367. Rory vs JD Vance, recording from Damascus, and Trump’s tariffs

Why are Rory and Alastair in Damascus? What’s going on with JD Vance? Has there been a twist in the German election? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit GetFuse.com/Politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to receive early access to Question Time episodes to live show tickets, enjoy ad-free listening for both TRIP and Leading, receive our exclusive newsletter, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and join our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/therestispolitics. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Assistant Producers: Evan Green, India Dunkley Video Editor: Joshua Smith Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  The Rest Is Politics is powered by our friends at Fuse Energy.

• 0:07Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, you know that Fuse have been very generous in their offers to members and to supporters of The Rest Is Politics. So how about this one? Anyone who switches energy supplier to Fuse, you get free membership to this wonderful podcast and The Rest Is Politics Plus for the rest of 2025.

• 0:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's a very, very generous offer indeed. All you have to do is go to getfuse.com/politics and use the referral code POLITICS when signing up.

• 0:34Alastair Campbell?

  And you will get, as a member of Trip Plus, all of the episodes ad-free. Question Time episode, you'll get that a day before everybody else. You get access to members-only live streams. You get early access to tickets for our live shows days before the general public.

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

  And we'd love to have you as one of our members. And hopefully, it's just the perk you need if you're considering switching energy provider. It's always worth mentioning that Fuse generate power from their own solar and wind farms, and they invest 100% of profits into building more renewables.

• 1:03Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, Rory, I had a look at TrustPilot, and on there, people give Fuse 4.7 out of 5. That's a very, very high mark in the modern demanding age. And there is comment after comment about how helpful and attentive people find the service that they get. And I do think people appreciate speaking to real human beings, rather than those awful chatbots.

• 1:26Rory Stewart?

  So, download Fuse's app now and use the referral code POLITICS after signing up. Visit getfuse.com/politics for the terms and conditions and to learn more.

• 1:42Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:44Alastair 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... Managed to watch it. There you go.

• 1:56Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Kref, 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.

• 2:20Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:27Rory 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.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  A BetterHelp ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day, every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com/restpolitics.

• 3:23Rory Stewart?

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

• 3:26Alastair Campbell?

  And with me, Alastair Campbell. And I should tell you, dear listener, that we are in Damascus, the capital of Syria. And the reason we're in Damascus is because last night, we interviewed the president of Syria, Ahmad Al-Shara. And that means that this podcast has been put together in sections. You're going to hear, first of all, a little bit about Syria. You're then going to hear a piece that we recorded earlier about Rory's extraordinary spat with JD Vance about God, of all things. And then, once we're back from seeing our president, we're going to talk about tariffs, we're going to talk about Heathrow, and we're going to talk about Germany and this extraordinary situation last week where the famous The firewall between the main parties and the far right almost came crashing down.

• 4:11Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, very excited to be here Tuesday morning in Damascus, beautiful sunny day. And we spent two hours last night with this rather extraordinary man who's gone from being one of the most feared jihadist fighters on the planet with a $10 million bounty on his head to now the president of a country with an enormous amount of challenges.

• 4:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, absolutely. So Asra and I have been in Damascus for a couple of days now. We've been walking around a little bit in the old city. It's a very, very strange moment, just before we get on to the to the interview. Because the Assad regime has been ruling Syria since the early 1970s, for as long as I've been alive, longer than I've been alive. And after more than 50 years of rule, people will remember just 55 days ago it collapsed. And these fighters who grew out of al-Qaeda Iraq, so quite literally the man that we interviewed, paid his allegiance to Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's successor as the head of al-Qaeda, swept in, took all the major cities and came into Damascus without a fight.

• 5:21Rory Stewart?

  And so you're driving through a city in which there are almost no police because all the Assad police have gone home, these intelligence services have gone home, the army's gone home. The prisons have largely been opened, releasing political prisoners, but also a number of criminals. You occasionally see standing on the street corners people with big beards and body armour and large weapons who are part of the old jihadi al-Qaeda groups, the HTS groups that have come down from Idlib in the northwest. Damascus is a city which has been spared for the last few years, much of the fighting, although northern Damascus has been pulverised and flattened

• 6:05Rory Stewart?

  and and looks like horrible images that you will be familiar with from around the world. But it's a mixed city with quite a large Christian community. It's a place that was very anxious about what would happen because it's been told for more than a decade by the Assad regime. That they're fighting crazy Islamist terrorists and that if the regime fell, some sort of Taliban state would be imposed on them. So people are a bit nervous. But let me stop there and just, so what was your sense yesterday and today, walking through the streets and just the sense of, yeah, the feeling of the place?

• 6:37Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it feels, it's really strange to say this, but it feels kind of quite normal. People are a lot happier than the last time I was here or you were here. Most of the people that we've spoken to are very, very, very pleased that Assad has gone. Some of them are very, very, very pleased that Al-Shara is now in power. Some of them anxious. I think all of them worried about whether he can be the person that leads this country into a, into a better place. The challenges he faces, and we talked about these when we interviewed him, the challenges he faces are absolutely enormous. And you do feel that. The kind of, the social public infrastructure is quite weak.

• 7:20Alastair Campbell?

  The streets are pretty dirty. There's lots of litter. The traffic system doesn't work. Youth unemployment off the scale. We had to pay Syrian money to one of the people that we used to help us fix the interview, but they wanted, they want, we had dollars. They wanted Syrian, Syrian pounds and literally by taking dollars and exchanging them for like a plastic bag full of notes with Assad's face on them. Because inflation is so rampant. So I think two things really that in a way are going to clash. The scale of what they have achieved to have gone from being this quite small, tight knit group of people who've been, you know, fighting in a violent way

• 8:04Alastair Campbell?

  for quite a long time, then to come over, come in, take this whole place over without anybody getting killed, now to confront the scale of challenge.

• 8:14Alastair Campbell?

  And so we we interviewed, when people see the pictures of Al Sharar, he was incredibly smartly dressed. He looked like a kind of a modern Middle Eastern leader. This is a guy who, two months ago, was still in his kind of, you know, military fatigues, ordering soldiers to do things. So the scale of what's happened is incredible. I think when people will put the, there's quite a lot of work to do in terms of getting the translation sorted and laying down the voice of the translator and so forth. But we'll put the the interview out on Monday. But I think people will find it fascinating, both about him. But I think more importantly, how do you take a country like this and try and get it to a better place?

• 8:54Rory Stewart?

  I think there are three main challenges. One of them is the economy, second is security, and the third is the kind of governance politics bit.

• 9:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Rory Stewart?

  The economy, difficult to get estimates on this stuff, but broadly speaking, the Syrian gross domestic product contracted by about 80%. I'm going to put that in context, we're talking about Brexit damaging the British economy by about 5% over a number of years. So many people effectively end up being 20% as wealthy as they were 10 years ago. And you can see that as we were walking through the streets. It's just, everything looks very, very shabby. The cars are very old, they're very battered, the streets are not that clean, buildings haven't been repaired, people are wearing increasingly kind of shabby clothes. So we're talking at the moment in a hotel with a generator, there's blackouts 10 hours a day. Unemployment rates are beyond imagining. I mean, you were commenting on

• 9:44Rory Stewart?

  this, just how many young men you see just on the street corners, not doing very much. So that's the economic side of things. And how on earth do you get the economy off the ground again? And where's the where's the taxation income going to come? How do you pay for basic services? Because schools are crumbling, teachers are underpaid, kids aren't getting into school.

• 10:03Alastair Campbell?

  Though it was nice today, we saw lots of kids as they were coming out of school. And it was just remarkable how they just looked like kids anywhere in the world with their sort of barbed old backpacks. And, you know, they're just all sort of coming out of school, holding hands, laughing, clapping, singing. That was, I found that quite moving, actually. There is education going on, but the services, public services are basically in a state of collapse.

• 10:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and you're right about the resilience point, that even though, I guess one way of putting it is that when I was last in Syria, which I guess was 2010, 2011, the country in some bits looked like maybe Greece, right?

• 10:44Rory Stewart?

  And now bits of the edge of Damascus look a bit more like Afghanistan in terms of what you see in terms of street sellers, clothing, collapsing buildings, et cetera. So it's a big change and a very, very humiliating, difficult change for Syrians who feel that deeply. Second thing I guess is is security. Yeah. So as I said, basically, the army, the security and the intelligence services either went home or were fired. There's been something like this famous de-bathification in Iraq or denazification in Germany, where you've lost a lot of the old regime. And that means that you've got a very few fighters connected to Jilani trying to hold security. And the risk is that those groups will then join a resistance against him. Hmm. The final bit, I guess, is the politics. So he's not been elected. He's come in and

• 11:29Rory Stewart?

  he's basically done what you might politely call a military coup. And he's now the de facto president. And he's saying it's going to be three months and there's going to be a transitional council and then there's going to be tomstitch about a constitution and then eventually there's going to be elections. But in the meantime, he's taken over one of the most complicated countries on earth. Started pretty complicated because as we've said, there are all these different religious groups. There's the Sunni groups, there's the Shia groups, and then there's the Alawite and the Druze, and then there's Christian communities. And then there's the Kurds again, who feel very, very different to the other communities. And most of these groups had their own militia. So there's bits of ISIS, Daesh, still going.

• 12:12Rory Stewart?

  There's Kurdish militia who've taken a lot of the land in the northeast of the country. There's Turkish-backed military groups. And then he's got his own faction. So he came out of, as we said, Al Qaeda, and he controlled HTS, which was a big coalition of different insurgent groups, some of which were pretty radical and wanted to set up something that would have felt a little bit like Taliban Afghanistan. And he's decided not to go down that path. So we interviewed him. He wasn't wearing fatigues. He's wearing. Modern clothes, but he will face a huge challenge trying to deal with the more extreme members of his own faction. Final thought I had is it's a sort of deja vu for me because here I am in Damascus, not long after the fall of Bashar al-Assad. I

• 12:55Rory Stewart?

  came into Kabul in 2001, just after the fall of the Taliban. I came into Tripoli just after the fall of the Afghani. In fact, I arrived in Tripoli the day he fell and I came into Iraq, not long after the fall of Saddam Hussein.

• 13:05Alastair Campbell?

  Couldn't you go to America and we have the fall of Trump? Sounds like this is a pattern here.

• 13:08Rory Stewart?

  I guess what I'm getting at is thinking back over these four very different situations, how badly wrong we in the West got it. What did we fail to notice? Often there's a lot of optimism. I remember, for example, in Libya and Yemen, huge amounts of optimism, which pretty quickly collapsed in the face of warring militia groups. I remember the incredible expectations that people had in Iraq, which were then disappointed as we couldn't get basic services going. And the question I keep asking myself, we sat down with some war reporters or journalists who specialise in conflict, both yesterday and today, how they struggled to put the story together. You know, what do they focus on? What are we missing? How difficult it is to predict the trajectory of a country at

• 13:51Rory Stewart?

  this stage? Anyway, I've talked enough. Back over to you.

• 13:54Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to put the episode out on Monday on Leading. Ahmed Al Sharah, very, very interesting guy, lots to him. Extraordinary journey from middle class background, off to fight in Iraq, imprisoned for five years, incredible rise through the ranks of various organisations, then leading in Idlib, and then this this kind of bloodless coup, and now the massive challenge of trying to rebuild this country. So Monday the 10th on Leading. Now, you're going to hear about Rory Spat with the Vice President of the USA, J D Vance, that we recorded yesterday, Monday. We'll see you in a minute.

• 14:35Alastair Campbell?

  A quite remarkable Twitter spat between you and the Vice President of the United States, J D Vance. I just put in J D Vance Rory Stewart spat into Google and it got quite a lot of coverage in different parts of the world with lots of the theological papers really taking an interest. Do you want to just tell us what happened with J D?

• 14:55Rory Stewart?

  That's right. So J D Vance had put out, I think it's an interview on Fox News, in which he'd said that there's a Christian idea called autoamoris, which is, in his interpretation, means that you should prioritise your family, yourself and your country over other people.

• 15:13Alastair Campbell?

  My spiritual advisor Rory tells me that the first in the order is God. Your love of God must come first. Okay. So anyway, but yeah, J D Vance said that. Yep.

• 15:22Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. And of course, this is coming, just to put it in context, at a moment where the US government is announcing that it has stopped all overseas aid. So all international development assistance to other countries.

• 15:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 15:33Rory Stewart?

  So hiding somewhere behind the idea is putting yourself first, family first, is charity begins at home, basically. And to some extent, screw the rest of the world. So I said, look, this is a slightly eccentric interpretation of Christian doctrine, but more than that, I don't think politicians should be pulling in Jesus on their side and using Jesus to tell us in which order to love. At which point J D Vance tweeted back saying, just Google autoamoris, this him replying to me.

• 16:02Alastair Campbell?

  Which means the order of love.

• 16:03Rory Stewart?

  The order of love, yeah. Aside from that, the idea there isn't a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone? And then he said, I've said before, and I'll say it again, the problem with Rory, people like him, is that he has an IQ of 110 and thinks he has an IQ of 130. This false arrogance drives so much elite failure over the last 40 years.

• 16:31Alastair Campbell?

  There's a lot to unpack in that. So first of all, here's a guy who is trying to, as you say, ally his faith. To his politics, it's okay to expel millions of people. It's okay to say that any immigrant is an illegal immigrant and they're all a problem, as long as you believe in God and Ordo Amoris. Common sense is what Donald Trump keeps saying he's all about. Moral duty is what he seems to think Christianity is about. But Rory, fascinating, do you know what your IQ is?

• 17:04Rory Stewart?

  I did take an IQ test when I was younger, yeah.

• 17:07Alastair Campbell?

  And what was the result?

• 17:07Rory Stewart?

  No, I'm not going to be dragged down into this because I absolutely think that this thing which Trump and Vance are obsessed with, which is saying that you should measure everybody by their IQs, and suddenly they refuse to take tests.

• 17:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I'm going to reveal to our listeners and viewers that you passed the Mensa test. Now, I don't know what the number has to be to pass the Mensa test, but I think it's higher than JD. JD Vance obviously thinks 130 is like, sort of, you know, the tops. That's as good as it can get. And what about your false arrogance and your elite failure? I mean, I've got to say, Rory, I'm not an expert on the Bible, but I did think you picked the wrong bit of the Bible. John 15, 12 to 13, this is all about you, you love everyone the same, yeah, you, you, you treat your neighbour as your family and et cetera. But that left him an opening, I think. I think you could have found a better bit in the Bible that actually said you have responsibility that goes beyond yourself. And let's be frank,

• 18:01Alastair Campbell?

  which Jesus was a socialist, let's be honest, Jesus was a socialist. Come on, admit it.

• 18:07Rory Stewart?

  So let, let, let me try to give the, the response as I, as I understand. I think the first thing that's really interesting is that the idea that you put yourself first and your family first and your country first, you don't really need Jesus for. That's basically what Genghis Khan believed. It's what most of us believe. It's perfectly instinctive, natural, selfish, human reaction. Put myself and my family first. What actually made Christ radical was that he pushed us to think well, well beyond that. And, and so much of his message is in fact directly against what JD Vance seems to be implying. Sometimes directly in the Bible, he talks about people turning away from their family to

• 18:49Rory Stewart?

  Serve God, that he says unless you hate your father, your brother, your children to love God, you can't, can't follow me. But he also, of course, uses the parable of the good Samaritan. Part about the good Samaritan is that the Samaritan is exactly somebody who wasn't from the Jewish nation. You know, he was a marginalized, almost hostile people.

• 19:10Alastair Campbell?

  Everyone is your neighbour.

• 19:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's his answer to the question of who's your neighbour. And I think more than that, it's the sense that Christ's message is radical precisely because it forces us to consider the very marginalized, the very poor, I mean, even, you know, love your enemies. Now, whatever you make of that, like, it's certainly pushing humans to go beyond the boundaries of what feels natural to them. There's that part of it. And it's been very interesting because I've had lots of priests getting in touch. I've had Jesuits coming out on my side on Twitter. I've had my mother very, very concerned because she reads The Spectator and The Telegraph that very much took J D Vance's side on this

• 19:51Rory Stewart?

  and thought that I'd been squashed. And, you know, this was the final destruction of the centrist dads because J D Vance had bossed me.

• 19:59Alastair Campbell?

  I've got to say, Rory, this row gave The Telegraph their perfect headline. Rory Stewart, not as clever as he thinks, says J D Vance.

• 20:09Alastair Campbell?

  It is wonderful how they, they desperately want Trump and anything to do with Trump to be winning everything, don't they? They don't realise the extent to which they're playing into this sort of madness that he's inflicting upon the world. You know, and if Keir Starmer or anybody says anything now that sort of mildly contradicts anything that Trump has said, this is somehow a blow to Britain, whereas actually, I think, it's the opposite.

• 20:33Rory Stewart?

  Well, just to finish this, because this is beginning to sound completely self-obsessed.

• 20:36Alastair Campbell?

  No, it's funny, though. It's interesting.

• 20:38Rory Stewart?

  But it is an extraordinary sort of moment on social media, isn't it? So I think his tweet to me got 21 million views and 76,000 likes. My quote tweet back to him got 8.2 million views and 68,000 likes. But the thing that I sort of concluded on was a quote from Paul Zett of the Galatians, which I think is a good way of replying to J D Vance. He says, "There's neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

• 21:12Alastair Campbell?

  Ah, that's the one you should have gone with right from the start, Rory. You say I was right, wasn't I?

• 21:17Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, I just think it's incredible that this newly elected Vice President of the United States with so much going on has time to get engaged in a Twitter spat with somebody from a podcast in a different country. And it suggests to me that he hasn't got very much to do. And maybe that's because Elon Musk is in charge.

• 21:35Rory Stewart?

  And it may also suggest, I mean, it's an interesting question. I mean, he says, you know, that he's always said this about me and he's said it before about me, that it is an interesting thing because I came across him when I was a Conservative MP. And there is a fight going on for the identity of conservatism. And we shared some things in common, a belief in tradition, patriotism, skepticism about what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in those days, he seemed to be more on the side of conservatives being about caution, restraint, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And then, of course, he reinvented himself as this radical. And what disturbs me much more than him attacking me on Twitter

• 22:17Rory Stewart?

  is that he's now putting out posts saying implementing Trump's executive orders immediately is democracy. And any attempt to balance it or check it is oligarchy. And it shows a complete radical challenge to the whole of our idea of our democracies, which are, of course, all about checks and balances and all about how you balance majority representation with the protection of minority rights. And that's why the US Constitution has a judiciary separate from an elected president, separate from a legislature. And Vance has gone for something which is profoundly populist and authoritarian, which is the idea that you won, you win one election, in that case by a relatively narrow margin, you know,

• 22:58Rory Stewart?

  even though he won all the houses, actually in terms of the margins that he won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan by their narrow margins. And on the basis of that, you then behave as though you're 100% of the people and you accept no checks and balances at all.

• 23:12Alastair Campbell?

  And you do it with a focus on not just your own country, but the impact on other countries as well. We'll come on to that. Don't forget that J D Vance did once say that Trump was America's Hitler. So, you know, he's clearly a man on a journey.

• 23:27Alastair Campbell?

  We did actually, before we went off to the palace yesterday, record a huge chunk about Donald Trump and tariffs, but being Donald Trump, he made it almost instantly out of date by, I think, backing down. He, of course, is saying that this was an amazing victory for his strong man approach. But, you know, just to tell people, he threatened huge tariffs on Canada, huge tariffs, 25% on Canada and Mexico, 10% tariffs on China, which seemed to be going ahead, a version of, but he's given a 30-day reprieve to the Canadians and the Mexicans, provided they do a few things, which, as far as I can see from the Canadian perspective, they were pretty much doing anyway. So Rory, what have you made of the last sort of 48 hours of tariffology?

• 24:11Rory Stewart?

  Just to kind of quick recap on the whole thing, Trump is bizarrely obsessed with tariffs. And when you go back to his first term in office, you can see these incredible fights happening, where he and a guy called Navarro are very in favor of tariffs, and another guy called Cohen in particular, who's on his National Economic Council, is very against them. And the tariffs against Mexico and Canada were particularly surprising because tariffs against China, if you were to talk to, I don't know, Larry Summers, who's more on the left as an economist in the US, there could be a justification for it. Because, three things. I mean, China has artificially kept its currency low. China also has run a very

• 24:54Rory Stewart?

  odd economic policy, which has involved putting an enormous amount of money into property and infrastructure and not into consumption. And those things have distorted its trade with America, creating this enormous trade deficit. And finally, of course, the China shock devastated manufacturing industry in the US and in Europe at a speed that nothing has ever seen before. It went from being the seventh largest economy in the world, smaller than Italy, to being the world's largest manufacturer exporter within about five, six years. I mean, it's an unbelievable story. Mexico and Canada are very, very different stories. Canada in particular, Trump can't say that Canada is a place like China, which has got kind of cheap slave labor, that's stealing industrial secrets, undercutting American factories. In fact, if anything...

• 25:39Rory Stewart?

  Canada's a more regulated, higher wage place. And so getting around why he thought tariffs against Canada, Mexico could make sense is very, very, very difficult.

• 25:50Alastair Campbell?

  The only thing I can think of, Roy, is that, well, there's two things. And I don't have a very high opinion of Donald Trump. I recognise that he's an extraordinary communicator. He's clearly somebody who's been able to persuade the American people to reelect him after a pretty disastrous, in my view, first term record. But two things. One, he wants us all to know that he is the most powerful person in the world. He wants us to know that. He wants world leaders to wake up and worry whether he has said anything overnight that might affect them. But I think it's frankly weird that you pick as your first big fight, you pick on Canada, which by any, Canada's one of those sort of soft power triumph stories. Most people around the world like Canada.

• 26:34Alastair Campbell?

  They think Canada's a pretty good country. And he argues that this is about stopping, dealing with immigration, the crisis that he talks about and dealing with fentanyl, the importation of drugs that are, that are causing a real health crisis in the United States. According to Justin Trudeau, and I suspect Justin Trudeau has a greater hold on fact and statistics than Donald Trump ever does, less than 1% of the fentanyl that's in America is crossing the Canadian border. And when I said earlier that I don't think Trudeau's doing anything different to what he'd been doing before, because they've talked about investing in this, they've talked about investing in greater border security, et cetera. The one thing he has added in that's sort of vaguely new, they're going to have a fentanyl czar. And this stays into my second point about Trump.

• 27:17Alastair Campbell?

  We must never forget that he became a presidential hopeful and possible, horribly, in my view, but this is what happened, through a reality TV show. And he's taken the sort of format of the reality TV show and he's taken it into government. So for week one, we had Sheinbaum as a new, as a new character in the soap. We had Trudeau, who he dragged down to Mar-a-Lago and who Elon Musk calls girl. And they became the characters that they can sort of beat up. And then they, hey, guess what? What they fought back a bit. Hey, they're fighting back. I've got to find a story that says I've beaten them because everybody is telling me,

• 27:57Alastair Campbell?

  Mr. President, this is fucking crazy what you're doing. Every economist in the world is saying to me, this is going to damage America just as much as it does Canada and Mexico. So I've got to find a story to to unplug it.

• 28:07Rory Stewart?

  Just to remind people what these tariffs would have meant if he'd held to them, and he may bring them back again. So it's worth getting our heads around it.

• 28:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, thirty day reprieve. But that's another episode, another episode in thirty days.

• 28:18Rory Stewart?

  So twenty five percent tariffs means that if you are an American car manufacturer and you're importing steel from Canada, let's say there's, I don't know, four thousand dollars worth of steel in your car, suddenly it's five thousand dollars worth of steel. The other way, Canadians buy American goods, their supermarkets are stacked full of American food and suddenly, instead of paying, I don't know, forty dollars or four dollars, you're paying five dollars for whatever you're buying. So the cost of living goes up twenty five percent almost overnight for a lot of key products going back and forth across the border. Now, what's interesting is that Mexico and Canada responded so quickly, announcing immediate reciprocal tariffs back. But I then sort of got myself into the mindset, and I'd like your view on this.

• 29:03Rory Stewart?

  I got myself a mindset thinking, well, this is good. You know, you're standing up to a bully. He says twenty five percent tariffs. You put twenty five percent tariffs up. What I wasn't expecting was Trudeau to then do things which even if cosmetic says, I'm putting up a fentanyl czar, I'm sending soldiers to the border, so that it sounds to Trump, so Trump can present it as I got these new things which I wouldn't have got if I hadn't threatened to put tariffs up. And presumably that's because somebody said to Trudeau, listen, the damage these twenty five percent tariffs will do to the Canadian economy is so much that you've got to allow Trump to save face. You've got to give him something to allow him to back down because you can't actually afford to get to a trade war with the US.

• 29:44Alastair Campbell?

  So let's just say for the sake of argument, Trudeau is a lame duck because we know that he's going to go. But he's not a populist leader. He's somebody who's dealing in the real world and dealing with real challenges. So as you say, people are saying to him, this is really dangerous and he's got the backing of, you know, Poyet is talking. Talking tough against Trump, Mark Carney's talking tough against Trump. Everybody who's thinking about taking over is talking tough about Trump. Canada is kind of coming together, right? He's dealing with that in the real world and he's trying to stop the tariffs. It's fine to give Trump what he wants because all Trump cares about are the markets and headlines. And as long as Trump can go out and have people like Elon Musk say he won and have all this sort of the misinformation pumped out there.

• 30:23Rory Stewart?

  Can I just get pushed back for a second though? Because if what we're doing is thinking about how Europe responds, how the UK responds to Trump doing this again. Might it not have been better to wait a few more days before giving Trump what he wanted? Less Americans feel the pain a bit more. Let people experience because I didn't think you really want to give a bully even a cosmetic win.

• 30:45Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe.

• 30:45Rory Stewart?

  And certainly not give him a cosmetic win within 24 hours. I think Trudeau folded too quickly. It would have been better for the world if he'd held his nerve and stuck to it.

• 30:54Alastair Campbell?

  The only thing I'll say about that, I mean, I think that's easy to say. I think that's very, very hard to say if you're in his place. Where he's an outgoing prime minister, this thing comes out of nowhere. A bit like the Greenland Denmark thing, it literally comes out of nowhere. Even though we know that Trump has talked about tariffs being the most beautiful word in the language. Everybody assumed that that was going to be to go after people you would identify as America's enemies. China, you know, more on Russia. Instead, he picks on Canada and Mexico. And I think people might say, oh, well, Mexico, yeah, reputation for drugs, all that. Immigration, build a wall, all that stuff's been going for years. But Canada comes literally out of a clear blue sky. So I kind of have some sympathy for Trudeau in thinking, right, the most important, what's my objective here?

• 31:39Alastair Campbell?

  My objective is to stop these tariffs happening. What's, how do I do that? I give a little. And when you actually look at what he's given, it's next to nothing. But Trump, he lets Trump go away and Trump goes off and plays another game. I mean, it's tragic that we have to do this, but I'm afraid there's going to be an awful lot of it in the next four years.

• 31:58Rory Stewart?

  You think we're all going to keep giving concessions to Trump? And even if they're cosmetic and allowing him to feel that he's winning by behaving like this. Because I thought actually to push back one last time, Trudeau. Was in an incredibly powerful political position. The whole of Canada was united against what Trump had done. The Canadian Conservative Opposition was united, the Liberal leadership challengers were united. I think Trudeau absolutely had the space to say, F you. You're not interfering in our internal affairs in this way. We have very professional measures on the borders. This is simply not true, this fentanyl thing. And no, we're not going to set up new institutions. And by the way, here's 25% tariffs straight back at you.

• 32:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yep, okay, could have done that. A big risk though, is all I'm saying. I mean, I, I do think he was in a strong position though. I mean, I, we were quoting yesterday the figures about the, the share of American petroleum that goes in through Canada is, is huge. I mean, so they've got, they've got a lot of things that America wants. I just think, did Justin Trudeau want Canada to be the test bed of this sort of, you know, ridiculous macho bullying approach? Look, there's two ways of looking at it. I'd be, I'd be fascinated to, you know, we've been in Syria all week. So I don't know what many Canadians are thinking. But it'd be lovely if, if a few Canadians could actually let us know whether they think that Trudeau broadly speaking did the right thing or agree with Rory

• 33:19Alastair Campbell?

  that he should have actually just held firm and then put both countries through the pain of massive tariffs. My final point on tariffs Rory is that the research I read up on before we recorded the podcast on Monday, there's very little research you can find that suggests that tariffs will ever deliver the domestic economic benefit that Trump keeps claiming for them. And in fact, there was an analysis by the America's own Commerce Department that says that they, done at the time, they said the tariffs that, that Trump did against the law of opposition internally, as you said earlier, get through in his first term, that the net impact on the sectors he said he was helping was actually negative.

• 34:00Rory Stewart?

  The reason, of course, it's so popular is that he is pointing out that in the US. And in Europe, there used to be good, high-paid jobs in manufacturing for people who didn't necessarily have university degrees. You could work in an aluminium factory, or you could work in a car factory, you could make a decent living.

• 34:19Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 34:20Rory Stewart?

  And the globalization and free trade has meant that those jobs have largely left and gone to places like China. So his idea is that if you put up tariff barriers, it makes it easier for the American car company or steel company to compete with other countries. Now, the problem with it, of course, is that it doesn't make economic sense. I mean, an economist would say, listen, all you're doing there is you're just subsidizing people, and you'd be better off running a competitive economy, getting the income in, and almost handing it out in cash to the people who used to work in the steel factory, rather than subsidizing the whole industry in order to deliver decent wages. But where it went wrong, and this is why Trump can get away with it, is that, of course, with Mrs Thatcher

• 35:01Rory Stewart?

  and Ronald Reagan and others, the economists never did what they said, right? They said, well, you know, we'll close the coal mines, we'll close the steel factories, that will generate more money for the economy, and then we'll be able to give that money to the people who lost their jobs. And of course, that's what we failed to do. What actually happened is more and more inequality, more and more money going to the rich. So there's a whole bit of trauma, politics, inequality going on, which makes this tariff stuff, even if it doesn't make any economic sense, because it would make America poorer, the world poorer. It's completely inefficient, it doesn't lead to innovation, doesn't lead to competition. But there's a reason why it's appealing, and I think we should also watch for it with the far-right parties in Europe.

• 35:45Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely, a hundred percent. China is responding, says it's going to put some sort of countermeasures against America. And the other thing, of course, that we should maybe just reflect on before we go to the break, is that the UK, Keir Starmer, kind of caught a little bit in the middle of this, at quite a difficult and challenging time. So Keir Starmer Was in Brussels yesterday, had a meeting at NATO, had a dinner with European Union leaders. And, and of course, what the right wing in particular are trying to do is say, look, you know, you've got to go with America. And what people, I guess, like me, are saying is, look, you know, much more important to repair our trade relations with Europe. And because Trump has become such an unreliable partner, I think it's very, very, very important Labour don't get sucked into this idea that they're going to get some kind of special deal.

• 36:30Alastair Campbell?

  Because what he's shown to the Mexicans and the Canadians is he doesn't believe in the deals that he signs, that he signs anyway. So I think Keir Starmer seems to me to be trying to hold the line, saying these are both incredibly important relationships to our economy, to our security, to our future. And I think that is the right place to be, but I want to see more in terms of this reset with Europe and less of the sort of, you know, maybe the, the kind of pandering to Trump that maybe the, the future ambassador feels he has to do because that's now a part of his job. But I think for the strategy of the government as a whole has got to be, you know, this is a false choice.

• 37:03Rory Stewart?

  Paradoxically, this could be the moment, in fact, to drive Britain much closer to Europe because the more unpredictable, unreliable and vicious Trump gets with his trade policies and his treatment of his allies, the more sense it makes to group with your nearer neighbours. So this could be a great moment to rejoin the customs union.

• 37:22Alastair Campbell?

  Now we'll go for a break. When we come back, we're going to be talking about growth and Heathrow Airport, and we're going to be talking about what's going on in Germany right now.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  This episode is brought to you by Tic Tac. Lace up and get your game on because the Tic Tac lineup just got a new teammate. Dr Pepper Tic Tac. This new double threat puts two of your favourite flavours into one box of mints. And when two iconic flavours come together, the result can only be iconic.

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Score big. Try Dr Pepper Tic Tac today.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 38:28Speaker 05

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 38:30Speaker 04

  How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibes, star level and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. And wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.

• 39:02Rory Stewart?

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

• 39:05Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Heathrow Rory, I was at Heathrow yesterday. Terminal three, my God, it was busy. It was absolutely rammed. Couldn't even get a cup of tea at Pret, it was so busy. So I think airport expansion, where do you stand on airport expansion? Because on the one hand, you're a green agenda man. On the other hand, you travel a lot. And on the other hand, if we can have three hands, you're also somebody who I think agrees that the British economy needs a bit of a kick up the backside to get growth going. So how do you react to the growth speech?

• 39:44Rory Stewart?

  You've put your finger on all the main arguments there, haven't you? I mean, so making travel out of Heathrow easier, which a third runway, if built, is supposed to be able to do. Secondly, the question about what that would mean for the environment. And then the thirdly, the question on how this relates to growth. So I don't know whether we're going to be able to get a little bit of an agreeable disagreement going here, Alistair.

• 40:04Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 40:04Rory Stewart?

  So I'm going to come out against the third runway at Heathrow.

• 40:08Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 40:09Rory Stewart?

  Are you in favor of the Heathrow third runway?

• 40:11Alastair Campbell?

  I'm broadly in favor of the third runway, provided that these arguments, which Rachel Reeves and Keir Starmer were busy making, that this, what they call sustainable aviation fuel development is a real thing. Now, if you're, if you're wondering if I'm a little bit skeptical, I'm a little bit skeptical. But I don't honestly see how we can. Unless you decide to go down the Kate Rayworth route of saying, sod all this growth stuff, it's not working. And if we're going to save the climate, we've got to stop travelling full stop. We've just got to stop flying so much, et cetera. And I kind of, there's a part of me that wants to buy that argument. But I think it's quite unrealistic. I think

• 40:54Alastair Campbell?

  it's unrealistic because of the way we live. And I think it's unrealistic because of people's basic kind of need to move and businesses. And also, we're talking in a way, you know, a lot of what we talked about in the first half was about nationalism and the impact of nationalism. The one place when nationalism might have a nice, simple argument is in relation to the environment. If we all just stayed home more, maybe we'd do less damage. But I just don't see how Britain reestablishes itself as a, as a kind of global power without proper connectivity to the rest of the world. And the fact is that we've got, you know, we've got some pretty good airports, we've got some pretty good transport links, but

• 41:36Alastair Campbell?

  Heathrow is a mess. And, you know, you don't have to, I, I quite often, I, Rory, when I am flying, I quite often will check out, not just sort of, you know, Luton Stansted or that, but actually at Birmingham in East Midlands and, you know, get a train to go. I actually, I, when, when this was under discussion, when we were in government, and it started, you know, I think the first discussion we had was in, in the first term.

• 41:59Rory Stewart?

  So it's been under discussion for 28 years, right?

• 42:02Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah. And I think it was under discussion before. And then certainly on the Heathrow saying, we're going to need to expand and develop. And then I think Gordon Brown gave the go ahead in, I think it was 2009. And then the coalition unplugged it because David Cameron was going through his green phase at the time. And then, of course, you had Boris Johnson saying he was going to sort of, you know, step in front of the, lie on the runway in front of the first plane that took off, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 42:26Rory Stewart?

  And then Theresa May, I think Theresa May sort of approved it again. And then the argument, I mean, I think what I'm hearing you say, the argument for it is firstly, capacity. Heathrow's running at about 98% capacity, which is why there are these endless delays. And anyone listening, just practically, you'd be better going to almost any other airport because they've got themselves in such a muddle. I mean, I was talking to a pilot about why the planes are delayed in Heathrow. And he said, It's such chaos, nobody even really knows what the problem is. You know, I was coming to try to join you on an overseas trip recently. We landed and we just sat there and the pilot kept trying to reassure us that something was going to happen. And it was something to do initially with the fact that, you know, a particular gate wasn't available. And then something to do with air traffic control, I think, before that.

• 43:09Rory Stewart?

  And then they couldn't get the stairs. And then, once the stairs arrived, they couldn't find a bus. And these are all different parts of the Heathrow system.

• 43:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Rory Stewart?

  None of whom seem to be coordinated. And I did think at the time, look, you could make a hell of a lot of improvement with decent machine learning and AI to actually model which gates you're going to and make sure the bus and the stairs is there on time. I mean, it can't be beyond the widow man to sort this out, but boy, are they failing. So there's that point. I think the second thing is your growth point, which is the UK wants to, you know, be a big logistics hub and move pharmaceuticals and electronics around the world. And 74% of that goes out of Heathrow. I think another argument for you, before I come down against you, is that there's a lot of infrastructure already there. There's the M25 there, the Elizabeth lines there, Heathrow Express is there.

• 43:56Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, as I understand it though, Rory, is part what the plan that seems to be the favourite, the runway itself is going to require massive rebuilding of the M25. So the thing I felt, the thing I felt about, about Rachel Reeve's speech, and to be fair, we have been banging on for some time. Set out a growth plan, set it out in big detail, what have you. So this is an issue that had to be kind of grasped one way or the other. She's decided to go down that way. But again, I felt it was very aspirational. We want to do this. The timeframe strikes me as, you know, when, when, when would this thing actually get planning, get built, have people take off?

• 44:38Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. You're beginning to preempt my counter arguments. Exactly. So you're completely right. So this thing looks like it would take 15 or 20 years to build and would involve new tunnels under the M25 and relocating villages. It's based on a particular idea that air travel in 15, 20 years' time is going to be like it is today, which is this hub and spoke model where we're meant to be competing with Schiphol in Amsterdam and Paris. And the idea of hub and spoke is that you fly from Edinburgh to London and then you fly from London on, or you fly from Geneva to London and then you fly from London to Bay Ridge, whatever it happens to be, right? Whereas in fact, it may be that the world's going to change over the next fifteen, twenty

• 45:20Rory Stewart?

  years. You talked about aviation fuel, could be that we act up with electric and hydrogen planes, which might make it much cheaper to fly directly from Geneva to Beirut, as opposed to going Geneva, London, London, Beirut. Might change all regional airlines. So I would have thought, given the expense, given the risk, given that it's not going to deliver any growth for poor old Rachel Reeves any time in the next fifteen years, I would say invest actually in our existing network. Maybe put a second runway in in Gatwick, put more investment into train links into Manchester and distribute yourself, not betting the house on an airport which already has fifteen billion pounds worth

• 46:03Rory Stewart?

  of debt, in trying to force something through planning at huge expense, which may well, and this is my fear in life, turn out to be yet another HS2.

• 46:12Alastair Campbell?

  Well, that speaks to the question, what is it about Britain that these big, big, big infrastructure projects appear to be so difficult? I mean, the last, I guess the last really big thing that we pulled off, and I think pulled off well, was probably the Olympics, London twenty twelve.

• 46:32Rory Stewart?

  Crossrail two was very impressive.

• 46:34Alastair Campbell?

  Crossrail's good, Crossrail's good, yeah. But why it takes so long is, I guess, is down in part to NIMBYism and to what Keir Starmer has been talking a lot about, this whole thing about planning. In other words, they want to be able to make strategic decisions about the British economy and the infrastructure that the British economy needs without all the kind of protest. Now, that's a difficult place for a progressive government to be.

• 47:02Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, because the problem isn't really NIMBYism. I mean, the number of people who live in Uxbridge right next to Heathrow is pretty limited. The reason that in the end it has been blocked consistently is that building it is completely at odds with the government's carbon targets. So a lot of the regulations and the rules come out of the fact that the government sets a strategic vision, that we're going to go carbon neutral by twenty forty or twenty fifty, or whatever it happens to be. And everything else then follows from that. And then we'll have air quality targets, right, which will be blown out of the water. If Heathrow's built there.

• 47:34Alastair Campbell?

  Unless this sustainable aviation fuel thing is real. So I would have, I would have liked to have seen a PowerPoint presentation by Ed Miliband alongside Rachel Reeves, saying, this is why we're confident that this can be done in a sustainable way.

• 47:48Rory Stewart?

  I also, sorry, on a communications point, I think one of the problems with this and HS2 is the governments that always want to do one big dramatic thing called a third runway or HS2. And actually, what's much better than HS2 would have been investing in a Leeds Manchester line, improving the bus service in Birmingham and Liverpool, dueling the A66, sorting out regional road networks. But it just doesn't sound as dramatic as one big hundred billion dollar contract. Ditto, isn't there a communications point, let's say I'm right, that actually a smarter, less risky thing to do for the British economy would be to put a little bit of investment to Gatwick, some into Manchester, put a bit into Luton, improve some train lines.

• 48:30Rory Stewart?

  Am I right in saying part of the problem is that somebody in comms would say, but that's not sexy enough, that's not exciting enough?

• 48:37Alastair Campbell?

  No, I don't think so. I don't think so. I wouldn't. I actually think there's, there's, at the moment, you can generate quite a lot of, I mean, maybe excitement's the wrong word, but I think there is a yearning in the country for a sense of a kind of long-term vision, long-term plan. Where I do think you might have a point in relation to this is it did slightly feel that it came out of nowhere. And if you go back, you remember when we talked endlessly on the podcast before the election about the £28 billion that the green programme was going to cost, and that slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly got parked. And if you wind that back, the claim at the time was that Rachel Reeves wanted something really big to put into her conference speech at the time,

• 49:19Alastair Campbell?

  and hey presto, 28 billion, and then they took a long time to have to unravel that. And whether in this, you know, we've been pushing, lots of you have been pushing for some big signals of growth ahead, and Heathrow is one of those, as you say, it's not going to deliver growth for some time to come, but it's about a message about growth. But listen, there were, and there were other bits. The Doncaster Sheffield Airport thing was in there. This thing about linking up Oxford and Cambridge better was in there. So there was other stuff in there. There were road projects, although as you keep saying, road projects to keep being re-announced is one of the most irritating things of, of non-infrastructure Britain. But I'm broadly in favour, because I'm broadly in favour

• 50:01Alastair Campbell?

  of the government doing big things and getting on with them. But I know that my, my eco-credentials are threatened by that. That is why I keep saying I want to see the evidence that this sustainable aviation fuel is a real thing and that we can continue to fly around the world without damaging the planet that much. And I'm not a hundred percent convinced of that bit.

• 50:22Rory Stewart?

  So this is our final philosophical disagreement. I'm in favour of governments doing lots of small, cautious, meaningful things. Right. Okay. Now, listen, on, on to Germany, which you, you raised, and which is a huge story. Let me try to play to you, because you understand Germany ninety-nine times better than me, my sense of what happened in a, in a mini explainer, and tell me if I've missed the trick. And then maybe just tell us about the details and how it works. So my understanding is basically three things happened. Firstly, the CDU, the kind of right wing, the German, of Britain's Conservative Party, had an idea in the back of its head that it wanted to close German borders, turn away asylum seekers, partly because there'd been a massive rise in the number of asylum

• 51:05Rory Stewart?

  seekers in Germany. Three hundred and fifty thousand asylum seekers last year, two hundred and fifty thousand this year. Part two, which is where it began to get very weird, is that Merz, who's their leader, suddenly announced a five-point plan. And this is quite Trumpian, right? This sudden announcement, almost out of nowhere, with almost no consultation of a plan. And the problem with the plan is that it said that it was going to have a permanent border, Germany'd have a permanent border, which basically means leaving Schengen. And it was going to turn everybody away at the border, which basically means breaking European Union law. So suddenly they went from a reasonable aspiration of being tougher on immigration to doing something which was...

• 51:49Rory Stewart?

  So radical and potentially illegal, it blows the whole thing up. And then the third stage was he decided to put it to a symbolic vote. Because he's not the government, right? He's not in charge, it's right. It's like a backbench motion, I guess, in the House of Commons. Put it to symbolic vote and he then suddenly said for the first time that he didn't care who voted for it. Now, this is big problems because traditionally he and the right wing in Germany have said they won't work with the AFD, which is this far-right fascist party. And suddenly AFD said, well, hooray, hooray, we will vote for it. At which point Metz thought he could deal with that, saying, well, we want all of this, but the AFD are terrible people and we don't like them. And the AFD said, well, we don't care about you insulting us, we will vote for this.

• 52:34Rory Stewart?

  So, so they voted for it and it passed on Wednesday with the CDU and the AFD. And the AFD now gets to say, if you want to get anything done, you've got to work with us. Because the Greens and the SD who are going to form a coalition with the CDU are never going to vote for this kind of stuff. And your only hope is us, the AFD. In other words, in a week of entire madness, Metz has blown up his party, lost his intellectual credibility and given a massive gift to the German far-right just before the election.

• 53:05Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think that was a, that was a reasonable explanation of what's gone on. Whether it helps those of our listeners who don't follow German politics at all, fully to understand it, I don't know, they can, they can let us know, but the facts you've definitely got in there. So essentially, where I think this has been incredibly badly handled by him, by Metz, is the fact that he basically wanted this election to be about the economy. And he had a plan for the economy. The economy is stagnating. Schulz and the Ampel coalition, you know, with the, the Greens and the Free Democrats has, has been hopeless.

• 53:46Alastair Campbell?

  And he was, he was sailing almost Keir Starmer style to a, a big victory, well, well ahead in the polls. And it feels like he's gone from carrying the big vase to suddenly say, sod this forgave of soldiers. I want it to be more exciting. And the thing is, I think the thing that maybe triggered the change, I don't know, because I haven't spoken to him. But I think the thing that triggered the change was the fact that was, there was this awful murder, including of a two-year-old child. By what became described in most of the media as a deranged asylum seeker, which I think they mean was an asylum seeker who had a complete meltdown and went on a killing spree, including this two-year-old child.

• 54:27Rory Stewart?

  Two-year-old child of Moroccan ethnicity, wasn't he?

• 54:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:29Rory Stewart?

  It's tragic and it was an Afghan who killed him and yeah.

• 54:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, horrible, horrible story and it and obviously it wasn't sort of politicised immediately in the way that say the Southport killings were, but it was obviously a very big deal in Germany. And I think that may be the moment that Metz thought we've got to get on top of this. The trouble with that, I I said in the introduction about this word Brandtmauer firewall, is that the AFD have wanted this to be an immigration election and they've been struggling really to get it right up to the top of the agenda in the way that they wanted. And Metz has absolutely put it there. The first vote that you mentioned on Wednesday was a non-binding motion. It didn't even change anything, but what it

• 55:13Alastair Campbell?

  led to was him winning the vote, but only because the AFD supported him. And then you had, you know, we talked to Angela Merkel on the podcast a few weeks ago, and she said she was staying right out of politics. Now, we know that she and Metz didn't get on terribly well when they were, you know, when she was in power.

• 55:32Rory Stewart?

  But they're from the same party, very senior figures from the same party. So she's like, I don't know, Boris Johnson in relation to Kemi Badenoch in British terms or?

• 55:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I really don't think Angela Merkel would like being compared to Boris Johnson on any level at all, Rory. But she was leader of the CDU, he's leader of the CDU. Where they're different is that he's to the right of her, he and and also he's somebody who she won a lot of support from social democrats. The reason that Schultz won last time is essentially he hoovered back a lot of people who'd voted CDU, having essentially been social democrats. Now, Metz has not won any of those back in what he's done in recent days. Now, I don't think anybody comes out of this terribly well, though, because of course Schultz and De Linka, the left-wing party in the Greens. The overall message that they're putting out in being so vehement against what Merz has

• 56:24Alastair Campbell?

  done is not that concerned about immigration. Now, that may be fair or unfair, but that's the kind of, that's what they've got to be careful with. And of course, what the AFD are saying is, look, we're at 20% in the polls, we've shown that we can get things done in in Parliament. Are you seriously saying if we become a substantial player within Parliament, that none of you should ever talk to us? That's what the Brandtmauer exists for. And right since the the new German constitution was devised, the right, the far right have never been the deciding factor in a vote. Now, Merz got very stung by the attack from

• 57:05Alastair Campbell?

  Merkel. Merkel said this was wrong, he shouldn't have done it. So she stepped out of her kind of self-imposed political retirement to speak out. And he basically hit back by saying, well, you know, if you hadn't have sort of lost the plot in relation to refugee and asylum politics, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place. I paraphrase and I exaggerate for effect.

• 57:25Rory Stewart?

  Coming, just coming quickly on this, yeah. The analogy, I guess, in British politics is how do the Conservatives deal with Farage and Brexit and Elon Musk talking up Tommy Robinson? Now, it looked two weeks ago as though the CDU was quite a good model of how you do this, which is a right wing party comes up with a clear policy on controlling immigration, which is well thought through, not illegal, not in conformation of international laws, doesn't drive them outside the EU, runs powerfully competence, control of borders, and wins. What's happened now is I think that it feels like Merz has been thrown off

• 58:06Rory Stewart?

  balance by Trump, by Elon Musk saying the AFD is the future of Germany, by the way that people are suddenly talking about immigration. And he suddenly feels, in the way that I guess Robert Jenrick, the British Shadow Justice Secretary felt a few weeks ago, that he needs to get out there and sound more radical. Than he was before, hence five-point plan pulled out of his back pocket, no consultation. We're going to basically drop out of Schengen, we're going to break EU law, thinking that by doing so, he can outmaneuver the far right, whereas in fact, of course, the lesson is the obvious one. This is the last thing you want to do, because as you've just explained, it massively benefits the far right.

• 58:43Alastair Campbell?

  I do think, I hate to say it, but I think it's true, that I think this does help the far right. He's basically, he's been dancing to their tune. He's given very good arguments as to why he felt he had to do it, in terms of, you know, these killings and I think it's 10% of those who should be returned have been returned. I mean, that's a pretty difficult figure to deal with. However, I just think to do this, this was not his election strategy. I don't believe that for one minute. So he has allowed other events and other political forces to dictate a change in strategy, which I think has blown up in his face. It's very hard to see how this helps him, unless it's simply about showing

• 59:27Alastair Campbell?

  that he's tougher than the social democrats and the Greens on immigration. But I think people probably thought that anyway. So now, I, look, I suspect he's still going to win, but, you know, the numbers, he's on about 30%, the AfD are about 20%, Scholz is sort of limping along behind. Scholz is still fighting like he thinks he can win it. He made the point, by the way, Scholz, you said about, you know, coming out of Schengen and breaking European law. Scholz made the point that the only other European leader who has done that is Viktor Orban, who has actually sort of come out and avowedly sort of stood out against European law and European institutions. So it's been an absolute meh. The whole week in reading German media has been extraordinary. And even the title of the Bill Rawley, the influx limitation law.

• 1:00:13Alastair Campbell?

  Is this is the law that he brought forward. So it was basically saying it's about the numbers. And it was honestly for a German Bundestag debate, the moderator had to stand up at one point and say, will people please stop whistling? Because you're not meant to whistle in the German, the German parliament. It was pretty for their, by their standards, we were used to sort of, you know, people tearing lumps off each other, but it was a very bad tempered debate. And then the other thing, there was a guy called Albrecht Weinberg, who was, it'd been quite a big figure in the, in the Auschwitz commemorations. And he's a 99 year old Holocaust survivor who has the order of merit. And he, he returned

• 1:00:55Alastair Campbell?

  it. He gave it back to the German state. Said that he couldn't possibly keep this if this is the Germany that we become, et cetera. And then you had a, some pretty heavy figures within the CDU resigned. So this, this is, Mouse is busy, the, his two people are arguing, oh, well, you know, this shows that we're tough on immigration. This is the message we want. But I don't, I don't really believe that. I don't really believe that they welcome this.

• 1:01:19Rory Stewart?

  No, I think that the message for right wing parties in Europe, or indeed any party of the centre running in Europe, is absolutely, you need to be very, very serious about immigration. It's top of the agenda for so many voters. There's clearly an incredible amount that's wrong. Safe third party agreements, which is what the European Union's been talking about for a long time, are obviously part of that story. It's also probably true, the Netherlands is right, that you need to set targets and work out what kind of population size you want. But the answer is a measured, thoughtful, serious set of small, meaningful changes that reduce the number of people coming to the country.

• 1:02:00Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, you're back to small changes?

• 1:02:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. What you don't want to do is be tempted into Trump land. And Trump land is all about, I'm going to suddenly announce something that is completely illegal, totally impossible to implement, and then just try to force my way through. Because if you do that, you just power the far right.

• 1:02:15Alastair Campbell?

  But just on the polling on this, so 66% of Germans are in favour of permanent controls on the borders. That's a complete reversal of what they've been used to, what we thought they wanted, what they thought they liked. And that includes 56% of supporters of the social democrats. So that's a that's a really big shift. And I think you probably do have to relate it back to to Merkel's, you know, wir schaffen das, we will we'll get it done, when they took in so many from Syria. And what the AFD have done, just as Farage has very effectively politicised things like Sadport in in our country, is weaponise it and and and turn that political issue into something that that benefits them.

• 1:02:54Rory Stewart?

  I just want to finish on this from me and then back to you. But it seems to me the benefit to them is they can go into the election saying, we've just learnt through all this stuff that none of the other mainstream parties are going to support Metz's very extreme position on immigration. The only people who will are us, the AFD. And therefore, if you really want this extreme position on immigration, it's not enough to vote for Metz, you've got to vote for the AFD because we're the only people that are going to make this possible for you.

• 1:03:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. It was interesting that Scholz I saw was at Cechers with Keir Starmer. And I I I suspect there was quite a lot of interesting politics went into that. Because of course, you know, they are essentially in the campaign now. They did one of those very nice films of Scholz wandering around the gardens at Cechers and Scholz putting out nice statements and what have you. He's still he's still in there fighting. I think Metz will win. I'm reading this book about Metz at the moment. It's it's got a very good title. It's called Der Unvermeidbare, which it it sort of means the unavoidable, which is not the most it's not sort of say, you know, the man for the moment, or.

• 1:04:03Rory Stewart?

  Not quite inevitable, more that you you simply just you'd like to avoid him, but you can't.

• 1:04:08Alastair Campbell?

  There's nothing else. He's finally, he's gone through decade after decade. He went out of politics, out of politics, back in. And it looks like he's going to get there. You can't do anything about it.

• 1:04:18Rory Stewart?

  He's the kind of Grant Shapps of German politics, isn't he? Imagine Grant Shapps coming back in, just hanging in there for 30 years and finally getting there. Is that right?

• 1:04:26Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, no, he's not. No, no, no, no. I think he's I think he's more serious than that. There's a very interesting, but the most interesting thing in the book, though, and this this this relates to something that I read this morning, is there's a I hadn't really realised, but there's a real sense of him having a real problem with women. Women in relation to colleagues, we've talked about Merkel, women in relation to voters and his relationship with them. Back in the day, he voted against the idea that rape in marriage could ever be a criminal offence. He says he's changed his mind on that. But the reason I say that is, one, because it's a really interesting part of the book. It's written by somebody called Sarah Severt, but there's an interesting thing in one of the newspapers today where Merz's wife has given an interview. So then they're now at

• 1:05:11Alastair Campbell?

  that stage, Rory, have got to get the wife out to say, he's not what you think he is. He's really soft and gentle and cuddly. And honestly, if you make him Chancellor, you'll absolutely love him. So there we are. February 23rd is the German election. I'm going to Germany shortly before that. So it's going to be very, very interesting. But this this last week felt a bit quite un-German in the way that it just suddenly flared up and became this really difficult. A massive protest, by the way, against Merz. People really taking to the streets to say, you cannot, you cannot get rid of this, this fire war with the hard right. But then the AFD, Alice Vidal, saying, well, what are you going to do? You've got lots of people to vote for us. You're saying they're non-people. Very, very big stuff.

• 1:05:55Rory Stewart?

  Thank you, Alice.

• 1:05:56Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

• 1:05:57Rory Stewart?

  See you soon. Bye bye.

• 1:06:04Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:06:15Speaker 07

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

• 1:06:20Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:06:25Speaker 07

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:06:28Speaker 05

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:06:29Speaker 07

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 and under 15 without parent.

• 1:06:34Speaker 08

  Espolon Tequila. It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolon Tequila. Balanced. Delicious. Perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. Then hold on tight. 100% A Cabe, 0% Eagle. Espolon Tequila. For a real margarita. Ride the rooster.

• 1:06:58Speaker 07

  Espolon Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Compaia America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.