416. Question Time: What the Head of MI6 Really Does

What does the murder of politicians in Minnesota tell us about the state of American politics? What is the newly appointed Chief of MI6 going to know about the world? Is there a more divisive issue than immigration in the UK today? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to Question Time episodes to live show tickets, ad-free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to ⁠⁠therestispolitics.com⁠⁠ to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: ⁠⁠apple.co/therestispolitics⁠⁠. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠⁠GetFuse.com/Politics⁠⁠ ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ ⁠⁠nordvpn.com/restispolitics⁠⁠ It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to ⁠⁠www.goalhanger.com⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@restispolitics⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠@RestIsPolitics⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Assistant Producers: Evan Green, India Dunkley Video Editor: Josh Smith Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Social Producer: Celine Charles 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

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• 0:04Rory Stewart?

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• 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. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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• 2:51Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:55Alastair Campbell?

  And with me, Alastair Campbell. Now Rory, we have some exciting news for our listeners and viewers. We are finally publishing our first ever mini series for members of the Rest is Politics Plus. And the first episode is out tomorrow. That's if you're listening on Thursday, tomorrow is Friday, June 20.

• 3:16Rory Stewart?

  That's right, really exciting stuff. And for our very first series, we're answering the question, who is the real JD Vance? New episodes of our series will be dropping every Friday morning for members.

• 3:29Alastair Campbell?

  So Rory, what did you, what did you think? I enjoyed digging into JD Vance. I read his book for the third time.

• 3:35Rory Stewart?

  You became like a Tory, started rereading books.

• 3:38Alastair Campbell?

  No, I was re rereading, which is the Labour version of the Tory, you know, when you really get in deep. Spoke to lots of people who knew him, read loads about him, watched him in action. Or did you conclude?

• 3:51Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, I, I think the first thing is how incredibly he's changed. I mean, I, I'm still sort of staggered by the fact that in 2016, he essentially says that as a Christian, he loves Muslims, immigrants, marginalised people. And on their behalf, he is completely against Donald Trump. And as a Christian, he just wants to apologise for Donald Trump.

• 4:18Alastair Campbell?

  God expects better than this.

• 4:21Rory Stewart?

  God expects better than this and how he's changed. So I think that's the one thing. Second thing that I think nobody should underestimate is he's still got a pretty good chance of becoming the next president of the United States. Now, a lot can change. I mean, you know, goodness knows, I above everyone understands that I shouldn't get into the business of predicting elections, but he's certainly a very, very major figure in MAGA. And I think anyone interested in what's going on in the world, looking at J D Vance is a great route into American politics.

• 4:49Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, it starts tomorrow, the evolution of J D Vance from, as Rory says, never Trumper to the potential heir to MAGA. Join The Rest is Politics Plus at therestispolitics.com for our cheapest rates. That's therestispolitics.com.

• 5:04Rory Stewart?

  And if you'd like to try before you buy, a taster of the first episode will drop into everyone's feed on Friday morning, first thing. Okay, Alistair, let's go to our first question.

• 5:15Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Rory, we had a lot of questions, both last week and this, about what was going on in Northern Ireland, in particular in Ballymena. And I want to relate that to something I was reading last week for my German homework, which was the report by the German intelligence services about the rise of the far right. So lots of questions about Ballymena. Let's go with this one, Rory. What on earth is happening in Northern Ireland? I find it really scary. That's from Toby. So what did you, what did you, how much did you follow? What did you make of what was going on in Northern Ireland?

• 5:51Rory Stewart?

  Well, just quickly to remind people what happened. There were anti-immigration protests, which turned into big clashes with the police, began after two 14-year-old Romanian boys were arrested on suspicion of sexually assaulting a teenage girl, which they denied. So of course, it links in again to what we were talking about in the last podcast, which is, this is an immigrant community accused of sexually assaulting a teenager, in this case, two 14-year-olds. It also links into this question we talked about in the J D Vance mini-series about communities taking justice into their own hands. By Tuesday night, there

• 6:32Rory Stewart?

  were rioters wearing masks, setting buildings and cars on fire. They set a leisure centre on fire. People were putting signs outside their houses saying UK or British household.

• 6:48Rory Stewart?

  And Ballymena is a unionist stronghold, so I guess some commentators will be saying that the unionist community has often been very traditional, conservative and anti-immigrant, and therefore they're not very surprised that it's happening within that community. Although in fact, interestingly, I think the views that community on immigration seem to have changed a lot over time, and just over the last 20 years, it's, many people see it as having become much more friendly towards immigrants. Anyway, over to you.

• 7:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, so it is Northern Ireland, actually, of the entirety of the UK is the least ethnically diverse in terms, so 3.4% of the population identifies as being part of a minority ethnic group, and that's compared to 18.3% across England and Wales. The police were very, very clear that this was racist, that the, what happened in the court led immediately to a reaction on the streets, and then the targeting of houses of people Filipinos, of people from, from Eastern Europe. There was then a local politician who said publicly that

• 7:58Alastair Campbell?

  some of them had been moved from their own, for their own safety to this leisure centre. I heard an extraordinary interview with an Olympic swimmer who, who teaches children to swim at this leisure centre about what it was like when this mob was trying to get in and they had to evacuate the whole building. And I guess one thing that, you know, maybe is worth just reflecting on is, is that you're talking mainly about young men, therefore that is a generation that has grown up in relative peace, thanks to the peace process and what followed from the Good Friday Agreement. And I, I just asked the question, I don't know the answer to this, but whether there is something that makes people from backgrounds

• 8:43Alastair Campbell?

  that have been used to violence through time more prone to this kind of violence, I just don't know. But I, it was a horrible, horrible, horrible thing going on. And, you know, I'm in France, as, as I say, and I, I was tracking it on French, German, Spanish, Italian media. This was sort of, you know, this, this was an image of Northern Ireland, that Northern Ireland has gone very, a long way to. To try to prevent, but it just shows you there are still issues of integration, there's still issues of community. And you know, you made the point about the series of J D Vance, that we did about J D Vance. I think the point that he makes about his community is

• 9:23Alastair Campbell?

  that people eventually sort of ran out of hope. Um, now he ends up blaming the people as much as he does society or government or what have you. But, you know, I think we do have some pretty deep questions to ask when we have young men going out, literally, clearly willing to kill people, set them on fire, burn them down their houses because they want to other them.

• 9:46Rory Stewart?

  We've got a question coming from Heinrich, which is, what on earth is going on with right wing extremism in Germany? And I think that connects quite neatly. You mentioned the, a report that's been produced by the German security services on this, we'll dig into that a bit deeper. But just to step back for a second, probably the central theme in right wing populist politics now is what you'd call identitarian politics. In other words, it's a politics that says it's all about cultural identity. And in particular in Europe, it's about cultural identity against Muslims. And a lot of the anti-immigrant sentiment

• 10:31Rory Stewart?

  is bound up with that. And in places like Germany, it's true, so in France and Austria and the Netherlands, but let's, that's just for Heinrich's sake, concentrate on Germany at the moment. We've got this building sense, particularly within the AFD, which is the far right party in German politics, that the problems of Germany, which range from crime to, let's, let's look back to Rotherham, let's also connect it to Ballymena again, often allegations of rape of minors are caused by immigrants coming into their country, and that the solution to this is to drive them out. Stop any more coming in and get rid of the ones that are there. And there's a guy called Martin Selner, who's one of

• 11:15Rory Stewart?

  the great ideologues of all of this, who keeps pushing the idea, which has been picked up by AFD leaders in Turingia, has been echoed by people like Alice Vidal, that ultimately it can't be done within the German constitution, it can't be done in the current European Union laws.

• 11:36Rory Stewart?

  Because of humans' rights protection and actually what needs to happen is these need, people need to be driven out of the country. And the reason why the, this office the constitution gets involved is that of course, the entire German constitution after the Second World War, after the Holocaust, after the killing of German Jews, and indeed actually killing of German Roma, made it very, very clear that you must not on any account do identitarian politics. You cannot constitutionally in Germany differentiate between your citizens on the basis of their ethnicity or race, because that of course is at the core of what led to the killing of the Jews in the Holocaust. Anyway.

• 12:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know whether our security service, MI5, this is the equivalent of MI5 that released this report. I don't know whether they do such detailed reports like this. I need to check that out. But this one is, there's an introduction by the new interior minister, Alexander Dobrindt. And he, and actually, people understand this, if they go to the website of the BFV, they will find, there is actually an English translation of this as well. But his introduction says extremists question Israel's right to exist and call for violence against Jews in our country. Islamists driven by religious delusion attack people with knives in the streets. Right wing terrorists are plotting to overthrow

• 12:57Alastair Campbell?

  our free democratic system. We are defending ourselves against the enemies of our democracy with all the means at our disposal. And it's interesting that he framed it in that, that order. I guess because of the history perhaps, and because of what's happening in the world right now, putting that questioning of Israel's right to exist at the top. But then, when you deep, deep into, dig into the numbers, it's pretty alarming. Fifty seven thousand seven hundred and one crimes with an, what they call with an extremist background. And that's a rise from less than forty thousand. It's an increase of more than forty six percent. And of those crimes, almost three thousand were recorded as violent crimes.

• 13:37Alastair Campbell?

  Big rise in antisemitism, big rise in attacks on Muslims and Muslim sites. It reports a big increase in interference, cyber attack, disinformation, particularly from Russia, China, and Iran. And the numbers, I mean, I don't quite know how they are so precise in their numbers. So the numbers that they call right wing extremists, they now say is over fifty thousand, fifty thousand two hundred and fifty, and that's a rise of ten thousand. Those that they identify as being violent is fifteen thousand three hundred. And then they go through some of the instances that they've had to deal with.

• 14:16Rory Stewart?

  I mean, you look at, look at the numbers are quite, quite interesting. So one of the things I think that will surprise people is that of those fifty seven thousand or fifty eight thousand crimes with an extremist background, almost two thirds of them, the extremists, are right wing extremists. And again, when we're talking about this massive surge in antisemitic crime, seventy percent surge, it's a surge to one thousand seven hundred and seventy six antisemitic criminal offences. But that's out of fifty seven thousand, fifty eight thousand extremist criminal offences.

• 14:54Rory Stewart?

  So the, the right wing extremists, if antisemitic offences are about two thousand, right wing extremist offences is up at thirty seven thousand. So it's nearly twenty times as, as many going on.

• 15:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. They do, they do say that right wing extremism has essentially has overtaken left wing and Islamist terrorism. But the numbers of those two are rising as well. I think it's almost forty thousand left wing extremists, twenty eight thousand that they define as Islamist extremism. The other thing they have is this, this, this thing called Reichsbürger. These are people who don't recognise the German constitution and they're growing as well. I remember that famous case of the, those guys who were sort of planning a, planning a coup and the court case is still going on. So you've got these different, different levels of extremism.

• 15:51Alastair Campbell?

  But as you say, the right is where it is, where it is growing. And, and the tone of this report was, was really. Calling it out, this, you know, we talked in the main podcast about grooming gangs and how part of the problem was that the state tries to downplay big issues and big challenges and big problems. This, this one was not doing that.

• 16:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, just to finish on this question, the numbers, 20,000 far-right, dangerous extremists are being pulled towards the AFD. It's become a massive magnet for these people. And again, you know, not to pussyfoot around this, some of these people sing Nazi songs, support SS standard bearers, use Nazi language, talk about remigration, support people who think that you should have a numerical limit on the number of Afghans, and that's a few hundred, when there are actually about 100,000 in the country. And what makes the AFD, and we

• 16:53Rory Stewart?

  get into this maybe another week, but whereas Le Pen's party in France has tried to distance itself from its far-right fascist ancestry, the AFD isn't doing that. They're pulling in the NPD and other far-right groups very, very quickly. So the AFD in Germany in many ways feels more extreme, more dangerous, from this report and elsewhere, than, than things like Le Pen's party in France.

• 17:21Alastair Campbell?

  And yet, Dobrindt is very, very clear that they're not going to, he does not support outlawing them or defining them as anti-constitutional, even though he does define them as a far-right extreme party. So I think that debate's going to go on. And it's the old age-old debate about whether you give people greater credibility if you, if you try to, try to ban them. But anyway, it's an interesting report. I recommend people have a, have a read of it. It's, and if you go to the BFV website, you should, you should find it in English.

• 17:54Rory Stewart?

  Question for you. Tia Kada, the hypocrisy of Trump coming out to declare the murder of Melissa Hartman and her husband is horrific. When he's actively promoting violence in LA, it's sickening. Can you please discuss the double standards? Jacob Brown, what are your thoughts on the assassination, attempted assassination of two Democratic state politicians and their families in Minnesota? Just to remind people, the assassination was of Melissa Hartman, who was the speaker in Minnesota, and a Democratic state senator was shot and wounded. A man called Vance Luther Butler was arrested and he had a list of names in his vehicle, which included Governor Tim Walz and Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.

• 18:36Rory Stewart?

  So he's, this guy, security contractor, which I guess is a polite way of saying, somebody who's worked around the Africa and Middle East with a gun, providing close protection, defending things, the kind of people that I worked with closely in Iraq, although a much, much more unpleasant, less regulated version. But also a religious missionary who preached as a pastor at the church in Democratic Republic of Congo. Now, although the people who've been targeted are Democrats, Trump came out, I think, quite rightly to say such horrific violence will not be tolerated in the United States of America. God bless the great people of Minnesota. A truly great place. You know, fine, that's contradictory, but I'd much rather he was saying that than saying the reverse. Anyway, over to you.

• 19:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I agree with that, but I found it pretty extraordinary that I didn't see a single word of empathy for the individuals concerned, those that were shot and the two, the other couple, also Democrat politician and his wife, who was shot and survived. And since then, you've had an absolutely determined effort by the MAGA crowd to identify this guy as a Democrat. When his best friend was out saying he was a big Trump supporter, very anti-abortion, there is actually, I don't think we should show it because, you know, but just to let people know, there is online a video of him doing this preaching

• 20:02Alastair Campbell?

  in Congo through a French interpreter. And he just looks completely crazed. But I think it underlines, I was talking to somebody yesterday, he was telling me that his daughter had been inspired by my book, you'll be pleased to hear, Roy, to get to think about, to think about going into politics. And he was saying he was trying to talk her out of it. Or not to become an MP because he just thinks it's particularly for women now, it's too dangerous. And you know, yesterday was the ninth anniversary of Joe Cox's murder. Look, I hope that people don't rule it out, but I know people who say that, who say, one, why would you want to do it? Because it's such a horrible existence anyway, you get abused online the whole time, you

• 20:47Alastair Campbell?

  never get credit, you never get thanks. Um, most of you don't make it very high up the ladder. But secondly, this, this hatred and the polarization, and let's not be, let's not kid ourselves, Trump fuels that polarization all the time. He was literally doing it the next day with this post about, you know, basically saying that the ICE, the immigration people needed to focus on these blue states and, you know, as if immigration was a kind of a, just a, we're just going to go after people in Democrat areas in case they vote Democrat kind of thing. So I, you know, you'd hope on the back of something as horrible as a murder, that the debate would calm down, but it didn't, didn't even, even for a minute, it didn't calm down.

• 21:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 21:32Alastair Campbell?

  Horrible.

• 21:33Rory Stewart?

  Horrible, horrible. Okay. Um, here's, you, you, you, um, managed to highlight this, so I guess we've got to follow through, which is some of the pushback on immigration. So, Careful Swimmer from Reddit.

• 21:44Alastair Campbell?

  That's me.

• 21:45Rory Stewart?

  Unlike you, you're not a very careful swimmer.

• 21:46Alastair Campbell?

  Quite careful.

• 21:47Rory Stewart?

  After you manage to give yourself hypothermia in Lake Geneva. I don't think you can describe you as a careful swimmer at all.

• 21:51Alastair Campbell?

  No, no.

• 21:52Rory Stewart?

  So this is the rude question you referred to. Question about immigration served to reinforce my opinion that Alastair just doesn't get it. Open minds, open borders and refugees welcome simply confirms my belief that he's a prime example of the sort of virtue signaling rich liberal, whose only experience of immigration is a lovely ethnic restaurant and that nice man who cuts the grass. Do you have a nice man who cuts grass? He's never suffered a single negative consequence of immigration, is literally unable to conceive of any circumstances where anyone who disagrees with him is anything but a racist. He hasn't changed a bit since the Blair government allowed thousands upon thousands of people to come here and set in motion a process that ended in Brexit. Rory was more realistic, but to describe boat people as a tiny programme when it's

• 22:37Rory Stewart?

  costing us billions of pounds a year in a time of financial crisis shows at best naivety. Well, what do you think about that?

• 22:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Careful Swimmer, may I respectfully and humbly suggest, is somebody who

• 22:51Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you for listening, but I think listens to us and hears those parts of the things that we say that supplement what he or she already thinks. So, for example, you didn't say the boat people was a tiny problem. You said that in terms of the numbers of people coming into the country, it was a tiny proportion. Likewise, I, it is true, the whole point of the fight that we put up against Brexit, when we were fighting for the second referendum, was open minds, open borders, because one of the, at the heart of that debate was that if we were going to stay in the European Union, we had open borders insofar as the European Union was concerned.

• 23:34Alastair Campbell?

  And refugees welcome, I think is just a straightforward way of saying that I do not join those people who want to treat all asylum seekers and all refugees as if they're somehow alien criminal entities that want to take our, our country away. And I, I don't know how you define one's experience of immigration, but I'll give you two experiences of immigration, which partly explain why I feel as strongly about this as I do. I grew up for the first 11 years of my life in Keithley in West Yorkshire. Congratulations to Keithley Cougars for their last minute win at the weekend against Rochdale. And I grew up in a nice middle-class area, and every time I had to walk into town, I had to go through what was essentially an Asian immigrant community in the poorer part

• 24:19Alastair Campbell?

  of town. And I just felt that the people there were, were nice people. I was a kid, I didn't really sort of sense their colour. Um, and what's more, what's happened since then, so my primary school, for example, this goes to the point about in- integration, I went to Utley Primary School, which when I was there was a hundred percent white. It's now a hundred percent non-white. And that is largely because people moved out, it's called white flight.

• 24:50Alastair Campbell?

  And I think that's sad, that we don't have a mixed community in that, in that school, in that area. And then I moved to Leicester, and I think Leicester became the first place in Britain that became majority non-white. And again, I just had a, I had a sense of nice people. Yes, there are bad people, there are bad white people, there are bad black people, there are bad brown people, there are bad all colours. Um, and I don't think that that makes me a, what is it, virtue signalling, rich liberal. We can have an argument about rich, I'm quite well off. Uh, virtue signal, I'm not sure I'm a big virtue signal, I'll let you be the judge of that one, Rory. A liberal, yeah, I'm a liberal progressive. And, and by the way, the other thing, I've never, have you ever heard me call

• 25:32Alastair Campbell?

  somebody who voted Brexit for whatever reasons they gave, have you ever heard me call them racist? I never bought into that argument. That was an argument that was put on us by people like Johnson, by people like Farage and by the right wing press. So I hope that's a fair and reasonable disagreeable, agreeable disagreeably rebuttal.

• 25:53Rory Stewart?

  It's good, it's good, it was good, it was good.

• 25:56Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think I'm, do you think I'm a virtue signal, Rory?

• 25:58Rory Stewart?

  No, I don't, I don't think you're a virtue signal. Um, I think that our, our agreeable disagreement is that I, I don't think you're any of those things. Uh, um, I, you, you may not cut the grass, um, but I don't think that's really, uh, here or there.

• 26:13Alastair Campbell?

  As, as, as Fiona loves to tell people, she once asked me to cut the grass. And my reply was, if I wanted to bow to the law, I'd have become a fucking gardener.

• 26:22Rory Stewart?

  There we are, you see, uh, not, not that we want to put off the fact that a very large number of our listeners are gardeners. And I rather wish I were a gardener, but anyway, you don't want to be a gardener. Um, anyway, um, listen, I think our agreeable disagreement last week goes back to three things. Number one, I think that the numbers of people that came into the country, seven hundred and twenty five thousand at one point, almost a million on another year, are completely insane, totally insane, right? Um, and secondly, I annoyed a lot of people in the university sector by questioning some of the ways in which funding pressures have forced people to take students into universities, some of which I'm afraid are not as high quality as they should be, particularly in some parts

• 27:03Rory Stewart?

  of the sector. And thirdly, I think that you're not changing the public's mind on this anywhere in Europe or the West. You have to accept that people want controls over both illegal and legal migration, and any party that fails to recognise that and bringing in a policy to do that is toast and is just giving sucker to the far right. But I don't think that having this disagreement, or the perfectly valid points that you make against me about the economic benefit that migrants bring, or my very strong agreement with you, that I think my personal interactions are incredibly warm and make me feel exactly

• 27:44Rory Stewart?

  like you, that these are often the nicest, most hardworking, committed British citizens that we've got. Change is at all for saying those things. Let's take a quick break and then come back with some questions after the break.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Mr President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 28:10Speaker 04

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

• 28:16Speaker 05

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze, that's what.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 28:23Speaker 05

  I'm not the first then.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 not a minute without parent.

• 28:35Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Rest of the Podcast, question time. Me, Alastair Campbell. And with me Rory Stewart. Selma Lou, can we have an explainer on exactly what the new MI6 boss will be responsible for? What if we told you, Selma, we'd have to kill you? Don't you know that? You can't say what the boss of MI6 does. I'm very pleased that Blaze Metroelli has been named head of the secret intelligence service, first woman ever. To do the job. She's a very impressive woman, lifelong working in the intelligence service. She was Q.

• 29:08Rory Stewart?

  Which was my my father's job.

• 29:10Alastair Campbell?

  Your dad was Q, wasn't he?

• 29:11Rory Stewart?

  My dad was Q, yeah, and he he failed to become chief. He tried to become chief from being Q and actually was defeated by an external candidate who was brought in instead of promoting him.

• 29:20Alastair Campbell?

  This this time is the other way around. It's the the the external has has been

• 29:24Rory Stewart?

  Was defeated and the internal came in.

• 29:26Alastair Campbell?

  Defeated by the internal, yeah.

• 29:27Rory Stewart?

  Which is cheering up a lot of people inside MI6. Just to remind people quickly in case they're confused about this, MI6 does our external intelligence service. So traditionally it targeted cultivated and recruited agents overseas, while MI5, more like the FBI, focused on threats internally. And of course, the MI5 has had female bosses in the past, you know, Stella Remington, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, who we interviewed. But you're absolutely right, Blaze is an internal country. She's she is, I think, liked by many, many people. She did spend a couple of years outside the service, which is working the private sector, which is also good because it gives you a bit of perspective. Sad thing for people my age is that we've jumped a generation. We've gone from somebody in their

• 30:09Rory Stewart?

  60s, Richard Moore, to somebody in their late 40s in the in the context of Blaze. And it makes people from my generation worry what on earth happened to the whole sort of 15 years in between and why did those people not get the jobs?

• 30:24Alastair Campbell?

  I think she's somebody who really does, and you'd want this, it's the same way we interviewed Alex Youngo and and John Sawyer, so we've interviewed two of her predecessors and Richard Moore, who we'd love to have on the podcast, you know, when he gets out of the place. But they you have to have people there who really think deeply about the world. And I think she does. She's somebody who really thinks through things from that strategic perspective. She'll be very good with the politicians and that's a big part of the job, keeping them at bay while making sure that they're properly informed. And I think the the SIS does feel that during our time, Richard Dearlove, who was another of her predecessors, got way too close politically to us.

• 31:09Alastair Campbell?

  So anyway, I think it's a very, very good move all round and I'm very pleased for her and very pleased for them.

• 31:14Rory Stewart?

  Great appointment. Structurally, the only challenge that she faces is that she came into the service very, very soon before nine eleven. So most of her career was dominated by a moment where MI6 was concentrating very, very much on international terrorism. And now she's leading an organisation which has to think much more about more traditional things, such as Russia and China.

• 31:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, sure, but the, I think the Middle East is probably her area of expertise. But I think it's one of those jobs where you, I think we found this when we were talking to Alex Younger, you just, you develop, because you have to, a level of knowledge about all areas of the world that just keep you on top of your game the whole time. And I've got no doubt she'll be able to do that.

• 31:57Rory Stewart?

  Well, given that we both know her, given we both admire her immensely and think she's a good appointment, we'd like to invite her to come on to launch her career with an interview on leading.

• 32:06Alastair Campbell?

  I've already said to her, Rory, you better make sure your first big interview is on the UK, on the, on the number one podcast of the country whose security you protect, is how I put it. Now Rory, what about this one for you? This is from A London Life. I just listened to a recent New Statesman podcast featuring Jeremy Hunt, and it struck me how balanced, reflective and frankly quite sensible he came across. It reminded me how often senior Tory politicians suddenly seem like the voice of reason, once they're no longer in government. Not just Hunt, but think Rory Stewart, David Gork, even George Osborne to some extent. They all undergo this weird transformation from hard-nosed operators to thoughtful commentators

• 32:50Alastair Campbell?

  with a surprising amount of nuance. Is it just the removal of the party line and media pressure? Or do they just sound more reasonable when they're not actively making decisions? Curious if others have noticed the same pattern. I think one of the reasons for Jeremy Hunt is he's got a book to flog.

• 33:04Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's true, but you can, you can still flog books in a pretty wooden way. No, I, I think it tells you a lot about, and it relates to your point earlier, about how difficult it is going into politics. It's simply the case that modern politics takes often people who are quite impressive before they went into politics. You know, I could add to it some of the people we've interviewed. Let's keep going on the Tories, Sajid Javid, Ben Wallace, John Major, some eccentric Theresa May. But these are people who, if you met them working for a company or they were in the charity you worked for, you'd think were really impressive, hardworking, thoughtful, serious people who managed well.

• 33:47Rory Stewart?

  As soon as you put them in politics, something weird happens. And I think they've identified a lot of the reasons why it's weird. It is partly to do with party whipping, it's partly to do with the way in which people do political communication, the sort of obsession on tribal loyalty, whacking it to the other side. It's also the weird way that social media works, the way that we clip people, the incredible polarisation, the lack of trust in politics. It's very difficult to give people space to be themselves if we live in a culture that is just out to destroy them. I think many of my colleagues have experienced what of course I experience all the time. And I was talking to a senior Australian politician, a senator from Victoria recently, who was commenting on the basic weird truth in every country in the world, which is a

• 34:32Rory Stewart?

  vast majority of people hate politicians, the vast majority of people who ask about their local politician who they actually know and have met, they quite like them. So it's partly a question of exposure. Anyway, what do you think about it all?

• 34:41Alastair Campbell?

  I think there is something about, you know, you feel a bit freer. I mean, Jeremy Hammond is still an MP, isn't he? And he still feels, he probably still feels a sense of party loyalty and so forth. But I think, I think the other thing, I saw an interview on Iran the other day with Philip Hammond, ex-Chancellor, ex-Foreign Secretary. And he came over as, a bit like the question is saying, came over as very thoughtful, had really kind of gone deep into the issues about Iran. It was a really interesting interview. And whereas I guess, and this is what, you know, I mentioned when we talk about the grooming gangs, I think Kemi Badenoch should take a look at the way that she responded to Yvette Cooper yesterday, determined to sort of make it as political as possible.

• 35:26Alastair Campbell?

  Now, listen to her interview on The Rest Is Money. With Robert Peston and it was sort of really frustrating. He was trying to draw out on where her economic philosophy came from. And she just gets very snarky and sort of slightly taking the piss out of him. And I don't know, I found it very, very unsatisfying. And not much nuance in the way that she speaks. And, you know, I think that's what these former frontline guys are doing, just a bit of nuance. I think what London Life is describing is politicians who come out of politics and don't feel that their prime purpose is to project themselves in a positive way by projecting their opponents in a negative way.

• 36:09Rory Stewart?

  There's also a question of a selection of candidates which will be relevant to Labour. A lot of these people that we're praising are people who had serious careers, often if they're Tories, Jeremy Hunt, Philip Hammond, very successful business careers. Satya Javed would be another one. Came into politics late, having made a great deal of money, run their own big organisations and in the case of Hunt being an entrepreneur or Hammond. So they've got a bit of ballast and a bit of background before they become politicians. They're not people who are coming into politics as party activists in their early twenties. You know, I have many disagreements with David Cameron, but one of the things he tried to do through his A-list system, which brought in people like Satya Javed, and of course, he promoted

• 36:53Rory Stewart?

  Jeremy Hunt quickly, was to try to make sure that the Tory party was still bringing in people who'd done things the other side. Well, Ben Wallace, for example, again, he'd spent many years as an army officer before he became politician.

• 37:04Alastair Campbell?

  I, I think Labour have got a lot of very, very good new MPs, but we're not seeing enough of them. I think there are some really talented young politicians in there and we, we just need to see more of them.

• 37:14Rory Stewart?

  And, and I think Keir Starmer made an effort, didn't he, actually, to

• 37:16Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:17Rory Stewart?

  to fast, fast track people who'd heard quite, I mean, the most dramatic example is this unbelievable Minister for Veterans, who was the most legendary war fighting Royal Marine, who led our operations in Ukraine, has just climbed to the summit of Everest.

• 37:30Alastair Campbell?

  Hello.

• 37:31Rory Stewart?

  A member of parliament. I mean, that was an incredible coup. If you want the total antidote to my grumbles about some of the kind of Labour Party red prints political machine, this was Starmer recruiting someone who was basically completely non-political, who's one of the great fighting soldiers of our generation. I mean, can you imagine a, a member of parliament sort of cheerfully just romping up Everest and producing a sort A pretty self-deprecating account of how he, a middle-aged man with his mates, just did this incredible feat.

• 38:00Alastair Campbell?

  You're talking about Mr. Alastair Khan's and we should, we should welcome the fact you're, you spend so much time criticizing Labour and peace. Thank you for that unadulterated praise.

• 38:09Rory Stewart?

  I don't want to continue my fanboying, but this is literally, I mean, this is, you know, we've talked about other people who've served in the military. We talked about your friend Johnny Mercer, we've talked about Ben Wallace, but Alastair Khan's completely different level, right? This guy was a Colonel, but he's also Alastair Khan's DSO, OBM, C. I mean, he's a highly decorated guy. And one of the few people that I, in my experience, even soldiers are a bit scared of how brave he is. I mean, the normal setup in the special forces is that the soldiers do the crazy stuff and the officers hold them back. I don't want to be, sort of overdo it, but this is a real kind of door-kicking action man, who even the soldiers are like, woo, that's, that's, that's quite tasty.

• 38:50Alastair Campbell?

  War heroes, great, love them. But there are lots of people in the Parliamentary Labour Party that I think I'd love to see more of in the, in the public space. Raj K., could it be argued that the government's decision to cut the BBC's World Service budget leaves us more vulnerable to Russian propaganda? It feels like an attack on a soft power asset. We didn't really talk about the spending review much last week because Iran kind of slightly took over. I thought in general, Rachel Reeves did a pretty good job. I, I didn't like, and I know they've got to, you know, they say they've got to make cuts, but I think this soft PowerPoint is incredibly important. So there were cuts to the World Service Budget, cuts to the British Council, and also cuts to the Culture Budget. And, you know, you remember when we interviewed Lisa Nandi and I was saying, you know, I've

• 39:35Alastair Campbell?

  got this obsession about Britain being a cultural superpower. I've written my new world column about this theme this week because Boris Johnson used to go on about global Britain and world-leading this and world-leading that. We are world-leading in culture. But we've got to fight to stay there. I mean, at a time when, you know, what are we saying that report about the German intelligence service, that China, Russia, Iran are upping their investment in terms of information warfare and so on. Now, the BBC is not part of information warfare in the same way the stuff that they're doing. I'm not suggesting that they should be. But the BBC World Service has been an incredibly important part of Britain's voice politically, socially, culturally around the world.

• 40:18Rory Stewart?

  This is an ongoing story, which has been very, very sad. So if you go back to the days of John Burt, you had Sir John Chusser as the director of BBC World Service, right at the top of the organisation. Running the World Service out of Bush House was one of the most senior jobs in the whole setup. Over time, the head of the World Service became more junior within the BBC hierarchy, put underneath other people. And then this process started, unfortunately actually, under Gordon Brown and David Miliband. Some of the first lacks of investment got worse under the Tories, because the Tories started controlling the licence fee, putting pressure on the BBC. And the BBC took over funding

• 41:00Rory Stewart?

  from the Foreign Office for this stuff, so it began to go down. We were writing reports in the Foreign Affairs Select Committee now, almost 15 years ago, pointing out that China, Russia and others were massively increasing their spending on their overseas services, while Britain, which had every advantage, English language, name of the BBC, most trusted thing, everywhere you went in the world. Not very long ago, people were listening to BBC World Service, and we began to close all our language stations around the world. So it's sort of astonishing, you know, closing Arabic language stations, incredible stuff, right? And it's just got worse and worse and worse. And, you know, you often talk about soft power. It's a really sad moment, because we've just lost Joe Nye, who is the amazing

• 41:44Rory Stewart?

  American professor who coined this phrase, this incredibly thoughtful, charming epitome of the kind of old civilised American foreign policy establishment, who more than anyone captured how actually real power in the world is often not about your guns or your ships. It's about ideas, and it's about culture, and it's about values.

• 42:12Rory Stewart?

  And it's really sad that Joe, who was a really lovely man, as well as a great thinker and a great coiner of phrases, has died at the moment where Trump is killing the idea of soft power and where, for some reason, the Starmer government, instead of seeing the incredible opportunity, and this is true of Europe in general, to fill the gap left by the US as it gives up on international development and the rules-based system and values, is shrinking as well.

• 42:37Alastair Campbell?

  I see that America has recalled the Farsi speakers at the Voice of America. So part of the whole madness at the start with Musk was to shut down USAID, defund the Voice of America, and they've suddenly realised that actually, when there's a sort of war going on between Iran and Israel, it's not bad to have a bit of Voice of America in Farsi out there. And the other thing, Sopar, I see that the other thing, and there's so much stuff that happens in Trump land, he's apparently adding another 36 countries to the list of people who can't come in. But what message does that send at a time when China is swamping these countries with aid and development and the Belt and Road Initiative that we talked about?

• 43:20Rory Stewart?

  Well, Alissa, we're coming up to the end. It's been a lot of fun, but here's a question for you. Not anti-terrorism or counter-terrorism, but in this case, counter-tourism. Miriam Finley, what do you think about the anti-tourism protests spreading across Europe? Locals protesting Bezos's wedding in Venice. Feels like it represents a much deeper problem. What do you think, Alissa? What do you think about tourists?

• 43:43Alastair Campbell?

  You know, from time to time, I have been a tourist. I'm not a good tourist. I don't, I don't, I don't do much tourism, but I, as I, as I say to Fiona, we're not going on holiday, we're going to work in a different place. But it's fascinating what's going on. Barcelona this week, huge protests. And one of the things they go around with, they go around with these water spray guns, sort of squirting water at tourists. Mallorca, there was a big one. Lisbon, there was a big one. And the point they're making is that the locals don't have anywhere to live. That their entire economies are imbalanced in favour of one sector, which is tourism and hospitality.

• 44:28Alastair Campbell?

  They're being priced out is another argument. And the point about Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world, he's getting married. And the wedding, they're determined that the wedding should be one of the biggest, the most glamorous, the most glitzy. And to that effect, they've taken over loads and loads of hotels. Police are having to get involved, security is having to get involved. And it's just a sort of disgusting display of I'm really, really, really, really rich. And Venice has become a popular place for people to get married. So the people in Venice are basically saying, we've had enough of you lot coming here and, you know, sort of wrecking the joint, so go away.

• 45:05Rory Stewart?

  It's a really interesting question. I mean, Venice particularly, which has been a tourist destination rather than a functioning economy really for three hundred and fifty years. I mean, Venice was, you know, a great trading state in the late Middle Ages, but it basically, since the early seventeen hundreds, it's existed on people going there on holiday. And that's been particularly true since the, since the Second World War. Every single person in the world wants to visit Venice. You know, I've been thinking about this because my constituency, Penrith and the border, our largest income earner by a large way was not farming. It was tourism, people coming up to the Lake District and Hadrian's Wall. And there were many of these kinds of complaints. Now, it may be too optimistic to say this, but my sense is that it's about how you do it.

• 45:47Rory Stewart?

  And that's why I'm very impressed by the way the Swiss or the Austrians have thought about it. So I did quite a lot of recording earlier in the year from a Swiss ski resort. And what's interesting there is that they've really thought this through. They've got houses for the Swiss and they've got houses for tourists. They've got prices for the Swiss, they've got prices for tourists. They make sure that the tourism economy doesn't just end up with everybody chasing cheap wages. Instead, they've got Swiss employees and if you're a Swiss painter, decorator or manual labourer working in Valbier, you're earning forty quid an hour. And you're going out for fancy cappuccinos and hotels. I was in Switzerland at Interlaken at the Swiss Economic Festival two weeks ago.

• 46:28Rory Stewart?

  Again, there you can see how they're really going for high end conferences, bringing year round income. The Austrians are very, very good at this. So my guess is that the real answer for these places is to go, I'm afraid, more serious, more training, more higher end, more year round. And make it something that is a proud part of your economy, because it's certainly growing. It's a huge, right, the number of people getting on planes is going up all the time. You know, the number of people from Asia traveling, you know, a number of Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Vietnamese travelers just going through the roof. And final point is, we're all a bit hypocritical about this.

• 47:08Rory Stewart?

  Not to be funny about it, but many of those people who are protesting against tourists in their own country, and this, I'm afraid, may be true even of some of my constituents. Loved going off to Mallorca themselves on holiday, where they were probably getting sprayed by locals protesting against their presence.

• 47:24Alastair Campbell?

  Funny enough, what was happening with the protest, I heard, when I was in Jersey recently, I heard the opposite from a very eloquent taxi driver. Who said that the trouble with Jersey is that we haven't got enough tourist capacity. You know, the balance had gone wrong. So I think it is a question of balance. And that requires our good old friend, now that you've converted to socialism, Rory, by thinking we have to, governments have to build houses. We need our good friend, a good friend, a bit of central planning at the local level. But if you're a Mallorca, I mean, how much of Mallorca's economy, I don't, I should know the answer, I should have looked it up, but, you know, tourism is so important to these places. But I think it's very, very interesting.

• 48:05Rory Stewart?

  Incredible, I mean, if it's anything, I mean, most of these places are like my constituency, it will be by far the largest income. I mean, tourism in Penrith and Border brought in two and a half billion pounds a year. I mean, it dwarfed anything else. So one of the questions in any place, I mean, Venice, tourism income will be 90% of the income of the whole of Venice. So there is a bit of a question, if you're really pushing against it, what else is Venice supposed to do? I mean, it composed of beautiful medieval buildings, it doesn't, you know, it's not exactly the manufacturing heart of Italy.

• 48:39Alastair Campbell?

  And then in 20 years' time, they become the equivalent of our coastal towns that say, you know, we've been left behind. Um. So yeah, this is not as simple as the the the water squirt as my my haves believed. I've got to say, Rory, my the favourite thing I read all week relates to Jeff Bezos, because as well as having his wedding in Venice, he also has three homes, I think it is, on this island. It's a manmade island, a gated community of Florida. And this this is wonderful row going on, because Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have also got a place there. And so it's been built. And so, you know, these fancy multimillion

• 49:21Alastair Campbell?

  houses and they've got their own golf course that only the sort of couple of few dozen residents are allowed to use and what have you. But the trouble is, they didn't plan properly for where the sewage goes. And so the sewage is having to go into the low the the the neighbouring council's area, and they're asking ten million dollars

• 49:43Alastair Campbell?

  to take the unwanted waste products of Mr Bezos and Mr Kushner. So I'm on the side of the local council, that one.

• 49:52Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think the big question I need to look into in my new political conversion is what exactly did Karl Marx have to say about tourism? And I suspect the answer is not very much, did he?

• 50:00Alastair Campbell?

  No, although he's he has quite quite a few of them go and look at his his tomb in Highgate Cemetery every single day.

• 50:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, including some people we've interviewed who've objected to their dads tra- traipsing them around the tomb. Well, okay. And Alastair, thank you very much. Have a lovely, lovely time. I've got to get to Ireland.

• 50:18Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, lovely.

• 50:19Rory Stewart?

  Talk to you when I'm back from Ireland.

• 50:21Alastair Campbell?

  As Rory rushes off, I just want to tell people, if they didn't know already, we were done this week by dead ringers. Have to say, I think they they're Rory's better than they're Alastair. I think that it's like the Rory Bremner guy still hasn't quite got me. But Rory, it's worth listening, worth seeing. And finally, finally, finally, do not miss out on our first miniseries on J D Vance, which starts this Friday, June the 20th.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  Hello, it's Gordon Carrera here from The Rest Is Classified. Now, you might have heard Alastair mention our recent episodes on Israel's 2020 assassination of Iran's top nuclear scientist. In those episodes, we hear how Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency, used a robotic artificial intelligence-enhanced gun to kill essentially the father of Iran's nuclear programme. Now, that was just the latest instalment in a long shadow war between the two nations which erupted into full-scale conflict in the last week or so. So, my co-host David McClosky and I have recorded our take on the recent developments

• 51:41Speaker 06

  and how they fit in into this longer story of the battle between Israel and Iran. And you can hear that now on The Rest Is Classified.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

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  On October 2nd.

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

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  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

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• 52:19Speaker 05

  I'm not the first then.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.