49. Queen Elizabeth II, Ukrainian counter-attacks, and Sweden

Join Alastair and Rory as they discuss Queen Elizabeth II, the Ukrainian counter-offensive, Rory's trip to Kenya, the far right in Sweden, and the Shanghai Co-Operation Organisation. Blackpool live show tickets: Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ 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. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson 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/restispolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restispolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  So, welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:49Alastair Campbell?

  And we are going to be talking about elections in Sweden and in Kenya. We're going to be talking about the extraordinary events that unfolded in the last few days in Ukraine. But inevitably, we're going to start with the death of the Queen. A bit weird for both of us Rory, because neither of us were in the country. And I'm not suggesting that that would have affected very much, but I don't know about you in Uganda, but it felt a bit strange being in Albania as the country was convulsed.

• 2:16Rory Stewart?

  A bit strange. Are you a privy councillor at the moment? Were you put in the privy councillor as part of your...

• 2:20Alastair Campbell?

  No, I was never made a privy councillor, thank God. As you know, I don't believe in titles.

• 2:25Rory Stewart?

  So as a privy councillor, theoretically, I could have been there at the acclamation service for the new king. So I felt sorry to miss out on that, although I think they're doing it on a lottery. So I probably wouldn't have made it in there anyway. So yes, one of the things I think I've seen you talking a bit about on Twitter is the question of the coverage of the Queen, although most of the coverage I've been picking up is in The Nation and The Standard, which are Kenyan newspapers and then Ugandan newspapers, where I must say the coverage has been extraordinary, day after day, front page coverage in Uganda and Kenya. I was in a drought affected area of rural Kalifi yesterday, which is pretty remote, three hours on dusty roads, and Union Jack at half mast outside a building.

• 3:09Rory Stewart?

  The Kenyan president has announced national mourning, people are wearing black ties. In Cuba, for goodness sake, there's a lovely little thing on Twitter coming from my friend Ben Judah saying, "It's going to create real cognitive dissonance for the kind of classic pro Cuban Republicans to find that the Cuban government has also announced national mourning and put its flags at half masts of the Queen."

• 3:30Alastair Campbell?

  This is extraordinary. I do think the international response was, even though we knew it would be huge, it was extraordinary. I thought that some of the images, seeing the Sydney Opera House with the picture of the Queen in the middle bit of that extraordinary construction, I thought the Brandenburg Gate done up as the Union Jack was extraordinary. I thought Macron's speech... Both in French and English, particularly in light of Liz Truss's friend or foe, the jury is out. I thought he, I thought he won the foreign tribute.

• 4:03Rory Stewart?

  He's so graceful, isn't he? And so graceful. But, but Justin Trudeau as well, though, I thought was wonderful. Really moving and.

• 4:11Alastair Campbell?

  But what was, what was, what was interesting, like down where we have a place in France, the, the local paper, La Provence, page after page after page and pictures and lots of, I did it, I've actually not done, I see you've done a few, I had, I'm sure you did, and everybody did, who's had any connection ever with this extraordinary woman and this remarkable story, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of bids to talk about it. And I actually decided just not to do any. I felt that was easier. And I actually think it's one of those stories where you really, there's so much, what I call just the blah factory. Whereas actually, the stuff that really matters is the, is the event itself, it's

• 4:52Alastair Campbell?

  then the planning, it's what the people who really matter are saying and doing. So I do think that actually seeing those interviews with the former prime ministers was really interesting. I do think that watching the family and, and their reactions and so forth. But I, I do think there's, you mentioned the coverage. I thought the BBC got it absolutely right. I thought Hugh Edwards was brilliant. Hugh Edwards, I interviewed him for Men's Health a few months ago, and he, he actually said to me that he thought the death of the Queen would the biggest, be the biggest test of the BBC in its history. And he also revealed to me that he, he practised for hours in front of his mirror for the moment. And that sounds a bit disrespectful, but I just, it's the old Benjamin Franklin thing,

• 5:35Alastair Campbell?

  fail to prepare, you're preparing to fail. And he did it absolutely brilliantly. But then I think once we got through the first day, by the time I was back from Albania, we're on to sort of day three. And then, you know, recent days in particular, where you you literally had to watch foreign media to find out what was going on anywhere else in the world. And and I think I do think that obviously she's incredible. She was incredibly popular, hugely loved around the country and around the world. But I do think this kind of this absolute mono narrative that everybody has to be saying everything was wonderful. Everybody has to be just cloyingly sort of supportive and pro. And I I'm not saying, you know, we should have had lots

• 6:19Alastair Campbell?

  of sort of people covering this, that, the other. But then it led to this extraordinary thing on Sky News, where there was a protest by the family and their supporters of somebody, a guy called Chris Caber, who'd been killed. And there was a protest against police conduct. And so there's these aerial pictures of this protest, the Sky News that are there, there are people marching towards Buckingham Palace to pay their respects, because they're just and to be fair to them, they apologized, they didn't, it was a mistake. But it's what happens when you get into this monotone.

• 6:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 6:48Alastair Campbell?

  And I think we've just got to be a bit careful.

• 6:50Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think I'm sure I think we should probably should be a bit careful. But thank goodness, doesn't happen very often to have a monarch who lasted 70 years. I mean, it's extraordinary.

• 6:58Alastair Campbell?

  It's incredible. It is incredible. I agree.

• 7:00Rory Stewart?

  I mean, the I'm trying to think of this. I mean, in a way, you're right. I mean, I I did one brief interview on the Today programme, and I've otherwise stayed off completely because I think that that's not a great deal that you can say. I mean, one of the things that I think was part of her genius was she was extremely were extremely discreet and extremely restrained. I remember when I got made a Privy Counselor, I I knew I knew I knew Her Majesty a little bit. And so I was expecting when I went to get you, when you become a Secretary of State, you go to get these kind of stamps of office, which you can give to your kids to put in candle wax and go around stamping things with sort of gold chains of office.

• 7:40Rory Stewart?

  So I went to receive them in this very kind of formal thing in Windsor Castle. And I was expecting a sort of wink or a smile or some sort of recognition of the fact that that she knew me. But she was so absolutely professional, very much played it very straight, no distinction between me and anybody else who was being made a minister at the time.

• 8:01Alastair Campbell?

  I think I think the Daily I think the Daily Mail will love this story. Rory Stewart hurt that Queen didn't wink at him.

• 8:07Rory Stewart?

  That is very much not what I'm saying.

• 8:08Alastair Campbell?

  Kevin Spacey winked at me.

• 8:12Rory Stewart?

  But I guess what I'm saying is that that she, as a result, I mean, I think it was exactly the right thing to do, right? She's she's the queen, she's swearing in sex, she's a state, there's absolutely formal, no favoritism, nothing personal going on. But that does mean that some of the encounters that people I think have been relating, they're trying to squeeze an enormous amount out of somebody who I think with her friends, you know, I definitely wasn't one of her friends. I think with one of her friends in private, she could relax more. But I think most of us who are encountering in public, we're encountering a pretty formal person from whom you're not extracting a huge number of anecdotes.

• 8:47Alastair Campbell?

  I love the the line by Tina Brown, oh, here we go again promoting the New York Times. Tina Brown wrote a piece in the New York Times. She had, it was my favorite line of the whole week. She said, we're so going to miss not knowing what she thinks. I thought that was absolutely brilliant, because you don't know what she thinks. I mean, people, I read all those pieces over the, over the weekend, and all the political correspondents sort of feel they have to get in on the act. So they're writing big, long pieces about who were her favorite prime ministers and so forth. And they don't know. The truth is, they do not know. And little myths develop, like she didn't like Tony Blair because he's, quote, saved her when Diana died. She didn't like Thatcher because she was another strong

• 9:29Alastair Campbell?

  woman. I think these mythologies just develop. And then they, she really liked Harold Wilson. She really liked John Major because he came from a humble background. We don't know any of that.

• 9:38Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. Which is a great tribute to her. But you're quite right. So I think that's a good thing to move on to and conclude on that, because we don't have a great deal to say. We don't, we don't really know.

• 9:46Alastair Campbell?

  There's actually one bit I do want to talk about, because I don't think, I don't think it has been given enough sort of thought amidst all this. And that is that, and I wrote a book called Winners seven years ago, and I actually ended up writing a chapter about the Queen as a very British, enduring British winner. And I spoke to a lot of the people who worked for her down the years. And because I got to know them during that week of Diana's death. And I do think it's important to recognise, this is a point about leadership. Even though Prince Philip viewed strategy as something that only people like Stalin and Hitler talked about, I think the Queen was remarkably strategic and I think that her ability to

• 10:27Alastair Campbell?

  lead and adapt to a world of change while staying the same and talking to these guys who were, I'm not, you know, bullshitting here, they were genuinely close to her, they were part of the operation that she led and so forth. And when they explained to it, it was this whole thing about how do you, they, they, they talked about the famous novel, The Leopard by

• 10:46Rory Stewart?

  Lampe Dusa.

• 10:47Alastair Campbell?

  James P. Thomas, Lampe Dusa. You know, everything must change, everything needs to change so that everything can stay the same. That was the approach. And I just think that that, I think we should recognise the kind of, it is a form of genius. And, you know, I, I have been a Republican all of my life. My first ever row with my mother was about not wanting to watch the Queen's Speech when I was about seven and she made me. And, and yet you have to recognise that, I think in large part down to her and what she's done over the 70 years, but particularly since Anna Serebelis, when they decided they had to make change. And then again, after Diana's death, I think they made changes, she gave the go ahead for that.

• 11:28Alastair Campbell?

  But ultimately, what we're seeing at the moment is the celebration of her and the institution rather than the changes, which is an incredible feat.

• 11:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, extraordinary. And it's only, by the way, on, on book recommendations, I, I've read a wonderful biography of, of Lampe Dusa, the, the guy that wrote The Leopard. So, um, I, I, it's called The Last Leopard. It's by David Gilmour. And so anyone interested, it's an amazing book, amazing film too. You'd seen that great black and white film.

• 11:56Alastair Campbell?

  I can hear yet again bow down to your extraordinary vastness of knowledge because you did not, we did not in any prior discussion, discuss the fact that I was going to, to raise the leopard. So, well done on that one.

• 12:10Rory Stewart?

  No, no, it's, it's my friend Felix is obsessed with the film, amazing black and white film. I tried to, tried to watch it with the family and they got really bored. So maybe, maybe it's not for everyone.

• 12:18Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I know you as the arch royalists keep wanting to move off, but I want to come back to something. And that was Prince Charles and the inkwell.

• 12:27Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 12:27Alastair Campbell?

  You mentioned the, did you not see this?

• 12:29Rory Stewart?

  No, I didn't see the inkwell, no.

• 12:30Alastair Campbell?

  So when, when, at the, at the meeting of the Privy Council where he was sworn in, I have to say, I thought, I thought Penny Mordaunt was a brilliant emcee. She really did very, very well.

• 12:40Alastair Campbell?

  But when Prince Charles, they all had to sign the, the thing that they were reading out and Prince William. I remember my daughter watching saying she was very excited that Prince William was left handed because she's left handed, these left handed people are superior. But when Charles was sat down to sign it, he got very, very tetchy because there was an inkwell in the way.

• 13:00Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I see.

• 13:00Alastair Campbell?

  And he waved it away very angrily in a way that we all sort of turned to each other and said, God, the Queen would never have done that. It was a very, you should look it up. It's a very, very interesting moment.

• 13:11Rory Stewart?

  Look at that moment. It must be a very tense, tense moment. I was sorry I wasn't there actually. I mean, I, it was, my mother thought the only point to my becoming a Privy councillor was so that I'd be able to do that. Turn up, stand somewhere behind Tony Blair and the line of people in black seats.

• 13:25Alastair Campbell?

  It wa, it was funny watching everybody trying to sort of photobomb this. They'd obviously lined up the six prime ministers.

• 13:33Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 13:33Alastair Campbell?

  Keir Starmer, Keir Starmer was standing next to Tony Blair and they were chatting away. Gordon Brown got the very, very short straw because he was, he was next to Boris Johnson and then there was a bit of a gap. So he had to sort of talk to him quite a lot. And then Tessa Blackstone, I noticed, got in between Theresa May and John Major. So the picture of the six never, it was never totally clean.

• 13:56Alastair Campbell?

  But it was, it was an extraordinary event and it was, it was, yeah, it was, I, I did find the whole thing very moving. And yesterday Fiona and I went down to the, to the palace and just sort of milling around and of course during the week after Diana's death, I was, because I was shuttling backwards and forwards to the palace when we were planning the funeral. I got the feeling there were more, I think there were more people around that week, but actually, when we were walking away, I realised that the police and the crowd control, they were, they were spreading the crowds. So the flowers actually were being laid for a long, long way from the palace.

• 14:31Rory Stewart?

  Well.

• 14:32Alastair Campbell?

  And it was pretty, it was a pretty extraordinary thing, so.

• 14:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's amazing. I mean, maybe in question time, we can get back to this because people have obviously asked whether this is the time to rethink the monarchy and republicanism and things. And I think there's some interesting things to be said about that. But you had something on the Swedish elections. Tell us about Swedish elections.

• 14:47Alastair Campbell?

  This is going out, I think, Wednesday morning, and it may be clearer, we're recording on, on Monday. But it does look pretty seismic, what's happening in Sweden, because the, the ill name Sweden Democrats have looked like they're going to get about 21%, 20% of the vote. And the Sweden Democrats are a party that emerged from the neo Nazis in the 80s. They've done a bit of a rebranding job. They kicked out some of the real kind of, you know, John Marie Le Pen types. But they're very, very right wing. There's been a lot of gang violence going on in Sweden. They've been, you know, focused on that. Scandinavia has such a wonderful reputation in the, in the rest of the developed world. We always talk

• 15:28Alastair Campbell?

  about the Scandies. And so the Social Democrats are going to be the biggest party. But because the Sweden Democrats are coming second, and then their kind of, I guess, equivalent of our Tory party is the mod, they call themselves the moderates. And I think what's going to happen, if, if it does go this way, and it literally is on a knife edge, they're now waiting for overseas votes to come in. And it's so close that that may swing it either way. But it, but it will be an extraordinary thing. And even for them to get one in five of the Swedish vote for this far right party that has campaigned mainly on immigration is a pretty extraordinary thing.

• 16:04Rory Stewart?

  It's amazing. And the immigration story is amazing in Sweden, because Sweden has been incredibly good about reaching out to asylum seekers, and has taken a country which was very ethnically homogeneous, in a very short period of time, towards a situation where now, I think, 30% of the Swedish population don't have Swedish as their mother tongue. And that's, you know, almost half the population in some areas of cities. So there's part of that going on. They had, you told me about this just before we went on the podcast. So this is not me showing some amazing knowledge. I just popped on the Guardian website. But one of the things I noticed there was that they'd campaigned, the Swedish Democrats, this Nazi originating party with a metro train decorated in their electoral

• 16:49Rory Stewart?

  colors called the Repatriation Express with one way ticket, next stop Kabul. And they were sort of driving this underground train through stations.

• 16:58Alastair Campbell?

  And it just shows that that sort of nativist populist, really quite nasty campaigning can strike a chord. They've grown with every one of the last half dozen elections or so. They've just grown and grown and grown and grown. They've got this quite charismatic leader, Jimmy Akerson, who started out, I think he was about 25 and he's now, he's now been there about 10 years. So quite young still. But I think it will be, you know, if they do have to form the government, that will, that's a big moment for Scandinavia and indeed for the European Union. And we, you know, we've talked so much about this. And we're back to this whole thing about the power of the force of populism, whether the established parties and governments did take the concerns about immigration seriously, whether they're

• 17:43Alastair Campbell?

  just being exploited or what have you, the whole thing. I think, I do think that it'll be interesting again to see whether social media and the abuse of technology has been part of this, as it has been of so many of the other elections where this has taken place.

• 17:55Rory Stewart?

  So on this bigger issue, because you're framing the biggest strategic issue, I really believe that we are in the middle of an age of populism. And it's an age of populism that really got going sort of 2014 to 16. So that's kind of Modi, Bolsonaro, Trump, Brexit, et cetera. And there was a moment with Joe Biden's election and Trump's defeat, where it felt as though maybe the pendulum was swinging back in another direction. But I think the underlying drivers of populism. Which go all the way back to the 2008 financial crisis and inequality and problems of globalization and social media are very, very durable.

• 18:37Rory Stewart?

  And that sadly, what we're seeing, that, you know, we get these moments of what seem to be good news, Macron's election, for example. But as you've pointed out, under the surface of Macron's election is something very, very worrying, which is actually that the stronger trend is the deep development of these far-left, far-right parties and a real worry about what on earth replaces him.

• 18:59Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the other thing, of course, is the, this is going to be worsened by the conjunction of the energy crisis and the Ukraine war. You're already seeing, and the fact that Liz Truss can even appoint somebody like Jacob Rees-Mogg to be the business secretary, when business, we know, I think, does have actually the center of gravity in business is actually concerned about the future of the environment. But the whole net zero campaign, that's the next sort of target for the populist right. And you can see how easy that's going to be for them. Your bills are going up. Why should you pay the price to save the planet for future generations? It's almost like, you know, what have future generations ever done for me? And that's the game that they're going to play.

• 19:41Rory Stewart?

  And of course, the problem is that one of the things that particularly right-wing governments attempted to do is effectively put the burden on the very poorest. Because what they're doing is they're trying to put a carbon tax on the consumption of carbon, which has a good economic logic and it makes sense for an economist. But the truth is that that carbon consumption is a much larger proportion of the budget of somebody who's poor than somebody who's wealthy.

• 20:04Alastair Campbell?

  So it would have been very interesting, Rory, if the Queen had not died on the day that she did. And it was kind of extraordinary. There's Liz Truss, a new prime minister, on her feet in the House of Commons, announcing this extraordinarily large energy crisis package. And a very, very, very clear dividing line emerging where she thinks this should not be paid for by windfall taxes, it should be paid by borrowing and loading onto future generations. The thing that they've said during the leadership election, they would never do. And Keir Starmer, very, very clear that it should be. You saw any of the debate. I did think it was one of Keir Starmer's better moments than that. I thought he really was pretty clear and pretty strong and very, very, the dividing line was clear. And of course, that debate has now just vanished for now.

• 20:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 20:49Alastair Campbell?

  But it's going to come back and it'll be very interesting to see how that plays out.

• 20:55Rory Stewart?

  We'll come back very soon because you're quite right. There's been an enormous amount of coverage of the new king, but I think that's something that will pass very quickly. And then we'll be back to the brutal reality of what's happening in our economy. On the populism side, I'm speaking to you from Kenya, from Nairobi, where the new president.

• 21:12Alastair Campbell?

  Ruto.

• 21:13Rory Stewart?

  Yep, William Ruto is going to be sworn in, inaugurated tomorrow. I was actually at the last inauguration of here of Uhuru Kenyatta, his predecessor. This is another classic populist story. So in this case in Kenya, the old establishment really tried to come together. And it felt as though they could really guarantee stitching up the election. So Adinga represents the Luo community and Kenyatta, the previous president, got behind him. And he represents the Kukuyu community and it felt like there was no way they could be defeated. The maths were all in their favour. And it was a classic campaign run by an older man and Ruto, who was very much the insurgent, younger, been part of political youth movements.

• 21:55Rory Stewart?

  Actually, a history of violence was indicted by the International Criminal Court. But very much self-made. I mean, Adinga's father, Kenyatta's father, were huge politicians in their own right. William Ruto ran a campaign called Hustler Nation. And he's the hustler, came from nothing, built a fortune.

• 22:16Alastair Campbell?

  He's very Trumpian.

• 22:17Rory Stewart?

  Very Trumpian, very, very Trumpian and very much a strong man. And very much, you know, challenging a lot of the orthodoxies and but a bit like Trump, also got some right-wing economists on side by talking quite a extreme line on on on economics. And it was one of these classic results where you, Mombasa, which was supposed to be the real heartland that was meant to be delivering for Adinga, didn't really turn out, didn't really vote for him in the way they were supposed to. And the Luo turnouts were low. And the Kukui vote was split and he got his base out. I mean, this is one of the things the populists do so well. He got that base out and voting when people thought he couldn't. And he's taken the election. And it's a real sign, both of troubling populism,

• 23:00Rory Stewart?

  but also a very positive sign, because it's broken.

• 23:04Alastair Campbell?

  It's broken the stranglehold.

• 23:05Rory Stewart?

  It's broken the stranglehold of the old establishment. It's broken the idea that it's all defined by ethnicity. It isn't anymore in Kenya for the first time. And the election result was upheld, and there wasn't the widespread violence that people were predicting. So in many ways, it's a really, the institutions worked. It's a very impressive moment for Kenyan democracy.

• 23:24Alastair Campbell?

  We had a few critics this week, Roy, I don't even notice in the questions of people saying that I thought this is very unfair, but they thought that we were a bit belittling of what was happening in Chile last week. I don't think we were belittling at all. I think we were shocked that the result was so big, given that so many people had wanted a new constitution.

• 23:40Rory Stewart?

  Why did they think we were belittling? What did they think?

• 23:42Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know. I think because I think because we laughed at the point during the, and maybe that's just our, our humour coming out too.

• 23:48Rory Stewart?

  We shouldn't laugh too much. I shouldn't laugh too much. There's one more thing on Kenya quickly before we go to Ukraine. I was in these very drought affected areas in Kalifi yesterday. And if you want to see climate change in action, generally people tell stories from things like Lake Chad, which is famously retreating 500 metres a year. So villages eventually are just too far away to even walk for the water. Or they talk stories of Somalia. They don't focus more on the much more complicated, but much more, almost much more worrying story of climate change, which is the way that it's happening in almost every country of the world. And it's a more complicated story. So in the case of Kenya, I was in villages which give directly been supporting, but which have been hit very hard by drought. So you'd go into the maize granaries and

• 24:33Rory Stewart?

  there was no maize because the entire crop had been wiped out, just shriveled tusks from last year's. You could see the bones on the cows. One woman I was talking to had lost all her livestock. I went out with the young men who were walking their cows out forage. They're now walking miles and miles and miles to try to get a scrap of grass to keep them alive. And it's microclimate stuff. Part of the reason why it's a difficult story to tell is we then drove another 25 miles and found a village where there actually had been some rainfall and everybody was much better off. But I very difficult for journalists to tell these stories because I don't know whether editors can really bring them alive for British voters. But if you want to see climate change and how devastating it's being and why 200 million more people are likely to be pushed into poverty, we've got to learn how to tell

• 25:17Rory Stewart?

  these sort of micro stories from places like Kenya.

• 25:20Alastair Campbell?

  But I think the problem with the whole debate on climate change is that the media, large parts of the media, they don't cover climate change, they cover the weather. It's about the weather. So we hear about it when we see these flash floods and we see, you know, Pakistan underwater and it's about the rescue and it's about the operation. But actually, bizarrely, the lot, the more impactful these events have been, I think we're actually having less debate about climate change than we did. So and what you're saying there, I mean, even as you were saying that, I was imagining a journalist going to an editorial meeting and saying, let's go and do something about how climate change is affecting farming in Kenya. Are they going to look at you and say, well, you know, shouldn't we be doing,

• 26:03Alastair Campbell?

  shouldn't we be doing something else about Prince Charles? Anyway, shall we, shall we, shall we take a break and come back and talk about extraordinary events in Ukraine?

• 26:10Rory Stewart?

  We will. Thank you.

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• 28:14Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Restless Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 28:18Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 28:19Rory Stewart?

  And we were moving on to the extraordinary developments in Ukraine. Do you just want to remind us what's been happening over the last few days?

• 28:27Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I mean, I do think if it hadn't been for the for the Queen, this would have been like huge news. And in fact, even though the Queen has been the main story in pretty much every country in the world, I have been even more than usually getting my news from foreign sources because I think people have realized this is, I think potentially it's extraordinary. And when you when you have people like Laurie Friedman, the historian at King's, talking about this being a tipping point, then you have to take that seriously. I mean, Zelensky is saying, and you've got to be careful with this because the media can't get to the front line. A lot of the information that we're getting is from Telegram videos that have been posted and from official Ukrainian claims.

• 29:11Alastair Campbell?

  They're talking about as of now, as of today, as we're speaking, more than 3,000 square kilometers being taken, including these very, very important supply line places, Izium and Kupyansk. And the Russians admitting that they've had to, the phrase they use was retreat to regroup. And you're also seeing So extraordinary, I noticed John Simpson on the BBC this morning, he tweeted that somebody called Igor Gierkin, who used to work for the SFB and is a huge Vladimir Putin supporter, saying that what's happening around Kharkiv is similar to what happened in the

• 29:52Alastair Campbell?

  Battle of Mukden in 1905, when Japan destroyed the Tsar's army. And that led to ultimately led to the revolution.

• 30:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:02Alastair Campbell?

  So it feels very, very special.

• 30:05Rory Stewart?

  Just on that one, though. So I think it's a double edged sword, people like Gierkin's comments, because he, of course, is using this to now argue for a massive national mobilization in Russia.

• 30:18Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely.

• 30:18Rory Stewart?

  So the big threat now to Putin is now increasingly coming not from more pro-Western critics of the human rights abuses in Ukraine, it's coming from nationalist Russians who feel he's not doing enough. In fact, the overwhelming Russian population is very much in favor of what's going on, as far as one can tell from the polling polls. And there is now big demands on Russian television, on social media, and it seems to be being allowed by the regime, demanding national mobilization. And that's including very sinister people like the Chechen leader, who's been out demanding action. So there's a real move now, which may mean that this counterattack, this incredibly successful counterattack, may provoke, or at least there are people in Russia who are trying to push for it to

• 31:03Rory Stewart?

  provoke a very, very brutal mobilization and reaction. I also, just, just, one other thing that I was thinking about on this is, is the morale collapse. Because basically what's happened, there's been fantastic jokes from the Ukrainians on social media saying, "Thank you so much to the Russian military who continue their role as our largest defense supplier," with photographs of all these abandoned Russian tanks and stuff. But basically, the Russian soldiers don't know what they're fighting for, is at the core of the problem. They were told they were going in to deal with Nazis, then they were told they were going to go and take Kiev, then they were told they weren't taking Kiev. Many of them have deserted. Morale is absolute rock bottom. They've just been sold this amazingly simple deception plan where the Ukrainians

• 31:48Rory Stewart?

  just basically said they were going to attack on the south and then attacked on the east and the Russians responded by moving all their troops to the south. I mean, it's a catastrophe.

• 31:56Alastair Campbell?

  The other, the other thing, I do agree with you, by the way, the stuff, the criticism that is coming out, which you've seen a little bit on state TV, you've actually seen it also, TASS, the official news agency, reporting quite negatively about some of this stuff. And there's another ex FSB guy, a guy called Strelkov, who said this, "Tonight, the capital of our motherland, Moscow, salutes the surrender of Bakhcheev, Izium and哈尔夫库皮安sk with high altitude fireworks." And this was Putin going to this 875th anniversary party and boasting that they now had the biggest Ferris wheel in the world. And it did make him look incredibly out of touch with what's going on. But whether that's being sanctioned, and of course, the other point that analysts

• 32:39Alastair Campbell?

  are making about this is that if we should be worried about a strong Russia under Putin, we should also be worried about a weak Russia under Putin, because the more that he feels he's either being humiliated or put into a corner, don't forget, his whole strategy has been driven by his insight that the collapse of the Berlin, collapse of the Berlin Wall and the breakup of the Soviet Union was an utter humiliation. It's all been about rebuilding from that. And he's now being described as having been humiliated by this little guy in a brown vest who goes around, you know, putting out videos every night. So I think he is, you know, none of us, like, it's a bit like with the Queen, none of us really know what's going on inside Vladimir Putin's head. But it's, this is, these are, these are dangerous days, the next few days.

• 33:24Rory Stewart?

  Very dangerous. And, and remember, we were talking about the fact that during the classic May Day parade, he didn't announce a national mobilization when people expected him to. He hasn't used tactical nuclear weapons, but all those options remain to him.

• 33:37Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think the thing about the draft, I mean, you talked about the opinion polls, and of course, it's very hard to know whether an opinion poll in Russia means anything. But I wonder whether, whether mothers in particular, we talk about Russian mothers, if there were to be a draft, when they know, they do know, despite state propaganda, that an awful lot of people have been dying. Whether that actually will even, whether that might be the moment that the people really, really do turn.

• 34:01Rory Stewart?

  So I think it depends partly, I mean, I think Putin, part of him will be thinking about the Afghan experience. And of course, Afghanistan, this Russian Soviet experience in Afghanistan was one of the things that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was the terrible humiliation of tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers dying year after year and being smuggled back in secret. I went to see Russian veterans of the Afghan war in Moscow. I went to a bar with them and it's a very, very troubling, disturbing story. And I think that there may be somewhere in Putin's back of his mind, because he was a KGB officer, of course, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He may fear that getting dragged into

• 34:39Rory Stewart?

  very deep intractable conflicts. And of course, as we said before, Ukraine is not Afghanistan. Some of these veterans I was with in the bars had very kind of racist views about Afghanistan. Some of them were respectful, some sort of talked about worried people, but there was also a sense that this was very much a third world country. Ukraine, of course, the rhetoric is from the ultra-nationalists, this is really part Russia. It would be more like, I don't know, we keep stupid analogies, but it'd be more like Britain trying to invade Ireland or something. I mean, it's, it causes a much deeper psychic tension amongst Russians.

• 35:17Alastair Campbell?

  I hope Liz Truss is not listening. We don't want to put this thought in anybody's head. The other thing that's happening this week that I think will be really interesting, if it goes ahead, I mean, it'd be interesting whether Putin actually feels he has to stay in Moscow. But there's this thing called the Shanghai Cooperation Association, which is meeting this week, and this is China, I mean, it's basically called the sort of dictator's club, but it's China, Russia, and they're planning to allow Iran.

• 35:50Alastair Campbell?

  To enter.

• 35:51Rory Stewart?

  Great.

• 35:52Alastair Campbell?

  And at the moment, it's basically, it's China, Russia and a few of the, I think it's Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, I think the Saudis are there or thereabouts, Belarus are there or thereabouts. And it's, and they're meeting, the, the, the plan, I think this was when they felt they were on the up, they're meeting in Samarkand and with the symbolism of the Silk Road and the great game that they're winning and so forth. So, but I think what Xi, what Xi Jinping and the Chinese will be thinking about what's happening in Ukraine at the moment, that is the bit of this that I would really love to know because I think they, they must be a bit alarmed. They are taking extra heat from the Americans on Taiwan because of what Putin's

• 36:35Alastair Campbell?

  done. There's no sense of real progress that they thought might be happening. So I, I think this could be, could be interesting.

• 36:42Rory Stewart?

  These Chinese-Russian relations are kind of long and difficult, but there's definitely, I think, a sense in China, along with sympathy with the anti-Western rhetoric coming out of Putin, a real sense that Russia failed, that it's humiliated itself, that this is exactly the kind of thing that China would not do. And China has been quite careful to toe a neutral line. They haven't fallen over backwards to provide support for Russia on this. Putin would have expected much, much more support. Remember, we were talking about this after the Winter Olympics, that maybe there was some cunning plan, that China was going to come in hard behind Russia. That, that hasn't happened. So I think, I mean, you know, I'm, again, I'm in on China, I mean, I'm in the heart of this here. I, I came up from Mombasa, there's a huge train line that Chinese

• 37:26Rory Stewart?

  have just built. It's a Chinese train on Chinese rails, and it's run by Chinese train operators and arrives on the minute in Nairobi. The one thing actually very disappointing is there's not a Chinese dining car. I was hoping for delicious Chinese food, but that, that, that was not coming on the train. But also fascinating on, on development and things. I mean, one of things happening here, which you could imagine from British politics, is this train line, which is moving all the goods and is meant to move them from the port of Mombasa up to Nairobi and even up to Uganda. Both political candidates have offered in their electoral campaign to stop the train line entirely because the truckers from Mombasa have all lost their jobs. They

• 38:09Rory Stewart?

  were supposed to be, their, their jobs were driving the trucks up and down the main road. Very polluting, very bad for the environment, totally inefficient, blocks all the roads. But this beautiful new train, which is actually, it's extraordinary cost. I mean, people estimate that it's costing 25% of the GDP of Kenya, so huge debt to China to try to pay it off. Both presidential candidates at some point suggested they were just going to stop the train entirely and go back to driving stuff on trucks.

• 38:33Alastair Campbell?

  Wow. I do think, by the way, we should recognise, because I don't, I don't think the guy gets nearly enough credit for what's happening in Ukraine. The reason, one of the main reasons for this extraordinary military turnaround, if that's what it is, has been the incredible commitment that Joe Biden and the Americans have put into providing the weaponry. And I know Britain's been part of that as well, we should recognise that too. But I think Joe Biden has, and I think part of his thinking throughout this thing has been in relation to China, because it does, it has troubled the Chinese. And I think that Putin now, if he is as desperate as people are saying he is, he will be looking to China for support.

• 39:15Alastair Campbell?

  If that support is not forthcoming, it weakens his alliance with the Sino-Russian alliance. If it is forthcoming, then that is a massive risk that the Chinese are playing vis-à-vis the Americans. So I think, what do I know, but I do think Xi Jinping will be looking at Putin rather differently than he was at the Winter Olympics.

• 39:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, the United States is such a central player in all this stuff. So I think even last month, there were well over $50 billion of assistance to Ukraine. And incredible weaponry they're providing. And as countryside Britain, very sadly, you know, our budgets are under pressure, we're cutting international development, something we've talked about a lot. I believe in the latest humanitarian response in the Horn of Africa, the United States is carrying 93% of the burden, financial burden of that extreme famine humanitarian response to drought, as players like the United Kingdom, but also the European Union. Are really not doing as much as the United States in these areas. I mean, America's carrying a lot of burden around the world.

• 40:19Rory Stewart?

  And it's sad in a way that actually other players haven't stepped up as much as one hopes because of course, America, you know, is still about the same size of world economy as it's been for many decades, but you would have thought these emerging powers would begin to play a bigger role in this stuff and they haven't quite stepped up.

• 40:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there we are. I think we said we were going to do the Queen, Ukraine, Kenya, Sweden. Anything else you'd like to tell a grateful public, Rory?

• 40:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, grateful public. Well, what we want to know actually, you're saying maybe this is unfair, but you're seeming a little bit chappier than when we saw you last week. Are you feeling a bit better or is it still a bit tough?

• 40:53Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, I'm feeling a lot better. I feel a lot better. Thank you. Thank you for asking. I do feel a lot better. I feel I'm definitely through the worst. I had a peak when we recorded, I think it was two or three, was it two or three weeks ago? When I was really, really bad and then about a week to 10 days where I was struggling. And I feel I'm through the other side, which is a nice, nice thing. And I just better warn you, Rory, that when I get through the other side, I can get, I can start again with the 4am email saying, what the hell is going on? And why aren't we doing this? So the manic side kicks in a bit, but no, thank you for asking. I've got my, I've got my mojo back.

• 41:33Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Well, lots of love and see you for question time.

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