504. Is Trump Losing His Tariffs War? (Question Time)

Will Trump escalate his global acts of aggression in response to the dramatic Supreme Court ruling? How will the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor change the course of British royal history? Will Labour’s SEND reforms in the schools white paper strengthen inclusion in mainstream schools or risk stripping essential legal protections from children with special needs? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more. __________ Sign up for our free newsletter at therestispolitics.com. Join The Rest Is Politics Plus: Start your free trial at therestispolitics.com to unlock exclusive bonus content – including Rory and Alastair’s miniseries – plus ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, an exclusive members’ newsletter, discounted book prices, and a private chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit fuseenergy.com/politics. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ __________ Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith, Vasco Andrade Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green Senior Producer: Callum Hill General Manager: Tom Whiter 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.

• 0:00Rory Stewart?

  The Supreme Court has just slapped him, not on something marginal. I mean, this is something right at the very core of his power.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  It's fundamental, both to his economic policy and to his foreign policy.

• 0:10Rory Stewart?

  It's his favourite instrument. It's the thing that allows him to play the mini emperor.

• 0:13Alastair Campbell?

  The violence of the language he uses when he doesn't get his own way does underline the worry that people have that he basically is a wannabe king, a wannabe dictator. He actually said at one point, "I have the power to destroy the country, brackets, if I don't get my way." We really are now looking down the barrel of somebody who wants to run this country like Putin runs Russia. That's why I think it is so significant.

• 0:43Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to the Rest is Politics Question Time with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 0:46Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart.

• 0:47Alastair Campbell?

  Apologies if you're confused about Question Time coming before the main episode. That is because for the main episode, Rory and I are going to talk the whole episode about Ukraine, the war, four years on, from Putin's so-called special military operation, which of course was a full-on invasion. It's the anniversary of the war. Indeed, it's also the anniversary to something said of this podcast because you may remember we started the whole thing roughly around the time of the Ukraine war. So that will come a day after this Question Time, where we're going to talk about Trump and tariffs, we're going to talk about former Prince Andrew and Epstein, we're going to talk about the school's white paper. Rory, where do you want to start?

• 1:30Rory Stewart?

  Why don't we start, as you say, with tariffs, which we got a lot of questions on, and I'm going to take one particular one, which has come in from Ben. Could Trump simply just ignore the Supreme Court ruling on tariffs? My understanding is Supreme Court decisions have been ignored before, see Andrew Jackson and his callous slaughter of Native Americans. If he instructed the government to ignore it and tried to suggest to people that he alone was the sole answer to America's existential crisis and exploitation, could he? I mean, it's not like Congress could impeach him. Let's, before we get into the sort of details of Ben's question, try to just remind people where we are, because I think oddly, this is something we covered a huge amount on this famous Liberation Day tariff. So about 10 months ago, Trump... Announced these astonishing array of tariffs where people will remember islands

• 2:14Rory Stewart?

  full of penguins were getting tariffed, Lesotho was getting terrible treatment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That was sort of one big wave. Listeners who are really paying attention will also remember, he used tariffs violently against India and Brazil and indeed Switzerland for different reasons. So India was the spat about Russian oil, Brazil was about prosecuting Bolsonaro, slapped 50% tariffs on. Switzerland, as he confirmed in Davos, was because the president of Switzerland, he thought, had not been polite to him. So he whacked their tariffs up to 37%. Canada and Mexico has been a different form of psychodrama, back and forth endlessly with different types of tariffs going up and down. But the end of the story, because I think we often, like I suppose many people in the news, we

• 2:57Rory Stewart?

  often tell the story at its height, but we don't necessarily keep people up to date with what's happened since. The broad story is that since then, after countries like Brazil and India and Switzerland went through really sort of four months of hell, eventually most of these things settled down with what people call napkin deals. In other words, Trump made these back of an envelope deals, which in the case of Britain's deal seemed to be a blank sheet of paper. But anyway, broadly speaking, what happened is that he would say to Vietnam or to wherever, if you agree to be nice to me, and in many cases, if you agree to give me a lovely present or invest a lot in the United States and give me some pretty non-specific promises about not doing too much with China, I'll

• 3:41Rory Stewart?

  bring the tariffs down to what on average ended up mostly around the world being about 15%. Over to you.

• 3:47Alastair Campbell?

  I want to give a shout out here, Roy. You talk about how we cover the big moments, but maybe not all the little details in between. V O S selections are a wine importer who took the Trump administration to the US Court of International Trade. Learning resources and hand to mind, they are the ones who challenged the legality of Liberation Day tariffs in the federal court. And essentially, they had won. The court granted in their favour, the administration went to the Supreme Court, and they veer several other courts, and the Supreme Court struck down Trump's authority to impose these tariffs without Congress, that's the key point.

• 4:29Alastair Campbell?

  In a vote of six to three, Q Trump going absolutely bonkers, doing an immediate press conference, one of his mad rambling press conferences, where he basically attacked the judges, praised the ones who backed him, attacked the ones who hadn't. And then the next day, having slept on it, he then produces this, you know how I love analysing his posts? Because they're so clearly written by him, usually in the middle of the night.

• 5:01Alastair Campbell?

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• 5:04Rory Stewart?

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• 5:13Alastair Campbell?

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• 5:33Rory Stewart?

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• 5:40Alastair Campbell?

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• 5:55Rory Stewart?

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• 5:57Alastair 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.

• 6:10Rory 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. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying, if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 6:33Alastair Campbell?

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

• 6:40Rory 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/resterspolitics. That's nordvpn.com/resterspolitics. And the link is in the episode description.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 7:26Alastair Campbell?

  Based on a thorough, detailed and complete review, yeah, of the ridiculous, poorly written, as if he could judge good writing, and extraordinarily anti-American decision, what could be more pro-American than standing up for the Constitution on tariffs? After many months, many in caps, of contemplation, the contemplation he's saying is by the court, not by him. He doesn't really do many months of contemplation. Please let this statement serve to represent that. Now, the next word is meant to be "I", but he's actually used the figure 1, so, which is kind of maybe to represent that figure 1, as President of the United States of America, comma, will be comma,

• 8:11Alastair Campbell?

  "effectively immediately raising the 10% worldwide tariff on countries, many of which have been ripping in quotes the US off for decades, without retribution brackets until I came along", exclamation mark, "to the fully allowed and legally tested 15% level." Get this bit? "During the next short number of months, the Trump administration will determine to issue the new legally permissible tariffs, which will continue our extraordinarily successful process of making great again." Then we go into full caps, "greater than ever before", exclamation, exclamation, exclamation.

• 8:49Rory Stewart?

  So much to unpack here, but I had a lovely, long conversation yesterday with my tariffs hero, Dmitry Grozubinski in Switzerland. He's in Switzerland, I'm Switzerland. And he is just wonderful on this stuff. And again, I find myself slightly parroting his views. But the thing that he's good at pointing out is that right at the heart of this whole thing is that Congress is supposed to have the power of the purse. They're meant to be the people who are really in charge of taxing and spending. And tariffs are a massive part of the power of the purse. In fact, you know, Trump has generated about $200 billion worth of revenue off these tariffs. And what the Supreme Court ruling did, and very unusual, six to three, big slap to Trump, is to challenge his use of emergency powers.

• 9:33Rory Stewart?

  So he essentially said that there was an emergency. He used something called AIPA, which is a particular act. And he tried to use it to say that he could, as president, unilaterally impose tariffs on basically any country, for any reason, on any sector and for any duration.

• 9:53Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, did your friend explain what the emergency was? Because at the start, in relation to Canada and Mexico, it's fentanyl. But then with every other country, I'm not aware that Switzerland has a big fentanyl relationship. So what was the emergency that he was addressing?

• 10:10Rory Stewart?

  So that's absolutely right. So that's one big problem, which the Supreme Court could have looked at. And actually, they decided to stay off the emergency thing. They got on to another thing. But the emergency thing, you're completely right, was nonsense. He decided that anything he wanted was an emergency. So two classic examples, when Ford in Canada put up some advertisements quoting Ronald Reagan on free trade, that was considered an emergency, an emergency that justified putting tariffs up on Canada. Again, you would have heard in Davos, I don't know whether you were in a meeting or listening to it, but when Lutnik was talking about why they were threatening to impose tariffs on Europe over Greenland, he said it was an emergency because in some non-specified time in the future, China might occupy Greenland. So it was an emergency, right?

• 10:54Rory Stewart?

  So the Supreme Court could have really got into that. They decided not to because They decided that they don't want to get involved in micromanaging what a president does or doesn't regard as an emergency. Instead, what they said is that quite clearly, in their view, the act did not allow him to raise tariffs. If Congress, who passed this act, had intended the president to be able to raise tariffs, they would have said tariffs in the act. The fact that they talked about economic instruments and not tariffs from Supreme Court's view makes it pretty clear that Congress was proposing to retain its traditional control over tariffs. Now, that then has given Trump a big, big problem because we've just removed his flamethrower that he's been throwing at the world. And

• 11:35Rory Stewart?

  it pushes him back basically to three other options that he can use. There's something called 232. So that's something that he could use in a national security emergency. So a classic example of that could be, you could say, for example, I'm going to put tariffs on Chinese steel because I need to make my own steel in order to make battleships, right? That would be 232. He could use something called 301, which is what his guy who does all the trade negotiations is now threatening. And 301 is about unfair trade practices. But instead, what you're seeing in that Truth Social post is that he's gone with something called 122. And 122 gives him the right, if there's a balance of payments crisis in

• 12:19Rory Stewart?

  the US, to impose 15% tariffs for 150 days before it goes back to Congress. The reason I'm being boring about all these different things, and I could also talk about something called 338, is that they're all very cumbersome. They're not going to work for him in the way the other stuff worked. And they're all open to legal challenge in different ways. And the problem is they're much more bureaucratic and procedural. So for a man who wants to play the hokey-cokey and say, you will read to me in a meeting and I'm going to put up tariffs by 7%. Now you've given me a gold Rolex, so I'm going to bring tariffs down to 15%. These instruments wouldn't really allow him to do that. These are instruments that usually require a full investigation by US Commerce, huge documentation. Once they've gone up, yes, he can bring them down. But if he brings them down, he's then open

• 13:03Rory Stewart?

  to legal challenge right across the board. That could be very expensive. I mean, it's possible he's going to have to repay $150 billion to all these companies because his tariffs may be illegal.

• 13:13Alastair Campbell?

  Although the dissenting Judges, the three arch conservatives who will largely view that Trump can do no wrong, they pointed out that it is very, very, very complicated process for people, be they countries or companies, to try to get refunds. But that is going to set off a whole new wave of activity for the lawyers. The section 122 that you're talking about, this is the first time this has ever been used, and it was part of the Trade Act of 1974. Now, what's really interesting about this, given that the original judgment is about the powers of Congress over the power of the presidency, is that this can only

• 13:52Alastair Campbell?

  apply for 150 days, at which point Congress has to step in. Now, of course, this is all leading us to the midterms in November, when people assume there is going to be a shift of power. But what I think you've seen, both in his reaction and the sheer violence of the language against these judges, I mean, the reason why they talk about the founding fathers and their love for the Constitution is because you have these three parts of it, one of which is this Supreme Court. And for him to come out and basically say, I don't need to worry about Congress, he actually said at one point, I can destroy the country.

• 14:32Alastair Campbell?

  I just, you let that sink in. I can, I have the power to destroy the country, brackets, if I don't get my way. And the interesting thing, I think, for me, you and I have both been very critical about the Supreme Court, the seeming willingness to go along with all these businesses and the tech bros have all caved in, and the media caving in one by one. And I think once you get the habit, any institution, once you get the habit of saying, right, I've crossed that Rubicon, I've given him that slap on the face, maybe there will be more of that down the track, especially when he reacts in the way that he has. I mean, calling these people a disgrace to their families, anti-American, the violence

• 15:14Alastair Campbell?

  of the language he uses when he doesn't get his own way, does underline the worry that people have that he basically is a wannabe. King, a wannabe dictator.

• 15:23Rory Stewart?

  But it is interesting, isn't it? My mother, that great figure on our podcast, was saying to me last night that she was very surprised because the impression she'd got reading the news was that the Supreme Court were total Trump loyalists, thanks to some of the recent appointments, and that basically the Supreme Court and Congress weren't going to stop him from doing anything. So she was very surprised to discover they'd voted six to three, particularly on something that, as she points out, is so central. It's an issue, tariffs is something he's made core of his brand. It's something he thinks about all the time. It's his favourite instrument. It's the thing, as we've said, that allows him to play the mini emperor, because every company has to come in and bend the knee and he'll give them a few per cent here or take off a few per cent there. And every

• 16:05Rory Stewart?

  country has to give him gifts and all this kind of stuff. So the Supreme Court has just slapped him, not on something marginal. I mean, this is something right at the very core of his power.

• 16:15Alastair Campbell?

  It's fundamental, both to his economic policy and to his foreign policy. So that's why it is a kind of double slap. And the other thing, because we know that Trump, a little bit like Putin, we know that Putin values loyalty to his vision of Russia, almost more than anything. If you don't share that loyalty, if you become disloyal, then you risk, I'm just reading this extraordinary German book at the moment called Der Stille Krieg, The Silent War, and I'm on the chapter about Putin's use of murder. And we know all the famous ones that have been dropped out of windows and died in baths, but there are so many others who, if they are deemed to be disloyal, they get dropped out of hotel

• 16:54Alastair Campbell?

  window balconies. And Trump seems to save his greatest bile for the two conservative, in quotes, justices that he appointed, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. John Roberts was appointed by George Bush, so he's seen as a conservative, but he's not Trump's conservative. So the absolute total disloyalty that Trump cannot stand is where it's somebody that he has appointed. And it's interesting that they in a way where the key argers on this. So I think it's going to be, it's going to be really interesting how this plays out. There will be, the legalities are complicated. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, he said something very interesting. He talked about this being a poison.

• 17:38Alastair Campbell?

  In the world economy, he's really hitting back. Britain, I think, which got this sort of slightly special deal that we don't know whether it's actually been implemented. We don't know what the effect of this will be. So those countries that did well before are kind of sitting back, those countries that maybe got whacked a bit more are using it to really go for Trump.

• 17:56Rory Stewart?

  My sense is that I think people like Amy Coney Barrett, yes, are very conservative. But often when we say that, we mean that they have been very conservative on issues such as abortion. I don't think that necessarily means that we could have assumed that she's always going to give in to Trump. I mean, she's extremely bright. In fact, actually, to be fair, most of these Supreme Court justices are technically very, very bright, very well qualified, most of them lawyers. And I think she's a very good example of that. She's just very conservative and I think quite religiously conservative in her views. The reason it's cheering up, though, deeply, deeply cheering, is that it shows that the

• 18:37Rory Stewart?

  US institutions are beginning to function. And because the way in which populism really took off around the world, and you can see this in Venezuela, where the Supreme Court basically upheld Maduro stealing the election, you can see this in Turkey, you obviously can see this in Russia, all these countries where elections continue to happen. But what really goes wrong is that the courts get seized. Well, you saw this in Bangladesh. I mean, that was one of the things that Sheikh Hosina was really doing. She stitched up the courts. And I guess, you know, 250 years of American democracy is really paying off here. In the end, these institutions are holding better than people feared.

• 19:15Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I don't think we should get too cheered up because I think this is getting such attention because, as you say, it's so fundamental to his overall foreign and economic policy. But they've let quite a lot go by. And I was reading a piece at the weekend. One of the progressive think tank had done an analysis of Project 25.

• 19:37Alastair Campbell?

  And it is pretty amazing when they go through line by line, just how much of Project 2025 has been, has been carried out, stopping foreign aid, stopping the D E I stuff, the, the really tough stuff on immigration, going for the public broadcasters, Venezuela are a big, big thing part of this. So I, I think we should still be worried because Trump is doubling down. The fact that he could have that response, a normal response of an American president would have been, well, I'm very disappointed by the judgment. We now have to make sense of it. Instead of which, your family's ashamed of you. You're a disgrace

• 20:17Alastair Campbell?

  to America. Now, hopefully, that will shake up the legal system and these media cowards to think, hold on a minute, we really are now looking down the barrel of somebody who wants to run this country like Putin runs Russia. That is what we're getting to on this. And so that's why I think it is so significant.

• 20:36Rory Stewart?

  I guess in the back of their minds, in the Supreme Court's justice minds, is they're balancing two things, aren't they? They're balancing what they think is their responsibilities and constitution and the law. But the background, and I think you're right to raise Project 2025 here, is that the big narrative, the big populist narrative in the broad sense, is that we're being crippled by the law. And you hear it from the right in Britain, you hear it from the right all over the world. The story is that we've become too slow moving. As somebody who I saw in Munich said to us, we've gone from a world where the people running our countries were engineers to a world in which the people running our countries

• 21:17Rory Stewart?

  are lawyers. And we, you know, we talked about the fact that every democratic presidential and vice presidential candidate for 40 years, with one exception, was a lawyer. And of course, Keir Starmer's a lawyer, right? And there's a general sense that governments find it very difficult to get things done. You talk about, you know, how come China can build all these airports? We can't. You know, why are we still talking about the third runway since 1997? And so there's a general sense in modern politics that we're being outcompeted. By authoritarian states like China because they don't have to worry about public inquiries, consultations, planning processes, and above all lawyers. And of course, ministers, you know, when I was a minister, I felt this a lot. When I wanted to try to put

• 22:00Rory Stewart?

  metal detectors at the gates of prison, the first thing I was told by my civil servants is it's illegal. You know, the lawyers won't let you do this, right? You have to spend a lot of time endlessly talking about what's legal, what isn't. So I suppose the Supreme Court, and we get a hint of this in their decision to say, we're not going to double guess whether or not something's an emergency. We're going to look at this narrow subject around tariffs is they don't want to be drawn into the culture wars of being accused of the lawyers and the blob stopping governments getting on with things.

• 22:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Anyway, we will doubtless be coming back to Trump and his tariffs because he is not going to let this lie. But I I think you're right. I think the world was broadly cheered up by this. You certainly saw a lot of positive reaction from different parts of the world, albeit worried in terms of, you know, whether they can now waste lots of money trying to get their money back or whatever it might be.

• 22:52Rory Stewart?

  Final thing they're worried about, I think, is that we had sort of settled into the mad old system. We were beginning to get a sense over a year of what he was doing with his AIP powers and how to deal with him. He's now going to be working with his own teams to try to come up with other ways of torturing the world with tariffs. And so there's going to be a moment where countries and businesses are going to be lurching around, trying to understand what this means, what other tricks he's going to try to pull out of the back of his pocket. And if he decides that somehow he can't quite continue using tariffs as his tool of torturing people,

• 23:33Rory Stewart?

  what other things is he going to try to find? Because he's want going to want to continue torturing people. He's going to want to continue to have short term transactional things that allows him to humiliate, bully, extract concessions, threaten, intimidate. So what's next? And that's where I begin to worry, you know, what's he going to do with American control of tech, cloud computing, AI, sanctions policies and others at the dollar payment systems, other other tools that he could have to torture people.

• 24:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, or. Move to the sort of dropping people out the window phase. I mean, don't forget, we have got ICE out killing people on the streets and Trump defending it. So, you know, we're on a very dark path, I would say.

• 24:13Rory Stewart?

  Shall we take a quick break?

• 24:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, quick break and then back for more.

• 24:17Alastair Campbell?

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• 25:12Alastair Campbell?

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• 25:26Speaker 02

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• 26:25Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to the Restless Politics Question Time with me, Rory Stewart.

• 26:28Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. Dave McGlade is a TripPlus member on Discord. There are few dramatic changes in the relationship between monarchy and parliament. Is the arrest of former Prince Andrew of such a scale it will be seen as a similar sort of change and be in school history books a century from now? Or will it be forgotten except by specialist historians? Now, you always sort of, I think, get the feeling that I get very emotionally disturbed when things, bad things, happen to the Labour Party. I get the same feeling with you and the bollocky.

• 26:59Rory Stewart?

  It's, I'm sure that's right. I'm sure that's right. I think it's a good, it's a good challenge. And I think it's certainly true of you and me. I suspect it's probably more true of, of the whole world than we want to acknowledge. There are certain kinds of things that outrage us and certain kinds of things that don't. And a lot of that is to do with where we're coming from. So it's easier for the two of us to get really outraged by Boris Johnson's conflicts of interest. We, we agree violently on that. And then, once, once we get on to Peter Mandelson or the monarchy, we tend to differ.

• 27:30Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I, I think I was fairly frank about Peter Mandelson. What, what did you make of Charlie Faulkner's take on the emergency podcast he and I did? Where he basically said he thought this was potentially a real crisis for the monarchy.

• 27:43Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So I think firstly, if anybody's not listened to Charlie Faulkner and you, they should. I thought he was great. I mean, you know, this is a guy who was the Lord Chancellor and he, boy, he knows his law and he's extremely good at expressing complicated ideas powerfully. So what did I, what did I think? I don't know. I mean, what's your, I mean, my instinct, but again, this may be my prejudice, but my instinct in relation to Dave McGlade's question is that it's not something that will be in school history books a century from now. My suspicion is that actually it will be forgotten except by specialist historians. And that that's because, in the end, I think institutions survive scandals.

• 28:29Rory Stewart?

  And I think that will be, and I, so I'd be very, very surprised if in a centuries' time, people were going to be studying this in history books. What do you think?

• 28:37Alastair Campbell?

  I think they might be. I mean, obviously, a lot depends on what now happens. I mean, you've you've got a you've got the situation where, until recent, quite senior member of the royal family has been arrested, is being investigated for really serious offences, misconduct in public office, which could lead to him being imprisoned. That's not impossible. They arrested him. They're still they're still searching his properties. They've taken away electronic devices. And and this is not about the sexual offences, which he's always denied. This is about misconduct in public office when he was a trade envoy.

• 29:13Rory Stewart?

  And in and in particular, the allegation is that he, within five minutes of receiving his government briefing for his trade trips, forwarded them on to Jeffrey Epstein.

• 29:24Alastair Campbell?

  And should say, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has consistently denied any wrongdoing. Charlie did make the point, and he's right, that there's a very, very high bar. This is a really, really difficult thing to prove. But my point is, if it does go down that route, if it does go to what Charlie calls the trial of the century, and it does lead to a conviction, I think that is a really big problem for the monarch as a whole. You're right that they've survived a lot of scandals, but I think this has the potential to be to be to be more serious. Now, the other thing, Roy, which I think we we should, you know, I spend a lot of time criticizing our beloved media, but the other reason why I think this is this

• 30:08Alastair Campbell?

  this might be studied in history books is because sometimes a photograph will be central to history. The photograph taken by this Reuters photographer, Phil Noble, who'd waited, he got a tip off that Adrie was at Aylesham Police Station. There are any number of police stations he could have been taken to. He gets taken to this sleepy police station, this sleepy part of Norfolk. This guy, along with others, gets a tip off. That's where he is. He spent six hours, or five or six hours, waiting. He drove from Manchester. So he five hours drive from Manchester to Norfolk. He gets there.

• 30:49Alastair Campbell?

  And I've worked with photography, a lot of photographers in my time, and sometimes, and he's honest enough to admit it, sometimes it's just luck. They see the cars leaving and he gets this, he just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, using flash, which is why you've got the red eye in the picture. Bang, bang, bang, bang. It turns out, most of the pictures were of the police or whoever was in the front, one of whom had remarkably looked like, the driver looked remarkably like Steve Whitkoff, Trump's special envoy, don't know what he was doing there. Anyway, there's Andrew in the back and it is just such a picture of panic, devastation, and the guy's admitted it's luck. He just banged him off. He didn't know whether he was sitting in the front or the back. It was getting dark and he

• 31:33Alastair Campbell?

  gets this picture. That picture was on every single front page in the UK and hundreds of front pages around the world. That, I think, is one of the reasons why this, because it captured something truly phenomenal. This is a guy who spent his entire life being entitled, obnoxious. That's the generous description of most of the people who've ever had anything to do with him. And he's suddenly like a mortal human being in the back of a car, filled with absolute panic about what he's just been confronted with and what that might mean for the rest of his life. So I think this has the potential to be really serious. Now, where I, Charlie and I both agree that your friend, the King, I thought his statement was

• 32:19Alastair Campbell?

  very, very well put together and the timing was right because what they're obviously trying to do is to build a total firewall between the institution and Andrew. And that, I think, is the right approach.

• 32:33Rory Stewart?

  In terms of media management, I guess one of the lessons, at least as far as I understand it, is that you need to try to move as quickly as possible and get ahead of these stories. So I guess if we go back on how they've tried to do this, the first step, and this is some years ago, was to sack him from his trade envoy role. I think that was maybe 10 years ago. Then he was taken off public duties. So he ceased to be a kind of public member of the royal family, he became a kind of private citizen. And then in, I guess, September, he was stripped

• 33:07Rory Stewart?

  His titles, then he was evicted from Royal Lodge, stripped to the night of the Garter. So I guess what they've been doing is to try to move quite quickly. The temptation in all these scandals is to hope that it can pass over, to try not to comment, to just be like, well, let the law take its course. In which case, there would be a continual drip, drip of people saying, how come this guy's still a prince? How come he's still in this grace and favour lodge?

• 33:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, you see, I, I think you could make the case that they've actually been very slow to deal with this because

• 33:42Alastair Campbell?

  it's not as if Prince Andrew doesn't have a certain reputation. And I think there were lots of sort of rumours and stories about the, the way that he conducted himself. And so once the Epstein thing started, and this is, this is where I think they will be perhaps a little bit worried, is that there will be, I mean, I don't know what the police will be able to have access to. You know, there, there was a time, in fact, I think there still is a time when you're not, the police are not meant to enter royal palaces without permission. That's why Charlie and I had the discussion about was the king tipped off and Buckingham Palace was clear that he wasn't. But the precedent was that you couldn't go into a royal palace without being invited or being someone.

• 34:24Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know if you know this, Rory, this is why it's good that you spend so much time with the king. If you ever get up to anything wrong, you're still not allowed to arrest somebody in the presence of the monarch. I've been looking at some, some of these crazy laws.

• 34:36Rory Stewart?

  I tell you, this is my, one of my favourite extraordinary moments in my early time in Parliament, where a Labour MP had got really drunk in the bar and had started hitting some Tories. And someone called the police and the police came and they grabbed him and he turned on them and he said, you are not allowed to arrest someone within the Palace of Westminster. And they were so.

• 35:01Alastair Campbell?

  This wouldn't have been, this wouldn't have been Eric Joyce, would it?

• 35:04Rory Stewart?

  It was Eric Joyce and they let go of him for a second, giving him just time to get across and headbutt one more Tory MP before they finally brought him down. Anyway, he was making the same argument about no arresting in palaces.

• 35:16Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the other one, the Cultural Property Armed Conflicts Act 2017, so that's less than a decade ago. That forbids police from searching royal estates for any stolen or looted artefacts.

• 35:29Rory Stewart?

  But just to come back to this, I, I think what has happened is that instead of hiding behind those kinds of laws, they have moved very, very quickly to say, A, we won't inform, B, let them in, let the police do their job. And in that statement, the rule of law must pass its thing. So I think the one thing that, the one thing that they're not doing is trying to claim royal privilege and exemption on Andrew.

• 35:50Alastair Campbell?

  I would argue that they've moved, they've moved very quickly in relation to what happened last Thursday. I think the more this goes on, the questions that will be asked and we, heaven knows what evidence is going to emerge from, from Andrew's phones and laptops, not just in relation to Epstein, but in relation to everybody else that he's had dealings with. And of course, the other thing that's happening, Rory, the Liam Byrne Select Committee, Business Select Committee, they're looking at the whole issue of trade envoys, because, you know, as you well know, we keep bumping into people, saying, oh, because I was appointed to be trade envoy to this and that and the other. And sometimes it's to, it's to let somebody down who thought they were going to get a different job.

• 36:30Rory Stewart?

  Always, in, in the Tory system, always. It was about managing backbench rebellion. And we ended up, Cameron ended up appointing dozens of these people. Some of them were backbenchers who were going to cause trouble. Some of them were ministers who'd just been fired. And it was a really disturbing thing because almost every little country ended up with a trade envoy, countries with whom we did almost no trade at all. And the embassy would then have to deal with an MP who wasn't considered by the government to be the kind of person they actually wanted as a minister, suddenly rocking up, taking the ambassador's time, trying to get a meeting with the president and claiming what they're doing is promoting British trade with that country.

• 37:08Alastair Campbell?

  So we, there are currently 32 trade envoys covering the world. And according to the government website, they play a crucial role in supporting the department's growth priorities. Well, they don't get paid, so they might get their expenses paid, but that to me is an open door to say, well, okay, I don't get paid, but what I've got, these other business interests going on. I'm not tarring them all with the same brush. Some of them will be genuinely driven by a desire to support the government, support the country, et cetera. But you can't say to me that there isn't at least the root. To double, to, to, to conflicts of interest, which, you know, I suspect Liam Byrne will get to the bottom of.

• 37:47Rory Stewart?

  The final thing, which I hadn't taken on enough, which you're completely right on, is if they get into all of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor's emails, WhatsApps, it's going to be terrifying. It's going to be a monstrous hornet's nest. I mean, even before you get on to whether there's crime. As soon as you start going through the emails of somebody like that, it's unbelievable what you'll find. I mean, what one of, and I, I keep, it, it sort of brings you back to my main point, which is at the heart of the Epstein scandal. Is that for the first time, we are actually released to the public, three million emails of this almost billionaire who knew all these presidents and billionaires and tech people.

• 38:30Rory Stewart?

  We don't normally get to see that. And as soon as you get to see it, it's very, very, very nasty. Even I suspect for people who aren't engaged in criminal activity, and I don't know whether this is going to continue to happen, you know, are all of Mandelson's emails and WhatsApps seized? Are they all going to be released?

• 38:45Alastair Campbell?

  I know.

• 38:46Rory Stewart?

  Because that's going to be not pretty because, you know, what, what do we know about all these people? They are flatterers, networkers, pushing the boundaries, striking deals, trying to get themselves invited to parties. I mean, I can think of another 20 people in public life whose emails you would not want to see released to the world. And the number of people they would drag down in the context, yeah.

• 39:09Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, yeah. And of course, what happens sometimes when people are being dragged down is they want to take other people down with them.

• 39:15Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 39:15Alastair Campbell?

  You know, you and I, Rory, at the anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, we were in Belfast, we were there, we interviewed Senator George Mitchell, sort of hero of the peace process. We were there for the unveiling of his bust at Queen's University. They're taking it down.

• 39:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 39:28Alastair Campbell?

  Because of what they say has been revealed about him in the files.

• 39:32Rory Stewart?

  I think I've talked before about the fact that so many of the people we've interviewed on leading have turned up in these emails. I, I, it would be interesting. I don't know whether he'd be prepared to come on, but Michael Wolf seems to have been very, very close to him and sending an incredible number of emails to and from Epstein. Now, none of this is an accusation of wrongdoing, but one of the things we're not getting. And maybe if Wolf were prepared to come on, he could tell us is what was it about Epstein that seemed to make him so sort of magnetic for these people? And I I've been reading these biographies, trying to understand it. And because he was this extremely evil, criminal, abusive man

• 40:13Rory Stewart?

  who did horrifying things to numberless underage girls, people are not trying to understand what it was that was attractive about him, because you don't want to talk about that. But clearly, he must have been a man with an incredible charm, sense of humor. I mean, who knows what it was, but there was something that was that was trapping these people.

• 40:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I'm, as I've said to you before, Roy, on my one meeting with it definitely passed me by. He absolutely gave me, it absolutely, and this isn't hindsight, this is, this is recorded in in my diary at the time, he absolutely gave me the creeps.

• 40:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, gave you the creeps.

• 40:49Alastair Campbell?

  He totally gave me the creeps. But my final point on this, Roy, is I think that I still am troubled by the extent to which the American angle on all this is so underplayed. Here we have, we have Ghislaine Maxwell in jail, Peter Mandelson disgraced, Andrew now disgraced. Now, there have been some people, as Charlie said, Larry Summers, George Mitchell I've just mentioned. But there is some stuff in here about Trump that for some reason, the media just seem not to want to cover too much, because there's so much material. So The Economist have got a full time team on this, The New York Times have got a full time team on this, they're still digging in and sort of finding all these stories. And this is happening, by the way, because what

• 41:34Alastair Campbell?

  we're seeing with Epstein is not just the criminality, it's the cronyism, it's the corruption, it's the total corruption of public life in a way. I mean, when you look at some of the stuff that I was reading over the weekend about. The way that the markets were moving on the back of some of the, including the Supreme Court, where people were making money out of the expectation.

• 41:55Rory Stewart?

  Allegations that Lutnik's children anticipated, so the Trade Secretary for, for Trade and Commerce's children somehow anticipated that the Supreme Court might overrule their father's policy and therefore took huge positions.

• 42:12Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:13Rory Stewart?

  Uh, to benefit themselves and their clients on that assumption. Now, that's pretty extraordinary stuff.

• 42:18Alastair Campbell?

  Totally agree. And, and we've seen the same. I saw an interview with Trump's, uh, sons, Don Junior and Eric. Their inability to think that there might be such a thing as a conflict of interest, given their nature and what they're all about, and given the nature of their father and what he's all about. So in a week, when he says, I don't care about Congress, I don't really care about the courts, I'll do what the fuck I want. And they're basically saying, well, there's no problem with that, as they go around the world, doing deals, making billions, et cetera.

• 42:48Rory Stewart?

  So Alison, next question for you. Connie, Trip Plus member from Manchester. Will the SEND reforms, so for international listeners, special educational needs reforms in the schools white paper, strengthen inclusion in mainstream schools or risk stripping essential legal protections from children with special needs? Can you explain briefly what it is that England, and I guess it's only England, right? Cause Scotland will have a different policy, is trying to do in terms of children with special educational needs in schools?

• 43:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, the direct answer to the question is that I hope that it will lead to greater inclusion without compromising standards, either for children with special educational needs or for children who are being educated alongside them.

• 43:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So in the current system, many parents feeling that there isn't good provision for their child that has special educational needs is frequently pressing for them to go to a specialist school, which is costing the government an enormous amount of money. And also many educational people would say isn't good. They'd rather have these children in mainstream schools. So the idea is to try to have fewer places in specialist schools and more children with special educational needs in a normal school, supported in the normal school. Is that right?

• 44:02Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And, and, and also just to point out that. Private equity has got into this space in a massive way. And, you know, we mentioned this last week. Georgia Gould is the schools minister. She's been given the task of reviewing the whole policy on send. What they're trying to do is to get far better teacher training. There's £200 million going into training teachers on how to deal with children with special educational needs. More and what they call an inclusion premium, new funding for mainstream schools, conditional on them showing that they can accommodate more children with special educational needs.

• 44:38Rory Stewart?

  The challenge back, I guess, will be people saying, uh-uh, the schools are no good at this. My child has real needs and I'm in no doubt as a parent that I can get better care and education for my child going to a different provider. Could be a charity, could be a private school, could be a private equity funded school. But what I care about is my kid and the government's not good at this. And here's somebody who is good at this in the local area and the council can pick up the bill.

• 45:09Alastair Campbell?

  Right, and the councils at the moment have got a massive double figure billion cost that they have been struggling with. So, look, this is a system that I think both the main parties accept is pretty broken and in need of fundamental reform. And just to give you some of the stats underlying this, 1.6 million children now identify with special educational needs. The cost of educating a child with special educational needs in the state system is about worse out at £26,000. This private equity running independent system, we're talking 63,000.

• 45:51Alastair Campbell?

  The other point that I think is worth making that comes through the arguments about the special education debate is that where children are accommodated.

• 46:01Alastair Campbell?

  Even with all the difficulties that might apply to school as a whole, you are seeing a better performance, both of the children with SEND and children without. So I think that what the argument, the argument Bridgette Phillips is putting forward is that inclusion and standards need not be in conflict, provided you have the resources.

• 46:20Rory Stewart?

  I'm really sympathetic towards this just personally. I mean, so as you know, my little sister Fiona has Down syndrome and my parents put a lot of energy into making sure that she was in mainstream schools.

• 46:31Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:32Rory Stewart?

  And these schools were very, very supportive and flexible because obviously her reading and writing skills would be similar to maybe a six year old.

• 46:40Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 46:40Rory Stewart?

  And it worked really well for her and they felt that that was a much, and many parents listening to this will have different views on their child and their child's needs. And this is going to be why, presumably this is going to be violent politics on the back benches because there'll be a lot of constituency MPs under pressure from parents who disagree with my parents and who feel that their child would do much better in another system.

• 47:01Alastair Campbell?

  There will definitely be people who are worried that what they feel has been a real struggle to get the support that they need, often involving the law, that any worry that that's being taken away, I think will provoke a huge debate. However, I think you, provided there are the resources there and the numbers they're talking about in terms of money are good, where that money's coming from is another question, whether that affects other parts of the education debate, that will also come out as well. But I think the principle of trying to accommodate as many children who identify with S A N D in the mainstream, I think is a good one, provided that those who cannot be accommodated

• 47:44Alastair Campbell?

  have the support that they need for the very, very complex needs that they have.

• 47:48Rory Stewart?

  This is probably one of the biggest problems that government faces well beyond children with special educational needs because it's also echoes the fact that government is spending an unbelievable amount at the moment on disability benefit.

• 48:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, correct.

• 48:04Rory Stewart?

  And without sounding too much like a Tory, we're spending more and more of our GDP on services. We're not as productive as we should be. Our economy's not growing properly. We've got to find some way of rebalancing our books and we've got to get out of a cycle, which is very understandable, but which the Labour Party is going to be particularly vulnerable to, which is.

• 48:28Rory Stewart?

  Hard cases making bad law, which is endlessly Labour backbenchers pointing to really moving and terrible individual cases where people with disabilities or special educational needs aren't getting the support.

• 48:43Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 48:44Rory Stewart?

  Simply because you you just Rachel Reeves isn't going to be able to run a government if the bills on these things keep going up in the way they are. So it's going and and the result will be unfortunately that either you're too generous or you're too mean. And if you're too mean, there will be people who are affected. But the governments, our economy is not growing fast enough. It's not big enough, I fear, for us to continue to keep our spending on these things going up. And that's a tough conversation with the backbenchers.

• 49:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, but that's why all this other stuff that's going on, Pat McFadden's welfare reform, Alan Milburn's review on so-called NEETS, not in employment, education or training, all has to wrap into this. What I like about the the way that the government is thinking in relation to this schools white paper, a lot of the focus, no doubt, will be on both politically and media, will be on send. But what I also read within this is an attempt to reframe a really important debate about childhood. There's some, there's some stunning awful facts in there. So one in five children between the ages of eight and sixteen now has a what's called a probable mental health disorder. That's up from one in nine in

• 49:55Alastair Campbell?

  twenty seventeen. So whether that's due with Covid, we don't know. Whether it's due to social media, don't know. But there's something going on. Another stat, Rory, I mean, I don't know, you know, I I can remember when growing up, I walked to school on my own to primary school. I don't remember what age I was, but I did that. In nineteen seventy one, eighty percent of seven and eight year olds walked to school alone. By twenty twenty, and it's probably got worse since, it's one in four. And here's one, you'll you'll like this, Rory, well, you might, you'll hate this, but given your interest in prisons and my interest in prisons, children now spend less unstructured time outdoors than prisoners.

• 50:32Alastair Campbell?

  And have fifty percent less free playtime than their counterparts in the eighties.

• 50:37Rory Stewart?

  I'm guilty of this too. So we live only ten minutes from school. And I keep trying to cross that threshold and get our eight year old and eleven year olds to walk to school. Of course, every time I try to stalk them and follow them to school to let them do it independently, I see them not looking as they're crossing the road. And I'm just like, they're such space cadets. They're gonna be talking about Pokemon and they're gonna step in front of a truck. And I mean, but it is very, very tough, as you can imagine as a parent to think.

• 51:09Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Rory Stewart?

  Listen, if this idiotic child doesn't look properly for his crossroads and get flattened, I would feel really dark.

• 51:17Alastair Campbell?

  I hope they don't listen to this episode. If this idiotic child, I mean, this is your son you're talking about. I do. But I, I, I think there is something about, there, there's a line in the, in the white paper about, you know, getting children to regain their childhood. And I'm, I'm sorry, I mean, I was on a train in France yesterday and I was, I was sitting next to these two girls that had been, what, thirteen, fourteen. The entire journey from Neim to Paris, they spent on Instagram, the entire journey. But now that letter we had last week from Seraphina Jennings, you know, there is good on social media. There's no doubt about that. There is good in the mobile phone world.

• 52:00Alastair Campbell?

  But I hope that part of this reclaiming childhood really does step up the debate about how children are spending their leisure time, consuming the addiction to phones, the addiction to social media and what have you. There's a, there's a few other things which I thought you'd be interested in, Roy. There's a thing called RISE, Regional Improvement for Standards and Excellence. When we were in power, we got a lot of credit, but some opprobrium outside London, but we really tackled the educational problems in London and it really had an impact. And this white paper is targeting the North East and also coastal England. And I think that identifying where there are particular problems and then taking the best people and taking the best practice and trying to

• 52:45Alastair Campbell?

  integrate that into the, the system there. There's good stuff on school building. There's good stuff on sport. There's good stuff on inclusion and creativity. But and it reads to me, Bridget Phillips and gets quite a lot of flack for being seen as a bit sort of, you know, I think this is your view generally, a bit sort of, you know, pro-union on the left, all that stuff. But this this reads very much like a sort of David Blunkett approach to education. But I think the big issue will be money, both in terms of the new teachers that they're promising, the new teacher training that they're promising, some of the hubs that they're promising. There's a lot in here that will require money. But I think as a as a vision for education, there's a lot to there's a lot to commend it.

• 53:25Rory Stewart?

  Lovely. Well, Alissa, listen, we've run relatively long. So I think maybe we should wrap it up. But I think there's three great things. We've done tariffs, we've done Andrew and Epstein, and we've done, I think, quite a thoughtful piece on education, schools in Britain. So thank you very much. And you're about to go on travels, but I look forward to seeing you on your travels in a couple of days' time.

• 53:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So this week's main episode will be devoted entirely to Ukraine, four-year anniversary of Putin's invasion. Should also give a shout out to Olaf Scholz, who is this week's leading episode, and also to part two of our mini-series with Ken Rosen on the Arctic. But anyway, and Rory, I've been enjoying your skiing videos, but I want to test your knowledge. Who is Johannes Husflot Claybo?

• 54:18Rory Stewart?

  Well, he's the great hero, hasn't he? He's just got all these gold medals.

• 54:21Alastair Campbell?

  Well done. How many did he get at the single Olympics?

• 54:25Rory Stewart?

  I don't know. Is it five? What's he done?

• 54:27Alastair Campbell?

  He got six. He got every every gold in cross-country skiing. He's a Norwegian, and he would be, he as an individual would be in the top 10 of the medals table. But Norway are winning the medals table by a mile.

• 54:39Rory Stewart?

  I once my only boasts is I once skied with a guy called Tony Siler, who's from Kitzbühel in Austria, who got, I think, three gold medals, or certainly three World Cup prizes in a single thing since the mid 50s.

• 54:54Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 54:55Rory Stewart?

  But it's funny how these kind of legends. A kind of forgotten, you know, by early nineties, you could still say to people, I skied with Tony Siler and they sound a bit like people.

• 55:06Alastair Campbell?

  I got it. I know that one.

• 55:07Rory Stewart?

  Played football with Maradona, but nowadays you say it to a young ski instructor, they've got no idea who he is. I guess that happens eventually.

• 55:13Alastair Campbell?

  What about Jean-Claude Keighley was the one that I always remember as a child.

• 55:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Keighley and Valiser, he's from Valiser. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Franz Klammer, you remember Franz Klammer, the downhill guy?

• 55:22Alastair Campbell?

  I remember Franz Klammer, yeah.

• 55:23Rory Stewart?

  But we're dating ourselves here.

• 55:25Alastair Campbell?

  I'll tell you what I've really enjoyed though, Rory, is I've been, there's two things I've really enjoyed. One is Mark Carney's social media congratulating every medalist and just clearly loving it. But the other thing I've really enjoyed is these sports I didn't know existed. Some of the kind of acrobatic stuff, but uphill mount, uphill ski, what is going on?

• 55:44Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Alastair Campbell?

  They're going uphill.

• 55:46Rory Stewart?

  And at such speed. I mean, at such pace. I mean, I, I, I do a bit of uphill stuff and boy, it's not like that. Anyway, thank you, Arista. And we, maybe we could even share my ridiculous new video of me in the trees because the snow here has been unbelievable.

• 56:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 56:01Rory Stewart?

  It's just snowed and snowed and snowed and snowed. And a lot of avalanches, sadly.

• 56:04Alastair Campbell?

  No, I listen, you'll be pleased to know, you talk, you talk about your mother a lot. I talk about Fiona a lot. Fiona was moderately impressed by your skiing video. Moderately impressed. And it takes a lot to moderately impress Fiona, to be.

• 56:15Rory Stewart?

  Oh, very good. All right. Have a great day.

• 56:18Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon. Bye.

• 56:19Rory Stewart?

  See you soon. Bye bye.

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