447. Is Starmer Sleepwalking Britain into Farage’s Hands?

Has Starmer’s reshuffle shifted Labour to the right, and frozen out the left? Will Farage ultimately lose control of Reform UK? Why has the French government collapsed again? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠https://www.fuseenergy.com/politics⁠ ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Senior Producer: Dom Johnson 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.

• 0:00Alastair Campbell?

  We've had a year, Keir's ratings are terrible. There's no real sign of where the change that's going to turn things around is coming from.

• 0:07Rory Stewart?

  It's beginning to remind me a little bit of what I felt in the Conservative Party as the Conservative Party began to collapse. I'd love a reality check from you.

• 0:15Alastair Campbell?

  I think he gets that the small boats issue, Farage on the rampage, that has got to be sorted.

• 0:21Rory Stewart?

  This is a guy who is so far beyond the kind of Britain we want. This is somebody who wants to trash institutions, break international law, expel 600,000 people in contravention of all our international treaties.

• 0:33Alastair Campbell?

  We're on some terrible, inexorable march towards the UK becoming another right-wing populist governed country, which I think will be a disaster. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy.

• 0:46Rory Stewart?

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• 0:56Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:07Rory Stewart?

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• 1:19Alastair Campbell?

  That's less time than it takes for a media organisation to tell you there's breaking news which isn't really breaking news and with an outcome that people might actually welcome.

• 1:29Rory Stewart?

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• 1:38Alastair Campbell?

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• 1:51Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:53Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:06Rory Stewart?

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

• 2:29Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:36Rory 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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• 4:00Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 4:03Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, I'm afraid the Tube strikers somewhat defeated me. I tried all sorts of ways, but in the end it was walking and I was going to be late. So I'm at home and you're in the studio.

• 4:14Rory Stewart?

  It is amazing. For those who weren't out and about in London today, as most of our listeners, I guess, are not London based, it was pretty amazing. There are so many bicycles.

• 4:21Alastair Campbell?

  And bus queues, huge bus queues.

• 4:23Rory Stewart?

  Huge bus queues, but our producer tells us that bikes have overtaken cars to become the most common vehicle in central London. It literally looked like my memory of China in the early 1980s as I was coming through Buckingham Palace. There were just hundreds of bicycles and very few cars. It was in the sunshine. So on a good day, it's a, it's a pretty encouraging thing, but you can't get a Lime bike, which is one of those kind of Boris bike equivalents at the moment.

• 4:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I'm not really a Lime bike kind of guy. And I'm, I'm doing the, um, the awards at UCLH Hospital tonight. And somebody was telling me there's, there's now a thing in A and E called the Lime bike break.

• 4:59Rory Stewart?

  Which is a particular type of injury.

• 5:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, because they're so, they're quite heavy, aren't they? They're quite heavy. And people sort of think they're a nice sort of light Pirello, bladdy, blah. Anyway, Rory, this is not getting to the point about what we're going to talk about, is it? So.

• 5:10Rory Stewart?

  I, I think we, we've got a good, good segue there, haven't we? Because we can go from the nice subject of, of Tube strikes, which is Tube drivers requesting fewer hours and requesting that they manage to get much reduced travel for vacation with their families on trains to the subject of Labour reform and what's going on in British politics at the moment. And I'm just going to set up the thing just to remind people where we are. So the latest Ipsos poll shows Reform now at 34%. Labour, this is June 2025, was at 25%, but now many polls are showing Labour down at 20%, with potentially Corbyn taking 5%, bringing them down to 15, and the Conservatives down at 15%. So we are in a very, very different world, a completely radically different world from obviously 2019, where Boris Johnson and the Conservatives won this extraordinary majority, very different world from last year where Labour won this big majority.

• 6:06Rory Stewart?

  Into a world where the Conservatives certainly seem on the verge of extinction and Labour seems to put it mildly in trouble. Over to you.

• 6:12Alastair Campbell?

  There's no doubt about that. I mean, you know, I think you and I are both of the view that Farage's reform is a classic right wing populist party. Wouldn't be serious as government, but the fact that we're even talking about it shows that something quite strange is going on. The fact that they've only, literally only got four MPs and yet nobody talks about Kenny Badenoch remotely having a chance of getting to number 10. And of course then throw into the mix Angela Rayner's resignation, which we talked about in the the podcast we did immediately on the back of her resignation on Friday. A deputy leadership contest, which is now shaping up, where you sense that the party machine is kind of hoping that

• 6:53Alastair Campbell?

  there's not going to be, there's not going to be too many candidates who get above the ATMP and a couple of affiliates and trade unions threshold. I see Bridget Phillips is the latest name that's being put into the mix. And meanwhile, a sense in politics, not just in the UK, but right around Europe, we're going to talk about France later. France is kind of imploding. The AFD in Germany are probably going to win the next big regional election that's coming up there in just under a year. And so this is kind of big, big political churn. Just drop into the fact we had the Norwegian Prime Minister on recently on leading. He actually upped his vote. No doubt it was our podcast that sort of just got him up to that level, Rory, but

• 7:35Alastair Campbell?

  so it's not all kind of one way, but of course Norway is a very, very different country because it's so wealthy. And I think what we're seeing is a consequence of the post-COVID energy prices, post-Ukraine, and basically anybody in government right now is finding it very, very, very tough. Question is, does the reshuffle make any difference? I mean, you and I talked a little bit about that. What's your final? I felt watching the reshuffle as it unfolded, we were kind of half, it was just beginning when we were talking the other day. It did remind me a little bit of your book of this sense of there's David Lammy has just got on top of the foreign policy brief in a year and now he's moved on. Peter Kyle strikes me as whatever we think of the decisions he's made, he really kind of knows that world

• 8:19Alastair Campbell?

  of big tech and he's really got into it. Pat McFadden has really got a grip of the kind of white machinery and then they move.

• 8:27Rory Stewart?

  Well, exactly. So as you say, that's what a lot of politics on the edge is trying to express, how strange it is. So you think about what it is to be David Lammy. He was the shadow foreign secretary. So he spent a lot of time getting to know issues, getting to know world leaders, building up his own team of people who shared his foreign policy vision. And he got himself in a situation where he managed to build, for example, a relationship with J D Vance enough for J D Vance to come and stay with him when he was in the Cots world, pretty unique thing. He worked his way slowly towards a position on Gaza and Palestine, a difficult negotiation with the party, civil servants coming on board and all of them thinking, okay, this is the guy who may be there to stay. And of course, different people around the world developing those relationships, particularly

• 9:12Rory Stewart?

  important, for example, in places like the Gulf where because they're monarchies, there's much more continuity. But it's true in Africa too. I was the Africa minister. Many, many of the leaders in Africa have been in there for a very long time. I really felt when I was lucky enough to, as a foreign office minister, to meet someone two or three times, that was completely different from the first time that you met them. So all of that's baked into what David Lammy had been doing. And now he's gone. And now a completely new person comes in and takes over the job. And this has been repeated structurally right the way across government because it's, I don't know whether the analogy is with a poker hand, but traditionally you would have thought that you want to be decisive. You either want to fold or you want to raise, right? In other words, you either want to be making a dynamic

• 9:56Rory Stewart?

  decision to promote people, you want to fire them. What's actually happened in this reshuffle is it's quite genuinely a re reshuffle. I mean, all that's happening, or a lot of what's happening is only two cabinet ministers were fired and they were not in key positions, Lucy Powell and Ian Murray. And Ian Murray's doing quite a good job, but anyway, for some reason, they went.

• 10:17Alastair Campbell?

  Ian Murray's now come back though in two different minister of state jobs.

• 10:20Rory Stewart?

  That's right, come back in a different minister. Okay, so only Lucy Powell actually lost her job. And so ten cabinet ministers were kept in the cabinet, but just changed their position around the cabinet table, given a different department. And the same with twenty junior ministers. The the problem is that civil servants are faced with a problem. A minister comes in and the best of them obviously wants to come in with ideas, with a programme, with change. Often the departments they're taking over are in real trouble. And so they want to communicate to the civil servants, we're going to be radical, we're going to go out and communicate. You know, I'm going to resign unless I get this done, or these are the three main objectives,

• 11:03Rory Stewart?

  or this is where my predecessor was wrong. And the civil servants are going to think now, well, okay, all very well. But if we go right out on a limb here and do something very radical, how long are you going to be around?

• 11:12Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 11:13Rory Stewart?

  And we talked about this for the election, because of course the fundamental criticism of the Conservatives is, as you kept pointing out, they'd had fourteen housing ministers in twelve years, you know, twelve defence ministers in thirteen years, you know, whatever it was, ten prisons ministers in eleven. And we said, I think, we were hoping Keir Starmer would say before the election, I will make sure that all my ministers are in position for a minimum of two years unless there's a scandal. And that was the sort of culture of the whole thing, and it hasn't happened yet.

• 11:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, you see, I I think what Angela Rayner's resignation did was make Keir Starmer bring forward a reshuffle, which she then made, I think, even bigger. But what it doesn't really do is signal much change. Other than this, I I think the thing that he wanted to do, I think he gets that the small boats issue, Farage on the rampage, immigration, much bigger within the debate than maybe it was two years ago, just after Boris Johnson presided over a record immigration post Brexit. And I think the the the change, it seems to me, within this reshuffle that he really wanted to make, was to put Shabana Mahmood as Home Secretary, who's already projecting herself, both in rhetoric and some of the policy statements that she's making, as if you like, being very much on the tough end of the market.

• 12:24Alastair Campbell?

  And she's going to be, and that's kind of her reputation, the way that she projects herself and so forth. Now, there is a part of me that that thinks that that's fine, but then. At the same time, is that a judgment on Yvette Cooper? If it's a judgment on Yvette Cooper not having done what he wanted to do, not having achieved in the way, even though I think actually she did some pretty good things. You talked about some of the changes she's made, some of the relationships she'd made, for example, with the French. Anyway, so he doesn't sack her. He makes her Foreign Secretary. Brackets, by the way, I think it's the first time in history, all three of the so-called great officers of state are occupied by women. And I've got Rachel Reeves, who is staying, Yvette Cooper and Shabana Mahmood.

• 13:05Alastair Campbell?

  And meanwhile, that meant, okay, what do David Lammy, well, David Lammy Justice is sort of, you know, difficult job, prison's probation, it's partly his background, it's where he comes from.

• 13:15Rory Stewart?

  I interrupt for a second though, Alice, that instead of making Yvette Cooper Foreign Secretary, one option, as you say, would have been to say, I'm going to fire her.

• 13:24Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Rory Stewart?

  And the second option would have been just to do a simple swap and say, I'll make her Lord Chancellor, Secretary of State for Justice, I'll just do a job swap with Shabana Mahmood and leave everybody else in place. I mean, what's so weird about what you seem to be describing is that the desire to make Shabana Mahmood Home Secretary suddenly leads to reshuffling 10 other people around the cabinet table, rather than doing the simpler thing.

• 13:45Alastair Campbell?

  But that's, that's how it works. I mean, you know, I've often just, reshuffles are a nightmare. And I wouldn't have said they're like sort of, they're like jigsaws where you just move one piece out. And if you get the wrong piece in place, then everything else falls apart.

• 13:56Rory Stewart?

  So why wouldn't he do the two other things? So let's just lean into the two other options. Why would he not just fire Yvette Cooper? Presumably she doesn't have a huge, massive base of people in the Labour Party that are going to go to battle with it. She's a respected figure, but she's not somebody who's going to lead an insurrection against him.

• 14:13Alastair Campbell?

  No, but I, you know, talking to a few people over the, over the weekend, you know, Keir's not exactly beloved by the PLP. So he probably is a part of him thinking, I can't have too many enemies out there. But then the thing with Dave Lammy, of course, is David Lammy then is made. Deputy Prime Minister as well. Now that's then going to play into, and you know, I said on the, the, the episode we did on Friday, if I were Keir, I would not commit to the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party becoming Deputy Prime Minister. So I think that was him thinking, I've got to have somebody in place who is not going to be running for Deputy Leadership, and they're going to stay as Deputy Prime Minister, because the leadership contest is, seems to me is, is, is, this is why they're going to try and keep the debate as short

• 14:56Alastair Campbell?

  as possible. You know, it's tricky for them right now, because there are a lot of people who feel, look, we've had a year, we're still not really feeling that we're, the polls, as you say, are terrible. Keir's ratings are terrible. There's no real sign of where the change that's going to turn things around is coming from. The budget obviously is going to be very difficult. And therefore, it's become not a survival game, but I think part of the thinking is just don't, don't make it too difficult. So he's, he's put Shabana in there, she'll become a very high profile figure very, very quickly because of the salience of the issue and because of the way that she projects herself. And the other thing that's done though, is it means that they really now do have to crack that. That has got to

• 15:38Alastair Campbell?

  be sorted. And if you talk to any of them, both Tory and Labour who've had to deal with this, the one thing they recognise is it's very, very difficult. And that's why Farage standing up and saying, I'll sort it in two weeks is sort of classic Trumpism.

• 15:51Rory Stewart?

  Just a little one on from talking to friends of mine who are Labour MPs, some of whom have, have got ministerial jobs in the reshuffle, some of whom didn't. And I'd, I'd love a reality check from you, because you know the party much better. So the, the overview that I was given is firstly, astonishing, 23 new MPs have now got jobs. Incredible. I mean, when I was in the Cameron government, not a single one of the new intake got a job for at least two years. We all had to serve our apprenticeship on the back benches. Secondly, a real sense that there's a massive reward for ultra loyalists, and particularly young ultra loyalists. So the entire Whip's office, with the exception of someone called Christian Wakefield, now seems to be manned by new MPs who are considered loyal to Starmer, including

• 16:32Rory Stewart?

  Morgan McSweeney's wife. The other thing is that it's quite striking that the, what's called the soft left, but it's based Basically, a word for people who consider a little bit more left wing than Starmer, a little bit more progressive than Starmer. And in particular, people who expressed anxiety about his welfare cuts seem to have been frozen out. Either fired, so losing Janet Darby, Catherine West, Flora Anderson, or overlooked. For example, Helen Hayes, Ruth Cradbury, Annalise Dodds, maybe a bit different because she resigned, who people might have hoped might have been promoted. And that possibly Justin Madda, Lucy Powell, who went out again, has sort of seen more on the soft left side.

• 17:13Rory Stewart?

  So the story there that I was getting from an MP yesterday is that this is about tightening up the Whip's operation. And Morgan McSweeney saying, we're going to have an almighty battle about welfare. I want to make sure that every minister is happy with us to push through with welfare cuts. And anyone who's a bit wobbly is going to be pushed out or not promoted. Is that an overstatement?

• 17:32Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, probably not, no. But I think also it's not necessarily a recipe for bringing the PLP together. You know, you get away with a lot if you're number 10. If the PLP and the public think, well, we may not like them very much, but bloody hell, they're good at what they do. That's not the feeling they've got right now. The feeling is that nothing much seems to go the way that we'd really like it to. And I think this is leading to the debate that the many within the Labour Party clearly want to have across this deputy leadership election about, you know, are we actually going in the right direction? What is the clarity of direction? So this, I think, is a very, very tricky moment.

• 18:13Alastair Campbell?

  I think that if the, I think the combination of the Labour Conference and the budget are fundamental now to whether the government can actually get back on track or whether we're on some terrible inexorable march towards the UK becoming another kind of right wing populist governed country, which I think would be a disaster.

• 18:32Rory Stewart?

  Yes, absolutely. And that's, of course, one of the reasons why I keep thinking that it's actually in France's and the EU's interest to work to sort out small boats of migration, because I don't think it's in the EU's interest to have Nigel Farage as the Prime Minister of Britain. On the Labour Party, what it feels like to me in the worst case scenario is it's beginning to remind me a little bit of what I felt in the Conservative Party. As the Conservative Party began to collapse. So of course, what I saw from the early Cameron days is these figures who are now popping up in Reform. So it began with Tory MPs, a guy called Douglas Carswell, who defected. We've just seen Nadine Doris, who was the Cabinet Minister under Boris Johnson, has now appeared as this Reform on the stage, Adam Holloway.

• 19:16Rory Stewart?

  These were all people who, in the early days of the Cameron government and through 2015, were sort of disgruntled rebels, who felt that the Prime Minister was bringing in too many bright young things who were sort of part of his Cameron coalition, and they weren't respecting traditional Conservatives. So it's a sort of mirror image of people on the soft left of the Labour Party, saying Starmer's bringing in bright young things and is ignoring the left-wing heritage of the Labour Party. And the result of that, basically, is now that Reform has absorbed a huge number of those voters and a lot of those people. If you've seen Nadine Doris in the Reform Conference, she begins by saying, "Thank goodness I'm here. At last I feel at ease. At last I'm in a room with people who I feel understand

• 20:01Rory Stewart?

  me", which she felt that she wasn't getting in the Conservative Party. I wonder whether that isn't one of the tensions here, which is that either with the deputy leader election might produce somebody more from the soft left, a sort of anti-Starmer figure, or maybe in six months' time or nine months' time, Angela Rayner becomes the kind of leader of a sort of soft-left opposition towards Starmer from the back benches, and that the direction of that is to split the party. Now, it may not go as far as eventually them popping up on a stage with Jeremy Corbyn, because I think Corbyn is not as nimble an operator as Farage, but is it some of the same tension, or am I overdoing that?

• 20:39Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that we had, you and I didn't go to the Reform Conference, and my newspaper, The New World, had all its credentials withdrawn at the last minute, so much for free speech. But we did have one of our producers go, our social media producer, Celine, who-

• 20:54Rory Stewart?

  From the Rest of His Politics.

• 20:56Alastair Campbell?

  From the Rest of His Politics, yeah. And sent back some very kind of interesting insights. It was clearly very well organised as a sort of show, and of course, that's sort of what Farage is good at, we know that. But I think it was interesting reading some of the vox pops that she was doing. There was a very different collection of people who were going there. And I think what both the main parties are struggling with is that they're they're sort of losing their own sense of identity and that's sort of eating into what sort of people are prepared to back them. And I think a lot of this is about the working class. So, you know, what we call the working class, traditional white working class people

• 21:38Alastair Campbell?

  who do seem to be disproportionately amongst the groups that are moving towards reform. And I think that's a consequence of them feeling that kind of, you know, yeah, things are probably better under Labour, but did my life really change fundamentally? And then there was terrible under the Tories. Give it a go. Give, let's just blow the whole system up and give him a go. And I don't know if you had time to read it, Roy, but I sent you a report which I think relates to this, which is about, it's written within the Education Department, and it's been doing the rounds about the success or lack of, we should say, within the education system of white working class pupils who are substantially now behind Chinese pupils, black pupils, both in terms of their exam qualifications

• 22:21Alastair Campbell?

  and also, you know, getting into university and so forth. And this paper, you know, it doesn't sort of pull its punches in terms of what it calls performative accountability, sort of sees the Ofsted system as basically supporting those schools that are that are that are doing well already, as opposed to actually sort of looking across the piece. And and also the the the feeling that white working class kids are genuinely being let down and left behind. And that's what reform kind of trapping into.

• 22:51Rory Stewart?

  Let's take a second on this, but and maybe loop back to the Reform Conference after we've we've looked at this, because you're completely right, that they're at the heart of politics in Europe is this question of where working class votes go. And what we've seen in France is that the traditional Socialist Party dipping down below 10%, in Germany, the SPD, again, the traditional most successful left wing party in in Europe, in a very, very weak position, and Labour now hovering at about this, I don't know. Twenty percent level and a lot of these votes in all these countries in East Germany, going to the AFD, in France, going to Le Pen and in Britain, going to Reform. Your, your paper is, is amazing. I think there's two different things. I think there's the, the description of the problem.

• 23:36Rory Stewart?

  And then there's the solution that your friend proposes in the paper. So description of problem, as you say, is that white working class kids on free school meals are twenty three months behind the average when they get to secondary school. Whereas children from Chinese ethnicities are twenty seven months ahead. So twenty three months behind against twenty seven months ahead. Again, people from ethnic Chinese parentage, seventy two percent of them go on to university. Whereas only thirty three percent of poor white working class kids go on to university. And in terms of the key achievements, what used to be the A to C in maths and English.

• 24:15Rory Stewart?

  White working class kids, only eighteen point six percent of them are meeting the basic standards in maths and English. Compared to if you take white children in general, it's sort of up at seventy five, seventy six percent.

• 24:28Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Rory Stewart?

  So that's the problem. In terms of solutions, um, look, that, that's really difficult. And I think one of the big questions is really understanding how success happened in London. I mean, if you'd gone back to when you were in office, people were very concerned about London, two thousand two, two thousand three. And now London actually is looking much better than coastal communities. So immigrant communities in London across the board, including now Bangladeshis, Somalis are massively outperforming white working kids in coastal communities. Although twenty years ago, we would have thought London had bigger problems because these people had English as a second language. They came from very poor backgrounds. The schools were not performing. That's been to a very significant extent turned around, whereas these coastal communities, white communities much struggling.

• 25:12Alastair Campbell?

  I think actually there are lessons to be learned from that because that happened as a result of a, a very direct targeted strategy on that as a specific problem, London schools. And I think the education department, the various ministers really pushed on that and that's had consequences. And I think now we've got to do the same for white working class kids in some of these poor areas. And the point that the paper makes about the system and the Ofsted regime being essentially, you know, not really telling a, a full picture. Is this line that you'll have seen, assist, we've got ninety percent of schools now judged to be good or outstanding. But only forty five percent of children leaving school with a strong pass in English and maths. And of course, the data on this is so, so important. I mean, I've heard you

• 25:55Alastair Campbell?

  quite often, Rory, I know that the former Tory government used to say, well, we've, we've made this massive progress, which you can see in the PISA results. And yet, what this paper reveals is that actually, England rose in the PISA lead tables, but the actual real scores judging the success on maths and English actually fell. Mathematics declined from five hundred and four to four nine two, and reading fell from five oh five to four nine six.

• 26:24Rory Stewart?

  I think that's a bit misleading, though, just on that one.

• 26:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it's misleading both ways, isn't it?

• 26:28Rory Stewart?

  I mean, I, it's an interesting one, but it's been interesting because, because, because what he says is that we went up because we fell less than other countries. But the, the key point is the dates. This is the Covid dates.

• 26:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Rory Stewart?

  So every country in the world fell, and we fell slightly less than other countries. I, I, I think the broad story that England has done much better than Scotland and Wales. And actually, schools in England are much better than they were fifteen years ago. And I think the English and maths results are much better. And I think that's a huge tribute to teachers. And I think the performance of head teachers and performance of teachers has been incredible, particularly in England.

• 27:02Alastair Campbell?

  And also having had to deal with Covid. But the, the, when you, when you go through the, the solutions that are put forward in the paper, one is about funding. Well, that's always going to be very difficult, but it's, it's the targeting of funding. Because of course, the more money you put into these working class schools, the more you're going to take away from the aspirational parents who are going to be shouting a lot louder in complaint, unless you can make the budget bigger. And then you're into debates about tax and all that stuff. I do think the stuff on data is interesting. I thought the issue of teacher recruitment and retention is a real problem. And that, I think, is about making teaching much more attractive, rebuilding the sense that teachers are fundamental to our future. And then on the politics, I think it's really, you know, the, the paper uses

• 27:47Alastair Campbell?

  the phrase, you know, for a Labour government, there should be a moral imperative. So I think this does relate to the sort of debate that we're having about the post-reiner deputy leadership Labour Party. Are we going to be much more focused on these kind of issues? And if so, I was very pleased to see Philip Gould's daughter, Georgia, she's now in a Schools Minister, which is, you know, I'm very, very pleased about that.

• 28:09Rory Stewart?

  I said she's been been been in Parliament for about a year and a half already, well on to her second senior job.

• 28:15Alastair Campbell?

  She's bloody good though, Rory. She was a bloody good council leader. So that's not a bad, it's not a bad start.

• 28:20Rory Stewart?

  I I have indeed done stuff with, I'm very impressed by her. Um, just on the, on this thing on schools, because it it is so important for everything. And again, we can have a bigger discussion about this, because maybe it's a policy area that many, many people care about. And we've all been to school and many of us have kids in school. I think in, at the bottom of it is a, a decision that Bridget Phillips has to make, which is, is she going to be convinced that the fundamental problem, and that the paper slightly puts the emphasis on this, is Ofsted and the fact that the curriculum is a little bit old fashioned and too focused on maths and English, and go down the route of we want to change the Ofsted standards, change the curriculum? Or is she going to do what my instincts would suggest are actually

• 29:01Rory Stewart?

  better, which is to learn from the success of London and lean into supporting teachers properly, working out how to recruit them, focusing on things like home school engagement? I mean, a lot of the issues are around what's happening at home. And this is very multi-agency stuff, but a lot of these very deprived communities, there is a problem with school attendance, a problem with homework, and how you escalate back and how the school tracks those things. Just to sort of reinforce, I mean, I think it's also true that teachers feel understandably that their lives are unbelievably stressful. They are very underpaid. They're very underappreciated. But again, I was talking to an educational specialist

• 29:46Rory Stewart?

  this morning who said, and they've been going in and out of schools now for 30 years, just how good English schools are compared to international comparators now.

• 29:54Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 29:55Rory Stewart?

  For example, i- if you were in the US, a lot of the schools, if you go to a school in Harlem at the moment, basically it's not functioning. It's the discipline problems are so out of control in a classroom that the teachers are basically sitting there hoping that people aren't going to wallop each other. That that's not really a problem in English schools. In in in English schools, it's more that if you're in deprived coastal community, the school is just providing so many of the things that the rest of society can't provide. It's having to provide mental health care, it's having to provide trips, it's having, and and a lot of those things are a bit easier in London because there's just more resources around.

• 30:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I just want to read this one. Paragraph that that leaped out at me, of course, remember, we, the reason I think it's important to talk about this at the moment is because the the school's white paper is is due fairly soon. And there's this paragraph, in the white working class communities of England, this crisis, this is the crisis of underachievement, is most acutely felt. These are the pupils for whom no tailored initiative exists, no ring fence funding is allocated, no national conversation is convened. They are the statistical footnote of a system that has become more interested in self-congratulation than self-correction. Their low performance is rationalised as inevitable, their underachievement pathologised rather than understood.

• 31:14Alastair Campbell?

  Now, this is somebody, this is somebody who's worked outside the system and is now inside the system. So I, listen, I, I really, I thought it was a very interesting paper, and I think it's, I hope it does inform the the school's white paper, because I think that the debate on education is so dominated by, if you like, the aspirational middle class, and what we're seeing is a large numbers of kids who have, you know, have been failed and and they've got to be, they've got to be helped.

• 31:39Rory Stewart?

  Final one for me then, just as we promised to get back to the the Reform Reform Conference to kind of tie off this issue. I was talking to Danny Finkelstein yesterday, he's the the Conservative peer and a Times journalist. He was very interesting, I think, on trying to understand what it would take for Farage to come unstuck. And he was pointing out that a lot of the attack lines against Nigel Farage, mounted by journalists and other parties, are not working. The attack lines which aren't working are ones which say, he's just a one man band, he hasn't got experience. But Danny's instinct is, and I'd be interested to what you thought about this, that actually

• 32:19Rory Stewart?

  the more productive criticism of Farage would be to start saying, this guy isn't in control of his own party. And as you get closer to the election, pointing out how the online right is trying to tear parts of the party, that you're getting these anti-vaxxers appearing, that he's, at the conference, you had someone standing up saying, you know, the royal family were getting cancer because of Covid vaccines. The sort of, the kind of British equivalent to the MAGA right, the people who, when they hear Lucy Connelly speak at the conference, don't just think, well, she committed a crime, but maybe the sentence was excessive, but people who are genuinely applauding her for what she said, and that that's going to be his Achilles' heel.

• 33:00Rory Stewart?

  Whether or not he can actually become a mainstream party, or whether he's in the end going to be taken down by these endless splits towards the kind of maga right.

• 33:09Alastair Campbell?

  Interesting, because when he did the sort of final rallying cry at the end of the conference, his message within that was very much, you know, disciplined, we have to be disciplined. Now, his track record, of course, within all the parties he's been involved in, lead, Rob, is that he's not very good at holding teams together. And we've even seen that within the very small number of MPs he got, that Rupert Lowe's off to, you know, he's quit, he's gone further right. I don't know, I need to think about that. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sure. I agree that none of the attacks so far have brought him down. Part of this is about our bloody media. I mean, there's Angela Rayner, I guess, every single front page in the country going after her, day after day, after

• 33:52Alastair Campbell?

  day, after day. Similar story about Nigel Farage's tax and housing arrangements. The Daily Mirror banged away about it, but that's pretty much about it. There is that problem. But as you've said before, it's not enough just to sort of say, oh, the press are a bit biased towards him, which at the moment they are. I think I'd say two things. One, I've said a million times before, and I'll keep saying it. He should never be allowed to forget that he was a big part of Brexit, and Brexit's been bad for the country, bad for the economy, bad for people in these working class areas. That's the first thing. I think the second thing, and I've been in two minds about this until now, I think actually the idea of him as prime minister, which he will welcome on one hand as saying,

• 34:34Alastair Campbell?

  well, that normalises and that makes it a sort of self fulfilling prophecy. But actually building a debate about what sort of values and sort of person do we want leading the country, related to what sort of country do we really want to be. In other words, take it to a much bigger argument than the sort of tactics of can he hold his party together, et cetera, et cetera.

• 34:56Rory Stewart?

  Just to understand, so what you're saying there is maybe saying, listen, this is a guy who is so far beyond the kind of Britain we want. This is somebody who wants to trash institutions, close the BBC, break international law, expel 600,000 people in contravention of all our international treaties, really pin on him that this is not what we want, that yes, Britain wants reform. But it doesn't want that kind of stuff.

• 35:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well, of course, the word reform, by the way, which is why it was such a clever name for them. You just said there, you just said three words. They could, they could clip that, they could clip that now, Rory, and they could put it on social media. Say even that wet woke liberal Rory Stewart says Britain needs reform. They all do it. All the politicians do it, you know. Of course, we need to change things. Of course, we need to shake things up. They've got to change the language. That's partly what I'm saying, but I'm also saying that in a way. And they will say this is project fear, but he has to be built up as a threat to the things that we actually hold dear. I think the health service is obviously a really big one. I think pensions are another. I mean, they've, they spray out these promises. This is what the populists do.

• 36:04Alastair Campbell?

  They spray out these promises without remotely costing them. Labour's and the Tories have just got to be tracking this and tracking this and tracking this. So that eventually you get to a place where what he's promising will actually destroy the country as opposed to build it up. But it's going to be tough.

• 36:20Rory Stewart?

  Look, there's something really interesting here, which I think you've just pointed out, which of course I didn't get to. Which is what you've just said is, listen, Rory, don't, don't say he's a threat because he's threatening the BBC and the international legal order. Say he's a threat because he's going after the NHS and pensions.

• 36:37Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. I also do think, and I know it's difficult for the government to do this because of the, you know, you were talking about Lammy Vance and Starmer Trump. It's difficult to do this, but actually I think Trump should be a massive negative for Farage. You have to find ways of, you have to find ways of, of, of making that damage him politically without damaging the government. And that's tricky. One other, maybe the final name should mention in the reshuffle, Mike Tap, the Dover MP. We've mentioned him a couple of times on the podcast because at least I've got a sense of him only on social media because he's not really. Thus far been somebody that gets too much coverage on the mainstream media. But I've got a sense there of somebody who gets how bad the problem is, gets how deep the challenge is, but has really sort of worked out.

• 37:22Alastair Campbell?

  You don't, you don't take on Farage by pandering to Farage, you take on Farage by going for Farage. But listen, there's no doubt their, their conference was by their standards successful. I've got to say, Rory, I hate calling out the BBC, but Chris Mason's, Chris Mason's piece on the website, the BBC website, I mean, it could have been written by Nigel Farage's press office, honestly, get a grip. And, and let me say this as well, Rory, that this, we'll, we'll talk about Trump a bit in, in question time. We should put in the newsletter, this brilliant 10, 12 minute thing that the, I think we call him a philosopher. He's like a public intellectual, he's what you want to be, that's this guy Vlad Wexler, who does these really interesting kind of, sometimes quite strange pieces to camera.

• 38:06Alastair Campbell?

  But he did an absolutely brilliant one yesterday where Donald Trump, this was on the back of the Ukrainian government building getting hit, okay? And he's doing one of his little pool sprays and the, and the end, the, one of the journalists shouts out, will you go for the second phase of sanctions now? And Trump starts to walk away from the camera and sort of goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Lead story at the BBC News at 10 o'clock, Donald Trump is considering imposing secondary sanctions on Russian, on Vladimir Putin as a result of blah, blah. When you saw the clip, he did no such thing. And Vlad calls this Trump sane washing. And I think we've got to just, you know, you've got to, we've got to be communicating

• 38:50Alastair Campbell?

  the context of these guys, these post-truth populists like Trump and Farage, context is all, but in their world, where they can post a clip, I can't wait to see it, Rory, Britain leads reforms, says Rory Stewart, with the blue and red behind you there, oh God, I think we should take a break. Into our break then.

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• 41:36Rory Stewart?

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

• 41:39Alastair Campbell?

  And with me Alastair Campbell and yeah, France Rory.

• 41:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, bit of a crisis. I go, I go back to your reaction when my friend Emmanuel Macron, as you always call him, when Emmanuel Macron called his snap election, as you basically said, it was madness. So now here we are with the fifth prime minister in less than two years, because François Bérou, he did something similar to Macron. He basically committed Harry Carey. He said, I'm right. Okay. If you don't like my budget and you don't like the 44 billion euros of cuts and you don't like the fact that I'm forcing you, the country to face up to this debt crisis, you can put it all on me. Vote of confidence, bring it on. And he's lost it.

• 42:24Rory Stewart?

  Yes, it's a very sort of strange technique in politics, isn't it, that we're seeing in French politics. I suppose it's tempting. The, the, the risk is that what it is, is politicians sort of get on a moral high horse, set themselves up as I, maybe, you know, I, I was guilty of doing this occasionally myself as a politician, where you sort of say, I'm going to speak truth and bug the consequences and then end up imploding your career and going down as having spoken truth, but not got much done. I, I was watching Behul do an interview in about 10 days ago now. I'm very struck by the communication style. He speaks unbelievably slowly, so much so that even somebody with my primitive French can follow him very, very easily. He's like, c'est clarification,

• 43:07Rory Stewart?

  c'est argent. I mean, it's very, very sort of grand.

• 43:11Alastair Campbell?

  What was that first bit?

• 43:12Rory Stewart?

  It's a clarification?

• 43:14Alastair Campbell?

  No, he didn't. He didn't. That, that was grammatically horrible Rory. You didn't say that.

• 43:18Rory Stewart?

  Okay. He didn't say that. All right. I'll, I'll test, I'll get the reference for you. We'll, we'll have it, we'll have it out on the next podcast.

• 43:25Alastair Campbell?

  But I've got to say, I, I saw his speech yesterday. I watched, I watched his speech in the parliament. It was actually in, as a, as a sort of setting the, the facts of what is happening to the French economy. It was a very well put together speech. The trouble is that the politics... I'm just not ready to hear it. And he went down by three hundred and sixty votes to one hundred and ninety four, both left and right against him, him sort of now sort of stuck in the middle. Even some of his own MPs were not with him. Are you giving me a French lesson?

• 43:54Rory Stewart?

  Incentive, you're completely right. What he said is c'est un moment de clarification et de vérité.

• 43:59Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He wouldn't have said it is clarification. I mean, that is just nonsense.

• 44:05Rory Stewart?

  Just to step back for people who aren't in the absolute weeds of French politics, that the big story here is that France is facing a debt crisis. So its debt to GDP ratio is now up at about one hundred and fourteen percent, and it's running a deficit of five point six percent a year. That's almost twice what it's supposed to run. Europe's trying to hold it at three percent. And Berhug, who's just stepped down, was trying to do something pretty modest. Forty four billion of cuts sounds like a lot, but that was just designed to bring it down from about five point six percent down to four point six percent, I think, of the deficit. And this is a real problem because France is the second largest economy in Europe. It's the nuclear power. And as we keep pointing out, Macron is trying

• 44:50Rory Stewart?

  to really pose on the world stage as the guy that's going to fix Ukraine, get Trump on cybersecurity guarantees, reimagine security cooperation, leading on the recognition of Palestine, et cetera. Whereas it's in danger of becoming pretty much one of the six countries of Europe. I mean, if you go back a few years, the story was broadly speaking, Italy, Greece were the countries you were worried about. And France was in a completely different category if you looked at its, you know, bond prices, for example. If you now look at French bond spreads against Germany, it's now looking much more like Italy. And in fact, Maloney's Italy seems to be going in a much more positive direction than France. And just to sort of put the boot in again, because I obviously have a complete campaign

• 45:35Rory Stewart?

  against Emmanuel Macron, anyone who's part of his team, it's his fault, right? The guy's been in power for seven years. And one of the big problems he's got is not around spending, it's his unfunded tax cuts, both from his first year in office. And what he did a year and a half, two years ago. If you look at the French accounts, the problem isn't the spending, which has been relatively static. It's the tax receipts. He kept promising growth that was never coming. He did a sort of Liz Truss. I'll cut the taxes, we'll have fantastic growth. Surprise, surprise, the growth hasn't come and the by cutting taxes, he's not getting his tax receipts in. So somewhere at the heart of this whole thing is is the centrist Wunderkind is actually responsible for a lot of the mess which he's complaining about.

• 46:17Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, certainly the politics of this got started to get really difficult for Macron in in the first term when he was giving these big tax breaks to the rich and his argument, sort of traditional right wing argument that, you know, by doing that will unleash entrepreneurs entrepreneurs to sort of succeed and the economy will pick up. That led in part to the whole Gilets Jaunes moment, which was very, very tricky for his first term. The hard left are trying this sort of, they call it bloc en tout, block everything, which sort of is a kind of fancy way of saying, don't go to work, do a bit of protest, you know, it's not quite saying a general strike, but there we'll see how that goes. That's happening on on Wednesday.

• 46:59Rory Stewart?

  And that's that's an amazing online thing too, isn't it? Because one of the the trends in French politics, we talk about a lot about social media, but in France, there seems to be a very, very strong online right wing presence and then a very, very strong, this bloc en tout is also very much an online sort of grassroots organized stuff.

• 47:17Alastair Campbell?

  I was talking to somebody, this this relates back to what we talked about in the first half and and the rise of reform. I was talking to somebody who works in this area of monitoring and trying to counter narratives on on social media. And he was saying that both in relation to what we've seen recently about flags and in relation to this bloc en tout in France, that well, the Russians don't necessarily start this stuff. They don't say, let's sit down and work out how do we make life difficult for Macron. Oh, let's have a sort of general strike, get that going. They see where stuff starts, like the flags thing, probably was somebody just saying, you know, wave the flag. And then they absolutely flood the space to try to sort of promote the messaging and and make it difficult. So

• 48:00Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know whether that's what's going on in in France, but I wouldn't be surprised because nobody's kind of owning this campaign. It's just sort of, it's morph, it's sort of just morphing. I've just been looking, Rory, at this, um, this graph. Call me sad, but it's a graph that matches Keir Starmer's ratings alongside Emmanuel Macron's. Macron had a very similar, if you see it there, he had a very similar slide to Starmer, and then of course went back up, sufficient to win the second term. And now he's gone straight back down again. If I was Keir Starmer looking at that, I'd say, well, it shows you can recover, but

• 48:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 48:35Alastair Campbell?

  maintainy recovery is very, very, very difficult. There was a thing in The Guardian today of all the, the major leaders of the world, they're all polling pretty badly at the moment. Even Mark Carney started to drop a bit. He's still doing pretty well, but he's dropped a bit.

• 48:46Rory Stewart?

  Just to wrap it off by coming back to your, your friend and this leading interview that we did on with the Norwegian Prime Minister, which I loved. And if people haven't listened to, I'll just get into. Norway results are really interesting because they're unusually, the left is holding, his coalition is holding. You know, he had, they had forty nine seats in twenty seventeen, forty eight seats in twenty twenty one, fifty three seats now. So they've remained pretty static. The story in Norway is the complete collapse of the traditional conservatives and the rise of this party called Progress, which is out on their right. Conservatives down from forty five in twenty seventeen to twenty four now, whereas Progress has reversed that, gone from twenty seven up.

• 49:25Alastair Campbell?

  Jonas Garstor has said that their right wing populist party is nothing like Le Pen, nothing like AFD, nothing like, really like Farage. It's what you would probably have seen in your day as, as, as kind of the right of the Conservative Party that you were part of. Nothing, it's not as bad as what we've seen.

• 49:41Rory Stewart?

  It's still interesting because it's, it's the, it's the fracturing of the right, isn't it? The traditional Conservative Party has basically collapsed.

• 49:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Rory Stewart?

  And this has taken a lot of their votes. And the centre has also collapsed. I mean, the centre in twenty twenty one had twenty eight seats, now down to nine seats. So I think this story that we're seeing repeated in many, many countries, holds true in Norway in terms of the splitting of the right, the collapse of the centre and polarisation, the difference in Norway, and maybe to some extent with Canada and Australia, is that there is still seems to be some space, particularly if economies are going reasonably well. For credible centrist left leaders, these Albanese, Carney, Guster type. Looking forward very much talking to Question Time tomorrow. We've got some great stuff to do on what Trump's been up to. Remind people where we are there.

• 50:30Rory Stewart?

  Some very, very interesting conversation around the tragedy unfolding in Haiti, which you wanted to raise.

• 50:38Alastair Campbell?

  I think we should talk about this. We've got quite a lot of questions last week about this Green Party leader, Zach Polanski, and whether he's a risk to Starmer or to Corbyn or to the Lib Dems or to all of the above.

• 50:49Rory Stewart?

  Okay, look forward to that tomorrow.

• 50:57Speaker 05

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