407. Question Time: The U-turn Starmer Can’t Avoid

Just how extreme will Merz’s immigration curb get? Can the Labour Party still identify as centre-right? And should the men guilty of felling the Sycamore tree be sent to prison? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to Question Time episodes to live show tickets, ad-free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to ⁠⁠therestispolitics.com⁠⁠ to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠apple.co/therestispolitics⁠⁠. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ 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 ⁠⁠GetFuse.com/Politics⁠⁠ ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ ⁠⁠nordvpn.com/restispolitics⁠⁠ It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to ⁠⁠www.goalhanger.com⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@restispolitics⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠@RestIsPolitics⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Assistant Producers: India Dunkley, Evan Green Video Editor: Josh Smith Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Rory Stewart?

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  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 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.

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• 2:46Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest Politic's Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:50Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:51Alastair Campbell?

  And we've had quite a strange week Rory, because Monday we did the live on the UK-EU summit. Main episode went out yesterday and we're now, you promised you were going to talk about the Romanian election. So Monica wants to know whether we think that the defeat of the hard right candidate in the Romanian election is a vindication of those who stopped the election first time round, or the pandering to people who don't believe in democracy?

• 3:22Rory Stewart?

  Let's give a quick explainer then, just to remind people. So first time round, a man called Carlin Georgescu ran, and it appeared that he was running off an staggering number, hundreds of thousands of accounts which appeared to be linked to Russia. Having won the first round, and he'd come from nowhere, a completely unknown figure, the election was stopped. This provoked real outrage, including I think from people like Musk and JD Vance and others who saw it as a real attack on freedom of speech and democracy. The elections were then rerun, and representing the far right was a man called Georges Simeon, and running against him, Mr Dan, Nikos Dan, who's the mayor of Bucharest. And in the first

• 4:05Rory Stewart?

  round, Simeon got 40% of the vote, Dan got 20%. So it really did look as though the far right were doing very well. In the second round, actually, Nikos Dan got fifty three percent and Georgi Simian got forty seven percent. So it is a welcome sign in a sense, because this liberal, apparently really good mayor of Bucharest, who people like, has won. And it would have been a real blow if Romania, which is a big, you know, serious NATO contributor, had gone in the far right direction, because, you know, those candidates were talking about expelling NATO troops, teaming up with Putin effectively against Ukraine, et cetera. But it was skin of the teeth. I mean, it was real skin of the teeth. And as we've seen in some other

• 4:49Rory Stewart?

  countries, the two major mainstream parties have completely blown up. The traditional centre left, centre right parties have vanished from the scene. And these new parties emerged from nowhere. So it's also a sign of real instability.

• 5:01Alastair Campbell?

  What was really interesting was when the result came out. And it was, you know, you say it was skin of the teeth, but actually, given the background and given the, although as you say, the mayor of Bucharest is a popular figure within Bucharest and what have you. But but actually, it was a pretty convincing win, considering where he was coming from. If you if you take the first election, the one that was annulled, as as a genuine indication of the politics of the country. Of course, what would have happened had he lost? You would then have had countries in Eastern Europe, we often talk about about Moldova. I noticed that Maia Sandu, the leader of Moldova, was the first out with congratulations, because they would have been sitting there thinking, look, if Hungary is already kind

• 5:45Alastair Campbell?

  of within the Putin sphere of influence, Romania in there as well. This is a guy who during the election was saying things like, you know, people need to elect me so that we can undo the policies of dictators like Macron and von der Leyen. I mean, this was an absolute full on against the European Union, despite all the the help that Romania has had in developing itself. So I think it is a pretty, we shouldn't overstate it, but I certainly put it into the Albo Markany category of elections that I welcome the result.

• 6:15Rory Stewart?

  Really welcome result, but still very, very disturbing. Because Romania, you know, Romania was a country which in the twenties and thirties was ravaged by, you know, military coups, fascist parties, then had the horrors of Ceausescu during the communist era, then in the nineteen nineties. Pretty bad politics where former communists like Ilescu were sending coal miners in to beat up the opposition, massive corruption scandals. And really, it's thanks to the Kosovo War, which you were very strongly involved in, Romania coming in with the Allies and that, that they got the opportunity to join the European Union.

• 6:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Rory Stewart?

  And since they have, they've been a pretty remarkable success story in terms of the way in which their economy's gone. I mean, Bucharest, I first saw Bucharest in, I guess, 1990, and it was an unbelievably poor city. And now it's a really prosperous place. But there's another story to Romania, I suppose, which is that there were very interesting statistics around expatriate Romanians, because many, many Romanians now work abroad. A lot of the economy's kept going with remittances. I remember going to a village in Romania, Transylvania, and noticing there were basically no men to be seen. Oh, women working the fields, and all the men were working in Germany from that village. And a surprising

• 7:36Rory Stewart?

  number of them in places like Spain and Germany, 68% were voting for the far right, whereas the Romanians in Moldova, as you said, are voting overwhelmingly for the more liberal pro-EU centre. Anyway, really something to watch, because it's part of this general story, which is that even if they didn't make it through this time, gosh, there's no room for complacency. And those two main parties in Romania did get too complacent and have been wiped out. Question for you, Sean, given Labour's welfare cuts, winter fuel allowance, disability benefits, and the roast recent talk of immigration having done incalculable damage to the UK economically and politically, how much more right do Labour

• 8:19Rory Stewart?

  need to go before we have to admit it's not a centre-left party anymore? I was reminded of the fact that we didn't explain to people because it would have confused them, but in Portugal, the centre-right party is actually called the Social Democrats.

• 8:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we talked about the immigration, incalculable damage, Ireland, stranger stuff last week, and I didn't hide the fact then that I didn't like that. I think that what they're doing is, I guess they're trying to do this sort of...

• 8:49Alastair Campbell?

  Economically fairly left wing, socially a bit more conservative. But the problem is that the the stuff that is really connected with people is stuff that people have not expected from a left wing government. I was up in Scotland over the weekend and spoke to, you know, quite a few people, including quite a lot of local politicians, Labour and SNP. And they, I was really quite surprised, they were, they were saying, look, you know, people talk about reform in England, they talk about reform in Wales. Reform has got next to no local kind of political profile at all. But they're doing pretty well in the polls in Scotland as well. I think this is a policy, the, the, the winter fuel allowance is a policy that I think Labour

• 9:34Alastair Campbell?

  would be very, very wise to change. I thought at the start, when they came in, they had, you know, the explanation was this so-called black economic black hole, the things are worse than, worse than we thought, et cetera. I'll tell you what one guy said to me, it's really interesting, a Labour guy. He said that when we keep talking about tough choices, people have started to notice that these are all tough choices made at the expense of the poor, not the rich. Now, Labour could argue that they're doing this on health and they've done, you know, the private school stuff and all that. So there's, there's stuff they can point to. But in the end, a lot of politics is about what is connecting with the public. And I was not taken aback because it, but, but I was, I guess I always get a different feel of politics in Scotland.

• 10:16Alastair Campbell?

  And this time, the feeling I got was people really think this winter fuel thing is just not what a Labour government should be doing. And I think they, they just need to get to the place of saying that we did it for the reasons that we said at the time. We actually think we should reverse a lot of it, we should reform it so as the people like me, I'm sixty seven now, I shouldn't get it because I'm pretty well off and, you know, but P and maybe people in the middle, you could think about take some sort of tapering system, but poorer people should actually get more of it. And I think it's sometimes a U-turn is what gets you back on the road. And I think this is one that I would make.

• 10:50Rory Stewart?

  Well, honestly, I mean, I think it's a, it's really interesting because it was one of the ones which I thought that I supported. I mean, for the same reason that you mentioned, which is I couldn't understand why my mother was getting winter fuel allowance. And because it wasn't something that traditionally existed, it'd just been introduced by Gordon Brown. And it was costing so much. I mean, it was, you know, the cost of winter fuel allowance was about twice the entire budget of the UK Foreign Office, for example. I thought it was one that we should get rid of and the reason it wasn't happening was that when when the Conservatives were in government was because people like George Osborne were quite wily and thought that it would be politically very unpopular even if it made economic sense.

• 11:33Rory Stewart?

  But the sort of those of us who were being more geeky and technocratic thought there are other ways of doing welfare payments, we don't need to use wind of fuel allowance to do that, we can target poverty more accurately in other ways and what's my mother doing getting this cheque? So, I mean, the things that I'm more troubled by are things like them not dealing with the two child benefit cap, which is going to really lead to a lot. You talked about them being left wing economically, they don't feel very left wing economically, there's going to be a big rise in child poverty. I'm also very confused about why they cut international development quite so much when Trump was cutting it at the same times. I mean, because Britain and the US together were covering about thirty, forty percent of international development, particularly in things like health.

• 12:18Rory Stewart?

  And I'm also wondering, I mean, if they're economically, as the data's coming in now, and of course it'll be disputed, but certainly seems in the short term as though it is true that we're losing a lot of billionaires and millionaires out of the country. Somebody who's actually quite close to the Labour Party said to me that they're a bit confused by that too, because Rachel Reeves is falling over backwards trying to attract investment and wealthy people to the United Kingdom. But actually, an easier thing to do would be to keep them in the first place rather than driving them out, particularly with the changes around inheritance tax on non-dom. So there's a lot of stuff that doesn't quite add up at the moment. And I guess maybe you're saying wind of fuel allowance, though, is the thing that you feel really strikes the soul of the party.

• 13:00Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think it's really about the party. This feels to me actually like something that the party has sort of thought it could wear. The media has kind of given up talking about it for quite a while, but it's definitely out there as something that. It's had a real impact on some people, but it's had a really profound, I think, symbolic political impact on a lot of other people. And it then plays into all this other stuff. So that I I wouldn't also, I wouldn't underestimate the impact of Keir Starmer and the British government's position on Gaza, the feeling that people just want to feel that their government really, really gets it and says things. And even though, you know, we had a question this week, what power does the UK government actually really have? Well, maybe not much, but, you know, it was it was Beth Rigby at Sky asked the press,

• 13:45Alastair Campbell?

  asked Keir Starmer at the press conference the other day, when you say you've done everything you can, do you think you can really say that? Well, the all these sort of things build up. And I think the the point about left wing, right wing, I think that, you know, Keir has this word that he uses all the time about, you know, pragmatic solutions, trying to resolve issues. And I think sometimes there does feel to be a clash between the kind of the overall big messaging. So even when even when I said that, when I said they want to be left wing economically, immediately quite a few things popped into my head that I thought, oh, maybe that's not quite right. And I'll tell you, I think generally on the strategy, on the overall strategy, I I feel sometimes what's going on, that there's a lot of politics goes on, but I'm not sure that's always the same thing as political

• 14:29Alastair Campbell?

  strategy. So I think, you know, you hear, I've heard too many people, or I read of too many people saying, oh, well, you know, we've got a, we've got a sort of, you know, hit hard on immigration because that's the way to keep the reform people on side. And, you know, I just think that there's there's too much sort of taking for granted on the left. But I guess what I'm saying about Winter Fuel Louts, they need one big thing, I think, to basically say, you know, we don't always get everything right. This is something we did for the right reasons at the right at the right time. But actually, we've underestimated the impact that it's had. We're going to undo it. We're going to reform it. We're not going to go back to universal, everybody gets it, but we're going to reform it because we've we've we've heard loud and clear what you've said.

• 15:13Alastair Campbell?

  Now Deutschland, if I can go back to Deutschland.

• 15:15Rory Stewart?

  Deutschland.

• 15:16Alastair Campbell?

  Jan, Jan, it could be Jan or it could be Jan. Merz, new chancellor, threatened to do this, but I don't think any of us in Germany, ah, it's a German, thought he would actually deny asylum at the border in conflict with the European Court of Justice's ruling. This is surely a very extreme method to curb immigration.

• 15:35Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, very strange. So this is something Merz trialed and famously when he tried to bring it to a non-binding vote. This was before the election, only the AFD were prepared to come with him. His coalition partners from the left have been very, very uncomfortable with this. And what he's basically done is he said, it's an emergency and I'm no longer going to accept asylum at the border. Now, whether it's actually happening is a bit in dispute. The Poles and the Austrians are saying he stated it, but actually people are still going through the border. If he really does it, though, it's very dangerous because what will then happen is the European Court of Justice case will be taken to them and they will have to rule, almost certainly there isn't an emergency, and he is contravening European law.

• 16:19Rory Stewart?

  Now, remember, European law means laws that German politicians have signed up to, right? It's not, here's Germany and there's Europe as a separate thing. So, and that's a real gift to the far right in the AFD. Because that will then allow them to say, aha, you see, we always told you, you're not going to be able to come up with a sensible way of controlling immigration. Because the European Union and the ECJ won't let you do it, which is why we, the AFD, think you should leave Schengen, etc. So, very, very dangerous stuff Merz is doing here. And which is why, you know, I want to return to the extraordinary proposals made by Gerald Knaus, which I still think are the smartest things that we've got on the table. About how to think about safe third country returns, how to think about

• 17:03Rory Stewart?

  working out a solution that both stops boats crossing the channel to Britain, also deals with Germany's problems, brings Turkey into this equation, talks to North Africa and really addresses this rather than trying to break European law and address it together, not individual countries doing it.

• 17:19Alastair Campbell?

  The guy at the heart of this is a guy called Alexander Dobrindt, who is the interior minister. And he's, he's of the same political breed as, as Merz. And so you had a government spokesman. But what this relates to, it's something the Italians did, is you can declare an emergency, okay? If you declare an emergency, you can then Uh invoke this special clause, it's called Article seven two T F E U. And you can you can invoke this and that then will allow you to take these sort of special measures in an emergency. Government spokesman comes out on the back of newspaper reports and this is no, this is not happening. But then same day, Dobrin said he's not ruled it out.

• 18:03Alastair Campbell?

  So that's what I think is leading people to think they're really testing the waters on this. And as you say, if they test the waters and really go for it, that is a very, very, very big, uh, very big deal. Now, Roy is one, I love trees, I do my tree of the day, you love trees. Ryan, Trip Plus member from Chester. Over the past decade, activism and protest have raised significant awareness of climate change, of environmental protection, and the need for urgent action, even if some methods are controversial. But with anti-climate populists, deniers and doubters gaining more attention, a growing appetite for chaos, could we also see a rise in activism against climate action? While the motive behind the felling of the Sycamore Gap tree remains unclear, might

• 18:47Alastair Campbell?

  similar acts targeting symbols of environmentalism emerge as protests against regulation? Um, there was a brilliant piece in The Observer at the weekend by a guy called Andrew Hankinson, who'd also, I think, written a book about that guy, Raoul Moat. Um, the but but the it was a really, really, really long read about the trial and the background of the Sycamore Gap tree felling.

• 19:15Rory Stewart?

  This is right in the heart of my constituency. So I had half hadron's wall in my constituency and the Sycamore Gap, for international listeners, was the most iconic thing because it stars in the great Hollywood version of Robin Hood because Kevin Costner's sitting on this tree. So that the wall comes down and the tree is perfectly placed, growing in the middle of it, and a couple of cumberins appear to have driven over and chopped it down for a laugh, causing real sadness and devastation because it is the great image. I mean, it's it's difficult to quite express how how central that is to the way that we think about the wall and the way we think about nature. And I guess maybe the question is getting at something which is the sense that a lot

• 20:00Rory Stewart?

  of what's going on in politics at the moment. Has this kind of sort of destructive iconoclastic edge that they may at some subconscious levels, it's difficult to understand what motivated them entirely, but at some subconscious level, they clearly thought it would be really funny to take out something that was so precious to so many people.

• 20:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, what's interesting, and as I say, it's a really long read, and we should maybe put it in the newsletter, because what comes out of it is, reading it, there's a lot of it is just the transcript of these guys' interviews with the police, or their evidence, and what have you, and it's not entirely clear. What is, and then they definitely don't strike me as being, as it were, politically motivated. I don't think they've been sentenced yet, but I get the feeling they're going to get quite long sentences, they're being found guilty. And also, you underestimate, what you said there, you underestimate just how big a deal this story was right around the world. I mean, it was literally, people are aware of this tree and the similers, and not just because, you know, I think one of the reasons the Robin Hood film was filmed there was

• 21:02Alastair Campbell?

  because the tree was already so famous, rather than the tree became famous because of Kevin Costner. But anyway, it's a good read, because it just sort of, I read it and thought, you know, all the coverage I've seen, I didn't really get a sense of these two characters at all, you just make assumptions that they're sort of, you know, just sort of mindless thugs going to chop this great tree down, but it sort of speaks to sort of something deeper going on.

• 21:27Rory Stewart?

  We're about to get into the sentencing review, and that's going to be very interesting. On Thursday, David Gork, my hero, is about to announce the sentencing review he's been doing with the government, about how long you put people in jail for. And one of the interesting things that may be happening, and I just did an event, speaking at Number One Court in the Old Bailey, which is where all these great death penalty cases used to happen, and somebody pointed out that there's a big shift, which is in the past, the people who were generally on the side of reducing sentences were the left. But the right is now quite interested in reducing sentences, because they're beginning to get a bit perplexed by why people are getting long sentences for cutting down trees or posting stuff on Twitter. And the basic deal is that our prisons are massively overcrowded, and really, we should as a root of thumb, keep

• 22:12Rory Stewart?

  Prison for people who are violent dangers to citizens. I mean, there are many, many offences committed in our country all the time, but we simply don't have the spaces. And at the moment, our prisons are just places where we put often people who are mentally ill, who have serious social problems and just make them worse. And so I think one of the other things that we're picking up with Kirsten, it'd be interesting to see how this works on a sense of view. Is he's created a psych culture which is about locking people up. At exactly the time when we should be locking up fewer, not more. And I'm afraid these people, what they did was horrible. But in a totally overcrowded, insane prison system, which should really be kept for murderers and violent criminals, I'm not sure it's a good use of

• 22:55Rory Stewart?

  a prison place that costs more than Eton to put people around for cutting down a tree.

• 22:59Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, okay. You'll have upset quite a lot of people with that, Rory. You who say you love, you're a conservative because of your love of landscape.

• 23:09Rory Stewart?

  That's it, that's it. I'm here to upset people all the time. That's what my joy is. I'm love trees. I'm second to none with my love of trees. But one of the ways in which Britain is an outlier in Europe is only about forty percent of the people in our prisons are in for violent crimes. In almost everywhere else in Europe, prisons are really reserved for people with violent crimes. And we really love locking people up. And this is just another example of it. This just happens to be a case that appeals to the left.

• 23:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I told you the other day, I was in Pendamill the other day and something like eight out of ten prisoners on remand.

• 23:39Rory Stewart?

  Which, which is even worse. I'm just expecting people to remand prisoners of people who haven't been convicted, which means they don't actually really get any services. They don't go into education. They could be there for months or a year. And they're really getting nothing at all during that whole time, just having horrible lives. Um, let's take a quick break and then after the break, I want to ask you about your enormous friend, Eddie Rama. Um, and we'll maybe touch on Mexican judges, uh, the SAS, and that'll probably be about it.

• 24:04Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For one hundred twenty five years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one year old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating one hundred twenty five years with new moments still add. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 24:39Rory Stewart?

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

• 24:43Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Aniston Campbell.

• 24:45Rory Stewart?

  Question from Geoff Spink. What was behind the Starmer Rama miscommunication?

• 24:50Alastair Campbell?

  Starmer Rama.

• 24:50Rory Stewart?

  Was the UK PM as blindsided as he appeared to be? Surely these positions were agreed in advance, not in front of the media. Right, Eddie Rama and Keir Starmer, of course, two of our favourite people, both interviewed on the podcast, so are leading if you want to hear our interviews with them. Eddie Rama, who also did an extraordinary kind of bow to Georgia Maloney on a red carpet in Italy, because he's exactly twice her size. But tell us about the Starmer Rama issue.

• 25:15Alastair Campbell?

  The Albanians were very, very excited because David Cameron almost made a visit to Albania. He was basically en route, all the red carpets and the flags were laid out, and then he got hauled back for one of those three-line whip votes in the, I can't remember, one of the, something was going on that fell apart and he got, he got hauled back. So Keir Starmer, the first serving, Tony Blair's been to Albania, but first serving Prime Minister, and this was because of the, in advance of the European Political Community meeting that Eddie Rama was, was hosting. So there's this press conference they do together where the, the media say Keir Starmer was sort of, you know, slapped down because he was talking

• 25:57Alastair Campbell?

  about one of these kind of Rwanda-style agreements to get asylum seekers processed in a third, in a third country. And Eddie Rama said, and by the way, this is something that was known and had been put into the media beforehand, said that, you know, they, they'd done this thing with Italy, Albania had done this deal with Italy, but that was it, there were going to be no more. So I'm afraid I, I'm going to speak up for Keir Starmer and Eddie Rama here. I think this was a case of journalists refusing to believe. What because it made a better story for this to be a slapdown than actually they'd already been told this was not going to happen. So it didn't, it wasn't great. I want to say something else about Albania because you're right Rory, I am very fond of Eddie

• 26:39Alastair Campbell?

  Rama and of Albania. He's just won his fourth election victory in a row doing the new Labour playbook. But there is something going on in Albania at the moment that I think is a real problem. And that is the mayor of Tirana, a guy called Eriol Velaj, who is actually a Labour politician, very close to Eddie Rama. And he's in jail on corruption charges. Well, I say corruption charges, the thing that I think is scandalous, he's in jail and has been for several months without actually being charged with anything. And one of the, there's this body that's been set up called SPAC, it's a special court against corruption and organised crime. And this is very much part, Eddie Rama has made

• 27:21Alastair Campbell?

  it part of his thing to crack down on corruption. And SPAC has enormous powers and they've, they claim to have lots of evidence against Eriol Velaj. But he's literally been in jail for months now without being told what he's been charged with. The reason I know this is because, you know, I know him very well and he's sent me a, you know, pretty harrowing letter. So I think, listen, if they're gonna, if you're gonna lock somebody up, you should either basically piss or get off the pot, as we say. And the extraordinary thing, he's still the mayor while he's in prison. So he's still the mayor, meant to be running the city of Tirana, the biggest, you know, half the population of Albania there.

• 28:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and he's in jail.

• 28:01Alastair Campbell?

  And he's in jail, yeah, yeah. So there we are. Sort that one out. And it does say, because I don't, I can't believe that Eddie Rama wants him to be, if I know he doesn't want him to be in jail. So it does at least underline that these, these, these new institutions are operating independent of government. But SPAC, I think you've, you've either got to sort of charge this or do something. I think it's, it's a bit much to expect somebody to be the mayor of one of the major cities in Europe, certainly the major city in Albania, if you're stuck inside a jail. Right, talking of the law, Mexican judges, Emilia. I'm shocked that nobody seems to be talking about Claudia Scheinbaum's decision to elect all judges in Mexico.

• 28:46Alastair Campbell?

  On the first of June, Mexicans will vote in the first of two rounds of elections to replace the judiciary from local magistrates to those who sit on the Supreme Court and powerful electoral tribunals. How can this be fair and just? This is an overhang from AMLO, isn't it?

• 29:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But it's something Claudia Scheinbaum's still behind. So AMLO, Obrador, populist, left-wing leader. We often talk about populist, right-wing leaders, but there's some pretty significant populist, left-wing leaders, particularly in Latin America. And there was a lot of centralisation of power on Obrador. He also made himself quite close to the military. He took over a lot of control of executive agencies. He put a lot of pressure on the media. And the final part of this was moving against the judiciary, moving to have the Mexican judiciary, which is independent, instead make them elected, which is basically a route to having them controlled by his political party. And it's been very disappointing that Claudia Scheinbaum, who many of us were tempted to sort of

• 29:42Rory Stewart?

  celebrate as a woman, the first Jewish woman to be elected as a Mexican leader, and from the left, has pushed ahead with this real attempt, I think, to suppress the proper separation of powers.

• 29:56Alastair Campbell?

  I wasn't aware that this was being taken forward. I knew that AMLO was up for it. But clearly, I mean, thank you for the question, because it is something we should probably look at again. The thing I did notice in Mexico this week, which was absolutely horrific, was a 23-year-old influencer, Valeria Marquez, was in the middle of a livestream in a chair at the hairdresser or a nail salon, some sort of beauty thing, and two guys literally just walked in and shot her, killed her. What has sparked is this debate about femicide. In in in in Mexico and other Latin American countries where,

• 30:37Alastair Campbell?

  you know, it's sort of seen as part of a sort of fight back against women's emancipation, liberation, call it what you want. Um. And so and it's a really, really, really horrible, horrible story. And femicide is what where where basically somebody's murdered, where it's killed due to her gender. And that is how it's being seen. She was killed not necessarily because these people had anything against her, but because she was a a a woman. So, you know, it's a pretty horrible story, and we should maybe put something on that in the newsletter uh as well. Honduras has got the highest femicide rate in the world, followed by Dominican Republic, and then Brazil, and then, I think, uh, Mexico.

• 31:20Rory Stewart?

  We should keep returning to Mexico, as you say, because it's um it's a really big, important country, and its politics are quite different from the rest of Latin America. Um. And of course, it's right in the heart of Trump's sights on the on the question of tariffs in China.

• 31:35Alastair Campbell?

  Right. Question question here from Sunny. Um. You briefly mentioned the Turkish government deal with the PKK, but you jumped very quickly onto something else. Can you just explain what actually happened? Go on, you're our mystery.

• 31:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's huge.

• 31:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think it's huge.

• 31:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's huge news. So PKK, obviously, um, the Kurdish group in Turkey, which has been the major force in opposition politics, uh, associated with a lot of terrorism, longstanding almost civil war in some bits of southeast Turkey with the army, uh, with its leader locked up on a prison island, and it's now signed a peace deal.

• 32:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 32:15Rory Stewart?

  And it's an amazing move by Erdogan, because on the one hand, Erdogan has gone very, very repressive politically, and, you know, threatening to lock up Imranoglu, his main opposition opponent. On the other hand, there aren't elections for some time, and he feels absolutely on top of the world because he feels his strategy won in Syria, his guy, Ahmadal Sharah, who he protects, it took over, and the Turkish Foreign Minister and the People were driving around with Al-Shara on the first days in Damascus. And there are now millions of Syrians who speak Turkish. He's now set up a very smart deal, which is a go and see deal. Where if you're a Syrian living in Turkey, you can go back to Syria to have a look.

• 32:59Rory Stewart?

  But you keep your rights in Turkey. So he's making it as low pressure as possible, encourage people to go back. And this PKK thing, I think, is also a sign of how much things are moving in the region. So one of the reasons why peace had been difficult is that the Americans were strongly supporting Kurds in eastern Syria. Those Kurds in eastern Syria are now under pressure to combine behind Al-Shara.

• 33:22Rory Stewart?

  And I think young Kurds are not motivated in the same way to continue what was a very felt like an increasingly budding, impossible fight. So it is really interesting. And I think it would be interesting to see, if I finish this sort of finally grander note, Europe have a real Turkey policy to have what they want and what they're going to give. You know, what they want presumably is to not lock up political prisoners. Think about the kind of political democratic journey of Turkey. What they're prepared to give, I think, much stronger economic and security cooperation, which could be very helpful for both Turkey and Europe.

• 33:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I should mention again, the interview with Arab Barghouti on leading, whose dad is in an Israeli jail and is seen as a sort of future Palestinian leader. He's been in jail for 20 years. But a key player in this move was a guy who's been in jail for, I don't know how long, a long time. And I think he's been in, this guy, Abdullah Otselan, has been in solitary confinement most of a sentence since 1999. And he's now in his mid 70s, 76, something like that. And he issued a call to the PKK, of which he's a sort of leading figure,

• 34:38Alastair Campbell?

  to just lay down their arms and disband. Now, Heaven knows what sort of treatment he's had inside a Turkish prison since nineteen ninety nine. We've all seen Midnight Express. But I think that that does seem to be a have been an influential move. And and I am fascinated. The reason I raise that is because I we would, you know, let's be honest, we were interviewing Arab Barghouti, not because he is such an interesting guy himself, which he is, but because of his dad. And it's so interesting how many of these terrorist organisations, how much of the politics of what they do and how that politics develops happens inside jails, where they're smuggling out messages and in this case issuing a public

• 35:23Alastair Campbell?

  statement, which seems to have led to to this change.

• 35:28Rory Stewart?

  Okay, final question for me.

• 35:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, it's been a bit heavy this. Rory, this episode has been a bit heavy.

• 35:33Rory Stewart?

  Okay, I'm going to lighten that up. I light it up, got that. I'll lighten it up. I won't ask you about SAS war crimes, which I know you don't want me to ask you about. I'm going to ask you about James, Trip Plus member from Highclere. Thank you, James, for being a Trip Plus member. Hope you're enjoying, at the moment, Ken Rogoff, our Trip Plus special interview. And James says, are you aware that when Katty Kay is introduced frequently on Morning Joe, she's referred to as US BBC special correspondent and the host of The Rest Is Politics, no mention of US? This, says James, is how coup d'etat start.

• 36:07Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's not a coup d'etat, James. It's it's how The Rest Is Politics has been constituted. You have to understand that Rory and I, how can we put it, Rory and I are the United States and Katty and the Mooch, they should see themselves as like a state, the first or the fifty first. We don't really care what number they are. They are technically, I guess, the first state, but we're really the first state. So they can pick a number. So I'm I'm very glad to Joe Scarborough and his wife of Morning Joe that that they understand this. So they're they're they're independent. They can they can have their own policies on certain things. But yeah, know their place, I say.

• 36:48Rory Stewart?

  I I'd never normally say this, but there is something a little sort of Trumpian about that response. There was sort of a tone of a Donald coming to that whole explanation of your relationship. Anyway, on that, I think I think we should end and we'll wait for a response from Katty Kay, who is is also a Trip Plus member, we hope.

• 37:07Rory Stewart?

  See you soon. See you soon. Bye bye. Bye.

• 37:25Speaker 04

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 37:32Speaker 05

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 37:38Speaker 06

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 37:40Speaker 07

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 37:57Speaker 08

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 37:59Speaker 04

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 38:08Speaker 06

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 38:12Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 38:14Speaker 06

  New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 38:19Speaker 07

  You're my soldier, are you Sergeant Tom McDuff, Duffy?

• 38:23Speaker 06

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• 38:25Speaker 07

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 38:29Speaker 06

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller.

• 38:32Speaker 08

  We have two types of friendly KIAU.

• 38:34Speaker 06

  Where Britain plays its strongest arm.

• 38:36Speaker 08

  He's the best.

• 38:36Speaker 06

  Against its strongest foe.

• 38:39Speaker 07

  Don't do it Duffy!

• 38:41Speaker 06

  Bear Hunt. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.