, again, billions have been spent, tens of thousands of civilians killed, quite a lot of French soldiers killed. And really, they're leaving with a situation no better than when they came in. And they're handing over in that case to a Russian-backed mercenary group called the Wagner Group, or the Wagner Group, but I think they call it the Wagner Group. And that was supposed to be an example of France doing it differently. And the conclusions are that France didn't do it any differently to anyone else.

• 15:05Alastair Campbell?

  Or that France tried to do it differently, but ultimately we're back to the whole thing about whether countries have the stomach to stay the course. And the thing about this Wagner Group or Wagner, whatever they they call. There was one other question we got this week about, I keep banging on about sovereign individual and what do I mean? I basically mean people and organizations that can essentially operate almost out with national and international law. And we now, we are now talking about private, essentially privately run armies that are kind of, you know, being put in different parts of the world to do the job that state-run armies used to do. And that's what we're now, that's what we're now relying on in Mali.

• 15:44Rory Stewart?

  Just to remind people what this is, this is a group of effectively Russian mercenaries who are hired as a private security company by these governments to operate. And of course, the advantage from the point of view of those governments is firstly, they don't follow the rules that other countries do. But they also don't come with the full baggage of a government behind them. So the French became increasingly unpopular, they were seen as patronizing, isolated, out of touch. The French ambassador was expelled from Mali a year and a half ago, still hasn't been replaced. There was a coup d'etat against the French-backed president by the military. So one of the things that seems to be going on, this was something I saw very strongly in Iraq, where landing at the airport in February, there were these huge signs attacking the United States.

• 16:29Rory Stewart?

  That one of the legacies of these interventions is very, very deep, strong resentment against the powers that intervene. And in the case of Mali, relationships between Mali and France have been so soured over the last decade.

• 16:43Alastair Campbell?

  Let's stick with Africa and round off with the election in Kenya. Because I do think it's like, you know, we talked about this a few weeks ago and there was a precious little coverage of it when it's such an important country. And, you know, I've been talking to Tom Fletcher, who was, do you know Tom? He was a diplomat.

• 16:58Rory Stewart?

  I do.

• 16:58Alastair Campbell?

  I met him first in Paris, he was an ambassador in all sorts of places, including the Middle East.

• 17:01Rory Stewart?

  He's now taken the one job that you and I agree nobody should take.

• 17:05Alastair Campbell?

  Go on.

• 17:06Rory Stewart?

  Who is there? Isn't he the head of an Oxford college?

• 17:08Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, no, please tell me he's not done that.

• 17:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, I think he's the head of an Oxford college.

• 17:11Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, no, he's also written a novel. He's written a very good novel called The Diplomat, which I recommend. But Tom, Tom worked in Kenya many, many years ago. And so I actually thought, you know, because I knew we were talking about this, I gave him a call and just say, you know, why? Why should we be that bothered about Kenya? And of course, you know, this, we do a lot of trade with them. I didn't realise that we, a lot of our tea and coffee comes from Kenya. We've got a British military base there.

• 17:36Alastair Campbell?

  The Royals love it, the Queen at treetops and all that. And I think that Prince William did his, his case gap year there. But also the other thing, Tom ended up as Gordon Brown's kind of main foreign policy advisor when Gordon was Prime Minister. And I think the last time there was a real crisis of a post Kenyan election was 2007, where poor old Gordon, well, I say poor old Gordon, Gordon's not the most, he's not the biggest party animal, unlike the current part-time caretaker on holiday again, Prime Minister.

• 18:03Rory Stewart?

  Not a big party animal. Hey, can we just stop on that for a second? Just, just for a bit of comic relief. What's the closest you've ever seen to Gordon Brown as a party animal? When have you actually seen him really kind of let his hair down, laughed?

• 18:13Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I've seen him have a good laugh. I've seen him have a good laugh. I've never seen him ever the worst for a, for drink. I've, I've very, very rarely seen him with it without a tie.

• 18:24Rory Stewart?

  What's his idea of a good time? What does he do for a good time?

• 18:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I've seen, I, he, I think he, he does like football. He likes sport.

• 18:32Rory Stewart?

  Well, he was a very good, very good rugby player, wasn't he?

• 18:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and then that's when, when he lost, when they lost a side of his eye in a rugby match. So he is, he is into sport, but he's, he's, when he goes on holiday, I think he's a bit like me. He's not really into Kindle. But he'll probably take an overnight bag for his kind of clothes and all the rest of it. Then he has about four suitcases full of books. But he missed his own New Year's, this is why I was saying he's not a party animal. He missed his own New Year's Eve party at Checkers. In 2007, because this was his first big foreign policy crisis was the violence after the elections in Kenya. Now, I just want to, I do want to draw contrast. I'm not going to bang on about the useless Boris Johnson too much, but what is Boris Johnson

• 19:17Alastair Campbell?

  doing at the moment to be the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom? He's gone from one holiday to another holiday. We've got all these problems, whether it's cost of living, whatever. He's literally doing nothing. What is the point of him?

• 19:30Rory Stewart?

  On the other hand, I'm actually quite relieved. I think things probably operate much better when he's on holiday.

• 19:35Alastair Campbell?

  Now, listen, the Kenyan election was even closer than the lying leave-winning referendum in 2016. Fifty point four nine percent for William Ruto, who has won, against forty-eight point eight seven percent for Ryla Adinga. Adinga, who is not accepting it. Several of the election commission officials have said they're not accepting it. So it probably is going to get to court, but at this stage, there has been violence, but nothing on a scale of what we've seen in the past, which is probably good news.

• 20:09Rory Stewart?

  Incredible relief, incredible relief. So going back, the election 2017, which we talked about actually on the show, which was this election where Kenyatta's or people associated with Kenyatta shot up the Supreme Court Justice's car, and I had to have this very difficult conversation with the Kenyan Foreign Minister. And Boris then contradicted, Boris Johnson contradicted everything that I said by then saying, congratulations on a great election. So over a hundred people were killed in that election. And 10 years before that, over a thousand people were killed in the Kenyan election. The thing that really surprised me about this is that this was a really interesting election because it was supposed to be the opportunity to

• 20:53Rory Stewart?

  Deal with the fact that a particular ethnic group in Kenya, the Kikuyu, and the Kalenjin had dominated Kenyans democratic politics. And Ryan Radinga, who'd run four times to be president, is from the Luo community. So he and he was endorsed by Kenyatta, who was the great kind of hero of the Kikuyu. So it was supposed to be this very kind of orderly transition of power from one ethnicity to another, at which point William Ruto, who had been Kenyatta's deputy, decided to run, and he is from the Kalenjin community. So that might have caused real horror. I mean, I really was predicting that, and completely I was wrong. I thought this would end up in a situation in which hundreds of people be killed.

• 21:38Alastair Campbell?

  We probably shouldn't be complacent because there's going to be, there's now a process they're going to go through. It's still not been fully accepted. I suspect that Ruto will end up as president sworn in as president. But it's very, very interesting, as you say, because this is the first time that there's been no Kikuyu in the top two, in the final runoff. And so that does suggest that maybe the ethnic, the historical ethnic voting patterns are maybe breaking down a bit.

• 22:07Rory Stewart?

  Which, which is very exciting, really exciting. But it's also maybe disturbing the way that it's happened. I mean, it's been done with Ruto running a real classic populist campaign.

• 22:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Rory Stewart?

  Very much people against the establishment. He's an incredibly wealthy man who's done very, very well out of a whole series of land deals.

• 22:24Alastair Campbell?

  Just stop, just stop and nod for me, Ru. Isn't it incredible how these really rich people like Trump can present themselves as the, as the, as the populist friend of the people?

• 22:36Rory Stewart?

  It's bizarre.

• 22:36Alastair Campbell?

  And you're right, Ruto's done it extraordinarily well.

• 22:39Rory Stewart?

  It's bizarre, and he's done it by, and I think maybe this was underlying the Trump message, his message is, I'm a hustler. This is a hustler nation. And he almost, you know, there's been huge allegations of corruption against Ruto and how he got his hands on all this land. But in a way, he's communicating to the groups that he's got voting for him. And as you say, actually, he's reached into other ethnic areas. But the people that he's got are the young, often poorer communities who look up to him as a kind of self-made success story.

• 23:13Alastair Campbell?

  Well, shall we take a break and then come back and do um Cost of Living and Salman Rushdie? Cost of Living and Salman Rushdie. Thank you.

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• 25:23Alastair Campbell?

  This week's episode of The Rest Is Politics is very kindly sponsored by the excellent newspaper, The New European, of which I am editor-at-large, and in which, this week, I've written my column about Salman Rushdie, about Eddie Jones, and also my partner Fiona Miller, who is something of an education expert, is taking Rishi Sunak to task over his demand for a British baccalaureate and pointing out that, did he not know this, education is devolved in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. So we're going to get into all this in part two, but Rory, you're out in the States at the moment, which is where the attack on Rushdie happened. I imagine absolutely huge news there, as it has been here.

• 26:05Rory Stewart?

  Really huge, and people deeply, deeply horrified. And on my way to get a coffee this morning, first question I got from someone was, had I any news on what had happened to Salman Rushdie in hospital? I think people feel deeply traumatised.

• 26:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So that's my column in The New European. The New European, offering the best rates available exclusively for listeners to The Rest Is Politics. It's £1 a week for full digital access, or get the paper copy as well for just an extra pound a week. Just go to www.theuneuropean.co.uk/trip. That's www.theuneuropean.co.uk/trip.

• 26:51Rory Stewart?

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

• 26:55Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And shall we talk about cost of living?

• 26:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Alastair Campbell?

  And I mean, I do think it's pretty extraordinary that, of course, what the Labour Party says is relevant and important, but it does strike me as pretty incredible that the focus, it seems to me, in the British media has been as much about what are Labour saying, as opposed to what is the Prime Minister saying, what is the Chancellor of the Exchequer saying, or even, for most people, who the hell is the Chancellor of the Exchequer? It's Nadeem Zahawi, by the way, who doesn't really seem to do very much. I know he's a distinguished friend of yours, but you know, he's pretty quiet on the cost of living crisis. And then we've got this ridiculous, never-ending Tory leadership contest where... There's no sense that we have a government actually addressing the cost of living.

• 27:44Alastair Campbell?

  Number ten have said there'll be no announcement, no major intervention from the government until at least the 5th of September, when they have a new prime minister. So this is lame duckery gone mad. And then there's old Keir Starmer. I mean, look, I've been critical of Labour, you know, on and off throughout the last few years about them not being aggressive enough, not being high profile enough, not being visible enough. And I think you could argue that for now, but the guy goes off for a, you know, relatively short holiday compared to the holidays that Johnson's having. Almost certainly in Keir Starmer's case, paying for it himself, where I, you know, I don't believe a word that Johnson says about who pays for his holidays.

• 28:21Rory Stewart?

  Where did Keir go on holiday?

• 28:22Alastair Campbell?

  I think he went, I think he went to Mallorca.

• 28:24Rory Stewart?

  This is a classic thing, right? This is my big insight into politics that I can share with budding politicians on the show. You can have really as many holidays as you like, provided you do a staycation. Everybody loves staycations. You remember Theresa May never got in any trouble for going on walking holidays?

• 28:39Alastair Campbell?

  She bloody did. She went on trouble, she went on Wales and then came back and announced an election. She destroyed herself. What are you talking about?

• 28:45Rory Stewart?

  Never any trouble for her holidays. And, and you remember Angela Merkel never got any trouble because she'd go on these...

• 28:51Alastair Campbell?

  She always went to the, the music festival down in, um, oh, what's the famous one? The Wagner Festival.

• 28:56Rory Stewart?

  Berusch, yeah. I think that's another reason why people tend to forgive the Queen on holidays because nobody has much envy of her getting wet, schlepping around some Scottish, Scottish moor. So, um, I, my, my big bit of advice is, um, staycations for politicians is the way to go. Nobody wants to think about them in the sun.

• 29:14Alastair Campbell?

  Holidays are a nightmare for, for top politicians because you get judged on them, as you say. But also the truth is, I mean, look, if you, you've read my diaries, summer holidays were an absolute nightmare. The truth is you never stop working. I mean, Tony Blair never stopped working. I never stopped working. Jonathan Powell never stopped working. You know, we had during, it was during a summer holiday that we had the Omar bombing. Uh, that sort of, you know, broke into the holiday. Tony Blair actually had to go straight back. We had lots of difficult scandals that broke during the summer. The Hutton inquiry was all happening while we were, you know, we were getting summoned while we were all on holiday. And, but the thing I would say to Labour, which I was a bit disappointed with,

• 29:57Alastair Campbell?

  when the leader goes on holiday, you have to have in place systems, messaging, you, you don't stop, you cannot stop. And particularly when something like this is happening.

• 30:08Rory Stewart?

  Politicians desperately need breaks. Obviously they go completely mad and they get totally exhausted and they've got to have breaks. But equally, it's really difficult. I, I was the minister for flooding in the Christmas, 2015 Christmas. Very, very expensive holiday. We'd been looking forward for a long time of the in-laws to Costa Rica. And obviously, uh, I made the right decision, which was that I could not go to Costa Rica. When, uh, Cumbria and Yorkshire were getting flooded. Um, same, I was just, as I was about to go on my August holiday in 20, I guess, 17. The prison officers, uh, went on strike. I think actually someone in my private office had tipped them off that I was about to go on holiday and they.

• 30:47Rory Stewart?

  So again, that, that holiday got cancelled too. But, so I, I think staycations are definitely the answer because then you can, you can get to the frontline much more quickly.

• 30:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, that's true. However, I think if you're like the very, very, I mean, do you remember Johnson's ridiculous holiday in Scotland when he sort of pretended to be staying in a tent for about five minutes? Oh, Rory, another question. When you went to, when you've been on a foreign holiday, have you ever been shopping in a supermarket wearing a suit?

• 31:11Alastair Campbell?

  Is this an Italian thing? Do you get taught you have to go into the supermarket wearing a suit?

• 31:16Rory Stewart?

  How extraordinary. Is that, is that what he's been photographed doing? He was in the supermarket in a suit. So presumably he was, he was wearing the suit though, to try to seem more businesslike. He doesn't really seem like a suit-like person, does he?

• 31:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the other thing is that in his, when he is being the prime minister, he actually likes to dress up in funny clothes the whole time. He always wears a hard hat, a yellow jacket. And yet he goes on holiday with his family and he's wearing a damn suit. So anyway, should we get on to what Keir Starmer actually? Finally said.

• 31:44Rory Stewart?

  We're falling into the same trap, aren't we? We get stuck on the holidays when we should be talking about the policy. Go on, what's his policy?

• 31:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, essentially, you know, freezing the energy cap, energy price cap, trying to close a loophole in the government's energy profit levy, insulation, which is obviously a long term thing, and supporting customers that are not, you know, that are not being supported by the price cap. I think though people, I'm not sure people understand the price cap. When we talk about an energy price cap, I think people think that it means that we keep the bills down. But all that the energy cap, it only applies to the retail part of the energy supply chain. So that's the, that's the companies that send us our bills. It's about stopping them from making excess profits. But, but it doesn't restrict the profits of the, of the production and the wholesale parts.

• 32:33Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, because the energy market is so international, and even though we only get four percent, I think four percent we get from Russia. The truth is that the, the, the, the, the spike in prices because of Ukraine has affected the whole world market. So we're all getting hit by that now. So I think it's the cap itself that has to be reviewed. And I think that's what Labour is saying.

• 32:54Rory Stewart?

  I got the impression they were saying that nobody could get a bill over two thousand pounds a year, but is that not right? That's not what they're saying.

• 33:01Alastair Campbell?

  But how, how do they do that? So that means they have to then, the government has to step in and pay the bills. What they can't do through the price cap is keep the price down that low. The, the cap is about the profits of the companies.

• 33:16Rory Stewart?

  So I guess if they were to say that nobody's allowed to charge more than two thousand pounds, if the underlying price went up, the retail companies would go bankrupt.

• 33:24Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. Well, which is what happened the last time. If you remember, we had all those small companies that were going to the wall.

• 33:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So the government would have to use taxpayers' money to subsidize those companies somehow. Which is, I guess, why the Treasury prefers to give cash. At the moment, the, the policy that Rishi Sunak had was to give, whatever it was, four hundred pounds to families so that they could pay the bills rather than trying to cap it at the other end. And I guess.

• 33:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Rory Stewart?

  So the Treasury probably would say, if we want to do that, we've just got to massively increase the amount of cash we give to families up to one thousand, two thousand pounds.

• 33:56Alastair Campbell?

  Labour is saying that they could, as it were, keep these bills down. By and fund it by a windfall tax on the oil and gas companies. Of course, the oil and gas companies have been absolutely raking it in.

• 34:05Rory Stewart?

  It's unbelievable, isn't it?

• 34:07Alastair Campbell?

  Unbelievable.

• 34:07Rory Stewart?

  I mean, we get ripped off every time. Can I just on this one? It's completely mad. I mean, I know conservatives want to feel well disposed towards businesses and want to believe in the market, but it's absolutely unbelievable. With the COVID grants that were given to some of these big companies, massive multinational British companies, they were taking hundreds of millions, and as far as I could see, then paying it out in dividends to their shareholders, paying it out in bonuses to their bosses. In other words, they completely rip off the government. They go in there screaming, saying, we're about to go bankrupt, we desperately need money, we're going to the wall. And then when the money's given to them, it turns out that the whole thing is total excess that they then spend on dividends and bonuses.

• 34:47Alastair Campbell?

  And that's why, that's why there is, you know, I think, I think the concept of excess profits, even for a conservative, is something that in this context should be considered. And I suspect eventually the government will. But the, the, the point the Labour are making, so they get the, the, the money to keep bills lower from a windfall tax on the oil, on the oil and gas companies. But of course, then there's a problem with that, particularly from a Labour perspective, because it basically means that people who are very, very well off will get the same benefit, as it were.

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  Which was true with the winter, with the winter fuel allowance, wasn't it? Because I remember my mother used to get the winter fuel allowance. She didn't need the winter fuel allowance, but everybody got the winter fuel allowance. We ended up paying twice as much on the winter fuel allowance as the whole budget of the Foreign Office.

• 35:27Alastair Campbell?

  The other point about the energy price cap, which there's nothing, there is no provision within the energy price cap that is about stopping people from, from sliding into, into fuel poverty. It's never been designed for that. It's never been designed for the sort of energy price crisis that we're going, that we're undergoing now. So I think actually there is going to have to be a fundamental review of both the cap and also of how the, the energy supply chain works.

• 35:55Rory Stewart?

  And the more you interfere, the more closer you get to nationalising, don't you? To putting taxpayers' money into the companies, getting involved in setting their prices, the closer you're getting to nationalising the industries totally. And one, one interesting thing is the oil price has actually started slipping very dramatically because the Chinese economy, it seems, has been slowing so much that the oil price bizarrely, I think, has dropped from something like $130 down to $85.

• 36:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I saw it. There was a very good piece in your favourite paper, The New York Times, the other day. Somebody wrote a very long piece saying, "Give Joe Biden a break. He's doing a hell of a lot of good things." And one of them was, I think, fuel price had fallen in the States for fifty-eight days in a row.

• 36:36Rory Stewart?

  It's unbelievable, isn't it?

• 36:37Alastair Campbell?

  Which, as you say, is probably related to China. Just finally on the fuel thing, on the energy thing. I'm in France and here, of course, they've taken a very, very, very different approach. They've frozen gas prices. They've limited the increase of the regulated price of electricity. And they're going to keep the energy price rises, you know, way, way, way below what's happening in the UK. And I read a very good analysis by, do you follow the Conversation, which is a kind of online academic, it's academics basically trying to explain stuff. And it's really worth following because they go into this stuff in much more detail than our newspapers do.

• 37:20Rory Stewart?

  What is it? Is it a blog site?

• 37:23Alastair Campbell?

  No, I don't know really what it is. It's called Conversation. I think it's just the Conversation or Conversation.com. And it's basically just lots of academics who write stuff. And there was a really interesting, this guy sounds French, but he's at the University of Lancaster, a guy called Rono Foucault, senior lecturer in economics at Lancaster University Management School. But he's written a very, very interesting piece on the, essentially saying that the market, the market system for the UK is probably more efficient in normal times. But then actually, what the French have done is they really have kind of tinkered with the market in a way designed to, you know, protect consumers. But the debate that's happening in France at the moment is whether this is just actually sort

• 38:07Alastair Campbell?

  of storing up problems for the future. There's a, there's a report in one of the French papers today of somebody, it's alleged close to Macron, saying that it's like plying yourself with champagne, but you know that you're going to, you know, your plane's going to crash.

• 38:21Rory Stewart?

  I guess that's right. Because if we think about it, if going forward, we are predicting with more global conflict, with more pressure on trying to change our energy mix in order to deal with climate change, that we're going to end up with more and more energy price shocks. It is important that whatever policies the French government or Keir Starmer or Liz Truss comes up with, they can handle these lurches back and forth because if we end up gerry rigging short term government subsidies which work fine for a couple of months but then end up with a completely broken system going forward, we're in trouble. Which is

• 39:03Rory Stewart?

  why, which I think again, you know, to defend the treasury, why they would say the best thing to do, and I'm obviously a real believer in cash, the best thing to do actually at the moment is to give cash to low income households and let them pay for it rather than tinkering too much in the markets. But of course, that has a big inflation problem.

• 39:19Alastair Campbell?

  I also get the feeling that what Macron is doing is something that the Brexiteers would claim that they couldn't do inside the European Union, but he's doing it inside the European Union. So that's that. Shall we talk about Salman Rushdie?

• 39:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So firstly, obviously unbelievably horrifying. And I think everybody listening to the podcast will know that he was stabbed multiple times in the eye and the neck and the body, I think more than 10 stab wounds in a very liberal campus in New York State, a place famous for for rich discussions in front of a big audience. He rushed to hospital. I think he, thank goodness, I believe he's now come off the ventilator today, but very, very close to dying. Luckily, doctors in the audience ran up immediately and started trying to to help. But he's somebody that you know, right? So tell us, tell us a little bit about him.

• 40:10Alastair Campbell?

  I do know him because when when he was right, when he was really under kind of the most, I think he had the highest level of protection. I mean, on a par with, you know, Tony Blair, Prime Minister at the time. And of course, you know, he was, he was under the same prior to that as well.

• 40:25Rory Stewart?

  Put in place by by Margaret Thatcher, wasn't it? Kept going through John Major and Tony Blair.

• 40:29Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But we had, so it's 33 years ago that the fatwa was first put upon him. Massive reward or bounty for anybody who could kill him from the Iranian government. And Michael Foot, former leader of the Labour Party, was, who was, lives quite near, lives quite near to where we live, he and Jill Craig, his wife, good friends, and we used to go around there for dinner with, with Salman and his then-wife Elizabeth West. And it was pretty extraordinary because Salman, you know, as you have, I've been around people who are, and have had, you know, been protected at times and what have

• 41:13Alastair Campbell?

  you, but he had a level of protection which was pretty extraordinary. You know, and normally when even somebody like, you know, Tony Blair gets dropped off to have a dinner and they'll be like, you know, then they'll sit in the car or they'll maybe wander off and have a fag in the garden, whatever. These guys were, you know, very, very close the whole time, not in the room necessarily, but certainly at the door. And, you know, sometimes when Salman left after dinner, you know, he used to joke about, you know, we'd say, where are you going? He'd say, I don't know, they'll tell me when we get there.

• 41:44Rory Stewart?

  So they, they change where he stayed almost every night?

• 41:46Alastair Campbell?

  And I remember one dinner we had where Michael Foot was sort of, and we were discussing, how can we help him resolve this? Because Salman was complaining that he wasn't allowed to vote in the general election because he didn't have an address. And he was really, really, really pissed off about it.

• 42:00Rory Stewart?

  But, but, but, but I think, but I mean, apart from the voting, I mean, it must be incredibly disorienting. So he was moving basically between hotels and safe houses night after night.

• 42:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. And with, with, by the way, a wife and a child who was born during that period. So incredibly difficult, incredibly stressful. And, you know, some people that I've written a, a piece for the New European this week about, about Salman and about recalling some of those conversations. But also, I do think this whole, when I watch Sunak and Trust going on about this, you know, all the woke rubbish, as they call it, and the, the argument that people get into about freedom of speech, this is for me, a real freedom of speech issue, that somebody writes a book and then for the rest of their life have to live in fear. Of being murdered.

• 42:47Rory Stewart?

  And when you spoke about it, I mean, presumably he was, must have been very, very aware when he wrote Satanic Verses. What an incredible risk he was taking.

• 42:56Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know if he was, I don't know if he was, because I think that, I do think artists, I mean, we've had the whole thing with Charlie Hebdo and what have you. But I don't think when he wrote the book, I think he knew that it'd be controversial, but I don't think he, I think he was genuinely shocked when he got, literally got a visitation from the security services, saying, look, we're going to have to put you under protection and it's going to have to be, you know, for an indefinite period of time and it's going to have to be 24/7 and you're going to have to listen to us. And the thing is that, you know, I, I can remember people used to criticize Salman because he'd sometimes say, you know, he would complain about the level of protection that he was expected to have, because you know this, when you've had it in Iraq, it can, look, it's great on one level, you have,

• 43:38Alastair Campbell?

  you know, people driving you around, you feel safe, you feel secure, but on the other hand, it is, it can be incredibly oppressive. And he had it very, very oppressive for his own good. And he, I think he was hugely appreciative of the individuals who looked after him. But, you know, after a while, you think, you know, am I going to have to live like this for the rest of my life? Because it, there is the feel, I don't want to minimize prison at all, but there is the feel almost of like you're in a mobile prison. Because you cannot, you cannot actually choose who to see, where to go. Everything has to be planned for you and it's very difficult.

• 44:14Rory Stewart?

  So to get on to really our normal tricky territory and get ourselves in trouble with our listeners again. How do we think through where the line is between freedom of speech and offending communities? And saying things that are genuinely deeply offensive and provocative to other people?

• 44:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it is a difficult line, but, but I think, look, it's so long, I mean, I, I did read Satanic Verses when it came out, but it's so long ago.

• 44:43Alastair Campbell?

  But. I think if you're, if you're, if you're a novelist, there's all sorts of stuff that's going to offend people that you might have in the characters that you create. But I think if we start cancelling ourselves, it's very difficult. I'll give you a good example, actually. This, I, the column I mentioned for the New European, I talked about all this freedom of speech. And I, I mentioned this idea of, you know, for, for, for the, some people on the right, you know, freedom of speech, I said, is actually them getting really pissed off that they can't actually say that we're being swamped by immigrants, or that they can't use some of the offensive language that we've used in the past. And I then said this thing about, you know, and it's people getting in, getting, get their knickers in a twist about trans issues.

• 45:28Alastair Campbell?

  And it didn't even cross my mind. But then, when it appeared, lots of people thought I was being critical of women. When actually I was, because I used the phrase knickers in a twist, I was actually talking about the whole kind of, the gammon blokes who say, you know, all this trans thing, he, she and pronouns.

• 45:45Rory Stewart?

  I mean, it's, it's a very interesting question, isn't it? Because obviously, our culture is trying to find its way towards being more respectful. We're more conscious of privilege, we're more conscious of phenomenons like, like gaslighting, we're much more conscious the ways in which we can cause deep upset to other people and through microaggression. That's particularly something which I think, no, I, I find in the United States with people I interact with, particularly on the East Coast, are very, very caught up in these issues. And I, they feel it's a very strong corrective against decades of loud men expressing their

• 46:28Rory Stewart?

  views and offending everybody all around the place and causing an enormous amount of hurt. And, and yet, at the same time, obviously, we're, you know, we're not grand philosophers who can resolve this on a podcast, but there is obviously a tension between a society that wants to emphasise compassion, understanding, tolerance, not being offensive, while at the same time embracing free speech and allowing people to talk clearly, argue clearly, use metaphors. And, and I think we're still feeling our way towards it.

• 46:58Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I, I remember.

• 47:02Alastair Campbell?

  About a year ago, talking to Jamie Rubin, who was Madeleine Albright's, he was my kind of oppo.

• 47:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 47:08Alastair Campbell?

  When he was Madeleine Albright, when I was with Tony Blair.

• 47:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 47:11Alastair Campbell?

  And he was saying that in the States, this woke debate is becoming incredibly difficult to navigate, very, very polarising.

• 47:24Alastair Campbell?

  But I've, I just feel it's yet again, the right, the populist right, trying to have all the best songs to sing. The way that they did the same with, you know, Politically Correct. I never quite knew what Politically, you know, what, I don't feel I'm a politically correct person. I say what I think, but I'm also conscious of the fact that there are, there are certain things that people used to say in debate, which you no longer say because language develops, politics develop, cultures develop.

• 47:52Rory Stewart?

  This comes back, I guess, to the Rushdie thing. So I think the one thing that everybody agrees on beyond anything is that death threats, these kinds of attacks are so horrifying and beyond imagining as ways of responding. But having grown up partly in Muslim countries and spent a lot of my life working in Muslim countries, I do remember, I'm afraid, being quite shocked by what Salman Rushdie did. And I, I did feel why Muslims were, many Muslims felt really bewildered and surprised and offended and couldn't believe that this guy would want to refer to something that was very precious to them in, in that way.

• 48:34Rory Stewart?

  And I think, I think we have to be fair to the fact that just as we don't like the idea of right wing bigots making offensive comments about women and other protected groups, I think we also have to acknowledge that we have to show respect and thoughtfulness in talking about other people's religions.

• 48:57Alastair Campbell?

  I agree with that, but, but equally, would you say, for example, that we shouldn't? Comedians shouldn't satirise Jesus or God or.

• 49:04Rory Stewart?

  Well, comedians comedians are in a lot of trouble. I was I was on Have I Got News For You last year and a number of the people on the panel with me said it's really difficult being a comedian now.

• 49:13Alastair Campbell?

  My daughter's a comedian.

• 49:14Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, your daughter's a comedian. So it'd be fascinating to talk to her about this because it's not that they get in trouble satirising Jesus and God, that's fine. A lot of other things they traditionally satirise, they now feel they're in real trouble for doing, that mocking other groups, other people, which is absolutely part and parcel of traditional comedy is now very now very difficult.

• 49:34Alastair Campbell?

  Right, but this is where I think that so, for example, if you go back to when we were growing up and, you know, Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson, you watch those comedian programmes, it was all about, you know, taking the taking the piss out of the Irish for being stupid, taking the piss out of black people, taking the piss out of mother-in-law, mothers-in-law. I think moving on from that is is fine. I mean, and that's what I mean about how cultures develop and and advance.

• 50:00Rory Stewart?

  But I think it's but we've got to be consistent with this. I think there's a danger that we think it's fine to mock Christians, but it's not fine to mock other groups. And that's probably because you're an atheist. So you don't care that much about people mocking Christians.

• 50:16Alastair Campbell?

  I think we should respect all of them, but also if we are artists and if we are writing and if we are making films and if we are writing poetry or whatever it might be, that we can reflect some of the tensions that exist within all of these organised religions.

• 50:36Rory Stewart?

  But but I suppose all I'm trying to say is, I mean, I'm now flogging a dead horse, but that it's the same problem. I mean, it's not it's not a different problem mocking a mother-in-law from mocking someone who's a Christian. It's the same question. And I think it's a question comedians have to struggle with, to what extent mocking other people and mocking other groups is acceptable.

• 50:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, anyway, I just, you know, I think, I think, I hope Salman does recover. And I also think that people probably underestimate the pressures of, of living with that level of, of protection. And of course, perhaps one of the, you know, there will be some people who say, well, maybe he should have had that protection for the rest of his life. And that's why what happened, happened. But I very much doubt that he would have wanted the same level of protection that he had when I was seeing him for dinner at Michael Foot's house.

• 51:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it seems like, like, yeah, we should probably wrap on this, but it seems like the security at that event could have been much better without being oppressive.

• 51:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, there, well, you know, Salman, get well, hopefully. Final plug for Blackpool, October the 8th, Winter Gardens, Rest is Politics, uh, live. And we're doing Q and A tomorrow, Rory, but I think one of the questions, if I can preempt with this from Eunomagavi, you've heard of Morecambe and Wise, haven't you Rory?

• 51:54Rory Stewart?

  I've definitely heard of Morecambe and Wise.

• 51:55Alastair Campbell?

  Right, well, do you remember, do you remember Morecambe and Wise, when they went off the stage, they had a song, do you remember what the song was?

• 52:01Rory Stewart?

  No, what's the song?

• 52:02Alastair Campbell?

  Bring me sunshine, that one, okay? So they would go off. So Eunomagavi asked, if we were to do a live show together, what song would we like to play as we left the stage? Now, I've got mine, I've got mine. I want to ride my bicycle.

• 52:21Alastair Campbell?

  So unless you've got one better, that's what we're playing at Blackpool.

• 52:25Rory Stewart?

  Beautiful, we're wrapping on that. See you tomorrow for questions, guys.

• 52:27Alastair Campbell?

  Bye bye.

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