320. Labour’s struggle to define itself, Hezbollah vs. Israel, and understanding Long Covid

Does Starmer’s government lack a strategic vision? Are we on the brink of a wider war in the Middle East? Why has society turned a blind eye to those living with Long Covid? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. TRIP TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy, a green electricity supplier powering homes across the UK. Use referral code POLITICS after sign up for a chance to win tickets to the TRIP O2 Arena show in October. Learn more at getfuse.com/politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! ✅ TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to 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] Assistant Producer: India Dunkley + Becki Hills Video Editor: Josh Smith Social Producer: Jess Kidson Producer: Nicole Maslen + Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  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.

• 1:06Speaker 02

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• 2:08Alastair Campbell?

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

• 2:10Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. And you're at Conference, Liverpool Conference, we love to hear a lot about, where the new Labour Government is in Britain. We're also recording in the middle of Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon, and we'll talk a lot about what's happening in the Middle East. And we're also going to get on to the very serious subject of long Covid. But let's start first with you in Liverpool. How is it?

• 2:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the first thing to say is that they've not been blessed with the weather. It's pretty much, it's not raining right now, but it has been raining an awful lot. And a lot of my best memories of of conferences are of that sort of, you know, warm summary, lots of people outside, sort of chatting. There's very little of that going on. I'd also say that there's a really sort of strange mix of excitement for, as you say, first Labour Prime Minister for a long time, only the fourth in like a century to go from opposition to government with a with a good majority. But that sort of excitement mixed with quite a lot of kind of anxiety, a lot of the business people that you see

• 3:15Alastair Campbell?

  around the place complaining that it's all a bit flat, it doesn't really feel like kind of energised. And I think that's part of this thing of adapting from opposition into government. I think a lot of the kind of teething problems that we've seen are about that, both the government machine and the party sort of adapting to a very, very different way of doing things. And added to which, you know, let's be frank about this, in the run up to the conference, I don't think anybody who was planning this conference would have wanted in the week running up to be talking about Sue Gray's salary and, you know, all this stuff about clothes and what have you.

• 3:50Rory Stewart?

  I've been reading Alastair Campbell's diary, volume number two, which takes us from your election in nineteen

• 3:57Alastair Campbell?

  I believe the title of that one is from Power to the People, I think it was.

• 4:00Rory Stewart?

  Power to the People, that's right. So that takes you from being elected in the spring summer of ninety seven into the conference period. And I thought it was quite an interesting comparison because there again, Labour Government comes In after many, many years of conservative government and it's roughly the same period. But my goodness, it feels different. And I just wanted to try to maybe tease that out a little bit. So first thing that you notice, well, first thing you notice is that you mentioned that Tony Blair steps on to the conference stage with the independent running a story that he's got a 93% approval rating. So my goodness, that's a long way from where Keir Starmer is today. I mean, he's got approval ratings that have fallen off a cliff. I mean, they, they look like they're as bad as Rishi Sunak's, not much better than Liz Truss is at the moment.

• 4:46Rory Stewart?

  The other thing I notice is that although there are silly stories which are annoying you, you know, you're very caught up at the end of August with the stories around a guy called Lord Simon, which I don't even really remember the details of, but anyway, it seems to be some kind of allegations, corruption type thing. So maybe an equivalent.

• 5:04Alastair Campbell?

  He was a business guy from BP who came in to work with Gordon Brown at the Treasury. And the press just decided he was worth going after every single business deal he ever did and so forth. I don't think any, any sort of corruption was ever proved at all, but I don't think he found that very, very difficult. So yeah, I remember that one.

• 5:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So, so maybe that's the sort of an equivalent of some of the stuff that the Labour ministers have been going through with their freebie scandal, but it's balanced by the fact that there is a lot going on on policy terms. So there are Good Morning Britain interviews going on, which are very, very heavy in policy. There's a lot going on with Northern Ireland. There's devolution happening in Scotland and votes around devolution. There's Gordon Brown getting into big arguments. And even when there's arguments, even when there are things that are making Tony Blair angry, they're often around policy there. Are we getting the balance right with Gordon on how much we're spending on health? What is Robin Cook doing on banning arms sales to Indonesia?

• 6:04Rory Stewart?

  It feels much more as though the conversation is around what the government is doing. And even the controversies and the problems that you're facing are around what the government's doing. And, and that's what I suppose is, is one of the things that strikes me about the period from the election to now is that I'm not seeing the policy coming together. I'm not seeing a clear sense of the sort of things that you would, as it were, sit on the Good Morning Britain couch and your comms director say, well, that was a great interview because we did a lot of meaty policy stuff and locals ringing up to say that was working well.

• 6:41Alastair Campbell?

  I think the ninety percent plus approval ratings, of course, that came in the wake of Princess Diana's death, where I think people thought that Tony had really kind of caught the mood. As you say, we were kind of, you know, very plugged into the Northern Ireland thing that was moving on. Gordon had done his Bank of England independence. There was a lot, there was a lot of policy stuff happening. And you're right that, you know, one of the firms that I worked with, Portland, has done some polling, part of which has these findings, and this is on the back of some pretty relentlessly negative media in the last few days. I think this will shift back, but for example, a finding that, I can't remember the numbers, but, you know, when you look at which government is more honest, this one or last one, which government is more competent,

• 7:23Alastair Campbell?

  this one or last one, it's not, it's not a great picture for either of them. And that has to change. I think that if you go back to the, to when Keir Starmer was first elected, I think people sort of very quickly thought, oh yeah, he looks like he's the Prime Minister, he sounds like the Prime Minister, he talks like a Prime Minister, he, he sort of, he looks the part, sounds the part. I think Rachel Reeves has done pretty well on that front as well, and so have some of the other ministers. King's Speech, you know, setting out some pretty big changes, you know, housing, the Renters Bill, all sorts of the railways, big stuff that, you know, you could say, well, that was what we promised, and now we're about to legislate for it. Then along come the riots. I think that did, although I think they handled it well, I think it knocked them off course a little bit.

• 8:05Alastair Campbell?

  I then think that the black hole stuff, and this is where I think the, the difficulties started. I think they were very, very keen to show two things. One, there is a black hole, the inheritance is worse than we thought it would be. Two, to address that, we're going to do some very, very difficult things. Now, I think picking on winter fuel payments as the most high profile of those difficult things, I think that has created the first stage of problems, and then it's been exacerbated where the, the freebie stuff thing, which is trivial by comparison with some of the stuff that Johnson got up to you, for example, but it's sort of those two combined that have given this, the media this feeling that they can really get into them now.

• 8:46Rory Stewart?

  But let's just touch on the winter fuel allowance. So as an outsider looking at it, it would seem to make sense that you should be integrating that into a much broader set of announcements.

• 8:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Rory Stewart?

  That just throwing out, we're going to take the winter fuel allowance away from pensioners is much less powerful than saying, here's a problem, you know, we've got this big black hole, but here's the solution. This is the direction in which we're going. We're going to make some tough decisions. Here's an example, winter fuel allowance, but we're also going to make some great investments. You know, here's new money going into, I don't know what it is, primary care centres, new roads, new energy projects. If you get it right, possibly the winter fuel allowance then becomes one example of you taking a tough but necessary decision as part of a broader package, which includes some very, very confident, optimistic, exciting things. Is that right?

• 9:35Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think that's right. So you could have done it alongside further pension reform. You could have done it alongside, I mean, probably the ideal place to have done it would have been the budget, but they kind of obviously wanted to start doing this black hole argument long before the budget. But I think that's what's made quite a lot of MPs quite jittery. Interestingly, talking to some of the MPs yesterday, some of them said they're getting next to no trouble in their constituency over this. Others are saying that it's really, really difficult, that this winter fuel thing has really cut through. So I think it partly depends on the the demographic of a constituency. Sometimes I think it depends on on the the ability of the MP to defend it properly locally. Because the other thing you could have done is come along and said, look, you know, the state pension, and they've done the triple lock, they accept the state

• 10:19Alastair Campbell?

  pension as a universal pension, but you could have said some of the additional benefits to pensioners, it's unreasonable that people like Rory Stewart's mum, as you said, or people like Alastair Campbell, who are pensioners, but doing quite well. It's unreasonable and ridiculous that they also get the winter fuel payment. You could have made that argument and then said, and we'll be bringing forward, you know, proposals on that. I think it was the fact that it sort of came out of a clear blue sky.

• 10:42Rory Stewart?

  This again may be unfair, but it strikes me that when Margaret Thatcher came in, when Tony Blair came in, and when David Cameron came in, it was relatively easy for the public to be able to describe what the vibe was, what the critique was, and what the vision was. So Margaret Thatcher, I guess the critique would be nationalised industries, trade unions and regulation are crippling the economy. And so I'm going to come in with free market reforms. Tony Blair was going to be a vision above all of modernisation. I mean, again and again, when we get that story from ninety seven, it's about this is a modern country, we're modernising, we're getting away. David Cameron, it was compassionate conservatives.

• 11:25Rory Stewart?

  And so on the one hand, he was hugging Huskies and talking about the environment. On the other hand, he was going to tighten up, there was going to be austerity and what had Labour done wrong and spent too much money. And that then means that people around their cabinet tables have a pretty clear idea of what they believe went wrong with the last lot and what they're going to do to sort it out. Now, my problem with Keir Starmer is that there isn't such a good story that he's got between what went wrong and what he's going to do to sort it out. So if you're David Cameron, Gordon Brown spent too much money, what I'm going to do is I'm going to spend less money. The risk with Keir Starmer is what did the Tories do wrong? Austerity. And the logical conclusion from that is therefore we're going to reverse austerity, we're going to spend more money, we're going to borrow more, we're going to invest more. But that isn't really the narrative they're producing.

• 12:10Rory Stewart?

  They're saying we got in this hole because of austerity, but because we're in this hole, it feels like we can't really borrow more, we can't really tax more, we can't really spend more. And that also brings us to our second problem, which is, and our second critique is that the Tories were sort of wasteful, morally bankrupt, out of touch, elite people. And the natural conclusion from that is therefore we're going to be a very kind of pure government of service, incredibly high moral standards, showing people what government is. But of course, that is dangerous because that sets you up for the Tory press getting very cheerful about freebies.

• 12:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think, just to go through those, I think Margaret Thatcher, because she sort of became such a kind of mythical figure within our politics, I think people underestimate how difficult she found her early years. I think it was a while before what she was trying to do became clear. We had all that cabinet division for ages between the dries and the wets, and eventually she cleared out the wets and filled it full of dries. Also, her ratings fell quite substantially not long after she won. Tony, I think you're right that there was, it was absolute clear focus on modernisation. But it's interesting, as you mentioned, the David Simon thing, there were loads

• 13:21Alastair Campbell?

  Of things like that, which ultimately do get forgotten, just as I hope this whole kind of freebie thing will be forgotten because they'll they'll learn, you know, don't don't give your enemies chance to make hay with anything. And and then Cameron, in a bizarre sort of way, was perhaps the clearest because he used the campaign to build this whole message about, you know, utterly unfairly, in my view. Gordon Brown crashed the economy, therefore we're going to have to do austerity. And then he did it. I think the the critique that Labour are trying to do, and they have to hold their nerve on this because people will get sick to death of hearing them say it. But the critique is that the inheritance is way worse than we expected because the these were actually, they were people doing bad things, wrong values, incompetent, quite a lot of corruption.

• 14:06Alastair Campbell?

  I was pleased that Rachel Reeves revisited the whole Covid corruption thing yesterday. So that's the that's the critique. The analysis, which I think has come through a little bit more from Rachel and from Keir Starmer in their speeches, is actually, and this is picks up on something you've been saying, that you picked up in in Chicago. Is actually being much, much more positive about the basic core strengths of the country. And saying that the reforms that are going to come in are going to be rooted in those. Now, I'll give you one example. Before I did the Today Programme on Tuesday, I was listening to the programme beforehand just to see, sort of get the vibe or what have you.

• 14:43Alastair Campbell?

  And there was a story in the news that we had the lowest planning application successes, as it were, for, I think it was for, I can't remember the exact timeframe, but it was very, very, very bad. So that goes against the messaging. So you've now got to show how you're going to break through that, how you're going to change that. And I actually think they need to get the the missions, I think, are important, but there's a lack of understanding of what they are. They've got to reshape and reimagine government. That's what they're trying to do. So what what Keir Starmer's speech is trying to do is essentially say, this is who we are, this is where they went wrong.

• 15:18Alastair Campbell?

  These are signals of the change that we're going to make. And there was, you know, whether it was veterans, whether it was the Hillsborough law about candour in public life, whether it was the the stuff that they're doing about care, about young people leaving. There was kind of, there was meat in there, but it's not where I agree with you. It is not necessarily speaking to a strategic message that's been clear from the word go.

• 15:40Rory Stewart?

  One other thing that can be helpful in leadership and government is having a sense that the person at the top or the two or three people at the top have a very clear idea of the kind of country they're talking about and the kind of way that it's going to work. And that can be a little bit naive, it can even be a little bit embarrassing, but it is quite important. So in the case of David Cameron and George Osborne, in the years leading up when they were in opposition for the four, five years before they came in, they had all these policy working groups going, delivering their vision on international development. They had Bob Geldof working with Andrew Mitchell, they had Zach Goldsmith working on stuff on the environment.

• 16:22Rory Stewart?

  And in all of these things, it was broadly speaking, this compassionate conservative vision, which was very deferential to Tony Blair. So everybody knew that Osborne and Cameron admired the way that Blair had done things. They kept talking about the master. But you also picked up from a lot of their think tanks and policy stuff that they were really interested in Scandinavia, perpetually talking about the Finnish education system, the Swedish education system. So if you'd interviewed Michael Gove as he came into office, he would have had not just a very clear description of what he thought Labour had got wrong with education, or a very clear description of how he was going to sort it out, but a source of idea of the kind of system he'd seen somewhere else in the world that he was trying to achieve.

• 17:04Rory Stewart?

  There was all this stuff around Nudge, you'll remember too, where they got very excited about what was happening, the Obama administration, they would reach out to these American consultants who'd come over and tell them about how Nudge theory was going to work. Now, the reason I'm raising that is I think you did have an equivalent of that with Blair. And I think even, I'm sure you're right that Margaret Thatcher got a long time to get going, but definitely around Keith Joseph, the Chicago School, there was this real sense that they had an analysis. And your analysis, I suppose, people would say is modernisation, third way, socially democratic, pragmatically regulated, free markets, et cetera. I'm not seeing that. I'm not seeing at the moment, if you're sitting around that cabinet table, what is the sort of city on the hill to which they're aiming?

• 17:47Rory Stewart?

  You know, are they admiring Sweden? Have they all been running around looking at think tanks in Norway? Have they been admiring Biden? Do they have a, I mean, where's that stuff? In fact, the only person I can think of maybe doing a bit of this is maybe Ed Miliband, who gives the impression that he's got some sort of complicated ideas around climate and environment policy.

• 18:05Alastair Campbell?

  Ed Miliband's speech, actually, I mean, Rachel Reeves was the sort of main event on Monday, but Ed Miliband's speech went down very, very well, I have to say. It's interesting you say that. One of the things I thought you'd be gagging to talk about this week, and I don't know if it's true, but was a story in one of the papers at the weekend, that, for example, Keir Starmer's thinking about asking your hero, David Cork, to look at sentencing. The fact that Michael Barber, who we've talked about on the podcast quite a lot, he's back in helping, getting the number 10 in the Cabinet Office machine, how they focus on delivery. James Timson, we've talked about in relation to the prisons ministers. I think they are looking out and they are bringing people in. But I guess what you're saying is that it feels a little bit disjointed. It's not clear what that

• 18:48Alastair Campbell?

  driving message is. And I think this is the bit that I think has perhaps been missing. I always define strategy and strategic communication in the modern age, because the media is so difficult, because it is biased against Labour. You have to constantly be devising, executing and narrating strategy all at the same time. And very occasionally, I can feel that and see that. So, for example, I heard Pat McFadden on the radio and I thought he did that. I think too often what's been happening in recent weeks, first of all, is the departmentalitis, which, as you know, happens when you get into government, where you're so busy and you're so being bombarded by your civil servants and you're being briefed, this is what you're going to get asked, this is what you say. You've

• 19:31Alastair Campbell?

  always got to be taking the public back to that big picture. What are we trying to do for the country as a whole? And they need more people doing that. And if they don't have that. What happens is the media creating all this stuff. I mean, I thought it was absurd at the weekend. Angela Rayner on the BBC, Rachel Reeves on the BBC, literally half to two thirds of quite long interviews about their bloody clothes and about holidays. I'm not saying that stuff isn't newsworthy. It is newsworthy, but you have to keep perspective. And it's up to the politician to push back on that.

• 20:03Rory Stewart?

  Is it not possible partly that one of the reasons that's coming through is that there isn't enough policy and vision? That one of the reasons you managed to make it through some of those scandals, when I'm reading through your diaries, is there's so much substantial going on in Ireland, in devolution, in health, in foreign policy, and blah, blah, blah, that there's other stuff that the journalists feel they have to talk about.

• 20:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Rory Stewart?

  But there isn't anything else to talk about. I still don't get what the vision is. I mean, I really am struggling to work out. I get the story, right, about what was wrong.

• 20:35Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 20:35Rory Stewart?

  I still don't see what the solution is. As I say, the logical story is, the problem is these guys cut everything too much.

• 20:42Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 20:42Rory Stewart?

  There's a black hole. There's not enough money. And the logical answer to that is, and therefore, we're going to borrow more, we're going to spend more, and here's our vision. You know, it could be Biden's investment, you know, Inflation Reduction Act. It could be Germany's great at vocational training, so we're going to really lean into vocational training. Or it could be, this is about the tech revolution and AI, and here's the supercomputer we're investing in in Edinburgh, and by the way, we're going to build three more supercomputers.

• 21:06Alastair Campbell?

  I get what you're saying, but I think it is harsh. I think that if you go through what Keir Starmer was trying to do in his speech, and he has this line about, you know, a Britain that belongs to you. It's a classic kind of many not the few argument. So like, if you take something like Grenfell, what went wrong in that was that actually the people in authority genuinely neither understanding nor really caring about the lives of those people. If you take something like education, VAT on private schools, using that money to try to improve standards within the schools that are used by the many, not the few. That's the kind of vision thing, is a fairer, more productive, more equitable Britain where people are respected and valued and make the most of their opportunity. I think that's what he's trying to say.

• 21:50Rory Stewart?

  What I'm getting at is that fairer, more productive, more responsible Britain makes more sense to people. If you can sort of point to a country or a place or a model.

• 22:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 22:01Rory Stewart?

  Somewhere in the world where somebody's doing that. I mean, what you want to be able to say is you think that it's not possible to create a fairer, more productive Britain. And I hear what the conservatives are saying with their cynicism, but how come it is that in, I don't know, Sweden, where society is much more equal, they have more intellectual property patents than anyone else in a.

• 22:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, you can do that. Listen, I agree that the whole thing about intellectual curiosity is vital. So for example, we've recently interviewed, it'll be out in the next few weeks, the Archbishop of Canterbury. And I thought it was really interesting that one of the points he made about whenever he's going into to do conflict resolution, whatever it might be, is that the first thing he does is he reads dozens of books about the issue that he's trying to deal with. Now, maybe if you're the Archbishop of Canterbury, you're not necessarily under quite the same level of microscopic pressure and intense scrutiny as the Prime Minister, Chancellor, or Foreign Secretary. But I do think, I remember when Tony Blair, we talked about Northern Ireland, he spent that summer reading books about Northern Ireland. And so I do wish there was much more of that kind of intellectual reference. I think the problem with doing it country by country, you mentioned Sweden.

• 23:07Alastair Campbell?

  If I was a journalist and interviewing a politician who started to tell me about Sweden, I'd say, okay, well, that's very interesting, but let's be honest. Sweden's got massive problems of its own at the moment because of the rise of the far right. They're now in part of the government. What are you doing about the rise of the far right here? People will often say Singapore, but then say, okay, is that the democratic model that you want to choose? So I think it's far better to root that kind of messaging in what the best of Britain, what Britain has to offer. And how are you going to build on that? And yes, take in examples from around around the world. Where I think you were absolutely right is that there has to be a sense of, I always felt with Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader, I sort of, I wanted to hear him talk about things that he read and

• 23:49Alastair Campbell?

  and things that he'd been witnessing and we need more of that in our politics. So I think you are being harsh. One of the things that we, our current leading interview with Douglas Alexander, and one of the things he said, that the character of the leader is often as important as any of the policy stuff that's going out there. And I think what Keir Starmer is trying to do is be diligent, hardworking, competent, show that there's a different way, and also take politics out of people's lives a little bit, not have all the sort of screaming matches that we've been having. And that's a difficult thing to do. When you have the media landscape that we have, and I think, again, they may have learnt a few lessons from that in the last few days.

• 24:26Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's just finish with the thing which we've been sort of skirting around and not talking about, which is the freebies. And here I can talk a little bit more directly as a member of parliament who had to do my own declarations. First thing, I've been very, very surprised by how chaotic the communications have been. So every single one of them seems to have had a different defence for their freebies. We had Jonathan Reynolds saying, you know, members of parliament always need support on different stuff. Angela Rayner's defence was, everyone does it, all MPs do it. Bridgette Phillipson's defence was, I went to the Taylor Swift concert because my child wanted to do it. I went to Wimbledon in my capacity as education secretary, and my birthday was funded because

• 25:10Rory Stewart?

  it was a work-related birthday which journalists were invited to. And then you get other sort of different accounts from Rachel Reeves, which is, you know, a friend wanted to help me out and I was looking for a way to give an opportunity for a friend to help me. So I think, first thing is presumably it would be helpful if they had all decided what the strongest argument was to lead on. And I particularly was irritated by Angela Rayner saying, everybody does it, because it's just not true. I mean, I remember Dennis Skinner, for example, famously refused to even allow a journalist to buy him a cup of coffee. And, you know, I'm not, you know, I think it's very dangerous in politics, obviously, and this is the problem, they've got themselves in sounding as though you're getting on a high horse. But I didn't take huge amount of freebies. I'm very surprised by the number

• 25:53Rory Stewart?

  of sporting events they're going to, the number of concerts they're going to, the number, I mean, partly not because I'm a sort of moral person, just because I sort of look completely bizarre on my declaration that I'm going to all this stuff, yeah.

• 26:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I had a message from a friend of mine who works in the Singaporean government.

• 26:11Alastair Campbell?

  Now admittedly Singaporean ministers are on like a billion dollars and the civil servants. I mean, I think the, I think the head of the, the equivalent of Sue Gray earns about seven times more than Sue Gray does. But at the same time, he sent me a message. There was a huge piece in the Straits Times, pictures of Angela Rayner in her dress, picture of Keir Starmer at a football match. It was, you know, this story has kind of gone a bit too far around the world. And he just, he just reminded me that one of their ministers was, was sued for corruption for accepting a bottle of wine. But I think that there's a couple of things to say here. First of all is I think it is, I think it is reasonable to point out the double standards. I mean, some of the massive scandals under Johnson that barely got covered. You know, the, the free holiday mystique, Bamford paying for

• 26:53Alastair Campbell?

  his, the sort of stuff at his wedding, the Levadef parties, all the sort of stuff that Johnson did, we know all about. And, and, and I think there is a double standard. I think it's, and it's fair to say that. But that being said, if you have rightly, in my view, made an issue of standards in public life and being clear that you're going to be much, much stronger and much, much stricter, you have to live by that, absolutely. And what was unfortunate, this is all these stories kind of came together. The thing about Keir Starmer and Arsenal, I completely get, and I think most reasonable people do. He's been going to see Arsenal for most of his adult life. He's got a season ticket that he's paid for all of his adult life. He goes with his friends, and I know this because I've seen it at a game before when they were playing Burnley. He goes with his friends

• 27:37Alastair Campbell?

  that he went with from way back, and they're close friends and what have you. The police basically saying, I'm sorry, but once you become prime minister, it is a different level of security operation around you. We can't put you in crowds like that. Arsenal say, you can have this box. Now, all he had to do in that is say, right, I'm going to carry on paying my season ticket, give it to somebody else, and I'll go and see the games here.

• 27:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Alastair Campbell?

  Now, the thing with the, with Wahid Ali, who's a, I think, a good guy. I don't think he's one of these guys.

• 28:05Rory Stewart?

  Can I just come in quickly on that? Because that, that's again, very weird. Because Wahid Ali is in so many of these stories. I mean, it's almost as though somebody is saying to this sort of top group of Rachel Reeves, Bridget Phillips, and Angela Rayner, Keir Starmer, says anything you want. You know, he's like a concierge. You know, Ansha Raina's going off to New York for New Year with her boyfriend. Oh, well, Wahid Ali will let you stay in his flat. And somebody else wants some clothes. Wahid Ali will get some clothes. Somebody wants a birthday party. Wahid Ali will pay for your birthday party. I mean, it's a bit weird, isn't it? This sort of father Christmas figure who it seems to be on speed dial whenever anyone wants a freebie.

• 28:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, he was, he was part of the, you, you have to, as you know, and we both sort of don't like this, but fundraising is part of politics. He's a big fundraiser. He's brought in a lot of the money that ran Labour's campaign. And I think all that's happened is that they've just got into a place where, I think you're right. They just think, oh, Wahid will sort that out. And I think that's just got to, Wahid should carry on doing fundraising for the Labour Party. He should carry on supporting Labour Party campaigns. But I think they, I hope, and I think they have, that they understand that this, this kind of, you know, I can get free tickets for this, I can get free tickets for that. I think they've just got to understand that the sort of, the perception that creates amongst the public. And don't forget, it's not that long ago that we had the expenses scandal.

• 29:25Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think this is on par with that, but just don't, I go back to the point I made earlier. Don't give a media and political opponents any opportunity to take you off the core stuff that you're trying to do as a government. And I think, look, Keir Starmer, funny enough, yesterday, it was funny, when, when I arrived in Liverpool,

• 29:46Alastair Campbell?

  I hope she won't mind saying this, but the first person I bumped into when I got off the train was Vic Starmer, Keir Starmer's wife. And what was interesting about, we had a very nice chat about this, that and the other. But what was interesting, looking around, is nobody batted an eyelid that she was there because people didn't recognise her. And she'd be very happy about that because she doesn't want to be recognised. She wants to carry on working the NHS and so forth. But I thought that was interesting. She's been all over the front pages.

• 30:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 30:10Alastair Campbell?

  In all these sort of, you know, splendid clothes that she's been wearing.

• 30:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 30:13Alastair Campbell?

  And yet, here we are, Liverpool Lime Street, very, very busy railway station. And I was scanning the place. I don't think a single person there. So, oh, there's Keir Starmer's wife. Now, my point on that is that that means that it's maybe not cut through to the public in the way that the media might think, but, but it will if they keep going. So just don't give them the ammunition.

• 30:35Rory Stewart?

  And final one, to make an obvious point on media management. You're completely right that the press is more brutal to Keir Starmer about this than they are to Boris Johnson. But it's important to understand. That's partly because they think about right wing figures like Boris Johnson in a different way to the way they think about Keir Starmer. So it's not true that the right wing press is never brutal to right wing politicians. What they're brutal to us about is if we were ever seen privately to have said something critical of Brexit, or if we were seen to be too friendly towards immigration, then you can imagine the Daily Mail really, you know, these guys are traitors, they're letting down the party, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the political narrative is set up that the left are supposed to be

• 31:19Rory Stewart?

  the more puritanical, better behaved. And that's why they have to, for whatever reason, behave in a different way, just as they're given more latitude on Brexit and immigration than Tories are.

• 31:29Alastair Campbell?

  Before we go to the break, I'll give you a final example of this. One of the MPs I spoke to yesterday said that he'd been offered a ticket to a test match, cricket.

• 31:38Rory Stewart?

  Why does nobody do any work? I mean, I don't want to be mean, but I literally didn't have the time to go to all these sporting matches.

• 31:44Alastair Campbell?

  Let me finish the story. And he said, he said, no, I don't think I should do that. And so I think back to the dead.

• 31:51Rory Stewart?

  But that's what I did all the time. And most of us did all the time. I mean, that's why I resent her being like, all MPs do it.

• 31:58Alastair Campbell?

  Didn't she say that MPs have always done it, or MPs of all parties?

• 32:01Rory Stewart?

  No, she's actually said all MPs do it.

• 32:02Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, well, that's just wrong.

• 32:04Rory Stewart?

  Her phrase was, everyone does it. Every MP does it.

• 32:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, well, that's just wrong.

• 32:07Rory Stewart?

  I remember that Ed Miliband during expenses claimed basically nothing, presumably because he spotted, A, well behaved, but B, spotted that this stuff was going to get him in trouble. But I just also didn't get where they got the time. I mean, I literally, when I was an MP, did not have the time to go to all these theatres.

• 32:22Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, the one I'm talking about, the one I'm talking about didn't go to the test match.

• 32:28Rory Stewart?

  Well done, well done him.

• 32:30Alastair Campbell?

  Final, final, final point. Just so, and you know, I think we're agreed on this, but so the Prime Minister, he's on a good salary, people get that. But actually, as I saw watching alongside Tony Blair, there is also quite a cost to being Prime Minister financially. So for example, Czechoslovakia, people look at Czechoslovakia, they think that must be amazing, you've got this fantastic country residence, and you can go there for the weekend and take your friends and have parties and all that stuff. Unless it is literally official government business, like you're inviting Zelensky there to have talks, or Joe Biden or something, if he invited me, you, and, you know, a collection of other people just to go down for the weekend, they've got to pay for it. And so I think it's, and I think if you're, Keir Starmer is probably the most working

• 33:12Alastair Campbell?

  class prime minister of our lifetime. And I think maybe there is a part of him that thinks, what's the best way to put this? He has to get it into his head that he's now the prime minister, and he should just not worry about any of that stuff. Because when he leaves office, even Liz Truss is kind of, you know, doing quite well, thank you very much, out of being a former prime minister. So just don't worry about it. Do the job. Don't get into difficulties that don't feed the media anything that they're going to use against you. Be open, be transparent, be diligent, be honest, be capable, be, but above all, deliver the change that you've said you're going to deliver, because ultimately that's what you're going to get judged on.

• 33:51Rory Stewart?

  Good. Time for a break.

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• 35:54Rory Stewart?

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

• 35:57Alastair Campbell?

  And me Alastair Campbell. And let's talk Lebanon and Israel and Gaza. I guess since October the 7th and the awful Hamas attack, that what most of the international community has been trying to do is to stop this thing escalating, stop it spreading, stop it going wider and wider. And it feels like in relation to Israel, Lebanon, that we're getting perilously close to the sort of all out war that we had in 2006.

• 36:29Rory Stewart?

  That's right. So we've been talking about this over the last few months. The terrorist attack by Hamas last October was then followed by an Israeli invasion of Gaza. And the fighting has been happening there on that bit of territory bordering the Mediterranean and Egypt. And in the background has been an increasing push from certain factions in the Israeli government, some people in the Israeli military for moving the war up into Lebanon against Hezbollah. Hezbollah. Completely separate group from Hamas, Hezbollah being an Iranian backed Shia militia group, whereas Hamas has a more secular Sunni identity. One of the reasons for this is that because of Hezbollah rocket strikes, tens of thousands

• 37:11Rory Stewart?

  of Israelis in northern Israel had to evacuate and move south. And there's been a real push from the Israeli government to get people back into northern Israel. But more than that, a sense that Hezbollah is a much more formidable force than Hamas. Probably got 20,000 people under arms. It fought all the way through Syria. It's got huge arsenals of precision guided weapons. I mean, you know, 10 times the numbers that Hamas could ever have dreamt of. And rocky tunnel systems, which are far more impressive than anything to exist in the sands of Gaza. So a sense that strategically, from some people in the Israeli administration, they needed to use this opportunity to go after Hezbollah before it's too late.

• 37:54Rory Stewart?

  And, and that of course, reached its culmination this week. It reached it in three things. Explosions of PAGES, explosions of walkie talkies, and now an Israeli air bombardment of Lebanon. The PAGES story, many, many people listening will now be familiar with, but just to summarize, it was an incredibly elaborate Israeli intelligence operation. Hezbollah stopped using mobile phones because they were too vulnerable to interception and their messages being listened to and went over to PAGES, this more primitive form of technology, they felt being safer, less easy to intercept. Israel knew this and it managed to insert itself into Hezbollah buying its next package of PAGES.

• 38:39Rory Stewart?

  They were buying something called Gold Apollo PAGES from Taiwan, the AP924, which for some reason was supposed to be being manufactured in Hungary. And somewhere between Taiwan and Hungary, Israeli intelligence inserted into these PAGES, a couple of ounces of explosive and a trigger switch, which gave them the capacity to trigger these pages. So they would beep, people would pick them up at three, three o'clock in the afternoon, pick them up to look at their pager, to see what message had come in. If you remember the pager, you got a little message. And then once you've had enough time to pick it up, often hold it up to your face, it's then triggered to detonate. So 12 people were killed immediately, about 2,800 injured. And then the following day, Wednesday, when Hezbollah fell back on its backup system,

• 39:23Rory Stewart?

  which was a walkie talkie system. Israeli intelligence had implanted even larger explosives than those walkie talkies and 25 were killed and 450 were wounded as the walkie talkies exploded and that was then followed by the bombardments. Over to you.

• 39:39Alastair Campbell?

  Mossad have got a pretty fearsome reputation and I think this this does cement it and of course, just to elaborate on what you said, the thing went beep beep beep beep beep for four seconds and that meant that and they would know it takes it beeps for four seconds. So some would have it on their belt, some would have it in their pockets, some would have it lying around. The reason it seems why quite a lot of children were hit was because just as you know, your kids are used to sort of maybe hearing your phone ring or daddy phone's ringing, here's your phone, is quite a lot of kids picked them up and so was sort of walking around. And the reason for the four seconds was that that's they're assuming that people are going to then look at the message. So a lot of people lost their eyes, a lot of people, you know, had their face sort of ripped ripped apart. So that's

• 40:22Alastair Campbell?

  the sort of, you know, the damage done there. But of course, the psychological effect is enormous. This is Hezbollah and and, you know, the leaders of Hezbollah saying this is a, you know, this has been a dreadful devastating blow. You then had evidence of people saying, anything with electronics in it, throw it away. You know, even things like, you know, the the zapper that you use to open your security gate, the fridge has electronics in it. So you had all these conversations going, you know, where else have they implanted this kind of stuff? So a big, big, big psychological impact. The question then, though, I guess, on on the broader sort of conflict, and then you've had hundreds killed now in these Israeli bombardments. So I think just to sort of try and see it from the Israeli perspective, 60,000 Israelis who've had to leave the area.

• 41:07Alastair Campbell?

  That's what the Israelis are saying is the legitimate war aim in this is actually to be able to create the conditions for them to go back. Whether this does it or not, very, very moot point, but that's what they say. Politically, Netanyahu, who we've said many, many times, an extraordinary survivor in this really, really difficult coalition that he's got, driven in large part by the far right, who don't want any deal with Hamas at all, even though the security people are saying there is a deal there to be done. What Hezbollah are saying is they're going to carry on attacking Israel until there's a ceasefire in in Gaza. The question then on whether we do get to an all out war with a kind of land invasion as there was in 2006. Is whether Israel thinks that is in their interests and whether Iran wants Hezbollah

• 41:52Alastair Campbell?

  to go even further with the strikes that they can do into Israeli territory, which they can do. So, you know, it's possible to look at the news as we did last night and say, this is absolutely horrific. But actually, they both could be doing way more than they're doing. And then the question then for the international community is whether they actually can influence this. And it's a problem because, let's be honest, we've got the American election coming up. People know that Joe Biden is not going to be president after November the 5th. Netanyahu, a bit like Putin, probably is waiting, you know, to see whether Trump comes in and will be much, much, much more supportive, even though many argue Biden has been about as supportive as anybody could be. And so it feels like it's closer to that all out war, but it's not there yet.

• 42:35Rory Stewart?

  I mean, obviously, this was a secret operation. One thing is clear is that this was not triggered at the ideal time from the point of view of the people who put that operation together. I'm talking now about the exploding pages. So ideally, what they would have wanted is to have held that back for the moment at which Hezbollah launched a really big attack into Israel. So if you imagine Hezbollah launches big attacks into Israel, potentially even in the worst case scenario, ground incursions, and then on the morning of the Hezbollah assault, you blow up the pages and you take out 1,500 members of the top command of Hezbollah, blind them, maim them.

• 43:18Rory Stewart?

  The effect on morale, the uncertainty would have an incredible impact if you triggered it at the moment of that attack. They didn't do that. They triggered it on what was in many ways, an ordinary day in Lebanon. So the people who put this operation together will feel this was a very expensive, very complicated operation, probably the most expensive complicated operation they've ever done. And it's not clear what strategic benefit they got from doing it. So the question is, why was it triggered early? And we don't know because this is a secret operation and there will be very, very few people in the Israeli government who are privy to that. The story that's being put out is That they triggered it early because Hezbollah was on to it and they needed to trigger it before

• 44:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 44:00Rory Stewart?

  People found out these things. My view is you would say that, wouldn't you? And actually, I think it's also equally plausible that it was triggered because Netanyahu put a lot of pressure on Mossad, asking them to do something dramatic in Lebanon. Now, why would he want to do something dramatic in Lebanon? He'd want to do something dramatic in Lebanon. Firstly, because he wants to shift attention away from the hostages in Gaza up to Lebanon. And secondly, because I think he's trying to provoke a Hezbollah assault. And he wants the fight now. He's very uncertain that he will get support from Kamala Harris for a fight against Lebanon. He's very uncertain he'd get support for Donald Trump for an attack. He thinks that this moment, when Biden is in place, is the moment where he's most likely to get tacit US support.

• 44:44Rory Stewart?

  And in order to get that tacit US support, I think he wants Hezbollah to be launching precision munitions into Israel as his justification for hitting Lebanon very, very hard. So my suspicion is if you're in Mossad, there are some very, very angry people who felt they put together a very elaborate, expensive operation, which could have been used much more powerfully strategically and which has been triggered so that Netanyahu can increase the likelihood of a war with Lebanon.

• 45:09Alastair Campbell?

  At a time when, if you go back to what the war aims were in relation to Gaza, it was to eliminate Hamas. And as many people said at the time, it's very, very, very hard to eliminate an ideology. And so the focus now moves to this northern front. Gaza is, remains an absolute catastrophe on so many levels. But I think it's, you know, because he's not been allowed, even though the Israeli security people are saying, look, we can do this deal on the Gaza Egyptian, that strip of land between them, we can do it, it's not a problem. But the Smotrich and Ben Gavir's are saying, you cannot do it, you're not doing it. So I think the politics, you've got within Beirut, you've got a government, you're sort of caretaker government.

• 45:54Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, we should say to people Hezbollah, there are a lot of people in Lebanon really, really, really don't like Hezbollah. They sort of feel they've been taken hostage as a country, but they like Israel. A lot less. And so if it does escalate and people buy the argument that you just put that actually for for certain political reasons and strategic reasons Netanyahu wants this conflict to spread, then that's the point at which you get a kind of much more united Lebanon behind the approach of Hezbollah and a much more united Israel behind Netanyahu.

• 46:28Rory Stewart?

  And again, you've done this very perfectly when we discuss Sudan, which is just to remind people of what this actually feels like in practice. So on the Israeli side, it feels like tens of thousands of people displaced from their homes, schools, starting in September, with children in makeshift accommodation in Tel Aviv. On the Lebanon side of the border, it is columns of smoke exploding across the horizon around southern Lebanon. I mean, if you're out on the beaches of Tyrol side, in which you wouldn't want to be at the moment, there are literally, I think, 1,500 of these massive columns of smoke going up, everybody piling into their cars. So a short ride of about 30 miles up from southern Lebanon up towards Beirut is taking sort of 15, 16 hours because panicked families are cramming

• 47:11Rory Stewart?

  into their cars. 500 people have been killed and of course, inevitably, a lot of women and children killed with them. And this is a country which has been in the most extreme economic crisis, totally thrown off balance by the Syria war, totally thrown off balance by this horrifying explosion of explosives in the port of Beirut, which tore half the city to pieces, struggling to get adequate electricity, its economy in collapse, its government in collapse, and now you're adding to it columns of smoke on the horizon and planes flying overhead, dropping high explosives. And so people are really terrified. And of course, many, many people in Lebanon assume this is just the prelude and Israel is just going to up the ante. And

• 47:53Rory Stewart?

  what you're getting is the Israeli government saying they're absolutely delighted, you know, Hezbollah has never suffered so much, ever. And Hezbollah is saying in its statements that they believe that Israel is doing this to provoke them. And they're clearly being restrained at the moment by Iran and their own leadership from responding because they think it's a trap. But equally, they can't Not respond forever because they're being blown to pieces and they will begin to feel that they're very weak if they just take this kind of punishment without responding.

• 48:23Alastair Campbell?

  So meanwhile, United Nations General Assembly going on, we thought it was going to be Ukraine kind of really top of the American and British agenda, but this is now going to be a massive part of it for sure. Let's just close off on, we said last week that we probably had more questions in recent weeks on long COVID than anything else. And I've really sort of tried to dig into this and I was really fortunate to have a chat with a guy called Toby Hillman, who's a respiratory and long COVID consultant. He runs this long COVID, these long COVID clinics. I didn't even know these existed, but it is a university college hospital. And he said some very, very interesting things. The first is that we're talking massive numbers now and we'll come into what it is, but we're talking sort of somewhere between

• 49:08Alastair Campbell?

  1.5 and 2 million people who are reporting symptoms of what has become defined as as long COVID. The other thing I didn't know, Rory, is that long COVID as a term actually was not chosen by the medical profession. This came from patient groups who essentially wanted it defined as as long COVID. They were giving all sorts of sort of more medical terms, but they've they've accepted it's now it's called long COVID. They've got long COVID clinics. Two very interesting things he said. The first was that it disproportionately affects people who actually didn't have very severe COVID. We're not talking here about the people who were kind of in intensive care. There will be some in that in that category, but it's mainly people who who were not necessarily very, very severely ill with COVID. The second

• 49:53Alastair Campbell?

  interesting thing is on the demographic, the people who were very badly affected tend to be disproportionately male, older and over representation from ethnic minorities. The first groups which caught on with what what came to kind of as long COVID, a lot of middle class, white women. And also in terms of age, sort of late 40s, economically socially active, 80,000 have left the workforce with long COVID. But then the other thing he talks about is how there is still no treatment for long COVID as a condition because it's just it's a collection of symptoms. It could be pain, it could be breathlessness, it could be fatigue. With some people, there's all sorts of different ways that it's affecting people.

• 50:37Alastair Campbell?

  And so he says that all they're able to do really is to treat those symptoms, but they haven't yet been able to do the research and get the work that actually identifies this as something that can be treated in a different way.

• 50:47Rory Stewart?

  My friend, our friend Kate Weinberg, who we've talked about, who's had long COVID, who I was chatting to yesterday.

• 50:54Alastair Campbell?

  And who's written a novel based on this?

• 50:55Rory Stewart?

  Written a novel, yeah. But was saying that one of the problems is that it's so difficult conveying to someone just how extreme it is. I think maybe you'd have an analogy of this, which is that if you say to someone who's never had depression, that you've got depression, they would tend to sort of underestimate. They'd be like, oh, well, you know, I feel a bit sad sometimes. And ditto, if she says fatigue, we're all like, well, you know, we'll get a bit tired sometimes. She's talking about five months in bed with excruciating pain. She gets out of bed to go down and get a cup of coffee and she then can barely make it up the stairs. And when she makes it up the stairs, she's lying on her back in a delirious sort of hallucinating state in a pool of sweat for the next couple of hours. And, and I think that's one thing.

• 51:40Rory Stewart?

  I think a second thing is, and maybe this was probably true with, with depression and other conditions 20, 30 years ago, because it's clearly quite difficult to measure, it's not something like a broken leg, because it's a collection of related things and the diagnostics hasn't got to the stage that it has with depression, where you can check boxes. And because unlike depression, there isn't an obvious cure, and there's not, there's no equivalent of an antidepressant that you can just give people. People are facing a lot of stigma. And so, you know, people feel that families are underestimating what they've got. Some doctors have been very dismissive of it. And because there clearly is also a mental component to it, I don't know how you say

• 52:22Rory Stewart?

  this, a very difficult thing to say without, because that too will make a lot of people listening feel very, very angry, because that feels like I'm downplaying it.

• 52:30Alastair Campbell?

  No, but anxiety and depression are two of the the parts of this that some people have, which they didn't have before, but is a consequence of the experience they went through with with Covid and the condition they now have. The point you make about the medical profession is well made. In fact, Toby Hillman said that at the start, partly because of the symptoms, if you think about the, you know, breathlessness, sudden pain, sudden fatigue, those are things that are often associated with panic, with panic attacks. And he said, he said that quite a lot of medics at the start really were in the kind of pull yourself together mode. They'd been through the horror of dealing with the sort of Covid at its peak, with, you know, the hospitals rammed and, you know, intensive care units rammed and all the rest of it. And then suddenly they're through

• 53:14Alastair Campbell?

  that and they're seeing this sort of very large number of people coming with symptoms. And he says, but then now is even though the research on it has not been as effective as it might have been, he says that it is not fakeable. And he says there is significant pathology now, which says this is a real thing.

• 53:29Rory Stewart?

  There are different estimates on the number, but we're talking about millions of people in the UK and over a hundred million people worldwide.

• 53:35Alastair Campbell?

  I read 400 million worldwide and it's costing one percent, it's taking 1% of the world's GDP.

• 53:40Rory Stewart?

  And again, you know, if I come quote my friend up in Cumbria, I'd like to maybe just, as we come to close, to get you a little bit more on this. I mean, he was saying that he gets brain fog. And again, that can sound to somebody who hasn't got the illness as though that's quite a mild thing. But what he's actually talking about is that he's searching for a word and then the entire concept gets lost. I mean, he feels his brain is sort of crumbling like a digestive biscuit, or as though he's got some sort of damp blanket tied around his head. So I suppose just, just on this, this question of stigma and how difficult we find it to deal with things which are a combination of the physical and mental, as so many things are, and the sense that people feel that

• 54:21Rory Stewart?

  their character is being called into question, and that then, that somehow if you've got a broken leg, or maybe if you have cancer, people can sort of understand or relate to it more. Whereas if you're in bed with long Covid, or indeed with ME and many other things, you find this sort of horrible suspicion, stigma, lack of understanding, which presumably there's some equivalent of in mental health too.

• 54:44Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah, I think there's no doubt before, you know, again, this is something we talked to the Archbishop about, where a few decades ago. I think Pull Yourself Together was the sort of basic approach to all of this stuff. No, having just spent, you know, just a few hours this week looking into this, it's obvious that it shouldn't be underestimated and those numbers are pretty horrific. Well, I think the other thing that's happened is that, and I hope Toby Hillman won't mind me saying this, but he has some of the symptoms of long COVID himself. He says he gets very breathless when he's walking upstairs if he's talking at the same time, but has just had to kind of, you know, manage that. And I saw a report on the, I think it was on the BBC about a doctor in Leeds called Becky Williams, who says that she, she actually is sort of,

• 55:27Alastair Campbell?

  you know, virtually bedridden and said that she feels like she's been left to rot. You know, the other thing that's got, that's happened, I think because for most of us, it was just such a sort of awful experience for the country and for the world. And I think there's an element of us that sort of thinks, well, that was so bad, let's not think about it too much anymore. One of the other complaints we've been getting in the Q and A about the media and about politics is the fact that the, the COVID inquiry, which was getting massive coverage when the sort of Johnsons and the Hancock's and the Williamson's and the Cummings were all going there, that it's sort of just, you know, it's as if it's not going on. And the current module that they're looking at is looking at issues like long COVID. And I

• 56:09Alastair Campbell?

  think it's sort of exacerbating that sense that we're not being taken seriously on this, the fact that there's no, there's next to no coverage at the moment of the COVID inquiry, which is going on and is going to go on for some time yet.

• 56:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think finally to finish, Mount Sinai Hospital in the US, University College Hospital in the UK is doing more and more research on this. I think many people, at least anecdotally, feel that there's huge advantage in creating networks of other long COVID sufferers to talk to, be able to share experiences, learn from the different combinations of treatments that, that have been successful with people. But my goodness, it's bleak. It's terrible. And it's got real economic and political significance by the time you're talking about over a million people effectively out of the workplace.

• 56:54Alastair Campbell?

  If anybody from the Lancet is listening, they've published a very, very long report about the psychiatric implications of, of long COVID. And I just think for really, really idiotic people like me, if they could do just a sort of summary at the top. That is like, kind of, just like a really clear press release. I'd find it very, very helpful. Now Rory, very finally, finally, finally, finally, I thought I knew you quite well. Okay. After the many, many hours that we spent together doing this podcast. But last week, you and I sat down with my daughter for her podcast late to the party and I saw a side of you I've never seen. And I just, when you said, I like nothing better than to go out clubbing, I just couldn't quite believe that.

• 57:39Rory Stewart?

  Ah, that's me. It's my Angela Rayner side. It's true. It's true. I love dancing. I love clubbing. Anyone who was at university with me would complain about the fact that I spent my whole time out dancing late at night.

• 57:49Alastair Campbell?

  I was shocked. I was shocked.

• 57:51Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's, it's a side of me that I don't know how we reconcile, but you're right. It took Grace to bring that out. That's why your daughter's a great interviewer.

• 57:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, I did warn you Rory, that it would be a different sort of interview to those you've, to most of those you've done. Anyway, I'm glad you, I'm glad you enjoyed it ish.

• 58:07Rory Stewart?

  It was great. And Grace also brings out a different side of you. So I think she's, she encouraged people to listen to Grace Campbell interviewing the two of us. Thank you, Alice. Looking forward to reconnecting with Question Time and hope the weather improves a bit in your grim Liverpool conference.

• 58:21Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye.

• 58:23Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 59:11Speaker 07

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 59:13Speaker 08

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today. Disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 59:22Alastair Campbell?

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 59:26Speaker 08

  Yes.

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