573. Burnham and Carney vs. Trump, and the Diana Dispute

As Burnham meets Trump face-to-face for the first time at the UN General Assembly, will he adopt Mark Carney’s or Keir Starmer’s approach to dealing with the US President? With Carney receiving a standing ovation in the European Parliament and championing “deep cooperation” between Europe and Canada, is Britain in danger of being outflanked in its relationship with the continent? Where do Rory and Alastair stand on the allegations made by Princess Diana's brother, Earl Spencer, about the King? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Enjoy Rory and Alastair’s interview with Gordon Brown by searching ‘Leading’ on Spotify, Apple, or YouTube. Go deeper into the world of The Rest Is Politics by signing up for our free newsletter HERE, featuring exclusive interviews, analysis and weekend reads from Alastair and Rory. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus. Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, exclusive newsletters, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Stop overpaying for energy. Switch at fuseenergy.com/politics and get a free TRIP+ subscription. 🌏 Upgrade your online protection with an all-in-one security app! Get an exclusive NordVPN deal + 4 months extra here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk free with NordVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee! __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Lead Video Editor: Josh Smith Video Editors: Caroline Kaye, Bruno Di Castri Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Exec Producer: Bella Soames 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.

• 0:01Rory Stewart?

  We're recording this as world leaders gather now in New York for the United Nations General Assembly. Andy Burnham, the British Prime Minister, is preparing for his very first face-to-face meeting with Donald Trump. And across Europe, governments are confronting Russian sabotage. In Germany, the far-right and the far-left have just dominated elections. And countries like Canada are looking for new alliances as the old Atlantic order becomes less certain. And at the centre of all this sits the United Nations, an institution created for a very different world. For 80 years, we've talked about a rules-based international order. But what happens when the rules are no longer agreed? The great powers no longer trust each other, and America itself is questioning the system it once underwrote.

• 0:44Rory Stewart?

  So what is the United Nations actually for now? What should it become? And if the old order is disappearing, what institutions can still keep the peace? This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

• 0:56Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:02Rory Stewart?

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• 1:19Rory Stewart?

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• 1:30Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:41Rory Stewart?

  Switching takes three minutes. Go to fuseenergy.com/politics, use code POLITICS to get your free trip plus membership on top and start referring, earning money for both you and your friends. Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions. This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 2:06Alastair 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.

• 2:20Rory Stewart?

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

• 2:43Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:49Rory 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/restuspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/restuspolitics, and the link is in the episode description.

• 3:05Alastair Campbell?

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

• 3:15Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 3:17Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, we're going to talk a lot about the UN. Andy Burnham's there today, lots of world leaders there, he's got his first sort of big meeting with Trump. But also, what's the UN for? Is it functional? What's its future look like? Who's going to lead it after Gutierrez, of whom you're not a massive fan? And we're also going to talk about, whether you like it or not, the Charles Spencer attack upon your friend the King. It sort of feels incredibly, both consequential and inconsequential. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. I watched Gutierrez talking about his priorities for the summit, for the UNGA, and he said, he set out three: runaway artificial intelligence, climate change, and growing inequalities. Okay? And he said these were existential threats, plug for Rory's new mini-series.

• 4:00Alastair Campbell?

  And he then said, and we need to work hard towards peace in the Middle East and ending the war in Ukraine. And as he said those five things, I thought, yeah, he's probably right, but the UN's voice in that is, well, it's sort of, I can't even use the word weak. It's like, what is it? Where is it? Where is the UN place in all this? And of course, we can all criticise, as you and I do, Donald Trump's endless failures on different specific policy areas. But he set the strategic goal to weaken the United Nations, and he's done it. And it's with consequences.

• 4:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. I think the first thing is, US weakened it in a very straightforward way.

• 4:38Alastair Campbell?

  Money.

• 4:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And many of these agencies received almost half their funding from the US. So when the US stopped its funding, there was complete crisis in all these agencies.

• 4:47Alastair Campbell?

  And they still owe up to nearly £4 billion.

• 4:51Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 4:52Alastair Campbell?

  Whereas the Chinese have actually paid their dues.

• 4:53Rory Stewart?

  Right. And owing £4 billion, which one imagines under Trump they're not going to pay, he's not famous for paying his debts, is he? And then you've introduced the second point, which is, of course, as the US contribution goes down, the contribution of China, the other major economy in the world, becomes more and more important. And raises the question of what the UN's for. And this will become more and more important as we get close to hiring a new Secretary General. My sense of it is the UN's probably been through three phases, and it's now looking for a fourth. Firstly, set up after the Second World War, where I think if you were Churchill Roosevelt Stalin, or Churchill Truman Stalin, you thought that really it was going to be a way of the great powers together, the people who eventually became the Security Council, the great powers of those days policing the world together.

• 5:36Rory Stewart?

  Then they got an awkward shock in the 50s and 60s, when it suddenly turned out that all these new countries joining the UN turned out to be considerably more independent than people thought. First shock was when Nehru put formal criticism of South Africa on the agenda. And then you had this amazing guy, Utant, and Doug Hammer's call, these were two really interesting figures, who made the UN central to peace. Doug Hammer's calls on Suez, Utant on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Utant, of course, a relatively mild-mannered, middle-aged Burmese civil servant turned minister, who suddenly became a kind of rock star celebrity in New York. There's a lovely book about him by his grandson, Tampinu, which is a really lovely account of that. Then we fast forward to the period where you and I, I think, were mostly dealing with

• 6:21Rory Stewart?

  the UN, which is the period after 1989. So America emerges triumphant. And at this point, the UN goes from being something that's doing niche peacekeeping to a much more expansive vision, where it's going to be doing human rights, governance, peace and security all over the world. And it's part of a general story that, in the 90s, the whole world is, and you can see it in the data, every year, there are fewer refugees, there are more democracies, there are fewer conflicts, right? All going the right direction. Somewhere at the heart of this is the UN. It lets everybody down in Rwanda, it manages to recover a bit of credibility in its involvement, maybe in places like Bosnia and Cambodia. And now, we're in a completely different world. And I guess the question is, given firstly, a succession of useless Secretary Generals,

• 7:05Rory Stewart?

  I mean, this current guy Gutierrez is just no good at all.

• 7:08Alastair Campbell?

  That is harsh.

• 7:10Rory Stewart?

  And then collapse of the rules-based international order and the US backing, because in some ways, maybe this story I'm telling in the 90s is a story about the US and how the US want to use it. Where does it go now? Over to you.

• 7:26Alastair Campbell?

  I think, is he useless? I think he's just inherited an incredibly tough wicket. I don't know if the Portuguese play cricket, but he's inherited a very, very tough wicket because of this sense that the big powers are seeing the United Nations as more of a challenge to them than something that they're controlling. I still think the United Nations, you know, our friend Tom Fletcher, the humanitarian stuff that they do, I think there is some of the peacekeeping missions that they do, where the UN's played a really important role. But I think in terms of their place in the dominant global agenda, they've just been squeezed out. And if you go back to, you mentioned the time we were there, of course, you know, in the, say like the build-up to the Iraq War, one of the really big things was Tony Blair

• 8:08Alastair Campbell?

  persuading George Bush at least to try to take it through the United Nations. We do these things better if we do have the authority of the United Nations. But I think what you've got now, so if you go back to the start, most of the vetoing, so just to explain to those people who don't know, you've got five powers, who are the permanent five on the Security Council, and they all have the power of veto, and that's US, China, UK, France, Russia. Back in the day, back when the whole thing started, the Soviet Union was the biggest vetoer. I don't know if vetoer is a word, but the biggest vetoing power. It's now America. It's now America that is stopping the international approach. Now, you still have bilateral deals going on. So America and China, quite recently, for example, on Afghanistan, America has divvied up to pay for Afghanistan.

• 8:51Alastair Campbell?

  They have let China take the lead in terms of, there's these bilateral deals going on. And then you have these interesting partnerships. So Denmark and Pakistan have come together, leading together on trying to deal with the issue of UN peacekeepers coming under attack, which happens sadly all too often. But the point about the leadership is so important. So you say harshly, I think, Gutierrez is useless. I think it's just that he's operating with these incredibly powerful... Particularly the America and China and Russia, of course, doing what it's doing in Ukraine. But if you, so he's now coming to the end of his term, 10 years and it's the end. And I mean, you and I follow this stuff very, very closely. So Michel Bachelet, who was the former president of Chile, she's just pulled out. She's no longer standing.

• 9:32Alastair Campbell?

  So the candidates we're left with to take over, Yvon Abaki, Maria Fernanda Espinoza Garcés, former foreign minister of Ecuador, Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rebecca Greenspan or Grinspan, former second vice president of Costa Rica and head of the UN Conference on Trade and Development, who apparently at the moment is the favourite, Olara Otunu, former Aguante Foreign Minister, Carolyn Rodriguez Birquet, Guyana Permanent Representative at the UN. And I have to be honest, the only one that I knew anything about, Mackie Sal, who is the former president of Senegal. So they are the runners and riders to take over. Now, what does that say? And partly there's the old rotating thing. It's meant to be somebody from the Latin, Latin America or Caribbean next up.

• 10:13Alastair Campbell?

  But I think what you're seeing with those names is that people know that America, China, they're not going to have a big figure. They don't want somebody who's going to be able to.

• 10:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's interesting, only one of them is actually a head of state is interesting. So if you're Andy Burnham, because Britain as a permanent member of the Security Council will be a relatively influential voice in trying to guide this. And, you know, I remember when I was Minister in the Foreign Office, how much time we spent sitting, scratching our heads, looking at candidates, lobbying for candidates, often very unsuccessfully for different UN agencies. There's a choice on what type of person they want. Are they looking for somebody who's going to be a very, very skilled peace negotiator, which is a kind of UTA model? Are they looking for someone who's going to be an extraordinary communicator? Or are they going to be looking for what the US often talks about, which is somebody who does the management, administration, cuts the costs, gets the bureaucracy going?

• 11:06Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that's obviously what the Americans keep wanting. They're constantly pressing for cuts to programmes, cuts to budget, some of which are incredibly important. You know, they're trying to cut down the Kosovo mission, they're cutting down Colombia. So there is places where the UN have, you know, done a good job. I don't think we should, you know, and often incredibly difficult, dangerous circumstances.

• 11:25Rory Stewart?

  Let me, let me come in on that. I mean, like you, I've kind of grown up around the UN and a lot of my international life was about working with the UN, admiring the UN. In fact, if you'd asked me five years ago, what the great job I would want in life and that I haven't had yet, what to do next in my life, I would love to be an SRSG, a special representative, a secretary general in a country, you know, working like the amazing.

• 11:49Alastair Campbell?

  This is the latest job advert for a short.

• 11:52Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, exactly. Whichever you are, you know, deputy vice president, whichever country, I will back your candidacy if I can come the SRSG and DRC. No, but I mean, they are amazing figures. So for example, Hans Gruber in Yemen has done an incredible job. Laktar Brahimi, maybe in Afghanistan, is a towering Algerian figure. Sergio de Mello, who I was with in Iraq shortly before he was killed in 2003. These extraordinary figures and on the ground, they held their own with any general ambassador, foreign minister, and they really convened, they're extraordinary. Then on another level, the technical expertise can be incredible. I'm very struck in Ethiopia and again in Jordan by UNICEF and their water work.

• 12:36Rory Stewart?

  You know, in that case, it was a huge tool. I think he was an Australian who was running the UNICEF office, who was doing incredible work in the desert, moving water around. And he was funny and relaxed, UNHCR and all the camps.

• 12:47Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, exactly. They did loads of good stuff. I think, but I think we're dealing with, with America in particular and Trump in particular. He doesn't, they don't want strong people. And I think one of the criticisms, I'm not going to say useless, but one of the criticisms made of Guterres by people inside the UN, I think, is that he hasn't focused enough on the core purpose of peace and security. And partly because he maybe felt pushed out from that. Let's just take Gaza and Israel. Trump got the support of the UN for his approach, but the consequence of which has been to sort of push the UN out of the process. And we now have the ridiculous Board of Peace.

• 13:23Rory Stewart?

  Which essentially would in the past have been a UN convened body.

• 13:26Alastair Campbell?

  Correct, correct. And so the United Nations, I can't remember the last time that there was a sort of serious discussion about Israel, Gaza and the United Nations Security Council.

• 13:33Rory Stewart?

  Just quickly to remind people, the border peace is kind of one of the great symbols of our time, apart from the fact it's a lovely pun and it sounds like Trump is board of peace. But it's also that it's personal to him. It's not even connected to the US government. It's him, he nominates his successor. There's a membership fee, which mostly the Gulf states seem to be paying.

• 13:53Alastair Campbell?

  They can get rid of him, provided that he agrees with being got rid of.

• 13:56Rory Stewart?

  Then they really can get rid of him, can't they? That sounds like a real, putting in a billion dollars, who controls the money? Where does the money go? It's a really incredible sort of medieval entity. I mean, more like, I don't know, Henry the Second setting up some new church foundation than, than any way of doing global governments. Now, why is Guterres useless? I believe he's useless, you know, and you don't want to use these words, but exactly in that area you're talking about. It is astonishing that he was not right on a plane in the middle of the Russia, Ukraine thing, on the ground dominating that. Because what are UN secretary generals good at? It's not necessarily the kind of long protracted civil war stuff, where, as you say, the causes are so complicated and they go back 700 years

• 14:40Rory Stewart?

  that you really do need civil society, women's movements, all this stuff that was going on in the Northern Ireland peace process alongside the big guys. They're particularly good at state conflict or should be, where it really is a question of sitting Russians and Ukrainians together. Or Iran, you know, why on earth have the mediators been Pakistan and Oman? Or even, to be fair, you know, Qatar or UAE, which has been doing stuff on the great dam between Ethiopia and Egypt, right? Why is it them? Why is it not the UN? And the answer is, Guterres should be saying, excuse me, Pakistan has vested interests. It's a very complicated player here. Why should Pakistan be mediating between the US and Iran with the United Nations? This is our job.

• 15:24Alastair Campbell?

  But when I go through that list of his potential successors, and it's a quite sort of opaque process. They have all these sort of, you know, straw poles and you're not meant to overtly lobby and there's all that sort of nonsense. But you go through those, it's, now look, there may be within them a hidden character and leadership skills that you and I, sitting here in Britain, have not necessarily been aware of, but it's unlikely. It's unlikely that a list of people that most of our listeners and viewers will not have heard of, one of whom is going to become the leader of one of the most important organisations in the world at a time when we know, because they say it, that the big powers, particularly US, China, Russia, don't want the United Nations to matter quite so much.

• 16:08Alastair Campbell?

  So if you don't have that leadership symbolic figure, who is strong, who is respected, who is seen as, what do they think? What is he, she going to say? Then they weaken further.

• 16:18Rory Stewart?

  I think we're violently in agreement that the key role should be somebody who can do the peace and security stuff and secretariat stuff. I think we're also violently in agreement that a lot of the agencies on the ground do really good work. Not all of them, although I liked Akim Sina, who ran UNDP. I've got some questions about the huge UN development programme and whether that's really what we should be doing, which is pumping traditional development money through UN agencies that way. But certainly, UNHCR, UNICEF, et cetera. But there's a third bit, which I think they should be much more confident about and they're not doing enough on. And, and my example on that is that dam. So that's a classic example. It's something which brings Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan together.

• 16:59Rory Stewart?

  It's very complicated cross-border work because it's to do with what you do if there's a drought, what happens upstream, it's got massive environmental impact. So it's got the first thing which the UN's about, which is it's multilateral and it's owned by all the member states. But secondly, theoretically, it's impartial. And thirdly, it's got the technical expertise, it's got all the hydrologists, it's got the water experts, it's got the political experts. So that's exactly the kind of thing, particularly environment, climate, where the UN should be doing more and more and more. But the problem is that what actually happens on the ground is it turns out it's the United Arab Emirates leading on it. The funding's very uncertain. If the funding, and often the funding is coming from one or two particular countries, which makes everyone accused of being biased.

• 17:41Rory Stewart?

  And then the technical experts, the hydrologists, don't feel confident politically. They sort of shuffle them around in the background.

• 17:46Alastair Campbell?

  Now, let's just take people into the United Nations. It's quite an ugly building and.

• 17:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I thought you quite liked that kind of scandy look of all that kind of stripped pine and brass and big windows looking at the hard.

• 17:57Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe it's because, I think the building is quite ugly. But inside, particularly during Unger Week, it is, it's just chaos. And so let's talk a little bit about Andy Burnham, what he's going to do, because this is his first meeting with Trump. You know, we talk about Andy having quite a lot of luck along the way. I think he's quite lucky in this. It's not going to be as big a deal as if he was going to Washington. It's not going to be as big a deal as if Trump were in the UK. Why? Because lots of leaders are meeting lots of leaders. And the other thing is happening at this time, where Trump has had his latest tantrum against the media and has kicked out some of the key media, including CNN, at which, alleluia, how often have we been saying, when are they going to stand up for each other?

• 18:39Alastair Campbell?

  The broadcasters, including Fox News, have said, we're not going to do the pool.

• 18:43Rory Stewart?

  Wasn't that amazing that Fox News were the first to announce?

• 18:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Rory Stewart?

  And this is a real problem for Trump because there's nothing he enjoys more than dominating all of television. And suddenly now he's had to set up his own television channel.

• 18:55Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it is hilarious because they, he was doing a ribbon cutting thing yesterday and the pool didn't turn up. So there's no for life coverage. And of course, he, one of the problems with the media is they, they think that whatever Trump does is newsworthy, which is not, so they cover everything he does. So they put it live, they put it on the White House YouTube channel, but the pool also does the audio, so there was no audio. So you've got nine minutes of watching Donald Trump holding a pair of scissors and talking to guys in hard hats. Nobody knows what sort of rubbish he's talking, coming out with. So it's sort of, and they need to do more of this, take away his oxygen because he doesn't deserve it. So let's just, I don't know, Andy Burnham may have a pool, okay?

• 19:37Alastair Campbell?

  So Andy Burnham probably will want to be filmed, seen, et cetera.

• 19:42Rory Stewart?

  So this meeting will not happen in the place that we all know so well, which is this horrible British basement down a whole series of side corridors.

• 19:48Alastair Campbell?

  American one, but that's not, that's not much better. It's a bit bigger. But you really have to, I remember once we had a meeting, I can't remember who it was with, but we really had to struggle to get the flags in the background because it was like this tiny little, it was a cubicle.

• 20:00Rory Stewart?

  The British one is extraordinary.

• 20:02Alastair Campbell?

  It's terrible.

• 20:02Rory Stewart?

  You actually look like you're going down the sort of service bits of the elevator shafts through various bits of covers.

• 20:07Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 20:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and then, and then they put, they prop up the flags and then I, certainly as a Foreign Office Minister, then pretend to look like, I mean, I'm shaking hands with the president of Somalia, looking as though I know what I'm doing.

• 20:18Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. So Andy Burnham, and, and the thing is, what's, what's the risk when you're dealing with Donald Trump? It's that he comes out with some nonsense that kind of drives the agenda suddenly. Let's say he did, well, I'm also going to be talking to Millet, he's having a few problems, but I'm, I can help him on this Falklands thing, or he, or he does his United Ireland thing, or he says something about, I don't know, Sadiq Khan and immigration. I don't, he can come up with anything.

• 20:40Rory Stewart?

  Just to get inside Trump's head for a second. It's not necessarily that, you know, he sits down with his little

• 20:46Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 20:46Rory Stewart?

  paper before he goes in saying, one of my three points. It's that he somehow with some animal instinct

• 20:50Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:51Rory Stewart?

  senses where the story might be.

• 20:53Alastair Campbell?

  And where the weakness of the person is.

• 20:54Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 20:55Alastair Campbell?

  So I think, for example, when, do you remember we did when we did our live show, we showed the video of Trump dropping the papers? And Keir Starmer bending down to pick them up. I think that was deliberate.

• 21:04Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 21:05Alastair Campbell?

  He was trying to make him look small. I think in Scotland, when he sat there in the United Kingdom and started laying into Sadiq Khan, and I was sitting there saying, Keir, fucking hit back.

• 21:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Alastair Campbell?

  Right. And Keir just sort of sat there. So I think, and I hope Andy Burnham, and of course, we'll know, because this is, this episode is going to go out after this meeting has taken place. Obviously, Andy Burnham will hope that nothing sort of ridiculous happens. But I hope if there is something like this, if, for example, he talks about Ukraine.

• 21:31Rory Stewart?

  Hmm.

• 21:32Alastair Campbell?

  You know, and it's Zelensky's fault. I really hope that Andy says, well, no, I've got to tell you, the British position is, we totally support Ukraine, and Zelensky's a fine man.

• 21:40Rory Stewart?

  So on our map, where we've got Carney, who comes out pretty clearly saying, I'm not going to be a US vessel, we're setting up an independent middle class thing. And Starmer, who's down there picking up the bits of paper. The cliche in the British papers at the moment is that Burnham sort of puts himself in the middle, has a little bit of both. I'm not sure that's a very clear value statement or a very clear way of driving the Foreign Office. And this is something that worried me. If people haven't listened to the Ed Miliband interview, I thought it was terrific. But one of the things that worried me a little bit in the heart of that is I was struggling to really read beyond Gaza, what the big Carney-like foreign policy vision was.

• 22:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Rory Stewart?

  Particularly in relation to the US. You know, for example, it sounds as though, as usual, our security services, our military and everyone is defaulting into a pro-US position on Iran. Despite the fact that they are bankrupting our economy in every single way. I mean, the major problem the Chancellor is facing is Trump's war on Iran.

• 22:35Alastair Campbell?

  I'll give you an example of that, where I think a different approach would have been appropriate. Hexeth, this week, said it was, quote, shameful that Europe did not support the Americans and the Israelis in the attack on Iran. Now, I would have liked several European leaders to come forward and said, well, you can say it's shameful. We all have to represent our own national interest. And right now, our national interest is most represented by the need to deal with the economic consequences of what you've done.

• 23:01Rory Stewart?

  And point out, say, not only was it not shameful, it was completely the correct decision.

• 23:06Alastair Campbell?

  It was sensible.

• 23:06Rory Stewart?

  Let me just run through

• 23:07Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 23:08Rory Stewart?

  the seventeen catastrophes you've imposed on the world by your stupid decision.

• 23:11Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I don't think they can necessarily say that. This is the thing with, I thought with Ed Miliband, I thought, I had a long, long chat with him afterwards. And I think because his head was so in the weeds of Israel-Gaza, and I wouldn't underestimate how much of a push that was to get that through the, the system, that actually, when it came, I think he thought, Israel-Gaza, that's all they want to talk about. And then when we go on to Iran, I agree with you, I think he sort of defaulted to a, a position. I think Ed is going to be doing some pretty big, difficult things within the Foreign Office. So I wouldn't be too harsh among that. What I would say, though, is I, I think that, I think Carney is showing real leadership.

• 23:49Alastair Campbell?

  Weirdly, no, not weirdly, because, you know, I think she's pretty good. I thought von der Leyen's response to Carney, or the statement she made in advance of Carney, I thought was showing real leadership.

• 23:59Rory Stewart?

  And this was the offer of the associate membership of the European Union.

• 24:01Alastair Campbell?

  And I was really disappointed by some of the Europeans' response to that. It was basically, this is not, you know, we'd have to change the treaty, this is more complicated than it sounds.

• 24:10Rory Stewart?

  What, what were they doing? Why were they responding so bureaucratically and foolishly?

• 24:14Alastair Campbell?

  So depressing. What they should be doing is saying, this shows that Europe understands the scale of change in the world, and that we have to make change as well. And this, this was a big deal. This was the European Parliament, where the Prime Minister of Canada is invited to follow the speech by von der Leyen, which is like the State of the Union, the State of the European Union. And he is in the room for that. And then, day later, he makes this, well, he comes to Liverpool to watch a football match with Andy Burnham, he goes back and he makes this, this speech, which essentially was a, I guess it was the next chapter after the Davos speech that you and I saw, where he was talking about this being a rupture rather than a transition.

• 24:58Alastair Campbell?

  And he was setting out how we really don't have to just buy this other vision, even though it's noisy, even though it's loud, these are my words, not his. We have our own interests, we have a good understanding of the big issues that are facing us, let's meet them together.

• 25:13Rory Stewart?

  And such leadership, because it's about a solution. It's so unusual to have someone like that not just describe the problems of the world, or pretend, or pretend we can go back to the world that used to exist, but come up with a new vision.

• 25:27Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, Carney's, I thought, look, Carney's a very good speaker, and it was a very clever speech. I loved the starting with trees, ending with trees. Goethe, I wonder whether, do you think Trump's ever heard of Goethe?

• 25:38Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 25:39Alastair Campbell?

  Not even heard of him, even though his dad was basically German.

• 25:41Rory Stewart?

  Very confident he's not heard of Goethe.

• 25:43Alastair Campbell?

  He's not heard of Goethe.

• 25:43Rory Stewart?

  Not heard of Goethe. In fact, you can get

• 25:45Alastair Campbell?

  If he's Goethe, it was one of Ed's parties.

• 25:47Rory Stewart?

  Ask him in the press pool, but I can guarantee he hasn't heard of Goethe.

• 25:49Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, so, but anyway, it was a really clever speech, and it spoke to this change, the scale of change that is being inflicted by Trump.

• 25:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 25:59Alastair Campbell?

  By the undermining of international rules-based order, but also saying, so therefore we have to adapt. And I just think the other leaders need to be a bit stronger.

• 26:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, tell us about the speech.

• 26:08Alastair Campbell?

  What it was, people sort of talk about historic, you know, he's the Prime Minister of Canada, okay, over there on the top of North America. And you have von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, who makes a speech, sort of just a tribute to this guy's leadership, the change he's leaning into, offers this associate membership. Now, okay, the bureaucrats come out and say, well, it doesn't mean anything. And even the Canadians were coming out and saying, well, we, we prefer to think of that as a strong alliance.

• 26:37Rory Stewart?

  It's absolutely awful.

• 26:38Alastair Campbell?

  Lean into it.

• 26:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Alastair Campbell?

  Lean into it.

• 26:40Rory Stewart?

  Well, let, let me just sort of on that one, they've got to begin developing the muscles and the confidence in which Carney is beginning to develop. I mean, because it's, this is something you would talk about, it's going through the whole Canadian system.

• 26:53Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 26:53Rory Stewart?

  It's not just Carney, he's, the National Security Council actually does planning around how do we get strategic autonomy in ten critical areas? How do we think about what would happen if the US did X, Y, or Z? I mean, it's soaked into the system, and so they know how to do this. Now, von der Leyen's obviously getting there. Macron, France

• 27:12Alastair Campbell?

  Which I was surprised by.

• 27:13Rory Stewart?

  Which, which is very exciting. Yes, you're right, you're right. You wouldn't necessarily have guessed that. Macron, France presumably have a goalless tradition where they know how to talk a little bit about strategic autonomy. But my God, this is the opportunity for Burnham.

• 27:24Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 27:25Rory Stewart?

  Because if you could add to that Carney's voice, I mean, Britain, I mean, Canada's a wonderful country, but Britain is a larger economy, it's a larger military, it's more influential potentially in the world, Burnham could be doing

• 27:37Alastair Campbell?

  And we're in Europe.

• 27:38Rory Stewart?

  And Burnham could be doing this, the two of them together. And why not a partnership? After all, we have the same king, part of the same comms, why don't they make that a partnership together?

• 27:47Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I, I, I think, I could be completely wrong, could be wishful thinking, I think the government is going to do a big move on Europe at some point. I think at the moment, one of the things that's holding them back, I'm afraid, is, as you call him, my friend Emmanuel Macron, I think the French are being quite difficult on this. But I was, I was surprised even, I know we're going to talk about Germany in question time, but the Germans were sort of a bit iffy about this, and why weren't we consulting, or isn't the bureaucracy takes over? This is, what she was doing, and what Carney was doing, was actually setting out what people are desperate for, is sort of a projection of a future vision beyond this world that Donald Trump is trying to create.

• 28:22Rory Stewart?

  And it's hope, and it's a solution. I think we, you know, we, the danger over the last four years is all of us have exquisitely analyzed the collapse of the rules-based international order. The great thing now, which is giving us energy over the last year, is there's a solution, there's a vision for what it could look like, which is the Middle Power Alliance, and how to get there.

• 28:41Alastair Campbell?

  Which does go against what we've just been talking about, which is the importance of the United Nations as the body that, in which this is held. So I think the United Nations

• 28:49Rory Stewart?

  Not, not, not sure though. Let, let, let me put, I think these things could, if the UN is doing a Secretary General who focuses on two or three major conflicts and fixing them, great agencies on the ground, delivering water with UNICEF and refugee stuff, fantastic technical expertise cross-border, that could sit very comfortably with US-China middle powers. And I think the middle powers should be contributing more to the UN, because that will be part of their multilateralities. Let me just say, make the Tory argument for why Burnham being lockstep with Carney. I mean, I almost want two I's meld them together. It actually provides him with some cover on the Europe story. For Tories, people who are suspicious of Europe.

• 29:34Rory Stewart?

  They love the Commonwealth. They love the idea of the King. They love the idea of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. So actually, what Burnham would be doing there is demonstrating that he can do both. I can be closer to Europe and I'm reaching out into traditional Commonwealth. And, and, and we'd all be so excited. There's literally eighty-five percent of the British public will be with him. The only people who are nervous are a few bureaucrats hovering around number ten who are like, oh dear, we don't want to do these love actually moments. That's not annoyed Trump. We need him for Ukraine. You can imagine the consternation.

• 30:06Alastair Campbell?

  Do you know, we talked, we talked to Gordon Brown on Leading this week and we talked a lot about his book he's written, The Future Starts With Us. And of course, he's got a lot there about the need for UN, the UN to reform. When we talked to Alexander Stubb, President of Finland, you know, the, the UN Security Council is not really fit for eighty years after the war. But to get the changes needed, you need to buy in the support of China, Russia, America, France, UK, because they can veto anything they don't like. So I think that is the very, very hard bit. But look, I, I thought the, the reason I was so, so like Carney's speech, first, it was well written. Second, it was well delivered, even though he's not a rabble rousing sort of orator. But I mean, look, I don't know if you've ever been to the European Parliament. It's a tough gig. It's not an easy place to get the worked up and roused up. He got virtually a standing ovation across the piece. The

• 30:51Alastair Campbell?

  public gallery was giving him a standing ovation. Why? Because he was saying, look, don't be too scared by this crazy stuff.

• 30:59Rory Stewart?

  Why is Britain still so scared?

• 31:02Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think Britain is scared. I think Britain is, I think they're getting there. But I agree with you. It's got to be, look, Britain should not be outflanked by Canada in our relations with Europe. That is not good politics.

• 31:10Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 31:11Alastair Campbell?

  So.

• 31:11Rory Stewart?

  Nor outflanked by Canada in our relationship with the US. I mean, we're being outflanked every which way. I, I really would like to see, I, I, I cannot see really what the downside is of Burnham saying, Carney and Carney's vision is my lodestar, and we're putting the full, big weight of Britain in behind that vision.

• 31:29Alastair Campbell?

  Well, let's see what he says at the party conference.

• 31:31Rory Stewart?

  And just as a sort of small footnote in the background, you will have noticed today, we're, we're recording on Tuesday, that Britain's announced that they're going to provide air refuelers for the Saudis in, in the fight with the Houthis we talked about. And you'll see Canada's doing that, too. Part of the middle power play is going to be working with Gulf allies who have a very, very different view of the world. You'll also see that Qatar, UAE, Saudi are beginning to make statements about how they need to make a deal with Iran, which is not a US deal, just in order to stabilize the region and start to get stuff moving through those straits. And I think Britain's opportunity, now that Saudi, Qatar and others are so shaken by the way in which Trump didn't deliver from them, made them

• 32:15Rory Stewart?

  a target, and has actually destroyed their economies, basically, through this unnecessary war that they never want to. I mean, it's unbelievable what's happened to their economies now, and now the Saudi economy as well. This is another real opportunity to get these very, very wealthy, rapidly developing states part of that alliance, because they don't want to be beholden to China or the US.

• 32:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Before we go to the break, maybe just reflect a little bit on the Gordon Brown interview. You got very good feedback on it from all sorts of people. But what was, you, you were quite taken, I thought.

• 32:46Rory Stewart?

  I've, I've always really been taken with him. I mean, people will also pick up, there's a fascinating dynamic in the background between you and Gordon Brown, which I'll leave the psychologists and the anthropologists to, to analyze. It's, it's an intriguing thing because you've known each other for so, so long. I mean, it's, it's really weird. I mean, you're.

• 33:02Alastair Campbell?

  Who's a Tory equivalent if you were sitting there with?

• 33:06Rory Stewart?

  Oh, for goodness sake, I don't know.

• 33:08Alastair Campbell?

  David Cameron.

• 33:08Rory Stewart?

  David Cameron. David Cameron. No, Cameron's a good analogy, but I mean, but I'm not as close to Cameron as you are to Brown. But it's a good analogy because he's someone who's basically on my side politically, but who I have a massive personal anxieties and problems with. So you're right. I mean, fundamentally, you share so much with Gordon Brown in terms of your political vision, your New Labour vision. But there's obviously an enormous amount of history being played out of him.

• 33:33Alastair Campbell?

  So funny because I didn't feel it, but I know the production team came and he'd been watching it backstage as it were and said, God, that was tense. I didn't feel that at all. Maybe I'm just so, so used to it.

• 33:42Rory Stewart?

  He's such, he's such an extraordinary figure. You know, I, I think I've told you that my first meeting with him was when I wasn't anything to do with politics. I think back two thousand and six, seven, when he was Chancellor, he called me in to talk about Iraq. And I was so kind of flattered because I was very young. I guess I was in my early thirties and I was going to see the Chancellor of the Exchequer at number eleven. And I went in for an hour and it's a little bit disloyal to say this to him because I do admire him. But he literally talked to me for fifty-five minutes about the Treaty of Westphalia, the history of seventeenth century Europe and all this. And I sort of sat there and listened. And then in the end, he said, thank you very much. That's very informative.

• 34:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, it's good that he called in because he's not, he's not fond of Tories, I've got to tell you, Rory.

• 34:25Rory Stewart?

  Well, I wasn't a Tory then, of course. I, I.

• 34:27Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, you were, yeah, of course you were.

• 34:28Rory Stewart?

  Then when I became a Tory, he became absolutely furious. He saw me in a video with the King who was visiting the Tel Kuzman project in Afghanistan, two thousand and ten. And he mounted a formal protest to the palace, threatened to get the Electric Commission involved on the grounds that the King visiting me a few months before an election and me being on television would give unfair advantage to a Tory candidate.

• 34:49Alastair Campbell?

  I see what you mean. Yeah. I went to Fiona and I last night, we went to see, we're thinking about Gordon, we went to see this new James Graham play, The Standard of Living, which is all about John Maynard Keynes. And it's extraordinary. And we both came out and said, you know, he's, it's just incredible that an economist is one of the key historical figures from that period.

• 35:12Rory Stewart?

  And so much of it is brain power, isn't it?

• 35:14Alastair Campbell?

  Totally.

• 35:15Rory Stewart?

  What, what's so weird about Keynes? And I think it's true, Gordon Brown's very, very clever too. Keynes is clever. I mean, I think even Gordon would accept that. But, but it is incredible how just sheer processing power and a certain amount of charm and determination carried Keynes to this incredible position.

• 35:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we were both saying that he, in, in some ways, you know, not the whole sort of Bloomsbury set and all the kind of, you know, all the kind of promiscuity and all that. But the, the brain power and the belief that it was brain power that you needed ultimately to make change, in some ways, it did remind me of, of Gordon and the way that he operates in relation to politics, economy and change. It's a great play by the, I mean, James Graham, he's an absolute genius. I mean, he's every subject he takes. I saw him afterwards. I said, look, I do prefer your working class stuff, to be honest, but it's absolutely brilliant how he takes these really complicated issues. And the politics of it is because part of the story, there are lots of different stories going on, but part of the story is the, is

• 36:14Alastair Campbell?

  the battle, the intellectual battle between Keynes and Thatcher's favorite guy, what's his name?

• 36:20Rory Stewart?

  Hayek.

• 36:20Alastair Campbell?

  Hayek. And the, the, this, and of course, it plays out through the play. They use amazing black and white photography through the whole thing. And it plays out, it's no doubt who James Graham thinks is the superior economist and human being, that is Keynes. And so it's sort of, you see, and Fiona came out, she actually said, you know, you could, let's be honest, what did good Hayek's influence on Thatcher actually do to the country compared to the good that Keynesism did to the world?

• 36:46Rory Stewart?

  Look, again, shout out for people who haven't listened to it. There's a wonderful interview that we did on Leading with the playwright that you're talking about, James Graham, which people should listen to. I also was very lucky to be able to go and see Arcadia on the West End with Tom Stoppard's play. It's Tom Stoppard who died recently. The most brilliant production, funny, intellectual, beautifully staged, beautifully acted, incredibly charming, unexpected plotlines. So yeah, huge tribute to that.

• 37:15Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, we're giving shout outs to De Gaulle film.

• 37:17Rory Stewart?

  De Gaulle film.

• 37:18Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely brilliant. God, they don't make them like him anymore.

• 37:21Rory Stewart?

  Okay, now, let's take a break and then we'll come back from the break. And when we come back from the break, we will be talking about the King. Both the allegations which were made by Al Spencer and also the summit on artificial intelligence, which I was lucky enough to be in this week.

• 37:38Alastair Campbell?

  See you.

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• 39:26Rory Stewart?

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

• 39:29Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And Rory, I know you're gagging to talk about the King's views on artificial intelligence, but may I suggest that so far as the public are concerned, there does seem to be a lot of interest in this book by Charles Spencer, which I see has gone, surprise, surprise, straight to number one in the Amazon lists. Very annoying that it's bringing it out three weeks ahead of my own book, Perseverance, kdoganhall.com for tickets for the launch.

• 39:59Alastair Campbell?

  And The Mooch as well, whose book is flying. So to summarise what Charles Spencer is saying, he's essentially claiming that the King, then the Prince of Wales, said to him that Diana would soon be forgotten. And he also said that the King was giddily excited about what was going on. And needless to say, they are the bits that have been serialised in a newspaper. I believe it's called The Daily Fail, that is serialising the book, and the book has had massive publicity and has gone straight to number one. I mean, I was very, very involved in that period of the funeral, the death of Princess Diana and the days that followed.

• 40:42Alastair Campbell?

  And I was aware, because at the meetings, there were members of the Spencer family team, as it were, who came to all the meetings where we discussed all this. And there were tensions, there's no doubt about that, there were tensions. But I have to say, in defence of your friend, the King, who was then the Prince of Wales, anything I heard or sensed about his posture on the whole thing was completely at odds of this sense of, what did he say, giddiness and excitement and saying that she'll soon be forgotten and all that. I just didn't have any sense of that at all. Now, that being said, I'm sure they were having direct conversations as well, to which I was not remotely privy.

• 41:23Alastair Campbell?

  I'm imagining the King is pretty pissed off with that.

• 41:27Rory Stewart?

  I think the first thing is that I've never seen him ever behave in that kind of way. It just doesn't sit with his character. And I think that was my sense, talking to people who've known him all their lives, is they just don't recognise that. So I don't believe it.

• 41:45Rory Stewart?

  Now, I also am very interested in memory. I think I've told you before, I'm still mesmerised by this study that was done, where they interviewed people on 9/11 and then the same group of people every year for the next 20 years. And when they first interviewed them, these ordinary members of the public, they say, "I was in my kitchen in Connecticut, I didn't hear about it for a couple of hours." 20 years on, almost everybody says they were in Manhattan and saw the buildings come down.

• 42:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, including Donald Trump.

• 42:13Rory Stewart?

  And when you show them the video of what they said 20 years ago, they say, "No, no, that can't be right. That's AI. That's fake. These are normal humans. These are not politicians trying to bluff." Our memories are unbelievably weird.

• 42:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:26Rory Stewart?

  And if you go back over, whatever this is, almost 30 years.

• 42:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:30Rory Stewart?

  I don't know, it's a really interesting question about why he's doing it after 30 years, why it's still so central to 30 years. So I can absolutely believe that Charles Spencer believes this. I also just don't think it's true.

• 42:43Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. The thing about memories is fascinating, because I mean, that was, that was one of the most extraordinary weeks of my life. But if I didn't have my diaries, I don't think I'd remember that much of it. And now when I read my diaries, I don't remember most of it.

• 42:58Rory Stewart?

  And Spencer says he didn't write anything down, but, you know, he told people at the time and all this kind of thing. So, no, I think it's very weird. And I think you must have had this experience, because you're such a diary keeper, of going back and then reading a diary and be like, whoa.

• 43:10Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, totally. No, I completely get that. So I think what he's doing probably is either, look, he's a pretty wealthy guy, isn't he?

• 43:17Rory Stewart?

  Incredibly wealthy.

• 43:18Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not sure he needs.

• 43:19Rory Stewart?

  I believe he's just.

• 43:20Alastair Campbell?

  He's thinking for money for the book.

• 43:21Rory Stewart?

  No, I believe, you know, there's just been another very successful sale of a couple of fields some miles from his house. It's just raked in a few more million. Yeah.

• 43:28Alastair Campbell?

  So I don't think it's that, but I think there is a, yeah, sense of revenge. I also think it was very interesting that he allied himself so closely in talking about the book with Harry and Meghan and Diana, and this idea that the media are a kind of, you know, real enemy. But I, look, I've met Charles Spencer a few times and I spoke, he has this, I don't know if he still does it, but he has a book festival at Althrop and I've been at it and I stayed there. And I find him perfectly sort of charming and clever and quite funny and interesting. And absolutely, he does feel, I think, that the media were largely responsible for her death.

• 44:13Alastair Campbell?

  And he feels that the royal family didn't treat her well. I think both of those things are clear. I think if I knew something, or I was holding on to something as, quite as dramatic as Charles, who let's not forget was the father of the two boys that Diana brought into the world, one of whom would be the future King. I just, I think if you've heard that, him saying those things, I'm not sure he's sat on them for 30 years. And he says he sort of talked to people at the time. And okay, people can have a circle of trust, but that sort of stuff, I think if it's that dramatic, it kind of gets out.

• 44:51Rory Stewart?

  It's, I thought it was very disturbing. And of course, for me, the sadness was that this has all come at the same time that the King was doing this big summit that I was lucky enough to be at, Dumfries House on AI. And it was pretty amazing. If you want to see an example of the King doing impressive stuff, there was that speech, which I think you write about in Perseverance very well, and the Trump speech. But this was.

• 45:13Alastair Campbell?

  The Charles speech to Trump.

• 45:15Rory Stewart?

  To Trump, yeah. And I think you've analysed that very well. And I think, you know, you put that up with Carney's speech as one of the great speeches of the year. This AI summit was very interesting in another way. Firstly, timing, unbelievable. I mean, this happened just at the moment when hugging face had blown up, when the big AI companies are talking about safety, when even the Lib Dems in their conference have woken up and made it the central piece of Ed Davey's speech was about AI in his conference. So absolutely off the moment. Secondly, he was able not just to get the great titans of AI, you know, Jensen Huang, who runs the biggest company in the world, Nvidia, this $5 trillion company, Sedemis for service.

• 45:54Rory Stewart?

  But astonishingly, they sat at that table throughout the entire day, right into the evening, contributing to the conversation. It wasn't, they turn up for half an hour, jet off, and which is what you normally get in these kind of things. And even at Davos, nobody sits at the table throughout the day, right? Next thing, he managed to get the Chinese there. So Xi Jinping's sent, I think it's the dean of Tsinghua University, the greatest technical university in China, was there at the table at exactly the time when everyone's saying, "Well, the problem is you'll never get the US and Chinese to agree. The Chinese aren't interested in this." So he actually sat in there. And then the final thing is the UK government. Because suddenly it was an opportunity for the most senior figures at every level of the UK government, including senior civil servants and the AI minister,

• 46:36Rory Stewart?

  to be able to spend hours with these guys in a way that would have been very difficult to do otherwise. And the conclusion of it, they got to the idea that there needs to be independent verification of these systems. They absolutely got to international cooperation requires China. And this has then been followed this week with Scott Besson, the US Treasury Secretary, saying he's now setting up a working group with China for the Trump-Xi Jinping summit on AI. Now, Trump remains the big spoiler here.

• 47:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 47:04Rory Stewart?

  Because he says the whole thing's a hoax, there's no need for any safety regulation, at exactly the moment when OpenAI and Anthropic are terrified. And also at the, at the summit, where a couple of people, we've got in our mini-series on existential risk, so Yuval Noah Harari was there, Toby Ord was there, making their arguments about why they're worried. And I encourage people maybe to listen to that stuff as well.

• 47:28Alastair Campbell?

  And if you, did you leave it, because I've been very interested in seeing your sort of journey of development on this, on this issue over quite a few years now, because I remember you, right at the start, you were saying, "This is the most important thing happening in our world and in the future, et cetera." Did that meeting and that day, totally immersed in it in the way that you were, did it leave you more or less worried? More or less sceptical? What was your own sort of take out from it?

• 47:56Rory Stewart?

  I think always more worried. Every time I do it, I think it's more worried. But it's more worried in this contradictory way, which is, it is the hinge technology that is going to underpin everything in our lives. It's going to be right at the heart of our businesses in Britain, of the NHS, of our defence and security. And we will be reliant at the moment on a US and Chinese stack, which is an unbelievable dependency and vulnerability. And we need to work out how to get out of that. And at the same time, everything that makes these models powerful also makes them very dangerous. Yeah, because all the benefits of them are around autonomy, getting humans out of the loop. And the more humans you get out of the loop, the more responsibility the AI has.

• 48:36Rory Stewart?

  And everything the AI does, positive, it can do negative. I mean, of which probably the most dramatic is biosecurity risks. You know, yes, it can potentially solve cancer, but it can also create viruses. And that's before you get on to what Yuval was talking about in this interview we've just put out on the.

• 48:52Alastair Campbell?

  Which was pretty terrifying.

• 48:54Rory Stewart?

  Pretty terrifying, which is all about superintelligence.

• 48:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 48:57Rory Stewart?

  And the really interesting thing, which is of course where Trump comes in. It's the first time I really understood Trump's position. I mean, trying to understand why on earth is he against this? And we were saying, well, he's just trying to make money. Well, maybe part of it. I think he's also instinctively anti-regulation. But I was also reminded there that very senior figures are telling him there's nothing to worry about. So certainly David Sacks is AI advisor, Mark Andreessen, who's the investor. But Jensen Huang also comes pretty close to saying, "Nothing to see here. There's no real risk of this stuff. Let's go, let's roll." And that anyone trying to talk about safety is doing something called regulatory capture. In other words, they're just trying to exclude small startup AI companies and they're all bullshit.

• 49:38Alastair Campbell?

  Which is easy to believe, given the way that they've operated as businesses over time.

• 49:42Rory Stewart?

  Which is why Trump will be pulled into this narrative. But it's very dangerous, because these companies, I've never known any company in the world about to launch a product saying, "My product is unbelievably dangerous." I mean, I would take that seriously. I can't see an obvious financial interest in people about to launch trillion dollar companies saying, "I don't trust my product. It can get out of control. It can cause mayhem. It's a 20% chance it could end the world."

• 50:08Alastair Campbell?

  There we go. Right, on a cheer, you know, how was my friend Finley the Piper?

• 50:12Rory Stewart?

  Finley the Piper was there. So we had this amazing thing. That was also the amazing thing.

• 50:16Alastair Campbell?

  That's it. I thought I found out you were there, by the way.

• 50:18Rory Stewart?

  When you've got all these grandees of Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, et cetera, Google Gemini there in the room. And then you have this incredible Piper, incredible drummer. I mean, of course, quite loud, we're in a small room in Dumfries House, right up and personal with the pipes. And of course, I was very struck by the dean of Tsinghua, who was being very polite, but he looked like a visitor from another planet, looking at a strange cultural event as the pipes and the drums were hammering around.

• 50:48Alastair Campbell?

  That's right. It reminds me of when Mandela, when he was at the, he was at Chogham in Edinburgh and there was this display of Scottish culture and all the pipes and the drums and the dancing. And he said, "I'm not sure these people are ready for independence."

• 51:02Rory Stewart?

  No, no, really?

• 51:08Rory Stewart?

  That's a great line. Well, look, let me just finish with a final tribute to the team that put this together. Because of course, the King made it possible, but the team that spotted this opportunity and put Britain right back in the centre, back to this AI Safety Institute, the Bletchley Summit that Rishi Sunak put together, all the way through to this. I think it is Britain showing again and again that we may be a distant third, but we're definitely, if you're getting behind US and China, it's Britain still matters in AI.

• 51:36Alastair Campbell?

  Right, well, excellent. Let's close there. Then in question time tomorrow, we're going to talk about Germany. And we're also going to talk about rural Britain and a lot of the challenges that they're facing. So we'll see you then.

• 51:48Rory Stewart?

  See you then. Bye bye.