308. Question Time: Can you be friends with someone you totally disagree with politically?

Why have so many kids been excluded from school since the pandemic? How should the world respond to the ‘gender apartheid’ in Afghanistan? And how can we stay friends with political enemies? The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy, a green electricity supplier powering homes across the UK. Use referral code POLITICS after sign up for a chance to win tickets to the TRIP O2 Arena show in October. Learn more at getfuse.com/politics TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen and 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

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 Creef. 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.

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 2:08Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:11Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. Why don't we start with Thalia Sanchez, who says, I'd like to hear your thoughts on a recent report predicting a post pandemic spike in bad behaviour in schools due to homeschooling. Do you think we've all been too quick to brush off the guaranteed lasting impacts of such an unprecedented time, particularly for our children and young people? This is actually something I learnt a little bit about when I went to a school recently where they had already noticed a really big rise in exclusions. And of course, there aren't that many places that excluded children can go to. So this report did spell out that they think this is directly related to the impact of Covid. Did you take a look at that Rory?

• 2:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So to give a sense of the country as a whole, so about 3.5% of pupils in the UK traditionally were suspended from school. But being suspended from school correlates with or goes along with a lot of other things that can be very worrying in terms of poverty, in terms of your life chances. So just over 3% are excluded from school generally. But in prisons, we found often 35% of the prisoners have been excluded from school. So it's got a strong connection. There's a lot of controversy about this. There are people who think schools are using exclusions much too much. But there are other teachers that you talk to who are just like, you simply don't understand that we don't want to exclude children from school.

• 3:34Rory Stewart?

  But occasionally you have a child who's completely disrupting the education for every other child in that classroom. And you sometimes have no choice. You've got to think about the other children. And if one person is, you can imagine if one person's really kicking off at the back of the classroom, nobody else is going to pay any attention. They're just going to be looking at the child that's kicking off. So getting that balance right, working out how you deliver a good education for those students who aren't at risk of expulsion, while also looking after the children who get expelled is very tough.

• 4:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Fiona has been sort of Chair of Governors of various schools for Yonks. And I know that they go to real lengths to try to avoid exclusions. And sometimes it's impossible. I think there are schools where frankly, Kids get excluded all too easily because they worry more about the results and the offstead than they do necessarily about the welfare of all the kids. But there is a rise. Fifty English secondary schools have suspended more than a quarter of pupils after the pandemic, and that is much more likely to be happening in the areas, in the poorest areas. Three times more likely to be suspended as those in in wealthier schools. So there's definitely a problem coming down the track here, and I think it's good to be aware of it.

• 4:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so a lot of this seems to be people who were a primary school age during COVID and therefore were effectively at home, not at school, and maybe didn't socialise, missed out on education for that critical period. And that seems to be really contributing to them struggling to reintegrate. It's sort of polite way of putting it, or behaviour difficulties when they're getting back.

• 5:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, just sticking with post pandemic for a minute, we get a lot of questions about long COVID. We should probably come back to it and do it properly at some point, but I was struck by this in Edinburgh a couple of days ago. Isabel Hardman, the journalist, was chairing one of the events I did, and she was saying that she's got long COVID and she was describing what the effect that it had had on her. And likewise, at the book signing after the event, there was a woman there I saw, she was sitting in a chair in the queue, and I became fixated by watching her sort of come through the queue. And she explained to me that she was going everywhere carrying a chair because she kept having to sit down every, she wasn't, you know, didn't need a wheelchair as such, but she she just kept having to sit down because she was had this kind of permanent exhaustion that was related to to long COVID. So we should come back to that at some point.

• 5:44Rory Stewart?

  I've got a very close friend who has been completely devastated by this, and there are a lot of support groups out there. Kate Weinberg has written a very interesting book talking about her experience with long COVID, and has also helped organise forums for people. It's very complicated because it seems to manifest in so many different ways. And doctors are struggling, and of course, as with other related illnesses, sometimes people who are suffering from it feel that they're being treated as though it's purely psychosomatic and there's nothing real going on. But my goodness, you know, my friend John basically says he has not had a good day in three years, and sometimes just feels that life is hardly worth living. Over to you.

• 6:25Alastair Campbell?

  Right, Rory, one of this one, Luke Davis, can you speak about the political significance of Pavel Durov's arrest in France, particularly his links to Russia? Macron is adamant the arrest is not political, but I'd like to hear your views. So this is the boss of the direct messaging platform Telegram, who has been arrested and a judge has extended his period of detention, which means he can now be detained for up to ninety-six hours. Needless to say, the sort of Musks and all the sort of free speech libertarians are saying this is an absolute outrage. But what do you think of this one, Rory?

• 6:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, so Pavel Durov, Telegram is huge, maybe a billion users now, so it's bigger than Twitter X. It's like a WhatsApp messaging platform. It was developed partly to deal with Russia itself. So Pavel Durov is not a sort of agent to the Russian government, although a lot of Russians use Telegram. I mean, famously, that was the way of keeping up with the Wagner Group, was looking at Telegram. Do you use Telegram? And did you look at it a bit?

• 7:22Alastair Campbell?

  No, should I?

• 7:23Rory Stewart?

  I think it's interesting, but I mean, his deal basically is to say that the way to protect free speech is to have a platform that governments can't get into. And that, of course, is very threatening because it's also, and this is a bit, you know, like the discussions around Bitcoin and stuff. When something's completely removed from government control, yes, it's an opportunity for freedom and protecting you against bad governments. But it's also a huge opportunity for criminals to flourish. Telegram becomes the, and this is where the French government's getting involved. It's less about anti-Russian stuff. It's more about saying this is a platform that really allows criminal gangs to operate free of surveillance from governments.

• 8:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I suppose one argument I heard when this issue came up a while back about whether this encryption stuff had gone too far was, and this would be an argument, I guess, that Telegram would be making in defence of Durov, is that when the telephone came along, the fact that criminals use the telephone to carry out their criminal activities by communicating to each other about what they were going to do together, that didn't lead to us all saying that the telephone should be shut down. But I think the difference here is that when you know that technology is being used to get round the law to commit criminal activity and the platform that you have built

• 8:48Alastair Campbell?

  is the means by which that is done, that that takes it to a different space. Because the fact is that the police and security services can listen to telephone calls and so forth. So it's very, very interesting. And of course, I guess that the Musk's of this world and Musk I see is continuing to sort of troll Keir Starmer and spread absolute lies about Britain and the state of Britain on social media. I guess this might just put a little bit of wind up them.

• 9:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, the Musk thing, we keep banging on about it, but it is beyond imagining. He managed to retweet a deeply misleading article from a far-right Islamophobic account saying, can this be real? And by doing so, got, by the time I looked at it, forty-seven million people to view a post suggesting that Starmer was going to be spreading asylum seekers around here.

• 9:40Alastair Campbell?

  The thing basically said is a fact that the Labour Government now had a plan to basically to put asylum seekers ahead of British, you know, resident British people already here in relation to, you know, all sorts of stuff. Can this be real? Says Musk. Well, no, you jerk, it's not.

• 9:56Rory Stewart?

  And he gets forty-seven million views and three hundred and fifty thousand likes by the time I looked at it.

• 10:00Alastair Campbell?

  That's because he's basically said to the algorithm, can you make sure that my tweets go to everybody? It's not difficult. I mean, well done Elon. Oh my God, you've done well. People, lots of people like seeing what you've got. He is virtually the number one thing that I see on the, I am cutting back so much on shitter, as Lain Andrews calls it. But when I do nip on there to sort of, you know, post an interview that we've done with Chicago, invariably Elon Musk is at the top of my timeline. So we know how he gets all the views. Catherine T. Rory, how do I continue a relationship with my dad, who represents everything I struggle with in today's political climate? Brexit voter, Reform Party supporter, GB news watcher, and is

• 10:43Alastair Campbell?

  Everything I'm trying to fight against in today's political climate, who believes I'm woke and tells me that me and my wokeness is what's ruining the country. To maintain a relationship and not challenge it makes me complicit bystander, makes me angry with myself. While challenging, like I have, affects my mental health profoundly. I'm positive I'm not the only millennial who's in this position. Would love to hear your thoughts. Right, bit of, bit of advice here, Rory. That's tricky, that one.

• 11:08Rory Stewart?

  That is tricky and it goes to the heart of a lot of what we talked a lot about in Brexit, where at one point, I think almost half of Brexit voters and half of Remain voters wouldn't consider one of their children marrying someone from the other side. It was core to the Chicago convention where a lot of people talked about how politics was destroying dinner parties. I mean, it's really tough. You have to somehow, as with any disagreement in a family, try to get back to what you actually really love and admire about people. I mean, I, I'm of course in Cumbria. You know, the majority of my voters voted for Brexit, many of them would support Reform. And yet I found many of those people who voted for Brexit remained close friends, were incredibly funny, practical, loyal.

• 11:54Rory Stewart?

  And that's true, I'm sure, is basically what Tim Walz is trying to say about Trump voters in the US. One thing she could do, though, is a short term thing, is to share an article written by Will Lloyd called "The End of Woke Spells Trouble for the Right" in The Times yesterday, where he argues that actually, basically, the genius move of Kamala Harris and others is to basically give up on the woke rhetoric, leaving the right with nothing to complain about. Will Lloyd says that Kamala Harris's speech was largely noticeable for revealing the extraordinary power of American dentistry. So a typically sort of cheeky article from Will Lloyd that she might want to share with her father.

• 12:34Alastair Campbell?

  Do you mention Tim Walz there? Somebody made this wonderful observation about him. The reason why Tim Walz is connecting with people so much is because he reminds everybody of what their dad used to be like before Fox News was invented. And they all started just shouting at televisions all the time. The legacy of Fox News within the American political debate is pretty extreme. And Catherine there mentions the fact that her dad watches GB News. Now, not many people do, but those that do, I suspect, are being radicalised in the same way. And I guess all you can do, Catherine, is perhaps sit there and watch it and without sort of saying... He's daft to be watching it or daft believing it.

• 13:16Alastair Campbell?

  Do point out when the things that are being said are untrue. Do point out the reasons why they're being said and just try to engage in the debate. But this is the thing that I talked to Frank Luntz and David Urban about, that I talked about on the main podcast yesterday, that I have definitely got myself into this position, less so here, because I don't think I did have Boris derangement syndrome, as it was called, because I always felt that if enough people carried on telling the truth about him, eventually he'd be done, and he is done. Whereas with Trump, it goes much, much, much deeper. I genuinely find it hard to understand how anybody, anybody can vote for that guy. And it means it's difficult to have a conversation with somebody who does.

• 13:57Alastair Campbell?

  But you've got to try to separate the person from that individual action. So in your dad's case, voting Brexit, supporting reform, watching GB News, you've got to divorce those facts from who that person is and try to get back to who that person is and bring that real person out of them. I hope that helps. We've morphed into agonyans here, Rory.

• 14:17Rory Stewart?

  Right, Alison, let's take a quick break and we'll be back after break with a quick question from me on RFK, on RFK Junior Kennedy and his endorsement of Trump.

• 14:27Speaker 02

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• 16:27Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 16:31Alastair Campbell?

  And me Asda Campbell.

• 16:32Rory Stewart?

  And we have a question here from Simo and also from Lukar on RFK Kennedy. Why do you think Kennedy has aligned with Trump? Do you think the Democrats should have followed due process and elected their candidate? And Lukar, I'd be interested to hear your take on RFK Jr. The family released a statement distancing themselves from him and his decision to back Trump. How has he evolved to be this person coming from the ultimate Democrat family over the

• 16:56Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this goes back to the previous question before the break from Catherine about, you know, families are families and the Kennedys are quite a family. I think on why he's aligned with Trump, I wouldn't be at all surprised if he's done some sort of deal. If Trump wins, you know, get a job or something, I don't know. I think the real reason why he may have pulled out is that post the Biden decision to step down and make way for Vice President Harris is Kennedy was pretty much tanking in the polls. It was costing him a lot of money to keep the campaign going. The family were very, very quick to release a statement, as Lukas says, distancing themselves. It probably is pretty awful for them to have to feel that somebody who trades on the Kennedy

• 17:38Alastair Campbell?

  name and the JFK legend and all that, aligning himself with somebody whose values are so contrary. And it's interesting that very quickly on the media, when the decision was announced, people were playing back the clips of what these two have said about each other in the past. So whether it'll have an impact, I don't think it's automatic that somebody who was backing Kennedy will back Trump, because I think a lot of the people who were backing Trump were coming from the other side of the fence, the other side of the political scale, as it were. What do you think?

• 18:06Rory Stewart?

  So there's a good summary of this. So Donald Trump apparently said about RFK in April, "Totally anti-gun, an extreme environmentalist who makes the green new scammers look conservative, a big-time taxer, an open border advocate, an anti-military vet, I'd even take Biden over Junior." So what he's getting at there is that RFK Junior, he's not just the third son of Robert Kennedy, who was assassinated and therefore JFK's nephew. His career was as an environmental lawyer, where he took some extremely successful but quite radical cases on behalf, sometimes of Native American communities, sometimes on behalf of threatened natural environments and wildernesses, often against big business,

• 18:50Rory Stewart?

  and very much seemed to be on the left and was considered at one point for being the head of the environmental protection organisation under Obama and under Biden. His name was talked about. So he was very much there on the kind of Democrat environmentalist left. He's had a pretty peculiar, dubious personal life. I mean, he was very sadly a heroin addict, I think, from when he was 15 to when he was in his mid-20s. And that obviously may have partly been connected with the fact that he lost his father, his father was assassinated. He's had a very rickety private life and his wife left him when I think she'd found recording his diaries, him recording that he'd slept with 36 women in a very short period when he was still married to her. He's had these odd moments like...

• 19:34Rory Stewart?

  Being done for leaving a bear in Central Park, he made this incredible claim that he couldn't pay proper alimony to his wife because a worm had got into his brain and eaten part of his brain. So his brain didn't work properly, he couldn't earn enough. And then Reid Hoffman and others are accused, Reid, who we interviewed on Leading, are accused of funding a campaign to point out that RFK was not a New York resident and therefore actually couldn't run. He'd managed to register himself incorrectly to run to be president, leaving him ready with no choice other than to work out who to endorse.

• 20:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, our friend and colleague Anthony Scaramucci is absolutely adamant that the whole third party thing, including Kennedy, has been backed and funded by Steve Bannon and other kind of hard right Republicans as a way of trying to help Trump. So whether that's right or wrong, I don't know. I'm not convinced the lasting impact is going to be that huge. Here's one, Rory, AJM, when are you two going to discuss Taiwan properly, inviting a Taiwanese scholar on, spelling out to the public the reality of China? Well, we have literally, just before we recorded this, interviewed a wonderful person by the name of Audrey Tang. So Rory, do you want to tell AJM a little bit about Audrey?

• 20:49Rory Stewart?

  Audrey Tang, incredibly exciting. Audrey Tang was the digital minister in Taiwan and completely transformed the way that technology was used in Taiwan. Firstly, very practically to have an incredible COVID response. So they didn't have to lockdown, they kept their economy growing and booming while also having very few people dying of COVID through the way they used technology. But also just the way in which it's completely rejuvenated democracy, trust in government by using very positive forms of government, I suppose, digital citizens assemblies to get government going again. So yes, people interested in Taiwan, please do listen to our leading interview coming soon with Audrey Tang.

• 21:30Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, we talked a lot recently about Afghanistan following your visit there, and it provoked a whole loads of questions from people about Afghanistan, in particular with a focus on education. What about this one from Wanda Pomy? Should and can the West ramp up pressure on the Taliban in the face of what seems to be total and utter apartheid situation developing? I'm assuming that they mean the apartheid between men and women.

• 21:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's a gender apartheid. I mean, it is very, very disturbing. The Taliban have made no secret since they were in right back in the mid 1990s, so over 30 years, about the fact that they have this view, which really doesn't have much to do with traditional Islam, is really a kind of tribal, South Eastern Afghan view, that women should completely cover their faces, they shouldn't be educated, that they should barely leave home. And the religious authorities, particularly the leader in Kandahar, keeps issuing more and more extreme edicts on this. The story on the ground in the country is a little bit more complicated. I mean, I was just in Afghanistan two weeks ago, and actually, if you walk around Kabul at the moment, most women are not covering their faces, they're not wearing those burkas,

• 22:41Rory Stewart?

  those classic things with a kind of net face covering. And there's clearly a hustle going on inside the Taliban government about how much this stuff gets implemented or doesn't. Same to an education, I mean, the very, very strict rules in education, but again, in different parts of Afghanistan, people seem to be being educated online or using private schools or doing different types of things. The question of whether ramping up sanctions would make any difference, I'm afraid not. I think the Taliban government is pretty immune to that kind of stuff. This is not Nigerian politicians who want to go shopping in Harrods. These are people who've lived in caves, have been fighting for 20 years, don't care very much about sanctions' impact on them. The impacts of the sanctions unfortunately are on ordinary Afghans, on 35, 40 million

• 23:25Rory Stewart?

  people who are struggling to feed themselves and whose economy is tanking. And the best hope, I'm afraid, is to keep trying to support ordinary Afghans and trust that the civil society that's been built up over 25 years will Gradually exert that pressure, but I didn't think the United Kingdom wagging its fingers is going to have any impact at all.

• 23:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 23:47Rory Stewart?

  Okay, Alistair, here's a really testing question coming in from Jess. What are we supposed to believe about Steakknife, which to remind people was this very high level IRA, head of internal security in the IRA during the troubles in Ireland, who turned out to be a British agent and who the British, certainly military and potentially the security service, allowed to continue to operate, allowed him to continue killing people so that they could continue getting information from him. And there's been accusations that the former head of the security service, Eliza Manning and Buller, had suggested that they didn't know about it. And then listeners have come in saying she did know about it. Over to you.

• 24:23Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Eliza Manning Buller, who we interviewed with John Soares, the former head of MI6, on leading a few weeks ago, she is clearly a keen listener to the podcast, has followed the various discussions we've had. And she actually sent us this message, I'm going to read it because it's quite interesting. And I think Paul O'Connor, at the Fanuken Centre, will be interested in this because it sort of continues the conversation. She says, "I did not have knowledge of the agent known as Steakknife, who was run by the army when he was in place. This was in line with need to know principles. It's now clear to me that MI5 had some limited knowledge earlier than I had previously understood.

• 25:04Alastair Campbell?

  As has been made clear previously, MI5 was not responsible for how Steakknife was recruited and run as an agent. I'd also like to point out that it was not until October 2007, after I retired, that MI5, for the first time in its history, was given the lead intelligence responsibility in Northern Ireland. So we did not have absolute authority." I think that's a reference to the discussion that you and I had, and our rules were not necessarily followed by others. So I don't know what you make of that, whether that clears things up or actually just makes them even more interesting.

• 25:36Rory Stewart?

  I think I should keep this rolling. Maybe a final question from you, Alistair.

• 25:41Alastair Campbell?

  Andy wants to know, Rory, if you had to pick someone else to replace the other person on the podcast, who would it be and why? Serious answers only.

• 25:48Rory Stewart?

  Serious answers only? Bollocks.

• 25:52Alastair Campbell?

  In other words, it's not a joke, you know, I don't want Eric Morecambe or, you know, whatever.

• 25:56Rory Stewart?

  So you suddenly get so fed up with Burnley's poor performance that you head off to the Maldives and I have to think about who to get in instead?

• 26:04Alastair Campbell?

  No, I could do the podcast. No, no, Rory, I suspect that Andy is kind of, you know, imagining our deaths.

• 26:09Rory Stewart?

  Oh, gosh.

• 26:10Alastair Campbell?

  So if I suddenly had to die.

• 26:12Rory Stewart?

  That course in Elizabeth.

• 26:13Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know. That's how I saw it.

• 26:14Rory Stewart?

  You're imagining the deaths. That's treasonous. Okay, so Alistair.

• 26:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm not the king.

• 26:20Rory Stewart?

  You're not the king. Well, the problem is that all the obvious alternatives have already been tried by competitors.

• 26:26Alastair Campbell?

  That's not entirely true. I mean, David Gork stood in for you when you were on your retreat. I thought he was very, very good.

• 26:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he is splendid. I worship David Gork. He's very good. Yeah, there's David Gork. He tried quasi-quoting, but he did pretty well on our leading interview. Angela Rayner, I'd be very happy to do one with her.

• 26:42Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, you and Angela Rayner would be good.

• 26:43Rory Stewart?

  That'd be good, wouldn't it? Yeah.

• 26:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I had dinner last night with Anna Sawa. I think you and Anna Sawa would be quite good.

• 26:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, that's good. Yeah, yeah. We need a bit of grit in the oyster, wouldn't we? Yeah.

• 26:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, there aren't that many toys to pick from for me these days, are there?

• 26:56Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 26:57Alastair Campbell?

  They've all sort of vanished.

• 26:58Rory Stewart?

  Very few left.

• 26:59Alastair Campbell?

  Ken Clark would have been good back in the day. So we're going David Gork and Angela Rayner. How's about that?

• 27:04Rory Stewart?

  Lovely. It's a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. Let's end on that. And Alistair, have a great day today. I think you're running for train and thanks for doing question time with us.

• 27:11Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye, bye.

• 27:12Rory Stewart?

  Bye.

• 27:58Speaker 07

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