123. DOMINIC RAAB RESIGNS

Why has Dominic Raab resigned as Deputy Prime Minister and what does it mean for the future of the Conservative government? Join Rory and Alastair as they discuss all this and more on this evening's emergency podcast. Sign up to the free TRIP weekly newsletter: bit.ly/3zhYAIl TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:05Speaker 02

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• 1:33Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to our first Rest is Politics Emergency Pod, so called, in quite a while, with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:40Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:42Alastair Campbell?

  Bit of a pause there, Rory. Was that dramatic effect? Or you were eating crisps?

• 1:46Rory Stewart?

  I think it's jet lag, jet lag getting in the way. Anyway, we're here. You pressed the Emergency Pod button, which we haven't done for some time.

• 1:52Alastair Campbell?

  No, the listeners did. The listeners pressed it.

• 1:53Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 1:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 1:55Rory Stewart?

  And Emergency Pod button is on Dominic Raab. Shall I give a little quick summary of Dominic Raab?

• 2:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 2:02Rory Stewart?

  So Dominic Raab, who was the Deputy Prime Minister and the Lord Chancellor and Justice Secretary, previously Foreign Secretary, a very, very well-known voice in the Brexit campaign, somebody who joined Parliament with me in 2010, somebody I know quite well. Been accused a number of times of bullying and he denied it and said that he would like an independent report to be commissioned into whether or not he had actually been bullying civil servants, that's the allegation. And a King's Council barrister called Mr Tolly did a report and came back in the report and found that on a number of occasions, he felt RAAB had been bullying. And RAAB said that if that had been discovered, he would resign.

• 2:47Rory Stewart?

  This has come out, he's resigned. Although he's written a letter which basically says that he's resigning because he said he'd resign, but he doesn't really recognise the description of his behaviour. And he thinks that it is dangerous for ministers to be driven out by allegations of bullying because it stops them being able to challenge civil servants. Over to you.

• 3:11Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, I think it was inevitable because I really don't go along with the, or try not to go along with the whole no smoke without fire thing that is sort of generally attaches itself to people in public life. I can remember, for example, there used to be these awful, awful rumours that went around about Leon Britton and I would never indulge them because I saw no evidence whatsoever. And I just thought, well, this is just a kind of sort of smear. Whereas I think the stories with RAAB have been so frequent, so common. And of course, you have to remember, you know, I know quite a lot of people at various levels of the civil service and, you know, they don't, they don't normally, very, most civil servants you talk to, they try to be quite nice about their ministers. And I think you just kept

• 3:55Alastair Campbell?

  hearing it again and again, he's incredibly difficult, he's very unpleasant, he's very intimidating, he's quite a nasty personality. And that's what sort of made me think, well, there probably is a bit of fire with the smoke. And I think this is an important moment actually for Rishi Sunak, because if you remember professionalism, integrity, and accountability and all that, I suspect he was hoping that the process would clear RAAB, but it hasn't. RAAB said he'd resign and he's gone. But I don't think you can have a government delivering properly on its objectives unless you have got a well motivated public service behind you. And the real damage of this is that

• 4:37Alastair Campbell?

  There is, I think, a real sort of disjunction at the moment between the government, and I don't think this is political, the Tories would like to say this because the civil service is full of lefties and et cetera, and it's just not, I don't think anybody should fairly define them like that. But I think that you have to have them properly motivated. And I've said to you before that I was routinely called a bully in the media. But I'm very proud of the fact that not a single civil servant ever came forward and, as it were, justified or supported that claim, because I think this is about how you treat people. It's about your basic attitudes to other human beings, whether you think they're there to be belittled and intimidated, or whether you think they're there to try to help you as part of your team.

• 5:21Alastair Campbell?

  And I'm all in favour of RAAB when the Tolly, the King's Counsel, saying that he was demanding, he was inquisitorial, he wanted high quality of work, you should expect that, I agree with that. But then the question is, how do you get people to work like that for you? And I think good ministers will always be able to do that. And so I think Rishi Sunak needs to use this for a reset with his relations with the civil service.

• 5:45Rory Stewart?

  So let me just get to the details of what's come out so far from the Tolly report. So this is Tolly quoted. He said, "Miss RAAB was interviewed four times over the space of around two and a half days and engaged seriously and conscientiously in the process. In the conclusions, he said, on a number of occasions at meetings with policy officials, the DPM, who's RAAB, acted in a manner which was intimidating, in the sense of going further than was necessary or appropriate in delivering critical feedback, and also insulting in the sense of making unconstructive, critical comments about the quality of work done, whether or not as a matter of substance any criticism was justified." And then he gives some examples.

• 6:28Rory Stewart?

  By way of example, he complained about the absence of what he referred to as "basic information" or "the basics". So I think we imagined he said something like, "You just haven't given me the basic information. You haven't done the basics here." Complained about obstructiveness on the part of officials, whom he perceived to be resistant to his policies, and described some of the work as utterly useless and woeful. And then he goes on to say, "The DPM did not intend by the conduct described to upset, upset or humiliate, nor did he target anyone for a specific type of treatment." So he's saying that it wasn't that RAAB was harassing individuals, and particularly

• 7:07Rory Stewart?

  not individuals on the basis of their characteristics. He seemed to have been like this in general. It doesn't seem to have been personally directed. But he then goes on to say, "His interruptive style is not itself behaviour that could be regarded as intimidating or insulting. However, individuals who'd previously experienced the DPM, expressed an unconstructed criticism of their work, might reasonably have interpreted a series of interruptions as a form of implicit criticism." I mean, it's also important to understand in thinking about this that Dominic RAAB, who actually I was quite fond of in the House of Commons and I saw quite a lot of, but he's quite an introverted figure. He's somebody who spends a lot of time in the gym.

• 7:52Rory Stewart?

  He was in Oxford boxing blue. So he's physically quite big and intimidating. And he has a manner, I think people, I remember when I was in the leadership debates against him, found just the way that he stands on the podium and speaks, that he's quite aggressive.

• 8:09Alastair Campbell?

  I think one of my few encounters I've had with him was in a TV studio on the night of, I think it was the 2017 general election. And there were a few people who were in a studio that had been sort of been packed in the same place and all hang around this green room. And there were probably about half a dozen people in there, you know, people that you just know from across the political spectrum. And I have a vivid memory of him sitting down in a chair in the corner and literally just sitting there looking at the other people as opposed to engaging with them. And I think, and I remember at the time thinking, was he just a bit sort of, you know... Isolated and a bit introverted, as you say, and I think he probably is.

• 8:51Alastair Campbell?

  But that thing about physicality, and physicality is very, very important in politics. You know, there we were in Belfast the other day, you see Bill Clinton making a speech and, you know, he's tall and he's elegant and he uses his hands and his body well, that's a kind of, these are important characteristics, but I think it's every picture I ever see on the television or in the papers of Robert, Dominic Raab, getting out of a car, for example, he always has this look on his face as if he just wants to go and headbutt the nearest person. And again, that could be introversion, it could be just him having a sort of a shell around himself of which he's not, not conscious, but I think if you read, I've not had time yet to read the full report, I've skim read it. But you have a sense of somebody who may be unaware of the way that he comes across.

• 9:36Alastair Campbell?

  But you also get this sense that repeatedly he's de-motivating rather than motivating, undermining rather than building up. And these to me are just very, very poor leadership and team building qualities which you need in a minister.

• 9:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's interesting, isn't it? Also, I think of the change that we've seen in British political life. We were in Ireland, as you said earlier this week, and I was thinking about Roy Mason, who was the classic Labour Northern Ireland Secretary in the late 1970s. Kind of real unionist bruiser, who people at the time, sort of admired for being kind of tough and outspoken and challenging and demanding. And I think we are more conscious now than we were in the past of the, um, the impact that can have on people. How incredibly unpleasant it can be to work in an environment in which you feel that you're being undermined. And of course, what Dominic Raab did isn't actually illegal, bullying's not, not against the law.

• 10:34Rory Stewart?

  And I think another thing that I often think about is that you can have a pretty unpleasant time with a boss. I think people find this with some of the big sort of Silicon Valley startup culture. Without them necessarily saying anything that you can quite catch them out on, but they create a general atmosphere of people feeling generally inadequate, overwhelmed. Now, the, the question, I guess, is,

• 10:58Rory Stewart?

  How does one get the balance right on this? Because it's also true that the civil service can be pretty slow moving, can have very firm views on what it wants to do, and it can take very, very strong personalities and leadership to get any change going.

• 11:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, my experience of the civil service, like every other organisation, there are good and there are average and there are bad and there are some truly exceptional. Again, back to Northern Ireland, there were some really exceptional civil servants involved throughout that process, truly exceptional people. Others, bit slow, bit difficult, bit, you know, not, just not maybe on the same wavelength as those of us who were trying to get things, get things moving. But I think that in general, civil, I don't know what your experience was, but in general civil servants, if you're clear with them, if you genuinely listen to them, and I think what sometimes happens with people like RAAB maybe, and I think this goes across other ministers in this government,

• 11:58Alastair Campbell?

  is that when civil servants are doing their job, which is actually to speak truth to the power and is to give proper analysis of ideas that are being put forward, particularly with a government that sort of tends towards populism, that can be taken by the ministers, you're criticizing the policy, you don't want this to work. Now, I'd be very surprised if there are that many people inside the civil service who think it's a great idea to be shipping migrants off to Rwanda. I doubt there are many civil servants who think it's a great idea to be dragging us out of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which, you know, a former Conservative government was part of taking us in. But they would get on and do it if they were given clear instructions in a reasonable way and asked to analyse the realities of the policy.

• 12:43Rory Stewart?

  It's weird, I mean, so you kindly asked me what my experience was. And I think there is a difference between your experience when you were right there next to the Prime Minister and Number 10 and the experience of being a minister, even a Secretary of State. I did frequently find, and I love the civil servants and I was a civil servant myself, but if I was going to be more sympathetic towards some of the frustrations that Dominic Raab encountered. I did find times when people were deliberately blocking me. And it took me a long time to understand why. There's often very good reasons why they're doing it. So let me give you a couple of examples. I was asked whether or not we should be spending seventy five million on training the Afghan police.

• 13:27Rory Stewart?

  And I said, absolutely not. I don't know much about the world, but I do know quite a lot about Afghanistan. And we've spent a lot of money training the Afghan police and it's a complete waste of money. No, we will not spend that money. And I then found myself in a battle that went on for months where the ambassador would go around behind my back to the National Security Council. And I'd have to go and speak to the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary to win again. Then people would go around, civil servants would go around my back again to the Prime Minister. And I'd have to speak to the Prime Minister directly.

• 13:56Alastair Campbell?

  But is it not possible that there was a minister that was pushing that against you rather than just civil servants? I mean, that could have been civil servants from another department who were doing their ministers bidding.

• 14:06Rory Stewart?

  That's sometimes the case. In this case, what had actually happened, I think, is that the ambassador had made a promise, which he probably shouldn't have made to the UN system, that the money was going to be delivered before they asked my permission. And in a way, part of the problem in the relationship to Minister of Service is getting the honesty to get him confident enough to say, I'm really sorry, I screwed up. I made the promise before I asked you, would you mind letting this one go? And I probably would have been fine. But but often, I had another one with Yemen. The David came in to say to me, I said, you know, we're spending two hundred million dollars in Yemen. How do you know what's happening? We don't have anyone on the ground. And they said, well, we do Skype calls with Yemenis. So I said, well, I'd love to see one of these Skype calls with Yemenis. And they all went white.

• 14:49Rory Stewart?

  And then I said, look, I don't want to bully you, but you know, come back in four weeks' time. Show me a Skype call with a Yemeni. And in four weeks' time, Senior Service came back and said, Minister, why do you want to see this Skype call with a Yemeni? And I said, look, I can explain why I think if we're spending $200 million on the ground, we need to have some information. But more fundamentally, I effing told you to do it. Just do it, right? I don't care. Just set up a Skype call.

• 15:12Alastair Campbell?

  Roy, did you swear at the civil servant?

• 15:14Rory Stewart?

  I may have done. I may have done. And I think this is another thing.

• 15:17Alastair Campbell?

  Apparently, there was no evidence that Dominic Raab swore. I swore a lot, but I swore nicely.

• 15:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, you see, there we are. So in that case, I think what had happened is a junior civil servant, probably a bit intimidated, had made the mistake of saying they were doing Skype calls with Yemenis, and they weren't, and they just couldn't admit it.

• 15:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Rory Stewart?

  So I learnt through this. I mean, the reason I want to be a bit sympathetic is that I was actually called up by my permanent secretary, who said, took me aside very nicely and said, Roy, you're going to have to be a bit careful with your language here, particularly with junior civil servants. Because I was interrupting. And a lot of that is frustration. You're desperately trying to drive stuff through the system. You tell people to do stuff. Months pass, nothing happens. And often, you're right, there is a context. Some of the ministers blocking it, number 10s blocking it.

• 16:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 16:04Rory Stewart?

  Somebody said the wrong thing. But you don't see that. What you see is, as Dominic Raab says, it feels like obstructiveness. It feels like people are just not doing what you've asked them to do.

• 16:13Alastair Campbell?

  There's a reason why civil servants are civil servants and not necessarily people with high profiles, because they don't particularly want a high profile. Whereas politicians inevitably do. They know that having a high profile is being part of being a senior leading politician. And so the frustrations I used to see the most with the civil service were actually generally with civil servants that we weren't necessarily seeing. In other words, for example, I can think of lots of occasions when we were preparing for prime minister's questions, when Tony, who was always desperate to get facts, he always wanted facts before he kind of decided what the answer was going to be. And sometimes just getting very basic factual information out of the civil servants was harder than we felt that it should have been.

• 16:59Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I don't think that was because of concealing. I think it was just a sort of old fashioned, outmoded systems that we were trying to change. And then on policy. I, I, you know, he did, and I don't think he was the first prime minister, he did often complain about the Home Office, for example, as feeling that there was a, there was a kind of culture within the Home Office that felt it knew more about crime and criminal justice than politicians who are out on the sharp end of it, kind of all the time. But I think the culture that you have, that you, you try to develop is, is what's the key to this. And I think that the problem with this government, this isn't just Dominic Raab, I think that through the whole austerity period, there's, there's just been a general undermining of public service. And I think that's a terrible mistake. I think you have

• 17:43Alastair Campbell?

  to motivate people to work for you. And I'll see, the other, I think there's a couple of other interesting points to make here, Roy. The first is that this is Rishi Sunak, who's meant to be the kind of, you know, the grown up, different to trust, different to Johnson. This is now the third member of a cabinet that he's lost already. Williamson for bullying, Sahawi over his tax situation. And the other thing, I'm going to ask you a little quiz question here, Roy, it's quite an easy one, but I want you to ask me. What do these people have in common? Ken Clark, Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, Liz Truss, David Living, Liddington, David Gork, Robert Buckland, Dominic Raab, Brendan Lewis, and now I'm going to give it away, and now Alex Chalk.

• 18:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, they're, they're, they are all Secretaries of State for Justice.

• 18:26Alastair Campbell?

  We've had ten in a decade.

• 18:27Rory Stewart?

  No, it's, it's crazy. And it was true when I was a Prisons Minister, and it's one of the fundamental problems in British government. These reshuffles are completely out of control. You know, junior ministers in the Ministry of Defence moving every year, prisons ministers moving every year.

• 18:40Alastair Campbell?

  This is at a time, you take the justice brief, you and I both know from the work that we do with, on the prisons front, prisons are in a state of crisis, the probation service is in a state of crisis, the court system is in a state of crisis, policing is in a state of crisis, and Dominic Raab, the Justice Secretary, who's done the job twice now, by the way, he's, I think you can count it 11 if you count him twice around. Yet, these things are, I'm not saying they're not being addressed, but they're not getting the political input and drive that they should be, because this guy's been focused on all this stuff. All right, Roy, let's take a quick break.

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• 21:20Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to the Restless Politics Emergency Podcast with me Rory Stewart.

• 21:24Alastair Campbell?

  Nino, Nino, Nino and me Alex Campbell.

• 21:27Rory Stewart?

  Very pleased, very pleased with Alex Chalk's promotion. So he's somebody who I knew very well, very thoughtful, quite quiet, somebody who was horrified by Boris Johnson, very close to remain side. He worked with me closely with Ken Clark when we were trying to get Theresa May's deal through. He's somebody who I feel has been very, very unfairly overlooked for eight years and I'm really pleased to see that he's come in. So he's a lawyer, he did the prisons brief well. So I'm really pleased to see Alex Chalk back in and I think that's another sign of some thoughtful, serious people that I admire.

• 22:06Alastair Campbell?

  Is another Oxford Bridge private school boy in the cabinet?

• 22:08Rory Stewart?

  That's true. Damien Hines, who I think isn't a private school boy, is also a very good prisons minister. So we sometimes talk about, and he, to be fair, you know, was in the cabinet, was Secretary of State for Education when he was in the cabinet, took the demotion down to be the prisons minister and then did have, has done a very good job at a more junior level.

• 22:27Alastair Campbell?

  Oliver Dowden, Deputy Prime Minister, what do you think of that?

• 22:29Rory Stewart?

  I'm less of an Oliver Dowden fan because he was a very early endorser of Boris Johnson against me. I've always slightly chippily held that against him. Whereas Alex Chalk very sweetly supported me for the leadership.

• 22:42Alastair Campbell?

  No, you cannot, this is, you cannot judge everything according to their relations with or support for or opposition to you. What's your analysis of Oliver Dowden, political skills?

• 22:55Rory Stewart?

  He was David Cameron's Deputy Chief of Staff. He was very much liked by Cameron. He came out of Downing Street into politics 2015. He was seen as a liberal Cameroon. I think what was troubling for me is that he moved so quickly to become one of Boris Johnson's cabinet ministers and endorse. That whole catastrophe, but then he resigned as chairman of the Conservative Party and he tripped the downfall of Johnson because it was Dowden's resignation. You remember, we did a podcast about that, which led to those 52 ministers eventually resigning. And so bringing down Johnson. So he needs, he needs some credit for that. I was a bit troubled also when he was Culture Minister, that he was slightly getting into the cultural

• 23:37Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, he was into the, he's actually a state school boy, but desperately wants to sound like a private school boy. I find that very strange in anyone. Also, just on Alex Shaw, he's got an absolutely minuscule majority, hasn't he, over the Liberal Democrats?

• 23:50Rory Stewart?

  And in Shelton?

• 23:50Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's, I think it's in three figures.

• 23:52Rory Stewart?

  I mean, he was a difficult seat to take against Lib Dems. You'll see also on YouTube, an extraordinary scene outside his constituency office during the Brexit debates, where he goes out and addresses a huge crowd. It's, it's a lovely, lovely moment of proper street politics.

• 24:06Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, I remember that. I remember that. Yeah, yeah.

• 24:08Rory Stewart?

  We've got some questions, and maybe this is the thing to wrap on. A question from Holman. Does a resignation leave the door open for RAB to return at some point? And would a sacking have closed it? And James Lowry, why does a misdemeanor of this nature necessitate resigning from the Cabinet but not from Parliament? Is there a lower ethical bar to be a constituency MP?

• 24:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think I said a few weeks ago, I think it wouldn't be a bad idea for Keir Starmer to have a policy that the principles of the ministerial code should be adopted by Parliament for all MPs. You know, honesty, accountability, objectivity, selflessness, integrity, all that stuff from the ministerial code, and then some of the details. So that, you know, bullying and intimidation, there were, there are lots of complaints within the House of Commons from the House of Commons staff about bullying and intimidation by MPs who aren't ministers.

• 24:56Rory Stewart?

  And famously, your friend John Burco got in real trouble for that. I mean, that's what really destroyed John Burco's career.

• 25:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And, and, and also, you know, opposition MPs as well. You know, not everybody's a saint. Labour and the Lib Dems are saying that Sunak is weak, that he should have sacked him rather than wait for him to absorb his own report. The bit about natural justice that I didn't like last night was the fact that the people who had made the complaints did not see the report before the government and RAB were able to read it and then comment on it publicly. I thought that was a bit much. As to whether he comes back, I mean, look, look at Suella Braverman. I mean, she was reappointed to the Cabinet. A very short time after being sacked by Rishi Sunak, not sacked by Sunak but appointed by Sunak. So therefore, I think it probably does leave the door open, but I think it would be a very, very big mistake.

• 25:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, some people don't come back. I mean, Matt Hancock, for example, didn't come back. And I think he hoped that he, you know, he resigned and he hoped that Boris Johnson would bring him back and that never happened. But it is happening more and more frequently. I mean, you know, Gavin Williamson, Priti Patel, all these people who were fired from previous people's cabinets did eventually come back. I, it's odd, because if you go back to the big scandals, the 60s, people like Profumo, a resignation was very final. People didn't usually come back from resignations.

• 26:13Alastair Campbell?

  But, you know, David Miliband on the podcast last week talked about the age of impunity. We are, we are really in, living in an era where shame is not in massive quantity. I mean, I, I, I honestly could not believe that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss went to that dinner at Hillsborough Castle the other night. After all, I thought there'd be too, I really thought there'd be too ashamed to show that face.

• 26:34Rory Stewart?

  I was really looking forward to seeing you and him going head to head, but that, that never happened. Now, one of the great things we did manage to do when we were in Belfast together is interview Hillary Clinton. So maybe the thing to end on is, is to say that on the rest is politics leading, you'll be able to hear our interview with Hillary Clinton, which I thought was really exceptional. I often grumble about politicians being a bit stiff and boring. I thought she was very, very thoughtful. Do you enjoy it as much as me?

• 26:58Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think she's great. I've always thought she was great. And I think, I felt rather sad because I, I, I listened to her and I watched her and I also had a very fun night out with her husband in a folk club, which was, but that's another story. But I, I, I think, I thought she was truly stunning. And some of the answers, I really do urge people to listen right from beginning to end because she sort of got better and better and better. And then there was a question you asked about artificial intelligence and tech, which, to which her answer was stunning. And my favorite bit of the whole, of the interview, apart from when she was being pretty vicious about Trump and Johnson and populism, was when I asked her about that picture of her in the

• 27:42Alastair Campbell?

  Situation Room with Biden and Obama and the security guys and the bin Laden. And I don't think I've ever heard. Such a frankly mesmerizing account of how a single individual decision was being taken in a matter of minutes. It was really, really, really interesting. So I hope people listen. Well, I know I've got a sneaking feeling it will become our most listened to episode for some time.

• 28:05Rory Stewart?

  Coming up, Monday 24th of April. So in three days' time. Thank you very, very much. And thank you, listeners, for pressing the emergency podcast button.

• 28:13Alastair Campbell?

  We haven't, we haven't set the rule as to what numbers, but it was just a sort of, I just noticed quite a few people saying, you must do one on this, you must do one on this, you must do one of this. So here we go. We managed to get together.

• 28:25Rory Stewart?

  Thank you again. Bye bye.

• 28:26Alastair Campbell?

  All the best. Bye.

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