52. The Queen's funeral, United Nations, and fracking

Join Alastair and Rory as they discuss Queen Elizabeth II's funeral, Liz Truss' visit to the UN, the pros and cons of fracking and the drastic fall in value of the British Pound. Plus Biden's growing popularity, international diplomacy, and the role of foreign correspondents. Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, enjoy ad-free listening, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Blackpool live show tickets: Saturday 8th October: wintergardensblackpool.co.uk/events/the-rest-is-politics-live/ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor 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 Creve, 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/risterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/risterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 1:43Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:47Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, Alistair, where are you? What's up?

• 1:52Alastair Campbell?

  I am in my house. I've just been for a swim. This, I think, is one of our earlier recordings. It's pretty early on Tuesday morning. Before we get going, an announcement to make. We've had to open the upper balcony of the Winter Gardens for our live show on October the 8th. We thought it was just going to be the downstairs bit. That is now sold out. It seems we've opened up the upper balcony due to high demand. Google, rest is politics, Winter Gardens, Blackpool, October 8.

• 2:25Rory Stewart?

  You are amazing. You are a very, very, very great promoter amongst many other things that you're good at.

• 2:30Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you. Thank you so much.

• 2:33Rory Stewart?

  So you were in London for the funeral. Did you, did you watch it on telly or did you see some of it in person?

• 2:38Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I went, Fiona and I went down, I can't remember what day it was now. We went down and just had a sort of wander around the area surrounding the palace. And it was quite, it was very, very, it was interesting. I, I've been saying, Fiona reminded me, I've been saying for years, this is going to be the biggest crowd event possibly of our lifetime, but it was actually even bigger than I thought it would be. And particularly, I was genuinely taken aback by the size of the crowds between London and Windsor. It seemed to me pretty much the whole way. So it was, it was, it was a remarkable event. I found the, I found the coverage between the death and the funeral at times so over the top.

• 3:23Alastair Campbell?

  I had to switch off, but the funeral itself, I thought was remarkable the whole day. I, I, I actually had loads of work to do, but I ended up sort of just glued. And I was so, I don't know about you Rory, but as a member of the International Union of Bagpipers, it was fantastic to see not one, not two, not three, but four examples of some of the best, both mass bands and solo piping that you will ever see. And I actually, one of the guys, Jason, who was in the Lido queue this morning, he said, he watched the whole thing, but the thing that tipped him emotionally was the lone piper at Windsor moving into the distance. And I think a lot of people felt that.

• 4:06Rory Stewart?

  I couldn't agree more. And actually, I thought the piper at Westminster Abbey was extraordinary. He suddenly appeared in that gallery.

• 4:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Rory Stewart?

  Right, right towards the end.

• 4:13Alastair Campbell?

  I saw the organ was a little bit off in the Abbey.

• 4:16Rory Stewart?

  Oh goodness gracious me, well there's a musical talent coming in.

• 4:20Alastair Campbell?

  The organ, the organ in Windsor, I felt was perfectly tuned. I think there were just a couple of notes on the organ at the Abbey, or maybe it was the choice of music, but I thought the whole thing was absolutely extraordinary. And of course, you know, it is, I, I, I have a certain amount of respect for those people who stand there for hours just to get a glimpse of something going by. But if you're interested in political body language, then television is the only place to be. And there was, there was some pretty good political body language going on. I enjoyed the, I, this is a bit harsh, but I thought the Australian TV commentator who described Les Truss as a minor member of the royal family was.

• 5:03Rory Stewart?

  It was extraordinary, that little clip, wasn't it? We're not quite sure who this is. So I think she may be one of the minor roles. We're, we're getting, I think, to the, probably the thick end of the wedge here, less, less important people coming in.

• 5:13Alastair Campbell?

  Very good accent, Rory, very good. Almost Ricky Ponting. Do you know who Ricky Ponting is?

• 5:19Rory Stewart?

  Tell us about Ricky Ponting.

• 5:20Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Ricky Ponting's a great cricketer, never mind.

• 5:23Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Now, so one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the things that I thought was interested in actually exploring with you is Labour patriotism, republicanism. So your, your, your brother was in the Scots Guards?

• 5:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 5:38Rory Stewart?

  And had he been alive, might well have been marching in that kind of procession. How do you think he felt about those things? Would he have felt immense pride in marching for the Queen's funeral? And would you have had a different view to him? Would that have been a, a different perspective on the day, your brother and yourself?

• 5:57Alastair Campbell?

  He would have, without a doubt. And he, he did, I remember once he played at an event, he, he did state dinners and things like that. And he'd also played, I remember, I remember him talking about an event at which Princess Anne had been. And, and he, he said that, you know, he felt, he did feel that when he was in the, in the military, that the whole thing about Queen and country meant something. And it's interesting because I have always felt that I'm a Republican, but I do have this extraordinary admiration for the Queen. Oh, by the way, we got ticked off for saying extraordinary too much last week, Rory, especially me. So let's try and not say extraordinary

• 6:37Alastair Campbell?

  at all this week. Let's say the last extraordinary. I did have this this big admiration for the Queen. And I think when you see what's unfolded in the last few days, we talked about this last week about this, the extent to which she in particular had restored the fortunes of of the monarchy. And so, yeah, my brother, my brother was was very much part of that. He, he and one of the things I I feel very, I was really pleased to see the Scots Guards involved because one of the things I feel about him is that even though he was invalided out of the army because he had, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, he never had a bad word to say about them, either about

• 7:17Alastair Campbell?

  the way he treated, they treated him, or about his, the years of service that he had. So, yeah, he would have, he would have, I thought about him a lot yesterday because the pipes were so good yesterday, and he would have absolutely loved to be part of that.

• 7:30Rory Stewart?

  So my father, my father would be like, like your father a hundred if he'd been still alive. And my mother, who was watching it, both felt very bereft, felt that she was really going to miss the Queen's speech, but also felt how much my father would have been moved by it. And I remember him saying, I tried to, when I was becoming an MP, I tried to talk to him, he's obviously born in 1922, he'd been in the Black Watch during the Second World War. He then ended up Foreign Office as an intelligence guy. And I remember saying to him, you know, what was his vision of Britain? And he said to me, he always felt that really what he was doing was serving the Queen, and that he didn't think very much about Britain, that his, and I wonder whether

• 8:12Rory Stewart?

  it's a generational thing, but, or maybe a generational thing from a particular type of background, that for him, what he would have seen, I think, in that funeral is everything that he loved about Britain, believes in about Britain, and that, and I think there are still many, I was talking to a Quite a left-wing Republican friend of mine who teaches at Yale, who flew over on the Red Eye Economy class to stand in the queue for the Queen and came out feeling very proud of Britain as a result. But many, many of my friends still who join the Army, who join the Foreign Office, some of them even who go into Parliament, are partly moved by that sort of thing, that vision of Britain exemplified in that funeral service, which sits very awkwardly, I think, with the modern world.

• 8:57Rory Stewart?

  I mean, you could see it with the New York Times, which was completely bewildered, mystified and outraged by almost every detail of this. But from the perspective of an American looking at this, none of it makes sense. But even on Twitter, obviously, there are a lot of people who are coming across very, very angry with it. But I was interested in this because I think there's a deep swell of emotion, patriotism, irrationality, which motivates people. And I wonder whether that isn't something that Labour used to be much better at sensing. And it was a very important part of what kept the coalition together in Labour, that Attlee and his government really sensed strong trade union patriotism and affection for the monarchy.

• 9:41Rory Stewart?

  And that maybe the risks of people like Jeremy Corbyn is that they moved too far away from those roots and that that may be what contributed to the Red Wall victories.

• 9:50Alastair Campbell?

  I always notice this, anything to do with the military in sort of northern working-class seats, there's a really, really strong sense of support and belonging to the military. I do think that Jeremy Corbyn, sometimes with leaders, certain things connect very, very quickly in a damaging way. Michael Foot, for example, got absolutely lacerated for the so-called donkey jacket at the Senatath. And I remember talking to Michael about that. He thought the whole thing was so overblown. He thought it was a very smart coat. It wasn't a donkey jacket. But it sort of cut through because his opponents made it cut through. And likewise, when Jeremy Corbyn didn't sing the National Anthem.

• 10:33Alastair Campbell?

  And on one level, if you're looking at it through that New York Times lens, you're thinking, well, what's the big deal? But the big deal is the fact that so many people think it's a big deal. And a lot of those people, I I don't like the idea of trying to align patriotism to a political cause that somehow people on the right are more likely to be patriotic than people on the left. I think patriotism is just as much a progressive Labour thing as it is a traditionalist Conservative thing. But I think that you are absolutely right about that, and you quoted him last week. And afterwards, I went off and read that thing that he'd written about the about the monarchy. And it was a really interesting piece of writing. Tony Blair was the same. Tony Blair would no more have listened to some of my Republican bleatings

• 11:18Alastair Campbell?

  than, you know, flight to the moon. And I think Keir Starmer is the same. I I actually I actually think Keir has handled both in terms of what he said and the way he has conducted himself has been exemplary from that perspective.

• 11:33Rory Stewart?

  I I thought Keir Keir Keir seemed very, very dignified, didn't he? I mean, I think he he's come out of this well. He looked prime ministerial.

• 11:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he looked he looked like he meant what he was saying. I do think on on Liz Truss, I I think if if we'd had a Labour Prime Minister who had expressed some of the views that she has expressed in the past about the monarchy, I think we'd have heard a lot more about it than we have. But I think it's I think the the one thing I'd say, though, is I I totally get what you say. And, you know, I was I was channel hopping a bit yesterday. And there were some Australia, some of the Australian media has been just as over the top as the British media. And there's been a lot, there's been a lot of complaints about it in Australia. And likewise, the American media, it was wall to wall. And I think there is a risk as we go from this last couple of weeks, which has been overwhelmingly about

• 12:24Alastair Campbell?

  this. And as you say, about pomp and about pageantry and our our strengths in the world. And now, very quickly, I think we'll be going back into politics. At a time when it really does feel like we have got a particularly horrible cocktail of problems. And I think on the one hand, I was glad that, I think it was Paul Brand of ITV, he did a tweet saying, he tweeted yesterday saying, given the civil service gets so battered from time to time, isn't maybe it's time to say what an amazing job they've done in putting this thing together. It is extraordinary what the work that went into it, the execution. And you now look at that and think, right, well, can we now try and do the same, please, about the health service? Can we try and take the same approach

• 13:08Alastair Campbell?

  now to housing? Can we take the same approach to the economy? And I do worry, we're very quickly going to go into a period where the costless trust will be thinking she's not really had an opportunity to get onto the front foot politically. She'll now really be trying to motor very, very quickly ahead of the conference season. And if we read through some of the things that have been briefed in advance, then I think we're in for a pretty, you know, pretty held us kelt a time.

• 13:34Rory Stewart?

  It's a couple of things there. Yep, I really liked Paul Brand's tweet. And I think that's, that was good to praise the civil service, particularly at the moment when they're being beaten up. It's, it's an odd thing though, isn't it? Because we were also pretty good at the Olympics. And it's, there's something maybe worth digging into at some point. What is it about our style of governance, which means that we're very, very, very good, almost, you know, among the best in the world at these set piece events like the Olympics and like the Queen's funeral, but that we're struggling with more of the day to day administration and running the country?

• 14:08Alastair Campbell?

  I think one of the reasons why there's been this kind of really overwhelming sense of support for the Queen, albeit occasionally, I have to say that the Celtic fans did not exactly cover themselves with glory at St Mirren. I'm sure you followed that one very closely. I'm sure you're watching St Mirren against Celtic. I know how closely you follow Scottish football.

• 14:28Rory Stewart?

  Tell us, tell us what the Celtic fans did. Because even, even, even some other other listeners apart from me may not be familiar with what the Celtic fans did.

• 14:35Alastair Campbell?

  Well, basically what happened, they decided to have a minute's applause, rather than a minute's silence. I presume out of worry that quite a few would not obey the silence.

• 14:47Rory Stewart?

  A minute's silence, right.

• 14:48Alastair Campbell?

  And so therefore you had the television cameras all on the players clapping. And all you could hear was the Celtic fans singing, if you hate the royal family, clap your hands. And Rory, you should not be laughing at that. Rory, that is not funny.

• 15:03Rory Stewart?

  I had missed that.

• 15:04Alastair Campbell?

  And then the Dundee United fans, Dundee United were playing Rangers and of course Rangers fans so in love with the Queen, the Union, et cetera. So the Dundee United fans were disturbing the silence as well.

• 15:17Rory Stewart?

  If for international listeners, just to take it back one level, traditionally Celtic supporters had often connections to Catholicism, to Ireland, to the republican movement, and traditionally Rangers supporters had connections to Protestantism, the Orange Movement, the Union, and so some of that is being played out.

• 15:37Alastair Campbell?

  I think you're transferring your own ignorance to assume a level of ignorance of our many, many listeners in Aruba, who will be well aware of the Celtic Rangers connections. It was, mind you, Michelle O'Neill was there in the Abbey, dressed in black, representing Sinn Fein. I saw an extraordinary picture yesterday in Newry of an Irish tricolor flying a half mast.

• 16:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Somebody, I don't know whether this is true, but somebody contacted me to say that media didn't pick up enough that one of the people who greeted King Charles on his trip to Ireland had been somebody who'd been very closely associated with the militant paramilitary wing of the IRA.

• 16:19Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah. I thought that the, the one thing I was really sort of on the body language front, I mean, first of all, I think we should have a shout out for Macron and Brigitte, following in the Harry Meghan handholding pattern. I thought they looked extraordinarily chic and cool as they walked about.

• 16:41Rory Stewart?

  And his very cool little tweets on Twitter, if you haven't seen it, which just says, merci votre majesté. And it's this extraordinary lovely sort of minute and a half of clips of the Queen with every French present, finishing, I thought, very charmingly with Macron, very modestly in the background in a line up, seven, seven places from her, having shown all the other French presidents sort of gripping her hand and showing her around. So I thought that was a lovely moment.

• 17:07Alastair Campbell?

  The other clip, you probably saw this from that documentary where Cole and Mitterrand and Ted Heath and, and the Queen was talking to Mitterrand in French and then Ted Heath popped up and he was, she said, she twice said to him that he'd been able to go on a visit, that Mitterrand had not been able to go because you were expendable.

• 17:27Alastair Campbell?

  And I also saw, I also saw in that clip, I think I've mentioned before, my favourite ever interpreter, who was the German English interpreter, a woman called Dorathea, and she was in that clip. And she actually, she was, she was showing up what I'd said about her, which is that when she was with Cole, who was this enormous figure, she's actually quite slim, but she somehow absorbed his body language as well as his language. Um, but that was, if people should dig it out, if you just Google Queen Misha Ronhees.

• 17:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, so that's extraordinary clip. So that's a clip of, of a reception at Buckingham Palace in nineteen ninety one. And it's extraordinary. The cameras, I don't know how they're doing it, are right in the middle of these very private intimate conversations, many of them around the first Gulf War. So a lot of the conversation that's happening, you're just getting clips of it, are around what's happening with Tarek Aziz, with Saddam Hussein, with the Americans going into Iraq, how this coalition's being brought together. And, and it's, it's very fly on the wall. I mean, the, the Queen and others are talking as though they're completely unaware the cameras are there. Secretary of State Baker is having these very frank conversations, apparently not caring at all that there's a camera in his face.

• 18:41Alastair Campbell?

  Is it from a documentary, do you think? Because I'd love to see the whole thing. I've only ever seen those two minutes.

• 18:45Rory Stewart?

  I don't know. I don't know what it's from.

• 18:47Alastair Campbell?

  But the other, the other, the other thing that I found a little bit bewildering was why was Joe Biden in row fourteen, behind the Polish president, looking a bit uncomfortable?

• 18:55Rory Stewart?

  So I've heard two explanations for this, right? One explanation, which is all over the news. So Time Magazine, you know, why Biden was in row fourteen, absolutely claims it's because he got stuck in traffic. I think that's nonsense, because even if he was stuck in traffic, they'd keep a seat for him. I think it's much more likely that it's about protocol. And the great thing about protocol is that it doesn't distinguish between rich countries and poor countries, big countries and small countries. And it doesn't offend anyone because it's got a very kind of clinical list organised around things like how long have you been the head of state? Which hopefully means that you don't get too much tussle and envy.

• 19:37Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 19:39Rory Stewart?

  And where the Commonwealth and things go, yeah.

• 19:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah, no, but but but the so, for example, why was the Queen of Denmark? If it was a wedding, if it had been a wedding, you had Prince Charles, King Charles, sitting there by the coffin and directly opposite him.

• 19:54Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Alastair Campbell?

  Was the Queen of Denmark. Is she the most important queen because she's been the longest standing queen or what?

• 20:00Rory Stewart?

  It'll be something like that. There'll be a very, very clear protocol list, which somebody in the Foreign Office will be working their way through. And the reason for that is so nobody gets offended. And it'll be totally transparent what the rules are on how you do it.

• 20:12Alastair Campbell?

  I was very, very, I do think the commentators missed a trick of not pointing out that the original dancing queen was sitting in that front row as well. The Queen, the Queen of Sweden, who is the original dancing queen, after whom the song was named. Surely somebody could have got Abba into the.

• 20:27Rory Stewart?

  The Abba reference, yeah.

• 20:28Alastair Campbell?

  There should have been an Abba reference.

• 20:30Rory Stewart?

  Okay, now, moving on to, just before we go into the break, I wanted to pick you up on something that you were quite interesting, which was hydraulic fracking.

• 20:37Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Rory Stewart?

  And so, again, for for listeners who are maybe not concentrating on every detail of the British press. Liz Truss, new Prime Minister, has said that she wants to return to doing fracking in the United Kingdom, and you, Alistair, I believe, have been thinking quite a lot about fracking.

• 20:52Alastair Campbell?

  First of first of all, do I even really know what fracking is? So fracking is short for hydraulic fracture. It is, it involves vertical well drilling. And if you imagine eight Empire State Buildings on top of each other, that is how far this vertical drilling goes. Everything has to be cased in steel or cement. There is then a horizontal drilling into the layer of rock, which then contains this oil and gas, which then sort of slowly permeates up to the top and it gets collected. It involves the fracking fluid that gets pumped into the well

• 21:34Alastair Campbell?

  is a mix of water and chemicals, incredible high pressure, incredible volumes of of water and sand and these chemicals. And so in the States, there's been lots of it, not least because there's lots of space. I read that 15 million Americans live within a mile of a fracking operation that has taken place now. When you then try to work out the pros and the cons, and I'm being, I'm trying to be neutral here, okay? The pro people say it will give us more gas and oil reserves which we need. It will be good geopolitically because it will allow us to become self sufficient on energy. It will reduce coal production. It will create lots of jobs.

• 22:19Alastair Campbell?

  That one is very disputed, but it will create lots of jobs, give us greater energy security, reduce water intensity. And and they also claim it will lead to lower taxes and lower prices. The cons.

• 22:30Rory Stewart?

  Just just some of the pros for a second, then we'll come on to the cons. So a couple, couple more pros. And Brookings Institution in the US, big think tank, calculates forty eight billion dollars a year of net benefit to the US economy from fracking. They think that forty five percent of the US gas supply will come from fracking by twenty thirty five, so it's a it's a big deal. Gas, obviously, as you said, cleaner than coal, so less nitrogen dioxide, less sulfur dioxide.

• 22:58Alastair Campbell?

  But it but it is a fossil fuel. It is a fossil fuel.

• 23:00Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. Fifty percent less greenhouse gas emissions than coal, but still a fossil fuel. And of course, fracking releases a lot of methane and there's a bit of controversy about methane. Anyway, back to you.

• 23:11Alastair Campbell?

  So the cons, water contamination, lack of transparency about some of the chemicals that are being used, such a huge use of water, say the cons people, that it will lead to more droughts, earthquakes, industrialization in particular in relation to noise and light, ecological damage, damage to work to wildlife, decline, this is a big one for me, decline politically and economically in a focus on renewables. A big argument, again disputed by the pros people, but that it will contribute rather than contribute to further climate change. You're talking about ten between somewhere between ten and thirty five million liters

• 23:56Alastair Campbell?

  of water per well. That's a lot. That's a lot. Wales and Scotland have already banned it. And Liz Truss, as you said, is thinking about lifting the ban here.

• 24:07Rory Stewart?

  So one of the, one of the things that, all of this stuff is unbelievably complicated. And there's, for people who are really into this, there's apparently a 2014 literature review and the annual review of environment and resources where 160 studies are analysed on this stuff. So on water contamination, the defenders of fracking say that the oil and gas comes from a much, much deeper level. So that's your three Empire States buildings depth, whereas, or eight, eight Empire States buildings depth, whereas the water aquifers are much shallower. So there cannot be direct contamination from the bed of gas into the water aquifer unless you have faulty pipes.

• 24:51Rory Stewart?

  So they would say that that's an argument for people doing their job more carefully, but it's not a fundamental argument against fracking. So they're saying that if leaking is happening, water contamination is happening, it's because companies are using inferior piping, something's happening as the gas is coming up.

• 25:09Rory Stewart?

  The, the thing though, that I think is really important in Britain is firstly, we don't know how much of this stuff we actually have. I mean, there was, in 2013, we were told, I remember this because I was in government at the time, or as in, it was in the governing party at the time, that we had enough fracking gas for 50 years of UK energy supply. Then in 2019, an estimate came that suggested we had enough gas for three and a half years of UK energy supply. It's a big difference, right? Is this going to provide 50 years or three and a half years?

• 25:42Alastair Campbell?

  I read a piece on the Conversation by a guy called Stuart Hazeldean, who, and again, without knowing whether these people have a particular worldview and a particular established viewpoint, it's hard to know where they're coming from. He's the professor of geology at Edinburgh University. And he, he had a piece which basically said that this is all very well for Liz Truss to think we're going to get all this energy from, from fracking, but given how much stuff has escaped already, he's estimated that she's 280 billion years too late. And that a lot of it's already gone and that we're probably going to be able to get about 10% of the estimate.

• 26:23Rory Stewart?

  So Stuart Hazeldine, I'm a real fan of.

• 26:25Alastair Campbell?

  Do you know him?

• 26:26Rory Stewart?

  He worked, yeah, yeah, he worked on the nuclear waste facility in Cumbria. And there's a connection between these things. So Stuart Hazeldine came in to point out that where we were going to store nuclear waste in Cumbria was in a particularly unsuitable form of rock. And that actually, if you wanted to store nuclear waste somewhere in Britain, you'd want to store it in clay somewhere closer to London, not up in the depopulated areas, the North West. But the reason these things connect is that what we forget, both with nuclear waste and also with fracking, is the legacy of these things. So obviously, in Cumbria, we are living with multi-billion pounds a year clean up on nuclear waste facilities out on the West Coast.

• 27:09Rory Stewart?

  And nobody ever properly thinks about how you fund the legacy. And the same is true with fracking. Fracking, within five years, you're getting about 10% of what you get in the first month. Then you abandon the well. The United States has tens of thousands of abandoned fracking sites. They have to be then sealed. And you then have a giant unfunded problem of monitoring the sealing and the condition of these sites going forward. Another thing on Britain, I'm not only, the reason I'm now opposed is not only, I'm not sure how much there is, but we're a very small country. You talked about 15 million people in the United States being near a fracking site. These fracking sites are very heavy industrial stuff, big heavy equipment, trucks, rigs.

• 27:53Rory Stewart?

  And in a country like Britain, where we are very densely populated, more densely populated than India, the industrial impact on our landscape will be enormous if we start doing fracking.

• 28:04Alastair Campbell?

  Do you think Liz Truss has thought this through? Or do you think it's just something that she felt is kind of one of those things that sounds quite good and she has to sort of make an impact when she starts?

• 28:13Rory Stewart?

  I think she probably has thought this through in a way. I think it's on brand, which is that she and Kwasi Kwarteng. Put a huge priority on growth. And they would tend to think that my complaining about the industrial impact on the landscape is sort of NIMBYism. And I think there's been some, Ed Conway from Sky did a really good article on the problem with growth in Britain, in which he says that, of course, it is possible to generate serious growth in Britain. If you concreted over a lot of our landscape, built another three million homes immediately, started fracking away, put renewable energy all over the country and brought in an enormous

• 28:56Rory Stewart?

  number of immigrants, you can generate economic growth. I mean, one of the ways you generate economic growth for immigrants is that with more people, your growth goes up. It's actually one of the ways in which Britain has grown over the last thirty, forty years. GDP per capita doesn't go up, but GDP goes up. Well, she's not going to make that argument, is she? No, but I suppose that somewhere at the bottom of Conway's point is that one of the reasons we don't have the kind of levels of growth that you have in the United States is that at some level, we don't want it. In fact, in some ways, the vote for Brexit was a vote from people who are extremely uncomfortable with certain types of industrialization, building, global economic power, immigration, et cetera. So Liz Truss, I think, is quite far out with Kwasi Koteen on the side of growth, even

• 29:41Rory Stewart?

  if it makes it pretty unpopular. I mean, fracking is very unpopular. I mean, if you look at the figures, it's something like a third for, forty-five percent against, compared to eighty percent for renewables and only ten percent against renewables. So it's not something that's popular with voters. And I think this is something she'll find with many of the other things that she and Kwasi Koteen will be trying to do to generate growth. Is popular with that base that elected her. Well, it's popular, the idea of growth is popular. As soon as you start building massive housing estates next to people's houses. Sorry, I'm talking about fracking. Fracking will be very unpopular with anyone living next to it. So I think, I think it'll turn out that she will actually, this is the perpetual problem the Conservatives are in. Their base, or, sorry, I should speak as a former Conservative, our base loves the

• 30:26Rory Stewart?

  idea of growth, loves the idea of building houses, loves the idea of fracking. But as soon as we start doing it and they see what it actually means for the local environment, they don't like it at all.

• 30:34Alastair Campbell?

  Well, your friend Stuart Hazeldean, and yet again, I bow to your extraordinary knowledge that you actually knew who I was talking about. He said that this U-turn is not based on data, but desperation and dogma. So we'll see where that goes.

• 30:48Rory Stewart?

  Well done, Stuart, on the alliteration.

• 30:50Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you know, Stuart's obviously been listening, reading to your book about argument, listening to your podcast or your radio programme, whatever the hell it was about argument. I think when we come back, we should stick with matters economic and I would like to talk after the break about why the D-word is being consigned to history along with the B-word, the B-word being Brexit and the D-word being devaluation. We have a devalued currency and nobody seems to want to talk about it.

• 31:18Rory Stewart?

  Let's come back to the D-word. Despair, deregulation, devaluation.

• 31:23Speaker 02

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• 31:36Speaker 03

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• 31:42Speaker 04

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• 31:46Speaker 03

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• 31:49Speaker 04

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• 31:50Speaker 03

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• 31:55Speaker 05

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• 32:03Speaker 05

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• 32:10Speaker 04

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• 32:12Speaker 05

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• 33:27Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell. And me, Rory Stewart. So Rory, the D word. We've had A for austerity, B for Brexit, C for 12 years of wretched conservatism, which has done so much damage to the country with a succession of prime ministers. I thought that was going to be a different C word. That was, I was a bit worried by the direction you were going there. No, no, no, I would not do that. I would not do that, not before nine o'clock. And D, devaluation. Yeah. I just don't, if, again, if this were a Labour government and the pound had fallen as quickly as our pound, sterling has fallen against the dollar and even against the euro, which is not having a great time, then I think we'd be talking about nothing else.

• 34:11Alastair Campbell?

  So, and I think it's worth people understanding that when we talk about the pound, the value of the pound falling, it's because the famed markets are taking a very, very hard look at the prospects for the British economy and deciding it's not going very, very well. So we fell, it fell 10% on the day of the referendum result, and it's been falling pretty steadily ever since. And the more that Liz Truss talks about... Article sixteen, Northern Ireland Protocol, potential for a trade war with the European Union, it's going to fall further.

• 34:48Rory Stewart?

  So yeah, let's just take listeners back to the beginning. So pound now at a thirty seven year low against the dollar. So it's hovering at about a dollar sixteen. And of course, in our lifetimes, I mean, you know, I remember when it was up at, you know, a dollar sixty, dollar seventy. So it's a long way down. One thing sometimes people are getting confused on the reporting, I'm sure not our listeners, but some people are getting confused on, is the devaluations of the nineteen seventies, when of course, we had a fixed exchange rate. So the government actually moved stuff around. Since Britain left the ERM, this great kind of disaster, which

• 35:26Alastair Campbell?

  Thirty years ago last week.

• 35:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, which thirty years ago last year, which which actually was, in a sense, the end of John Major's government. So that that was the first steps towards joining Euro. We came under huge pressure. George Soros famously sold against us. Bank of England was losing billions in hours. And finally, we let our currency float free. And letting our currency float free in many ways has been very good for us. It's one of the ways in which we were much less badly affected than Greece was by the two thousand and eight events. Poor Greece got itself tied at an exchange rate which was completely unaffordable for it and it couldn't move. And of course, it should make our exports easier if we were a big exporting country. But it is also a problem for imports. So any goods coming in from other countries now more expensive. And it is also obviously something that often

• 36:14Rory Stewart?

  is connected with the strength of your economy, your national pride. And the big thing driving it, I agree, there was a Brexit element, but the really big thing driving it at the moment, is that people are just generally very, very gloomy about the UK economy. Retail sales are down. We're basically in recession now, even if we're not calling it a recession. Waitrose, I think, lost nearly a hundred million in six months. They say their shopping baskets, people are putting about a fifth less into their shopping baskets, and this is spilling out across the whole economy.

• 36:43Alastair Campbell?

  But you say, I do think the Brexit point is worth emphasising though, because that is the bit that other countries who are facing similar problems do not have. And I think partly explains why we're possibly in a worse shape than they are. So everybody's had to deal with, everybody's having to deal with higher energy prices, inflation is a problem for everyone, all the economies were hit by the credit crunch, all the economies had to deal with Covid in their different ways. But the Brexit part is, and also I think this is where politics and economics and the marriage of them becomes important. Because I think that the markets will have been looking at post Johnson, a new prime minister coming on, coming in, a new chancellor coming in,

• 37:25Alastair Campbell?

  and looking for something more mature, more serious, and they're not getting it. Au contraire, they're getting even more la la land than we had before.

• 37:36Rory Stewart?

  So you're right. So one of the things that you're picking up in the currencies and the markets in general is the predictions of international traders on where they think the British economy is going. And so what Liz Truss and Quasi-Courtain would have hoped is that the markets would have looked at them, got a sense of their economic plans and felt, this is good, we're going to take a bet, we're going to invest heavily in the British economy because we believe that they're going to deliver the kind of growth they're talking about. And clearly the markets don't really believe that. What the markets are looking at is a mini budget coming on Friday, so coming in a couple of days' time.

• 38:13Alastair Campbell?

  Fiscal event, Rory, fiscal event.

• 38:16Rory Stewart?

  Fiscal event. Why do we say fiscal event, not mini budget?

• 38:18Alastair Campbell?

  Because that's what they're calling it, apparently. It's a bit like, you know, Ukraine special military operation. We just call things different things to make people think it's new.

• 38:29Rory Stewart?

  Beautiful. So fiscal event. Fiscal event is where we'll hear presumably that the national insurance rise, which was put in place by Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, will not be going ahead. That may be where we hear Quasi-Courtain saying that he's going to lift the cap on bankers' bonuses, that's been trailed a lot. It may be where we see big cuts in corporation tax. And it's also, I think, where we'll get a chance to look a little bit more closely at the implications of the energy price cap. Lost in the funeral reporting a little bit, maybe. And because this is something we were talking about three, four weeks ago, is I think you said very clearly, and I think you've been vindicated, that was no way that Conservatives could really avoid putting a price cap on energy. That Labour had come up with that idea.

• 39:12Rory Stewart?

  And initially, Liz Truss looked like she was resisting it and saying, this is not good market economics, it doesn't make sense. But they've now said there's going to be a £2,500 energy cap. And the estimated cost of that cap through to 2024 is £150 billion. That is an enormous sum of money.

• 39:35Alastair Campbell?

  And not paid for by the windfall tax suggested by Labour, but by borrowing.

• 39:41Alastair Campbell?

  So what they're hearing, Roy, they're also, don't underestimate, I would have thought, even though you and I would support the idea of more spending on defence, particularly with, in light of recent events, they've heard about tens of billions more on defence spending, they've heard about massive tax cuts for the wealth, and as you say, hundreds of billions on the energy crisis, and all of it to be borrowed. That is spooking them.

• 40:07Rory Stewart?

  Exactly. And I think that really will worry the markets because I think, I mean, this goes back to our very, very longstanding conversation about how much debt and deficit you can carry. And obviously, we disagree strongly on austerity, but the argument that was made-

• 40:20Alastair Campbell?

  No, we don't disagree that strongly, Roy. You basically agree with me, you just find it a long, it's a long, painful journey to the final admission, but it will come, it will come.

• 40:28Rory Stewart?

  So the argument made by George Osborne back in 2010, 11, 12, is that you have to keep your debt under control in order to keep market confidence in Britain because it's not like the US, it's not the world's reserve currency, we don't have as much movement. And, and I think part of what's contributing to the lack of market confidence is the sense that the Conservatives seem at the moment to have given up on fiscal responsibility. And that actually was the, the choice against Rishi Sunak in a way, that the Conservative Party members created an environment where Rishi Sunak's attempt to argue for balancing the budget was-

• 41:01Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but also the bond, the, the bond markets and the currency markets are recognising that the government is going to have to borrow even more and even more expensively. And that just again erodes the sense of confidence in the future of the economy. I think the the simple way to think of this is that when people, you know, you can argue about is just sort of rich guys betting on our on our futures, but when the so called markets are marking the pound down, essentially, they are making a judgment about the future of the economy. That's what's happening.

• 41:36Rory Stewart?

  So then that brings us back to the question of what is the economic plan? How do we generate growth in Britain? And this is why, I think we've talked about this a lot, but really, there are far fewer options than politicians want to pretend they have to the public. There aren't a simple best practice. If only you had a bit of toughness and balls, you could drive through some set policy, which is going to guarantee economic growth in a place like Britain. As I've said, you know, there's one set of options which do generate growth, but create a lot of problems, which are bringing in a lot more immigration, building an enormous amount more can generate growth. But the more fundamental things that really you want to do are much more difficult, which

• 42:18Rory Stewart?

  are creating the right kind of business environment, which is very difficult. And that isn't just about playing with taxes. And secondly, investing in the stuff that creates productivity, getting the right kind of education in place, the right kind of educational reforms, the right kind of incentives. And and I think nobody's very good at this. And I think this is what Kwasi Kwarteng is going to find out. And I'm afraid this is also a struggle for Labour, because it's very difficult now, after forty years of people claiming that there is some fantastic neat market solution that generates automatic growth. Nobody really believes it anymore. And we don't really see from anybody, Labour, Conservative, Lib Dems, a vision of how you do this in a country like Britain while balancing all the other interests we have.

• 43:00Alastair Campbell?

  Can I make a pitch for one of the subjects that we discussed in the Q and A? You mentioned education there. We had a lot of questions, just sort of. I felt almost random, but we had a lot of questions this week, which if you boil them down was essentially saying, why is there so little focus on education in the current political debate? I think we should maybe

• 43:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do a lot more on that.

• 43:18Alastair Campbell?

  In the Q and A. Shall we talk, Bree? Listrass goes from funeral to New York with a lot of the leaders, the other leaders who were in the abbey with her for the funeral. You've been to the UN, I've been to the UN. These United Nations General Assemblies, they're very, very, very strange events. And I have a sense at the moment, I'm trying to think whether there's ever been a moment. I think Antonio Guterres, the General Secretary, is a great guy. I think he does a good job. However, I don't think I've ever known a time when the United Nations has felt so impotent, frankly.

• 43:53Rory Stewart?

  And marginalized. It's very odd, isn't it? So it'd be nice to get actually a few stories from you out of this horrible thing we called UNGA. But yes, you're right. When I was the, when I was a Foreign Minister and a DIF minister, we'd all fly over for the United Nations General Assembly. And Britain had this, I did probably there in your day too, a very strange, almost half kind of basement room down a series of narrow corridors. You'd look like you were going to go and inspect the electric fuse box. And then you'd arrive in this little room with a flag where I would meet, you know, the President of Somalia. And then I'd sit and chair these meetings with Antonio Guterres next to me. And it felt very important, right? You've got a lovely flag, you've got this table, you've got Secretary General United Nations next to you, and I'm chairing the

• 44:37Rory Stewart?

  meeting on South Sudan or the meeting on Somalia. But the truth of the matter, of course, is that it's very difficult to believe you're achieving anything. And somewhere at the heart of this is fundamentally that America turned away from the United Nations. It lost confidence in the UN project. There were many years where it wasn't providing funding. This got very bad under Trump. Where the UN was very low down his list of priorities. This has created an environment in which, on the one hand, China has increased its influence and controls a lot of the appointments in the UN. Groups of 70 smaller countries have created almost non-aligned factions which are challenging the dominance of the United States.

• 45:22Rory Stewart?

  There was the problem with Libya, really big problem, which is we finally got Russia and China to vote in the Security Council for an intervention and then we betrayed them by doing things in Libya that we were not supposed to be doing and that broke apart the Erdogan coalition. And now we have a situation in which we're back almost to the Cold War in which the permanent members of the Security Council, Russia and China, Britain, France, the United States, find themselves riven on the edge of a global conflict again.

• 45:52Alastair Campbell?

  Although it was very interesting this week, we talked last week about the so-called meeting of the dictators' club in Samarkand. Very, very, very interesting how both Xi Jinping and Modi made fairly veiled criticisms of Putin. Modi said openly to Putin's face in front of the media, I told you on the phone that this was not a period for war. Putin himself, although it wasn't reported in Russia apparently, but Putin himself referred to some of the criticisms that Xi Jinping had made.

• 46:34Alastair Campbell?

  And the president of Kyrgyzstan kept Putin waiting, no less. So there was a little bit of, I know you have to, you have to sometimes read very hard into what's going on around Putin, but you did have a sense of him losing a little bit of power in the, in those structures.

• 46:53Rory Stewart?

  Tom McTague, who writes very good articles for The Atlantic, has written an article on Britain's international position where he says that what we've finally unlocked is we've unlocked a fantasy about being hobbits. So he quotes these moments from The Lord of the Rings where the Shire, where the hobbits live, is completely isolated from the rest of the world. It's a sort of little Britain of people wobbling around with hedge rows, little cottages. And, and I think his point is right, that, and it's something that I've been struggling with, I never really properly took on board. When people were leading the Brexit campaign, many of the Brexit campaigners claimed they were doing it because they wanted a bigger role for global Britain.

• 47:35Rory Stewart?

  But actually, in truth, the real dominant trend in Britain is about us having less to do with the world, not more. And I realised this, I put out a tweet saying that I thought it would be great to commemorate the Queen by setting up a Queen's Development Agency, which would commit to spend 0.7% of British GDP on helping the world's very poorest.

• 47:57Alastair Campbell?

  I thought you were taking the Queen perilously close to politics there, Rory.

• 48:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'm quite right. And I thought the responses were very, very interesting, just how many people want to say charity begins at home, we're not giving any more money to poor people overseas, and how the whole movement to end global extreme poverty, which was so important, from Band-Aids through the Millennium Development Goals, right the way through to Sustainable Development Goals, is fading. People don't want to come on board for ending global extreme poverty. And I now realise that really so many of the things I was struggling with in DIFID and the Foreign Office were about my taking too literally the claims of people like Boris Johnson that they cared about global Britain.

• 48:42Rory Stewart?

  So I was really trying to think about how do we project influence, how does Britain play a role in the way that maybe France wanted to and Francophone Africa in really shaping policy in the UN and elsewhere. And I talk about, you know, how can we be big players in UNGA? And the truth is, politicians now sense that a lot of the British public doesn't want to have anything to do with any of that.

• 49:03Alastair Campbell?

  Right, but that is a failure of leadership and a failure of political education as well, because I think that real political leaders would be explaining convincingly why our interconnectedness, Brexit notwithstanding.

• 49:21Alastair Campbell?

  Matters more, not less. And also, if we're talking about global Britain, it's about how you maximize the strengths that you have to build more power for yourself and influence in the world. And, you know, one of the things, I think one of the reasons why we get quite a lot of overseas listeners to our podcasts is because we do talk about parts of the world that frankly, by a lot of the media are just being forgotten. I know that you're meeting this week a friend of mine who's been working with the World Food Programme in Yemen. What's happening in Yemen, we should maybe talk about this after you've had your meeting, but what's happening in Yemen is one of the most extraordinary humanitarian catastrophes

• 50:03Alastair Campbell?

  of all time. And yet, when was the last time you saw anything on the mainstream media about it? What's happening at the moment in Armenia and Azerbaijan? I think in another era would have been, even with the Queen's death and even with Ukraine, that would have been on the airwaves because it's of interest and it's of significance. But it's almost like, well, and I think that's the other reason why the Queen's death became such a focus because it allowed us, if you like, just to focus on ourselves, other than we focused on the world in terms of how they responded to how we responded.

• 50:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, no, I'm absolutely with you. I've actually got quite a lot of pushback from cross journalists. They think we're doing too much on saying that the UK correspondents are not doing enough. So just to challenge you a little bit. So here are small requests from us UK correspondents out in Africa. Just because Alistair doesn't read our coverage in The Times, Economist, Telegraph, Guardian, etc., doesn't mean we're not out here working hard to push this season to the spotlight.

• 51:04Alastair Campbell?

  No, I want to defend him. I want to defend him. I'm on his side because, but he's working even harder than he needs to because he knows he's finding it harder to get proper projection of the work that he's doing. Whereas if you read, if he read his German colleagues, his French colleagues, his Italian colleagues, they are still getting far more projection for the stuff that they do. So I'm with him.

• 51:28Rory Stewart?

  It's very odd. And even The Guardian, I mean, somebody pulled me up on this, that actually The Guardian didn't do a very good job reporting the dismantling of DIFID, the dismantling of the 0.7% A budget. They didn't get the scoops on what was happening on that money. They didn't really mention the pressure that that all caused leading up to the Afghanistan withdrawal. And there's also a problem, I mean, I think this is a real problem domestically too, that one of the reasons that, you know, what we like to call populism and post-truth polarisation takes off is that there's not very good reporting on implementation, on detail, what government actually does. They make a promise, they put out a press release. How's it actually going? And without that, it's very, very difficult holding people to account. But we've created a culture, and I think it's partly about the algorithms,

• 52:13Rory Stewart?

  isn't it, that it's not just Twitter, but it's that every newspaper editor is now looking at how many views each article gets, how many tweets each article gets. And the truth is, I mean, I found this in Parliament, my speech on hedgehogs got 2 million views. My speech on more serious stuff gets almost nothing. And so if you put out a kind of quirky article about some weird archaeological find, you get enormous number of views. If you write a detailed piece on what's happening to Britain's international aid spend, it's just not read enough.

• 52:44Alastair Campbell?

  Right, but that's why you do need, you need editors and owners who say, well, journalism is not just about clickbait. Journalism is not just about driving numbers. It's actually about trying to tell the truth about what's happening in the world. And by the way, I think there are some fantastic foreign correspondents. But I felt this during the week, that, you know, you had somebody like Olegorin in Ukraine doing some pretty extraordinary stuff, but really, really, really, really struggled to get on air. And I get that we've had the Queen's death, and that's the reason for that. But, you know, I just mentioned two there. So you had your guy from Africa.

• 53:18Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 53:18Alastair Campbell?

  But how many British foreign correspondents are currently trying to get into cover Armenia, Azerbaijan? Some will be.

• 53:25Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 53:26Alastair Campbell?

  But how many? And how much investment is an editor or an owner willing to put into that? Not very much.

• 53:32Rory Stewart?

  One of the interesting developments that you probably know about is that Bill Gates actually funded both The Telegraph and The Guardian to do something called global health reporting, which means that he, I think, pays for a certain number of journalists on both newspapers to do international development stories. And that's one of the reasons why oddly The Telegraph has actually done some surprisingly good stuff on Africa is because Bill Gates is actually funding it against the clickbait direction.

• 53:57Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Lord, my dear, I think that I can... I can think of a few conflict of interest questions arising out of that. But anyway, that's interesting. I didn't know that. I didn't know that.

• 54:06Rory Stewart?

  Now Biden, Biden. So Biden is doing much, much better in the polls. Really amazing. I mean, he's gone on his job performance. He's gone. Well, those people who think the country's on track has increased from 27% to 50% of the United States. His approval rating is up nine points. The polling's looking good. The Economist has this amazing thing, if anybody wants to go on it. They've got a model where each day they do 10,000 simulations on the likely results of the Senate. And 82 out of 100 times, the Democrats are winning the Senate at the moment. So, and it even looks as though the Republicans won't be able to make as much inroads in Congress. So,

• 54:49Rory Stewart?

  and final thing, sorry on that, just on which I think is important for listeners to get is that a third of the Senate seats are up at the midterms, but the majority of this this time are Republican seats. So it's it's actually a good situation potentially for the Democrats. Any sense on what's driving that, Alice? Why you think Biden's doing a bit better?

• 55:09Alastair Campbell?

  I think two things. First is, I think, actually, even though, yes, he's getting on a bit and sometimes could look a little bit, a little bit out of it. He actually has, his skills have come to the benefit of what he's been trying to do. He has, his great strength is his ability to get on with people, to get deals done, to get stuff through the American system. And he's done a hell of a lot on that. And we've talked about some of that before. The second thing, I wonder, is it too early to hope that even though Trump does have a remarkable following in parts of the political system, that a lot of decent, middle American Republicans are actually

• 55:50Alastair Campbell?

  thinking, if this is the direction we're going, I'd rather go with Biden. Now, I don't know, but I'm hoping that's part of what's going on, that there's just been a revulsion. We saw Trump's latest rally with what looked to me like a sort of, you know, Trumpian version of a Nazi salute. We saw him rambling and ranting in the same way that he does. Every sentence trying to polarize the debate, continuing to tell lies about himself and about his opponents. And Biden just kind of, you know, puts a smile on his face, puts his dark glasses on and gets on with it.

• 56:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it's, it's the polarization, though, it's amazing, isn't it? I was looking at these polls a little bit more closely and the President's job performance since July, Democrats gone from seventy percent approving of Biden's job performance to eighty three percent. Independents have gone from twenty five percent approving of his job performance to thirty nine percent, but Republicans since July have gone from eight percent approving of his job performance down to four percent. So I guess what's happening is that Trump is alienating people and probably the revelations of the classified documents being taken, the revelations about the insurrection are mobilizing the Democrat base, putting off moderate Republicans, but he's, boy, is he

• 57:04Rory Stewart?

  mobilizing the hardcore of his Republican base at the moment, isn't he?

• 57:08Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, I thought that I I I do, I saw a horrible report on, I can't remember where it was, but it was interviewing people in some part of the States where one after another was saying this whole thing, the FBI should be defunded, the whole thing is just a political smear campaign against Trump. And that's how polarization works. It drives people into a position of saying, and maybe, you know, sometimes I think, well, maybe I'm like this in relation to Tory Labour or Leave Remain.

• 57:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Alastair Campbell?

  But I try, at least I always try to kind of think the other guy might have a point. But what polarization does is it drives you to saying, if you are Trump and you're a Trump supporter, he is right, whatever he says, and his opponents are wrong, whatever they say, and their motives are always malign. And that is an impossible place to have a serious political debate.

• 58:01Rory Stewart?

  Just how serious this is, that it's sort of beyond imagining, six Republican governor and senatorial candidates endorsed by Trump at the moment are saying that they will not commit to accept the results of the midterm elections.

• 58:15Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:16Rory Stewart?

  And just how how dangerous that is in a in a democracy like the United States.

• 58:21Alastair Campbell?

  All right, Rory, well, on that unhappy note, we weren't too depressing today.

• 58:25Rory Stewart?

  No, we weren't too depressing. Thank you very much, and we're gonna, we're gonna get some bagpipe music up again.

• 58:30Alastair Campbell?

  I think we should, I think we should have a, I think we should have bagpipe music just lowly, gently, under, a nice undertone through the entire podcast for the rest of time.

• 58:40Rory Stewart?

  The great P Broch for you, yeah, okay, well, thank you.

• 58:43Alastair Campbell?

  All the best.

• 58:44Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 58:47Speaker 02

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

• 58:50Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 58:56Speaker 03

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

• 59:03Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You start, you freeze again, that's what.

• 59:08Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 59:11Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 59:12Speaker 03

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

• 59:17Speaker 07

  Espolón Tequila. It arrives in a cloud of feathers with a cry to wake the dead. Espolón Tequila. Balanced, delicious, perfect for nights out, nights in, and people who like to drink tequila. Just add ice, lime, and your mouth. Then hold on tight. 100% acave, 0% eagle. Espolón Tequila. For a real margarita, ride the rooster.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Espolón Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Campari America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.