58. U-turns, Ukraine and election season

Will Truss and Kwarteng survive a week of U-turns? Have worldwide elections followed the populist trends set by Sweden and Italy? Plus news on the conflicts in Ukraine and Yemen, Rory's admiration for David Miliband, and a critique of Singapore-on-Thames. 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] Producers: Dom Johnson + Theo Young-Smith Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

  And I must thank NordVPN because on my Grand European Tour with Fiona, I was away from the Hawthorns for West Bromwich against Burnley, but I managed to watch it. There you go.

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

  I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creef. And of course, the thing flashed up, saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. It was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're in all those cafes and things, which is actually genuinely, people can do all kinds of weird cyber attacks and spying if you don't have a virtual private network when you're sitting in that Starbucks.

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Hello. Welcome to another episode of The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

  And me, Rory Stewart.

• 1:49Alastair Campbell?

  And we're recording this on Tuesday, having just listened to yet another round of pretty catastrophic interviews with the Prime Minister Liz Truss. But speaking ahead of her speech to the Tory Party Conference, although I think we can fairly predict much of what she's going to say. And this is also the last of our podcasts before Saturday, this Saturday, 8th of October, Blackpool Winter Gardens.

• 2:16Alastair Campbell?

  Top, the top of the theatre, still some tickets left. If you want them, just get on to restispolitics.com or Google Winter Gardens Rest is Politics and it'd be lovely to see you there. Now, we're going to talk about lots of things today. There were several general elections at the weekend, Brazil, Bosnia, probably the most complicated electoral system on the planet, Bulgaria, Latvia, we'll sort of dip into them. Rory and I both want to talk about Yemen. We also will have to, I fear Rory, kick off, I think, with British domestic politics. And Kamala Kwasi, I mean, he's still there, but so is the Kamala Kwasi government, just becoming a complete catastrophe, isn't it?

• 2:58Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. So just, just to update listeners who maybe aren't focusing every minute on UK politics, there's been a U-turn on his tax cut. So the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were, in that announcement, they'd signaled in advance, Liz Truss had signaled in advance of being leader that she was going to stop the rises in corporation tax and national insurance. So she was going to effectively cut taxes. And she'd also signaled that she was putting out this big energy package. So if that had been all she'd done, you wouldn't have expected the markets to react quite as dramatically and negatively. The straw that broke camel's back seemed to be the decision to drop the top rate of income tax from forty five to forty percent. And at a moment where the government looked like

• 3:40Rory Stewart?

  it's going to be borrowing much more, that seemed very reckless. It also wiped out the Conservative Party in electoral terms. I mean, quite extraordinary. It put the Labour Party in some polls hovering towards fifty percent. It would have reduced, one of the pollsters suggested that it would reduce the Conservative Party from the mid three hundreds down to about eighty seats in the House of Commons. So that would mean that a lot of MPs, well, obviously Three quarters of MPs in the House of Commons from the Conservative Party terrified they're actually just going to lose their seat, lose their jobs. And as we've discussed in the past, we have to be honest about the fact, it's very, very difficult for somebody who's been a professional politician for a lot of their life to get another job. It's

• 4:23Rory Stewart?

  not, not easy. So one result of that was very, very quick rebellion on the Conservative benches. We didn't discuss the fact that she didn't put Michael Gove in her cabinet, but that was probably a big political error because he's been leading the charge against her. And the first concession that's been made by the Chancellor has been to drop top rate, uh, drop that cut in the top rate tax. So that's going to stay up at forty five percent. He's also changed his statement that he wasn't going to make his big budget statement till November. He's brought that forward and they've also agreed that they'll let the Office of Budget Responsibility bring forward forecasts. So three U-turns in a few days.

• 5:04Alastair Campbell?

  What do you call a triple U-turn? A double U-turn? I guess we call a double U-turn. But if you do a triple, I mean, you know, you have triple somersaults in gymnastics and I don't know where you end up with a triple, but

• 5:18Rory Stewart?

  I think a triple, you end up facing the wrong direction again.

• 5:21Alastair Campbell?

  Right. And then it was interesting to see them say it's not a U-turn, it's a change of course and a change of direction. The other thing, you often ask me about the way that these top politicians, I use the word top with some hesitation, but these senior politicians do their communications. There's something else that happened that was a bit weird this week, is that Kuateng did his, the first, the big U-turn on the forty five P tax thing. He did it after Liz Truss had pre-recorded a round of interviews with regional television, having first done her regional radio round, which was a total

• 6:02Alastair Campbell?

  disaster. She then did, pre-recorded these regional television interviews where she said to all of them, we are not budging, I am not for turning, we are sticking with the forty fee, forty five P tax plan. And they insisted on an embargo. So these interviews couldn't go out till the next day. That was Downing Street's insistence. And meanwhile, Kwang Tung has his midnight, you know, crisis meeting with trusts. Graham Brady, the chairman of the nineteen twenty-two committee of backbenchers, has been in to tell them this is a disaster. You're not going to get the votes. Gove has been on the assault. Grant Shapps has been on the assault and doubtless loads. Julian Smith is pretty mild mannered, as you know, he's been out there on the same thing.

• 6:45Alastair Campbell?

  So that was the first thing. She's actually on the airwaves, saying we're sticking to our guns. After it's already been announced that they're not. And then likewise, this morning, she was on the Today Programme with Nick Robinson, and yet again, Number Ten had insisted it was a recorded interview. So it was done yesterday, and he started the interview by saying, how do we guarantee that what you say today won't be out of date by tomorrow? No, no, Nick, that won't happen, Nick. And of course, meanwhile, they then do this second U-turn to make it a double U-turn. They do the thing on the Office of Budget Responsibility. So what you're seeing is ideology that drove the policy in the first place,

• 7:27Alastair Campbell?

  but utter incompetence in political management. And that's, I think, adding to the political turmoil. The market's already contributing to the massive economic turmoil.

• 7:35Rory Stewart?

  It's very weird, isn't it? I think we've talked about in the past where I think you've said these are almost like Trotskyites. I mean, they are incredibly ideological. They're people who are sort of high functioning. They did well at school and university, but they are completely, I think, lacking in normal empathy, political skills, and therefore Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng, I suspect, are totally bewildered by the reaction of the markets and the reaction of the Conservative Party to what they've done, because they've believed for twenty or thirty years that all that needs to happen is for them to get into power, drive through this kind of radical vision of Singapore on Thames, and they'll be rewarded

• 8:19Rory Stewart?

  by the markets and rewarded by the party, and they've found exactly the opposite.

• 8:23Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. And I thought it was interesting. I watched Kammy Kwasi's speech to the conference, and I mean, neither of them are very good speakers. She is a terrible speaker and she's a terrible communicator on so many levels. But his speech was There's something very, very strange about the way he projects himself. And I thought trying to make a joke of it, I think if you have a lot of authority and credibility in the bank, you can do that. I can remember, remember once Tony Blair, when we had the hunting, we had this conference down in Brighton and the place was absolutely swarming with

• 9:03Alastair Campbell?

  with hunting, anti Labour, pro hunting protesters. I remember Tony just stood up and said tally ho. And it was, it sort of, you know, it was

• 9:13Rory Stewart?

  It worked.

• 9:14Alastair Campbell?

  It was funny.

• 9:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Alastair Campbell?

  Or likewise, you know, Bill Clinton, when he addressed the Labour Party Conference and started, I can, I can confess that it was my suggestion. He thought I was mad, but it really worked. I said, just stand up and say Clinton, Bill, Arkansas, CLP. And he didn't really know what he was saying, but he said it and brought the house down. But you need authority and credibility to do that. For Quateng to sort of make a joke, you know, it's been a tough day at the office, there's been a little bit of turbulence in the markets, you don't have the credibility. And politicians at this level, here's something, Rory, I think is quite interesting. If you think of Tony and Gordon, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and Cameron and Osborne, they had quite a long time in opposition to shape

• 9:57Alastair Campbell?

  their political skills and strategies. These two have come along, she's gone around the country and hailing her own propaganda as she's toured the Tory party hustings, Quateng sort of parades as a kind of Etonian PhD economics historian, they think they are a lot better than they are. And I think what they found this week is that politics is a lot harder when you get to that level. And they have got to that level without really ever having been tested to the extent that you get tested all the time when you're at that level.

• 10:34Rory Stewart?

  I think that's right. And I think one of the things is that neither of them had done the job of Chancellor before they got in. So Liz Truss had been the Foreign Secretary, which is a job where I think you can get away with looking vaguely sort of dignified, or at least there's not necessarily much day to day management and administration in that job. It's a lot of flying around the world, getting photographed in front of flags. I remember thinking this with Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. That it is a job which, provided you're not actually Boris Johnson, who's one of the only foreign secretaries who managed to make the job really seem ludicrous. It's a job that's quite gentle on you and it's a bit dangerous choosing a foreign secretary

• 11:17Rory Stewart?

  as a prime minister because they're not really tested on domestic policy in the same way.

• 11:22Alastair Campbell?

  But why did the Conservative Party choose her as prime minister? I mean, we both felt that she'd be found out very, very quickly. She does have a thick skin, which you need. She does seem to be able to kind of keep going.

• 11:37Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 11:38Alastair Campbell?

  Which you also need. But I fear that, just as with Johnson, we knew that as one scandal died down, another one would emerge. I sort of have a feeling with her that as one catastrophe fades into the background, another one will come along. And to start with, we did discuss actually the Michael Gove thing in the context of, I think we said it was a mistake not to bring in any of the people who had not supported her into the cabinet, into the inner circle, because they're all out there now. And I watched an interview with Grant Shapps. When something extraordinary happens to the media relationship with cabinet ministers, when they cease to become cabinet ministers, they suddenly become respected and distinguished, if I can use your word. We're now joined by the experienced former.

• 12:23Rory Stewart?

  Exactly.

• 12:24Alastair Campbell?

  And they suddenly become treated as though their words are wise. And so you saw with Gove and Shapps in particular, you saw two of their better communicators under Johnson communicating very effectively.

• 12:40Rory Stewart?

  With no challenge.

• 12:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. That they thought she was hopeless.

• 12:43Rory Stewart?

  You're right. And it's fascinating, this no challenge point. I found this when I became chair of the Defence Select Committee. They suddenly treat you as though you're an independent expert. You cease getting the proper kind of push. I think one of the things that may explain why Liz Truss won is, paradoxically...

• 13:02Rory Stewart?

  Boris was so clearly amoral, so clearly lacking in any clear economic, stereo, political principles. And she may have benefited from seeming to be this incredibly clear ideologue that oddly Boris was terrible in a different way. He was terrible because he lacked moral principles.

• 13:22Alastair Campbell?

  Rory, Rory, Rory, just because he ceased to be the Prime Minister.

• 13:26Rory Stewart?

  I've got to remember, he's called Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson was terrible. Boris Johnson was terrible. Yes. So Liz Truss, I think possibly people responded to this strange clarity that she has. I mean, I do think there's something we tried to talk about in the last episode, but there is something about having very, very simple ideological views. You know, she reminds me of a certain type of communist or a certain type of kind of Puritan taking over in 17th century England. They have very confident views. They're not views they want to discuss or question in any way. You can't sit down with Liz Truss or Qasim Qotin, talk through these ideas. It's just a profound belief that somehow what needs to happen

• 14:06Rory Stewart?

  in the country is cut taxes. In the case of Liz Truss, I often heard her joke about building over the Greenbells. I wonder whether she's going to have the courage to follow through on that because that will be deeply unpopular with a lot of the core Conservative base. But that's certainly something, I don't think she's got much sympathy for the Greenbelt. And I think she also, of course, famously, we discussed this, wants to bring in a lot more immigration to drive economic growth. So she's, she's actually very much not part of the kind of centre of the Conservative Party at all. She's an ideologue. And the question is, why did people think that she could become an ideologue? And then I think your second point was really good, which is, it's a point about untrammelled executive power, that we've got, these are no longer teams of rivals. These are cabinets under

• 14:51Rory Stewart?

  Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, which are very different from Theresa May's cabinet. Theresa May had a lot of big beasts in her cabinet, a lot of people who were her rivals, David Davis, Boris Johnson, all these people were in her cabinet with her. But Liz Truss, by pushing people like Michael Gove and Grant Shapps out, is creating a huge risk for herself.

• 15:09Alastair Campbell?

  And she's also still got, we've, we've heard nothing from Rishi Sunak, who must be sitting there thinking that his day may, may come again. Do you think that the Conservative Party thinks?

• 15:22Alastair Campbell?

  That it could actually get away with dumping another leader and having another leader through one of their leadership elections who becomes the fifth prime minister in six years. Do you think, I mean, they are talking about it.

• 15:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I think it's incredibly difficult. I think they they are between a rock and a hard place. There will be many people saying, no, we can't possibly get rid of her when she's only been a few weeks. This is ridiculous. We can't have three prime ministers in one parliamentary term. But there will be others saying the only thing that matters really, our only chance is to stabilize the economy again. We cannot have inflation out of control, interest rates out of control, the pound tanking, guilt's in trouble. So we have to get rid of her and bring in Rishi Sunak in order to reassure the markets because that's our only hope of being able to make it through the next 18 months. But both choices are very bad choices for them.

• 16:15Alastair Campbell?

  You've now got more people have signed the petition demanding a general election. I think it's up to about 400,000, several times more now than voted for her to become prime minister. Her inter, have you watched many of her interviews, Roy? They are, they are, they are slightly mesmerizing because the voice is awful, the intonation is dreadful, the content is dreadful, the pauses are mind blowing. And that's what made me look at it and think, because I stopped watching the hustings after the first two, I just couldn't bear watching them. But those Tory party members, they, they witnessed this. So what made them think this is the person to get us out of the mess that Boris Johnson's led us into?

• 16:58Rory Stewart?

  So I think it's part of the sort of story of, of the populism that we often talk about on the podcast, which is that what Rishi Sunak was doing was to try to present relatively complicated compared to Les Trastefany, more nuanced, more complicated arguments. Trying to explain that the world is more difficult than it seems, that there are no simple answers, that he was going to have to raise taxes, that growth wasn't going to be spectacular, but he needed to do these things to reassure the markets. And we live in an age where there is an incredible appeal to what Liz Truss managed to do, which is to, it's a classic populist playbook. I'm standing against the elite. She tried to portray

• 17:41Rory Stewart?

  Rishi Sunak as the voice of Treasury orthodoxy. She managed to do this weird thing that both Donald Trump and Boris Johnson did, which is to be an establishment figure pretending to be anti-establishment. And it really resonates. I mean, it's, and this is a reason why I'm concerned for Keir Starmer, because we still live in an age where people like these kind of very simplistic stories. And I'm still concerned that he, you know, he's, he's doing very well at the moment, because I think they really have blown themselves up. And I think the, the point about people's mortgages are at the heart of this. I mean, I think if, if there's one reason why the Conservative Party is going to throw out Liz Truss and

• 18:22Rory Stewart?

  bring in Rishi Sunak, is that the mortgages are where all this stuff hits the road. The problems around interest rates and inflation hit the road.

• 18:30Alastair Campbell?

  Well, both, um, both Kwang Tung and Truss, in their public statements and the many interviews that they've, they finally did, they don't seem to get this. The, the, the fact is that this, they keep trying to put it all on Putin, put it all on post-COVID. The specific thing that we're talking about, the impact that there has been, the instant impact there has been on the, on the cost of a mortgage, was, was 100% caused by their mismanagement of their own plans. Now, I wonder if that is even recoverable, because even though they've now, they've, they've, they've dumped the 45p thing.

• 19:08Alastair Campbell?

  But actually, that's a very, very small part

• 19:10Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Alastair Campbell?

  Of the, you're right that it might have been a tipping point.

• 19:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Alastair Campbell?

  But it's a small part of the plan to which the markets were objecting. And it, and it underlined that, deep down, that is where their politics are. They really are for the rich and, and believe in trickle-down economics.

• 19:27Rory Stewart?

  So, so you're absolutely right. So the, the, the key point is what they've done on the other taxes is basically a forty-five billion tax cut compared to Rishi Sunak's plans. And the, the, a top rate of income tax was, you know, maybe a two billion pound decision. So the big decision to cut taxes forty-five billion, when you're spending much more than you were before, remains in place. But when you say that they don't understand the impact, I think this is all part of this very, very extreme ideological view, the sense that they are

• 19:59Rory Stewart?

  sort of bright, high-functioning people lacking in empathy, who simply cannot understand that anyone sees the world differently to the way they see it. And they're, and I, this is why I'm very interested in the sort of fact that at some level, they're obsessed with Singapore. Singapore famously, you know, low-tax economy, growing very strongly, good educational standards, good science, good maths. So there is a very sort of naive idea somewhere at the heart of this fringe of the Conservative Party, that we can just turn Britain into Singapore. And I don't think they've begun to think through all the reasons why Britain can't be Singapore and doesn't want to be Singapore.

• 20:37Alastair Campbell?

  And also, I, I know Singapore quite well, also why Singapore, not just geographically, but also its size, its history, its culture, its media. It's a very, very, very different country. And I think it's one of these things, we're, we're back to the populism thing. It sounds nice. Singapore's got quite a good image, quite a good reputation in lots of ways. Singapore on Thames, it's vibrant, its economy seems to, they've got economic challenges at the moment, by the way. It's not a kind of, it's not a kind of slam dunk. On the trickle-down, Rory, we'll, we'll do the Q and A later, but my, one of my favourite questions of the week, Mike, Mike Morris said, surely trickle-up economics would be much more effective?

• 21:22Alastair Campbell?

  If the poor had more money, they'd be more likely to spend.

• 21:26Rory Stewart?

  That's nice.

• 21:26Alastair Campbell?

  Whereas the rich tend to save. And I think that's absolutely brilliant. We should go for trickle up.

• 21:30Rory Stewart?

  Trickle up, it's very good. It's a good line, very good line. And just on the Singapore and Thames idea. So, as you say, British population, nearly 10 times that of Singapore. And Singapore is really a sort of equivalent of London for Indonesia, just as Hong Kong was a kind of London for China. It's, it's, it's a model really based on financial services and outsourcing. And this type of approach that people like Kwasi Kwarteng favour is very, very London centric. And a lot of the people who, you know, I'd meet conservative donors who'd talk about Singapore, often they'd worked in Singapore. Sajid Javid ran Deutsche Bank in Singapore for many years. So there's a sort of culture there, but

• 22:12Rory Stewart?

  they, it's very, very London centric. And it also doesn't take into account. I was looking at some stats recently. Singapore has got an average income of about fifty four thousand dollars a year, which is great. That's a much higher per capita income than Britain. But what we're forgetting about is that there is a group of people in Singapore, in particular migrant labourer from Burma or Myanmar, Indonesia, Philippines, which is paid absolutely nothing and is actually paid on nationality. If you come from Myanmar, you get four hundred and fifty dollars a month. That's compared to nearly four thousand dollars a month's median income. If you come from Indonesia, you get five fifty dollars a month. If you come from the Philippines, you get five ninety dollars a month.

• 22:55Rory Stewart?

  So there, there's a whole aspect to the Singaporean economy, which these people are not acknowledging, which would be completely unacceptable in Britain.

• 23:03Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Although, given the agenda that they seem to have on employment rights and sovereign individual approach to regulation, maybe that's part of Kwating's vision of Britain as well.

• 23:16Rory Stewart?

  But it's simply not possible, is it? I mean, there, there's these, the utopians. Well, they're crazy utopians. I mean, it's a bit like communists imagining a vision of human nature that doesn't exist. These people are imagining a Britain that simply doesn't exist.

• 23:28Alastair Campbell?

  I quite like the jibe from somebody who said that Liz Truss was the Jeremy Corbyn. She was the Tories Jeremy Corbyn. And meanwhile, did you see yesterday that Reece Mog, who's turned violently against Michael Gove, described Michael Gove as the Tory party's Peter Mandelson and Gove took this as a great, a great compliment. The other thing, the other thing about Singapore that people might not be aware of, I think I'm right in saying they have the highest paid cabinet anywhere in the world. Their, their Prime Minister and the cabinet are, have seven figure salaries.

• 24:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, over a million dollars a year.

• 24:03Alastair Campbell?

  Over a million dollars a year and they get, they, they go out and get them. They find them and they go out and get the brightest and the best. Now, again, politically, I think that's impossible, but they do have, I've met several members of the Singaporean cabinet, they are very, very clever people.

• 24:16Rory Stewart?

  It's unbelievable. I was talking to the Singapore Health Minister about three, four weeks ago and you're absolutely right, he's brilliant, he's incredibly thoughtful, he's a wonderful health minister. But again, Britain is not going to put up with politicians paid more than a million dollars a year.

• 24:30Alastair Campbell?

  No.

• 24:31Rory Stewart?

  Any more than it's going to put up with the fact that you basically can't afford a car in Singapore because it's a sort of authoritarian, I'm holding short of calling it a dictatorship, but very authoritarian rule. The, in order to stop traffic.

• 24:43Alastair Campbell?

  Strong, strong and stable government.

• 24:45Rory Stewart?

  Strong and stable government. They basically uprise anyone for buying a car, you famously get fined if you drop chewing gum, you can't protest against government. So I think Singapore is not the way to think about the United Kingdom. And now it may be that we should be going to a break and coming back for the more bits of the other bits of the world.

• 25:01Alastair Campbell?

  Let's do that.

• 25:50Speaker 02

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• 26:04Speaker 03

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• 27:01Rory Stewart?

  So, welcome back to The Rest Is Politics with me, Rory Stewart.

• 27:05Alastair Campbell?

  And me, Alastair Campbell. And before we go abroad Rory, shall we just briefly tick off Suella Braverman, I think saying that there's really no such thing as a legitimate asylum seeker, seems to me the sort of thrust of her latest offerings.

• 27:20Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah, it's pretty, pretty disturbing. In fact, one of the other tensions within the Conservative Party that you'll see is that at the same time as Liz Truss is pushing hard for more immigration because she wants to bring in more labor, and remember this is one of the great mysteries of the world, that of course you can create growth just by bringing in more people, but your GDP per capita doesn't go up. No individual gets wealthy, the country gets wealthy because you've just got more people. But meanwhile, she's got a Home Secretary who's completely opposed to all of that.

• 27:48Alastair Campbell?

  And the other, the other thing I noticed this week, which I thought was quite interesting, was the, the attempted metamorphosis into a human being of Steve Baker. He's apologised to the Irish for the way that they talked about Ireland and the EU during the Brexit negotiations, and apparently he's also come out in defence of footballers taking the knee.

• 28:10Rory Stewart?

  So Steve Baker is very, very interesting, and anyone really wants to get into the strangest psychological depths, the Conservative Party, needs to read an article in the Church Times, which is an interview with Steve Baker, where for two pages he explains how his reading of the Book of Kings influences his entire thought about British democracy, and says that he's not quite sure that God is a Democrat.

• 28:34Rory Stewart?

  So yeah, if you really want to get into the strangeness of this stuff, you'll begin to see that he, he is a real libertarian of a very extreme sort. He doesn't really believe, I think, at all, or this article implies, in the welfare state or the NHS, because he basically thinks all these things take away our autonomy and energy.

• 28:50Alastair Campbell?

  It's quite horrific that he's a sort of seen as a power in the land within the Conservative Party alongside the ever increasingly ludicrous Lord David Frost, who continues to get, to get wheeled out all over the place. Now, listen, let's talk about abroad.

• 29:07Alastair Campbell?

  Let's, shall we, shall we tick off these elections, or do you want to go to Yemen first?

• 29:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, let's, let's, let's do Brazil first. So you're, you're good on the other stuff. Let me just quickly, I've been paying little attention to Brazil, so yet again, this seems to be, I always get told off, I've got a friend called James Johnson, who runs a wonderful polling company, always gets very angry with me saying this, but yet again, the pollsters have got it totally wrong. So when we were on this programme last week, everybody was predicting basically that Lula would romp home, and Bolsonaro was 14 points behind in the polls. Sure enough, the results come in, and Lula's on 48% and Bolsonaro's on 43%. And Bolsonaro, you know, the right wing populist, is now the biggest party in the Senate, 19 out of 27 seats in the Senate. And Lula, who was convicted for corruption and money laundering, spent 19 months in

• 29:56Rory Stewart?

  jail, is now going forward to a second runoff at the end of this month in Brazil, where it's anyone's guess who's going to win.

• 30:04Alastair Campbell?

  I think the, I guess Lula will be moderately encouraged by the fact that those who have dropped out, you would define as probably left-leaning or centrist. But even, but I agree, look, the thing about campaigns is momentum's so important.

• 30:23Alastair Campbell?

  Bolsonaro may think that gives him momentum because he was being written off. I thought though, when I watched the live coverage on one of the channels, the mood at Lula's campaign did seem to be a lot happier than, Bolsonaro looked slightly defeated.

• 30:40Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 30:40Alastair Campbell?

  I could be wrong about that, but he, and I, I wonder, because what we talked about last week was the extent to which the CIA and others were worried that Bolsonaro was going to gear up for a refusal to accept the result. Because what happened was that because it was reasonably close, he accepted the result as the lever to saying we can win next time round. So he can't really kick up too much of a fuss.

• 31:03Rory Stewart?

  It's very interesting. Brazil has probably the most advanced electronic voting system in the world. And electronic voting is a fascinating thing because of course the proponents for it, the tech advocates of it, argue that it's by far the cleanest, most rapid, most efficient, most transparent way of doing voting. But because a lot of it is happening on servers and in the cloud, and people can't see it in the way that you can see bits of paper in ballot boxes, many, many populists around the world have tried to claim that electronic voting systems have been rigged. And that's the risk, I think, with Bolsonaro. It's also, I think, another reason Lula may be encouraged is that, as we've said often on the show, leftists are winning across a lot of Latin America, Argentina, Chile, where

• 31:47Rory Stewart?

  Gabriel Boric, who's the young man that we've talked about, the kind of bearded, young revolutionary, Gustavo Petro in Colombia, who's the ex-guerrilla leader, Mexico again's got a leftist leader now.

• 31:59Alastair Campbell?

  This is the line that Bolsonaro was using, wasn't it? The worry if Lula got back was that Latin America as a whole is going to be led in what he views as the wrong direction. But that one's going to get nasty as well because it's already started to get quite a lot of violence coming up and the hatreds, I mean, it's so polarised. I also really resent the way that Bolsonaro has co-opted the Brazilian football team shirt as a kind of, as his emblem and his uniform, as it were. If I was a Brazilian football fan who didn't support Bolsonaro, I'd be very, very pissed off at that. What about, now Bosnia, Rory?

• 32:40Alastair Campbell?

  Bosnia probably has the most complicated electoral system on the entire planet and it's almost impossible to explain. I actually worked for one of the Bosnian parties a few years ago and I went there and I got briefed and I just had the most enormous headache after they tried to explain how the political system works. They have this tripartite presidency. They had a situation this week where after the election, the high representative, who is an outsider appointed by the Bond process, actually came in and had to make further changes because you could see kind of absolute chaos emerging from the election.

• 33:24Alastair Campbell?

  So what seems to have happened is that the elections have entrenched all the divisions. And I do wonder, I remember talking to them at the time about whether the Dayton Peace Accords of 95, which were wonderful on one level, bringing this awful, awful, awful war to an end, but the political system that they put in place makes Bosnia Herzegovina very, very, very difficult to govern.

• 33:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it is amazing. Gerhard Krauss, who's an amazing analyst of the Balkans, if anyone's interested, runs something called the European Stability Initiative. It's a brilliant Austrian guy, is pointing out that this office, the high representative, which still exists, which is a sort of pseudo-colonial Raj administration that still keeps going in Bosnia, totally unaccountable, totally autocratic, no checks of any kind, is still basically interfering. The Bond powers are just... Being deployed again and again because these people decide that that the Bosnians can't look after themselves. And I I tend to favor Gerald's view, which is that the

• 34:30Rory Stewart?

  best hope for Bosnia is actually to throw off these decrees. This is that the ninth election, peaceful and competitive, they should be a candidate for the EU and the O H R should back off.

• 34:43Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. I don't know. But when you when you look at the the outcome, the extent to which you you actually had different people claiming victory based on the same results. Um, it's it's a very, anyway, look, we'd be here all day if we tried to explain it. If if people want to look, just look up, just Google Bosnia electoral system and see if you end up with the same headline.

• 35:08Rory Stewart?

  Just quick on that, if people are looking for holidays, Sarajevo hugely recommended, a bit like you recommend Albania.

• 35:14Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Rory Stewart?

  Um, it's it's amazing film festival, more and more prosperous all the time, despite all the political problems. It's a really exciting city where you see this incredible combination of Europe and really the Middle East.

• 35:27Alastair Campbell?

  But the last time I was there, I stayed in a hotel right opposite the plaque where and there's a plaque that says, basically says the First World War started here. And that was the old shooting of Franz Ferdinand. Now Bulgaria.

• 35:41Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 35:41Alastair Campbell?

  Shall we talk about Bulgaria briefly?

• 35:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, go on, tell us about Bulgaria.

• 35:44Alastair Campbell?

  Well, here's another one where, you know, political systems are so difficult and complicated. So you had a prime minister called Kirit Petkov, and he ran something called We Continue The Change.

• 35:54Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 35:55Alastair Campbell?

  And he's a basically an anti-corruption. He got to power on anti-corruption.

• 35:59Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 35:59Alastair Campbell?

  And the big target of the anti-corruption campaigns was a guy called Borisov, who's been prime minister four times.

• 36:05Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 36:06Alastair Campbell?

  And so I think he's been three times. And he runs a party centre-right called G E R B.

• 36:10Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 36:11Alastair Campbell?

  And he has won. He got twenty five point four percent. We Continue The Change got twenty point two. That would suggest that that would have to be the beginnings of an alliance and a coalition. But Petkov was clear during the campaign, he would have absolutely nothing to do with Borisov. So the chances are that they're going to have to have another election fairly soon. And the and the other thing that's really interesting, and this goes back to the sometimes why I get a little bit worried about you. I know you think it's great to have smaller parties in power, et cetera. So just in the context of Ukraine, Russia. The two smaller parties that look like they might have to be involved in a coalition, they're both pro-Russian.

• 36:55Alastair Campbell?

  So that changes the dynamic on Ukraine. And the other one is a Turkish minority party.

• 37:01Rory Stewart?

  Will you remember when we were interviewing your friend, Eddie Rahm, the Albanian leader? He was talking about the incredible differences across Eastern Europe and people's attitude towards Russia. I think he said that in Serbia, eighty-five percent of the population backed Putin over Ukraine, whereas in Albania, it was sort of the other way around. It was like ten percent.

• 37:22Alastair Campbell?

  No, it was naught point eight, wasn't it? Or something, absolutely tiny, yeah.

• 37:26Rory Stewart?

  And so it's extraordinary, isn't it, that two countries so close to each other can take very different views? But of course, Russia has always been trying to, historically, obviously, exercise influence over Slavic states, and it really matters. On Russia-Ukraine, so big advances by the Ukrainians, again, seem to have got to Lyman, which is a big rail hub. Some great illustrations, people want to go on the web, great graphic illustrations of how those advances have happened. Russia now unsure on what borders to claim. So you remember Putin made this big speech, saying he was going to make these places, bits of Russia, but as the Ukrainian advances continued, that becomes a bit more difficult for him, because he was going to announce that these bits of Ukraine were part of Russia

• 38:08Rory Stewart?

  that he controlled, but he's now losing control of a lot of those fringes. At the same time, we've got the situation with the gas pipelines that I don't think we've talked about. Nord Stream One, which was the big pipeline coming in, has now been bombed underwater, as far as anyone can tell, or at least certainly.

• 38:24Alastair Campbell?

  And they're accusing the Americans.

• 38:26Rory Stewart?

  Certainly leaking methane, yeah. And I think it's almost certainly would make logical sense that it's the Russians, because what the Russians have been doing since July is they haven't been saying, we're cutting off gas supplies. What they keep doing is saying, oh, we're missing spare parts, Siemens aren't giving us the parts, or we've got a problem on maintenance, was the excuse in August. And basically, there wasn't any gas running through those pipelines. But this is devastating. I mean, this is, they've cut supply to Europe by something like eighty-eight percent of the Russian gas supply to Europe.

• 39:03Alastair Campbell?

  Just back to Bulgaria briefly, that one of the reasons the election came about was because of the soaring energy prices, because the Russians, do you remember, the Russians cut them off because they were refusing to pay in rubles. So that was another one where Putin was having an influence over the fact of an election.

• 39:22Rory Stewart?

  And Giorgia Maloney, the Italian leader that we talked about last week, the right-wing leader there, the far-right in Sweden that you raised a couple of weeks ago, many of these movements are of course benefiting from people's anger about rising gas prices and energy bills.

• 39:36Alastair Campbell?

  And this is why, although I've seen literally nothing about it in most of our media, the election in Latvia, one of the smaller European Union countries, actually may be a little bit significant because they had an election at the weekend, yet again. I think the Prime Minister, Karins, Christianis Karins, New Unity Party, came first with 19% of the vote, which allows them to carry on. But what it means, they're very, very, very pro-West, anti-Russia in relation to Ukraine. And that means that you keep that

• 40:17Alastair Campbell?

  alliance going there between them, Lithuania and Estonia, in pressing the European Union to have a very, very, very tough view.

• 40:24Rory Stewart?

  And they've made huge sacrifices, haven't they? Because their economy's been hit incredibly hard, because they've also put sanctions on things like potash and fertilizer exports, which have really crippled them. It's been amazing what the Baltic countries have been prepared to do. But they very much feel that they're next, because Putin has been signaling since before Crimea in 2014, that he sees the Baltic States as being a natural part of Russia. And I think they're absolutely right to feel that they have to do everything it takes to hold Ukraine. If you followed Elon Musk, that's another weird thing. So Elon Musk, the Tesla guy, 107 million followers on Twitter, he initially went very pro-Ukraine and gave them 12,000 Starlink terminals to keep their satellite systems going. The Russians

• 41:09Rory Stewart?

  tried to turn off their internet. And a loss of the war in Ukraine has been a very, very... Artificial intelligence, technology driven more on the Ukrainian side. They use AI to to check and they have algorithms that tell them what's likely to be a convincing story and which targets to hit. Anyway, Elon Musk now suddenly flipped around and decided he wants a peace deal with Russia and has put out a tweet to his hundred million followers saying Crimea should be part of Russia and there should be a referendum in eastern Ukraine on joining Russia. And Zelensky has now come out and done his own Twitter poll against Musk, saying, do you prefer the Musk that was pro-Ukraine or the Musk that's pro-Russia?

• 41:51Alastair Campbell?

  If I was Zelensky, I'd have ignored him, I think. I mean, isn't Musk, I don't know the guy, is he not just somebody who's had some extraordinary success with his various business ventures, but thinks that like often happens to high profile business people that actually they'd be better at running the world than the people who are meant to be doing it and therefore they decide to develop political positions?

• 42:15Rory Stewart?

  Yes, I I think it's true and I think it is a phenomenon, isn't it? It's a phenomenon in Silicon Valley too, that as you say, people can be phenomenally successful business people, but it's difficult for them to take on board the possibility that there may be different areas of life where they don't have that expertise. Yeah.

• 42:35Alastair Campbell?

  And of course, Nick Clegg went the other way. He went from politics to Silicon Valley.

• 42:39Rory Stewart?

  Number two in Facebook, isn't he? I mean, incredible.

• 42:41Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. Hey, listen, I'm talking to your friend David Miliband yesterday.

• 42:46Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Rory Stewart?

  And I am a real fan of David Miliband's and my question to you is, is there any way of getting him back into British politics? Why is he not leading the Labour Party? Why did they not vote for him in the first place? Because he seems, at least for an outsider on the surface, to be the kind of perfect Labour leader.

• 43:02Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I think at a time when the current Labour leader, Keir Starmer, has had a successful conference and is leading the Conservatives healthily in the polls, might not be a time to be talking about whether he shouldn't be there.

• 43:17Alastair Campbell?

  But I guess the part of your question which I think I probably get asked virtually every day. Is somebody will say, oh, I think it went all went wrong, wrong for Labour when they didn't choose David Miliband. And of course, you can never prove that counterfactual. I mean, as you say, David is a very close friend of mine. I like him. I've got a lot of respect for him. I actually think a bit like you, he's, he's done, he's doing public service in a different sort of way. Now he's doing a similar job to yours. He's running an enormous global charity, working in a similar sphere to you. But I guess it's one of those questions that we will never ever know the answer to. I, I, I think that the, the, the short answer

• 43:55Alastair Campbell?

  to why he lost the election is that Ed Miliband, you know, successfully worked the system that elects our leaders and just as Liz trusted to the Conservative Party. So I don't know is the short answer, but I, I certainly think he's a terrible loss to British politics. As to whether he will come back, I think it's very difficult. I mean, I'm assuming, Roy, that you asked him the question directly yourself.

• 44:19Rory Stewart?

  But we were actually talking about international development. But at the end of the call, I said, no, you're right. We were talking about work on extreme poverty in Africa and how we can do more work on, on cash transfer and how we can do more on climate. And one of the points that he's making, which I think is absolutely right, is that there's $97 billion now committed to climate funds. And there are lots of very poor people in the world being very adversely affected by climate. And if we could really start a movement to work out how we can provide resilience and support for the extreme poor, who are the people who are going to be the biggest victims of climate. I mean, those were the people that I was seeing in those drought affected areas in Kenya two and a half weeks ago. That's exactly what's happening. A fourth year of droughts in Somalia and the whole of Africa now.

• 45:03Alastair Campbell?

  Now, Rory, you also, you met, I think you met another friend of mine this, this week from the World Food Programme.

• 45:09Rory Stewart?

  I did.

• 45:09Alastair Campbell?

  And this is a former colleague of mine who now works in Yemen. And we go on quite a lot about the parts of the world that are Criminally under-reported in the rich world, but I think Yemen, where we've had this eight-year war, where we have 24 million people in need of humanitarian support, 18 million of them being fed by the World Food Programme, a war that's been going on now with this truce that was, that has held from April until, I think it was the weekend it ran out, and it looks like the Houthis are not playing with the idea of extending the truce. But I just wondered what you picked up from your meeting this week?

• 45:54Rory Stewart?

  Well, it was, it was a fascinating meeting. I mean, he, he brought his boss, who's this extraordinary charismatic American, who's been all around the world and is an amazing kind of surfer. He's a guy who rode a, a snowboard down the side of one of the highest Himalayan mountains in the world. And he's worked in the Clinton administration. He's now running the WFP in Yemen, along with your, along with your friend. And the first thing I think they were trying to get across is simply the scale of the problem there. I mean, they are delivering food to 13 million people. They're having to move, you know, 70,000 kilograms of wheat flour. They're having to run, there's an entire

• 46:37Rory Stewart?

  UN system at the Hadada port with its own independent UN monitoring system to try to deal with the fact that Yemen is basically torn in half between the Houthis, who are broadly speaking allied with Iran, and they're Zaidi Muslims, but they've become closer to Iranian Shia Muslims.

• 46:55Alastair Campbell?

  And they're, they're up in, they've sort of got the north.

• 46:57Rory Stewart?

  They've got the north and they've got Sanaa, which is the old capital. And then down in the south and around Athen is a completely different government, which was more closely allied with Saudi and UAE. There have been this terrible kind of bombing campaigns and back and forth. And then the Houthis leader announced a ceasefire a few months ago, basically on Twitter, and announced that he was expending it. And the ceasefire, of course, has been incredibly good for Yemen because one of the reasons for the starvation of hunger is, is conflict. But unfortunately, they've refused to extend that ceasefire now. So there's a panicked process, talks are ongoing with the special representative of the Secretary General, a guy called Hans, who actually lives here in Amman in Jordan. Is trying to pull that together.

• 47:41Rory Stewart?

  And this all ties into these conversations you were having about Iran last week.

• 47:45Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 47:46Rory Stewart?

  Because the Houthis are used by Iran as a proxy war, just as Hezbollah are used in Syria and Lebanon for proxy wars by the Iranians. And the Iranians have managed to get back going again in a way that nobody really believed was possible. Four and a half months ago, four and a half months ago, everyone had given up on the JCPOA, which is the the nuclear negotiations with Iran. Everyone thought that was all dead. That now seems to have come alive again. But what exactly the Iranians think they're doing, how they're playing with Russia, they're doing a lot of sanction busting with Russia, the internal rebellion happening against them? And how does that all play into whether or not they want to continue to bomb back the Houthis, who are firing missiles against Saudi and UE?

• 48:29Alastair Campbell?

  Up to the truce, they were launching these missiles and drones regularly. I mean, the the the frequencies seem to be going up. So presumably the Saudis have their own reason to want want to stop it too. Or do they just want to plow on?

• 48:43Rory Stewart?

  Well, the Saudis, I think, maybe eventually want to get out of this, although it's taken a long time. But they are being asked to produce $3 billion to prop up the Yemeni central bank to try to underwrite the Yemeni currency. And meanwhile, the only country that's really playing a major role in famines is the United States. Seventy percent of all the financial support for humanitarian assistance in Yemen comes from the US. And over ninety percent of the support of what's happening in the whole of Africa and Kenya is coming from the US. It's very, very sad, but.

• 49:16Alastair Campbell?

  And where is the, where is your former?

• 49:18Rory Stewart?

  So my former department, very sadly, has completely left. I mean, its Yemen contributions were at 280 million. I think we'll probably be down under 80 million this year. And it's partly the cuts. It's partly that a lot of money has been diverted to Ukraine. And that's true for a lot of the other European donors. But it's tragic because just as the world goes into what I believe is going to be a very difficult 10-year period economically, the people who are really suffering are the extreme poor in places like Yemen and in Africa. And we are not providing the development assistance as they're hit by the full force of climate change.

• 49:54Alastair Campbell?

  And how do you, here's a question for you. How do you persuade? Somebody like Liz Truss, somebody like Suella Braverman, somebody like a Tory voter who buys the sort of Mail Express propaganda of, you know, we're just pouring money away, pouring it down drains, giving it to corrupt regimes and all this stuff that has led to us even thinking we can get rid of DIFIT and cut the 0.7% of GDP on overseas aid and development. How do you persuade people that actually that has the potential to damage our lives here?

• 50:29Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think first thing is you need to convince people that the money is being well spent. And I think we could be doing a much better job with technology and AI and algorithms and audit teams to reassure the public that when we are, for example, delivering cash, a lot of what happens in Yemen is cash, it's really getting to the recipient and we can prove that. I think we then have to obviously make arguments about the fact that if extreme poverty continues in these places, it is an enormous source of instability for the world. That's where the mass migration into Europe is going to come from. These are countries where, parts of Africa where pandemics have developed, Yemen has been a great source of international terrorism. So, lack of security in these places

• 51:12Rory Stewart?

  is not good for us. And finally, I think, just appeal to people's basic humanity that a very small amount of money can transform the lives of people who are literally starving to death. And even with all the economic problems that we're facing in Britain, we should be able to continue to play a responsible part of the world. And that's something that Britain used to be proud of. We're a country that had a reputation for moderation, for generosity, for connections to the world. And I think it's deeply, deeply depressing if we become a weird little Englander state that refuses to have anything to do with anyone else.

• 51:47Alastair Campbell?

  You know, one of the, I think you said the same when we were talking earlier, that we've had extraordinary feedback to the interview with Eddie Rahm, the Albanian Prime Minister, and I had a letter the other day from somebody who said that she felt really moved hearing him say something she didn't know, that Albania was the only country in the world that had more Jews living there after the Second World War than before. And when he talked through why Albania had taken in Iranians, taken in Syrians, taken in Afghans, and the fact that Britain has become this country where we've just sort of put up the, trying to put up the shutters. And I'll tell you, I'm reading, because I've been working with

• 52:30Alastair Campbell?

  Saidh of Osse in this TV programme, Tuesday night, Channel 4, Make Me Prime Minister.

• 52:35Rory Stewart?

  Tuesday night, Channel 4.

• 52:36Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you, Rory. But Saidh gave me her book, which I'd never read, and I don't know if you've read it, it's called The Enemy Within, and it's about, I guess it's about the history and the development of Muslim life in the UK. But it's really, really worth reading, because it's written from somebody, obviously, who's a British Muslim, from the perspective of what it's been like to be a British Muslim, as these attitudes have changed towards Muslims in Britain, and her pretty scathing analysis, frankly, both of her own government, under David Cameron, and of the one that I worked for, under Tony Blair, about how we may have contributed to that. Now, it's too complicated in a way

• 53:19Alastair Campbell?

  to go through it here, just on the back of a discussion about Yemen, but I've been really, really impressed by the kind of breadth of knowledge in it, but also that sense of trying to see it through the eyes of somebody who has lived that life, and then gone into government, a bit like you, with lots of ideals and trying to change things, and then come out thinking, you know what, I'm not sure we've made that much of a difference.

• 53:45Rory Stewart?

  We should return to that. It's a great subject, but maybe right now. Thank you.

• 53:50Alastair Campbell?

  See you soon.

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