206. How to fix the honours system, chaos in the Red Sea, and Taiwan at a crossroads

What should we make of Liz Truss's resignation honours? How does Iran use proxies to attack the US and Israel? Why was the election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo so expensive? 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 Creef. 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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• 2:11Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:14Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. Happy New Year.

• 2:17Rory Stewart?

  Very Happy New Year, very Happy New Year. And we are entering this amazing year of elections. So we've just had the election in Congo and coming up, we've got Taiwan and Bangladesh in January. We've got Pakistan and Indonesia in February. We've got Russia in March, India in May, Mexico in June, Europe in June, South Africa sometime between May and August, the UK, anyone's guess. Maybe you can give us your views on that. And the US at the end of the year. So it's going to be an astonishing year for people interested in politics and democracies as some of the biggest countries in the world go to the election.

• 2:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, shall we start with UK politics and then we should maybe in the second half, look at the two that you mentioned there, the Congo, which has happened with a very unexpected, completely unpredictable massive landslide for the governing party, not at all ballot rigged or corrupt or any of that stuff. And then we'll look at Taiwan as well. And also very interesting developments in the Middle East with the court ruling in Israel, putting domestic politics right back into Benjamin Netanyahu's inbox with his judicial reforms hitting a bit of a, a bit of an obstacle. So I think we should start though Rory with,

• 3:37Alastair Campbell?

  with the fact that we've now had David Cameron's resignation on us, Theresa May's resignation on us, Boris Johnson's resignation on us and Liz Truss's. And you've been in none of them.

• 3:48Rory Stewart?

  I've been in none of them.

• 3:50Alastair Campbell?

  You didn't make Liz Truss.

• 3:52Rory Stewart?

  I know. I know. Extraordinary that she didn't, didn't make me a Dame or whatever it is I'm, I'm supposed to be. So I think one of the, amongst many, many very deserving people, there's a lovely MBE that went to a man who was working on a station who I think saved 27 people's lives by talking to them. Then there have been traditional honours for, you know, many great sports people, writers and so forth. But I guess the big controversy is as usual around the giving of honours to political cronies and donors.

• 4:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I'm afraid it is. And also, I, you see, I think what you did there by saying there was a nice little MBE for such and such, and I could say wonderful that Kevin Sinfield, the rugby league player, now the England Rugby Union coach, got a CBE for his support for motor neurone disease and particularly his friend, Rob Burrow. We can all pick the ones out that we say they were thoroughly deserved. But I think the whole thing is now completely discredited by the fact that we've had this wave of resignation honours. And then, you know, it's not very often, I will say, that the number 10 spokesman in their defence of Rishi Sunak allowing Liz Truss to have what worked out as one honour

• 5:10Alastair Campbell?

  per four days as Prime Minister, said that all Prime Ministers have done this. Well, that is simply not true. Tony Blair did not have a resignation on his list. Gordon Brown did not have a resignation on his list. I think Attley did. I think Harold Wilson did. And Harold Wilson's was very, very controversial, became known as the Lavender List, because these were people that were defined as people that today you might say there was a bit of cronyism attached to it, but nothing like this.

• 5:37Rory Stewart?

  Well, I know, I think the Wilson thing is, the Wilson lists were pretty staggering. And it was genuine, big corrupt businessman there. I mean, that was so shocking. And Lloyd George even worse, right? I mean.

• 5:49Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I don't, I can't, I can't remember the details of Wilson's other than that there were, put it this way, he was a Prime Minister who served a fair few years as Prime Minister. Therefore, if we are going to have this ridiculous system, I would argue that he's entitled to it. I think the whole thing should be got rid of, as you know. But the point about Liz Truss is she was a Prime Minister for fewer than 50 days. She's put three people into the House of Lords, all of whom are out of the 55 Tufton Street Ideological Factory, including.

• 6:21Alastair Campbell?

  The chief executive of Vote Leave, Matthew Elliott, who is, I would argue, one of the very small number of people who's done as much damage to this country as any other by being part of this very right wing intellectual set. Daniel Hanan, who's also in the House of Lords already, Moynihan, who was also at a senior position in Vote Leave, Ruth Porter, who was her deputy chief of staff for the five minutes that she was Prime Minister, ex of the IEA, the Institute of Economic Affairs. Rory, you cannot defend this on any level. It is utterly indefensible. And I don't, and I don't think you can compare it to Wilson either.

• 7:00Rory Stewart?

  No, I mean, I, I really, I, I think the, the Wilson list was genuinely disgusting. I mean, he, he put in a man called Lord Kagan, what he made this man, Mr. Kagan, a lord, who was a famously dubious businessman, who was finally convicted of fraud in 1980 after the honest list. And Sir Eric Miller took his own life while under investigation for fraud in, in 1977. Again, the knighthood came from Wilson in that list. He also honoured James Goldsmith, pretty controversial figure. So, and then it's even worse if you go back to Lloyd George, where, you know, the corruption around the peerages and that liberal administration at the beginning of the 20th century was horrible. So I think it's been a sort of weeping wound in British life, where I do violently agree with you, we need to sort it out.

• 7:45Alastair Campbell?

  Right. So we, we can vaguely remember, I can vaguely remember the controversy over the so-called Lavender List. We've had Boris Johnson and now Liz Truss, and these scandals are now so commonplace that I suspect most of our listeners have already forgotten about who Boris Johnson backed into the House of Lords. And likewise, in a few days and a few weeks' time, people will roll their eyes and go, oh, well, Liz Truss is what it is. I think we're just, this is something we talked about on our review of the year. I think we are accepting. A level of cronyism and corruption that is just beyond any defence and is a complete disgrace.

• 8:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, no, I I'm I'm with you. I I think the honour system is disgusting. I think what Harold Wilson did was beyond disgusting. I mean, really shocking. And I think it's horrible what Liz Truss and Boris Johnson have done. And one of the reasons, as I said before, I think it's most disgusting, is that it undermines the value of the honours when it's given to people who are genuinely deserving.

• 8:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:44Rory Stewart?

  So what you want is people to get knighthoods or their CBEs. If it's going to the station assistant, if it's going to somebody who's done an amazing amount for motor neurone disease, you want to feel that the other people who are getting the honour are equally deserving. And the problem is really this thing called political honours, which is giving awards to veteran politicians, giving awards to donors, giving awards to political think tank people. And the solution, I think, there might be two solutions. One might be to limit the number that are given out every year. So some of the honours we have, the Order of Merit, the Companion of Honour, the Knight of the Garter, have a numerical limit on the number of people who at any one time can have the honour. That forces people to focus more and that avoids

• 9:28Rory Stewart?

  one of the problems, which is inflation. So I think, as we've said before, under Queen Elizabeth the First, I think she gave out just over a dozen peerages. Maybe there were 20 Members of the House Lords at the end of her time. Whereas under Tony Blair and David Cameron, the number got into the many hundreds, the sort of four, 500 per Prime Minister. Under Boris Johnson, the number of knighthoods was beyond imagining, far more than under Tony Blair. I think he was giving out many, many multiples, the number of knighthoods Tony Blair was giving out. So there's a huge depreciation of the currency.

• 10:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but I I read somewhere that if you go through the list of all Conservative MPs, every single MP who was elected to Parliament pre 97 for the Conservatives is now Sir or Dame, with two exceptions. They are Nigel Evans.

• 10:23Alastair Campbell?

  And Andrew Mitchell, which surprised me because I think his dad was Sir David, wasn't he?

• 10:28Rory Stewart?

  Andrew Mitchell, you know, you and I would normally think if you weren't on your current rant against the honours, was somebody who was deserving of a knighthood, the Secretary of State for International Development, basically back again running our development.

• 10:38Alastair Campbell?

  And oh, don't worry, I think the point you're making there is that all Secretaries of State for International Development should get, is that what you're saying?

• 10:44Rory Stewart?

  That's it, should be automatic. It's also interesting on tenure, you know, we've talked about this before, that in the Dutch Parliament, there's only one MP who's been in since 1997 at all, and that's Herd Wilders, the right wing MP who just swept the Dutch election. Whereas in Britain, it's not unusual to have people who are in for a very, very long time. I sat on the benches when I first came in, the father of the House was an extraordinary, sort of very exquisite, sort of old fashioned MP with a sort of beautiful three piece suits and a lot of cologne called Sir Peter Tapsell, who had been in the House of Commons so, so long that he was in the House of Commons when Churchill had entered the chamber. I don't think Churchill was still sitting, but Churchill had somehow walked into the House of Commons

• 11:29Rory Stewart?

  chamber while he was sitting as an MP, and he certainly had been a special advisor in the last Churchill government. So that took him right back to the 1950s.

• 11:36Alastair Campbell?

  If I remember rightly, he used to wear those watches, those fob watches that you took out of your waistcoat pocket.

• 11:42Rory Stewart?

  That's right.

• 11:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Rory Stewart?

  It's a very good way of showing the MP is speaking too long when he very ostentatiously draw out like, like, what is it, like the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland.

• 11:52Alastair Campbell?

  I think the system itself now is indefensible because it's like when, when we talk about the people that we describe as deserving, I mean, everybody's deserving in somebody's eyes, there will be lots of MPs who say, well, we do sort of do a good job and we have sort of, you know, worked for years for our constituents and we have done this, that and the other. If I was on any of those lists, recent lists, if I was on Johnson's list, if I was on Truss's list, I would be utterly ashamed to accept it. I could not accept, how can you accept honours from people who have disgraced the office? And what it's part of, two things. One is the, the normalisation of this level of incompetence where people who in the past, I think would hardly been able to show. Their face in public.

• 12:35Alastair Campbell?

  Liz Truss now sort of parading around the world as some kind of voice of the right wing, which is, I think she's being manipulated by these people, by the way. You think this is a woman who was fought for in Maine, as you've said before, you know, fairly kind of mainstream conservative politician, who since she became Prime Minister, by becoming Prime Minister with the backing of all these fifty five Tufton Street people, she's now rewarding them for that support, putting them into further positions of power and influence. And here's my other point, where we should, we should maybe talk about the poll that was in The Observer about Brexit. Brexit is now virtually universally seen as a terrible thing for this country. The poll in The Observer showed that, I think it was something like, there was not a single element of the promises that were made for Brexit that has been met,

• 13:19Alastair Campbell?

  and there's not a single element that is now seen as a positive by the British public. And yet, there you have Elliot, the chief executive, going to the House of Lords, Moynihan, the chairman or president, whatever the hell he was, Portia I've mentioned, and we even have the utter mind blowing vision of Rishi Sunak calling in Dominique Cummings for a couple of chats about how to help him win the next election.

• 13:41Rory Stewart?

  Let's get on to Cummings, because I know that's something you want to talk about, it's the second thing. But just, just to finish this question of, of what we might do to make the honest system better. So let's say Keir Starmer came in and he wanted to actually improve things.

• 13:53Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:54Rory Stewart?

  One of them, I think, would be to limit the number so that you don't have this ridiculous inflation.

• 13:59Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Rory Stewart?

  Another thing I think would be to have a very formal definition of the qualities that you would expect a, a nice or a member of the House of Lords to have, and read it out formally so that it would be too embarrassing, in a sense, to put Baroness Moan, which is what David Cameron did, into the House of Lords. If you then had to read out some great statement like the Nolan Principles, which said, you know, this is designed for someone with the most distinguished contribution to public life, blah, blah, blah. You would then, at least by setting parameters around what these things are, you could begin, I think, hopefully, to shame people into not doing things that are complete travesties. You could even bolster the House of Lords Appointment Commission, give it much more teeth and give it the power to say, when Boris Johnson

• 14:45Rory Stewart?

  proposed, he proposed a very, very young aide, didn't he, who was in her, she in her early thirties that he put into the House of Lords?

• 14:51Alastair Campbell?

  She was in her late twenties, I think. But do you not, do you not think that the, the key? To reform has to be Britain growing up a bit and finally accepting, hey, do you know what? We don't really have an empire anymore. Perhaps take the empire out of the whole honour system. Because that's the other thing it does. It structures things. I mentioned, I mentioned Kevin Sinfield and Rob Burrow, the rugby league player. Do you know that rugby league has never had a knight?

• 15:16Rory Stewart?

  I didn't know that.

• 15:17Alastair Campbell?

  Whereas rugby union, rugby union gets knights galore. I think the honour system is one of those things that cements by persuading people that, oh, there's the lollipop man or the lollipop lady gets an MBA. There's this, the school janitor, there's the this, there's the that. And then at the top end of it, it's the people who already have power, they get more power, more status. And your point about inflation, Rory, see, I, I hope Keir Starmer does reform it. If he becomes prime minister, he's going to come in with the, the, one of the first things he'll have to do, given our ridiculous, outmoded parliamentary system, is how do I balance up the fact that Johnson Trust, et cetera, have been packing the place with more Tory peers? These are now legislators in our parliament. So he probably has to put

• 16:00Alastair Campbell?

  more people in. And unless we actually start from scratch, I don't know how this thing ever gets fixed.

• 16:07Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's a really, really good, really good question. I mean, at the moment, I believe there are 664 life peers eligible to vote, and those are 215 Conservative, 171 Labour, eight Lib Dem, 149 crossbench. So there's no majority for any party because the crossbench holds the balance of power. And the slightly more Conservatives in Labour, which you'd expect when there's a Conservative government. So you'd probably expect him to come in and balance it out, wouldn't you?

• 16:37Alastair Campbell?

  Which means putting lots more into there, which makes it even bigger.

• 16:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. But I think it would be good if, if he really thought about, if there was really good criteria on who it is that you bring in and the kind of qualities you're looking for in people you bring in. Because I, I think that's one of the things that makes the whole thing so depressing. There are so many brilliant, talented people, and I'm sure there are easy to find 40 really impressive people who are prepared to vote with the Labour Party, who are not from the world of politics, special advising, local councils, but are You know, really brilliant people and it would be lovely to see him do that.

• 17:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 17:13Rory Stewart?

  You brought in Melvin Bragg, didn't you? I always liked the fact you brought in Melvin Bragg. Was that you or was that Gordon Brown?

• 17:18Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, I think that was us, but there are, listen, there are lots of really good people in the House of Lords. But again, a bit like we defend the honest system by saying, oh, well, he deserves it, she deserves it, but Michael Fabricant doesn't. Likewise, I think there's something fundamentally wrong about the way the House of Lords has developed. And I get you're a conservative and you respect traditions and institutions and so forth. But I think for a lot of people, these institutions and these systems now, they're not fit for purpose. And yes, the House of Lords has good people. Yes, the House of Lords does lots of really good, important work.

• 17:50Rory Stewart?

  And often much more impressive than the House of Commons. I mean, that's, I mean, I found during my 10 years that the quality of debates in the House of Lords consistently day in, day out, week in, week out, much, much higher quality than the House of Commons.

• 18:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Rory Stewart?

  That's really difficult for people in the House of Commons to take on. I remember when the debate around House Lords reform was happening, Chris Bryant hopping up and saying, I was doing down the House of Commons. Well, lots of good people in the House of Commons, why did I keep praising the House Lords? But the truth of the matter is that something about the way that party politics works in the House of Commons has really meant that debates and scrutiny of legislation is almost meaningless today in the Commons. The Commons feels really hollow.

• 18:29Alastair Campbell?

  There is already a body called HOLAC, House of Lords Appointments Commission. And I do think that people who feel strongly, particularly about this Matthew Elliott, the vote leave people, who let's not forget, there's a guy who was running a campaign which was found to have broken the law. So when you were, when you were saying, let's have something where you have to read out a citation, that should be included. There's a guy who, if we should put in the show notes, he finally deigned to appear in front of Andrew Tyree's select committee sometime after the referendum. And something like the first eight minutes are taken with him, refusing to apologize for the fact that he'd stood them up and not been there and not turned up and all this sort of things. These are people, these are the sovereign individuals that we've talked about, Rory.

• 19:15Alastair Campbell?

  And I think they are, they're part of Brexit, they're part of the anti-climate agenda. They are these 55 Tufton Street ideologues who have done massive damage and far from being punished for that damage, they're now being rewarded even further with it.

• 19:30Rory Stewart?

  Right, now you wanted to talk about Cummings and Suhrak.

• 19:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, what do you think? What was your first reaction when you heard that Rishi Sunak, according to Dominic Cummings, and this has not been denied by Number 10, but the Rishi Sunak held a couple of meetings and according to Cummings, basically wanted Cummings to come back and help him run the election campaign. What was your reaction?

• 19:51Rory Stewart?

  Well, first, obviously, what it's done has caused huge shock and consternation because Cummings is the man behind the Vote Leave campaign, very much the architect of it, probably more than any of the other people we've mentioned. As we've seen from the Covid Inquiry, he was also an incredibly divisive force as, in effect, Boris Johnson's Chief of Staff, where it seems as though he plotted to get Boris Johnson in and then from the moment he got in, plotted to try to get rid of him and replace him with someone else. So he's somebody that, for most of the moderate Conservative Party, it's completely horrifying. And not just for the moderate Conservative Party, even for the Boris supporters, it's completely horrifying that someone should be reaching out to Dominic Cummings because

• 20:31Rory Stewart?

  for the left, they see him as this kind of right-wing smasher of institutions and the right of the party sees him as the great traitor who brought down their hero Boris. So it was politically a very, very, very dangerous thing to do. On the other hand, I can kind of understand the temptation. I sat down when I was running for leadership with Dominic Cummings because he's a completely fascinating figure and the one thing you know when you sit down with him is you're going to get a very blunt, very clear-minded and sometimes quite original view of the world. I mean, he's a really provocative thinker. In this particular case, there's two narratives about what he said. There's the Number 10's

• 21:13Rory Stewart?

  narrative, which is that he wanted to raise the 40p tax threshold above 100,000. He wanted to reverse all the tax rises under Johnson. He wanted to leave the ECHR, the European Court on Human Rights. So essentially, the Number 10 view is this guy was coming in with a lunatic series of Liz Truss-style mad tax cuts.

• 21:34Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Rory Stewart?

  Dominic Cummings' view is that he wanted the government to address the scandal of nuclear weapons infrastructure, natural and engineered pandemics.

• 21:43Rory Stewart?

  The scandal of MOD procurement, AI and other tech capabilities and civil service reform. In other words, Cummings has really said he was pitching this very kind of high minded, very abstruse, obscure reforms to things like nuclear weapons infrastructure. Over to you.

• 21:59Alastair Campbell?

  No, I noticed that. There was very, because he writes these occasional very, very long blogs. And this is where it was first revealed that he was, he'd had these meetings. So that's the first thing you have to bear in mind in this. He is the, as it were, the author of the construct of this meeting. And he probably likes the fact that here we are, here's you and me on our first podcast of 2024, and we're talking about Dominic Cummings. He probably likes that. Rishi Sunak, I think you're right. We probably thought, well, the guy's got a track record. He helped Johnson become Prime Minister against Corbyn. Might be worth picking his brains. I get that. But I think if you look at Cummings' track record, his various relationships with key political figures,

• 22:42Alastair Campbell?

  there is a sort of pattern to this, is that he sort of works his way in, he whedles away, and then he falls out with them, and then he turns against them.

• 22:49Rory Stewart?

  And then does it publicly. So it would be a bit like, let's say, Ed Miliband had thought, or Jeremy Corbyn had thought it was worth having a cup of tea with you. They would want to feel, at the very least, that you'd be discreet about it.

• 23:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I had many cups of tea. I didn't have cups of tea with Jeremy Corbyn, but I've had many cups of tea with every other Labour leader, including, as you keep reminding me, and we'll no doubt come on to Keir Starmer. And I've often said to you that I think Cummings is an interesting character. I agree with you about that. But the reason why I sometimes get a bit pissed off when people sort of say, oh, he was to Johnson what I was to Tony Blair, or he is to the Tories what I've been to the Labour Party, is I would never have, I would never have written this sentence. Let me just read you this sentence about what Cummings said about this meeting. "The Prime Minister decided against the deal that I proposed. He wanted instead that I work secretly on politics and communication

• 23:41Alastair Campbell?

  in return for a promise that I could come to Number 10 and sort out my priorities after the election." In other words, he's saying, you're the Prime Minister, I'm an amazing- Genius Svengali strategist, although, as I said earlier, a campaign that broke the law, lots of illegal targeting of people in the Vote Leave campaign, Johnson, more lies, and also up against Jeremy Corbyn. So I don't think we should put him down as a great campaigning genius. But the fact that he can say with a straight face, the deal was, Sunak says to him, help me get elected, and then we'll do your priorities after the election. Now, I think

• 24:21Alastair Campbell?

  that reveals both an arrogance and a disregard for the fundamentals of our constitution as a parliamentary democracy, does it not?

• 24:30Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, no, it's pretty peculiar. And it's a very, very, I mean, it's fascinating that Cummings thinks he has that kind of power. Because, as you say, what made you effective, and the reason Tony Blair worked very well with you and continues to admire and rate you, is that you were very profoundly loyal, and you were very clear that you were there to try to facilitate and help Tony Blair. You were not going into these meetings saying, I'll help you get elected, and then in return, you're going to give me a carte blanche to pursue my own agenda.

• 25:00Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. And he also, you know, Cummings also has clearly got some self-awareness. And I suspect, I suspect he's quite irritated by this idea. And I have some sympathy with this. There have been times post my Downing Street career with some Labour leaders where they thought, you know, don't want it known too widely that I'm kind of coming in the back door and all that sort of, and I get that, that can be sort of irritating.

• 25:26Rory Stewart?

  And it's presumably irritating because in the, in case of you and Cummings, in that case, you feel this person wants my advice and is using me, but is somehow embarrassed to be seen in public with me.

• 25:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, or that it's delegitimising it. So I think, I think for me, I mean, look, ultimately, when I went back to help Gordon, he was perfectly happy about it, had me helping him with the preparation of debates, wanted me to go in the House of Lords as a minister. But I think sometimes it's like, you feel that your, your own side, as it were, is delegitimising your role. And I think I wonder whether that's what was coming a little bit through what the statement that Cummings was making. Cummings said that Sunak thought, quotes, "My open involvement in government would drive the MPs and media mad and cause him serious political problems." Now, that is probably true.

• 26:12Rory Stewart?

  Given how people reacted even to him meeting the Prime Minister.

• 26:14Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly, exactly. So what do you think, what do you think it says? The other thing that I think is interesting of this. So, a few weeks ago, we were talking about Rishi Sunak making another kind of bold personnel move that we actually, I think, both saw, we could see both sides of it, but, you know, on balance, I think a positive move, which was for him, which was bringing back David Cameron. But what does it say that one month, he's bringing back David Cameron, who is sort of seen as the kind of more modernising figure of Conservative recent history, and then the next minute is seeing somebody for whom I suspect, who has total contempt for the politics of David Cameron? So what does that say about where Sunak's politics are?

• 26:56Rory Stewart?

  I think the fundamental point is that the Conservatives are in a very, very worried state. Very few of my colleagues in Parliament think that they have any chance of winning the next election. I mean, you occasionally come across one or two, but I'd never quite believe them. The latest polls that have come out are absolutely extraordinary. So there's something called the Best for Britain Megapol of 10,000 people, and this has found that 32% of the public would like Starmer as PM, 22% want Sunak, and it suggests that Starmer would take 390 out of the 632 seats in Parliament on the basis of this poll. There are two quite interesting things in it. I think one thing before Keir Starmer gets

• 27:40Rory Stewart?

  overexcited is there's still an astonishing number of undecided, 29% of voters still saying don't know. The other thing that hasn't been reported much is this poll is catastrophic for the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems are now looking at being down at 7% neck and neck with Reform UK, which is the ex sort of Brexit party. So it's a very interesting election. Labour clearly well ahead, but very large number of annoyed undecideds and the Lib Dems in real trouble, as well as obviously the Conservatives.

• 28:10Alastair Campbell?

  Now, we'll put the these two polls that we've mentioned, the Best for Britain poll, this mega poll, and also the Observer Opinion Poll on Brexit. We'll put them in the newsletter. And the thing about as well about these these mega polls, we used to do some of these at the People's Vote campaign, and I never quite know how they work, but they they do them in a way because the because it is a larger than usual base. They have, as you say, 10,000 people. They do these constituency extractions. And they worked out that there are only four constituencies where Rishi Sunak was ahead of Keir Starmer in terms of who they wanted to be Prime Minister, including his own Richmond, where I think he came third after Don't Know at Keir Starmer.

• 28:52Alastair Campbell?

  So even his own constituency, it would seem he's got, no, I don't think Labour are going to take Richmond, but the fact is that he's he's had these several, for him, fairly big moments that he's tried. We've talked endlessly about, you know, the environmental pitch, the King's Speech, the boats, some of the sort of the Rwanda strategy, these things where he's tried to sort of find big moments for breakthrough, bringing back Cameron was another one, I guess. And they don't seem to have shifted opinion. But where you're right, and where Labour should really not be complacent, is I think the level of don't know-ology, that is leaning into a kind of, ah, can't be bothered with any of it. And that's what Labour, I still think, need to do

• 29:35Alastair Campbell?

  far more to break through into. I was pleased that in his, I mean, these New York messages, I mean, they're, I can remember from my time with Tony, they're a complete pain in the neck to do. Everybody feels they have to do them. But they're quite a useful opportunity to sort of signal your priorities. And I was pleased that in his, Keir Starmer specifically mentioned something we've been talking about, which is the need to restore faith in politics. And I do think there's something big to be done there. You're in Scotland at the moment, I'm in Scotland at the moment. It's interesting, I've been really interested at where I am in the Highlands. Far more open overt criticism of the SNP going on. I'm up in a part of the world where, frankly, quite a lot of the time, people are, people

• 30:19Alastair Campbell?

  just keep quiet about politics. You know what they're like, they just don't talk very much about it. But out and about in the last few days, really been interesting how many people have been much more open about saying, God, we've got to get rid of the SNP. So I think the combination of that, got to get rid of the Tories, got to get rid of the SNP, that is where there is an opening there, I think, for Labour in particular, to go to these people, but they've got to get them over from don't know to positively want to vote.

• 30:47Rory Stewart?

  You and I, of course, because we're in Scotland, we read the Scottish editions of newspapers, which people will know are often very, very different from the English editions of newspapers. And there's been an enormous amount on this. I mean, latest poll there, Scotland six-point lead over the SNP, which should mean Labour taking at the moment on track to take 35 out of the 59 seats in Scotland. Conservatives down on 16%, SNP on 31%, Labour on 37%. So I think my sense is that Anna Sawa is appealing to people, people like him. There's a lot of, there's more sort of affection for Hamza Youssef around, but there's not a sense that he's been very effective. And you can see people like Murray Black, who was the kind of firebrand young SNP MP when I was in Parliament,

• 31:31Rory Stewart?

  now coming out saying the problem is the SNP became too much of a cult for Nicola Sturgeon, and the problems around her and her husband now having a huge impact.

• 31:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Rory Stewart?

  Just before we go to the break, do you want to pay a quick tribute to your friend Jacques Delors, and then we will come back?

• 31:45Alastair Campbell?

  I think friend overstates, but somebody I admired. And I thought there was something very interesting about the way his death was covered. And this is a guy who had huge impact upon public life right across Europe. And yet, if you were to read most of the British obituaries and watch most of the British news, you'd have thought his life had revolved around one headlight in the sun and a fractious relationship with Margaret Thatcher.

• 32:15Rory Stewart?

  And just to remind listeners, the great headline in the Sun was "Up yours, de laws."

• 32:19Alastair Campbell?

  Up yours, de laws, and this was when he was pushing very much on the European integrations to gender. Margaret Thatcher made that very, very famous speech, "No, no, no," to some of his more radical plans. But if we talk about figures of history, I think a lot of the changes that had been made in Europe, you'd see Jacques de Lors at the centre of them. He was there at the Mastery Treaty. It was his committee that produced the paper that led ultimately to the foundation of the European, of the single currency. He was right at the heart of German reunification. And very interesting for a French politician, there was a feeling he should have gone for the presidency when he stopped being the Commission President, but he actually

• 33:00Alastair Campbell?

  felt France was never properly a social democratic country, and that therefore he thought he wasn't going to win. And he went on to do other things instead. But he was a formidable politician, and I just think it's, we're constantly saying we want big political figures with real vision and resilience and determination, and he was definitely one of those.

• 33:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Good, okay, time for a break.

• 33:30Speaker 02

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• 34:34Alastair Campbell?

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

• 34:37Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 34:38Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, we've kicked off a new year with the first episode of Leading, which is now out. And I had a lovely message from Sebastian Coe saying, you know, gold medals galore, peerages, knighthoods, companion of honour. But is there any greater honour than being the first interviewee on Rest is Politics, Leading of 2024?

• 34:59Rory Stewart?

  I thought he was great, Seb Coe. So, I mean, any one of our generation will know him as the most legendary British Olympian runner, who then went on to have a fascinating career in sort of every different bits of life, including sports administration, including politics, he was a member of parliament. But I just thought he came across as lovely, really worth listening to. One thing I think that's interestingly in common between him and Cristiano Figueres and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who we've also interviewed, is that he clearly had this very, very demanding father, to whom he is fiercely loyal. It's rather lovely. In all those cases, you know, stories have been written about these slightly distant dads who either pushed them too hard or didn't pay much attention to them. But in every

• 35:41Rory Stewart?

  case, our interviewees have paid huge tributes to those pushy fathers.

• 35:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. Anyway, there we are. That's our first Leading. And next week, we'll be talking to Guy Verhofstadt, which is, I think, been one of my favourites so far, for all sorts of reasons.

• 35:56Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 35:56Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, why don't you let our listeners into the secrets of what on earth is happening in the Red Sea?

• 36:02Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think let's just start quickly with what the Red Sea is. So, the Red Sea is the narrow strip of water, that sort of sausage that runs down from Suez Canal down to the Gulf of Aden. In other words, it's, if you look at a map, it's the bit that sort of splits Africa from the Middle East. And on the left hand side, it's got Egypt and Sudan. And on the right hand side, it's got Yemen, Saudi Arabia, a little bit of Jordan, and Israel. And it's one of the most important shipping lanes in the world, because the alternative...

• 36:36Rory Stewart?

  To going up the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal is going right the way around the tip of Africa, which is a much, much longer journey, which is why breaking through the Suez Canal was a huge thing, which Britain was very involved in. Prime Minister of the time, Disraeli, got private loans to get the thing opened. And of course, the Suez Canal led to this huge crisis that shattered British foreign policy for 20, 30 years in the 1950s, when NASA seized the Suez Canal. And it's come back into the press again now, because the Red Sea is also really, really important to global trade. I mean, the statistics are pretty striking. 20% of global container volumes go up the Red Sea. 10% of the seaborne

• 37:18Rory Stewart?

  trade, 8 to 10% of seaborne gas and oil passes through the Red Sea in Suez routes. And the Houthis, who are the group that have emerged, initially as an insurgent group, but now effectively control most of Yemen, and who are linked to Iran, have now said that so long as Israel continues its attack on Gaza, they will be attacking the shipping going up the Red Sea, saying that that shipping is bound for Israel. And the US and the UK have got naval vessels in the Red Sea. The US has already started shooting down Houthis missiles, has taken out boats and killed Houthis assailants. The British Defence Secretary

• 37:59Rory Stewart?

  Grant Shapps has now signaled that the UK will join the US in a coalition to protect the shipping lanes. And some of the major shipping companies have already announced that they're going to be sailing around the Horn of Africa, rather than coming up the Red Sea back to you.

• 38:14Alastair Campbell?

  Well, one of the things that we discussed with Gief Hofstadt is this theme that you and I both addressed in different ways about whether individuals really can make a difference. And you're a Houthis man, I'm a Houthis man. But the Houthis take their name from one individual, a guy called Hussein al-Houthis. And he was the founder of this, I guess you'd call it a subsect of the Shia Muslim community in Yemen.

• 38:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly. So the Zaidis. And actually, Zaidis were, when I was kind of studying this stuff back in the early 90s, were considered quite distinct from Sunni and Shia. But increasingly, partly under Iranian missionary work and Iranian outreach, have begun to reinterpret themselves as being a branch of Shia Islam closer to Iran than to the Gulf states, which are Sunni monarchies.

• 39:13Alastair Campbell?

  Is that real or is that opportunistic?

• 39:15Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think the Zaidis remain a strange historical anomaly. It is a different tradition of Islam. I mean, you can get into different theologies on whether it would be considered closer to the Shia tradition or the Sunni tradition. But the Iranians have been very, very adept at making them feel that their form of Islam is closer to Iran. And essentially, this is a proxy war. To go back to Yemen, because we were in a situation in which, after the Arab Spring, the Yemeni dictator was effectively toppled. And when I was visiting Yemen, in the final days, the British Embassy there, I remember having to scurry for cover with the British Ambassador because a Houthi column had come

• 39:58Rory Stewart?

  down when we were on a trip just north of Sanaa. British Embassy then evacuated, horrible civil war began, millions of people killed, some of the most extreme famine conditions in the world. Saudi Arabia and UAE then got involved on the anti-Houthi side. We've talked about Yemen again because they brought in the leader of the Janjaweed militia from Sudan, who first developed his relationships with the Gulf state, fighting for them in Yemen. And he's the guy that's absolutely at the centre of the civil war in Sudan at the moment. So that's an example of the way in which these wars spill over into neighbouring territories. It also matters because it's one of the major reasons why UAE and Saudi broke with the

• 40:40Rory Stewart?

  United States, because they felt the US had not been supportive enough when the Houthi had been firing missiles into Saudi Arabia and UAE. And so there's a sort of irony here, which will be adding salt to these wounds, which is the Gulf states will be saying, we were warning you about the Houthi, and when they were firing missiles at us, you didn't really do much to back us. Now they're firing missiles at your ally, Israel, and suddenly you're saying that you're going to launch some great maritime campaign.

• 41:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And if you want a sort of sense of their basic outlook on life, their official slogan is "Death to America, Death to Israel."

• 41:15Rory Stewart?

  Which used to be the great Iranian slogan. And in the glory days for Britain was "Death to America, Death to Britain, Death to Israel." But another sign of Britain's declining influence is we've been dropped from the slogan.

• 41:27Alastair Campbell?

  From the top league. What I find interesting, do you think is it, do you think is real? That the escalation from the Houthis side has been specifically related to Israel Gaza? Or do you think that is also something that they've just realised, gives them this opportunity to step things up and they're now just prodding to see how far, how far they can go because, you know, they have, the Americans have been pretty quick to take some of them out. And, you know, we know that once that sort of escalation starts, it can very, very quickly accelerate.

• 42:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And then the problem is, of course, that, and we had this when I was in government and we were trying to deal with the challenge of Somali piracy, which, which has been another big issue, is that quite quickly you get into a conversation around what you do on land. Because if you're simply attacking ships in the water, you're dealing with the symptoms, not the deep root causes. And of course, once you get into the deep root causes, you're getting into the whole mess that is Yemen itself. And that, that indeed was what happened with Somalia. When we began trying to look at these pirate attacks from Somalia, increasingly, of course, we were drawn back to do more and more development and investment and security programmes on the mainland of Somalia. So there's that threat. I think another thing that you're pointing to, which is going

• 42:45Rory Stewart?

  to worry people, is that the Houthis are an Iranian proxy, just like Hezbollah in Lebanon. And so far, the Israel Gaza fight has not spilled over into a regional conflict with Iran, because so far it seems as though Iran has been restraining Hezbollah in Lebanon and restraining the Houthis from doing very big attacks. I mean, there have been missiles, there have been these smaller attacks. At the moment, though, it feels like Iran does not want to be drawn into a big regional conflict, but-

• 43:13Alastair Campbell?

  But it wouldn't take much in the various hotspots that are now attached to this for it to step up.

• 43:19Rory Stewart?

  Then it becomes very, very, very, very dangerous. Because then you can imagine Israeli strikes against Iran backed by the United States. And then you're, then, then people who worry that we're at something that feels like the beginning of First World War, this is like the fights in the Balkans around Serbia and Bosnia that led to the First World War, this might be the same sort of trigger for a regional conflict.

• 43:42Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So before we go on to Israel Gaza itself, just to give people a sense of perspective on the war in Yemen, which we've said many, many times gets shamefully little discussion in our debate, 377,000 deaths since the start in 2022, and they reckon more than four million people now on the move as a result of it. So that is somewhere to watch, and it's a fairly new development related to Israel Gaza, and one that I suspect we'll be talking about again in the future. Just on Israel Gaza, you probably saw overnight, we're recording this Tuesday morning, the Supreme Court judgment against Netanyahu

• 44:24Alastair Campbell?

  and his judicial reforms, which kind of reminds him that this is a guy who's, I don't say this pejoratively, but in a sense has been using the current war to shield himself from some of the massive domestic political trouble he was in. But in a way, that's now right back in his face.

• 44:44Rory Stewart?

  Yes. If listeners want reminders of this issue, we'll put a link in the recording to an earlier interview that we did with Yuval Noah Harari, when he was right in the heart of these demonstrations. So the story coming out of Israel, listeners will remember before October, was a massive fight against this right wing government, and particularly the far right members of the cabinet, who were basically trying to muzzle the judiciary. They saw the judges in Israel as being too liberal, because they were occasionally challenging them on, including on issues around settlements. There were demonstrations regularly in the streets of Tel Aviv of over 100,000 people. The military and the reservists had come

• 45:26Rory Stewart?

  out on the side of the demonstrators against the Israeli government. The Israeli government passed a law effectively muscling the Supreme Court. And at the time, it seemed very unlikely that Supreme Court would overturn that, because it would put the Supreme Court into a massive constitutional crisis. So Parliament passed a law undermining the power of the judges, and the judges have now, by a slim majority, seven to six, overturned that. But it may be that in the new context, actually, the judges will be successful, whereas people feared Before all the horror that's followed on from October, that if the judges tried to do it, that really would be the end and Parliament would then pass a much more aggressive law and change the constitution.

• 46:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, the Israeli media at the moment is full of a lot of anger from some of the, particularly the right wing ministers in Netanyahu's cabinet, who think this is an absolute abuse of the constitution. So you're right, this has the feeling of a constitutional crisis in the making. There's one other thing I was reading, Rory, you've talked before about the possibility that we can get General David Petraeus onto the, onto leading, which I would love to do if we can.

• 46:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 46:34Alastair Campbell?

  He says in very interesting, he said that Israel has to clear and hold all of Gaza to achieve its stated mission of destroying Hamas and rescuing the hostages. Clear and hold all of Gaza. What do you think that means?

• 46:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so this is right back to, David Petraeus was the US commander in Mosul, and then he was the CENTCOM commander, and then he was the commander in Afghanistan. And he was the leading driver at a senior level of the US counterinsurgency strategy, its coin strategy. And the key of the coin strategy was clear, hold and build. And the idea is that you put in the troops, you establish security, you hold the area, and then you begin to reconstruct and try to win the population back onto your side. It is an incredibly expensive, labour intensive project. The US spent over $3 trillion trying to do it

• 47:28Rory Stewart?

  in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Rand Corporation was arguing that you needed one soldier for every 20 members of the civilian population, and frankly, they did not succeed. And of course, the extreme coin specialists say, well, we should have spent more money, had more troops, and maybe then it would have worked. But I think in the context of Gaza, General Petraeus is basically pointing to the fact that what Israel is doing is, or trying to do, is not just unbelievably brutal. I mean, it now looks like 21,800 people have been killed, 50,000 plus have been injured, half the housing stock is now in ruins in Gaza, but that there is no day after strategy. There is no concept of what happens when

• 48:13Rory Stewart?

  this is over.

• 48:15Alastair Campbell?

  The other worry I have about Netanyahu now being back in a domestic political difficulties is that they ramp it up even further. And if you think about when we first started to talk about this in the immediate aftermath, I think we both agree that there would be a really, really brutal response. I think it's very, very hard to make the case that they are taking every effort to avoid civilian casualty. It's very, very hard to make that case.

• 48:42Rory Stewart?

  Just to feed in from friends of mine in Jordan who are in touch all the time. I mean, to put it in context, I have a friend who ran a small charity in Gaza, which could not have been less political. I mean, it's basically a charity doing kind of sports entertainment for kids. And in his case, four of his senior staff members, one of which I met, have been killed with all their families. I mean, they could not have been less Hamas. And he reckons that every single person he knows in Gaza has now lost very close relatives. But it was particularly seeing the photographs of these four relatively junior employees of a small charity, young men with their families all dead, that really

• 49:27Rory Stewart?

  brought home to me what this is actually like, that we're just struggling somehow in our coverage to communicate who those 21,000 people are. I mean, I guess the easiest way through it is of course to explain that so many of them are children. But it's also just getting across the fact that some people may still believe that the vast majority of these people are somehow associated with Hamas or supporting Hamas. It just isn't the case. In fact, Israel has killed and captured very few Hamas leaders in this attack.

• 49:58Alastair Campbell?

  And the other thing you talked there about the coverage, 65 journalists have been killed. Now, war correspondents go to dangerous places, but you wonder too whether, and I've told you before about some of the discussions we had during the Kosovo war about being aware that there were targets that were under consideration, where we knew there would be journalists, and sufficient precaution being taken. Now, is that happening? And I think what happens is if you make the case that, you know, they use hospitals, they use schools to protect Hamas fighters, before you know it, everything becomes a legitimate

• 50:39Alastair Campbell?

  target. And it seems to me that we're already losing a debate about that. And the other thing that we don't see, you very rarely see pictures of the people who are dead. It's almost like, so you said 21,500, that's a lot of people. That's Burnley Stadium full. I actually had that thought when we were playing Liverpool on Boxing Day. If every single seat was filled, that is the number of people now who have been killed. Now, every single one of them is a person. What the media normally does in these situations is you see pictures and it brings home the humanity, but we're not seeing that. And I'm not criticizing the journalists because they've got a hellish difficult job to do. And as I say, 65 have been killed doing it. But I think it's almost like this is being

• 51:23Alastair Campbell?

  portrayed without the human stories being told. And that, again, normalizes it just as another zone of violence going on.

• 51:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly. As you say, it really came home to me when I can really connect it to individual lives and individual people, to get any sense of the context of it. Right, well, we promised at the beginning of the show to start talking about what is really the biggest year of elections in world history that we're coming into. You know, in a sense, this year, the whole world is the rest is politics. It's politics, politics, politics, as we go into 24 at a time when the stakes are hugely high. And the year ended just over Christmas, just in the couple of days before Christmas, with an election in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is this huge country in the middle of Africa,

• 52:15Rory Stewart?

  100 million people, and probably the most difficult country in the world to hold an election. The election itself cost $1.4 billion. They were trying to run over 70,000 polling stations. And for people who know the Democratic Republic of the Congo, one of the problems is just accessibility. The roads get washed away very quickly by rain. You can see on YouTube, if you're interested, images of trucks trying to move through these roads, which are basically like mud rivers. The election had to be extended, or had to be extended, the government decided to extend it by another two days because of the problems of getting into these remote polling stations. And the logistical difficulties are compounded by the fact that in eastern

• 52:59Rory Stewart?

  Congo, there are over 100 different insurgent groups. There is a very hot civil war taking place. And it's a country that is also matters to the world. And it's not irrelevant to the world. It matters to the world because it is the place from which so many of the critical minerals which are powering the energy transition, powering our attempts to address climate change come from. So, right at the heart of Tesla cars are 10 pounds of cobalt, of which the DRC is the biggest producer in the world. Coal tan, which is another thing they produce, completely vital for telephones, transistors, another part of the coal tan derivatives for jet engines. It's also a huge producer of things like

• 53:41Rory Stewart?

  gold. So there's muddled up in this is ethnic conflict between Tutsi and Hutu, which flowed over from the Rwanda conflict. There are Islamist militia groups. There are amazing conflicts to do with different people trying to control illegal mining. And the result, as you said at the beginning of the show, was that President Tishikidi, who I've met a couple of times, slightly unlikely politician, has been re-elected. And the man who appeared to have beaten him in the last election got surprisingly few votes. And all the opposition parties are calling fraud. Over to you.

• 54:17Alastair Campbell?

  He won with 73% of the vote. The guy who came second was sort of 16. And the guy who we thought was going to be the main challenger, he ended up with 4%. So.

• 54:31Alastair Campbell?

  Do we assume that that is the way this was voted? And do we, if you are going to rig an election, do you really want to give yourself those sort of Putin-esque style figures?

• 54:41Rory Stewart?

  It's amazing, isn't it? And one of the great tricks of these things, I remember talking to people who were trying to rig the Afghan election, is that they always get it wrong because they're under so much pressure from their bosses to steal as many votes as possible that they completely overshoot the mark. I remember some of the polling booths coming back from one of the Kazakh elections where all the results were always in 50s because that was apparently the, the number of things that you had on a stack of papers. So when you stole the votes, you always stole them in 50s. So it was always kind of weirdly, every number ended in 50. I think it's, I think it's completely, totally inconceivable that Felix Tishkedi can possibly have got 73% of vote if there was any proper functioning electoral system.

• 55:26Rory Stewart?

  And, and this is going to be the question as we move forward through this year and we look at places like Bangladesh with their elections coming, Russia with the elections coming there, Venezuela where the elections are coming there, but also probably more disturbingly, places closer to home, we're going to run into a lot of troubles and wonder if these things are fair.

• 55:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and also Donald Trump will be looking at this and thinking, oh, they can do it.

• 55:48Rory Stewart?

  No, I mean, it's, it's bizarre and the problems that he faces, I mean, we, we talk a lot about democracies and the evolutions of democracies, but I guess DRC is probably, as we talk through the elections that are coming this year, maybe the most extreme example of what these democracies, some of the democracies are like in practice, which is it's 2,000 miles from end to end. It's the most wonderful country on earth. I mean, you, you may have come across Congolese jazz music, which is, and Congolese music in general, which is a kind of incredibly dynamic. Huge differences between mountain gorillas in the east on the Rwanda border, stretches almost all the way through to the coast, the great Congo River.

• 56:29Rory Stewart?

  When I was a minister travelling around DRC, I astonished again and again by the variety of differences and how long it just took you to get from one place to the other. But poor DRC is also the place, of course, which had a very big Ebola outbreak in 2019, hit the press for that. But most of all, I think it's a place where six million people have been killed in in the Congo conflict since the 1990s. There are 15,000 UN peacekeepers on the ground and a lot of talk about withdrawing them because they don't seem to have made much difference over the years. The US, again, trying to do its best. I mean, US, almost the only country still doing this, as Britain and France and others withdraw. The Director

• 57:13Rory Stewart?

  of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, turned up on the end of November and managed to get a 72-hour ceasefire going in eastern Congo. So credit to the US on trying. But the big story there is that China has spent untold billions buying up all the key mines. Because since 2015, China's had a very clear view that if the world is going towards battery technology and electric vehicles, they need to own all the key materials. And they've bought these mines from Freeport, which is a US company. And now the US is scrabbling under Joe Biden to try to work out how to get US mining interests back into Congo because China now controls through Congo so much the world trade.

• 57:55Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, let's stick with China while we look very briefly ahead to the, I guess, the next big election in this election year, and that's Taiwan on January 13. So you've got an outgoing president, Xi Jinping. She's stepping down, has to step down because there's a two-term limit. Her successor as the candidate for the DPP is Lai Ching-tai, favored, leading in the polls. Main stance insofar as it relates to China, pretty robust, absolutely. And China, needless to say, relations with China is a very, very big issue for all of the parties, and they are the most critical of China. There are two opposition, main opposition

• 58:39Alastair Campbell?

  parties, the Kuomintang, Kuomintang KMT Party and the TPP, the Taiwan's People Party. There was a talk at one point of them coming together. That hasn't happened, which is probably to the advantage of the incumbent. But it's, you know, it's reasonably close. The leaders about, at the moment, it's 38 to 31, DPP 38, KMT's on just over 30, and the TPP on sort of 14, 15. The line that is sort of... Put out there the whole time is that the other main candidate in this election is China. That is the debate. They're amazing campaigns. You you mentioned music in relation to Congo. And Congo, by the way, you know, we we talk sometimes about the importance or lack of importance of celebrities in our elections.

• 59:24Alastair Campbell?

  The parties really fight in Congo to get the top musicians out backing them. And it was interesting how many of the really big guys just did not want to get involved. And likewise, if you want to see some really colorful, lively election rallies, just Google Taiwan election campaigns. There's a lot of, they're very, very lively, very, very vibrant. But this is going to be a big, big election for, because the the others are a bit softer towards China.

• 59:48Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly. Just just to come in on that. So the opposition, the main opposition party, the Kuomintang, was the party that ruled effectively a one-party state in Taiwan.

• 59:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 59:57Rory Stewart?

  And they were the party that ruled China under Chiang Kai-shek. Until he was booted out by the communists in the 1940s. And took his government with him to this large offshore island, Taiwan. And continued Taiwan continued to hold the seat of China at the UN till 1971. So the Republic of China, this Chiang Kai-shek set up, continued to claim to be the government of China. It would be a bit as though, um, let's say Ashraf Ghani's government in Afghanistan, instead of being completely kicked out by the Taliban, had retreated to a small enclave in the northern mountains and continued for nearly 30 years to claim to be the government of Afghanistan when the Taliban was effectively ruling the whole of the rest of the country.

• 1:00:38Alastair Campbell?

  It it is an amazing success story on one level. Absolutely extraordinary.

• 1:00:42Rory Stewart?

  It is absolutely incredible. And the odd thing about Taiwan, which is difficult to communicate, is that it's not, it it's never declared full independence.

• 1:00:51Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:51Rory Stewart?

  And there is a one-China policy. So the UN went from recognizing the Republic of China, recognizing the Taiwan government as the government of China in 1971, to recognizing the People Republic of China, the communist China, in 1971. And in this debate between the Kuomintang, which basically the opposition is saying the best way of preventing a war with China is to go gentle, gentle and go for closer economic and diplomatic ties with China. And they're trying to portray the ruling party, the DPP, as being more aggressive and more likely to lead to a confrontation with China. But neither of them are quite going as far as signalling full independence, and neither

• 1:01:33Rory Stewart?

  of them are prepared to accept the situation that China's suggesting, which is the situation of Hong Kong, which is this one country, two systems idea, which is that you bring Taiwan back into China but leave it a degree of autonomy, because of course, the experience of Hong Kong has been pretty awful. One of the reasons why that idea has been blown up is that since 2019, it's been clear that the People's Republic of China hasn't really honoured giving proper autonomy to Hong Kong, and so people who supported that in Taiwan have been none of mind.

• 1:02:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, so eighty percent of people say they're concerned about the worsening security situation, and that's exacerbated by the fact that China, as the election nears, have been stepping up the number of kind of incursion of flights into Taiwanese airspace and just sort of probing and testing. So the question then is whether if you're more concerned about the security situation, you lean in towards the DPP, who say that requires us to stand firm and be robust, or you lean to a slightly softer position, and that's where the election is being fought. But just to give the Beijing perspective, in common with most world leaders, President Xi Jinping did a New Year's address, and he was pretty clear, "The reunification of

• 1:02:46Alastair Campbell?

  the motherland is a historical inevitability. China will surely be reunified", and citing Wen in her New Year's address, said that "Relations with China have to be decided by the will of the Taiwanese people". Now, the will of the Taiwanese people is going to be expressed on January the 13th, and we should probably come back to it thereafter.

• 1:03:06Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, and the candidate to watch from the opposition is a man called, as you said, Huo Yui, and he was the former police chief for Taiwan, and he's been the mayor of New Taipei. He's seen as a really, mostly seen as an effective, pretty non-political administrator. He's been much less outspoken on the China issue than the candidate from his party that was defeated in the last elections. So we'll see what happens, but this, yes, absolutely, for those of us that are worried about regional politics, this election in Taiwan will have a huge influence on how Xi Jinping reacts to Taiwan over the coming months and years.

• 1:03:43Alastair Campbell?

  Good. We'll talk about that in the near future. Meanwhile, see you tomorrow for question time.

• 1:03:47Rory Stewart?

  See you tomorrow for question time.

• 1:04:04Speaker 04

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 1:04:11Speaker 05

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence, it was Russian.

• 1:04:17Speaker 06

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 1:04:20Speaker 07

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  Mernin, the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself: you want to play, or not?

• 1:04:29Alastair Campbell?

  You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 1:04:36Speaker 04

  We would need to understand the policy context. All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, and disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 1:04:47Speaker 06

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• 1:04:51Speaker 04

  Yes.

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