478. Farage’s Crypto Megadonor and the Graduate Jobs Disaster (Question Time)

Why has a crypto billionaire living in Thailand donated £9 million to Nigel Farage's party, Reform UK? With a graduate jobs crisis in full swing and rising debt, what are the prospects for young Brits? Can the fragile Gaza ceasefire realistically hold? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. Gift The Rest Is Politics Plus this Christmas - give someone a whole year of Rory and Alastair’s miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. Just go to https://therestispolitics.supportingcast.fm/gifts And of course, you can still join for yourself any time at therestispolitics.com or on apple podcasts. Shop Tesco food this Christmas, either in-store or online. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away free TRIP Plus membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP Plus gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ ⚡ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Senior Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

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• 2:05Alastair Campbell?

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• 3:12Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Restless Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 3:15Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. We're going to talk about Nigel Farage and all this money coming his way. We're going to talk about young people and the particular challenges that they feel. And we're going to do that as part of a discussion about the ongoing fallout from our interview with Zach Polanski. Rory's just been in Doha, so we're going to talk about issues to do with the Middle East and Syria. And we're going to talk about the FIFA World Cup draw. So Rory, first question is what?

• 3:41Rory Stewart?

  First question is about reform and this whole question around donations. So Nathan, Trip Plus member Shropshire, Reform UK has received a donation of £9 million from a crypto trader, making this the second largest political donation since records began in 2001, second only to a donation from John Sainsbury on his death of £10 million to Conservatives in 2022. Should this be more heavily regulated? If so, how can the system be changed to allow smaller parties to receive adequate funding without resorting to large private donations by private individuals? Just a quick thing, international listeners in the US are going to think, oh goodness.

• 4:20Rory Stewart?

  In a sense, how sweet. I mean, the US elections are now crossing a billion dollars apiece. Big donors are putting in over a hundred million dollars indirectly into these things, particularly through different forms of structure. They may even think that we're lucky, we're only talking nine, 10 million at the moment. But anyway, I'm disgusted, I'm very worried, and over to you.

• 4:40Alastair Campbell?

  You're right that Americans will think, why are we talking about this because it's peanuts? But I think one of the reasons that our politics is less corrupt, less dirty. I mean, I'm not saying we don't have issues to do with corruption, we do. But the last time I can remember Americans laughing at us was when the whole MPs expenses scandal, where they thought, you know, are these guys really going to jail because they, they fiddled a bit on their expenses. I think we underestimate just how much this kind of stuff is inbuilt in the American system. We don't have laws against the size of a donation. You can give all the money you want to a party if you want, but we do have laws on campaign spending during elections. And in fact, the other Nigel Farage story this week was the,

• 5:22Alastair Campbell?

  the police investigating whether he overspent in the election in Clacton, which led to him becoming an MP. And that's one that will just take its course. I think I'm right in saying, I thought these cases were time limited and the election was more than 12 months ago and you have to bring them within 12 months. I don't know, but so we'll see where that one goes. But this, one interesting thing to say, Rory, I mean, Nigel Farage parades as a man of the people. Seventy-five percent of all the donations that have been made to Reform and to the Brexit Party when it existed in the last six years have come from three men, one of whom is this guy who's now given this nine million donation, Richard Tice, who's the deputy leader, and a businessman called Jeremy, Jeremy Hosking.

• 6:04Alastair Campbell?

  So they parade, as you know, a bit like American politicians do, five dollars here, 10 dollars there. They get most of their money from people who want reform in power. Why would a multimillion cryptocurrency dealer based in Thailand want Nigel Farage in power, I wonder? And I do think we should, it goes back to what we talked about in the main episode, we should wake up the extent to which a lot of this kind of stuff is now internationalised. So Nigel Farage, he does want a more American-style politics. He does want to be able to raise money from super wealthy people to allow him to open new accounts,

• 6:47Alastair Campbell?

  to campaign more on TikTok and all the other stuff that he does. So I think we should be worried about this. You and I said before the election, we've said many, many times since, I think there is an opportunity and a need for an overall review of the way our politics is done. From my perspective, I think there should be a ban on all foreign donations, and to my mind, if you're living in Thailand, that's a foreign donation. There should be no titles and honours and peerages given to donors. I think that would staunch quite a lot of the flow. And I think our politics is not in a good place, and this does not help it.

• 7:24Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think we must be much more radical. And I think here we can actually, we need to go to our great mutual hero in South Australia, who has said there are not going to be private donations coming in anymore. And there are two ways of doing it. I mean, one thing which I think is brilliant in Britain, and I keep trying to sell to colleagues in America, is the limits on spending. The great thing when you're running for a constituency MP, it only works at a constituency level, but at a constituency level, you're capped on how much you could spend. So when I was running, I think it was seventeen thousand pounds in the long campaign, twenty five thousand pounds in the short campaign. And that sum of money, so sort of forty thousand pounds stretched over a few months, even

• 8:07Rory Stewart?

  the greediest Member of Parliament, I don't think can be bought and turned into an instrument of somebody else's interest for that kind of money. It's something that you can raise in small donations easily in your constituency. You don't need to take donations more than one or two thousand pounds, most. And you can't be bought. The problem is these parties spending millions upon millions. I mean, the the Labour and Conservative war chests going into the last election stretched into the tens of millions. And if you replace that with limits on spending and then state funding, I know that many people won't like the idea of state funding, but state funding for these campaigns, it's much more likely to reduce the influence. So we've talked

• 8:52Rory Stewart?

  about reform, but of course, Chris Hubbard was a big Conservative donor before. You know, he gave an enormous amount of money to the Conservative Party, particularly under Boris, before he started funding Farage. Labour, you know, we had in David Sainsbury gave five million pounds to Labour under Keir Starmer, gave eight million to the Lib Dems during the Jeremy Corbyn era. Sainsbury's daughter Fran Perrin gave two million to the party under Starmer's leadership. The Unions gave about seven million pounds. Gary Lubner from Auto Glass gave six million pounds to the party under Starmer. Dale Vince from Ecotricity gave four million pounds to the party since 2014. There are hedge fund supremos, there are bankers. Wahid Ali given seven hundred thousand pounds to the party, as

• 9:37Rory Stewart?

  well as, of course, this famous ludicrous scandal about buying Starmer's glasses and clothes for his wife and for members of the Cabinet. So it's rotten to the core. I mean, I just to sort of reinforce this, I didn't see this. I was talking to a Labour MP about this two days ago. You don't see it when you're running for your own constituency elections because the sums of money are limited and they're so small. But once I began running for the leadership, where you were trying to raise hundreds of thousands of pounds, and then when I was running to be Mayor of London, where you were trying to raise millions of pounds, you're then in a very, very bad situation because you're then reliant on people writing you cheques for hundreds of thousands of pounds. And by definition, there are only two categories of people who can do that. Either trade unions for Labour

• 10:21Rory Stewart?

  or enormously wealthy individuals. And the question you have to ask yourself again and again, why are they giving you the money? This is not a charitable donation. It's not, you know, deductible against their charitable things. They're giving you the money because they think you are going to further their particular interests in the world. And this is completely unfair.

• 10:39Alastair Campbell?

  I think there are some people who give donations because they genuinely believe. In the cause that they're donating to and don't necessarily want anything in return. But I think we've allowed a system to develop where there is an awful lot of nudge and a wink, quid pro quo stuff goes on, and that is in its own way a form of corruption. And you mentioned Peter Malanowski, and of course, you know, I've written my column about Peter this week because he's done two things. When I first met him at the Adelaide Book Festival a couple of years ago now, he said he was going to ban political funding and he was going to bring in a ban on social media for children. Right? He's done both of them. And so social media, that has now gone federal. He started it in South Australia.

• 11:23Alastair Campbell?

  It's now federal law, it's coming this week. And the political funding, he's done it. It's now law. Now, he had to go out and win an argument for state funding for that. Okay? He's coming up to an election in March. Believe me, Rory, he's going to absolutely walk it. And I think he's going to walk it. Look, it helps that he's incredibly good looking and he's very smart and all the rest of it. And it probably helps him even more that his main opponent quit last week and has plunged his party into a leadership election because they're so far behind in the polls. I think one of the reasons he's doing so well is because he's doing big things that require difficult argument that he makes over time.

• 12:01Rory Stewart?

  Things that people told him were impossible.

• 12:03Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 12:04Rory Stewart?

  And were against his own interests. I remember when we had lunch with him in London, he was pointing out that he was getting more donations than anyone else. So his party was saying, why would you stop private donations when you're getting all the donations and your opponents aren't, right? And that's of course why successive Conservative and Labour governments don't get rid of the donations, because whenever they're in office, people are giving more money to the government. So it's, but it worked for him. Um, listen, let me just, you pulled me up on that. Of course, people give money without wanting a quid pro quo. And I was very, very lucky in both the leadership election and in the London mayoral election to have people who genuinely I'd known for many, many years and were friends and would never have dreamt of asking for something back.

• 12:47Rory Stewart?

  But it's still not a good system. It would be a much, much better if we limited spending and we brought in state funding. Because let's even take that point that I just made. You know, maybe I'm lucky for my own background and class reasons to know very wealthy people who've been friends of mine for 30 years and can give me money without wanting anything in return. That's completely unfair. That won't be true for 99% of the people running against me. So. Money out, money out.

• 13:14Alastair Campbell?

  Let's go on to a question from Will, who's a TripPlus member from Manchester. Having followed the fallout from your interview with Zach Polanski, is there a risk, asked Will, that two white, wealthy, successful, older men, I don't know if you're an older man yet Rory, but you know, I don't get where he's coming from, don't fully understand the scale of challenges facing our generation? Enana from Edinburgh, I'm in my final year at university, my friends are already sending hundreds of job applications and still getting rejected. With rising competition, fewer opportunities, AI impact to the budget on student loans, and worsening intergenerational inequality, is there still hope for graduates? And the reason I think we should take those two questions together Rory is I think that

• 13:57Alastair Campbell?

  we had a massive response to the Zach Polanski interview. We then had another wave of response to the fact that Gary Stevenson, the city trader turned wealth tax campaigner, was, I think got justifiably a bit pissed off that you said he wasn't really a proper economist, when he's got a degree and a masters and from the same university as you went to. And that sparked off a whole new debate about this Polanski thing. But I think that's where this is all coming from, is a lot of young people in particular feeling that politics and the political class, so-called, don't really get it when it comes to this inequality. Now, I think I do get it because I know, I was talking to somebody last week who has

• 14:41Alastair Campbell?

  been really smart, young guy who has finally found a job after about 18 months of trying because they're just being rejected. So Rory, what was, you know, you've now had a couple of weeks to think about this. We've had a lot of feedback, you've had quite a lot of anger on social media. What's your take on how we did the interview and what you think about both of those questions, really?

• 15:05Rory Stewart?

  Well firstly, thank you so much for engaging. I mean, I don't think we've done an interview since Ahmed El Shara, the Syrian president who we interviewed in, in January, which has got quite as much engagement feedback. I mean, it's been incredible on every side. We've had The Lib Dems taking us and using our entire interview as part of their communication strategy against the Greens. We've got the Greens suddenly using it as an opportunity to explain theory. We've got Chris Williamson leaning in from the Corbyn side. We've got academics. We've got Gary Stevenson. It's been all over YouTube. And we've had the listeners. We've had Trip Plus members. We've had listeners of every different age suddenly engaging with some of the most fundamental questions about the way the Bank

• 15:48Rory Stewart?

  of England operates and the way that we finance our country. Thank you.

• 15:51Alastair Campbell?

  Tell you what Rory, if you're a clever, malign Green Party press officer, you can listen back to that last answer and just put together a little press release saying, Rory Stewart compares Zach Polanski with former terrorist leader Ahmed Al Sharari. You've got to be very careful about how you frame things Rory.

• 16:10Rory Stewart?

  Well, I'm hoping no longer being a politician, I have to be less careful. But you're completely right. I'm being demolished on social media over the last two weeks. I've now got the whole MAGA crowd after me. This guy Alex Brusovitz, who is, you know, Trump's favourite social media guy, has now swamped the social media space with attacks on me. So it's, it's, I'm really doing really well. I've got Zach, I've got Gary Stevenson, I've got Alex Brusovitz, I've got Femi from Novara Media. I mean, it's, it's really, I'm, I'm really feeling the love at the moment.

• 16:42Alastair Campbell?

  As long as you're tagging Rest Is Politics every time Rory, that's the main.

• 16:45Rory Stewart?

  I remain quite proud of that interview with one exception, which is I shouldn't have attacked Gary Stevenson on the basis of what kind of degrees he had. Because, you know, I don't have those degrees. And obviously, I feel that I get to talk about things and I should be judged on whether I'm right or wrong, and whether my arguments stack up, not what bits of paper I have. On Gary, I, like Gary, I think that book is one of the best books that I've read in the last few years, and I endorsed it on the cover. I pulled him onto the podcast because I admire him so much. I shouldn't have gone down that route. It is absolutely nothing to do with background. I knew from the book that he'd

• 17:26Rory Stewart?

  been to the LSE. What I didn't think was that he was an academic economist. And of course, I hadn't picked up on the fact that after he had finished all the stuff described in the book, he went and did an M Phil at Oxford, did a master's degree in economics at Oxford. And I suppose at my heart was a silly.

• 17:46Rory Stewart?

  Prejudice that he's not an academic professor with a doctorate, teaching at one of these universities, but that isn't the point. The point is, I disagree with Gary's ideas. I should have focused on his ideas. And I don't like being attacked about my qualifications, which are less than Gary's. And I certainly shouldn't have been attacking him about his. So people quite rightly would say, well, why did you do it? And I've explained why I shouldn't have done it. We should have played the ideas, not the man. The answer is, in the context, what happens in that interview is that we say to Zach Planck, he says, I'm not going to pretend to be an economist. What I am, though, is someone who listens to brilliant economists. In other words, he's not over all the details of this, but he's appealing to authority, saying there are these other people. And that, of course, is what tempted me to say, who on earth are these people?

• 18:31Rory Stewart?

  And then when I heard Gary Stevenson, Richard Murthy, Grace Blakely, who were the people he initially mentioned, I thought, well, wait a second, these people are not professors, they're not Nobel Prize winning economists. I shouldn't have done that. And actually, he mentioned also James Midway, who is an academic economist. So this whole path I went down was me being tempted in an argumentative state into something I shouldn't have done. I don't have these qualifications. He doesn't have these qualifications, and it shouldn't be about qualifications. It should be about ideas.

• 19:03Alastair Campbell?

  But if we go to Will's question about whether people like us, people who are, whether we like or not, seen as part of the political class, that we we might see things in terms of, well, if you've got a Nobel Prize, that means you're legitimate. If you've got a, if you can call yourself doctor or professor, that means you're superior. And I think what, I think the class point is quite important, because if you remember during the interview with Gary Stevenson, you said to him, when he was saying, I can't get in to see these politicians, they're not interested in somebody like me. And you said, I think you overdo this class thing a bit. And I wonder whether you. Automatically assuming that Gary Stevenson wouldn't necessarily be a proper economist is partly driven by that sense you had of him, that he's basically...

• 19:48Rory Stewart?

  Nah, nah, Alison, nah.

• 19:50Alastair Campbell?

  No?

• 19:50Rory Stewart?

  No, of course not.

• 19:51Alastair Campbell?

  You sure?

• 19:52Rory Stewart?

  Listen, I knew, I'd read his book carefully, I'd interviewed him carefully, I knew that he'd done an undergraduate degree at LSE, that he had a very good brain. Um, the context in which that came from was Polanski saying defensively, I don't know anything about economics, but I'm quoting all these brilliant economists, right? What I should have then gone to do, which would have been the right thing to do, is say, okay, this is why I disagree with Gary Stevenson, Grace Blakely, Richard Murphy, why I think they're wrong about these issues. Instead of which, I attack their qualifications. So I should have kept the argument around ideas rather than around qualifications, but I didn't think class has anything to do with it.

• 20:25Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, because, but you said, I don't even remember this, you said to, on leading, that you thought Gary was, quote, blinded by class anger. And I, see, I sometimes feel this, that I think that people always think of class warfare as chippy, working class people who think the establishment have got in for them. But I think there is also a sense sometimes of, of people of a, of, of, you know, from your sort of background, who actually sometimes have stereotypical views of working class people, and I think that's what Gary felt.

• 20:56Rory Stewart?

  I know, I know that's what he felt, and I know that's what he felt, but listen, I simply don't accept, I'm afraid, Gary's view that the reason why the cabinet won't talk to him is because of his social background.

• 21:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I thi- I think the cabinet, I think the cabinet will and do.

• 21:08Rory Stewart?

  I admire Gary immensely, but I think, again, just as I was wrong to put the focus on qualifications, I think he's wrong to put the focus on class, let's keep this on ideas. And the ideas point is where the problem is, right? So people think that I'm trying to shut down Zach Polanski because I don't care about inequality. No, I'm trying to shut it down because I'm saying that his ideas, I believe, will not help inequality. It's not going to make, if we follow his theory on debt and the deficit borrowing, it's not going to make Britain wealthier, it's not going to help people who are worse off. Making the state ever larger, which is what we've been doing over the last 25 years, has not actually contributed to a growing economy.

• 21:51Rory Stewart?

  And that really the thing that's driving the problem with people getting jobs is technology. You know, we are now manufacturing motor cars with a fraction of the workforce for making the same cars 20 years ago. And AI is making it much, much worse. And one of the problems with the whole worldview, which I'm not quite sure whether to say is Zach Plank's worldview or not, because of course, one of his rhetorical moves is to say, I'm not really an economist. Presumably what he means by this, I don't really understand all this stuff, but there's some other people out here who are my authorities, who I think understand the stuff I'm quoting. But they're not dealing with the question of technology and AI. They seem to assume that the problem is that we haven't understood some clever trick that you can play in monetary policy and some trick the Bank of England could do, which would sort out all our problems.

• 22:37Rory Stewart?

  Actually, our problems are about productivity.

• 22:39Alastair Campbell?

  And what about Will's central point is that, and this isn't just about us, but I think what the criticism of us and the way that we handle those discussions is that we were very critical of somebody trying to put an alternative view. But we don't have an alternative view to an economic system that is actually failing. And that that I think is, and I think there is something in this sense that people sort of, and this is what I think was one of the problems with the budget is it, it felt very kind of same old, same old. Massive, massive problems being identified. Let's have a bit more tax, let's have a bit more spend. Where are the new ideas coming from? And I think when you go through the sort of list of things that Eleanor writes in her, in her question.

• 23:24Alastair Campbell?

  And I'd be interested in coming to you on this because you've been digging into AI for this series that you're doing. Should, should that generation be terrified of the extent to which AI is wiping out and low entry jobs? Because it seems to me that most of the business people I speak to say that that is already happening. And that's why young people are finding it so hard to get work. And then the budget comes along and they find student loans are going to be more expensive over time.

• 23:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, I think AI is the single most important issue for our economy, our politics and our security over the next ten years. These companies are going to be at the heart of everything. We just did a national security strategy episode yesterday. And really, another way of talking about why America thinks that it can dominate the entire world is to do with the way in which its American large language models, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, are going to be right at the heart of everything that we do, the way we fight wars, the way we run the NHS, we run economies. And of course, the promise of these models is that they're going to be more intelligent than humans at certain things, and therefore they're going to replace humans with less employment.

• 24:34Rory Stewart?

  And so we've just done a mini series for TripPlus members. Please go to therestispolitics.com and sign up because it's a real deep dive. I've done it with Matt Clifford, who is was the AI advisor both to Keir Starmer and to Rishi Sunak, and who did the AI Safety Summit, and we're going through the geopolitics of AI, employment in the economy, threats from AI. I I think it is, it's it sounds like technology, but it's not. It's politics. Um, but your your bigger point, look, I I wanna, I think this is so important to everything. This idea that there are somehow radical new ideas out there, that the current systems fail, that what we need is people to produce some astonishing new idea that's going to change everything

• 25:14Rory Stewart?

  is very, very dangerous, right? Very dangerous. I mean, if you applied this to any other bit of life, right? Let's say,

• 25:22Rory Stewart?

  I don't know, you were struggling with cancer treatment and you became obsessed with the idea that the old system of medicine isn't working. We need a radical new one, right?

• 25:30Alastair Campbell?

  Or research.

• 25:31Rory Stewart?

  It it it creates the world of Trump. It creates the sense of change for change's sake. The system's broken, so and what it does is it leaves the window open for snake oil. It leaves the window open for people to say, well, you know, I've got a radical new proposal that's suddenly going to make the country much wealthier, everybody much more equal and deal with the problem that it's expensive buying a house in London, right? I personally think that that is not the way to think about this, that the basic principles of classical economics make mathematical sense and that we should be operating within our basic ideas of savings and investments and the operation of the

• 26:13Rory Stewart?

  bond markets and the way in which free trade works. And therefore, what are our ideas? I would say I would be following my friend Felix Martin. I'd be going supply side. I'd say our energy prices are much too high. We need to make sure that we have policies to make sure the million people who are currently in addition on welfare come off welfare, that we get planning sorted out and start building houses. And above all, that there's a sense of deregulation, energy, drive to support entrepreneurs, making the state smaller and creating more space for innovation and business.

• 26:46Alastair Campbell?

  And on the basis of that, how much do you see coming from the current government in some of that? You give them maybe eight out of 10, maybe on planning, but less on delivery. Where would you be on regulation? Where would you be on innovation? Where would you be on entrepreneurship?

• 27:01Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think that's unfortunately very sad. I mean, I think it's a very cautious treasury view, but it's not a government that's put growth at the centre. And I think the problem with the government is they're neither one thing nor the other. They're neither doing what Zach Polanski would like to do, or many of our listeners would like to do, which is radically leaning into reducing inequality, increasing welfare, taxing the rich, nor are they doing what I would like to do, which is creating a much more vibrant entrepreneurial business. What they're doing, and this is where you put your finger on it, the budget, where you said what she's done is she's done just enough not to alienate the labour back benches and not alienate the bond markets. And that's no route through when Britain's stagnant.

• 27:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I read a thing over the weekend, how many applications? Were submitted for seventeen thousand UK graduate roles in twenty three, twenty four. One point two million.

• 27:54Rory Stewart?

  One point two million. So it's nearly a hundred people, like eighty people applying for each job.

• 27:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so that that that I think goes to the heart of why so many young people you meet say they're spending their time being rejected for jobs. And here's another one for you. The number of graduate roles advertised on one of the country's leading job sites. Percentage rise or fall since last summer. Have a guess.

• 28:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, again, I mean, my whole A I series is about my instinct, which is we're going to find fewer and fewer jobs because of A I and technology, not because the government isn't borrowing and printing money. But I don't know how much it's falling.

• 28:32Alastair Campbell?

  Thirty three percent lower than last last summer.

• 28:34Rory Stewart?

  So a third down already.

• 28:35Alastair Campbell?

  Sixty percent fewer graduate vacancies in twenty twenty five compared with twenty sixteen.

• 28:41Rory Stewart?

  And and then then, Alistair, I guess one of the questions is what what are we training people for? Because if what we've done is we've created a school system that says you've got to get into university in order to get a graduate level job. And a graduate level job is defined as, I don't know, working in a law firm or working in an accountancy firm. And those law and accountancy firms have A I systems now, which are doing most of the work that used to be done by the graduate entrance. We then have to completely rethink the kind of way in which we think about educating people and the kind of jobs that are going to be available for them. But there's no but but but again, this is the problem with Chris Williamson, right? Or I'm being mean to Chris Williamson, but he's one of the guys that's been most active in the criticism service. What what is he suggesting would happen

• 29:26Rory Stewart?

  with his monetary theory? Is it that somehow the government would be creating graduate level jobs in law firms and accountancy firms, even though A I could do those jobs much more cheaply and much more efficiently? And what would that mean for the fact that these businesses are global? They're trying to compete with American Chinese companies who are using A I or reducing their costs. We suddenly end up having generated all this work. Which could be done by computers, and that is not the route sadly to productivity or competitive survival unless you cut yourself off from the whole world.

• 29:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, there was a very interesting explainer on this whole issue on the FT Working It site and they were talking about this thing about the diamond, you have CEO at the top, middle management, and then historically you've had it, it's gone down at that, but what was a triangle has become a diamond because all these lower level jobs are going. And your point about what sort of people are we hiring, there were people who were in the hiring business who was saying that the problem with the, when you get to the diamond is that you've got too few people coming into here who can then do the jobs in the middle. So you are still going to need to hire people. So there was an interview with a law firm who said that even though AI can do a lot of these jobs, they have

• 30:43Alastair Campbell?

  decided they're going to keep hiring. Others were saying, no, we're just going to get rid of those jobs. And there were others then saying, well, that may lead to your company not existing in the future. So listen, I think people will be fascinated by your series that this is the sort of thing that it's going to be looking into. But I guess what the main, I read all the feedback because one of our team did a very good note on all of the emails and all of the social media comments or what have you. And I think that is where they were coming from. As you know, we've got a lot of young listeners and I think they look to us sometimes to give them a bit of hope that politics isn't as bad as it seems, but also where they're really looking for hope at the moment is to think, you know, maybe there are people out there who do understand the level of pressure that

• 31:25Alastair Campbell?

  we're under. I really liked the apprenticeship stuff. I was glad that the conference, Keir Starmer made a big thing of it. I've been critical that they've not rolled it out enough. But actually, I was, I heard Jackie Smith, who's the Skills Minister yesterday, talking about this and it sounded to me like on the apprenticeships thing, there was a bit of meat behind this now. And I think we need to see more of that.

• 31:46Rory Stewart?

  I think the final thing to say is our job is to call people out. I feel that we were very generous actually in the first half of that interview to Zach Plansky. We gave him a lot of chance to speak. I really liked him. I loved the stuff that he said about his identity, his journey. His political journey. I'm also remain proud and defiant about the fact that we were the first media organisation to actually try to ask him basic questions about his economic understanding and data. And I was shocked. He has been the leader of the Green Party for many, many months. And nobody had asked him these questions. He actually said it after the interview. If I'd known you were going to ask me those questions, I would have learnt my lines better. And I thought, rather than being something we should be ashamed of,

• 32:30Rory Stewart?

  or apologising to people, people saying it's gotcha journalism. No, it's holding people to account. And I think just listen to the Michael Gove interview, if people think we only do this to people on the left.

• 32:40Alastair Campbell?

  Or the Anna Wintour interview, where you read some of the American Vogue, suggests it's not the finest Pulitzer Prize winning journalism ever. Anyway, that was a very good discussion, and I think we should revisit at some point. While we've been talking, and I don't think I'm breaking embargo here, because by the time this question time comes out, it will already be out. I'm very, very, very pleased. I've just received a text message saying the government's National Youth Strategy, which is being released today under embargo, says it wants half a million more young people to have access to a trusted adult outside the family home over the next 10 years. So I'm hopeful that is part driven by the work we've been doing on the Lost Boys Task Force.

• 33:23Alastair Campbell?

  So there we are. Some good news, I hope.

• 33:27Rory Stewart?

  Congratulations. Well done. Making a difference. Let's hope we can do the same for farmers. Rural areas.

• 33:33Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, exactly, exactly.

• 33:36Rory Stewart?

  Thank you, Alastair. See you after the break.

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• 35:14Rory Stewart?

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

• 35:18Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Anister Campbell.

• 35:20Rory Stewart?

  And this question is in partnership with Tesco.

• 35:22Alastair Campbell?

  Tesco, who are celebrating the real slightly imperfect moments that make you feel like Christmas. So we thought we'd talk about what Christmas looks like in politics.

• 35:32Rory Stewart?

  Some of it, I think, will just, anybody listening who's been to an office Christmas party can relate. I think this is when Liz Truss used to do her karaoke with her friends, where you get senior cabinet members beginning to get a little bit drunk. You certainly have a lot of staffers partying around. What's your memory of Christmas?

• 35:52Alastair Campbell?

  Christmas in politics, I think, yeah, a few parties, but my, this is going to sound really depressing, but one of the things I really hated about being in Downing Street was this expectation that the Prime Minister had to do a New Year's message and spent most of Christmas worrying about it. Even though I can't remember a single Prime Minister's New Year message that anybody has ever remembered beyond January the 3rd. You do a sort of ChatGPT style, you know, bring together all the cliches of the past 12 years. You're absolutely exhausted, you just want to get away with it. So I remember that. And then I think the other thing, the other thing is, is there's this, I don't know whether it's still the same, but there used to be a hell of a lot of focus on the Christmas

• 36:34Alastair Campbell?

  cards of the Prime Minister, the leader of the opposition and. You know, all these, we used to do all this work about the Christmas garden. I remember thinking it was Shireen there. Let's just put a bloody picture of the family on it and send it out. And they still do that. I'm becoming like a bit of a Grinch, aren't I?

• 36:49Rory Stewart?

  I remember actually the number of times I myself had to skip out to the Tesco Express, which is just on the edge of Westminster Tube Station, to try to pick up the food to keep us going, particularly the mince pies. I'm a massive mince pie eater. Another thing I've never, never really understood, but there's a weird sense that obviously the world keeps going day after day, but there's a convention in the British media that somehow at August, and am I right, it's sort of Christmas New Year, sort of becomes the silly season where there really isn't any news and the newspapers go into a completely different mode.

• 37:20Alastair Campbell?

  No, I think that's gone. I mean, even when I was still a journalist, we used to have, some journalists went into the office on Christmas Day because you had papers on Boxing Day. And it won't surprise you to know, Rory, that I was always-

• 37:30Rory Stewart?

  But you don't think people consume media in a different way, that maybe-

• 37:33Alastair Campbell?

  Oh yeah, sure.

• 37:34Rory Stewart?

  Even, even, even God forbid podcasts, they might listen to them less over the Christmas New Year period.

• 37:39Alastair Campbell?

  Well Rory, we've done a whole, we've, we've, we've got loads going out over Christmas. Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day. No, we never stop.

• 37:47Rory Stewart?

  We're going to change it because the quality, our quality is so high, that will change the general tendency. But, but presumably there is a sense that you do hope that some of your staff can take a bit of a break. I mean, I, I, I missed Christmas in 2016. I've been really, really looking forward to it. It's going to be the first time we were going to go away as a family. We were going to go to Costa Rica. And unfortunately, just as I was about to get on a plane, I began seeing signs from the Met Office that flooding was coming to Cumbria. And I remember thinking, oh, you know, maybe I can get on the plane and maybe the flooding won't be too bad. And fortunately, I came to my senses and said, okay, right, I cannot be in Costa Rica as the floodings minister

• 38:30Rory Stewart?

  when the flooding happened. So, lost my ticket, lost all my bookings, the family went without me. And sure enough, right the way through, I think I had a, my mother very sweetly came over on Christmas Eve to my cottage in Cumbria and we put something in the microwave. And then Christmas Day, I was just in water up to, I guess, my thighs, sliding around with a high vis vest on.

• 38:50Alastair Campbell?

  Was it really, really bad?

• 38:51Rory Stewart?

  It was terrifying. Right the way across Cumbria, Yorkshire, Lancashire, communities going underwater. And right the way through Christmas, just thanking volunteers. We deployed the army.

• 39:03Alastair Campbell?

  You probably did the right thing there, Rory. Um. But I I think I think that's a reminder to our listeners and viewers that they always go on. One of the things I loathe about, and you suppose they go MPs and their never-ending holidays. Good MPs are never on holiday, because any MP worth their soul, if they thought they were going away for a little holiday with the family, and suddenly they had something big in their constituency, nine out of ten are going to make the decision that you made. So let's hear it for good MPs, Rory. Yeah.

• 39:34Rory Stewart?

  Let's hear it for good MPs. So so I think I suppose to sum it up, um, politics, Christmas isn't really a holiday. It's more something that kind of bends stuff out of shape in weird directions, which I guess is a bit of a theme with our Tesco imperfect Christmas.

• 39:51Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, Rory, because Tesco are leading into these real moments with great quality Christmas food, not the picture-perfect ones.

• 39:59Rory Stewart?

  Shop Tesco food this Christmas, either in-store or online. So John H, Trip Plus member, who might be able to step up to progress the ceasefire in Gaza, which currently appears to be holding in name only? Without the lure of natural resources or any progress with the resort concept, Gaza is unlikely to retain any continuing interest for Trump, and the concept of Rio Ammar seems dead for the Palestinians. Alastair.

• 40:26Alastair Campbell?

  I'd be interested to hear what you picked up at in in Doha. Um, but I I think I think they're right to say the ceasefire is holding in name only. I mean, look, the truth is, it is better than it was. What is happening in Gaza is better than it was, but it is still really bad. And I do worry, this goes back to, we talked a lot about Trump on the main episode and this national security strategy. In the very first page, he talks about all these wars that he's ended, and he says he's brought peace to Gaza, just as he said, he's he's brought peace to Thailand and Cambodia, who are fighting again now. And I don't think you can call this peace. And I've been talking this week to some of the aid organisations who've been, you know, keeping us in touch with the way that their

• 41:10Alastair Campbell?

  operations are going. Now, they do say, to some extent, things are better than they were, but the fundamentals are really, really, really difficult. Let me just give you a couple. This is from Save the Children. The the agreement that was reached. Agreed to 600 humanitarian aid trucks going in every day, that's 4,200 a week. Last week, average of 134 a day, so fewer than 1,000 got in. And one of the issues that they're dealing with the whole time is the Israeli authorities deeming stuff that the aid agencies are trying to get in as dual use. And some of the, in other words, could be used for, you know, by the bad guys.

• 41:50Alastair Campbell?

  This includes meat, pesticides, vehicles, construction materials, tents if they have aluminium. And get this one, learning and recreational materials for children. Now, that was from Save the Children, the World Food Programme gave me some very interesting data on how they are managing to get more meals to people. They are doing that and they're finding it, you know, that part of this is working. But they still point to a level of suffering and a level of homelessness and a level of people literally scratching a living that we're just not talking about anymore. And I think that's the point of the question is that this is not peace and it is not settled.

• 42:33Alastair Campbell?

  And, you know, the world does seem to be looking away again.

• 42:38Rory Stewart?

  And that's a relief in many ways for the Netanyahu government, maybe a relief for some people in Hamas that it's not being properly covered. I think, and maybe I'm being unfair, but I think many, many listeners, if you ask them what's actually happening in Gaza at the moment, would struggle to say. So just to bring people up to date, what's happened since this so-called peace plan was announced in October is it was meant to have a series of phases. The first phase was about hostage release, which has happened. The second phase is really the more important bit, which is about Israel actually withdrawing to the frontiers of Israel, so no longer occupying large swathes of Gaza and Hamas disarming, right?

• 43:23Rory Stewart?

  Those two things are meant to happen together. It just hasn't happened. I mean, Israel continues to have troops in this enormous zone, which they call the Green Zone, which is basically an enormous stretch of Gaza, including most of the agricultural territories, stretching all the way around to the Egyptian border. With the vast majority of the Palestinian population pushed out of that zone into an ever smaller territory, about the size of Washington DC, around the major cities. And the yellow line, which is what divides Israeli directly occupied bits of Gaza from the other bits of Gaza, is where people are getting killed often.

• 44:08Rory Stewart?

  There are also strikes actually going directly in, Israeli strikes continuing but at a lower level. The story that we're hearing leaked from American planners is that they were hoping to bring in this international security force. So there were stories about Britain and France and Norway and others coming in, and they were going to be in the green zone on the other side of the yellow line. There was also a story that reconstruction was only going to happen in the Israeli occupied bit. And then presumably what happens there is those towns and villages in that bit of Gaza would be reconstructed. And maybe some Palestinians would come back or not, this is not clear. Certainly Palestinians who've tried with families to cross that border have been killed, children have been killed trying to cross that border.

• 44:53Rory Stewart?

  Meanwhile, the bigger story around the peace plan is that there's supposed to be this new council, right? Remember there was a board of peace which was going to have Trump and Tony Blair, rumours now that Blair's been bumped off the board of peace, and then there was going to be an executive committee, and then it was going to be run somehow by Palestinians, but it wasn't going to include Hamas, which is very difficult because in fact, even at the very junior level of people working in education, parks and recreation, these people are considered to be Hamas employees if they worked under the last government. And then you've got the question of the people who are going to be on the ground in the Hamas territories bringing security, right? And this is, is it going to be the Egyptians? Is it going to be the Jordanians? Is it going to be the Turks?

• 45:36Rory Stewart?

  Well, not the Turks now, it turns out, the Turks have been volunteering, but Israel doesn't want Turkey in because they see them as too pro Hamas. Egypt, very reluctant, and Jordan very reluctant because they're, they border Israel and their people are so tied into this issue. And fundamentally, nobody's going to deploy troops, I think. Because, or it's going to be very difficult to get them. I mean, they might do, but it's going to be very difficult because the fundamental problem is, what are you doing? Are you going in in order to keep a peace that's already been established? Are you there to create a peace? In other words, are you supposed to be fighting Hamas on the ground? And if you end up fighting Hamas on the ground, what's your position here?

• 46:18Rory Stewart?

  Hamas sees you as an instrument of Israel. Israel's blaming you for not doing enough for Hamas. Meanwhile, the local population are enraged because reconstruction isn't happening. This town has been favoured, the jobs aren't coming, they think you've stolen all the money, which is why all the funders are effectively saying that they're not getting involved either. So I was just in Doha, and one of the things the Khatari Prime Minister said is, until Israel withdraws back, until this phase two has happened, there's no way reconstruction money is going back in.

• 46:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. On the the the national security document, which we discussed on the main episode, there's so much in it. And I've just I've just looked up the the section on the Middle East, which we didn't even talk about really in the in the main episode. There was so much about Europe in it. But this goes back to the point that we make about Trump says something, and therefore in his head, it's true. So the the section on the Middle East begins like this. Conflict remains the Middle East's most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran, the region's chief destabilising force, has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions and President Trump's June twenty twenty five Operation Midnight Hammer.

• 47:30Alastair Campbell?

  The Israeli Palestinian conflict remains thorny, but thanks to the ceasefire and release of hostages President Trump negotiated, progress towards a more permanent peace has been made. Hamas's chief backers have been weakened or stepped away. I'm not sure the last bit is true. Syria remains a potential problem, but with American, Arab, Israeli and Turkish support, may stabilise and resume its rightful place as an integral positive player in the region. So the Middle East is sort of being parked by American strategy, and that, I'm afraid, is what these aid agencies are saying. They are still having to deal with the fallout of the fact that this there may have been a lull, but there has not been a real ceasefire,

• 48:15Alastair Campbell?

  and there has not been the workings of the peace process that's set out in phase two. And I watched a press conference that Netanyahu did with Chancellor Merz, who was in Israel there the day. And Netanyahu's line was, phase one is almost complete. We have the the remains of one hostage to get back, and we're we're ready for phase two. But then, when you got into detail, you felt that is him just saying that because he can say that, he gets a headline out of that. But as you said right at the start, phase two is not yet happening in any way.

• 48:48Rory Stewart?

  I think what Netanyahu and Hamas are doing is that this is a situation that actually suits both of them. Netanyahu, in a sense, and you can see he's doing more strikes into Lebanon. He's just killed another Hezbollah commander. He's there's been over a hundred strikes into Syria.

• 49:06Rory Stewart?

  This is all to do with the Israeli position in relation to the Druze in southern Syria. I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't more strikes going into Iran at some point, because they'll argue the nuclear programme, hasn't it? So that's Netanyahu signalling a very aggressive policy, keeping a general sense of crisis, probably in order to placate the far right in his government, Smotrich Ben Gavir, who like the sense of aggressive action, and maybe lead him through to an election, which of course is important because he's also being pursued for corruption allegations, which can't go forward so long as he's the prime minister. So Netanyahu wants to keep this general sense of crisis going. And on Hamas's part, so long as this situation continues, Hamas have a breathing space, they rearm,

• 49:48Rory Stewart?

  they reconstitute, and increasingly in the red zone, Hamas will be de facto in control of the whole thing. In other words, what actually Trump has done is put us back to a position which is a modified version of what existed before October the 7th. It's just that the Gazan territory has been shrunk, and Israel has now created a new, what would have been called Area B, an Israeli occupied strip, which according to an Israeli army chief in a recent interview, they intend to stay in indefinitely. And the only problem that both of them have is this question is, is Trump going to get impatient with them? And how will Trump's impatience manifest itself?

• 50:26Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing that happened in the region, which I thought would have got a lot of attention, but it seems to me didn't get that much attention at all, were these reports that Marwan Barghouti, who is in prison, Palestinian political leader, we interviewed his son, Arab Barghouti, on leading a while back. And these are the reports that he was, he'd been assaulted in prison up to and including having part of his ear removed. And I know this was raised by the Turkish Foreign Minister at Doha, but generally, this is not really, I don't think it's had that much attention at all, which again underlines the point that this is what Trump's a genius at. He does his big moments, whether it's Putin in Alaska, or I've delivered peace in Gaza,

• 51:11Alastair Campbell?

  and then the world does kind of move on with it. And why I think these aid agencies have been getting in touch with me is actually to say, listen, this is not how it's being described. Yes, it's a bit better, but it's still really, really difficult and the lives that people are living there are an absolute misery.

• 51:28Rory Stewart?

  Suddenly, of course, having conversations surfaces all these problems that we're not talking about in the media. Yemen, for example, is in a horrible destabilized state with sudden new military moves that nobody's reporting on. Libya, as we've described, is now absolutely split into two sides with this shadowy warlord effectively in eastern Libya who's now facilitating Russia and UAE moving arms from Libya through Chad into Sudan. We've talked a bit about Sudan. But there's other things, we already talked about Syria. I mean, Syria is in real trouble because of course, the president who we interviewed has got Trump's support. He's hoping the sanctions

• 52:12Rory Stewart?

  will be lifted, but the Syrian economy is not really taking off. And he doesn't control the Kurdish areas on the east of the Euphrates. He doesn't have any control of the Druze areas down on the southern border. So essentially, whole bits of his country are not under his control. And then the other things that nobody's talking about at all, Kuwait. The Emir of Kuwait is now going around stripping citizenship from Kuwaiti citizens. He's gone after the man who was the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington, who was married to a Lebanese woman and stripped her citizenship that she's had for decades. And he's doing this to business families in Kuwait. People in Kuwait are terrified. They don't understand what's happening. They don't understand the logic behind it. You can't talk about it openly. And of course,

• 52:53Rory Stewart?

  this climate of fear extends to other Gulf monarchies too, particularly Saudi Arabia. So Trump is creating a world in which more and more disturbing things are just going below the radar. If you're Kuwaiti, you're saying, well, why is nobody talking about Kuwait? Why isn't it talking about Libya? Why isn't it talking about Yemen? Why isn't everybody talking about Chad? Mali, I sat down with One of the most senior diplomats in the Sahel, and he was explaining, he's a former foreign minister, that Mali is now in the most incredibly dangerous state where Islamists are on the verge of capturing Bamako, Niger is in real trouble, they're relying on troops from Chad, Burkina Faso is now divided in two, and we're not even touching any of this

• 53:36Rory Stewart?

  because this is the violent, chaotic world that is beginning to accelerate. This is the acceleration of chaos.

• 53:43Alastair Campbell?

  This is back to the national security strategy document. This is where Donald Trump says we have to abandon the failed experiment of hectoring these countries about their, the way they govern. So that's one of the reasons why we're maybe not here as much as we did. Listen, let's end this discussion on a slightly more positive note. The slightly positive way to end this discussion is that both the Save the Children and World Food Programme said things are really bad, but they are at least getting better. And the point they made is if they were actually allowed to do and deliver what the ceasefire agreement says they should, they'd be able to alleviate a lot of the suffering fairly

• 54:26Alastair Campbell?

  quickly. So all our support to them in doing that.

• 54:29Rory Stewart?

  As you say, I've been in Doha for four days and it's been a fascinating thing. This is Qatar really stepping up and getting an extraordinary range of people there. There was a big attack by Laura Luma, which named me and Tucker Carlson as being part of a kind of anti-Israel conspiracy who'd been invited. But she, I noticed, didn't mention that Alex Brusovitz, the pro-Trump MAGA guy, was there, as was Donald J. Trump Jr. and Elon Musk's sister. So it was an extraordinary kind of collection of different voices from around the world. And to be fair to Qatar, they're really... Positioning themselves as mediators in a huge series of different events.

• 55:11Rory Stewart?

  But my goodness, you know, the Syrian president was there.

• 55:15Alastair Campbell?

  I thought he did amazingly well.

• 55:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he was interviewed by Christiane Amanpour. And she asked some pretty tough questions, but he was, I think, as you said, when you WhatsApp me after watching it, very fluent and confident. And so much the Syrian government was there. I spent a lot of my time meeting with ministers, officials, various others within the whole Syrian setup. And then there was Donald J. Trump Jr., who made this incredible attack on Ukraine, calling Ukraine the most corrupt country in the world, claiming that when he hung out in Monaco, all the Bugattis had Ukrainian plates on them, et cetera. And then I found myself on a stage, I was supposed to be actually with Bruce Fez and Tucker Carlson, but Tucker Carlson dropped out. So I was on with Tucker Carlson's business partner.

• 56:01Rory Stewart?

  But I hope you would have been proud of me trying to stand up for some vision of a different way of doing journalism.

• 56:10Alastair Campbell?

  Sorry, after all this name dropping at the conference that I just forgot to go to.

• 56:16Alastair Campbell?

  How many, how many of these big names are beyond leading in the next six months?

• 56:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's a really good question. And the answer is I haven't managed. I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried, but I cannot guarantee any of them for you yet, Alistair. But there may be some good news coming.

• 56:30Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, I watched the Donald J. Trump Jr. And I thought the thing about Ukraine, I mean, you know, that thing about, you just know that is not true. I mean, I can't say Monaco is my favorite place in the world, but I have been there several times. And, you know, he's probably seen one or two Ukrainian plates, and they're probably put there by Russians, by the way. But he says half, half of the luxury cars have got Ukrainian plates on them. And it was, the whole thing was, was basically, and this, I'm afraid this goes back to it, this is what they think of Ukraine. They're pro Russia. They're pro Russia.

• 57:02Rory Stewart?

  It's it's terrifying. And and of course, one of the interesting things that I'm not talking about the categories, but talking to people from other Gulf states is how they feel that America is now operating like a royal court.

• 57:16Alastair Campbell?

  Hundred percent.

• 57:16Rory Stewart?

  And position doesn't matter. It's all about individuals, you know. So Donald J. Trump Jr., the rumor at the moment is that he's less popular than he was because he didn't like Jared Kushner. So he was excluding Kushner. Now Kushner's up and Whitkoff maybe down. And everybody's endlessly trying to navigate through this list of names to to influence American policy, but not through formal systems or processes at all. The American ambassadors, for the first time in my experience, felt very, very marginalized. Nobody really was wanted to focus on them and talk to them in the way that they were trying to talk to social media influencers, business partners, the Trump, etc.

• 57:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, this is great that they have Donald J. Trump Jr. To go out and talk about corruption and nepotism in different countries around the world. Interesting.

• 58:01Rory Stewart?

  Here's another small, small positive bit. So as you're aware, America cut basically all development international funding. And nobody has any idea dealing with the American government, how you get funding and what logic there is. Because there's a 29 year old guy called Jeremy, and everybody just says, oh, Jeremy isn't interested in Sudan, so let's cut all the funding for Sudan. Or Jeremy's interested in this ally, or oh, no, actually, he isn't interested. And you're and it's all MAGA. It's all about the fact that if you make the mistake of saying in a meeting that you've developed a good testing equipment which was used on COVID, their brains short circuit and they start saying, COVID was a hoax. COVID was mad, right? So the whole American development funding mechanism has collapsed.

• 58:44Alastair Campbell?

  Who is Jeremy?

• 58:46Rory Stewart?

  So Jeremy is a 29 year old guy who was brought in by Elon Musk as part of the Doge project, initially as the Deputy Administrator in USAID, who seems de facto to be the only person able to make decisions about what remains of American international funding, where it goes. Some of it's allowed to go into humanitarian, but suddenly it's not allowed to go into this country. It's we're supposed to be helping. One of the phrases he apparently produces, we would help our allies if they were buried under rubble, but nobody can get him to define who America's allies are anymore. And so basically, if you're any of these organizations, you you you're just going mad, right? However, there's interesting things, which is that people are working around it.

• 59:27Rory Stewart?

  So in Sudan, the UK and the EU have backfilled the US on humanitarian funding. And Bill Gates announced that Qatar, an incredible partnership, I think it's $250 million each of pushing ahead with Qatar working with the Gates Foundation. So there are these extraordinary examples of people working around the problem. But it's never going to be able to create a stable, rules-based order. These are, these are people trying to improvise in a context of chaos. Now, here's a final question for you, and it's definitely a question for you because it's something that I know absolutely nothing about.

• 1:00:05Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 1:00:05Rory Stewart?

  Because, of course, it relates not to bagpipes, but to football. Ivan McCardle, Trip Plus member, West Berkshire. What did you, Alistair, make of the FIFA draw for the 2026 World Cup? And what are your views on the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize? It seems like the prize for the kid who never wins one.

• 1:00:24Alastair Campbell?

  Did you watch any of it, Rory?

• 1:00:26Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 1:00:27Alastair Campbell?

  I think you should. I think you should because it was utterly revolting. It was absolutely revolting. And it was in the Kennedy Center, which, as you know, has been sort of taken over as part of the anti-woke cultural war within the United States. Donald Trump was there. So was Mark Carney. So was Claudia Schornbaum, because this is a World Cup that's going to be in the United States, Canada and Mexico. I was praying for Scotland to be drawn in Canada or Mexico's group because then they would have played in Canada or Mexico. However, they'll be playing in Miami and Boston. But the whole thing was turned into a bit of a show, not just for Trump, but also for Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA, who

• 1:01:14Alastair Campbell?

  Any, I mean, Trump won the FIFA Peace Prize, but if there is a prize for global sycophancy and the selling of a soul of a great global sport, then Infantino has got it. I mean, I could, unfortunately, you couldn't see the audience when Trump was given this award, but the applause didn't feel very loud. And the, the audience was made up of football managers, heads of football associations around the world, who were all desperate to find out who they were going to be playing in the bloody World Cup. And they had to sit through Infantino describing how Trump had invited him to the Thailand-Cambodia signing and he delivered peace in Gaza. And so he gave him this award.

• 1:01:57Alastair Campbell?

  And the thing is, it, it actually, the award itself is quite hideous.

• 1:02:01Rory Stewart?

  What is it? What does it look like?

• 1:02:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's a globe with these hands on it. So it's a sort of, it's a bit like the World Cup itself, but the hands look like they're dragging.

• 1:02:09Rory Stewart?

  Are they very, are they very small hands, Alistair? They're very small hands?

• 1:02:12Alastair Campbell?

  You could certainly think they might belong to Donald Trump. There was a brilliant, there was, we should put in the newsletter, the funniest thing I saw was a German AI advert for a new perfume called Or d'obéissance, Gold of Obedience. And it was just this tribute to Infantino's sycophancy. And of course, because Trump is a narcissist, he can't see that the whole world are looking at this. I mean, I was, I was watching on television, I was following on social media, I didn't see a single comment other than, this is nauseating, this is revolting, as you say, this is like the kid who never gets anything and being given a prize for trying really, really hard.

• 1:02:55Alastair Campbell?

  He then made a speech, saying it was one of the proudest moments of his life. To be fair to Infantino, he cut, he kept Trump very sure, it was about two minutes max.

• 1:03:03Rory Stewart?

  What do you think of the draw? The draw? That was the second question. Final thing.

• 1:03:08Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, well, it's really interesting. Two of the three teams that Scotland were drawn against, the teams that were drawn against the last time they were there, in 1998, Brazil and Morocco. I think Haiti should be a nailed on win, but, you know.

• 1:03:22Rory Stewart?

  And Brazil, you're doomed, right? I'm sorry, I don't want to be rude, but.

• 1:03:25Alastair Campbell?

  No, not necessarily.

• 1:03:27Rory Stewart?

  You're not gonna, Scotland's not gonna beat Brazil, that's it?

• 1:03:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it'd be tough, but Brazil are not what they used to be. Um, so I think draw against Brazil, draw against Morocco, beat Haiti.

• 1:03:39Rory Stewart?

  Through we go. Beautiful. Fingers crossed, fingers crossed for Scotland. All right, Alistair. See you soon. See you soon. Bye bye. Bye bye.

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