77. Qatar, the World Cup, and Sunak vs. Starmer

Join Alastair and Rory as they discuss the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, what's meant by a 'Swiss-style' Brexit, 'flying kites', Twitter, Trump, COP, and more. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:48Rory Stewart?

  And Alastair, I guess the first thing is amazingly vindicating all your judgment, we've managed to sell out the Royal Albert Hall, which seemed to me a sign of megalomania when we proposed it. But apparently it came off.

• 2:01Alastair Campbell?

  No, I had the megalomania in saying, why are we only booking the Albert Hall when we've got Wembley Stadium, a just short tube ride away? No, it is quite extraordinary. It's sort of weird. I mean, I'm at the CBI at the moment.

• 2:12Rory Stewart?

  And can we just remind our listeners for a second before we get that thrown out? Confederation British industry, and you were talking to them about mental health.

• 2:18Alastair Campbell?

  I was talking about mental health, or I was chairing a panel, Amanda Pritchard is the chief executive of the National Health Service England, she was on it, the head of Pure Gym, had a guy from AstraZeneca, and a guy from a company called Ciensis, and it was really just about what lessons we learned from the pandemic and so on and so on. However, Roy, the really interesting thing, I think, about having been at the CBI, which is, you rightly say, is the Confederation of British Industry, I reckon 93% of our listeners around the world know that, but anyway, it's very good that you see yourself as the explainer, is that Keir Starmer, I have to tell you, went down a lot better than Rishi Sunak.

• 3:01Rory Stewart?

  And who, you presumably were not there for Rishi Sunak's speech, so this is somebody else talking.

• 3:06Alastair Campbell?

  I watched it on TV, I watched it on TV, and also, no, just, you know, how do you measure these things, but just in terms of the number of people who said they thought Keir went down a lot better than they expected him to, and they thought Rishi went down a lot worse than they expected him to.

• 3:20Rory Stewart?

  And what didn't they like about Rishi? Any details on what didn't work?

• 3:24Alastair Campbell?

  Not very good answering questions, a bit sort of prickly, didn't really give them much to chew on by way of, he sort of said some of the right things, was how they said it, but there was just not much, they didn't feel the love. And I think that, whereas I think, I think, I did see Keir, and I saw his Q and A as well, and I just think they felt, I mean, you just got the feeling that there was, they're definitely looking at Labour in a completely different way. I mean, I'm sure it was for Rishi Sunak, but the hall was absolutely rammed, I mean, it was like rows of people standing at the back. It just, it was just, it just felt like very, very different to how I think Labour leaders have been received.

• 4:08Rory Stewart?

  Which part of his economic message was resonating? Is it the green investment stuff? Is it, and what is it? Is he still doing the green investment? I mean, that's one thing I want to push you on.

• 4:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, he is, yeah.

• 4:16Rory Stewart?

  Because that was a £23 billion commitment, wasn't it? And I'm interested in whether he's pushing ahead with that.

• 4:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that was the message. And also, I think the thing that really kind of landed well with them was the The message about the Labour, you know, it's the message he's been hitting for some time. The Labour Party has changed and we now see ourselves as a party that can work in partnership, in genuine partnership with business. I mean, I think the thing that they'd briefed out for the news, which I imagine the news have gone on, was him talking about the need to wean ourselves off cheap migrant labour. And migrant labour is the kind of elephant in the room for these business guys. They're all basically saying they wanted Sunak to say more. And I think what really disappointed them about Sunak was that when he was specifically asked about immigration and migrant labour, he turned

• 5:03Alastair Campbell?

  it all into a thing about the boats crossing the channel and very much back on to his Brexit agenda.

• 5:09Rory Stewart?

  Presumably this stuff from Keir Starmer about weaning people off migrant labour, if you were somebody running a restaurant business in the north of England, or if you were running plays and performances in the west end of London, or you were running a fruit farming business in East Anglia, you might well say, well, that's all very well as a slogan. But how am I really supposed to run my business? Because we're facing massive labour shortages at the moment.

• 5:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think both of the government and the opposition are aware of the problems. You couldn't, you couldn't, it's impossible not to be aware of the problems when you spend even five minutes amongst this CBI audience, because they're all talking about this problem they've got with labour shortages. But at the same time, I think what Keir Starmer was trying to do is to avoid piling in to massive great holes that are labelled Tory Party trap. So I think the rhetoric, I think what drove the coverage today was the rhetoric. But I think the message in the room was we kind of, you know, we get the problem and we have to try and fix it together. But he's not going to jump into that trap. I think that's what was going on.

• 6:12Rory Stewart?

  Well, maybe let's loop back to that when we get on to Brexit. And the idea that came out from, was leaked, it seemed, from Jeremy Hunt, Rishi Sunak, that they were considering a Swiss-style relationship with Europe.

• 6:24Alastair Campbell?

  Which they both adamantly denied very quickly.

• 6:26Rory Stewart?

  And we'll loop back to that. But first of all, Qatar, you being, you know, I saw you described in the press this week as one of, what was it, one of the leading football authorities of our generation.

• 6:37Alastair Campbell?

  I think it was ironic, Rory, you said I was a bastion of football knowledge.

• 6:40Rory Stewart?

  Bastion of football knowledge. What do you make of the World Cup? Have you been watching a lot of it?

• 6:44Alastair Campbell?

  I'm afraid to say, Rory, apart from the game that I've just missed because I was doing this mental health panel in Birmingham, where I failed to watch Saudi Arabia beat Argentina, which I think we could say is the first big shock. Thus far, I've watched every minute of every game. Or let me put it a different way. What I did yesterday for the England game, the Holland game, Holland, Senegal and Wales against America, is I sat all day on the sofa, but I was honestly working. Fiona kept coming in and saying, what a life, you just sit there watching football. I honestly was working really, really hard. Here's a question for you, Rory, which actually came from one of our listeners, which I'd completely forgotten about. Somebody said, am I right in thinking that the World Athletics Championship was in Doha in 2017? And I don't remember there being any political

• 7:29Alastair Campbell?

  fuss at all. And it is the extent to which the debate and the build up, I think it's moving now because the football has started. But I think that Qatar desperately wanted to get the World Cup, to shine a spotlight on Qatar. And now that the spotlight has been shone, the sense of where this debate is, and I think Infantini, the head of FIFA, he said this thing about, I am gay, I am disabled, I am a migrant worker, or I feel a migrant worker, I think it was. And then said that, and he's now completely bald, but he said that he identifies with all of this because he was bullied as a child because

• 8:10Alastair Campbell?

  he was ginger. It was an incredible sort of weird speech. But listen, you're in that region. What do you make of it? What's going on and how it's playing out on the sort of geopolitical level?

• 8:21Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think the first thing is that obviously Qatar is very, very proud to have the cup and is very much presenting it in this region as being a win for the Middle East and the Arab world and the Islamic world in general. And of course, that has now tied in very neatly to this amazing Saudi Victory over Argentina. I was reading the New York Times yesterday, the most sarcastic article about the Argentina Saudi match, saying literally, there is no way on earth that Saudi can win this. Huge praise of Lionel Messi, how he's going to get a hundred goals. Sorry, get to his hundred goals. I'm actually, he's on ninety two at the moment. So that's the first thing. I think huge sense of pride in the region. I've been in Doha probably four times in the last six months and it's rather fun seeing the

• 9:04Rory Stewart?

  images that people are playing with because often the international reputation of Qatar, at least before the recent scandals, but was very much about people in very neat white robes going down to their ankles and looking quite sort of serious and businesslike. It's a very wealthy country. It's the fourth wealthiest country per capita in the world now. Over a hundred thousand dollars a head, having come from being one of the poorest countries in the world only fifty years ago. It's the most incredible story, largely about their gambling on gas, investments which in the seventies and eighties people thought were crazy, turned out to be totally transformative for the country. But I think one of the interesting things about football is that you see all these images of people looking very, very formal

• 9:48Rory Stewart?

  in their long robes, playing football. And it's the sort of sense, it's the sort of juxtaposition between the kind of formality and the business and this sense of fun and sport and exuberance, which I think traditionally hasn't been associated with the Middle East so much, or certainly not with the Gulf.

• 10:03Alastair Campbell?

  You know, when people say, you know, sports should be kept out of politics, I think it's, I think it's one of the most naive statements that is possible to make because of course, there is always politics in high level sport. But what I have noticed, which I think is is less easy to compute is the way that the athletes now are, it's not just that they can choose to have a political voice, as for example, Marcus Rashford did over his campaigning on food. A lot, you know, lots of these athletes now that do things in what you would define as a political space. But it's the way that they're almost like expected to now. So right up until the kickoff

• 10:44Alastair Campbell?

  of the England game and the Wales game, these discussions about whether Harry Kane and Gareth Bale would wear the the One Love armband rather than the the official FIFA armband. And of course, I I find this one quite difficult because the on the one hand, we can say, well, it's obvious that they should be allowed to because and we know the reasons for that. And when they do it in England, it's not viewed as a political statement. Why is it viewed as a political statement there? And that's what I mean about when you say just take the politics out of sport. That becomes the focus of a of a political debate. And I think I guess the most the most impressive moment politically so far of the World Cup was the the stance of the the Iran

• 11:27Alastair Campbell?

  players when I don't know if you watched the the build up to the England game already, but they they just stood there during the Iran National Anthem. And it was obvious, it was obvious even without being told so by the commentators, obvious to what they were doing. They were very defiantly not singing the National Anthem.

• 11:42Rory Stewart?

  Incredibly courageous. I climbed once with a very famous Iranian climber called Mohammad Oraz, who was killed in an avalanche in Gashenbrum. And I went to see him actually on his deathbed in Pakistan. I just saw him just before he died. But he really introduced me to this because sports stars in Iran are in a very, very different culture situation. So Mohammad was the first Iranian to climb Everest. He was somebody who, like many of the sportsmen and sportswomen in Iran, are real symbols of the modern world. They're often much more progressive. They're often clean shaven. They are often very uncomfortable with sort of conservative rhetoric, but their entire careers are controlled by the religious establishment and the mullah. So Mohammad Oraz had to join

• 12:27Rory Stewart?

  the Revolutionary Guard in order to be allowed to climb, despite objecting, I think, to almost everything that they believed in. And it will be true for the footballers. They're taking a huge risk that they will never be selected for the national team ever again. But it also goes back to something very deep in Iranian culture. There was a man called Gulam Reza Takti, who was their champion wrestler in the 1960s. And he became a very, very major political figure, speaking out against the Shah, speaking out against earthquake. But he also embodied, I suppose, honour.

• 13:02Rory Stewart?

  And dignity through his sport, famously in a World Cup wrestling match, wrestling, I think, against a Russian opponent with a damaged leg. He refused to attack the Russian's damaged leg all the way through the match, at the risk of losing the match himself. So, these people, this Iranian captain in particular, is going to be an immense cultural icon, and this is a very, very important moment.

• 13:25Alastair Campbell?

  What do you think, so that's Hassan Hajj Safi. And you do worry about what will happen to him. So basically, just to let people know exactly what happened, he wasn't asked about this at the press conference, he went to the press conference, and he opened up about this, he talked about the protests, he talked about the protests that followed the death of Mahsa Amini, that was the 22-year-old woman whose death in custody started the recent protests which have led to the massive crackdown. And he said, "We have to accept the conditions in our country are not right, our people are not happy. We are here, but it does not mean we should not be their voice or we should not respect them." He went on, "Everything we have, we are to our people, we're here to work hard, to fight, to perform on the pitch, to dedicate ourselves to the people of Iran, I hope the situation

• 14:09Alastair Campbell?

  changes and that everyone will be happy." Now, he could not have been clearer, that he was the captain, and it was clear from the stance of the national anthems that he was, they were all essentially speaking as one. And you do kind of worry about what happens to them if and when they go back.

• 14:24Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, he plays in Greece, doesn't he?

• 14:27Alastair Campbell?

  Quite a few of them do play abroad, but, you know, quite a lot of them go, you know, they'll all have to go back at some point. And they have become, because of course, I don't know if you know this, Rory, but it was not shown, I think they, obviously the Iranians must have worried that it was something like that was going to happen. The match was shown on TV, but that protest was not.

• 14:46Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 14:47Alastair Campbell?

  So, you know, anyway, you talk about, you use the word brave, it does show enormous courage. And the point I'm making though, but in the broader point, you know, I saw quite a lot of people criticizing Harry Kane and Gareth Bale for not going ahead with what they said they'd wanted to do, which was to wear the One Love armband. But the fact is, if you are, you know, they are there as footballers, they're not there as... Icons or role models, they're there to try and win a tournament. And okay, I even saw Roy Keane, I was astonished by this, Roy Keane saying they should have taken the yellow card that they'd have got as part of the protest. I'm not sure I agree with that.

• 15:24Rory Stewart?

  It's very interesting. The other thing that, maybe this is just me speaking from, I'm in Jordan at the moment, speaking from the Middle East, but there is some discomfort here in this region with the way that Qatar is being portrayed in the West. And I think at the heart of it is, just to remind people what the issue is. The issue is that Qatar has Sharia law on its books, along with a dozen other countries in the world. And under Sharia law, extramarital sex is punishable by death, and you cannot get married as a gay person in Qatar. Now, remember, that is not something that was possible in the United States until quite recently.

• 16:02Alastair Campbell?

  What, do you, I mean, this is sort of bouncing something on you, but do you know how many people have actually been executed on that basis?

• 16:09Rory Stewart?

  Nobody, nobody has. So that's the other interesting thing here, that it's a law on the statute books, but the death penalty hasn't been exercised against people for gay sex in Qatar. So it's, so I think one of the questions that people around here would ask is, is it that the West is protesting against Sharia law in general? And let's step back for a moment. I mean, I think there's a bigger, interesting issue, which is, if we think back to the 90s and the early 2000s, we were in a world in which the West was very confident that it had universal values, and it went around lecturing other countries, sometimes at the point of a gun, about human rights, about democracy, about our free market systems. And in many ways, we've moved away from that. We are

• 16:52Rory Stewart?

  more worried about the histories of empires and slavery and colonization. We're less inclined to go around telling other people how to behave. But this seems to be an exception. And I wonder, in Nigeria, for example, in states in Nigeria, it's illegal to have gay sex, and that's punishable by death in some states in Nigeria. So I guess my question would be, would the world have reacted in the same way if the World Cup had been held in an African country like Nigeria? Or is there something, and this is what people in Jordan would say, about people's discomfort with the Arab world?

• 17:26Alastair Campbell?

  So you're saying there's an element of Islamophobia?

• 17:29Rory Stewart?

  I don't know. I mean, homosexuality is criminalised at the moment in seventy two countries around the world. So it's quite a big deal to say in the World Cup that this is going to be the major issue or the major condition to move forward.

• 17:43Alastair Campbell?

  I suppose the other issue that has been very prominent has been the, you know, the role of migrant workers. You mentioned, for example, that Qatar is a very wealthy country. And I think, am I right in saying that Qataris don't pay tax? And possibly, you know, the labour market is filled with migrant workers. And that's where the other issues that has caused them some difficulty in the build up.

• 18:11Rory Stewart?

  But I think, I mean, I think that that is true. And to be absolutely clear, I voted for gay marriage. I very, very, very much think that we have made huge progress on these issues. And I very much hope that countries like Qatar will make progress on these issues. But it's important to understand that Qatar is being portrayed at the moment as though it is a solitary exception in the world. You have the same issues around migrant workers throughout the Gulf and other Gulf countries, which many British people go to on holiday. UAE, for example, have issues around migrant workers, also have the death penalty for homosexuality.

• 18:51Rory Stewart?

  So I think putting it in context is important without defending the fundamental principle. I think you can, on the one hand, say, we believe absolutely in equal rights. We believe that the death sentence for homosexuality is abhorrent. But also acknowledge that Qatar is operating in a particular Islamic context, which it shares with many other countries around the world, rather than portraying it as though it's a kind of unique horror.

• 19:17Alastair Campbell?

  Obviously, now that we do this podcast regularly, and one of the things I was doing very busily as I was sitting on the sofa, watching three football matches without a break, was thinking ahead to the podcast today. And I do want to ask you this, Rory. What is it like? Being somebody who doesn't get this thing about sport, forget the politics of sport, but what's it like being someone who just can't get the passion that sport arouses?

• 19:43Rory Stewart?

  Um, well, it's a good question. I, I, well, so firstly, obviously I don't. I like playing sport, but I don't like watching sport. I grew up without a television, so I, I, I think I was, didn't manage to access for now. And I grew up overseas too. So I was born in Hong Kong. I grew up in Malaysia. So I neither could watch football on television, nor could I go to matches. So I think that's the first thing. I, I didn't have what you would have had in your childhood, which is years of developing your sense of a team. My, my wife, Shashana, is somebody who got really into sport for the first time in her life when she was living in Boston, got really into the Red Sox. But she would say that it's something where you get more into it, the more you know.

• 20:25Rory Stewart?

  So the more she knew the players' names, the more she knew the statistics, the more matches she watched.

• 20:30Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, I'm very, I'm, I'm more than, I'm more than happy to teach you about the history of Burnley Football Club. I can teach all the players' names. You can, you can, you know, we can make you, but I'm also interested in your, because your interest in development and so forth. So I'm a very good friend of a guy called Nick Keller, who runs something called Beyond Sport, which is a, it's a charity, it's a nonprofit that, that is all about using the power of sport to drive development and to, to enhance communities that have otherwise would be, would be struggling. And is that something that you maybe don't get as much as somebody who does love sport might get? Or do you think actually you can?

• 21:06Rory Stewart?

  I'm sure I don't get it. And just, just in the same way as I guess, you know, I, I support charities that do drama for development. You know, I've supported people who do Shakespeare. I'm, I'm into Shakespeare and many other people are not into Shakespeare and would be a bit bewildered that I think Shakespeare was a, a thing to do. So I, I think there's a sense, and, and I guess it's the same thing, isn't it? I mean, I've just been watching Hamlet with my eight-year-old, the Kenneth Branagh production. We're going kind of lying.

• 21:29Alastair Campbell?

  So, so, hold on a minute. This, this is the eight-year-old who was a seven-year-old who was reading The Week?

• 21:34Rory Stewart?

  That's it. Now an eight-year-old watching Hamlet with it. But I think what I'm picking up with all of this is the more you know, the more you enjoy it. And I don't think it, I think I can watch Shakespeare completely fluently and I, but that's because I've watched a lot of it. And I'm sure the same is true with football. The more you watch it, the more you enjoy it.

• 21:50Alastair Campbell?

  Is your son watching the World Cup?

• 21:52Rory Stewart?

  Uh, no.

• 21:53Alastair Campbell?

  He's not watching the World Cup?

• 21:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, we don't know. We don't watch television as a family, so there's no real opportunity to do that.

• 22:01Alastair Campbell?

  Oh dear God. I mean, I can't imagine life without watching sport. I just can't imagine what it must be like.

• 22:06Rory Stewart?

  Tell you what, I'm very, very lucky. I think I'm going to, we're going to be able to take the family to Doha to watch a live game. So I will then be able to report back on what it's like going to see a live game with no background.

• 22:16Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Well, don't, don't do what, don't do what Fiona did when I took her to a Burnley game once in our, in our courtship. And she turned to me bored after about 10 minutes and said, when is the interval?

• 22:31Rory Stewart?

  Okay, let's have our interval.

• 22:33Alastair Campbell?

  Let's, let's go for a short interval. Yeah.

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• 23:13Rory Stewart?

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

• 23:17Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Annette Campbell.

• 23:19Rory Stewart?

  And we were just going to come around to the subject, your favorite subject of Brexit. The fact that there was a lot of briefing over the weekend that Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt were considering a Swiss style relationship. And then they backed off from it. And a couple of things quickly on that before I, I'm going to throw to you the question of where you think Labour might be on this and how this might play into the next election. But, but just, just again, for listeners who understandably are probably a bit exhausted about different versions of Brexit. Switzerland has a very, very unique relationship to Europe. And it was a relationship that Theresa May was very interested in because it was a sort of bespoke relationship. It's not a single market. It's not a customs union.

• 24:04Rory Stewart?

  It's instead composed of almost a hundred different individual bilateral deals, which mean that.

• 24:11Rory Stewart?

  There are very few checks on the Swiss European borders. No ID checks, no veterinary checks, very few physical checks because they standardize things, they standardize their statistics, they standardize a lot of their products. And I guess the thought was that as Britain is now in a real economic struggle, there could be economic benefits of building that close to trading relationship with Europe again. And I think this is something we've been talking about a lot on the show, which is that one of the big gambles, of course, that some of the Brexit supporters were making was Europe wasn't growing fast and instead we should be reaching out to markets like China. But of course, the geopolitics has changed a lot now.

• 24:54Rory Stewart?

  The idea that what Britain should be doing is massively expanding its trade with China looks much more dubious now than it did six, seven years ago. And Europe seems to be a more natural trading partner again. So good economic logic for it, but then it collapsed. And can I hand over to you on Labour and then maybe I can come back to why I thought it collapsed within the Tories?

• 25:13Alastair Campbell?

  What I think's worth looking at in relation to this situation, so you've now had, how many Tory prime ministers have now been kind of defenestrated because of their party's difficulties on Europe? We're getting close to half a dozen. And I don't know, but my sense was, if you think about the Sunday Times, and even though the Sunday Times might occasionally sail close to the wind and fly kites and what have you, I don't think on the eve of the World Cup, they're going to lead the paper on the story that they did without it being pretty well founded. And I think what was happening was that somebody in government, I suspect closer to Jeremy Hunt than Rishi Sunak, but I don't know that, somebody was flying a kite to see how it would land.

• 25:55Rory Stewart?

  Will you just explain what flying a kite is and why people do it?

• 25:58Alastair Campbell?

  In other words, whoever was behind that story landing in the Sunday Times was giving them enough for them to write the story that that is under consideration. With a view then to seeing what the reaction would be from the, partly from the public, but I think mainly from Conservative MPs. And then according to how that reaction went, they could either just quietly let it go or very loudly deny it, as Rishi Sunak did in a very public forum yesterday at the CBI.

• 26:32Rory Stewart?

  Did you ever do it, Alistair? Was there ever a situation where you flew a kite? Can you give us an example of flying a kite?

• 26:37Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, flying a kite, I mean, I'd have to kind of think deep into the recess of my mind, but certainly you'd sometimes, you would, you would sometimes float ideas, but not necessarily say that they were formed policy, because you were trying to see whether people would, would react in a certain way.

• 26:55Rory Stewart?

  Did Tony Blair do anything like that initially around things like clause four to test the water before he did it, or?

• 27:01Alastair Campbell?

  No, on that one, that was a very, very good example of where we absolutely kept it very, very tight until we announced it. There's one that somewhat to my shame pops into my head. It's very rare that Cabinet Ministers shouted at me as vehemently as I sometimes shouted at people, but I do remember Charles Clarke, when he was Home Secretary, Tony was making some big speech in Germany and I kind of got this line inserted that we were going to look at what became known as cash point justice, where you could, if the police arrested you and felt that you were indulging in antisocial behaviour, the line was something like, we could march you to the cash point.

• 27:43Rory Stewart?

  I remember that.

• 27:44Alastair Campbell?

  You know, do you remember that? It was a terrible, terrible, terrible. And I can remember. And it was just one of, it was a classy thing where we were thinking, and that was, I guess, was it kite flying or was it just sort of, you know, looking for a line? But anyway, it was one of my, it was one of the low points in my, in my career. And Charles Clarke rightly phoned up and said, this is the most ridiculous idea ever. What the F you are you playing at?

• 28:03Rory Stewart?

  What's interesting about those ideas is I remember it as happening, but you're saying it didn't actually happen. It was just a story that appeared and then in the end, nobody was marched to a cash point.

• 28:10Alastair Campbell?

  No, not only was nobody marched, but the policy was, you know, publicly and very volubly, not least by myself, dropped. So I think likewise with this one, because there was, there was a very interesting thing appeared yesterday where David Davis explained...

• 28:30Alastair Campbell?

  I think on social media, he wrote something somewhere where he said that when he saw this story, the first thing he did was phone Jeremy Hunt and say, what the hell is this about? Jeremy Hunt said, it's absolute nonsense. Now, of course, the other thing that sometimes happens is that a politician plants something. And it's interesting, in the introduction, you said Jeremy Hunt.

• 28:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Alastair Campbell?

  You said, right, well, Jeremy Hunt has absolutely denied that. And yet, I suspect there are a lot of MPs thinking Jeremy Hunt was doing that, not least because when he presented his Autumn Statement the other day, and when he did an interview at the weekend, he was sort of talking through the kind of salami slicing on some of these specific deals that you could, for example, do as the European Union do with the Swiss, on some of the specific problems that are arising. And, you know, just to go back to where I am at the Confederation of British Industry, they are genuinely nonplussed, I think, even if they can understand the political logic. Well, from Sunak's point of view, you can understand it, because as he said yesterday, he is a Brexiteer and he's convinced there are great opportunities, just that most people

• 29:32Alastair Campbell?

  can't see them. But likewise with Keir Starmer, he's, again, he said today in the Q and A, we are not going back into the European Union, we are not joining the single market, we are not joining the customs union. But he then did go into saying, and I saw this as something Pat McFadden, the Shadow Chief Secretary, said in an article in the Financial Times the other day, he said that we have to fix the holes in this Brexit deal, and we have to have a much more grown up relationship with the European Union. Now, that says to me, they're leaving the door open to at least have serious discussions that may in the end end up having elements of a Swiss style arrangement, but it won't be the Swiss style, if you see what I mean.

• 30:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, it's, it's really interesting, isn't it? Because the, within the Conservative Party, as soon as Swiss style was announced, as you say, you get people like David Davis picking up the phone, you get people like Liam Fox going out to the media, Liam Fox, who was the Trade Secretary under Theresa May, and David Davis, obviously the Brexit Secretary, who resigned from her cabinet in 20, I guess, 2018, middle of 2018 with the Checos deal. Um. The problem is that it's become so deeply totemic. So even though opinion polls are now showing, it seems that there is a significant lead for people who think leaving the European Union was a mistake. There are polls now showing over fifty think it was a mistake and only thirty.

• 30:54Alastair Campbell?

  Well, well over fifty, really, well over fifty.

• 30:56Rory Stewart?

  And and something of the sort of mid thirties saying they were still strongly in favour. So that that's a big shift. But within the Conservative Party itself, we've gone from the majority of Conservative MPs being Remain voters when I was in Parliament, to a situation where the majority of Conservative MPs were not just Brexit voters, but obviously because they're politicians, very, very active champions in Brexit. And for them, any talk about these kinds of regulatory alignment, that's the sort of buzzword that people hate because they think that what it means is Europe's setting regulations for what happens in Britain. So you've seen quasi-quartaine coming out saying, this would be a disaster. We must take advantage of the opportunities of Brexit and the only opportunities are about being able to deregulate.

• 31:39Rory Stewart?

  So that goes, I mean, that's the kind of whole libertarian argument. So I I was surprised that they floated it because I I don't think anyone who's been in these horrible fights within the Conservative Party would believe for a moment that you would ever get Conservative MPs behind it and you would certainly get well over a hundred of them that would destroy your government if you tried to do it.

• 31:59Alastair Campbell?

  But what's what what is interesting, however, is that the debate, even though they don't want to go there, the debate about going there is already happening. And I, again, without knowing who floated this and why, it's very hard for us properly to analyse this. But I do think that sometimes what you do, this, you know, you you you fly a kite and you bring it down. But there may come a point in the future where you fly it again and the debate around it may have changed. And I I think what's been, just over the last two or three weeks, I've noticed, for example, funny enough, I just bumped into Tim Davy, the the boss of the BBC, who was also speaking here today. And I was doing my usual thing about, you know, criticizing their coverage of Brexit during the referendum,

• 32:44Alastair Campbell?

  which I do from time to time. But it's interesting how the media, I think, has moved ahead of the politicians on this Brexit debate, and I think the public is ahead of both. And I thought the it was, I saw the clips last week, you may have seen it, Rory, the the clip that really sort of flew out of question time last week. Was a minister, Victoria Atkins, who honestly was waffling and inarticulate about sort of talking about the opportunities, just reading the number 10 lines to take on Brexit. And there was a guy who introduced himself as a small businessman and with absolute sort of passion and forensic attention to detail, explained why his business was really, really struggling and linked it absolutely, you know, none of this all about Ukraine,

• 33:27Alastair Campbell?

  all about Covid. He said it was Brexit. And I think more and more people are feeling licensed and willing and able to voice that argument. So the debate will move.

• 33:35Rory Stewart?

  It's very interesting, so because and also how difficult it is for MPs. So Victoria Atkins, her father, Robert Atkins, was a big, big Remainer and she was a member of the European Parliament.

• 33:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 33:47Rory Stewart?

  And she was a very, very strong campaigner on the Remain side. And now, of course, presumably as a minister, she has to then get into strong defences around Brexit. Listen, this question about the times and stories, I mean, occasionally journalists can be very naughty. One of the things I've noticed them doing recently is that they will, particularly when they write stories about the royal family, I don't know whether this is something that you saw when you were a journalist or a more, more active journalist, writing daily. But I mean, they will run a story saying, I don't know, something about, I don't know, exhuming a royal corpse for DNA studies. And then they will add a paragraph saying, King Charles is, you know, actively considering this. And they, they put it in, I think, knowing

• 34:29Rory Stewart?

  perfectly well that they've got no evidence for that at all, but he's never going to deny it. And it helps the editor get the story across the line.

• 34:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the Queen, of course, was famously had, you know, never apologise, never explain. I think that has changed a lot. I think that the, the connections between media and the royal family have developed and evolved. But certainly, they, they know that when it comes to writing about the royals, they can, they can get away with more and they try and there's no doubt in my mind that they, that they do. I think that where they, the reason why the, the relationships that during the breakup of the marriage, that Prince Charles, as he then was, and Princess Diana. That because it transpired that the same people who were adamantly denying these

• 35:19Alastair Campbell?

  stories, it then transpired were also the ones feeding these stories. And then, of course, the, you know, the fact that both of them, as is now, you know, famous, they both had their their connections with the media which they which they exploited. And so I think that that gives the media license to to to think that they can, that's their justification for, as you say, putting something in that they know gets the story over the line, even if they're not sure whether or not it's true.

• 35:48Rory Stewart?

  Well, moving on to to Trump. So we we talked a lot about DeSantis last week and talking about how Ron DeSantis performed incredibly well in the election in Florida and how Trump seemed to have been really humiliated. But I guess I've had quite a lot of pushback from American listeners saying, we must not in any way count Trump out and that his support amongst his base is incredibly strong. And one of them said to me on Sunday, he still thinks there's a 70, 80% chance of Trump winning the primary. And if that happens, you've got somebody going into an election fully committed to

• 36:28Rory Stewart?

  the narrative that the last election was stolen, with something like over 60% of Republican voters believing that the 2020 election was stolen. And that is a very dangerous situation to have an angry man who totally rejects election outcomes going into an election and a country as divided as the United States.

• 36:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Is it with the person that said that to you, was he or she a Democrat or Republican?

• 36:54Rory Stewart?

  A Democrat.

• 36:54Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. See, I think that I think the DeSantis supporters got very, very excited around the time of the the midterms. But I saw a very interesting thread from a guy, what's his name, Seth Abramson, I think his name was. And he was giving some pretty compelling arguments confirming what you just said that he cannot be ruled out. Because I think what happens is that we, we apply, and I think we did this in our discussion last week, we apply the political logic that normally goes with election outcomes. But when you've seen somebody who has taken the most high-profile

• 37:34Alastair Campbell?

  election in the world and subverted the sense of what the result was amongst his own supporters, then he's not going to be put off by a little matter of the midterms where people say that guy in Florida disinterested very well. And he will be, I don't think we should ever underestimate how much of a, how much of a campaigner he is. That's what he gets his rocks off, it's how he makes his money, it's how he does his deals, and he is, he's a very, on his own terms, people like you and me, he disgusts and repels us, on his own terms, he can be a very, very effective communicator. And I also think, by the way, I, I think Joe Biden has been doing really well on the substance on lots of issues. I think even though they've lost the control, lost

• 38:19Alastair Campbell?

  control of the House of Representatives, he still gets out with a spring in his step and a smile on his face every day. And he kind of gets, tries to get stuff done, he's clear in his agenda and so forth. But I think that the chances of him running again, which means he was 80 this week, I think, he'd be 86 by the time he finished a second term, if he were to win it. I think the chances of him running again are increased the better that Trump does, because Biden has a track record of beating him, and that will be his unique selling point in the party.

• 38:47Rory Stewart?

  But 86 is very old. I mean, that's a tough, it's a, it's the toughest job on earth being President of the United States. I mean, all of them, you know, Obama turned white, Clinton turned white, but to be doing it in your mid 80s. I mean, I felt with my father, who I guess retired at 75, that even at 75, he was beginning to wish he'd retired a bit earlier. But at 86, the guy that definitely, whose hair definitely has not turned white in this whole situation is Donald Trump.

• 39:12Alastair Campbell?

  No, I wonder whether he might have assistance in that regard. But he hasn't aged horribly, has he? He's, he's sort of overweight and. But he doesn't, he doesn't look that much older.

• 39:23Rory Stewart?

  No, and, and, and to, to everybody's fury, he seemed to come through Covid unbelievably within about two days, when I assumed it was going to knock him out for weeks during the presidential campaign. And the result, not just for American democracy, but for standoffs against Russia, Ukraine, for climate and everything. I mean, this is something over the next two years, which we, we've talked a lot about whether this is an age of populism and figures like Trump, I think he's almost the central figure of the age. So we've seen the fantastic defeat of Trump by Biden, the defeat of Bolsonaro, those elections that you talked about, for example, in Slovenia.

• 39:57Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Where, by the way, Rory, Slovenia, the other thing about Slovenia, they've just elected their first woman president as well. So, and, and, and they, they ejected a populist as well.

• 40:06Rory Stewart?

  So there is a sort of countervailing force, but then Trump is back on Twitter. And it's, it's a horrible feeling. I don't know how much, I sometimes think you don't spend quite as much time on Twitter as I do.

• 40:17Alastair Campbell?

  No, I don't think I do, because I, unlike, I tweet, but I don't engage much. And, and also, he's not back on Twitter, he's just that he's, he's got the right to be back on Twitter.

• 40:24Rory Stewart?

  It's, I, I have a little sort of hobbit world on Twitter, where I've got sort of cheerful people sharing images of Roman glass and jokes about Stonehenge and all this kind of stuff. And suddenly, sort of Elon Musk is all over my feed. And it's as though I've gone to stay in a hotel and the, and the owner of the hotel is trying to break into my bedroom. I mean, it's, it's a really kind of, I feel totally sort of violated.

• 40:47Alastair Campbell?

  I wonder if Trump's thinking about not going back on Twitter at this stage, because actually, he recognizes in Musk somebody very similar to himself, and he doesn't, he doesn't want to be in that same playground with somebody who's playing the same games.

• 41:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's an interesting idea. Now, on climate and on the Middle East, we've just had the COP in Egypt. So another very interesting example of a country with a very, very difficult human rights record. I mean, we, you know, you're talking about Qatar, I mean, I was expecting much, much more focus on Egypt. And it's interesting that, you know, Egypt effectively murdered an Italian student with its security forces, still has enormous number of people imprisoned, proper autocratic military regime. But am I right in saying, oddly, there wasn't as much coverage of Egypt in terms of its human rights record as there has been as Qatar? So why is it that a football competition is different from a climate conference?

• 41:41Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, I think there was a fair bit in the build up, but I, no, you're right. There were, there were a lot of protests, but of course, they, they were, I think, fairly quickly dealt with. Um. I remember I actually met C C before he became president and um but everybody knew that he was going to be president. And I remember, I shouldn't really laugh, but I I remember saying to him that, you know, I think it'd be absolutely great if you kind of went even further than the most liberal progressive Western might expect you to in terms in terms of acknowledging human rights and the importance of

• 42:18Rory Stewart?

  Took your advice all the way, yeah.

• 42:19Alastair Campbell?

  He did not. He is fair to say he was one of the leaders who did not take much of my my advice. But no, you're right. And I I I thought the, I don't know, COP left me pretty disheartened, to be absolutely frank. I mean, we we talked before in one of our previous episodes about this whole loss and damage thing. And there was definitely progress on that. But when it came to, I thought Alex Sharma, and people do get very emotional at these conferences because you go for days and days and then it overran by two days and nobody slept. You had all those shots of people sleeping on floors. And but the fact is, it's it's not much of a step forward from where we were at Glasgow. Um. And a lot of the, you know, when you read about that, literally, the hundreds

• 43:02Alastair Campbell?

  of oil and gas and fossil fuel lobbyists who are into these governments in the way that they are. And there was, you know, you talked about the some of the the culture clash that we have, say, with a country like Qatar. There was a very illustrative clip on one of the news channels of a British journalist trying to get a quote from a member of the Saudi delegation about why they were pushing back so hard. And eventually, the guy just sort of, you know, realized he couldn't just keep walking away. So he just sort of turned his back and walked into walked into the camera. So you could see you couldn't actually continue the the chase at all. But I I felt that was that was incredibly disappointing and perhaps confirmed Greta Thunberg. And she said that she wasn't going to bother

• 43:46Alastair Campbell?

  going because she didn't see the point of just listening to them all say the same things again. But it was pretty dispiriting, I thought.

• 43:52Rory Stewart?

  Well, one of one of the the big dispiriting things is that even the existing funds that have been set up, the existing money that's been committed, is not really being spent. I mean, we've got caught in this argument about people having promised 100 billion and whether 100 billion has been delivered. But the truth is that a lot of that money is simply circled back to wealthy countries in the West. It's not getting to the developed world at all. And when I talk to charities that are applying, for example, to do work in places like Somalia, which are devastated by climate change, and they're applying to these big UN funds, it's often taking them over two years to begin to get these contracts and funds through. And again, I mean, to return to something I'm obsessed with, but I was also talking to your friend David Miliband about, if we're serious about resilience

• 44:37Rory Stewart?

  for these communities and we want to get support to them quickly, one of the most straightforward ways of doing it is cash. Getting cash to the poorest people in the world gives them the resilience to be able to respond when their livestock is killed, when their house is wiped away by a calamitous flood, when their maize crop is wiped out, gives them the wherewithal to survive. And we're doing so little. A small amount of that putty of £100 billion could transform lives, transform resilience, and we're not doing it.

• 45:05Alastair Campbell?

  Now, can I, can I close on something closer to home?

• 45:07Rory Stewart?

  Go on then.

• 45:08Alastair Campbell?

  We got quite a lot of love from the local government community last week, Rory, because we just sort of, we just talked about them a bit. And I bumped into, while I was swimming, I bumped into a woman called Grace Williams, who's the leader of Waltham Forest Council. And I think sometimes we do underestimate the importance of local government in our lives and in the way that we, our public services are run. But when, what I wanted to focus on was Jeremy Hunt talked in his Autumn Statement about taking all the tough decisions. But when you get into the small print, in terms of the tax rises, this, he's loading an awful lot of this onto local authorities by giving them the right to go

• 45:52Alastair Campbell?

  for higher council tax. And very, given the state of our public finances and the state of council-run services, it's going to be very, very hard for a lot of our councils to resist that. So I just think it was a very interesting example of where he talked the talk. The whole framing was about tough decisions.

• 46:11Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I suppose the justification for that is that people like me, who are big believers in localism, have long been campaigning to try to give much more tax-raising powers and budgetary powers to local authorities, to let them be responsible for their budgets, raise more of their own money, make their own decisions on investment. And one of the problems in Britain for years has been this rhetoric around it. But in the end, we have a very micromanaging central state that's very reluctant to actually trust councils to borrow, trust them to tax, trust them to spend. So It's probably done, as you say, for political reasons, but it may be a step in the better direction. The other thing on the mini-budget while we're on it is that so many of the big decisions have been left out to the future.

• 46:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, the spending decisions in particular.

• 46:55Rory Stewart?

  The spending cuts are not supposed to come till 2025, which, remember, is after the election. So it's basically going to put these parties, as they go into the general election, in the position of having to square up to the public and say whether or not they're going to cut public services at that point.

• 47:13Alastair Campbell?

  But that's what I meant earlier when I said that, you know, it was a very, very, I mean, Jeremy Hunt's got a nice kind of vicar-style manner, but he was, that was a very political statement. The more you look into the detail, it's back to this point about trying to lay traps for Labour rather than...

• 47:28Rory Stewart?

  But equally, I guess, there is no appetite at the moment for significant public spending cuts. So you can completely understand. And I guess Labour too was not in favour of big public spending cuts. But we're getting into a world where we're basically punting all these decisions down the road.

• 47:43Alastair Campbell?

  This point about the council tax, 5% council tax rise, and bear in mind, this is a government that keeps talking the talk on levelling up, 5% council tax rise would raise you £85 per household in Richmond-on-Thames, 81 in Surrey, 75 in Dorset. In Manchester and Hull, it would raise you £39. So I think there was a lot of politics in that, which I don't think actually will play necessarily that well for the Conservatives if people are alerted to the truth of it and its impact.

• 48:14Rory Stewart?

  So I don't quite get that. You think that the problem is that you're taxing people in the South more than people in the North?

• 48:20Alastair Campbell?

  That if you raise the council tax, no, my point is that in the wealthier areas, a rising council tax is going to raise more money per household.

• 48:30Rory Stewart?

  But it will also involve those houses paying more.

• 48:32Alastair Campbell?

  Sure, yeah, but that's because they're wealthiest. My point is that...

• 48:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, so I think it sort of balances out, doesn't it?

• 48:37Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it depends if you want to make, if you're saying, I don't think it does. The point I'm making is that you give them more flexibility, okay, the wealthier areas are going to be able to raise a lot more money for their areas, that's my point.

• 48:51Rory Stewart?

  Because the 5% is more. Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah. Good. All right. Well, maybe wrap on that.

• 48:56Alastair Campbell?

  All the best and I'll see you soon.

• 48:57Rory Stewart?

  Thank you.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 49:04Speaker 05

  On October 2nd.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 49:10Speaker 05

  Tom Cruise is.

• 49:11Speaker 04

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 49:15Speaker 05

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• 49:17Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You start, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 49:22Speaker 05

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• 49:25Speaker 06

  I'm not the first then.

• 49:26Speaker 05

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.