202. How Labour should fight the election, taking on the British press, and Orbán's future far-right axis

Who actually is Michelle Mone? Does Starmer need to be braver in how he respond to attacks from his opponents? How much power does Viktor Orbán have in the EU? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all this and more on today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive our exclusive newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, benefit from discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. 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] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

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• 2:28Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:30Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:32Alastair Campbell?

  And Rory, I think we should go half domestic, half overseas. Domestic, I think it'd be good to focus on standards in public life. I don't know if you managed to catch Michelle Moan yesterday on the BBC.

• 2:45Rory Stewart?

  Mesmerising stuff. I'm actually, I'm talking to you from Utah.

• 2:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 2:50Rory Stewart?

  But even here in Utah, we were able to catch up on that astonishing interview.

• 2:54Alastair Campbell?

  Very good. So talk about that. We'll talk also about the media in the light of the Prince Harry judgment and Piers Morgan's rather bizarre response to it. And then I think second half, we should look at Mr Orban. And not far away from Mr Orban, also look at President Vukic, because we've just had the elections in Serbia. And of course, you know, in both those places, there is, you know, it's close to what's happening in Ukraine as well. So how does that sound?

• 3:21Rory Stewart?

  Sounds absolutely brilliant. And actually, I think you shared with me a lovely article from the FT on Orban, which, which had a winning line from Trump, where he said, there's a man, Viktor Orban, out there, one of the strongest leaders in the world, the leader of Turkey, which, which I think reveals a great deal, that somehow in Trump's mind, Turkey, Hungary, all come together in the new strong man world that he's hoping is going to come to existence.

• 3:45Alastair Campbell?

  They're all the same. So listen, I'm glad you got to see the Michelle Moan interview. Before she'd even got to the bit where she admitted that she was a liar, Prince Andrew was already trending on Twitter.

• 3:59Rory Stewart?

  Can I, can I just quickly do a little explainer on Michelle Moan? So Michelle Moan is an absolutely extraordinary figure. I mean, she's somebody, again, who came from an incredibly hard background. She grew up east side of Glasgow. She lost a brother to spina bifida at the age of eight. Her father lost his legs to cancer at 15. She left school with no GCSEs. She had a child as a teenager. But unlike the wonderful interview that we did on leading.

• 4:30Alastair Campbell?

  That was with Angela Rayner.

• 4:31Rory Stewart?

  With Angela Rayner. The story had a sort of slightly Less happy ending. So in some ways, both of them came from very, very tough backgrounds. But in Michelle Moynihan's case, what she then did with her life is to essentially build a business reputation partly out of celebrity TV shows. So she went on a version of I'm a Celebrity. She launched an underwear line and she was an absolute brilliant publicist because she would deliberately hire as her models, people who were going to be in the press anyway. And then she could use the photographs of them in her underwear, promote them. And her biggest coup on this was that she managed to sack Rod Stewart's partner Penny Lancaster,

• 5:14Rory Stewart?

  who was her underwear model, and replace her with Rod Stewart's ex-wife Rachel Hunter. That's guaranteeing that every newspaper in Britain at least carried pictures of them in her underwear. She then went on to launch weight loss pills. She claims it had clinical trials, but there were no clinical trials. She later claimed she'd had responses from 60 people, but she lost those responses. So couldn't share them with anyone. She then launched her own cryptocurrency. She tried to build a development in Dubai funded by Bitcoin. Her cryptocurrency collapsed. And on the basis of this, David Cameron chose to put her into the House of Lords in 2015.

• 5:53Alastair Campbell?

  Thereby further endearing David Cameron to you as a great statesman.

• 5:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And so you might have thought on the basis of that track record, you might be a little bit worried about this particular businesswoman. But over to you then on the next stage, the saga.

• 6:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think it is, it's pretty remarkable that I haven't seen David Cameron at any point brought into this story or asked about why he put her in the House of Lords. I mean, as you said, in relation to Angelina, everybody loves a story where somebody comes from a poor background and makes something of themselves. But at the same time, that doesn't give you a free pass to bypass all the values of decent life. And what I found utterly mesmerizing about the interview.

• 6:39Alastair Campbell?

  Is that both Michelle Moan and her, I've been struggling to find the right adjective, her husband Doug Barrowman, but I'll have to keep working away on that one. But the two of them utterly shameless, utterly shameless. Him sort of sitting there saying, well, I'm an entrepreneur and, you know, I saw the opportunity. Her pretending she was doing out of some sort of commitment to public service. And then the very casual, you know, well, I phoned Michael Gove and they were, they were getting all peers and baronesses to sort of, you know, see what connections they had.

• 7:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, just quickly on that one, just, just for people who didn't watch it. It's, it's one of the oddest things she says right at the very beginning of the interview. She says, yes, there was a call to arms to lords, baronesses, senior civil servants and MPs to help out. It's a completely extraordinary. She just sort of inserts the word baronesses as though somehow her title and this thing were all somehow connected in her brain.

• 7:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And, and of course, what that led to was them having this business, MedPro PP, whatever it was called. And what Laura Koonsberg did quite cleverly through that, throughout the interview, she wasn't aggressive. She wasn't unpleasant. She was asking them pretty straightforward questions and allowing them to tell the story. But in so doing, they dug themselves into so many holes. And the thing about this sort of basic moral decency and values, it's like she thought that the fact she could say, I only lied to the press, as somehow that is not the same as lying to somebody else. Because if you're lying to the press about the misuse of public money, you're lying to the public

• 8:13Alastair Campbell?

  about money that you've taken from them. And yet, right at the end, Laura Koonsberg's one sort of really softball question actually elicited one of the most interesting responses. She said at the end, what are your hopes for 2024? Which, you know, if I'd have been sitting there, I'd probably say, well, I hope I can get through this and I, I hope it doesn't go to a criminal case and I hope that I can start to rebuild my reputation, which I accept as taking a battering. Instead of which she just said, I don't see what the case against me is.

• 8:40Rory Stewart?

  You can see Laura Cusack, he's going, what? And again, sort of quick, quick, quick explainer on the case. So the government was desperate for personal protection equipment after COVID. There was a real shortage of things such as masks and gowns. And as Britain scrambled to try to get this stuff, because we didn't manufacture it in Britain, there was a huge push for any companies who could get it in. And in the case of Michelle Moen, she manufactured garments in China and Asia. Or the company did. Yeah. Her underwear company manufactures in China and Asia. So she was saying because she manufactured bras, etc. Oh, I see. Okay. She knew that she could get the stuff made. And then, having sent text to Michael Gove,

• 9:23Rory Stewart?

  the company set up. But the first thing that's very striking about the company is the company isn't set up in her name or her husband's name. Instead, it's set up in the name of somebody called Anthony Page, who initially she claims that she has next to no contact with, but later turns out that he's very closely connected to them. He's the secretary to one of their companies MGM Media. He basically runs her husband's family office. They then proceed to get £80 million for 210 million face masks, which they deliver and which work. I mean, the face masks are valid. And then they delivered their £122 million contract on

• 10:03Rory Stewart?

  gowns, which were not used. And the government has rejected a substandard and is suing, the government is suing them for £122 million. It's an extraordinary thing to be doing. Now, PPE MedPro maintain the gowns have been fit for purpose, but that is absolutely not what the government believes. And it then transpires not only that having told The Guardian that she's not connected in any way to this man, that she's personally recommended the company to Lord Agnew, she's been involved in the size of the garments, she's been lobbying for another company that she's involved in. And finally, The Guardian, through an extraordinary, and I'm sure it's not only The Guardian, so I apologize to the other journalists who were involved, and we can put in the report, the other people who did some extraordinary

• 10:45Rory Stewart?

  work on this, discovered an Isle of Man trust has received £29 million from this company, PPE MedPro, through a whole series of complicated offshore routes. So I think there are two big questions. One is The delivery of stuff that simply didn't work. But secondly, if she thought she was doing no wrong, and what this interviewer, as you say, keeps saying is, there we were, sitting at home during lockdown like everyone else, thinking, this is ridiculous, what can we do for Britain? They don't have any masks, we know how to do this. Get me on the phone, I'll deliver it as public duty. Why then set it up in the name of someone else who they claim to have no connection to, and then set up a series, roundabout routes to get £27 million into their own trust?

• 11:27Alastair Campbell?

  I also, when her husband sort of casually dropped in those wonderful three words, Isle of Man, it's never a good look when you basically say, well, we're running this all through the Isle of Man, and I've got nothing against the Isle of Man, I've got nothing against Manx people. However, I think that suggests that possibly they might just have a tad reluctance in terms of sort of, you know, shelling out loads of tax.

• 11:50Rory Stewart?

  And again here, I'm going to get in trouble, but explain this for overseas listeners. The Isle of Man is one of the associated parts of the United Kingdom. There are other examples of these things, Jersey, Guernsey and others, which have a very, very complicated, long historical relationship with the United Kingdom and that in some senses are part of the United Kingdom and other senses aren't. And anyway, have an independent legal systems which have traditionally allowed them to benefit as good tax vehicles for people to place their money in.

• 12:15Alastair Campbell?

  Very well put. But I think, I guess the thing that links this to a lot of the stuff that we've seen in politics, not just in the UK, but in different parts of the world, is this sense of impunity, that people feel that if they're at a certain level in our social and political and economic structures, that the rules don't really apply to them.

• 12:34Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I think it's particularly the wealthy. I'm not even sure that it's a question of her thinking she's on a ridic-, I think it's about capitalism gone mad. I think this is the madness of modern wealth. I think they get to the stage of, I almost think that they can't even really see that they're doing anything wrong. I mean, that's what's so chilling about it, that they sort of somehow simultaneously think they're saving the world, we sorted out the problem, we brought in the face masks, and by the way, we made £27 million through an offshore tax-efficient trust vehicle at the expense of the British Pax pair.

• 13:06Alastair Campbell?

  But, and also the point on the trust, the other reason she got into real difficulty, both yesterday and I think will do as this situation unfolds in the courts and so forth, or in the legal process. Is that she also denied that she she would be a beneficiary from the trust. And she kept saying, she sat there with the husband, saying, it's not my money, it's his not money. And then it's not my yacht, it's his yacht, even though the yacht is named Lady M. And one of her many sort of glamorous self promoting photos is of her standing there on Lady M. And the reason why I was particularly sort of disgusted and appalled by the whole thing is, as you know, I'm editor-at-large at the New European.

• 13:49Alastair Campbell?

  And a few weeks ago, she, her lawyers issued a writ against me, James Ball and the editor of New European. Because we had written this stuff about her in the paper and essentially saying to Rishi Sunak, never mind stop the boats, it's about time you stopped this particular boat, the Lady M. And in came this letter with threats and demands that the paper be pulped and demands for an apology for things which have turned out yesterday live on, or recorded on television to be true. So Rory, just imagining a goal hanger lawyer on my shoulder, I might point out, Michelle Moan and Doug Barrowman are subject to a long running national crime agency investigation facing allegations of fraud and bribery, which they deny.

• 14:31Rory Stewart?

  Now, is this, is this a good moment to transition to something which is connected to that? So you're getting legal threats, investigative journalism is being done. In a way, this story is a story about good investigative journalism. And this is at the heart of one of the other issues you wanted to talk about today, which is the Lefferson Report. And the Lefferson Report, people remember, came out of these horrible phone hacking scandals where it turned out that various newspapers were employing private investigators to break into the telephones. Or in other words, blag private information out of people to run endless tabloid stories. And it's come to the front recently because Prince Harry has been in the court, first royal to appear in the court for over a century in a civil court against the Mirror Group.

• 15:14Rory Stewart?

  And one of the key things here has been about getting the balance right between the freedom of journalists to do sort of good Panama paper style investigations or this great investigation to trust on the one hand. And their impunity to do truly destructive, horrible, damaging, personal attacks with no form of regulation on the other. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what's happening here? Because this is something you understand deeply, and you testified to the High Court. Am I right about?

• 15:41Alastair Campbell?

  I did. I was a witness in Harry's case against The Mirror. I was a bit confused as to why they called me, but I, having read the judgment, and honestly, it's very, very long, the judgment, but it's absolutely the most extraordinary devastating critique of media culture and standards. But the reason I think they wanted me to testify was because in a lot of the invoices that were found for these private investigators that were being paid by The Mirror, there was one where he was being paid because he'd provided details of my bank account and our mortgage. I think that's why I was there, was simply to testify.

• 16:22Rory Stewart?

  And it was complicated, isn't it? Because on the one hand, you were a victim. On the other hand, you used to work for The Mirror, right?

• 16:27Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and also, I have got a case myself against The Mirror. I've had a case again in the past against News International, which I won, and I've got a case now against The Mirror. I don't particularly want to damage The Mirror, and my big worry out of this, there are so many people now who are going to have a case against The Mirror. If you saw the full list of people who were targeted, it's very, very long. And I think the reason that my case was significant within the court is that it didn't lead to any stories being published. And in a way, what I think the judge was indicating is that that kind of doesn't matter. It was the fact that the law was broken to get the information. And so with Prince Harry, I think it was roughly half of the stories,

• 17:10Alastair Campbell?

  the judge concluded that they came through illegal means. Harry was awarded £146,000 in damages. The papers between them are already into over a billion in terms of legal costs and settlements.

• 17:23Rory Stewart?

  And this, at the moment, is sort of Murdoch Inc. and The Mirror Group. It's the two main ones, right?

• 17:28Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. But this is really interesting, I think. Harry's next target is the Mail.

• 17:35Alastair Campbell?

  And just as Piers Morgan, there there appeared to me to be quite a conflict between three things, his evidence to Levison, which was under oath, what has emerged in the court case and the judgment in particular, and also Piers's rather unhinged response when in true Donald Trump style, he was lashing out against against the courts, against me, against anybody. And so so so next, Harry goes to the to the Mail, and and and his case with the Mail has got other people involved, I think Elton John is one of them. And so this is not going to go away. And the thing that I rather admire about about Prince Harry, and I don't know whether you know what his what his father and those close to him may

• 18:17Alastair Campbell?

  think of this strategy, but I Harry could easily have settled for a lot of money. But he he decided, and it's clear from him and his legal team, he is going to get make sure these people get justice in some way.

• 18:31Rory Stewart?

  And to take us back to the sort of beginnings of this. So this stuff was going on, as far as we know, definitely was going on in the 90s. And there was people were unlawfully tracked, they were blacked, they were hacked, they were spied on. These are all sort of different technical terms, aren't they?

• 18:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Rory Stewart?

  Can you give us examples of some of the sort of things that journalists were doing? And they were doing it generally with a cutoff, weren't they? There was usually a private investigator doing it on their behalf. Is that right?

• 18:55Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, a lot of it was done through private investigators. So and and that gave them this sort of deniability. So when Piers Morgan says that, you know, I didn't hack a phone, I didn't ask anybody to hack a phone, I noticed he wasn't speaking specifically to the judgment. The judgment was that he knew this was going on.

• 19:13Rory Stewart?

  And and the way they got in was often people hadn't changed the passcode on their voicemails. So they

• 19:18Alastair Campbell?

  They basically would guess that people were using default PIN codes for their own voicemails. And then and blagging is something slightly differently. Blagging and and and my case was, I think, a mixture of blagging and hacking. The getting of my mortgage details and this is this was at a time when, if you remember, Peter Mandelson got into difficulty because of his mortgage details. He was clearly a victim of this stuff as well. And so I think what happened was that the Mirror, having done this story on Peter Mandelson's mortgage.

• 19:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and let me just quickly give a reminder on Peter Mandelson. So Peter Mandelson, turned out, had got a loan from Geoffrey Robinson, who was a fellow Labour MP and was going to go on to be, you know, a fellow minister. And this had not been, it seemed, properly declared or explained either to the leader's office or to Parliament. And he had then resigned. And then 10 months later, he came back again. So the idea was that he'd resigned and he'd paid his penalty, he'd come back. I guess it was the beginning of trying to clarify what people should declare and what they shouldn't. I've become aware since from gossip, it seems that quite a lot of MPs in the 90s were taking mortgages, which they weren't declaring

• 20:28Rory Stewart?

  from other wealthier MPs, and that that was happening on the Conservative side as well as the Labour side.

• 20:34Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think the issue with Peter was was declaring it to Parliament. It was the fact that when he became President of the Board of Trade, there was an ongoing investigation into Geoffrey Robinson's business affairs. And it was felt that he should have declared that that relationship.

• 20:49Rory Stewart?

  That's right. But I also think today, in the modern rules, the Parliamentary Commission would expect you to declare if somebody's lending you £400,000. I mean, that's why I was horrified that Boris Johnson seemed to be able to get away with some undeclared guarantee of £800,000 without declaring it. I mean, I don't think loans should be treated differently to cash gifts in terms of debt question. Anyway, enough of that. The point the point was, they were then hoping presumably that you were also doing something similar. So they were trying to get into your bank account.

• 21:15Alastair Campbell?

  So they so they say, and I think they did that in the main through blagging. In other words, they were phoning up or finding ways of getting into our building society, our banks and talking to people to get all the details. And that would be through straightforward conundrum.

• 21:31Rory Stewart?

  And with that one, Alison, I mean, in your case, you were innocent and that activity is legal. But presumably, somebody might say that there's more public interest in trying to work out whether the Downing Street Director of Communications is corrupt than there is in finding out whether Prince Harry is having a row with his girlfriend.

• 21:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think had they discovered that there was something untoward about my financial arrangements, then I think they could probably have mounted a public interest defence. But I think what was interesting about the judgement was he seemed to accept that this sort of industrial use of illegal activity was was wrong. And what's the other thing, of course, is that I thought it was absolutely fascinating. If you think how how keen most of our newspapers normally are to put Prince Harry and Meghan on the front pages, not one single tabloid put the Harry mirror story on the front. Most of the broadsheets covered it well inside

• 22:30Alastair Campbell?

  the paper, buried away. The Mail, for example, I noticed, they simply quoted Piers Morgan's statement in full. It just said, Piers Morgan hit back, quoted the statement in full without any contextualisation whatsoever. And of course, then, as I said to you, they're next in line. And I think for most people who've been the victim of this stuff, the Mail is the paper that they feel is probably the most egregious. Whether they have broken the law to the extent that so far it's been revealed, the Mirror Group and News International have, I don't know. But I think people will be very, very, very interested by what emerges in the in the case of Harry against the Mail.

• 23:08Rory Stewart?

  And I think the other thing that's, as an outsider, that's so shocking about this, is that this activity apparently didn't stop when the Information Commissioner exposed it in 2003. They kept doing it. Didn't stop when a News of World journalist was arrested in 2006. Didn't stop when the cover up payments were made in 2009. And apparently seems to continue even beyond the Leveson report in 2011.

• 23:30Alastair Campbell?

  Absolutely. Even during Leveson, I'd be amazed if some of them, for example, weren't targeting the lawyers in that case.

• 23:39Rory Stewart?

  Which then brings us to Leveson. So Brian Leveson is somebody that I knew and worked with quite closely when I was Justice Secretary. Huge admirer of his, I mean, one of the the brightest, most thoughtful senior judges. I mean, he was, I remember going to see him in his, I suppose, in the High Court in his sort of grand judicial chambers, surrounded by books. He gave me a very earnest book on sentencing policy. So I was always full of admiration for him. But his stuff was not fully implemented. And there are two bits to it. There was the section two of the Levenson Report, which was meant to be going forensically into the detail of what the newspapers were doing.

• 24:13Alastair Campbell?

  And their corrupt relations with the police.

• 24:15Rory Stewart?

  And their corrupt relations with the police, which was dropped by that great figure, Matt Hancock.

• 24:20Alastair Campbell?

  On behalf of your great hero, Theresa May, let it be said.

• 24:23Rory Stewart?

  On behalf of Theresa May, that is true. And Theresa May's government, that is true. So my bad too, because I was part of that government. And then there's been something called section forty, which has been floating around. So briefly, Alistair, I've just praised Sir Brian Levenson, but tell us a little bit about what the Levenson Inquiry was and how it related to this hacking thing, in case people are confused.

• 24:42Alastair Campbell?

  The stories about phone hacking have been going on for years, and both the media and the government kept insisting that, you know, it was, it was not extensive, it was the occasional rogue reporter, et cetera. The tipping point was when it was emerged that Millie Dowler, who was a murder victim, that they'd hacked her phone.

• 25:01Rory Stewart?

  And Alistair, sort of remind us what it was that in the end made the Millie Dowler case so shocking?

• 25:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it was the fact that, put it at its most blunt, they were hacking the phone of a dead person. And as a result of some of the things that emerged from that, her parents actually thought she might still be alive. So the inquiry was into the ethics of the press. David Cameron said that as long as they weren't absolutely crazy, that they would implement the proposals. I gave evidence twice, both as a journalist and as a government employee. I thought the report was actually very fair, very measured, very reasonable. It set out plans for a form of regulation, which was the idea that it was some great threat to the freedom of the press, utter nonsense. But of course, the press decided to attack it for all that they could.

• 25:50Rory Stewart?

  And reject it astonishingly across the board. I mean, you know, people like The Guardian, for example, still steadfastly reject articles. Article forty, which is, Article forty was supposed to say that if you joined the regulator.

• 26:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Rory Stewart?

  The Leveson recommended regulator, then you would be protected from certain kinds of legal case. So if, I don't know, wealthy oligarch brought a vicious libel case against you, you would be protected if you belonged to this independent regulator. If you didn't belong to the independent regulator, you wouldn't be protected. And potentially you might have to pay the costs even if it turned out that you had won.

• 26:25Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. Section forty is where the current political issue rests because Labour have been pretty clear that they've supported this proposal. And also have been pretty clear that IPO, which is the successor to the Press Complaints Commission, which is completely a body of the media, by the media, fewer than one percent of cases get upheld. It takes six months to hear a complaint. It's an absolutely useless body, which is exactly what the press want. And Labour's always been clear that that's not good enough. But in recent days, they've indicated that the government who have pledged to repeal section forty, that Labour are not going to undo that.

• 27:09Alastair Campbell?

  As it happens, I think it's a very, very badly drafted piece of legislation. But the point is, I will be very angry if Labour simply go along with the Tories in dropping it as opposed to coming up with something that does incentivize newspapers to join up to a genuinely independent regulator. And of course, what they'll do is they will say it's a threat to the freedom of the press, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, utter nonsense. This thing about cost, it's not about oligarchs. It's about the fact that for most people who suddenly get caught up in media intrusion, so-called, quote, ordinary people, the costs can be very, very, very high. So the thinking behind section forty.

• 27:52Alastair Campbell?

  Was that they wouldn't necessarily have to put themselves at risk.

• 27:56Rory Stewart?

  So if I was traduced by the media, I could take a case without running the risk that I would bankrupt my family if I lost.

• 28:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, correct, correct. But if they'd signed up to the independent regulator, the papers signed up to the independent regulator, they wouldn't be bankrupt either.

• 28:10Rory Stewart?

  Presumably because the independent regulator would say, okay, we regulate this newspaper, we think it's fair enough, we'll provide some kind of insurance for both sides.

• 28:17Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, and there'll be some sort of redress. And the reason I worry about this from Labour's perspective, if you, you know, you and I did an event at the Albert Hall last week. And if you remember, one of the, I think, most positively received parts of the stuff that I was saying was when I ran out my idea for how Keir Starmer could campaign about the restoration of standards in public life. And I think, and I really passionately believe that if Labour were to say the Tories have damaged the body politic and we have the responsibility to repair it. I think there'd be massive public support for them to say they're doing and do it.

• 28:56Rory Stewart?

  Be a wonderful campaign, wouldn't it? And, and you're right, if you could connect, connect this to it.

• 29:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, and also, I'm not saying to Labour, make the press a big part of the campaign. But I am saying if they think that by going soft on the press now, by sort of quietly dropping this Leveson stuff. They somehow think that if Labour get into government, the press is going to be, go easy on them, forget it. On the contrary, what they will think is, ah. We've got them where we want them, we can do what the hell we want. And as soon as Labour's in power, they will turn. And what's more, they will turn, and unless Labour has something in a manifesto that says Leveson's not been fully implemented, there have still been excesses, there's still been criminality. We have to find ways of addressing that, then the press will think they've won game, set and match.

• 29:43Rory Stewart?

  And this all came to, to a height, didn't it? Because you, we then had a very strange thing that really troubled people, which is that the Labour Shadow Minister, Stephanie Peacock, made a series of statements that appeared to reverse the Labour position in, in Parliament in the committee stage, the media bill.

• 30:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 30:01Rory Stewart?

  And she wasn't prepared to support a very modest amendment from the SNP to find an effective alternative incentive to section forty, which is this thing which we've just been, been talking about.

• 30:10Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. And I understand why sometimes you don't necessarily want to back an amendment that's put forward by another party and the SNP, you know, we've seen that in lots of cases. But there has to be a replacement of this. I don't think in the end, anybody's going to die in a ditch for section forty itself, because it's not very well drafted and so forth. But in terms of the principles at the heart of it, there has to be something that replaces it.

• 30:35Rory Stewart?

  And which the SNP, to be fair to them, you know, this is the first and only time I've ever praised the SNP on this, but I think their amendment was about finding an effective alternative to section forty.

• 30:45Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. And I think George Eustace, who's a, you know, formerly David Cameron's press secretary, went on to be a cabinet minister, I think he's thinking, he's trying to do something as well. But, you know, I worry, this is Labour, they sort of, you know, they've got this, let's shrink the target, okay? So the barnacles, get the barnacles off the boat, don't get attacked, which is fine, I understand that.

• 31:06Rory Stewart?

  Explain your metaphor, shrink the target, get the barnacles off the boat. What does that mean in practice? Sorry?

• 31:11Alastair Campbell?

  Well, shrinking the target means give your opponents less to attack you over. Opponents in this case being many of the newspapers.

• 31:18Rory Stewart?

  And in this case, don't put out too many policies, because if you've got too many policies in public, there's too many bits they can attack.

• 31:23Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Now, where I get that on one level, however, I sometimes feel that the people running Labour's campaign, I know you think it's me, but this is proof that it's not. But the people running Labour's campaign, I think sometimes they think they're doing a lot of the things that we did, because we had a strategy to try and neutralise the press, not let Murdoch, you know, run riot, not let any of the papers kind of destroy us. But we also had, alongside that, major, major, major campaigns, which were being attacked by the press all the time. Minimum wage, New Deal, section twenty eight and gay rights, Scottish Parliament, these were being attacked. And what's more, we were welcoming the attacks, because that allowed us to ventilate the difference between us

• 32:06Alastair Campbell?

  and the Tories. What I worry about a strategy where you're saying, let's shrink the target, give them less to attack us on, is that essentially, that's what's leading to this problem of people saying, I don't really know what Labour stand for. And so, I'm not saying, by the way, put a post-Leverson media strategy at the centrepiece of their campaign, far from it. I am saying that I think one of Keir Starmer's strengths is that he's honest, he's serious, he's Mr. Rule of Law. And that's why I think a campaign on standards would really, really suit him.

• 32:36Rory Stewart?

  I think it's really interesting that because you're absolutely right by attacking you over the Scottish Parliament, by attacking you over gay rights, by attacking you over the minimum wage, it was actually drawing people's attention to stuff that you were proud of. And it is true that we continue to feel that Keir Starmer is overwhelmingly likely to be the next Prime Minister. But just to remind people that on the net favorability rating, Keir Starmer's net favorability is falling and he's at minus 22%. Now, that's much better than Rishi Sunak, who's at minus 49%. But to put that in context, Blair at this stage was plus 19% and even Cameron before 2010 was at plus 17%. So there is something for

• 33:17Rory Stewart?

  Labour to think about. And if you're worrying, as I guess many Labour supporters are, that they're being too complacent, I'm really attracted by your idea that they should be putting out things and having a fight about some things.

• 33:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. And if you're this far ahead in the polls, maybe you think you can sort of just, you know, it's going to happen anyway. But some of the things we talked about in the podcast in recent weeks, four out of 10, 18 to 24 year olds not registered to vote, the fact that the newspapers are going to, you know, kick hell out of Labour in the run up to the campaign. And this, you know, we had a great example at the weekend of something which I think not Keir Starmer, I'm not saying he should do this, but somebody from Labour should have been out on the front foot attacking the Tories and The Telegraph at the weekend. They ran a story, front page story, saying that the Tories have prepared a dossier on Keir Starmer about the cases that he did as a lawyer, where he defended terrorists and defended gangsters and he defended this, that and the other. Now, they

• 34:10Alastair Campbell?

  did the same with Cherie Blair. There's a thing called the cab rank principle, where lawyers have to take on cases, right? So what they're going to try to do is basically a smear. They're going to try and say that because he once defended a terrorist in this case or that case. Now, and what's more, The Telegraph, why did they give it to The Telegraph? Because they knew they'd get an easy hit with it. Instead of The Telegraph saying, as they should have done, this is utterly absurd and evidence of how desperate the Tories are, they put it on the front page and they've got a debate going about it. Somebody from Labour should have been out there, I think, saying this is utterly desperate. It actually further undermines the rule of law. And it shows that the Conservative Party are absolutely done, spent force, et cetera. Instead of which, I feel there's been, you know, oh God, this probably shows why we have to be a bit nicer to The Telegraph.

• 34:55Alastair Campbell?

  Now, I've got nothing against Keir Starmer writing The Telegraph, nothing against Wes Streeting writing The Telegraph. And, uh, uh, fine, do all that. But do not for one minute think that if you go easy on these papers now, in the post-Leverson environment, that somehow they're going to be your best mates, because they're not.

• 35:13Rory Stewart?

  Alistair, thank you. Great first half. I think time for a break.

• 35:16Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you.

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• 37:08Rory Stewart?

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

• 37:11Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. So Viktor Orban.

• 37:14Rory Stewart?

  Viktor Orban. Well, we began with this extraordinary quote from Donald Trump, where he referred to him as one of the strongest leaders in the world, the leader of Turkey. But it is part of a much bigger general picture, which is that for Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary, it's absolutely red that what he's doing is waiting for a world in which Trump wins in the United States, in which Putin triumphs in Ukraine, and in which his general vision that he's had for decades now, that democracy is failing and that strong men are going to lead the world, will triumph. And of course, there's lots of things that give him confidence in this analysis, because what we can actually see,

• 37:58Rory Stewart?

  if you look at the world from the perspective of Viktor Orban, and just as a, if anybody wants a deeper understanding of Viktor Orban, you cannot do better than read the extraordinary book by Anne Applebaum, that really gets into the depths of the way in which he has undermined the media, the political parties, the judiciary in Hungary, and created a sort of one-party state in the middle of the European Union. But his story would be that the old liberal world order of the 90s has crumbled, and that all the evidence really since 2014 is that we're now entering a much more anti-democratic age, an age of strong men.

• 38:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you said it within that, that he's always had this same worldview, but actually, if you think of his first term as Prime Minister, so people regularly, you regularly hear on the media, Orban, who's been Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010, but he was actually Prime Minister from 1998 to 2002 as well. And he then had eight years in opposition. And this is a guy who became leader of his party, Fidesz, aged 30. Prime Minister of the first time aged thirty five. And the big thing that he did in his first term was to take Hungary into NATO. So he's not always been this kind of Putin-esque figure.

• 39:11Rory Stewart?

  No, I mean, even even weirder, I think, you know, one of the big things he does is he's got a massive conspiracy theory about George Soros. But I believe that in his younger life, he actually was the beneficiary of a scholarship funded by Soros.

• 39:24Alastair Campbell?

  He was. He got a scholarship to Pembroke College, Oxford. He did law in a university in Hungary. Then George Soros funded him to go to, or the foundation funded him to go to Pembroke to do political science. And in one of the five election campaigns that he's won, George Soros was the was the figure that he had all over the billboards. And it was it was basically sort of playing into antisemitic tropes. He hasn't got a campaign on at the moment. He hasn't got an election. But here's a question for you, Rory. If you went to Hungary today, which political figure would you see on billboards around Hungary put there by Viktor Orban as an enemy?

• 40:01Rory Stewart?

  Gosh, I don't know. What's the answer?

• 40:03Alastair Campbell?

  The answer is Ursula von der Leyen.

• 40:05Rory Stewart?

  Ah.

• 40:06Alastair Campbell?

  And here's another thing for you. When she comes up for will the will the European Union, will the council agree to her getting another term? Who should be sitting in the chair of the rotating presidency but Hungary, Viktor Orban? And this is a country of ten million people. And the reason why we're talking about him today is because in recent days, he first of all surprised some people because he left the room when the other leaders were discussing possible accession to the European Union for Ukraine.

• 40:40Rory Stewart?

  Which he was strongly opposed. And he had an opportunity to veto. And there was a strong conversation about whether what was going to happen is he was going to try to get concessions on the EU budget in exchange for him not vetoing. Is that right? Not vetoing the accession of Ukraine to the EU.

• 40:55Alastair Campbell?

  Instead of which, what happened was that he had breakfast with Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany and President Macron of France. We don't have much detail about what happened. But as a result.

• 41:08Alastair Campbell?

  Orban left the room when the decision was taken. He nonetheless since then has pointed out there will be seventy situations, seventy moments in the process towards accession when any one of the twenty seven countries will be able to veto. So what happened then was in Kiev and around Ukraine, people were celebrating. The European Union says we can start the process, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Then the next day, he did use a veto, and this was to stop financial support for Ukraine by the Europeans in January. Now, I think it will still happen, they'll find a way around that. But it does underline just how much he operates within the European Union,

• 41:51Alastair Campbell?

  almost like a lone figure, because of course he's lost his mates from Poland, Donald Tusk having taken over there. But my God, he knows how to play the power game. And if you go through his elections, so you mentioned Anne Applebaum's book about how he undermines the media, how he's undermined the judiciary, and he completely changed the electoral system. So in his second round, he ended up with almost more than two thirds of the seats in parliament, having got forty four percent of the vote by changing the system. And that means you could change the constitution. And he's been stopped at some points. He's also, some people think he's a bit of a kleptocrat, that there's a sort of quite a big oligarchical thing going on, very anti-LGBT.

• 42:35Alastair Campbell?

  And he poses, we talked to him, if you remember, when we interviewed Tom Holland, that's coming out on Christmas Day. And we were talking about Christianity and politics. He projects his politics very much as the defence of Christianity against other forces.

• 42:48Rory Stewart?

  Yes, he sometimes calls himself the ideological centre of the international conservative movement, which means that a lot of the things that we've been talking about, which are the sort of family of beliefs or views, which the right is propagating across Europe, of which, of course, the biggest and most central is immigration. Which we must talk about in the UK context as well. But he's also links this to LGBTQ issues. So he's tried to drive through some very restrictive laws on LGBTQ and accuse the European Union for basically being a front for the promotion of LGBTQ rights. Also connected with this, of course, is concerns about measures on climate change.

• 43:32Rory Stewart?

  Others, they tend to be climate skeptics. And they also increasingly are gesturing that they are not sympathetic towards continuing to fund Ukraine against Russia.

• 43:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:41Rory Stewart?

  But at the heart of this is very old fashioned 19th century nationalism. So a couple of quotes from Orban. He says, this is 2018, "We must state that we do not want to be diverse. We do not want to be mixed. We do not want our own colour traditions and national culture to be mixed with those of others. We do not want this. We do not want that at all. We do not want to be a diverse country." And then he said, "We Hungarians are not a mixed race and we do not want to become a mixed race."

• 44:13Alastair Campbell?

  And he's quite fond of promoting the so-called great replacement theory.

• 44:17Rory Stewart?

  Just tell us what the great replacement theory is.

• 44:19Alastair Campbell?

  Well, essentially that, you know, people like him, white Christians, are going to be replaced by people of colour in terms of power and wealth and all the rest of it.

• 44:29Rory Stewart?

  Because of immigration.

• 44:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:31Rory Stewart?

  And birth rates.

• 44:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I'm trying to think if there was anything like him.

• 44:34Rory Stewart?

  Well, the person I think that we have been talking about, I think that we should keep an eye on, who's watching this very carefully, is Vucic in Serbia. And Vucic, of course, is somebody that you know because you were dealing with Vucic back in 1999. Just give us a quick reminder of Vucic and your connection with him before we get on to why Vucic is echoing Orban.

• 44:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I wasn't dealing with him other than the fact that we were opposite numbers. He was in charge of Milosevic's media machine and I was helping NATO run theirs during the... The Kosovo War. And I've met him subsequently. I met him in through the work that I do in the Balkans. And this election, so we're speaking on Monday, the election in Serbia was yesterday. They've had five general elections since 2012. They've had three in the last three years. And essentially, he calls elections because he's also got great control of the media, because he's also become very, very powerful over all the institutions of the state. He calls elections because he can use them to kind of, you know, drive his

• 45:36Alastair Campbell?

  message. And he's ended up so far, look, he's got forty six point six percent of the votes. And similar to to Orban, that could give him an absolute majority, which now he'll probably do some sort of deal with some of the smaller parties. But, you know, we took the last time, I think we talked about Serbia was after they'd had those terrible killings. And it led to the formation of a new alliance called Serbia Against Violence on the centre left. They've ended up with just twenty three percent. They're going to get sixty three seats. Where he might not get away with things as much as he wants is in that they've also got local elections in Belgrade, municipal elections. And it looks like that his party, the Serbian Progressive Party is winning there, but not by nearly as much. And by the way, it was really interesting about this election, Roy, he wasn't even

• 46:20Alastair Campbell?

  a candidate. This was not a presidential election. This was a general election, which he was the main figure.

• 46:27Rory Stewart?

  So President Vucic, really worth looking at, because he is absolutely increasingly sympathetic towards the sort of Orban vision of the future of the world. There's a link to an interview that he gave. If you get a chance to watch it, he's sitting there in an amazing, what I can only describe as a lilac tweed jacket, sitting there, sounding very, very calm and patient. But all the way through, even if you, obviously, most of our listeners don't speak Serbian, and my Serbian is very rusty, but he keeps saying, Čekati, Čekati, wait, wait. And what he's saying is that we need to learn, or the Serbs need to learn, from what happened in Nogorno Karabakh. He's learned from Azerbaijan. He

• 47:07Rory Stewart?

  said Aliyev, president, and his son in Azerbaijan, waited for twenty seven years for the special geopolitical crisis that allowed them to take back Nogorno Karabakh. So listeners will remember, a few months ago, this thing which, in the nineteen nineties, was resolved with a small Armenian settlement in the centre of Azerbaijan territory. Essentially, there was an invasion beginning this year, and neither the US, or Russia, nor the United Nations, or anybody. Did anything to prevent officially Azerbaijan overrunning it and kicking out the Armenian population. And this is relevant for him because he is thinking particularly about how northern Kosovo, the Serbian bit of northern Kosovo, is going to come back

• 47:47Rory Stewart?

  to Serbia and how Republika Srpska, Republika Srpska is the Serbian part of Bosnia Herzegovina. So listeners will remember that during the conflicts in the mid 1990s, within Bosnia in particular, Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks, the Bosniaks being the Muslim population, were fighting. That war came to an end, 94, 95, in a settlement in which the Serbs were left with a chunk of the territory called Republika Srpska, where about 80% of the population are Serbs. And that was in some ways, one of the great triumphs, the 1990s. I mean, it was the US and Britain and the European Union, ending a war where 37,000 people had been killed in Sarajevo. The war criminals were arrested, the checkpoints

• 48:32Rory Stewart?

  were removed, the crime rate was lower than Sweden. And now, you know, decades later, we have Vucic strongly signalling that he wants to get it back. And we're hearing this also from the leader of Republika Srpska, who's also strongly hinting that reunification was happening. And these strange phrases are now coming out of you hear them. They will also say, this is one of the reasons we keep encouraging listeners to try to look at what's happening in the local press. They have these same strangers about, we are the victims of a conspiracy of the American Democratic Party. Because it was Bill Clinton that imposed this. So this is all part of sort of worrying sense of the world order slowly unravelling. And the geopolitical conditions he's waiting for in particular are Trump winning and Putin triumphing in Ukraine. Over to you.

• 49:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's interesting because the other thing that connects Orban and Vukic, at different times, they've indicated, I mean, at the moment, I think you're right in saying that they're both very much pointing towards the sort of populist right and on foreign policy, pretty sympathetic to Russia and China. Wasn't always necessarily so. There had been moments where it looked like they were possibly thinking of pivoting the other way. But I don't know whether it's the same interview, but somebody sent me An account of an interview he did where he mocked all the other Western Balkan countries for aligning with the EU. He was very mocking of the West. He was almost laughing as he was saying, you know, they tried to prevent this human catastrophe in Kosovo during the

• 49:59Alastair Campbell?

  Milosevic regime. And he said that, this is a quote translated, now everyone understands that they cannot defeat Russia militarily. This changes everything. And that was a pretty kind of straightforward, you know, as you say, the geopolitics of the world are changing and I'm kind of, I know which side I'm going to be on.

• 50:20Rory Stewart?

  And there's also an interesting character here to get a sense of the, you know, we've talked about this in relation to Israel, that it's important to understand governments partly through some of the more extreme members. So we've talked in Israel about the importance of understanding Ben Gavir and Smotrich in understanding the way in which Israel is thinking about Palestinian rights. In the case of understanding Serbia, it's important to understand characters like Aleksandar Vulin, who was the Minister of Labour, then Defence, then Minister of Interior, then the head of the intelligence agencies, who's just sent in his resignation letter. But in it, you get the full throated Serbian thing, you know, these people are trying to make us apologize to Croats, to accept the Shebanitsa

• 51:03Rory Stewart?

  massacre, they're trying to force us to sanction Russia and expel Chinese investments and reject our family values. And again, this is the Orban stuff. And he talks about our brotherhood with Russia and China, that Serbia is the last free leader in Europe. Now, this then brings the big geopolitical question, which is, is it possible to re-energize the movement, paradoxically, it sounds a bit contradictory to say it, but to actually get Serbia, Kosovo and the other Western Balkan countries into the European Union?

• 51:36Alastair Campbell?

  Which for them is a stated policy objective, yet at the same time, For example, the Prime Minister, I don't know, I never know how to pronounce the name because it's got three consonants at the start, B R N A B I C, Branovic. She recently said that Serbia will not comply with the parts of the agreement that were brokered by the EU in relation to Kosovo. And that they will never accept a de facto or de jure recognition of Kosovo. And the other thing we've talked about in the past, which is this whole issue of number plates, they've now reached the point, and this is the issue where there are around 50,000 Serbs, many of whom have cars, where they refuse to have Kosovan number plates,

• 52:21Alastair Campbell?

  they insist on Serb number plates. Kosovo has insisted the Serb number plates have got to go, they've given them time for the transition and the time has now run out. So technically in law now, the Kosovan police could arrest and fine and even confiscate the cars of Serbs. Now, that will kick off all sorts of stuff if we're not careful.

• 52:41Rory Stewart?

  This sounds like a petty issue, but of course it's

• 52:43Alastair Campbell?

  Huge.

• 52:44Rory Stewart?

  central to discussions about nationhood. Because effectively, from the point of view of the Kosovo government, these Serbs in northern Kosovo are behaving as separatists, behaving as though they lived in Serbia. So I suppose the equivalent in Northern Ireland would be if back in the day when this was very raw, nationalists in Northern Ireland were insisting on going around with Republic of Ireland licence plates on their cars. And it feels like a tiny issue, but in fact it's symbolically unbelievably important.

• 53:11Alastair Campbell?

  And it's led to violence in the past.

• 53:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 53:13Alastair Campbell?

  It's led to violence in the past. One maybe final point on this election is that, you know, like Orban, he's been in power for quite a long time now, quite a few accusations of ballot rigging this time, busing of voters in from Bosnia Herzegovina to vote in Belgrade, intimidation of monitors, falsifying of signatures. Now, these are accusations, all of which are pretty widely reported in much of the media, but of course, you know, as far as he's concerned, he's got 46.6% of the vote. I've won, you've lost, suck it up or we move. And it is quite amazing to be a winning Prime Minister who keeps holding elections.

• 53:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Alastair Campbell?

  We're a country which has, we're different Prime Ministers without elections.

• 53:56Rory Stewart?

  I think the The big picture reminder here is that we became, I guess, during the Cold War, used to something quite unusual in Europe, which was from 1945 to the early 90s. These borders in Europe, which of course had moved a great deal, First World War, Second World War, huge movements, you know, that what is the border of Poland? What is the border of Hungary? What's the border of Romania? These were very contested things that particularly sparked the First World War. But we were used to those borders being controlled and frozen. And that was very, very important. I mean, that's basically what the United Nations existed to do, protect these sovereign borders and states, for example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, this is hugely important to them

• 54:38Rory Stewart?

  because because these borders are often artificial, straight lines on maps and groups cross those borders, it's been unbelievably important to hold those borders. And that's why when there was a Biafran rebellion in Nigeria, it was extremely important to Nigeria to argue that they needed to keep the borders of Nigeria intact. Now, this we were complacent about, it broke in the Balkans in the 1990s. And it seemed as though we'd found a resolution for it. It was a time of huge US confidence. And under the John Major and Tony Blair government in Bosnia and Kosovo, the West intervened and settlements were found. And we assumed, I guess, moving on from 2000, that that was pretty permanent, that that problem was dealt with.

• 55:21Rory Stewart?

  We are now entering a world where if you look at Putin taking Crimea, Putin having effectively annexed now Eastern Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh now having been taken back without anyone really noticing, we're entering a world in which it's becoming much, much more likely that Serbia would attempt to retake northern Kosovo, would attempt even possibly to reintegrate Republika Srpska, that Putin, if he really feels that he can act with impunity in Eastern Ukraine, might have a go at the Baltic. And that's a much, much more dangerous world.

• 55:52Alastair Campbell?

  You mentioned how lots of these populist right wing leaders are waiting for Trump and Putin, of course, number one waiting for Trump. Fiona and I watched The Crown last night and.

• 56:02Rory Stewart?

  Oh dear, we don't like that.

• 56:03Alastair Campbell?

  Well. But it was, it was the, we're into the Blair era and we're into Kosovo. And the, the narrative base of the era is that the Queen's very jealous of Tony Blair's popularity. But she sees that Tony Blair seems able to get the American president to do things that otherwise he wouldn't do. So the story is Kosovo and it's overdone, but I don't think Donald, a Donald Trump America would go anywhere near a war in the Balkans.

• 56:28Rory Stewart?

  No, no. And, and the very, the tragic thing is if you see the way that people reacted to Nagorno-Karabakh, or basically the way they reacted to Crimea in 2014.

• 56:38Alastair Campbell?

  Or didn't react.

• 56:38Rory Stewart?

  I wonder how much outcry tragically there really would be if Serbia tried to take northern Kosovo, unless we really put it on the agenda now.

• 56:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, there we are. Um, that's all for this week. I'll sort of see you very soon. I should just say to our listeners, leading this week, new guest on there, out now, Tim Peake, the astronaut, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

• 57:01Rory Stewart?

  Amazing insight into space travel. Please listen.

• 57:05Alastair Campbell?

  Bye.

• 57:05Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

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