475. The Budget Backlash – and Trump’s Plan to Profit from Peace in Ukraine

Is the media too negative about Reeves and Starmer, or are they simply out of ideas? What has the relentless Budget turmoil and fallout done to already low levels of trust in the Government? How much of Trump’s approach to Putin and Ukraine is driven by his business interests? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Gift The Rest Is Politics Plus this Christmas – give someone a whole year of Rory and Alastair’s miniseries, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. Just go to therestispolitics.supportingcast.fm/gifts. And of course, you can still join for yourself any time at therestispolitics.com The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away free TRIP Plus membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP Plus gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ To save your company time and money, open a Revolut Business account today via get.revolut.com/z4lF/therestispolitics, and add money to your account by 31st of December 2025 to get a £200 welcome bonus or equivalent in your local currency. __________ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Senior Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Rory Stewart?

  The big question for Labour is, is this a government about inequality or is it a government about grace? Now, they'll try to say they want to do both, I get that, but in the end, there needs to be a relentless idea driven through government of what the priority is here. What one needs from this Chancellor, I don't care what it is, could be right wing, could be left wing. Here's an analysis, this is what's fundamentally wrong with the country, this is what's holding it back, and this is what we're going to do to fix it. What's the problem you're fixing? I don't, I don't care. What's the problem you're fixing and what are you doing about it? And that's why I think she's no good.

• 0:32Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:41Rory Stewart?

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• 0:50Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:06Rory Stewart?

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• 1:13Alastair Campbell?

  I'd love to know how many of our listeners have 20 acres of land, we shall maybe find out. You can watch the energy revolution from the sidelines or you can join it today.

• 1:21Rory Stewart?

  Turn idle land into forward progress with Fuse. Contact fuse@[email protected] to start a referral and have the chance to win £2,000.

• 1:37Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:39Alastair 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.

• 1:50Alastair Campbell?

  Managed to watch it. There you go.

• 1:51Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve. And of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're 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.

• 2:15Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:22Rory Stewart?

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

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Payday bars have a bone to pick with the other candy bars. Enough with the toppings and layers and stuff, kay? Payday bars are just salty crunchy peanuts and sweet caramel. Delicious. Payday Peanut Caramel Bar.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 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 125 years with new moments still add. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 3:31Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 3:33Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 3:35Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, we're going to do first half UK focusing on the fallout from the budget last week. And then we're going to do second half, various elements of Trump, but in particular, Ukraine and this extraordinary situation in Honduras and Venezuela. So where do you want to start with with the budget?

• 3:55Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think the obvious place to start is that a lot of the UK press has been caught up in the last few days with whether or not the Office for Budget Responsibility had told Rachel Reeves that the fiscal situation was better than she feared. And basically, the story here is that the briefing to the press, and indeed, it seems to the Cabinet colleagues, was that they had got some pretty worrying information from the OBR. And therefore, a few weeks ago, the idea was that because they were going to be getting less income in than they hoped, and the productivity was less good than they hoped, they were actually going to have to put up income tax, which would have been a really big move, because it would have broken the manifesto commitment. When it actually came to it,

• 4:37Rory Stewart?

  she didn't put up income tax, she put up other forms of tax, and largely got most of her revenue by just freezing the thresholds, so that increase in people's salaries would naturally drag them into higher tax thresholds, was going to generate her billions. And I think the complaints are basically twofold. There's the complaints from journalists, like Robert Peston, our colleague on the Rest is Money, that he felt effectively lied to, that he was briefed and given the impression that there was a severe fiscal crisis, basically, which was going to require these very dramatic measures. And it turned out that wasn't really the information she'd got from this independent office at all. And then there were complaints from Labour colleagues, saying that they had walked them up the hill, saying there'd

• 5:20Rory Stewart?

  been a crisis, they needed to raise income tax, and then they brought them down again. And this has now all resulted in the resignation of Richard Hughes, the head of the Office of Budget Responsibility. Over to you.

• 5:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think the resignation is more related to the fact that, in what everybody recognised as a complete fiasco, somehow the Office of Budget Responsibility released the budget before it had been delivered, which is sort of beyond belief on one level. But I think underlying it, there had been tensions with the OBR, there'd been tensions about his remit, about his role. It was interesting yesterday that Keir Starmer made a speech and then did a little press conference where he actually spoke up for the OBR in terms of its existence and its and its remit.

• 6:03Rory Stewart?

  So, so given the pressure Reeves has been under this week, I think we're going to do two things here. One is Alistair has got some very interesting points about actually the way the media operates in Britain and the way that it's not serious and it's biased. And then we'll wrap up by actually looking at the substance of this. Is Rachel Reeves a good Chancellor or not? So first we'll talk about some of the coverage and then we'll talk about the substance of what she's doing.

• 6:25Alastair Campbell?

  I think on the bigger picture, partly because Rachel Reeves is getting such a kicking and has been ever, well, for a long time now, I'm going to put the case for the defence on this one. And it's interesting how you say that journalists feel they've been misled. A lot of the misleading in the build up to budgets is done by journalists. And I think that this relates to the totally different context and the way that the modern media now operates. I've told you before, when I was a political journalist and I was once called in by my editor, Richard Star, this was about when Nigel Lawson was Chancellor, and I'd written a sort of trailer of the budget. And it was very, very speculative. I wasn't saying anything that justified taxes to go up, taxes to go down. I was reflecting

• 7:08Alastair Campbell?

  the sorts of conversations I'd been having. And bear in mind, this was on a Labour supporting tabloid newspaper. So I wrote this piece and Richard called me and he said, they always call me old man, he called everybody old man. He said, have you seen the budget, old man? And I said, no, of course I haven't seen the fucking budget. Nobody's seen the budget, apart from the people who've written it. And he said, well, why are you writing this crap then? Now, I just don't believe that conversation would happen, never mind in the Daily Round, I don't think it happened in any newspaper. So, and the other thing, it used to be accepted across politics and across the media, by and large, budgets didn't leak. And that has steadily changed over the years. And in part, I think, again, because the press want to have their cake and eat it, to quote Boris Johnson. So they will speculate on all sorts of ideas. I think the one that did the damage, when Kemi Baden

• 7:53Alastair Campbell?

  not talked about the markets, I think it was this idea floated of an exit tax. If you leave the country, you go to pay. And I'm not sure that that ever came from anybody within the Treasury. I think that was me. Media speculation that then took a life on a life of its own. Now, here's a bit of advice. I saw that on the back of the West Streeting mounting a leadership challenge against Keir Starmer. Keir Starmer apparently briefed the cabinet. He didn't want to see any briefing coming out of Number 10 other than from Number 10 comms team headed by Tim Allen, which I think was a way of saying to Morgan McSweeney, stop spending half your time talking to the media. I think now would be a good time for Starmer and Rachel Reeves to make clear a genuine determination to get back to a place

• 8:39Alastair Campbell?

  where the golden rule governing statements about the economy, like the budget and others, public spending and so forth, is that unless it comes from somebody authorised to speak on behalf of them, it has no merit whatsoever. And I think that can be done, even with the media making stuff up. So I think, you know, you mentioned the speech that Rachel Reeves made, and we said at the time it was rolling the pitch. And we both thought that it was, and so did the markets, that she was going to put up income tax. I watched Keir Starmer's speech yesterday and I watched the press conference afterwards. I think what you've got to understand is that with something like a budget, there is a mixture of politics and economics going on. Now, you can argue the merit of doing what she did and you can argue

• 9:21Alastair Campbell?

  the demerit. We thought she did it for a purpose, that purpose then changed because I think probably Number 10 had said, we are not going to put up income tax. But if you think about what the budget actually achieved, I think the biggest thing that it did, and this is what kind of settled the markets, was actually the creation of that far bigger than expected fiscal headroom. Now, she did that by putting other taxes up. So it's possible for conflicting contradictory statements that are being made now and analysed to the nth degree by journalists who don't really want to write the story, the budget went down quite well with the markets, went down quite well with Labour MPs. They want to say it was a complete fiasco because that's what they said it was going to be. So I think they should calm down a bit.

• 10:05Rory Stewart?

  And let's step back from the subject of the comms and whether or not she was right to use the OBR in the way that she did. And just look at that statement she meant, the budget went down quite well with Labour MPs and quite well with the markets. If I was being challenging, I'd say that's the problem. That if you wanted to analyse what's wrong with Rachel Reeves, what's wrong with her is she's trying to produce a budget which goes down quite well with Labour MPs and doesn't spook the markets. And that that isn't actually what Britain needs at the moment. Our productivity is pathetic and has been since 2019. And we need a story about growth and how on earth Britain is going to compete over the next 10, 15 years.

• 10:46Rory Stewart?

  And she is the Chancellor who basically, in the end, is largely concerned with not upsetting Labour MPs and not spooking the markets too much. And that means she ends up in the worst of all worlds. She's neither doing the kind of radical pro-business reforms because she doesn't want to annoy the Labour backbenchers, which would really please the markets, nor is she prepared to really lean into the kind of instincts of her backbenchers because she's worried about worrying the markets. And she ends up in a grey muddle in the middle, which, to my sense, I don't really see anything big enough, clear enough in what she or Starmer is communicating, which would really give a sense of business confidence.

• 11:29Alastair Campbell?

  I'll respond to that actually by going through in some detail what Keir Starmer said yesterday. Now, this goes again, I'm sorry, this does go back again to how the media frame stuff. So Keir Starmer, he is the Prime Minister, right? If Keir Starmer makes a speech about anything, it should have some news value to it, okay? The news value that the media decided in advance was that Keir Starmer was shoring up Rachel Reeves' position, defending the budget and claiming that there was no misleading going on. If you go into the Number 10 website and read the whole speech, there is a lot in it. Very little of which was reported yesterday or in any of the newspapers today.

• 12:13Alastair Campbell?

  Why? Because that framing has been set. So if I just go through it now, and by the way, BBC, Sky, they will say, well, we covered it live. Okay. Yeah. And fair enough, they covered it live. So Keir Starmer started his speech essentially by talking about how proud he was of lifting the two child benefit cap. Now, you could say, a journalist might go back and say, well, hold on a minute, a year, not long ago, you were expelling MPs for, from the party for

• 12:39Rory Stewart?

  saying- Yeah, well, let's stop on that, Alyssa, for a second, because I think it is worth reminding people of that. They came in just over a year ago, and one of the really difficult, tough decisions they made, challenging their backbenchers, was to say, we're going to keep a cap that beyond two children, you're not going to get welfare benefits. And when Labour MPs voted against that policy, they expelled Labour MPs from the party. They were that hard over on this policy. So it's very odd to say, I'm very proud that I've lifted the two child benefit cap, when you were expelling people a year ago.

• 13:11Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, you've partly made my point for me. So Keir Starmer finishes his speech, there was actually quite a lot in it, I'll go through it in a minute, after which they do that thing, Chris Mason of the BBC, Beth Rigby of Sky, Robert Pest of the ITN, somebody else from somewhere else, then a couple of kind of influencers, and they go through. Virtually every question was about the pre-framing, okay? You say you're defending your Chancellor, but on this day she said this, and that day said that, don't you think she should resign? Whatever. A better question, I think, would have been, given that I could have told them what he was going to say about that, because he'd written in the bloody Observer the day before, would have been, hold on a minute, can I just remind you what you said about

• 13:52Alastair Campbell?

  the two child benefit cap? When you were expelling MPs, okay. But he did that. He then goes through, he said, we, we had to face choices. We could have cut public services, we could have ignored child poverty, we could have done extra borrowing, and then he kind of did a little subliminal reminder of list trusts, et cetera. He then talked about austerity. Austerity has scarred the long-term productive capability of his country. Now, for the next bit, Rory, I want you to imagine that the Daily Mail, the Sun, the Express, the Telegraph, the Times, that their psychology- Is not to look for stories the whole time to denigrate and damage the Labour government, but it's actually to act as cheerleaders, as they did, for example, when Liz Truss did her budget,

• 14:35Alastair Campbell?

  which smashed the economy, as they do a lot of the time with Nigel Farage. Okay. He then went through, he said this point about, if you'd have said to me that when we took power, by now we'd have cut NHS waiting times, got immigration down, cut child poverty, cut borrowing faster than any other G7 country, fiscal headroom up, economic growth beating the forecast, wages up, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, I can imagine a Daily Express front page that goes, immigration, down, waiting lists, down, wages, up, all that sort of stuff, right? Freezing rail fares, freezing prescription charges. So, my point is, none of that gets covered. Now, we then go on to the next, the next thing, which I think is really, really important, because

• 15:18Alastair Campbell?

  you said you're one of the few people in all of the coverage who mentioned this thing called the Fingalton Report on nuclear power and the building of nuclear power stations. Keir Starmer set out three areas where he said there has to be major change across the economy. He quoted the Fingalton recommendations on nuclear power. He talked about a mindset that favors process over outcome, which I think you had referred to. He talked about gold plating, well-intentioned misguided environmental regulation, and then said that in addition to accepting these recommendations on nuclear power, I'm instructing the business secretary, Peter Kyle, to apply these lessons across an entire industrial strategy. Now, all I would

• 16:00Alastair Campbell?

  say is if this was France, or Germany, even America, or Australia, or any country with a serious media, that would have been part of the news coverage. I've not seen it anywhere.

• 16:11Rory Stewart?

  I guess that what one wants ideally from analysis is not either cheerleading or trashing.

• 16:18Alastair Campbell?

  No, great.

• 16:18Rory Stewart?

  One wants an attempt to step back and objectively look at it. So, part of the question is, have Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves won people's trust? When he says, I'm going to cut process, focus on outcomes, do people really believe on the basis of what he's done over the last 18 months that that's where his heart is and that's what's going to really happen? And part of the problem at the back of all of this is there's a general sense, which has been going on in British politics for a very long time, which is that the... Government makes endless announcements and they want the press to report them as though they've achieved them.

• 16:55Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, I agree with that.

• 16:56Rory Stewart?

  And actually, what I think the public sense, and we can get into this a bit more, but you know, when I look at this government, I was trying to think at about six this morning, what it is that really troubles me about this government. And I've concluded that it's in every department of government that I worked in as a minister, I cannot see that they're making the right decisions. But the departments I know really well, so I served in DEFRA, I served in the Ministry of Justice, I served in Overseas Development, and I served in the Foreign Office. And in every single one of those departments, this feels like a government that isn't gripping it and isn't ultimately making the right calls.

• 17:35Rory Stewart?

  So when he says waiting list down, immigration down, I'm afraid my instinct is, okay, how much down? Why is it down? How much is the government to do with this? How much is this about net migration when in fact we've got astonishing figures, the number of people choosing to leave the United Kingdom?

• 17:52Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:53Rory Stewart?

  Hundred and fifty thousand British citizens have voluntarily left the United Kingdom because they would rather be working in Poland, Romania, Australia than working in the UK. That's not necessarily something to boast about. Anyway, back to you.

• 18:04Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not pretending, I'm not going to pretend that this government is, and I said this when we were on tour recently, I said to virtually every audience, that it's not performing in a way that I was hoping and would like it to. I'm trying to make a bigger point, that I still think that they're, they're trying to do the right thing in a very, very difficult media environment, way worse than we had. It's on a par, I think, with the way the media covered Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock. They were sort of just constant, the media saw his role as denigrating them, and that's possibly one of the reasons why they never made it to power. But this is a government in power. And I think part of what's happened is that they're so used, since the, the sort of churn of prime ministers and chancellors and foreign secretaries and all the reshuffles and all the madness of Truss and Johnson and what have you, it's all about getting scalps.

• 18:49Alastair Campbell?

  And they've got a few, Angela Rayner, Peter Mandelson and so forth. But let me just finish a couple of points, Rory, because the other, these all relate to things that we've talked about. The second point, so he made that first point about the Fingalton Review and said that's going to go across government. And I agree with you.

• 19:03Rory Stewart?

  And let's see.

• 19:04Alastair Campbell?

  My point is about the media, that is a serious proposal. Analyze it, test it, force them to ask questions. Nobody asked about that, not a single word. Then the second point was welfare. He said, we've got to reform the welfare state. And then he said, that's why we've asked Alan Milburn, one of your heroes, to report on this issue of young people inactivity and work. And again, interesting area, look at it, test it.

• 19:28Rory Stewart?

  I guess the test is that the idea that he's floating is that they will cut some of the payments to young people. And instead, one idea is that they will provide incentives for people to employ them. So let's say you were going to get three thousand pounds. When you weren't working, your employer might be given matching to employ you so that you'd be transferred to the workplace. But I guess the issue that we're struggling with here, and the journalist needs to test, is every time so far Reeves and Starmer have talked about radical welfare reform, their backbenchers have blocked it.

• 20:03Alastair Campbell?

  They lost the vote, for sure, for sure. But that's why, so for example, just going back to what a serious media would do with that, I would go off and I'd say, okay, let's go and you can do this now with ChatGPT and AI and all that stuff. Let's go and find out everything Alan Milburn has ever said about reform of welfare, when he was in government and since. When we interviewed him, he talked about it. What are his principles in this? Start a debate about that. And then the third area, this is the one that really cheered me up, of course, we must all now confront the reality, said the Prime Minister, that the Brexit deal we have significantly hurt our economy. We have to keep reducing frictions. We have to keep moving towards a closer relationship with the EU. Now, Rory, to be

• 20:46Alastair Campbell?

  fair to the Daily Express, can I say those words, to be fair to the Daily Express? They are the only paper that led today on Keir Starmer's speech, under the headline, Fury As Under Fire Starmer Says Brexit Has Hurt Our Economy. Oh no, how could he say that?

• 21:05Rory Stewart?

  So he's cutting through that.

• 21:07Alastair Campbell?

  A bit, a bit, a bit.

• 21:09Rory Stewart?

  There's a bigger point though, isn't there, which is sort of part of the whole thing, which is, I guess. If you were actually to say to a highly intelligent, well-informed reader of The Guardian or The Times or a listener to Today programme, what is actually happening in military defence spending? Putin's threatening Ukraine, he's threatening Europe. What's actually the deal here? My sense is it's not been reported in a way that has got through to anyone. I think vaguely in people's mind, they would think Labour's increasing defence spending, but the reality is, in real terms, it probably isn't going up and most of the money is going to be absorbed in the nuclear programme and we're woefully underprepared. But that's

• 21:50Rory Stewart?

  always the same thing, isn't it? This isn't just about the media being very right wing. It's also about a media environment that's very, very uninterested in holding people to account for details. They're not, you know, how much real reporting has been done on the fact that the Foreign Office is now losing something like 30% of its staff? And what that actually means for global Britain and post-Brexit Britain and how we're going to operate in the world, were those 30% of staff necessary, unnecessary, etcetera?

• 22:19Alastair Campbell?

  Just on that specific point. So, you know, before we started recording, I sort of just had a quick look through some of the news websites and there's a story on the BBC, Yvette Cooper angry that tents that Britain has paid for have taken a year to get to Gaza. Now, I didn't read the whole story, but if I was a journalist, I'd be coming straight back at them on that. So, hold on a minute. When we had a properly funded overseas development agency and we were, and DIFID was leading the world in this. So it works both ways this, okay? I think it's the short-termism, it's the lack of, we go with that critical thinking in education. There's so little critical thinking, I would say, in modern journalism. And listen, I'm not tarring them all with the same brush.

• 23:01Alastair Campbell?

  But if you followed our media over the last five days, and I suspect this story about, you know, so you've now got John Swinney, you've got Nigel Farage, you've got, you know, Badenoch, you've got them all. So to say Rachel Reeves must resign, and that's what everybody's talking about. I get the feeling, looking at Keir Starmer yesterday, he's not going to sack her. Uh. He doesn't think it justifies it. And I actually, I think this is reaching a point. And and I know that my colleagues at Number Ten will be going, oh, God, here he goes again. What's to declare war on the media? I don't want to do that. But I actually do think from time to time politicians should do a better job of explaining to the public about some of this stuff.

• 23:43Alastair Campbell?

  Like, we've both said that we we thought that the build up to this budget was pretty chaotic. Okay. And and I think it was. There was far too much talking out the side of mass going on. There were far too many people felt they were licensed to get talk to the press. Stop it. Just grow up and stop it. But that being said, I think this so called mess that we're in is as much about the way the media now operates as it is about any mistakes made by the Treasury.

• 24:09Rory Stewart?

  And you're right, there's obviously a right wing bias and a huge amount to the media. And there aren't that many left wing supporting papers. But it's also true that if you were Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt listening to this, you'd be saying, hold a second. How do you think the media treated us in our last two and a half years? Every single thing we did was treated as a joke. Every announcement we made was ignored. Every attempts to lay out serious principles was swept aside. The stuff we did on AI wasn't taken seriously.

• 24:38Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure that's true. I'm not sure that's true. There is a big difference here. They were the fag end of a government that most people thought were going to lose, including them. We know that, talking to Jeremy Hunt. He said he knew he was going to lose, but he had to stay. We're talking about a government that was elected just over a year ago with a majority. Now, you and I can agree, as we do, the Labour haven't necessarily used that majority well, that they haven't set out big things on AI, whatever it might be. But I actually think yesterday was a very good example, whereas if you actually took what Keir Starmer said and analyzed it with a journalistic mind that isn't party pre to say, this is a shambles, this is a disaster, there was a lot to talk about. I saw very little of it being talked about.

• 25:20Rory Stewart?

  So maybe two ways from which I'd agree with you. First is that Keir Starmer is definitely not as bad as his net popularity rating suggests. He's got about twenty. Percent of the British public think he's doing a good job. Something like forty one percent of the American public think Trump's doing a good job to put that in kind of context, right? It's got half the popularity rating of Trump. So I think that is not justified. Normally, you would look at um Keir Starmer and you'd look for an analogy in history. You know, he's not there with the worst prime ministers on record. He's not, I don't know, Neville Chamberlain or whatever. He's there with some of the slightly underwhelming early twentieth century prime ministers that we can't really remember the names of.

• 26:01Rory Stewart?

  Or maybe he's with Alec Douglas Hume or something. But Alec Douglas Hume didn't have a net popularity rating of of of, you know, whatever it is, minus fifty.

• 26:08Alastair Campbell?

  And he and he didn't win an election.

• 26:10Rory Stewart?

  And he didn't win an election. And the second thing is that your bigger point about the media is really important. Um. I was very struck by how when we did our emergency episode on Covid, people getting in touch, saying, thank goodness, somebody's trying to get into some of the details of this thing, because this was a really big deal. That's right. Four hundred billion pounds hit to the British economy, massive effects on education, et cetera, et cetera, almost forgotten. But also in that time when you went through all the points in the Ukraine peace plan, we'll get on to this a bit after the break, but again, the number of people who said, goodness, nobody had actually pointed out to us these commercial financial deals in the Ukraine peace plan. So there's clearly a big problem.

• 26:54Rory Stewart?

  I I don't think it's just, I think it's partly an anti labour problem, but it's a bigger problem of the fact that for whatever reason, editors have decided that the public isn't interested in policy detail.

• 27:08Alastair Campbell?

  And yet, large numbers of the public, this isn't just blowing our trumpets, it's a fact, large numbers of the public listen to a pensioner and a middle aged guy from, you know, your background, talk about politics a few times a week. So I think I, this is the point I keep making, the media, I think they are wrong to assume that the public can only cope with one story at a time. And the story this week is Rachel Reeves lied to us. Chris Mason at the BBC, who's, you know, who had a kind of multiple orgasm when the O B R accidentally released the budget live on television.

• 27:45Rory Stewart?

  Do your Christmas impression, like your Christmas impression.

• 27:50Alastair Campbell?

  The rise and rise of reform. But he said, he'd wrote this long piece and he said, in other words, this was the end of the analysis, nothing she said in that news conference was wrong. But, and this is the key point, we now know she knew something that she didn't share with us that morning. What's that saying? It's basically saying, if you tell us something, you must tell us everything about everything that we might one day write about. Look, I'm not pretending that journalists and politicians don't sort of, you know, they're always talking to each other, but it is an incestuous world, there's no doubt about that. They, you know, Michael Wolff, one of his books, have I read about, Britain is this

• 28:33Alastair Campbell?

  weird place where they're all marrying each other, shagging each other, all this sort of stuff. He had this very, very dark view of our media political complex. But I do think there's something gone very, very wrong that I have, I've gone across this period, and I'm not pretending I was a great journalist, I'm not pretending I didn't, I wasn't biased, I was very, very biased pro labour. But to go from a place where in the eighties, Richard Scott says to me, don't write this crap unless you actually know what you're talking about and you know what's in the budget, otherwise just, you know, write a column, but don't present it as news, to a place now where news and comment is virtually completely fused.

• 29:17Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, listen, thank you for allowing me to present that fairly one-sided, but I think quite analytical view of the way this media stuff works. But you started, and I described it as the case for the defence. Why don't, before we go to the break, why don't you just give the case for the prosecution, as it were?

• 29:35Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's go back to our interview with Rachel Reeves before the election. One of the most telling things she said when we asked, why do you want to be Chancellor? Is she said, I think I'd be a good Chancellor. And that's really important because what she was saying there is not ideas, this is not my analysis of the economy, this is not the two big principles that are going to drive growth. I'm pitching for the job on the grounds that I'd be good at it. I'm sort of competent technocrat, right? What she's demonstrated is that she's not a good Chancellor in that sense. She's clearly, you know, nobody would suggest she's been good at the comms. Nobody suggests that she's been good at articulating a clear vision for growth.

• 30:17Rory Stewart?

  Nobody would even suggest she's been very good at rolling the pitch and handling how you head up to a budget. So that then drives us back onto the question of what are her big ideas? What's Labour's vision for the British economy? And there, I think, we're in real trouble. I think the most of a clue we can get is probably this figure Torsten Bell, who used to run the Resolution Foundation. And the sense one gets is that Torsten Bell is still very much stuck in fighting the 2010 to 2019 conversation. In particular, the Resolution Foundation was around inequality. And the big question for Labour is, is this a government about inequality? Or is it a government about growth? Now, they'll try to say they want to do both, I get that.

• 31:03Rory Stewart?

  But in the end, there needs to be a relentless idea driven through government of what the priority is here. Yeah. My instinct is that actually many of the inequality figures that Torsten Bell was focused on have actually changed over the last few years. And since 2019, there's been a very different type of economic problem. British productivity, actually, 2008 to 2019, was more in line with the US than it is now. Something's happened over the last six years that we don't really understand and we can't really explain. And what one needs from this Chancellor, I don't care what it is, could be right wing,

• 31:45Rory Stewart?

  could be left wing, I mean, I'd obviously rather be on the right, but could be right and left wing. Here's an analysis, this is what's fundamentally wrong with the country. This is what's holding it back, and this is what we're going to do to fix it. And and it can't be a series of kind of small measures dressed up after the event. I mean, that's what I feel about the way that Reeves and Starmer do this. They reach for what somebody says, you know, check what we've done over the last year and a half. And then let's try to make a little speech which ties it together and tries to provide a narrative explaining why we're doing good stuff. No, it's the other way around. Start from the what's the problem you're fixing? Is the problem you're fixing that too much money is going to pensioners?

• 32:29Rory Stewart?

  Is the problem that you're fixing that the state has got too big? And that there's too much process and there's too much bureaucracy and too much regulation. And we need to unleash entrepreneurial spirit. Is the problem that you're fixing that we haven't built enough infrastructure? Is the problem that you're fixing that we have? I don't I don't care. What's the problem you're fixing and what are you doing about it? And that's why I think she's no good, because I still think fundamentally they came into office believing that the problem was that the Tories were stupid, incompetent and a bit evil. And she would just be a better Chancellor. And what she meant by that is she thought that fundamentally, running the economy was pretty straightforward.

• 33:12Rory Stewart?

  And if you put in a good person like her, it would all be fine. And that the problem was people like Jeremy Hunt, George Osborne, were either poorly intentioned or didn't know what they were doing. And I think everything stems from that.

• 33:24Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I I agree with Sun Bin and all of that. Um, I think if what I think motivates her and what she keeps saying, and this is a consistent theme since she was in opposition, is this thing about she goes on like, you know, she grew up in a school where the roofs were leaking and and and girls like her didn't really have the chance to sort of make the most of their potential. I think that that is a big driver. But where I profoundly agree with you. I think a lot of the problems this government faces are about that sense of not having the driving narrative that everybody understands. You get the narrative and then you get the policy areas you want to focus on and then you get the the policy solutions. And sometimes it feels that that's that's disordered. But I do think, going back to

• 34:05Alastair Campbell?

  my point about Keir Starmer's speech, if they did manage to fix trade through a proper look at regulation, planning it, et cetera, if they did manage to sort welfare through Milburn, et cetera, if they did manage to get proper trade relations at the European Union and take all this friction, that would be a big step forward. The shared disappointment we had about the budget was next to nothing about AI. And actually, if you look at the OBR, British Youth Organisation and the the report they published, the one place where they actually decided there was going to be economic growth, I don't know how they worked this out, but the AI was actually the driver of that. So they've decided there is something in that, but we're not really hearing that. Since Peter Carl left, we're not really hearing that from the government.

• 34:50Rory Stewart?

  And and I think the risk then to to finish is that in her obituary, the risk at the moment is, my story is, I managed to get budgets through in a way that didn't alienate my backbenchers and didn't alienate the markets.

• 35:06Alastair Campbell?

  She's not dead, Rory.

• 35:07Rory Stewart?

  No, but that's that's I think that that framing that you put at the beginning catches very well what they're doing and that that's not enough because in fact, Britain's in trouble. So you would have to be very brave. You'd have to pick enemies. You'd have to decide, you know, if you're Polanski, and we'll get on to this when we do an episode tomorrow, you're going, your enemy is the bond markets. If you're on the right, I guess your enemies might be the Labour backbenchers. Trying to steer your way neatly between the two without annoying them might work in very positive situation where the economy is growing and everybody's happy with you. But when productivity stalled and you're massively unpopular, you've got to take some risk and you've got to make some enemies.

• 35:48Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, let's not take a risk. Let's take a break.

• 35:51Rory Stewart?

  Hey.

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• 37:42Rory Stewart?

  As the year draws to a close, it's time for our annual reminder. That even in an age of political noise and division, one national consensus still stands firm: roast potatoes.

• 37:54Alastair Campbell?

  Oh God, all this British stuff. If you're wondering, however, what to buy the politically obsessed person in your life this Christmas, might I gently suggest a year's membership to The Rest Is Politics Plus?

• 38:10Rory Stewart?

  It's a thoughtful kind of present: ad-free listening, bonus episodes, early access to Q and As, book discounts, and perhaps, I think, most interesting, it's our mini-series, available only to members focusing on the world's most complex characters and topics. We've already explored Rupert Murdoch and J D Vance, and we're doing many more subjects to come.

• 38:29Alastair Campbell?

  So think of this as a civilized gift to allow families to disagree agreeably over Christmas. What could be nicer?

• 38:38Rory Stewart?

  And if you've left it until Christmas Eve, as I fear I often do, the great thing is it's digital. No queues, wrapping or panic. The membership lands neatly in their inbox on Christmas Day.

• 38:48Alastair Campbell?

  So spread a little political peace and goodwill. Head to therestispolitics.com and click Gifts.

• 39:01Rory Stewart?

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

• 39:03Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 39:05Rory Stewart?

  Now, exciting announcement before we get into Ukraine, Honduras and Venezuela. We are doing a live performance on 6th of September 2026 at the Royal Festival Hall in London, and there will be a pre-sale going live on the 4th of December. These tickets will go very, very quickly, so if you want to gain access to the pre-sale this Thursday, 4th December, become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus at therestispolitics.com.

• 39:29Alastair Campbell?

  So we've done the UK, let's go to the US. There's so much going on in the foreign policy field, but I think particularly in relation to Ukraine, yet again. And also this extraordinary intervention by Trump in advance of the election in Honduras. Do you want to start with Ukraine?

• 39:43Rory Stewart?

  We talked in the first half about bad journalism. Here's unusually a shout out to good journalism, but unfortunately it's American journalism.

• 39:49Alastair Campbell?

  But with a British editor, Emma Tucker.

• 39:52Rory Stewart?

  So Wall Street Journal, incredible detailed reporting on what was going on behind the scenes in terms of the Putin plan. So this is the plan that you took apart in our emergency podcast. And what they've pointed to is how deeply this is all a commercial deal. And what they've talked about is both Whitkoff's meetings with the head of the Russian Sovereign Wealth Fund, and then many, many other encounters. Roommates of Donald Trump Jr. bidding for Russian assets, Trump donors bidding for Russian assets. An incredible web of moves where it seems as though the Kremlin policy since January

• 40:36Rory Stewart?

  is being vindicated and the Kremlin policy since January towards the US has been to say, forget about Europe, we will give you lots of juicy deals. We'll give you deals on rare earths and minerals in Siberia. We'll give you access to gas. We'll give you some of our government assets and knock down price and American, particular American individuals, some of them close to Donald Trump, will be able to make an enormous fortune and will cut the Europeans out of the picture. And in return, what we want is basically your recognition that Ukraine is effectively part of the Russian sphere of influence. NATO is going to be driven back and Russia is going to be left alone. And it's an extraordinary move. I'm going to come to you on this, but one of the lines in another article in Wall Street Journal,

• 41:21Rory Stewart?

  which really sat with me is that Putin thinks this is like Stalin dealing with Roosevelt and Truman about dividing up Europe after the Second World War. He thinks he's as powerful as Stalin was at the end of the Second World War and that his legacy will be to convince the US that he is this giant superpower who therefore deserves to put most of Eastern Europe under his sway.

• 41:44Alastair Campbell?

  I think his ambitions in terms of his historical legacy, they go even further than that. He's had this idea that there's, you know, Peach the Great, Alexander the Great and Vladimir the Great. And the great is, Stalin never got that one. Just a sort of side note before we get into the substance of this, yesterday. And I think we've got to be really careful with how we talk about Ukraine and Trump and Gaza and Trump, because we keep, this is like Groundhog Day. So you turn on the radio this morning and watch the television. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are meeting Vladimir Putin to discuss the latest stage and the da, da, da, da. We've been here so many times.

• 42:21Rory Stewart?

  Can I just interrupt on the, on the media point here?

• 42:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:23Rory Stewart?

  How is it that, as you say, Rachel Reeves can't get away with anyone taking her budget seriously, but somehow Trump gets away continually with fooling the media

• 42:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:35Rory Stewart?

  almost every day into believing that he's on the cusp of an amazing breakthrough and comprehensive peace deal despite all the evidence to the contrary. Why are they not as cynical about Trump as they are about domestic politics?

• 42:47Alastair Campbell?

  Well, they are probably as cynical, but I think there are various things going on. The first is Trump, unlike Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, is an intimidating bully when it comes to the media. Piggy, the woman who get called as being Piggy, had another one woman the other day said, are you stupid? Are you a stupid person? I actually think there comes a point where the media, if they had any balls whatsoever, they're just all down tools and say, we're off. You know, have your, have your Marjorie Taylor, I don't know whether Marjorie Taylor Greene's boyfriend is still in the inner circle or not, but keep your little influencers and all your, your sort of MAGA crowd, but the rest of us are off and we'll cover you from outside, which kind of is what the Wall Street Journal are doing. Because you don't forget, the Wall Street Journal is one of those papers that Trump is suing over

• 43:29Alastair Campbell?

  the story they ran about him and Epstein. For some reason, Trump has got this hold over the media because they know that he is newsworthy. Whatever he says, whatever he does, people will tune in. We, when we did the, the, the series on Murdoch, one of the points that, you know, digging into the research, that it became apparent to me is that Trump outfoxed, no pun intended, Murdoch by becoming more important to Fox News ratings and success than anybody else, including Murdoch.

• 44:01Rory Stewart?

  On this one, I said, if you were an editor, why would you not be saying, all that we know about the last two and a half years strongly suggests that Putin is not going to accept anything Short of getting his hands on the whole of Donetsk and Luhansk. And ensuring that Ukraine is weakened and NATO push back. So it doesn't really matter what Europe and Ukraine have just produced. And that Whitkoff just set off to Russia with, he's not, he's not going to get it. Why is it reported as though they're on the cusp of a deal?

• 44:33Alastair Campbell?

  Because they report what Trump says and they feel they have to because he's the president. It goes back to this point we've made a lot, that a very abnormal presidency is being covered largely in normal terms. So, I mean, I would say, I would suggest that it is utterly abnormal that Jared Kushner is there. He's his son in law. We know that when he was very close to Trump in the White House in the first term, he became a multi billionaire on the back of deals done whilst being responsible for and getting praise from Trump for helping deliver the Abraham Accords. This sort of fusion of money and power.

• 45:11Rory Stewart?

  I was talking to one of the ambassadors who was in Washington at the time. And I said, what was Jared Kushner like? And he said, it was completely terrifying. Every time he went in as the ambassador from his country to see Jared Kushner, who then had an official position in the US government. Half the meeting would be about business deals. Kushner would basically say, well, let's stop talking about whatever kind of geopolitics you were talking about. By the way, I'd like to do this deal. Do you think you could help facilitate my business deal?

• 45:38Alastair Campbell?

  So the situation today, Putin's there. Putin, as we've said many times, he hasn't really changed his position at all. He occasionally drops hints that he might. Trump then celebrates and says we're on the cusp of a deal. And then Trump, Putin just pushes in the same direction. And the point you made about Europe, this goes back to what I think was one of the most consequential moments of the year. JD Vance's immunity speech.

• 46:01Speaker 07

  The threat that I worry the most about vis a vis Europe is not Russia. What I worry about is the threat from within.

• 46:09Alastair Campbell?

  Sometimes you've got to take these people at face value. That was him saying, you lot don't really matter to us. The idea that they're working for peace in Ukraine in the same way that Keir Starmer, Meirats, Macron think they are, think they are working for peace, they're operating in a completely different lens. And the fact that Rubio, who has actually, I think, been More sensible. I mean, it was interesting when they met the newly formed Ukrainian negotiating team because Zelensky's lost his chief of staff Yermak through this corruption scandal. But he met the new team and it was a pretty high powered Ukrainian team. And there's Rubio sitting there because he's the secretary of state, flanked by Witkoff and Jared Kushner.

• 46:53Alastair Campbell?

  That was the American team. It's all about the business deals.

• 46:57Rory Stewart?

  Witkoff famously being the golfing partner. I mean, this is the the real thing that we don't keep. I mean, the reason he's so trusted is that he was one of Trump's favorite golfing buddies.

• 47:07Alastair Campbell?

  The reason why Witkoff would be a very good golfing partner is because to be a good golfing partner for Trump, you have to be willing to lose every game that you play and you have to be able to turn the blind eye when Trump hits the ball into the rough or into a bunker and then miraculously that ball moves via the caddy's pocket into the middle of the fairway. And then you have to say, great shot, Mr. President. And that is what makes you a good golfing partner.

• 47:33Rory Stewart?

  And he refuses refuses to use secure telephones. He insists on using unsecure mobile telephones for the most classified details, the Russian negotiations. When one of the European security agencies tried to reprimand him and said, could you please use a secure line? He said, no, I find it very inconvenient that that machinery takes too long to set up. He doesn't inform the US government. When Witkoff was doing prisoner release, he didn't tell the CIA, which is actually in charge of that type of prisoner release, that he was doing it. The US Treasury only found out about the fact that he was deciding to suddenly lift sanctions on this man Kirill Dmitriev, who was banned from visiting the US to bring him in after the event. It's the British that had to tell

• 48:13Rory Stewart?

  US officials what Witkoff is up to in Moscow sometimes. I mean, and Kellogg, who is the general.

• 48:19Alastair Campbell?

  He's gone.

• 48:20Rory Stewart?

  Serious figure who was doing the Ukraine stuff has announced he's he's out. And as you say, Paul Rubio has become this figure, a bit like Rex Tillerson, who was the secretary of state in the first Trump administration. Rubio is on the right of the Republican Party, but he is becoming now and is being sidelined because he's seen as the voice of the establishment because he's at least listening a little bit to the State Department, listening a little bit to the CIA, listening a little bit to experienced generals, trying to make the normal arguments that America has made for 80 years. And as a result, he's treated as a joke.

• 48:49Alastair Campbell?

  I thought one of the most interesting moments, though, in that meeting the other day was when Rubio used the words sovereign and independent about Ukraine. Witkoff looked physically ill. The the the social media was flooded with these pictures of Witkoff just looking like he'd been forced to eat the most disgusting food imaginable.

• 49:10Rory Stewart?

  But then who wins in that?

• 49:11Alastair Campbell?

  Nobody. It's just the next chapter, just the next chapter in the show.

• 49:15Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. And presumably Trump, given a decision to choose between, I don't know, Rubio and Witkoff, or let's say Rubio and an extraordinary series of wonderful rare earth and mineral deals with what he believes is the great superpower of Russia, will choose the latter, right?

• 49:30Alastair Campbell?

  One day this war will come to an end because in the end all wars do come to an end. But it will only come to an end if both sides decide that there's there's nothing more to be gained from fighting. We're nowhere near that yet, nowhere near it. And the idea that that plan is the basis to stop it is just completely for the birds.

• 49:47Rory Stewart?

  There's also some very interesting reporting on drones again. And the way that Russia is currently using new generation of fiber optic drones. So you can't jam them through electronic warfare because they're literally linked by a fiber optic cable, which they're buying by the hundreds of kilometers from China at the moment to push much further behind the Ukraine frontline. So Ukraine's still doing a really good job at drones right at the frontline. Within about 12 miles, you can't pop out without being hit if you're a Russian. But the Russians are now able to hit much deeper into Ukrainian territory and take out the drone operators themselves. So this is a moment where Russia, which was behind in the drone story, now seems to be getting ahead.

• 50:25Alastair Campbell?

  One final point on that, Roy. I think it was really interesting this week that the Ukrainians have been hitting the shadow, the Russian shadow fleet a fair bit as well, because that's that's been a very, very important part of Putin's economic strategy. So listen, the war is still going on, and I think we're kidding ourselves if we think that we're, quotes, on the cusp. I would love it if we were proven wrong, but I don't buy it. Right, Honduras and Venezuela.

• 50:48Rory Stewart?

  Very quickly on this, two stories which you've been looking into a bit, and I think are fascinating. One of them is Venezuela that we have talked about in the past, but essentially there are more and more American troops now gathering around Venezuela. Huge US aircraft carriers strikes against Venezuelan vessels. The report is that there was a single strike on a Venezuelan boat on the second September, in which nine people were killed, leaving two alive. And then there was a second strike, which killed the two survivors. And the story is that Pete Hegseth had given orders to kill everybody on board. The Defence Secretary is distancing himself from that and saying that the Admiral, who commands Special Operations Command, has his full 100% support. That's implying the Admiral's sort of done it without him.

• 51:32Rory Stewart?

  Meanwhile, US lawmakers are demanding answers. And Senator Chris Van Hollen said it's very possible there was a war crime committed if Trump's construct of an armed conflict with drug gangs is to be believed, or plain murder if it isn't.

• 51:45Alastair Campbell?

  And meanwhile, Rory, in another very, very suspect move, Trump did another post announcing unilaterally that all pilots and all planes should regard Venezuelan airspace as closed.

• 51:59Rory Stewart?

  And then we have this question around Honduras where Trump has again followed in his new pattern, which is of picking winners in other people's elections and threatening the population of Honduras and saying, if you don't vote for my candidate, I'm going to cut economic assistance over to you.

• 52:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and related to that, shortly before the election, Trump announced on a Truth Social post that he was planning to pardon the former president of Honduras, Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year jail sentence in an American jail, having been convicted by an American court of charges related to flooding the US with drugs, hundreds of tonnes of cocaine. Now, here's the thing, Trump's stated reasoning for taking out these boats from Venezuela is that they're flooding America with drugs. Literally on the same day, he is pardoning or saying he's going to pardon

• 52:56Alastair Campbell?

  a man who's been convicted for 45, 45 years, who was told when he was convicted that the judge expected him to die in jail. And Trump says he's going to let out, and worse than that, says unless Honduras elects the part of this guy Nasri Tito Asfura, who is the conservative presidential candidate in the party of Hernandez, then America will stop supporting Honduras in any way at all.

• 53:24Rory Stewart?

  Am I getting this right? So Trump's policy is essentially, I want to kill you because if I don't kill you and you get arrested and convicted by a US court, I'll pardon you.

• 53:36Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think he's quite a, I don't think these Venezuelans, and here's the thing about, we shouldn't really laugh because this is, look, they may well be drug dealers.

• 53:43Rory Stewart?

  Well, the point is, we don't know. They've not been tried. There's no evidence put forward, and they're just being killed.

• 53:48Alastair Campbell?

  They've not been named. We don't know who they are. We're now, we're now close to a hundred people that we know of. We don't know of them. We don't know who they are, but the numbers, we're into the eighties of people who've been killed whilst at sea by American forces. And as you say, in some instances, including when they have turned backwards.

• 54:09Rory Stewart?

  And again, to remind people that you are not allowed to conduct extrajudicial killings of this sort, right? The, the whole international legal system broadly was built to resemble the principles that we have in our own countries, which is you don't get to, in Britain, for example, send vigilantes down the street or even policemen down the street and just shoot people saying, well, we thought they might be drug dealers, right? You arrest them, you bring them to trial, you convict them, they're innocent until proven guilty, et cetera. But overseas, it's even more extreme because this isn't your country. These are not your citizens. So in order to be able to assassinate the citizens of another country, the US Congress, very controversially after nine eleven,

• 54:52Rory Stewart?

  authorized laws which were about protecting America from clear and present dangers to the US. Essentially terrorist attacks, imminent terrorist attacks against the US. It was authorized. You could kill an Al Qaeda person if you could argue that they were about to mount some new nine eleven in the US. But at no point. Does the legal system exist to say you can just go around randomly assassinating other people's citizens on the grounds that you think that they're carrying drugs, right?

• 55:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 55:21Rory Stewart?

  And although the administration is now saying they're acting legally, JD Vance, of course, is on the record when challenged about legality of this to say, I don't give an F, I don't care, I don't care about the law, right? So we're now in a position where the head of our special operations, this admiral, is not just attacking these boats, but it seems as though they have also been killing the survivors of these attacks. So 11 people on a boat, nine of them are killed, two of them survive the first attack and are presumably bobbing around in the water, waiting to be rescued, and then they're killed too.

• 55:53Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing is that Venezuela, and I'm not defending Maduro, a terrible human being and he rigged the election and all that, but Venezuela is not as big a source of America's drugs as, say, Honduras.

• 56:06Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 56:07Alastair Campbell?

  The court case that Hernandez was involved in, which ended in going to jail for almost half a century, as I say, they talked about how he'd opened a superhighway for cocaine between Honduras and the United States. And I think what this is, what this is indicating and the message that this sends, and it's the same with Netanyahu, remember, Trump went to the Israeli parliament, spoke in the Knesset, and with his usual sort of half jokey, half serious way, pointed to the president, pointed to Netanyahu and said, come on, Mr. President, just give the guy a pardon, he's got a water fight. And now, a few weeks later, Netanyahu formally asks for a pardon from the president of Israel.

• 56:48Alastair Campbell?

  What Trump is doing here is signaling that if you are part of his gang, his political tribe, you're Millet, you're Netanyahu, you're one of his crowd, you should be entitled to do anything you want, and that goes up to and including flooding America with drugs. As long as you're my guy, it's okay. And this election that's taking place now, while we're speaking, Rory, on Tuesday morning... They're saying that the ruling party, you've only allowed one term on the Honduran constitution, the candidate for the ruling party is in a very distant third place. The two candidates are literally, they are locked virtually in a tie while the voting is still going on.

• 57:32Rory Stewart?

  It's a few votes either way. I mean, it's literally what, you'd literally be asking for a recount, wouldn't you?

• 57:36Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 57:36Rory Stewart?

  When you start staring at ballot papers.

• 57:38Alastair Campbell?

  And also, and this in an election where there was very little focus on policy and a lot of focus on the other side are going to try and rig it. So this is absolutely made for Trump to come out at some point and say, my guy's won, this is being rigged by the other lot. And what's interesting as well is they're both, the two who are leading, they're both essentially on the right, they're both right wing. But he's decided his guy is the one who is the successor to Hernandez, this guy Astura. And Astura, by the way, because the Hondurans don't particularly like, there were massive celebrations in the streets when Hernandez got jailed. So Astura's thinking, I've got to distance myself from this guy. So, I mean, Trump may have helped, he may have hindered, but it's so

• 58:22Alastair Campbell?

  close, it's impossible to work out.

• 58:25Rory Stewart?

  Final one is the way in which the traditional allies of Venezuela, so particularly Russia, China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, haven't really come to Venezuela's defence.

• 58:34Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 58:35Rory Stewart?

  And if you were going to explain what's going on here, it is that Trump has got Russia thinking they're about to get a great deal from him in Ukraine, so they're not going to go out on a limb for Venezuela. The Chinese are in the middle of these huge tariff negotiations, they're not going to go out on a limb for Venezuela. Iran, of course, nobody came to their assistance when they were struck by Israel and then by the US. So this sort of axis is really not holding together at all.

• 59:01Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 59:01Rory Stewart?

  And in the short term, this very, very disruptive, aggressive behaviour of Trump around the world, with these very unpredictable and frequently unjust resolutions, is working in his favour in relation to leaving Venezuela exposed.

• 59:14Alastair Campbell?

  But the other thing is, when he does these things like, say, I'm going to pardon the guy. Do you think he or anyone in his team even bothers to go and look at the evidence in the case? Because what he said, he was asked about it on Air Force One, he said, well, a lot of people whose judgment I trust, they told me this was a bit of a political fit up like Biden did with me. Okay. But when you go and read the evidence of this case, I mean, this guy Hernandez, he was in, he was in league with El Chapo. El Chapo is one of the most famous drug dealers in the world. And the, the whole thing got triggered because Hernandez's brother was arrested whilst taking a million dollar bribe. Other cartel leaders

• 59:55Alastair Campbell?

  gave evidence of how they were giving quarter, in some cases quarter of a million and in other cases more, some cases less. They were just giving this to the president and his family and as, as a payment for not being prosecuted.

• 1:00:11Rory Stewart?

  And the reason this is so nuts is that, as you say, it was an American court. Because normally what Trump is claiming is that the courts in Latin American countries are biased against political opponents. That was the case that he was trying to make in Brazil about Bolsonaro. But in this case, it's a US court with unbelievable detailed information on exactly the issue that Trump claims to care about, which is governments involved in narco trafficking. And clearly what's happened, presumably, is if you're smart enough to employ the right kind of lobbyist who can get to Kushner or can get to Donald Trump Jr. And pop a word in his ear, all you have to do is say to the president, uh, this is, you know, another one of these Biden things, would you mind pardoning this? And off you go.

• 1:00:50Alastair Campbell?

  We know he said, Trump, Trump is on, on the record, statement given to the New York Times, Trump said, many friends, many friends had asked him to pardon Hernandez. They gave him 45 years because he was the president. You could do this to any president. In other words, this is never going to happen to me because I'm going to make sure that it doesn't happen to any of them. What you'd love though, Rory, I read extracts from Hernandez's statement when he was setting out why he was the victim. And it was a very, very long statement, but you'll be pleased to know, he quoted the Bible.

• 1:01:24Alastair Campbell?

  Martin Luther King Junior and Edmund Burke.

• 1:01:27Rory Stewart?

  Ah, there we are. Marvelous. Well done you on reading the statement. Gosh, you've really been doing a lot of work on this one. Okay, well, I think on the off your mastermind subject, I think we're going to come to an end on that, but maybe we will return when we get the result from Honduras and look forward to speaking to you tomorrow.

• 1:01:41Alastair Campbell?

  And in question time, we're going to talk about Zach Palansky. We have so much feedback about our interview on leading Rory.

• 1:01:48Rory Stewart?

  Zach Palansky, the leader of the Green Party in the UK with his radical economic policies, for those listeners who are not right in the heart of the British system.

• 1:01:56Alastair Campbell?

  And more importantly, our current episode out on Rest is Politics Leading, we're going to talk about your party. That's not your party, the Tories, that's the Jeremy Corbyn Zara Sultana party.

• 1:02:07Rory Stewart?

  We're going to talk about climate change. So we're going to talk about the horrible tragedies in Sri Lanka and in Indonesia.

• 1:02:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and we're going to talk about my secret campaign to get back in the European Union.

• 1:02:16Rory Stewart?

  Very good. Looking forward to speaking all about that.

• 1:02:19Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye.

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• 1:03:04Speaker 10

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:03:15Speaker 11

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:03:21Speaker 12

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

• 1:03:25Speaker 11

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:03:28Speaker 12

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:03:30Speaker 11

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