255. Is Labour's lead narrowing?

Is the gap between public opinion of Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak narrowing already? Have the Conservatives stolen Rory's idea for a compulsory national service? What tactics are being used to suppress democracy in India? Rory and Alastair discuss all this and more in today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. Subscribe to The New European and receive a £25 voucher to spend on their shop, exclusively for The Rest Is Politics Listeners: theneweuropean.co.uk/TRIP 🌏 Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ https://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. TRIP FIRST 100 DAYS TOUR: To buy tickets for our October Election Tour, just head to www.therestispolitics.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Podcast Editor: James Hodgson Video Editor: Teo Ayodeji-Ansell Social Producer: Jess Kidson Assistant Producer: Fiona Douglas Producer: Nicole Maslen 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 Crete. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:05Speaker 02

  I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Botox on a botulinum toxin A prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  A payday candy bar is miles and miles of peanuts. Salty, crunchy peanuts, sweet, sweet caramel, wrapping you up with every bite. Enjoy the tasty journey, my friend. Payday Peanut Caramel Bar.

• 2:28Rory Stewart?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Politics with me Rory Stewart.

• 2:31Alastair Campbell?

  And with me Alastair Campbell and this is all very exciting today Rory because this is the first of several of our podcasts that are going to be going out not just on The Rest Is Politics channels but also on Channel 4, one of, well I would say, our best TV channel in the country. And what's going to happen is we're recording Tuesday morning, our regulars will get this on their audio feed Tuesday afternoon and then tomorrow night, Wednesday 11pm it'll be on Channel 4 and every week thereafter up to the election we'll be doing the same on Tuesday night, 11pm Tuesday night, Channel 4. So that's a bit of an exciting development.

• 3:11Rory Stewart?

  Incredibly exciting and we're right into the elections, which obviously I was not expecting until the end of the year. And here we are. And my goodness, we've got so many dimensions to cover. We've got to cover the personalities, we've got to cover the polling, we've got to cover the target seats, we've got to cover the media stories. I mean, we're really going to get into the absolute depths, the entrails of this election. Where would you like to start though? How would you want to structure this?

• 3:36Alastair Campbell?

  We've commissioned a number of polls and we're going to be producing these week by week. Now, I am on record, let me get this out there right at the start, I'm on record as saying that opinion polls are the junk food of journalism. So before anybody throws that back at me, I will admit that I've said that. But I think what is different? No, no, no. So these will, these will form part of our discussions. These are done by JAL Partners, we've been doing them monthly, we're now going to do them weekly. And I think where we, let's just start on the, on the, the thing that gets the kind of headlines is the, the Labour lead at the moment and that there is a tightening of that Labour

• 4:15Alastair Campbell?

  lead. It's down from 18 in April to 12 points today. Labour on 40, Tories 28, Reform on 12. I think what's happening, Liberal Democrats 10, Green Party 5. I think what's probably happening, and this is, I think you can see this in the Conservative strategy. Thus far with this thing about national service, which we'll talk about, and then today pensions, which we'll also talk about, is I think that the Conservative strategy is focused very much at trying to go for the older vote because they are worried about the rise of Reform. So that's what's going on there. And then on the rest of it, massive expectations that Labour are

• 4:55Alastair Campbell?

  going to win. A very interesting question about whether people think that Rishi Sunak thinks he can win, and that's in pretty small numbers as well. And as per the last time we did this poll, Keir Starmer doing better than Rishi Sunak on all the positive leadership traits. So what else did you say in there that was interesting?

• 5:15Rory Stewart?

  Well, I suppose one thing which I suppose can be expected is that from the last poll, the Tories are now, having been behind, are now neck and neck with Labour on inflation. And that's because there were some more positive inflation figures. This inflation thing is all a bit odd because as Keir Starmer points out, there's a limited amount that actually a prime minister can do to control inflation. But the public were giving Labour credit on inflation last time, and this time the two of them seem to be pretty much neck and neck. Probably the most interesting thing is this question of why Reform isn't really performing. And one route into that, which we haven't talked about much, is party finances. The government has increased

• 5:58Rory Stewart?

  the amount that the parties can spend in this election to well over thirty million pounds from nineteen million pounds. So it's going to be an enormous election. I think that's something that both you and I think is pretty disgusting and unnecessary. There's no reason for Britain to go to these huge numbers. The Tories have spent something like eight hundred thousand pounds on social media advertising, as far as we can see since the beginning of the year. By contrast, Reform, which is this old Brexit UKIP party, has spent something like twenty five thousand pounds. And their entire funding, almost all of it, seems to come from a single man, Richard Tice, who's the head of their party, who's given them a one million pound loan and given them a few hundred thousand pounds worth of donations. So one problem simply maybe Reform is just not

• 6:43Rory Stewart?

  getting its presence out there. It's not ready. And actually, that's the only thing maybe that can be said. You talked about Rishi Sunak doing this as a surprise. The one party he obviously wasn't going to surprise was Labour. The Labour machine was pretty ready for him. But it's possible that he has slightly surprised reform.

• 7:01Alastair Campbell?

  Well, interestingly, Nigel Farage, of course, is their best known figure, although he's decided he's not standing. He, I mean, there's an element of narcissism here, which you have to aim off for. But he said, actually, he thought the reason why Sunak had done this was because of him. This was to catch him on the, on the back foot because he wouldn't have time to get a seat. Now, I think there's something. There's a bit of self-serving nonsense in there because actually he could easily have got a seat. There are plenty of seats up for grabs. In fact, for the Tories. I, I read yesterday that they're going to have to find a candidate every hundred minutes between now and when the nominations close. Because they've got so many pulling out, most famously, I suppose, Michael Gob, but also Andrea Ledsum.

• 7:47Alastair Campbell?

  We should put a full list of the candidates who are stepping down in the newsletter because it is a very, very long list. The, the message that the Tories are trying to push out about reform is if you vote for them, you're basically voting for Labour. And I see why they're doing that. And I do, I do think that if you look at the two things, let's just go to policy for a minute. Both of these big announcements that Rishi Sunak has made, I mean, they, they, they don't feel very coherent to me, but let's just park that for a minute. The thing about national service, you can see that appealing, not necessarily to somebody in their late teens. But you can see it to the, you know, the guy who's sitting all day in his sixties and seventies, watching rolling news, watching GB news.

• 8:31Alastair Campbell?

  And along they come and say that, you know, we've got to make young people step up to the plate. And you can see people going, yeah, yeah, yeah, quite right. These young people, they need to get a bit of national service in them. And then today, this, what they're calling triple lock plus on the pensions. And, you know, when I'm going out to schools, Rory, I always say, one of the reasons why you guys have got to vote is because. Political parties know that older people vote in greater numbers. So they're playing directly to that. And this triple lock plus, I heard Mel Stride being interviewed about it. And it feels to me like what they're doing is they're they're trying to pretend that a change that they are making to their own original plans is somehow a sort of seismic change and a massive boon to pensioners.

• 9:16Alastair Campbell?

  So there's a bit of kind of, you know, there's a bit of sort of smoke and mirrors attached to it.

• 9:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I guess that you you've pointed to something before we get into the details of them of a fundamental problem which the government will face on this, potentially if they want to abolish inheritance tax, which is, people will say, well, wait a second, you've been in office now for 13 years. Why didn't you do these things when you were in office if you cared so much about them? You had ample opportunity to introduce your national service, ample opportunity to do this thing about pensioners. So my instinctive reaction is, are voters not going to say, wait a second, this is the government, so why are they only announcing it now when they had an ACC majority and could have done it any time over the last five years? Or do people, is that not quite how it works?

• 10:00Alastair Campbell?

  No, well, I think for some people, you've got to remember, and we should say this in relation to Keir Starmer's speech yesterday. I watched Keir Starmer's speech from start to finish and I watched his Q and A with the with the media. I got the sense that he was talking very much to people who are not necessarily following politics closely most of the time. He was completely unembarrassed about saying things that you and I have heard 100 times. And I thought in his manner as well, the kind of tone of it was very much, you know, I get why some people still haven't sort of bought into me. I get why some people have still got big doubts about Labour. And likewise, I think with the with the Conservatives, I think they're they're hoping that for an awful lot of people, they're not really following this

• 10:45Alastair Campbell?

  until they now get into the campaign and they start to hear these announcements. But where your point is absolutely right, just on the national service thing. If you remember, it's not that long ago that Rishi Sunak made a big, big speech about sort of, you know, the future of our national security. And this wasn't even alluded to. So on the one hand, there he was saying this is a big deal. Then all of a sudden, out of a clear blue sky, pops this idea for some sort of, form of national service, clearly taking his entire cabinet by surprise. We've had this ridiculous spectacle in the last 24 hours of Steve Baker, who you and

• 11:27Alastair Campbell?

  I both know is a, you know, a bit of a, I think, quite a troubled soul and a bit of an attention seeker. But nonetheless, it is quite something for a serving minister, essentially to say, none of us were consulted about this. I work in Northern Ireland where security is a big deal, and this was just sprung on us by Sunak and his advisers. And meanwhile, rather than fight by seat, I was told I could go on holiday before he had this ridiculous July the 4th call, therefore I'm staying on holiday.

• 11:55Rory Stewart?

  In Greece, Steve Baker said he's campaigning from Greece. So that's another theme that we should get into, which is the way in which the Conservative Party at the moment is splitting. I mean, the Labour Party may begin splitting, but it doesn't feel like it at the moment. We've had this with Steve Baker. He's got a majority of 5,000 in High Wycombe, very, very difficult for him to hold the seat. So campaigning for Greece basically means he's given up.

• 12:20Alastair Campbell?

  But by the way, you know, I keep trying to teach you how to plug things. The mere mention of Greece means that we should remind listeners that we put out two episodes of Leading this week. First of all, with the Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who is like the Rishi Sunak character that could be, somebody from finance who's become a very effective political leader, and also with Rachel Reeves, which we should maybe talk about a bit later. And then the other thing we've had, as well as Steve Baker, is another MP coming out and basically saying she's voting Reform.

• 12:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so this is Lucy Allen in Telford. And again, to explain how upsetting this will be for the Conservative Party.

• 13:03Rory Stewart?

  When you choose to step down in your constituency, your successor is appointed. And what she's supposed to do is put your weight behind them and campaign for them. And even if you're stepping down, you get out there on the streets delivering leaflets, showing that you're still a good team player and you're not abandoning everybody. What she's chosen to do is to go out on Twitter, and it is very much, all of this is about Twitter. Steve Baker's on Twitter, she's on Twitter, and just announce that she's endorsing the Reform candidate in her constituency. Now, hers is a constituency with a majority of over 10,000 in Telford. And 10,000 is, is almost the magic number in this election. If Labour can take all the seats with majority, Conservative majorities of 10,000,

• 13:46Rory Stewart?

  then they're pretty much on course for a decent majority. So it's a real bellwether seat. By putting herself behind Reform, she almost guarantees that that seat in Telford will be lost. And it's a very, very odd way of repaying colleagues that she's been with in Parliament for years.

• 14:07Alastair Campbell?

  Unless, within the local party, there is such anger that it sort of fires them up to, you know, go out and do the work they need to do. But I agree, I think this is a, it's a pretty big blow in that constituency. But it's also given this, it's cemented this sense that Rishi Sunak took everybody by surprise. And you, to be fair to you, thought that was a very bad idea from the start. I was trying to see some element of a positive in it. But the thing that's happened since then is that there have been so many things that have indicated that the planning that you need to underpin a decision as big as this just wasn't there. So let's just go through some of the sort of the disasters. First of all, there was the weather.

• 14:52Alastair Campbell?

  Now, okay. You can't help the weather, but you do have the capacity as Prime Minister and the Prime Minister's team to look out of the window and say, do you know what? I think it's really wet out there. And do you know what? And I might, I might look at it silly if I get completely drenched. But also, thanks to that wonderful predecessor of mine, Boris Johnson, we have this two million pound purpose-built media suite. Why don't we say to the press, hey, guys, here's an umbrella, keep yourselves dry, and in half an hour, come into the media suite, and we'll do it in there, okay? And everybody would have been dry, and everybody would have been calm. So he comes out, he does his thing. And then, what would then have

• 15:36Alastair Campbell?

  been prevented, had they done that, is that Steve Bray, the, the blue-hatted, anti-Brexit, unbelievable campaigner, I mean, the guy, honestly, as you know, I, I think the honour system should be abolished. But if we're not abolishing it, he has got to be first in the list for a night, to have Things Can Only Get Better blaring. And the other thing, Rory, he had umbrellas for the speakers. So Rishi Sunak didn't have an umbrella. Steve Bray thought ahead, it's going to rain, my speakers might get wet. So that was the first thing. Then the next thing, Rishi Sunak then gets on the road, they've got an event planned,

• 16:16Alastair Campbell?

  I think, at the XL Centre. He gets there, he's got people behind him, including James Cleverly and Grant Shapps, who both looked absolutely livid. They were probably standing there thinking, what the hell are you doing calling this election? Why did you spring it on us? This is nuts. You've got to, he, he then, I watched it on Sky News, where the entire coverage was dominated by this live footage of the Sky News reporter being bundled out of the room by security, as he's trying to say what Rishi Sunak's going to say. Then they go to Wales, where Rishi Sunak says to the people, you must be looking forward to the Euros.

• 16:58Alastair Campbell?

  The football and they say, well, we didn't qualify. Oh, yeah, forgot. And then he has this this this this event with people in orange, high vis jackets, they're meant to be warehouse workers. It turns out they're basically Conservative Party councillors. He then goes to Northern Ireland and they decide to do the interviews in the Titanic Centre. And so it goes on. So there's no planning.

• 17:22Rory Stewart?

  So many things to tackle, but on the national service, I think let's just spend a little bit of time on on looking at it as a policy. I think the first thing that makes me sad, I was.

• 17:33Alastair Campbell?

  You you had this idea, didn't you? Didn't you propose this? Yeah.

• 17:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, this. And in fact, actually, people from Number Ten reached out and said, we've stolen your idea from your leadership campaign. So I feel quite sort of personally connected to this thing. And also also irritated because of course the inevitably something that I think is actually quite a good idea. And that incidentally, David Lammy, who's going to be our Foreign Secretary, in his book, came out with an equivalent to this idea.

• 17:58Alastair Campbell?

  I think it's a good idea. It's just that I don't believe that they that they are doing it to make it happen. They're doing it for the politics of the campaign.

• 18:06Rory Stewart?

  And the problem and the risk is that we end up with Labour, because it's been launched in a campaign, rubbishing it and absolutely shutting it down. So the chance of it actually happening, given that I'm certain that Labour is going to be the next government, is actually diminished by doing it this way. So one of the things I'm hoping against hope is that maybe Keir Sarr and his team, while mocking the idea, don't so completely shut it down that it becomes impossible, because it's it's modeled on what is done in Norway and Sweden. And I think that that's the the first really important thing. It works in those countries. And there's no particular reason why if it works in Norway and Sweden, it couldn't work here. The idea is that a very small number

• 18:51Rory Stewart?

  of people who volunteer and want and are put through a selective process, aged 18, 30,000 of them out of a few hundred thousand, would be allowed to spend a year where they will receive a stipend and they'll work in specialist professions alongside the military, such as, for example, cyber.

• 19:12Rory Stewart?

  And what they've found in Norway is that it's great for building up skills. People, you know, learn a lot of cyber stuff, get a lot of training. It also provides a reserve force so they can continue to be in the reserve for 10 years. So over 10 years, you'd end up with 300,000 in reserve. It will, these are not frontline operational roles, but it frees up the soldiers to do the frontline operational roles and brings in a lot of very smart young civilians, particularly on things like cyber. And then for people who aren't doing that, it's 25 days of voluntary service. And that again is stuff like working with St John's Ambulance, which has seen a big drop in volunteers since Covid, supporting community policing. And these are things which can be done on the basis of some training in 25 days a

• 19:56Rory Stewart?

  year and will take some of the burden off those frontline emergency services. So I, I'm, I'm really keen and I think it's got a lot of different dimensions. It's got a national security dimension, it's got a skills dimension. But I think as David Lammy said in his book, probably most important of all, it's a way of building a sense of cohesive national identity, citizenship, bringing people from different backgrounds together, common sense of commitment.

• 20:23Alastair Campbell?

  I, I, listen, I've got nothing against the idea. In fact, I'm a bit like you, I, I can see a lot of positives in it. But the fact that it came out of a clear blue sky, the fact that it was perfectly obvious, nobody, Steve Baker is just one of them, but none of the ministers who would be responsible for putting something like this into action were, were consulted. It was clearly something just sort of dreamt up to try, quotes, to get on the front foot in the campaign. Now, I, I think the other, and the other thing to say, by the way, Roy, we, we talked a few weeks ago, and this is a very live debate at the moment in Germany. The Defence Minister Boris Pistorius is really pushing ahead, not with this kind of national

• 21:03Alastair Campbell?

  service, but literally national service because of the, the change in European security that's been caused by the whole, you know, Putin's aggression, the war in Ukraine and the possibility of, of that war extending if, if Putin is allowed to win. The other thing that I think makes it difficult for, for Rishi Sunak, David Cameron also announced this, uh, I think about 13 years ago now, and of course it never really went anywhere. And I saw something very interesting in Akira Starmer's event yesterday down in Sussex, is that he openly was using levelling up.

• 21:42Alastair Campbell?

  As he basically said, this national service thing, they say that they're going to fund it by taking money away from the levelling up fund. And the Tories are also racking up sort of promises based on we're we're finally going to crack down on on tax avoidance. Well, yeah, okay.

• 21:58Rory Stewart?

  Which is which is, and that one also just sort of quickly for listeners and viewers is the great cliche of all time. I mean, every single party.

• 22:06Alastair Campbell?

  We're going to close loopholes.

• 22:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you know, we're going to closing down tax points. We can get a billion. And as you say, this particular Conservative government for 13 years has been saying this. Labour will also be saying this, but surprise, surprise, it never really turns out that you are making an extra billion pounds out of cramping down.

• 22:22Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, I think I think with a concerted effort, there is all sorts of stuff you could do to to clamp down on tax avoidance and so forth. But the idea that you can suddenly in an election campaign, having had a party that frankly, has been exposed for failing to tackle tax avoidance, suddenly saying that's how we're going to fund this stuff. But you see, I actually think one of the the one thing I will give the Conservatives over the last 14 years is they've been very good at slogans. I actually think this this national service thing, it fits with what David Cameron used to call the big society. The big society never happened. Levelling up, one of Boris Johnson's two sort of election winning slogans in in 2019, the other being, you know, get Brexit done. Levelling up again

• 23:06Alastair Campbell?

  is exactly what the country needs and wants, but the Conservatives didn't have a plan for it. So I thought it was there was something quite refreshing about Keir Starmer saying, you know, yeah, we're going to we're going to take the money for levelling up and spending on levelling up. They're basically saying they're doing this national service. But I agree with you. I hope that actually Labour, yes, they're going to dismiss it for now because of the the way that it's happened, the way that it's been done. And also, I think that this goes back to the lack of planning in the announcement. The Conservatives didn't have any senior military figures lined up to say this is a good thing. So the senior military figures, blindsided like everybody else, just came out and said, this is nuts.

• 23:45Rory Stewart?

  They finally got one, and they finally got General Richards to endorse it. You're absolutely right. Admiral Lord West came out against.

• 23:51Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. But then the other thing, Rory, was that the other thing that happened was that this is why, you know, having stuff so easily accessible online, the other thing that happened is somebody at Labour just sort of went in and Googled, you know, government statements on national service. And the first thing that came up was a statement from the Defence Minister just a few days ago, basically saying, no, we're not looking at this. It's a very bad idea. It would be very bad for morale. We wouldn't be able to fund it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 24:17Rory Stewart?

  I mean, we just go back to the sort of fundamentals here, as you've pointed out. And we did an emergency pod on this at the moment that it was announced. And I was getting all those texts from Conservative MPs and some Cabinet Ministers, completely bewildered. And since then, I've had some earnest conversations with people in Number 10 and people very close to Rishi Sunak, trying to explain to me what he thinks he's doing. But it just doesn't work. I mean, you know, their line is, he saw some positive economic trends, to which the obvious answer is, well, why not give it a few months for them to sort of bed in and see a bit of benefit? So people are really feeling that the economy is working for them. And of course, the terrible suspicion is, as Harriet Harman's pointed out, that

• 25:01Rory Stewart?

  you can only conclude that he thinks actually the economic news is going to get worse, and therefore he wants to go now before it gets worse. On Harriet Harman, let's just talk a little bit about what we now know about how very different the new Parliament is going to be from the old Parliament. I mean, it's a real change in the universe. So Labour, Margaret Beckett, who was first elected in 1974, and nearly 50 years, that is 50 years, isn't it? 50 years.

• 25:29Rory Stewart?

  That's amazing. Fifty years. I mean, so she is really reaching back to the world of Wilson, Ted Heath is going, John Crutus is going, Harriet Harman is going, Margaret Hodge is going. Yep. So let's just stick with those four for a moment. Those are some pretty significant, considerable figures in the Labour movement, aren't they, who represented real seniority, ethics, in the case of Harriet Harman, amazing stuff around feminism in Parliament. So tell us about what it means to listen.

• 26:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Labour often get criticised for never having had a female leader. But of course, both Harriet and Margaret have at different points been leader of the Labour Party, albeit for, you know, whilst a succession election was taking place. I look, I think both of them are extraordinary figures for all sorts of reasons. And in fact, in my last book, But What Can I Do?, I devoted a section to Harriet because I felt when she was first appointed a minister, and do you remember, we talked about Frank Field recently, and they were both in the Social Security Department, and they weren't really getting

• 26:41Alastair Campbell?

  on, and the policy development was all very difficult. And I had quite a few sort of bad fallouts with Harriet. And what I've been just so impressed by her, one, is that even though as a result of those difficulties, at one point, she lost her job, she left the cabinet, I never ever felt sort of that she had any kind of personal resentment to Tony, to me, to anybody in the Downing Street operation. She just sort of kept going. And I think that what they all show, those ones you've mentioned, what they all show is this sort of extraordinary resilience and just sort of determination to keep going. And

• 27:26Alastair Campbell?

  the three, the three women you mentioned, the other thing to add in, they've all, they've all lost husbands, they've all lost their husbands during this, the later years of their political career. And yet, even with that, have kind of kept going. And I think, I think Harriet will genuinely go down as one of the absolute trailblazers in terms of changing politics for women. She really will.

• 27:52Rory Stewart?

  On the Conservative side, again, we're going to see an incredible sea change. So the real loss, big core loss is everybody came in with Cameron 2010. So my whole generation are stepping down, basically. It's a lot of the leading figures in my generation are going. But we're also going to have a parliament that will lose a lot of bits of the Conservative Party from older periods. So the last of the kind of Thatcherite drives are going. You know, John Redwood, Bill Cash, these kind of 1980s, early Brexiteers going. We're going to lose a lot of the sort of 2005 right wing Tories.

• 28:36Rory Stewart?

  So Chris Grayling, Michael Gove, dramatically, I mean, Michael Gove, pretty considerable figure, not just because he was a very energetic Minister in Education, Justice and the Environment, but also because he was a master user of the Times newspaper.

• 28:54Alastair Campbell?

  That's a very, very polite way of saying it. You basically mean that he used to work for the Times and for most of his career, he still did.

• 29:02Rory Stewart?

  It was extraordinary. I mean, absolutely extraordinary. And in the tribute paid to him by Tim Shipman, Tim Shipman, as well as saying, you know, he's the basically the giant of British politics over the next 20 years, the last 20 years, spends a lot of the articles saying, and he never leaked to me, he never leaked to me. And then paragraph four, he never leaked to me. I know people think he leaked.

• 29:22Rory Stewart?

  So that's good going. We're also losing some of the big figures actually on the more centre right of the party. So Greg Clark, who I had a lot of time for, who did really good jobs, really, I mean, he's a serious guy, I think actually was in the SDP briefly, but really led a lot of the government's work on, which I still think is one of the few achievements over the last 13 years, which is really leaning into more of these elected mayors, more of the devolution, police and crime commissioners, getting more votes down a little there. And then. Ben Wallace going, Philip Dunne going, and then if you just look at my intake,

• 30:00Alastair Campbell?

  you're forgetting your hero, Theresa May.

• 30:04Rory Stewart?

  And Theresa May, Theresa May, very much, very good point, Theresa May, yep. If you look at my intake, you're losing Sajid Javid, Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock, Narim Zahawi, Kwasi Kwarteng, Alok Sharma, and many, many, many, many others. And so of the people who ran for the leadership in, against Theresa May, so that was Andrea Ledson, Boris Johnson, Theresa May, all out.

• 30:33Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 30:33Rory Stewart?

  Of the people who ran for leadership against Boris Johnson, which was in the last seven was Matt Hancock, Dominic Raab, Sajid Javid, me, Michael Gove.

• 30:47Alastair Campbell?

  All gone.

• 30:48Rory Stewart?

  With the exception of Jeremy Hunt, who's clinging on, but it really means for the Conservative Party, and they're also losing, I think, nine at least from the 2019 intake, similar number from the 2015, 2017 intake, so it will be a very, very, very different party.

• 31:05Alastair Campbell?

  Are we going to have any that were there in 97? Yeah, of course.

• 31:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, some of the 97 lot will still be clinging on, but very, very few. I mean, David Davis, I think, hasn't announced he's stepping down.

• 31:18Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, God, he'll be out, he'll be taken out of the box, won't he? He's definitely, he's there for the long haul. Mind you, I always thought that about Bill Cash, I always thought that Bill Cash would, and I say this as somebody who is not unfriendly towards Bill Cash, because he, as I've told you before, he used to help me out at my radio show back in the day, but I'd phone him at midnight, I'd say, get to the studio, I've lost a guest. But I always thought Bill Cash would die in the House of Commons, making a speech about the Maastricht Treaty.

• 31:47Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 31:47Alastair Campbell?

  I thought that would be his way to go. Now, Roy, one thing we're going to do in these, in these coming weeks is, although, as you know, I've never, ever put a bet on in my life.

• 31:58Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 31:59Alastair Campbell?

  I do have a friend called William, who works at Star Sports Betting.

• 32:05Alastair Campbell?

  And he's keeping me up to speed with all the sort of odds. So do you want to know the current odds for who will be the next permanent Conservative Party leader? Temporary acting doesn't count. Right. The current favourite is Kemi Badenoch, which I think is good news for Labour. She's 11 to four.

• 32:21Rory Stewart?

  Oh, no, sorry. Help me understand. What does 11 to four mean? Does that?

• 32:24Alastair Campbell?

  11 to four means that if you put four pounds on, you you will win 11.

• 32:28Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I see. Okay. So it's not like when I ran against Boris Johnson, when it was the other way around, where I think if you put down six pounds, you'd win two.

• 32:35Alastair Campbell?

  No, no, no. In fact, that that would that would that would be called three to one on.

• 32:39Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 32:40Alastair Campbell?

  Okay. Yeah, we're going to have to educate. I've tried to educate you about football and failed.

• 32:44Rory Stewart?

  But you're saying to me that obviously with Boris, if you put six and made two, it meant that they thought he was kind of 80% guaranteed to get it.

• 32:52Alastair Campbell?

  Well, if I tell you, for example, that Keir Starmer to be the next Prime Minister is something like, I'll check it in a minute, but I think he's 12 to one on, which means if you put on 12 pounds, you'll win one.

• 33:03Rory Stewart?

  I see. Okay, okay, okay. But so Kemi Badenoch is not like that. She's still.

• 33:08Alastair Campbell?

  No, she's not like that. But that's quite, that's pretty, that's, that's, you know, she's the favourite. Next up is Penny Mordaunt, 13 to two. So that means you put two pounds on, you win 13. Robert Jenrick, I mean, who would ever have thought that Robert Jenrick would be coming in at seven to one? Priti Patel, eight to one. Your man, James Cleverly, nine to one. Braverman, 11. Tom Tugendhat, 16. Here's an interesting one. David Cameron, 20 to one. Boris Johnson, 25 to one. That's ridiculous, William. He should be five million to one. And Nigel Farage at 28 to one. These are all quite, these sometimes reflect what people think, and sometimes they reflect money that may have already been been put on.

• 33:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 33:48Alastair Campbell?

  So what do you think about that, Badenoch?

• 33:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, I don't know. I mean, I, you know, when I was up, I mean, it's difficult to know. I was number two to Boris for a couple of weeks in the in the betting odds. And I think I was, you put on a pound, you make six pounds.

• 34:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 34:02Rory Stewart?

  But.

• 34:04Rory Stewart?

  I found that everybody having told me that the betting odds were more reliable than anything else, they obviously overestimated my chances of getting through to number two.

• 34:13Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but that's probably because you, you, you, without you even knowing it, you probably had a few rich mates who were whacking huge bets.

• 34:19Rory Stewart?

  It's my mother.

• 34:20Alastair Campbell?

  Most seats, here's one for you, Roy, this is, now this, this will, I think, will alarm Labour, because it will, it will feed into this narrative that this election's all over bar the shouting, which I think is a very, very dangerous mindset and nobody should get into that. Most seats, my friend William is saying Labour 50 to one on. In other words, you put on £50, you get one back. Conservatives 12 to one, Reform 100 to one, Greens 500 to one, Lib Dems 500 to one. Overall majority, Labour 12 to one on. No overall majority, eight to one, Tory majority 28. So the, the, these are all, and, and when you get, they also do betting on the number of, on the number of seats that you can, that

• 35:05Alastair Campbell?

  they think Labour will win. And they're predicting quite big numbers judging by the odds against them. So that's kind of where the betting is at the moment. And we'll, there's even a market, I'm not going to go into this one because it will just feed the egos of too many broadcasters. They've got a market on who will be the main BBC presenter. We should say that we will be presenting for Channel 4 News.

• 35:27Rory Stewart?

  So, so much more to be done. And, and as we, as we do more of this, we're going to really lean into policy because obviously, in the end, what matters is not so much the gossip of up and down, but what an incoming government is or isn't going to do and what choices they really face. So we'll try to do that in future episodes. We'll have a bit more detailed look at the geography of the election, how things break across Britain. But I think probably as we move into our concluding thing, we were going to do a bit about India. More of that after the break.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, prevents headaches in adults with chronic migraine. It's not for those who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away, as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, Myasthenia gravis or Lambert Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Why wait? Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  A payday candy bar is miles and miles of peanuts. Salty, crunchy peanuts, sweet, sweet caramel, wrapping you up with every bite. Enjoy the tasty journey, my friend. Payday Peanut Caramel Bar.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  This episode is brought to you by Welch's Fruit Snacks. Back to school season can be tough on parents. But choosing a snack you and your kids can both get behind doesn't have to be. Stock up on Welch's Fruit Snacks, made with whole fruit, and now made with no artificial dyes. It's a snack kids already love, and one you can feel good about giving them. Go back to school with Welch's Fruit Snacks, now made with no artificial dyes.

• 37:52Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to the final part of The Rest Is Politics.

• 37:55Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, let's just go, let's just do a little bit more on some of these poll findings. Because I think there's a couple of interesting things that we, that we haven't covered. The first thing is that... A lot of the time in election, you're fighting for, quotes, the narrative. You're fighting to be on the issues that you, that are doing better for you. Now, Keir Starmer remains 12 points ahead of Sunak on who would make the best prime minister. And that's been a pretty steady lead. So Labour will not fear this becoming sort of Sunak v Starmer, which is how it's sort of pitching up. The second is that despite, as you say, getting closer on inflation, Labour continue to lead on the economy and on the health service.

• 38:37Alastair Campbell?

  And those are by a mile, the two issues that are most dominant in people's minds. And the other thing, very briefly, you're in Creif and I'm in Loch Lomond. So we're both in Scotland. Somebody sent me, somebody from the David Hume Institute sent me a fascinating survey about Scottish opinion in this election. And they asked, they gave people a list of about 30 issues, 20, 30 issues. And said, pick three that are the most important to you in this campaign. And I think what would be quite worrying for the SNP is just how low the constitutional questions of devolution and so forth were, and independence. It was, it was, it was something like, I think it was about 7%.

• 39:21Alastair Campbell?

  And the fourth one, by the way, which really interesting was trust in politics was massive up there.

• 39:27Rory Stewart?

  Obviously, being in Scotland, I've been reading the Scottish newspapers rather than the English newspapers. And what's been striking to me, looking at the papers, for example, yesterday, is that there's comparatively little about the elections. I mean, the Sun, Scottish Sun, had nothing on the elections until page eight. And even then, it was some stories on Anna Sawa and the wage that he paid. But the first seven pages were all entirely devoted to different forms of celebrities and their love life. The Daily Mail, again, had very, Scottish Daily Mail, very, very few articles. And they had maybe three articles related to the election, couple anti SNP, one on national citizen service.

• 40:09Rory Stewart?

  But otherwise, it was mostly about golf, Grand Prix and chocolate.

• 40:15Alastair Campbell?

  Surely the Celtic Rangers Cup final. I went to the Celtic Rangers Cup final and very poor game, but fantastic atmosphere.

• 40:21Rory Stewart?

  And then even the FT barely managed three stories. I mean, national service, employment. But really, basically, it was behaving as though the election wasn't central to the newspapers.

• 40:32Alastair Campbell?

  Well, first of all, first thing to say, I think they know six weeks is a long time to keep people's interest. It doesn't sound long, but it is a long time. So they maybe think, let's just, you know, keep it a bit low key for now. And the second thing is there is some, you know, really remarkable things happening in the world. What's happened in the last couple of days in Rafa, utterly horrific and commanding a lot of space, rightly. Russia, Ukraine, you had Stoltenberg yesterday essentially saying that, you know, we may have to think about actually getting weapons there and using them from inside Ukraine, which was like a pretty big development. So there's lots of stuff going on. But the one thing that we did see from the poll, that I think it was, was it 90% are aware

• 41:17Alastair Campbell?

  that the election is going on. Now, you might think, how could anybody be unaware? But again, that relates to your point. And the perception is lowest amongst the young. Good move, by the way, I thought. I was very pleased. If you think, Rory, about the things that we've been banging on about, I've been banging on for a long time about, I really hope Labour lower the voting age. I'm very, very pleased that they've announced they're going to do that if they win. And may I, on that subject, Rory, can I be utterly shameless here and announce that we have brought forward the publication of my two books on politics for young people. The election, thank you, Mr Sunak, the election seemed too good an opportunity. So the one for teenagers, Alastair Campbell Talks Politics, that's coming out on June

• 42:01Alastair Campbell?

  the 20th, ahead of the election. And the one for primary schools, Why Politics Matters, I think there could be no better day for publication than Election Day itself, July the 4th.

• 42:11Rory Stewart?

  Very good. And little, little plug then for me too.

• 42:14Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, here we go.

• 42:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, here we go. So paperback edition, paperback of Politics on the Edge, also now coming out for the election. So anybody interested in getting into some of the depths and the details and the horror of Parliament and the way in which this whole political system works, do, do go and buy the paperback edition of the books and slightly different actually from the hardback for the real nerds who want to.

• 42:38Alastair Campbell?

  Have you done a new introduction or something?

• 42:40Rory Stewart?

  There's been a little bit of change too. It's tightened a few things up.

• 42:43Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, I see. Did you make it slightly less anti-politics following some of my discussions? Or did you make it more anti-politics?

• 42:51Rory Stewart?

  It remains pretty anti-politics.

• 42:53Alastair Campbell?

  I suppose the only other hopeful thing for Rishi Sunak in the poll, in our poll with JL Partners, is that there's a slight increase for Sunak on who would you most trust to make a Sunday roast?

• 43:09Rory Stewart?

  Well done. His culinary skills are pretty...

• 43:12Alastair Campbell?

  Which, considering he's a vegetarian, I thought was a very, very interesting poll move.

• 43:15Rory Stewart?

  Just on book plugs, Damien Collins, who's an MP, has produced a book called Rivals in the Storm, which is about Lloyd George. And if you want optimism and hope in politics, it is incredible. Basically, it is a story about how Lloyd George, almost single-handedly, transformed Britain's position in the First World War, completely sorted out the munitions situation. I mean, just again and again and again, using public speeches, bashing his way through Cabinet, really bringing change. I mean, when we think about how little we feel the Conservatives have achieved in 13 years, how much that Liberal government achieves in a much shorter period leading into the First World War.

• 43:57Rory Stewart?

  And in particular, this figure, this guy, Lord George, who wasn't even Prime Minister, the way in which... So I think along with reading your books, I would encourage people to have a look at Rivals in the Storm. If you want an example of how politicians were able, can make the most incredible difference through charisma, courage, sheer intelligence, Damien Collins's book, Rivals in the Storm.

• 44:18Alastair Campbell?

  That's great. I wish I'd actually, I hadn't thought of Lloyd George, because I've got a chapter in the teenagers' book about people who have made, individuals who have made a difference in extraordinary circumstances. No, that sounds a very good one. So is Damien Collins standing?

• 44:33Rory Stewart?

  He is standing again, yes. So he is standing. Whether he can hold a seat, I don't know, but he's definitely standing again, yeah.

• 44:37Alastair Campbell?

  Right, if I were his constituents, I'd be thinking, how the bloody hell did you have time to write a book about Lloyd George?

• 44:42Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's because the foolish government never made him a cabinet minister. So he's always, he's always had that.

• 44:47Alastair Campbell?

  That's true, that's true, he is good, yeah. I have just read, and I'm going to recommend, a proof of Kate Weinberg's book, There's Nothing Wrong With Her, which is a novel. And it's, you know, you know, my sort of interest in mental health, mental illness, but it is, and it will, a lot of people who went through Covid and found it horrific will, will relate to it. So that's what I've just finished.

• 45:07Rory Stewart?

  And Kate, Kate herself had a pretty tough experience with Covid, didn't she? So this is partly her coming, and actually she's done a lot of good work on also helping other people who've come through long Covid. She's beginning to work out protocols and therapies. One of her points, I think, is that people's experience has been very, very, very different. There are some common themes, but my goodness, the horror it's in, I mean, I've, I've got a very close friend in Cumbria who has had moments over the last two and a half years where he sort of basically thinks it's hardly worth being alive because he feels he's just,

• 45:41Alastair Campbell?

  Well, because of the physical.

• 45:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, he's just low all the time. He, he, he's lost his physical strength. He just feels depressed all the time. He, he says, you know, in a week he'll have five or 10 minutes, which are okay. But I mean, and, and he very much traces this back to Covid.

• 45:56Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, sad, sad. Anyways, that's what I'm reading. And so should we just talk, um, should we just talk a bit about, about India and what's happening there? In fact, there's some very, very big elections on the moment. We've got South Africa, India, we've got Mexico still going on, but let's just focus for a minute on, on India. What have you been making of what's happening out there?

• 46:13Rory Stewart?

  Well, I, I think one really big bit of news is Arvind Kirchwal, who is the Chief Minister of Delhi. And we, we did talk about, I, I know we've got some very, very assiduous listeners who tell me off for repeating my stories on Liz Truss, so they may remember that nearly two years ago, we did something on, on Arvind.

• 46:33Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, they only do, they only, Rory, let me jump in here. They only do that because you said in our interview with Rachel Reeves, that she told a story that you'd heard four times before, and you felt she should have had a new story to tell us. And somebody pointed out, you've told the story about Liz Truss.

• 46:50Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, so that same attentive listener, well, doubtless to remember, about two years ago, we covered Arvind Kirchwal and his Armadhi Party. And so he is a man who. Rather kind of remarkable, quite a sort of geeky man from the Revenue Service, who led a case back in 2005 on anti-corruption, managed to get elected into Delhi, has on and off been there for almost 10 years, was arrested five days after the election was called because he is the absolute linchpin of the opposition to Narendra Modi. There's a coalition called the India Coalition that brings together the Ahmadi Party in Congress. And was just released seven weeks after his arrest and he was arrested of being accused

• 47:35Rory Stewart?

  of siphoning money from a liquor licence, which is part of a general pattern of what Modi's been doing. We can talk a lot about many of the ways in which Narendra Modi's India is becoming more authoritarian. There's a lot of democratic backside, but one of these things is the use of something called the Enforcement Directorate, which is part of the BJP Finance Ministry and which has really ramped up. They've gone from 84 searches to 7,264 searches during the, a year during the BJP period. 95% of the senior politicians they investigate are from the opposition. And when 25 of those politicians from the opposition who were being investigated for corruption

• 48:17Rory Stewart?

  defected to the BJP, the cases were dropped. So it is a very, very, very politically motivated thing. He will have to go back to jail again next Sunday, but he went straight to Haryana, Punjab and Delhi. This is a staggered election. It's been going on since April. And you can see that Modi seems to be getting a bit wound up and a bit more bad tempered. Now, polling is banned in India during the elections. Exit polling, opinion polls, focus groups, all banned. So we're guessing slightly, but one of the signs of this is Modi made a very, very aggressive

• 48:59Rory Stewart?

  anti-Muslim speech referring to the Muslims who are, you know, 200 million people in India. As being infiltrators, referring to them as, you know, having too many children. But over to you, what have you observed about India?

• 49:13Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the first thing, because this is such a big country, the election takes place in these seven phases, you say. So it started several weeks ago and it's been going kind of region by region. So what you don't get is the result necessarily, but you can see the turnout and very interesting that the turnout is quite considerably in some places down with Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan are all down, it seems. So.

• 49:42Rory Stewart?

  And, and those are, I think Modi's strongholds, or at least Gujarat was originally his state.

• 49:47Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Well, certainly, absolutely. Gujarat was his state, yeah. So the turnout, for example, in Uttar Pradesh is fifty seven point nine five, down from sixty point six four. Gujarat had a turnout in twenty nineteen of sixty four percent plus, and it's now just over sixty. Rajasthan's turnout similarly a lot lower. So that, listen, that could mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's less of a shoe in for Modi. I was at an event recently where somebody from the Indian High Commission was there and I was saying, oh, well, you know, at least we know that we don't have to worry too much about what's going to happen in your election. It's all sort of done deal. It's, oh, I think it'll be closer than you think.

• 50:30Alastair Campbell?

  No, maybe you're just saying that, I don't know. But this thing about the, um, the anti-Muslim rhetoric, and as you say, it's, we're not talking here about, when we talk about a minority in the UK, you know, you might be talking about relatively small numbers of people. As you said, we're talking about two hundred million. So he said that, basically, the line that they're running against the Congress party, well, one of the lines they run is that they're the elitists and we're for the people. But the other is that they basically say that they want to put all the wealth among the Muslims. And this is where he said, quote, those who have more children, the infiltrators. Now, he went on to, when he was challenged about it, he said, you know, it's an insult to, you know, he, why, why should you assume that he was talking about Muslims? But it's a classic sort of, you know, it's a classic.

• 51:15Alastair Campbell?

  Populist sort of tactic, you say something, you get challenged and you pretend you're saying something slightly different. And the other thing is, is the line that they're pushing is that Muslims get all the, if Congress come in, Muslims are going to get all the advantage. And the, if you look at the data, Muslims make up fourteen percent of the national population, but four point six percent of students enrolled in higher education, which is a, you know, an indicator of, of how much they share in, in, in the country's prosperity.

• 51:42Rory Stewart?

  So they're, they're, they're a third, and two thirds less likely to go into higher education than the general population. I mean, so increasingly marginalized. And, you know, I was talking to some very, very bright Indian Muslims recently, who are not trying to join the Indian administrative service, which is a great kind of elite civil service, because they feel such discrimination now that they're not likely to get jobs. And, and, and the, the, the big signs of the anti-Muslim moves, of course, have included a citizenship law, which basically makes it very easy to get citizenship in India if you're not a Muslim. The changes to the status, the autonomous status of Kashmir.

• 52:23Rory Stewart?

  And of course, the, what we covered, which was the, in Iodya, his support for the building of this Ram temple on the site of the old Muslim mosque that was torn down by a mob in the early nineties. And then I think also just not calling out and speaking against some incredibly unpleasant radical statements made by some of the religious right. Couple of years ago, we had monks calling for two million Muslims to be killed. There are groups that celebrate the assassination of Gandhi because he's considered to be too pro-Muslim, too pluralist, not standing up for Hindus enough. And, and again, the BJP, Modi's been quite cute about, as you say, avoiding sometimes himself explicitly

• 53:05Rory Stewart?

  saying stuff, but he certainly empowers and allows many people around him to say outrageous stuff.

• 53:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. In, in the context of our election, the UK election. If there are people who listen to the podcast and who are receiving online advertising, WhatsApp messaging and so forth that they think is of interest and might be of interest to us, we'd really like it if you could send it to us at [email protected]. Particularly at the moment, if I'm going through my social media, I'm endlessly seeing Labour campaigners saying, out on the doorstep, getting a great reception. I'm seeing a little bit of, you know, the government and the Tories, but it's obvious that whatever changes are going on, there's no doubt at all that we are, the stuff that's coming to us on social media is being filtered ever more heavily. And what's, so I'd like to see what

• 53:56Alastair Campbell?

  sort of stuff is going out under the radar.

• 53:58Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. And just quickly before India, I mean, so we know that the Conservatives have spent £800,000, which is a lot of money, nearly a million pounds, on social media since the beginning of the year. It's obviously not being directed to you, Asta, because I think they may have concluded you're not likely to vote Conservative. But if there are listeners who are on the receiving end, or listeners who are on the receiving end of Labour or Lib Dem campaigning, it'd be really interesting to see this stuff, yeah.

• 54:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, all of it. Absolutely. Well, just to give you an example, somebody sent me one yesterday, which was a picture of Rishi Sunak looking rather smart and handsome in a crisp white shirt and it says, it was something like, you know, Rishi has cut immigration by, and it was a huge figure, completely, I think it said 35% or something. And then alongside was a picture of Keir Starmer wearing a really badly fitting shirt and looking a bit overweight and a bit podgy. And it just said, you know, Starmer doesn't have a plan. And it was like, now, you're fair enough, it's political rhetoric to say he doesn't have a plan, but I think that there will be so much factual disinformation going on. So, as you say, all parties, if people are listening who are receiving this stuff,

• 55:05Alastair Campbell?

  we would love to see it. And just in terms of India, and South Africa is the same, by the way, because the, at least in Europe and America, you and I complain a lot that we don't really know how these social media companies work, but at least the governments and the authorities have got some sort of handle on it. In India, in South Africa, it's kind of Free for all, social media companies are not really having to feed in too much about the data that they're that they're getting and how it's being used. And there was a very interesting piece on the BBC website I read the other day about the role of WhatsApp in the Indian election. And it was, there was an interview, one guy who said he was on four hundred and fifty WhatsApp groups, around about two hundred, three hundred members each, and he's then got five thousand contacts of his own. So he's, he was reaching

• 55:51Alastair Campbell?

  between ten and fifteen thousand people every day. Now, when you think about how many volunteers a party like the BJP has got, then that, I suspect, is where an awful lot of the, shall we say, the, the less pleasant kind of advertising may be going on.

• 56:07Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And, I mean, you, you direct us towards a, a really good article, uh, also, is it, is it in the conversation or?

• 56:14Alastair Campbell?

  Conversation about South Africa.

• 56:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but the, that, that and the BBC thing are very interesting. And one of the things that BBC, uh, has written about is the fact that a huge number of Indians have smartphones, credible, very, very high proportion of the population, maybe as many as six, seven hundred million smartphones out there. And it's very easy to access information from the apps. So you can access the data that comes from people booking their taxis, booking their food. You can find out pretty quickly their ethnicity, their age, you can look at their location enabler. The Indian government that also collects a lot of data through Digital India also sells the data on citizens to commercial companies. So

• 56:56Rory Stewart?

  very, very easy to know an incredible amount for micro-targeting. And this is something that obviously I did as a Conservative MP, and I did when I was running to be Mayor of London. The ideal is that you get right down to the granular detail of, you know, Alastair really loves this policy around private schools. So we're going to hammer him with reminding him the VAT on private schools, you know, Rory loves National Citizen Service, so we'll hit him with National Citizen Service. And then, and then somebody else, let's say they're, I don't know, you, we pick up that they're uh, thirty five years old and have two kids aged nine and eleven and live in Doncaster, obvious target for something around education.

• 57:42Rory Stewart?

  Ditto, somebody with an elderly mother, you hit them on health. So this is what everybody's trying to do. Obama started it with Jim Messina in his campaign in 2012, but a bit of it in 2008. But when you get to India, South Africa, you're getting into a world where it's almost impossible to monitor. The European EU Digital Services Act allows free access to the algorithms and the APIs of these companies, which is not the case. So that you can't, I mean, one of the problems for researchers is that they can get anecdotal glimpses, but they never get the total picture because Facebook, Twitter, TikTok won't share with them the information to actually know where the fake accounts are, who's

• 58:26Rory Stewart?

  triggering and feeding stuff, who's retweeting, where the dodgy messages are coming from, etc.

• 58:32Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Now, on the, just my final point of the Indian election, Modi went a bit full Trump at the weekend. He said this, "I am convinced that Parmatma, God, sent me for a purpose. Once the purpose is achieved, my work will be done. That is why I have completely dedicated myself to God." And earlier this month, he said this in his constituency, "When my mother was alive, I used to believe that I was born biologically. After she passed away, upon reflecting on all my experiences, I was convinced that God had sent me." Now, I think even Trump might stop at that one, don't you think?

• 59:12Rory Stewart?

  That's, that's going some, going, going beyond the idea. I mean, it's actually going beyond even Christians who at least give the Virgin Mary a role in the, in the birth. Going beyond the biology of the mother is going, you know, one step beyond. Yeah.

• 59:24Alastair Campbell?

  So there we are. One final piece of rebuttal, Roy, which I have to do. I said on the podcast last week, We were talking about which of the Tories might be the sort of Portillo moment. And I think we were talking about Rees-Mogg. Portillo, of course, was the famous loss in 1997 that people led to this thing, you know, were you up for Portillo? And I said that I thought the Lib Dems might beat Rees-Mogg. And it turns out, actually, Labour and Dan Norris are better placed there. So slap on my wrist.

• 59:59Rory Stewart?

  Did you by any chance get an emergency call from Labour Central Office saying, what are you doing?

• 1:00:05Alastair Campbell?

  I might have had a little call that showed me some numbers. I continue to encourage tactical voting. I continue to encourage tactical voting. And the reason why I have not rejoined the Labour Party is because I can keep saying that without risk of expulsion. But it turns out that the tactical vote I was urging there might have been the wrong one. There will be other places where it is sensible to vote Liberal Democrat.

• 1:00:31Rory Stewart?

  Excellent. Okay. Thank you, Anastia. Look forward to talking soon. Bye bye.

• 1:00:35Alastair Campbell?

  All right, Rory. Take care, bye bye.

• 1:00:41Speaker 06

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 1:00:56Speaker 07

  Mr. President, my company told 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. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped moving? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:01:17Speaker 07

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:01:20Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:01:22Speaker 07

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

• 1:01:28Speaker 08

  Afternoon glare totally ruined my watch party for the big game. That's when my buddy recommended blinds.com.

• 1:01:35Speaker 09

  With custom window treatments made to fit your style, space and budget, customers who shop at blinds.com experienced overwhelming satisfaction. Side effects may include a fuller, deeper night's sleep and a sudden urge to host the watch party again. Blinds.com isn't a medication, but it can improve how you feel about your home. Visit blinds.com to order your free samples today.