Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics 534. Is Wes Streeting Trying to Sabotage Andy Burnham? About this episode By re-igniting the Brexit debate, is Wes Streeting deliberately trying to sabotage Andy Burnham's chances in a Leave-voting area, or is he forcing Labour to finally confront reality? Does Hungary's new leader Magyar offer a playbook for defeating Reform UK – by exposing Farage's wealth, mysterious funding sources, and corruption? Is Gary Stevenson correct to say the centre-left is relying on outdated tactics, while right-wing movements gain ground through social media fluency and opaque international funding networks?
Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more.
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Transcript 9,927 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Rory Stewart? At the moment, smart money is on Keir Starmer not being Prime Minister by the end of the year.
0:07 Alastair Campbell? It's very hard to see how Keir Starmer gets through this.
0:09 Rory Stewart? We have West Streeting resigning, one of the big contenders against Starmer, and then Andy Burnham, the very popular mayor of Greater Manchester, now trying to re-enter parliament to run against Starmer.
0:19 Alastair Campbell? If you're Keir Starmer at the moment, you must be going absolutely nuts. It's very hard to govern in these circumstances.
0:26 Rory Stewart? We see the two halves of the Labour Party reveal the kind of contradiction the Labour Party's dealing with.
0:32 Alastair Campbell? My plea to all of them, please don't turn this into soap opera. Well, fat chance of that. This episode is brought to you by Fuse Energy.
0:40 Rory Stewart? Fuse has introduced the tracker tariff, designed to give customers what matters most from their energy supplier: savings clarity and a bit more control.
0:49 Alastair Campbell? And it guarantees that your rates stay below the off-gem price gap, which saves you up to £200, and the tariff updates automatically every quarter.
1:00 Rory Stewart? Energy prices don't move in straight lines. Global events and market pressures you can't predict and certainly can't control still find their way onto your bill.
1:08 Alastair Campbell? And if you're on the wrong tariff, you can be stuck with higher rates after the pressure has ended.
1:14 Rory Stewart? With Fuse Energy's tracker tariff, that changes. If prices fall, your rate adjusts at the next quarterly update.
1:21 Alastair Campbell? And it's automatic. No switching, no trying to second-guess the market. You're protected while prices are high and ready to benefit when they fall.
1:28 Rory Stewart? Switch to Fuse Energy's tracker tariff at fuseenergy.com/politics and use code POLITICS to get a free trip plus subscription.
1:38 Alastair Campbell? Visit fuseenergy.com for full terms and conditions.
1:47 Rory Stewart? This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.
1:49 Alastair 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 Managed to watch it. There you go.
2:01 Rory Stewart? I actually had a NordVPN thank you. I was in the new Starbucks here in Creve. And of course, the thing flashed up saying this is an unsecured public network. And I was able to go to my VPN. And it was a little reminder of something we often forget when we're 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.
2:25 Alastair Campbell? Well, I think you're not really sort of proud of me that I managed to do this, or should I say Fiona Fiona managed to do this?
2:32 Rory Stewart? I 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/RestIsPolitics. That's nordvpn.com/RestIsPolitics. And the link is in the episode description.
2:48 Speaker 02 A BetterHelp ad. Imagine carrying a backpack every day, every conversation, every mistake, every expectation. You probably wouldn't notice how heavy it was until someone asked if you wanted to put it down. Sometimes feeling better starts exactly like that. Better isn't one size fits all. Better is personal. It's therapy tailored to you to help lighten what you've been carrying. Match with a therapist who truly gets you. Visit betterhelp.com/RestPolitics.
3:27 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to the Rest is Politics. Me, Alice Campbell.
3:29 Rory Stewart? And with me, Rory Stewart.
3:30 Alastair Campbell? We are going to talk about the Labour Government. We're going to talk about an upcoming by-election. We're going to talk about the policy shenanigans that this upcoming by-election have launched. As Keir Starmer ponders from wherever he is at the moment, not heard much over the weekend. And we're going to talk about Germany. You wanted me to report back on my trip to Germany. And I'd also like to give a little shout out to Mr. Magyar for the way he is handling his early days in power in Hungary.
3:59 Rory Stewart? Brilliant. Let me start, though, with my like big tabloid headline and the thing that really excited me about this race. So people who glanced at the Sunday Times yesterday, we're recording this on Monday, would have seen. It leading with Wes Streeting says that if he becomes Labour leader, he will lead the country back into Europe. So he's somebody who's on record saying that he was pro Customs Union and he's now saying that if he becomes a Labour leader, he will put into the party manifesto for the next election, rejoining the European Union. So now for the first time, we have somebody with an outside chance of becoming Prime Minister saying if he becomes Prime Minister, we're going to rejoin the European Union. Now, lots of ifs, is he going to make it?
4:44 Rory Stewart? Is Andy Burnham going to make it? Is this going to make Andy Burnham have to sound more eurosceptic? But just on the surface, that's really big news.
4:50 Alastair Campbell? It is. And because it's in the context of Wes Streeting having resigned from the Cabinet last week and said that he doesn't want Keir Starmer to carry on being Prime Minister, Andy Burnham having put his name in the frame to be the candidate in the Makefield by-election, which has been created by a former Minister, Josh Simons, stepping down, also saying he thinks Keir Starmer shouldn't carry on. The context is more complicated even than just a leading Labour figure says let's rejoin the European Union.
5:27 Rory Stewart? And I'm going to do this very boring thing for international listeners again, and maybe to bring up to date British listeners who aren't following this minute by minute. So to remind people, Keir Starmer has got a pretty bad popularity in Britain, but he was elected with a big majority in Parliament, big majority, and could have sat there for five years. And everyone assumed that he was going to sit there for five years. But a very bad showing in the local elections where Reform did well, that's the Nigel Farage right wing party, and Labour did badly, suddenly led to a situation where we have Wes Streeting resigning, who, as you say, is one of the big contenders against Starmer. He's the guy I'm talking about with the European Union. And Andy Burnham, the very popular mayor of Greater
6:10 Rory Stewart? Manchester, now trying to re-enter Parliament to run against Starmer. And As we recorded, if people want to get into the depths of this, please listen to our last podcast where we get into this in depth. But essentially, we're in a situation where it looks likely that if, and it's a big if, Andy Burnham manages to get into Parliament in this by-election, he will then run and have a chance of being Prime Minister by the autumn, and Keir Starmer will cease to be Prime Minister.
6:33 Alastair Campbell? So this morning, I was listening to David Lammy, Deputy Prime Minister, and listening, I could feel his kind of exasperation because he's speaking on behalf of the government. He is also a leading figure in the Labour Party, explaining that he obviously wants Labour to win this upcoming by-election, but can't answer, for obvious reasons, very simple questions about whether he agrees with something that Andy Burnham, who may be the candidate, was saying at the weekend.
7:02 Rory Stewart? So you've put your finger on one big paradox, which I think's worth leaning into a little bit more, which is, yes, of course, Keir Starmer and David Lammy would like Labour to win the by-election, but Labour winning the by-election means bringing in Keir Starmer's biggest rival, and almost certainly leads to Keir Starmer stepping down as Prime Minister and this man, Andy Burnham, taking over.
7:22 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, so it's sort of crazy. And in addition to Wes Streeting, who, let's not remember, just a week ago was part of the team that put together the King's Speech, came out and didn't just go for Britain going back into the European Union, a position which, by the way, I have long supported, but you have to kind of always focus on context. And the context here is very, very complicated, because on the one hand, he's basically saying Keir Starmer's been too timid, there's been drift, there's been a lack of embracing big arguments. He made it part of a much bigger attack. Andy Burnham, meanwhile, does an interview, I thought a very interesting choice of interviewer, which was Dan Hewitt of ITV, who's actually, whose expertise is housing.
8:07 Alastair Campbell? And it's ITV, he's not gone for BBC, he's not gone for Sky, he's not doing the Today Programme, it's a long interview.
8:13 Rory Stewart? Explain a little bit what that means, what might ITV mean if you were putting something together? Why would ITV be a bit different to those others?
8:19 Alastair Campbell? Well, because the normal, you know, the normal thing, you probably expect, let's do the first interview, you'd probably do, and it was, it was at the weekend, you'd probably say, well, let's sit down with the Sunday morning show with Laura Coons.
8:29 Rory Stewart? And is that because that has more listeners or has more Westminster listeners? What's the normal logic for why you do that?
8:34 Alastair Campbell? The normal logic for that, I think, is just historically, everybody always used to do David Frost.
8:39 Rory Stewart? Okay.
8:40 Alastair Campbell? I actually, but I thought was interesting to do it with Dan Hewitt, who has got this kind of reputation. I mean, most of our listeners won't necessarily know this, but he's got a reputation really serious about housing, really, really serious about inequality. And Andy, in this interview, talks about one of his big policy ideas, he leans very heavily into electoral reform. Another thing which isn't in the Labour Party manifesto. So he's basically saying, I want to stand for this. And his big message was Westminster and Whitehall have failed. I've shown there's a different way of doing things in Manchester. I'm coming in to, to try to do the same in Westminster. Dan Hewitt kept pressing him on whether that meant he was going to challenge Keir Starmer, and he's just found a form of words to sort of go around that. So it's.
9:25 Rory Stewart? Why, why is he going around that? Sorry, because he's obviously trying to challenge Keir Starmer.
9:28 Alastair Campbell? Because he doesn't, he wants to keep saying, I am just for the moment standing to be the MP.
9:35 Rory Stewart? But, but, but that's insane. I mean, nobody believes that at all, do they? I mean, literally nobody.
9:39 Alastair Campbell? Nobody, nobody on the planet, you know, and including Andy especially, Keir Starmer.
9:44 Rory Stewart? Right.
9:45 Alastair Campbell? So on the one hand, he's sort of saying very different sort of politics, very this, very that, new politics, but it's quite old politics.
9:53 Rory Stewart? Not to answer a straight question.
9:54 Alastair Campbell? Not to admit that this is why you're doing it.
9:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
9:57 Alastair Campbell? So he's, he then found this other formulation, I want to take the arguments that I've made as high as I can, as high as I can go. So what you have now.
10:06 Rory Stewart? Can I just, sorry, I'm just, because what you're saying is so weird and will be difficult for people to understand. We are in an era where, like it or lump it, people like quite blunt, outspoken. Frank type of politics.
10:20 Alastair Campbell? Which, by the way, is what Wes Streeting was trying to do.
10:23 Rory Stewart? Right. So why can't Burnham say, obviously, I'm trying to get elected because I want to run to be Prime Minister, because I think the problems that Manchester faces and the country faces are best dealt with by my becoming Prime Minister, and I think I'd be a good Prime Minister.
10:36 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I think, but then we're back to the point that I made when Andy Burnham first tried to get selected in Gordon and Denton, where I think if you were to say it as bluntly as that, people will think Keir Starmer's taken the leave of his senses if he says, well, come on in then. So I look, this is what I mean, this is what I kept saying last week, let's just step back a bit, because this is going to create for the next week, what, do you remember my final words on the podcast last week, my plea to all of them, please don't turn this into a soap opera. Well, fat chance of that, when you have literally, no, we've just about, just about finished the podcast last week when I was in Germany and you were here, and Wes Streeting comes out with a big attack on Keir Starmer and a big policy
11:20 Alastair Campbell? announcement on the European Union, followed by, same day, Andy Burnham doing a very different style, not going for Keir Starmer personally, I think that's what answers your question, not going for Nigel Farage personally, not going for Reform.
11:35 Rory Stewart? Right.
11:36 Alastair Campbell? And why that, this is why some of Andy Burnham's people are now saying, well, West Streeting is an absolute bloody snake, he's done this deliberately.
11:43 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
11:43 Alastair Campbell? Because he knows that in the by-election.
11:45 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
11:46 Alastair Campbell? You know, in a constituency that voted very heavily Leave.
11:50 Rory Stewart? Sixty-four percent Leave.
11:51 Alastair Campbell? Sixty-four percent Leave, and fifty percent of whose residents who voted, voted fifty percent Reform in the recent regulations, he doesn't necessarily want to go in all guns blazing, saying, let's get back in the European Union.
12:01 Rory Stewart? So in a very interesting way, we see the two halves of the Labour Party revealed, and that the kind of contradiction Labour Party's dealing with. Wes Streeting making the big ideas, rejoining the European Union, which will be hugely appealing to many, many.
12:20 Rory Stewart? I suppose one bit of Labour vote. People like you, educated, city dwelling, professional, more liberal, really want to join the European Union. And then you've got another chunk of voters who I suppose we might think of as a traditional red wall voter. More of Labour's traditional patriotic working class base to clean the north of England. Who went over to Boris Johnson in 2019 because they like Brexit, they wanted to get Brexit done. And so we're in a situation in which Andy Burnham is saying, vote for me because I'm a figure from the north. I can re-win those reform voters. I can win the seat that voted over 60% to leave the European Union.
13:05 Rory Stewart? And we've got Wes Streeting saying, the problems that Britain faces, all the problems that Britain faces almost. Are to do with much bigger things than Britain. You're not going to be able to actually fix Britain's productivity or our cost of energy or our security or any of these things without rejoining the European Union. And Andy Burnham is saying, hyper local, hyper local, I'm the guy who's going to get your buses running. I'm going to get the police back on the streets. I'm going to improve things. And Streeting saying, you've got to lift your head and look at the bigger global policy issues. You're not going to be able to fix any of those things.
13:38 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, and that's showing the tension between the two very different contests that they're engaged in. Because Andy Burnham's fighting a by-election in a northern working class constituency that was, when Tony Blair was around, massive. We used to get huge majorities in.
13:56 Rory Stewart? Over 60% of the vote, 63%.
13:59 Alastair Campbell? I think it was more than that the first, I think 97, I think it was 70% at one point. And so he's fighting that contest. And Wes Streeting, even though he's not yet, you know, there's not yet a contest formally. He's fighting the leadership election. Ahead of Andy Burnham being able to get there. Now, I've got to say, if you're Keir Starmer at the moment, you must be going absolutely nuts. Because it's very hard to govern in these circumstances. He's the Prime Minister, he's still the Prime Minister. And he's watching this without any real control over it. And so when I mentioned David Lammy's interview, you just feel his exasperation. How are we meant to deal with this situation?
14:40 Rory Stewart? One of the problems is that the tradition in government is that you shouldn't do anything too radical if you're just about a step down. So the civil servants, quite rightly, are extremely reluctant. And you would have found this when you took over in ninety seven. In the last months, the major government, they don't really want them launching huge new things that the new government might undo. And a classic example here is John Healy was trying to announce an enormous new investment in British defence. And it's probably one of the most important issues in Britain. It'd be a huge amount of the British economy if they go up to three and a half percent. It has these massive implications for NATO, for Ukraine, for containing Putin. Can he do it? Not really.
15:22 Rory Stewart? Because the real question that the Treasury is going to be asking is not just who's the next Prime Minister, but who's the next Chancellor? And what does Wes Streeting, or Andy Burnham, or Angela Rayner, or Al Khan's, or another? Think about this.
15:38 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, they all like to say, well, government can carry on, the business of government can carry on. A lot of it will, a lot of it will carry on. But you, you're taking several weeks out of the political calendar. At a time when the reason why Labour did so badly in the local elections was in part because the country is saying, we don't feel the country's working terribly well. And we want you guys to fix it, because that's what you said you'd do.
16:03 Rory Stewart? And remember, one of the things we've often criticised the last Conservative government for was the ludicrous number of ministerial reshuffles. You know, so famously you would have ten prison ministers, eleven junior defence ministers, and so on and so forth. The first thing that will happen when the new Labour Prime Minister comes in, Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting, whoever it is. Is there'll be an enormous reshuffle because they have to look after their supporters. Some people will remain in the cabinet, I don't know, let's say one of them may decide to move Shabana Mahmood from Home Secretary to Chancellor, but that's already a huge shift. And then at the junior level, they've got to look after the people who are with them. And they're going to be throwing out quite a lot of the people who were loyal to Keir Starmer.
16:45 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
16:45 Rory Stewart? That happened, I guess, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, right? There was quite a lot of reshuffle when he took over.
16:49 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
16:49 Rory Stewart? Very different cabinet.
16:50 Alastair Campbell? When Gordon took over, was it massive? Yeah, there was pretty big reshuffle, yeah. But I think, look, I think that where I've kind of ended up on this, and you could, you could feel my sort of getting very agitated last week. I think it's very hard, very hard to see how Keir Starmer gets through this. Because the debate has moved in a way already.
17:14 Rory Stewart? Well, okay.
17:14 Alastair Campbell? From being, what's he trying to do with the country to what are these people want to do with the country?
17:18 Rory Stewart? Okay, so let's imagine I'm the whisperer to the, the, the Joe Biden's side of Keir Starmer, right? I would say, you know, it's very important for British governance and confidence and bond market that you remain. And here we are, and thanks to Wes Streeting raising Europe massively in the minds of the voters going into this make field election, Andy Burnham may well fail to get elected. Now, if Andy Burnham fails to get elected in this by-election in a few weeks' time, he's in real trouble, real trouble.
17:48 Alastair Campbell? Andy?
17:49 Rory Stewart? Yeah, Andy Burnham's in real trouble. If he can't get elected in that by-election to come and say, oops, I failed to get elected in what used to be a very safe Labour seat in Northern England, give me another one, can someone else resign? I'll have another by-election, have another go to get in. He's toast, pretty much. It's difficult to recover from if he fails to get elected.
18:05 Alastair Campbell? Well, the only, just, the only thing I'll say on that is he can remain as Mayor of Greater Manchester until he gets elected.
18:10 Rory Stewart? Yep, he can remain.
18:11 Alastair Campbell? If I think even, he could even stay as an MP. What he couldn't do is be Prime Minister and Mayor of Manchester.
18:16 Rory Stewart? Yeah, but his credibility and his leadership race is massively ahead of him. So Starmer might well think, well, what are the chances of Burnham being elected? And that's fifty fifty? And if he doesn't get elected, maybe Starmer thinks, oh, I, I'll be fine. Wes Streeting's very unpopular now, much less popular than he was in November. November, you saw data suggesting that Wes Streeting had maybe a third more support within the party than he's got now. He didn't manage to get his eighty one MPs. So how about a Starmer view where he's sitting there with his, with Morgan McSweeney and his mates saying? Well, actually, maybe this could be okay. Maybe Andy Burnham doesn't come in and I remain as Prime Minister for the next two and a half years.
18:55 Alastair Campbell? Well, yeah, possible.
18:57 Rory Stewart? What is it they chant? Five more years.
19:00 Alastair Campbell? Well, he says he was ten. But the thing about, and also I must say, when Wes Streeting, on the day that Wes Streeting resigned, and we had that whole sort of day of not chaos exactly, but nobody quite knew what was going to happen and what have you, there was a lot of anger around.
19:17 Rory Stewart? Against Wes?
19:18 Alastair Campbell? A lot.
19:18 Rory Stewart? No, this is
19:19 Alastair Campbell? And not just from Kestrel.
19:21 Rory Stewart? This is a famous cliche that I remember when I was going through all these conservative leadership things.
19:25 Alastair Campbell? He who wills.
19:26 Rory Stewart? Exactly. There's this famous story that you don't want to be the person who's seen as bringing down the leader, that Michael Heseltine made that mistake, you don't want to seem too ambitious, that actually the smart money is being slightly dark horse. Now, the one person who managed to defy that was Boris Johnson, who was such an enormous brand, he somehow got away with it.
19:47 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
19:48 Rory Stewart? But it's certainly true that Gove's reputation was deeply, deeply damaged by the sense that he'd been too clever by half, too political, too disloyal.
19:55 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
19:56 Rory Stewart? And so all the people like you who are like, this is the last thing we need at the moment, all those leader writers who've been pumping out articles saying Britain used to be respected for its governance around the world and now we're a laughing stock, all those Tories who are saying this is ridiculous, we can't have another Prime Minister, are blaming Wes Streeting, aren't they?
20:15 Alastair Campbell? A lot of them are. And I think that when you made a point about, I thought Andy Burnham's interview was actually quite effective in lots of ways, but I think a lot of real people will actually reach the conclusion that you reached, which is basically, hold on it, why can't you just say yes, because that's obviously what you're doing. But I just worry from the Labour Party's perspective, that the debate is, you're already seeing it going off in directions that nobody really planned. And then the other thing that I've said to you many times before, that I really resent the way that people claim to speak for whole regions and whole chunks of the population. There was this Labour MP on the television, on the radio over the weekend. Who was really going for Wes Streeting, saying, you know, the last thing the country
20:58 Alastair Campbell? wants. Lisa Nandi saying, nobody in this country wants to reopen the debate on Brexit. It's just not true. Lots of people do, including in the north of England.
21:06 Rory Stewart? Including possibly Lisa Nandi herself. It's very odd that she's, I mean, I like Lisa very much, but I seem to remember she was quite sympathetic on Europe back in the day.
21:14 Alastair Campbell? So what this guy Jonathan Hindo, who's an MP up in East Lancashire, and he's saying, you know, if I went to my constituencies, then we're going to reopen the whole debate. Yeah, if you put it in those terms, they might say, well, that sounds a bit mad. If you said that this government is getting punished because we're not delivering on the things that we promised, and the first thing we promised was growth, and if we're serious about growth, we've got to reopen the debate about European Union.
21:41 Rory Stewart? Having made the case for Andy Burnham in our last recording, where I said, you know, there could be a great story where Andy Burnham wins, proves that he can take a reform seat, comes romping in, charismatic, delivery guy. Let me make the case for West Streeting. Case for Wes Streeting is this, that actually there is a risk that everybody has become completely obsessed with reform voters. It's true of the Conservatives, it's true of Labour. And that's understandable reasons, because these are voters who are better at turning out, and they're also voters who are in these marginal constituencies that everybody's focused on. But as a number of the people in the country, it's actually not that many people. What you're talking about, when we talk about the reform voter,
22:21 Rory Stewart? only one in five reform voters have university degrees. They tend to be older than the general population, whiter than the general population. Eighty-five percent of reform voters voted Tory in 2019. Eighty-five percent voted Tory in 2019. They are an existential threat to Kemi Badenoch's Tory party, because she's trying to occupy the same space. But if you're Labour, there's a completely different strategy, right? The completely different strategy is to say, British politics has changed. You no longer need to get forty five percent of the vote to win a majority. Keir Starmer's just proved that actually you could probably be the largest party with twenty eight, twenty nine percent of the vote in the five party system.
23:00 Rory Stewart? And there is a huge vote bank of progressive, educated, more diverse, younger, pro-EU remain voters. Wes Streeting was smart, allowed the Conservatives and Reform to duke it out, chasing the traditional Reform voter. He has a huge space where he can get moderate Conservatives, Lib Dems, Greens and excite a lot of the progressive Labour base. And I think he could lead Labour in, he could be the biggest party, he could make a good coalition, he could get us back in the European Union.
23:34 Alastair Campbell? There you go. God, and why are you becoming a Labour Party spin doctor? I mean, you know, you did, you did, you did the case for Burnham last week, you do the case for Wes Streeting, we'll get you on Al Khan soon. I've got to say, I'll show you this little graphic, which the, the main story of my life dug up from somewhere. It's a graphic, ten years of elections in Wigan.
23:53 Rory Stewart? And this is relevant because Makefield is Wigan, where it's in the Wigan area.
23:56 Alastair Campbell? Correct, yeah, the borough of Wigan.
23:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
23:57 Alastair Campbell? And what you'll see, Labour has been the biggest in all of them.
24:01 Rory Stewart? Yep.
24:02 Alastair Campbell? Right, but the dark red is the three mayor elections.
24:05 Rory Stewart? Uh huh.
24:05 Alastair Campbell? So what that says is Andy Burnham pretty substantially outperforming the Labour Party at the time.
24:12 Rory Stewart? By a huge amount every time.
24:13 Alastair Campbell? A bigger man.
24:13 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah. So a lot is depending on that.
24:16 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
24:16 Rory Stewart? And, and there's been a lot of reporting from Makefield saying, whatever the, um, the national figures are, he's genuinely popular. Many of them are using buses that they credit him with providing as Mayor of Manchester. And it's not, again, we, we talked a lot about Reform voter. One of the things that comes across is that it's easy to talk about a Reform voter or a white, working class, older voter. But it's a very different story if you're talking about those voters in Nigel Farage's seat. These are east of England coastal constituencies. And, you know, what was happening in places like Norfolk, where they were taking a lot of Tory votes away, that's very different.
24:55 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
24:55 Rory Stewart? From the story up in the north. And even in the north, I think there are two different stories, aren't there? There's the difference between, I don't know, maybe a community like Eastington Colliery, which is. In a very, very extreme type of deprivation and economic challenge. And somewhere like Makefield, which is actually on the edge of rising prosperous areas like Manchester, where in fact, if you look at the data around unemployment benefits, it's not as deprived as some of the other areas of the country.
25:27 Alastair Campbell? Just to dig into the the population of Makefield, it would be 105,000 people. Ninety-six percent were born in the UK.
25:34 Rory Stewart? Yeah, compared to about eighty-five percent of the national picture.
25:37 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, correct. But it's often in communities which don't necessarily have huge immigrant population that feel most strongly about immigration as an issue. And one thing for sure, it's already started. Because Wes Streeting has put Brexit and possible re-entry into the European Union centre stage in the Labour leadership debate. Andy Burnham, when he was asked, I think it was, I don't think he knew that Wes Streeting had done this. When he was asked by Dan Hewitt in the interview on ITV, he said, I, he was, played back his words. I hope in my lifetime to get back in the European Union. And his response to that was, I'm not advocating that in this by-election. In other words, he knows that that will, Reform will really go for that.
26:22 Alastair Campbell? Now, I actually think if the Labour Party had not, since 2016, essentially conceded so much ground in this debate, that actually that wouldn't be a bad place to be. Because the one thing, one of Farage's, we've interviewed Rahm Emanuel on Leading this week, the American possible contender for the Democratic nomination. And he said, we asked him about him and the three presidents he's worked for. And he said, you know, everybody's strength is often their weakness and vice versa. I am convinced that if the Labour Party had, over the last few years, attacked Farage over his role in making every single person in this country weaker and poorer because of Brexit, we wouldn't be in the state that we're in now.
27:04 Alastair Campbell? But for Andy Burnham, that is a big risk to do at this time in this by-election. So we're back to the point about the clash of those.
27:10 Rory Stewart? And we're back to the point that all these parties, Labour and Conservative and Reform, are all fishing in the same pool. They're all trying to get the same pro-Brexit, working class, older white vote. It's, and it's partly because of the electoral mathematics. I guess if you were brutal. For Labour, where they have huge majorities in somewhere like London or central Manchester, there's not much point in them adding a couple of votes there because of our first past the post system. But it's very weird. It means that the whole of British politics is being distorted towards perhaps 20% of the population who are not very representative of the population as a whole, who are more conservative, more anti-immigration, more anti-EU. But the problem
27:53 Rory Stewart? is that is exactly the battlefield that Burnham's chosen to fight by election.
27:56 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. Well, Andy Burnham has achieved something today, which is a very rare thing. He's managed to get the Daily Star to lead on the Labour leadership election with Burnham calls to scrap VAR. What do you think of that, Rory?
28:13 Rory Stewart? Well, there we are. There we are. Listen, this is, and this is the controversial video football thing, right?
28:20 Alastair Campbell? The video football thing is exactly what it is. Yeah.
28:22 Rory Stewart? Yeah. Would you support getting rid of VAR?
28:25 Alastair Campbell? I think I probably would.
28:27 Rory Stewart? Is that because you're just a massive populist and that's just the thing to say?
28:29 Alastair Campbell? No, I just realised. Shall I tell you another fact? If Andy Burnham does win?
28:34 Rory Stewart? Yeah. Are you just saying that to flatter the listeners, the VAR thing? Do you really believe?
28:38 Alastair Campbell? No, I tell you, you know the only time that the Daily Star?
28:40 Rory Stewart? What would David Dean say if he was listening to you?
28:42 Alastair Campbell? The only time that the Daily Star led on politics during the 2001 election campaign was Brittany backs Blair.
28:49 Rory Stewart? Oh.
28:50 Alastair Campbell? So getting the Daily Star, they did the lettuce though, didn't they with those straws? But let me give you another football fact, Rory. This is, this will absolutely get the geeks.
28:57 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
28:58 Alastair Campbell? If Andy Burnham does become leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister.
29:00 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
29:01 Alastair Campbell? It means that two of the G7 leaders will be, will support the same football team.
29:06 Rory Stewart? No.
29:06 Alastair Campbell? First time in history.
29:08 Rory Stewart? No, and who will they both support?
29:10 Alastair Campbell? Mark Carney and Andy Burnham are both huge Everton fans.
29:13 Rory Stewart? No.
29:13 Alastair Campbell? There we are.
29:14 Rory Stewart? Well, that's a big news.
29:15 Alastair Campbell? So David Moyes could be Chancellor of the Exchequer in no time at all.
29:18 Rory Stewart? That's amazing. Well, look, this is terrific news. Listen, let's just finish up and then we'll go into a break. So to wrap it up again, at the moment, smart money is on Keir Starman not being Prime Minister by the end of the year. And probably if Andy Burnham manages to leverage his popularity as Mayor of Manchester and not be torpedoed, he wins the by-election and he's probably odds on, I guess, in the betting to be Prime Minister. But there's a lot of buts there. And we have this very different, I think, rather interesting candidate in Wes Streeting, who's pretty unpopular at the moment because he's wielded the knife and he's seen as a bit of a snake in the grass. But I'm really liking the shape of his policies. I think it's bold. I think it's radical. And thank goodness, there's somebody in this era of nationalism and parochialism
30:02 Rory Stewart? who's making the big structural arguments that we need for rejoining the European Union.
30:06 Alastair Campbell? I had a few exchanges yesterday with Gary Stevenson, sitting, doing a bit of reading and researching.
30:12 Rory Stewart? He's got a bit cross with me on YouTube recently.
30:14 Alastair Campbell? Did he?
30:14 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
30:15 Alastair Campbell? Did he? Well, he got a bit cross with both of us on this latest one because I've got several people sending me messages saying, have you seen Gary Stevenson's thing? He's had a bit of a go at you and Rory.
30:23 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
30:23 Alastair Campbell? And actually, he wasn't that much of a go. He basically just said we were sort of centrists.
30:26 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
30:26 Alastair Campbell? But also what he was saying, he did make some, I thought, really interesting observations. He wasn't specifically talking about the issue of the by-election. He was talking about the rise of the far right and how to beat them.
30:38 Rory Stewart? Hmm.
30:39 Alastair Campbell? And his big thing, and this is something which I think Andy Burnham was trying to do in his interview, talking about affordability, just as Mamdani won on affordability in New York. He was basically saying that the reason why mainstream parties like Labour and the Tories keep losing and getting hammered is because the big, big, big thing for people is falling standards of living.
30:59 Rory Stewart? Hmm.
31:00 Alastair Campbell? Related to inequality. So there are loads of rich, very rich people, but there's so much more poverty. But the other point he made, and this is where he sort of, he basically thinks that you and I talk to people like us.
31:11 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
31:11 Alastair Campbell? Okay. Now, I've not seen the analysis of how many actually reform-leaning people listen to us. But where I think he's got a point, and this is what Andy Burnham is definitely trying to do. This is why Andy Burnham was not. He was asked directly, do you understand why people vote reform?
31:26 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
31:27 Alastair Campbell? And he said one hundred percent. Whereas, you know, I might be tempted to say, yeah, because they're manipulated and a liar and blah, blah, blah.
31:34 Rory Stewart? Can I challenge for a second though? It's absolutely true, I think, if you look at all the data, that a lot of people who are furious with Labour and Conservative and are tempted to vote reform are motivated by the fact that cost of living is going up, wages have been stagnant since two thousand and eight, housing is difficult to afford, services are creaking. What they really are looking for is a government that's going to be pro-business, cut their taxes, cut welfare spending, get the economy going. The voters sound as though they believe that there are market solutions to this, not that they want, not that they want Gary Stevenson to come in and redistribute and steal the money from the rich and give it to the poor.
32:07 Alastair Campbell? No, I guess he would say that in terms of the politics of this, that one of the reasons why Zach Polanski has made such an impact is because he has been pretty clear about wealth tax and so forth.
32:16 Rory Stewart? But that, that's not, I think, it'd be interesting, I mean, how much of the vote that is, and I mean, we'd get on to that, that's a totally different vote broker, isn't it? There's young, green party voters.
32:25 Alastair Campbell? But there's another couple of points he made.
32:27 Rory Stewart? I don't know, there's very few of them in Make-A-Field.
32:30 Alastair Campbell? And, and also the other, the other thing, I mean, you've got this debate going on in Make-A-Field, the Greens are going to stand the candidate, whereas Caroline Lucas, former leader of the Greens, she was actually advocated with the Greens not to stand, assuming that those who might be tempted to vote Green would actually vote for Burnham and stop the far right. But the other, just a couple of other points that Gary Stevenson made, that's what we're worth thinking about. The first was, he had this line where he said, we've got to stop the beef between the left and the centre. And I, and I, yeah.
32:53 Rory Stewart? Well, he, he said he's got to stop.
32:55 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, I know, but we, no, but I tell you what, I, I actually reminded me of how we did actually try to sort of build New Labour, which was, yes, we're appealing to the centre, but we don't want to lose. We don't want to lose people that.
33:09 Rory Stewart? You don't want to rub the left's face.
33:10 Alastair Campbell? Correct. So, and I think this is something, and he actually said, the centre needs the left and the left needs the centre.
33:15 Rory Stewart? Okay.
33:15 Alastair Campbell? And that is true. And I think that, and then he's, the final point, he made ten, nine pretty big points. The other one where absolutely is right.
33:22 Rory Stewart? Blimey.
33:22 Alastair Campbell? He was an hour long.
33:23 Rory Stewart? Well.
33:23 Alastair Campbell? I did watch, he was interesting, he was interesting. He mentioned us about four times, none of them very flattering, but let's just park that, it doesn't matter. But the other thing he said, and he's absolutely right about this.
33:32 Rory Stewart? Instantly, he wrote a very good book, wrote a very, very good book.
33:34 Alastair Campbell? He did write a good book, you had your name on the cover of it.
33:36 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah.
33:37 Alastair Campbell? You even read it, which is, you know, names on covers is always the case.
33:40 Rory Stewart? Very good writer.
33:41 Alastair Campbell? He is a good writer.
33:42 Rory Stewart? Yep.
33:42 Alastair Campbell? Um, Rory trying to get back in with Gary Stevenson. But the other point he made was that this isn't just in the UK but around the world. And this is true, and I saw this in Germany, which we'll talk about after the break. The right wing parties, these populist right wing parties are so much better at social media than. And I've been watching, looking at Andy Burnham's stuff, and it's fine, it's fine, but it's on a different level. What the right do is on a different level. And the other thing he talked about was funding. He was making the point that when these sort of upstart right wing influence start up, they suddenly get money, getting given big donations to build them up. And then suddenly they end up on Joe Rogan because there's this international network.
34:24 Alastair Campbell? And so I thought there was a lot in there that the Labour Party needs to get its head around because the truth is, on social media, both of the two main, the two main parties, Labour and the Tories, they're still, to my mind, pretty lame. You know, I'm lame because it's not my thing, right? I'd like to think the podcast is better, thanks to the team that we have doing it. But, but that is, so the point he was making to me, he actually said, he said, you, me, you're like a general sitting above and you sort of think you're ordering troops. But out there, the troops are all fighting in a different way. They're not reading, they're not listening to the BBC, they're not listening to newspapers. They're sharing anger making videos about Muslims and they're all, that's why.
35:04 Rory Stewart? And rich people.
35:05 Alastair Campbell? And rich people, exactly. So I do think that we've, and my argument to him is I don't want to, I don't want to get into the same means of fighting for the lying and the disinformation and all the other stuff. And bear in mind, Farage is going to chuck so much money at this pollination and they've got a lot of money to chuck. But I just thought you should watch his, he did it yesterday, he came out yesterday, it was interesting.
35:26 Rory Stewart? Good. Okay, will do. Let's take a quick break and then back for more.
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36:51 Rory Stewart? Welcome back to The Rest Is Politics. Me, Rory Stewart.
36:53 Alastair Campbell? And me, Alastair Campbell.
36:55 Rory Stewart? Now, Alastair, I would love to hear what you picked up in Germany. You've been Germany for the last week or so?
37:00 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
37:00 Rory Stewart? Yeah, gone. So, German politics, really interesting. How's Metz doing? How's the greatest economy in Europe doing? How's, how's the FD doing? Are we going to be able to have the middle powers led by Germany recreating the global order? How's Germany-Trump relations going? Germany?
37:16 Alastair Campbell? If people can remember those questions in order, badly, badly. Too well, and I don't think so. Okay, so Metz is doing very badly. His ratings are now just absolutely tanking. We went up to the very, very north. In fact, it was rather startling to arrive at the hotel and there's a gigantic portrait of Angela Merkel. Right up on the Baltic coast.
37:42 Rory Stewart? In, in former East Germany.
37:43 Alastair Campbell? Former East Germany, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
37:46 Rory Stewart? Right.
37:47 Alastair Campbell? Is the, is the, the land, the state.
37:48 Rory Stewart? And am I right? This is like AFD territory?
37:50 Alastair Campbell? Well, interestingly, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and below us, Saxony and Haald.
37:56 Rory Stewart? Right.
37:56 Alastair Campbell? Okay. These two states, the reason why I was particularly interested to go to, go, go into this area, they are the two states that have elections in September.
38:04 Rory Stewart? Okay.
38:04 Alastair Campbell? And as things stand. The AFD are going to do well.
38:09 Rory Stewart? Okay, how does it look?
38:10 Alastair Campbell? Well, so if you start in Saxony and Halt. The the current minister president was their kind of prime minister. He's called Sven Schultze, and he only took over in January because his predecessor was in real political difficulty. So he stepped down to improve their in their prospects. In the result in the last election was twenty twenty one, the Christian Democrats, Maastricht's party, got thirty seven point one percent. The AFD got twenty point eight, but that which was a which was down from their previous vote. And then the LINKA got eleven and the Social Democrats got eight. So the Social Democrats not very big there. Latest poll last week, AFD forty one point four, CDU twenty four point nine, LINKA twelve, SPD six. So that's Saxony and Halt.
38:55 Rory Stewart? Okay, just to explain again to people, remind people, AFD, strong links to fascism. Real question about whether the German Constitutional Court should actually be certainly launching investigations into some of the AFD leadership. And if they win this land, if they win the state, they actually will end up with a president there who is in charge of the police.
39:16 Alastair Campbell? Yep.
39:17 Rory Stewart? Who's in charge of a lot of local operate very, very disturbing if you end up with them actually having proper executive power.
39:23 Alastair Campbell? And and his, this guy is called Zeigmont, Ulrich Zeigmont, and his, this is the AFD candidate. And his manifesto was as out there as it gets and big on what they call remigration.
39:36 Rory Stewart? Right, and remigration again to remind people, this is an idea that's beginning to get into British politics. And the idea is that effectively lots of people who live in your country are booted out. So reform is talking about millions of people. So not just people who are asylum seekers, but people who lack indefinite leave to remain. But some of the AFD adjacent figures are talking even about German citizens with German citizenship.
40:02 Alastair Campbell? Correct.
40:02 Rory Stewart? Being removed from the country and largely Muslims.
40:05 Alastair Campbell? And just to give you a flavour of the of the rhetoric, this is what he said at the launch, let's take back our country. In other words, it relates to take back control, make America great again, et cetera. Bit clamp down on immigration, as you say, huge support for large families. And a family means a man and a woman and lots of children.
40:24 Rory Stewart? Okay.
40:25 Alastair Campbell? Pushing back on all sides of that. The stuff that really worried me, there's one of the slogans that they that they run is. We have to stop recognizing Ukrainians as war refugees. They are broadly pro-Russian. Um. It was interesting how I I watched a documentary while I was there about why they were doing so well in this area. Quite a lot of people, elderly people in particular, saying, you know, why are we giving all this money to Ukraine when we've got so many of our problems here?
40:51 Rory Stewart? So so to what extent is this um similar to reform voters and to what extent it's different? Similarity, I guess, they both are very, very focused on the question of immigration and control of immigration. Different is that this isn't connected, as it would in Britain with Brexit, instead of which it's connected with the strange relationship between East Germany and West Germany. And is there a sort of different feeling to this area of Germany to what you'd expect to see in a classic reform voting part of Britain? Does it feel different?
41:23 Alastair Campbell? It does, yeah. I mean, we we, you know, we were driving around and the place, I said to Fiona at one point, that we were going through all these kind of quite small towns and villages. They all feel very clean. Whereas a lot of the, you know, this this the left behind communities in Britain, you always feel very.
41:41 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
41:41 Alastair Campbell? So, you know, the way you, I didn't see the whole shuttered up shops phenomenon that you have here.
41:45 Rory Stewart? So you you wouldn't necessarily have complaints that public services are collapsing, high streets are shutting.
41:52 Alastair Campbell? No, not in the same way, not in the same way. And the other thing, I've got to say, particularly in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, apart from one waiter in one restaurant, we didn't see a single non-white face. And yet, this is the place where, so at the last election in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
42:08 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
42:08 Alastair Campbell? This is Merkel's constituency, population's smaller than Saxony and Haald, it's about one point six million or something. Uh. The last election, the the governing coalition in twenty twenty one before the election was Social Democrat CDU.
42:21 Rory Stewart? Yep.
42:22 Alastair Campbell? After this election.
42:23 Rory Stewart? Yep.
42:23 Alastair Campbell? The after the twenty twenty election. The Social Democrats got forty percent.
42:28 Rory Stewart? Yep.
42:28 Alastair Campbell? And they went into coalition with Dílinka.
42:30 Rory Stewart? Okay.
42:30 Alastair Campbell? Left party, okay. You look now.
42:33 Rory Stewart? Yep.
42:33 Alastair Campbell? And the AFD, which got roughly seventeen percent, I think, last time.
42:39 Rory Stewart? Yep.
42:39 Alastair Campbell? They've more than doubled it.
42:41 Rory Stewart? Okay, so.
42:41 Alastair Campbell? So they're now ahead.
42:43 Rory Stewart? So one of the themes that we're seeing, and maybe this is a good transition to Hungary, is party loyalty is collapsing all the way across Europe. So France, Germany, increasingly Britain. The fact that your parents, grandparents voted for a particular party doesn't seem to make any difference.
42:57 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
42:58 Rory Stewart? Between one election and another, vote shares can double, you know, millions more people vote. The other thing that, though, that you're picking up, particularly in Saxony and Halt, is that it's the sense it's a very, very strong right wing vote. And that's an interesting thing as we move to Hungary, because there too, the left is getting very, very little vote, even if there's a split between the far right and the right.
43:19 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And then, of course, the other thing that this gives rise to, so let's just say, for example, this guy, Sigmund, in Saxony and Halt, let's just say he does get, I don't know, over forty percent.
43:28 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
43:28 Alastair Campbell? The angst that is running through the main parties at the moment is whether they can keep to this thing about the so-called Brandmauer.
43:35 Rory Stewart? Yeah.
43:35 Alastair Campbell? The firewall.
43:36 Rory Stewart? Which.
43:36 Alastair Campbell? So none of the other parties will go into government.
43:38 Rory Stewart? And to be fair, Metz is holding that line, but there will be people in his party, which is, you know, the equivalent of Kemébád Nács conservatives, who will be thinking, no, no, no, no, we need to go into coalition with them.
43:48 Alastair Campbell? Not least because, for example, in Töringya, another of the German lender, the CDU are in coalition with the Tsar, the Bundestag und Vagenknecht.
43:59 Rory Stewart? Which is the far, far left.
44:00 Alastair Campbell? Breakaway far left.
44:01 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
44:02 Alastair Campbell? So it's like, I mean, I suppose it's like, yes, it'd be like Kemébád Nács going into her party, going into coalition with Jeremy Corbyn.
44:09 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
44:10 Alastair Campbell? In your party.
44:11 Rory Stewart? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. The new Jeremy Corbyn.
44:12 Alastair Campbell? The new Jeremy Corbyn away from the Labour Party, to the left of the Labour Party. So that, that's sort of getting up there. So it was, look, on the one hand, we were swimming in beautiful water. We were seeing lots of nice, happy-looking German people, having lots of interesting conversations. But the politics are, I would argue, in a really bad state. And Metz, he's starting to look really kind of troubled by it. He's got this thing of answering questions very directly, which you and I both support, but you do have to be a bit careful. So basically, he's just about got over the rail with Trump about saying, you know, you completely screwed up in Iran. He was asked whether he would advise his children to go to America, and he said, no, not at the moment.
44:53 Alastair Campbell? Not with everything that's going on there. So that sort of made big headlines in America.
44:57 Rory Stewart? Um. Final thing before we go into Hungary. Um. One of the things that's so troubling about your German story is that often, if you were Gary Stevenson or someone, you would say the reason why people are voting for the far right is cost of living, austerity, creaking services, rubbish NHS, roads not working, councils not working, everything being ground down. But Germany is a lot better than Britain on a lot of those end of case. Not perfect. I mean, Germans listening to this will grumble. But it would take a hell of an effort for any Labour government to get the standard of public services, street cleaning, local services up to German levels. And even when you get up to German levels, forty percent of people are voting for the AFD.
45:38 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. One of the things I argued with Gary Stevenson about yesterday, because he was saying that the right wing parties are the only ones who are giving people a clear answer to how they're dealing with living standards. And I said to him, hold on a minute.
45:51 Rory Stewart? What is that?
45:51 Alastair Campbell? Well, he said, you, you, people like you and me, you think parties have to come, opposition parties have to come up with thought through policies. They don't. They just want people to think because this law haven't dealt with immigration, the economy's screwed.
46:06 Rory Stewart? Right.
46:07 Alastair Campbell? So he's basically saying it's not that they've got policy, but they've got an argument, which in this new media landscape is proving to be very, very powerful. So, but I'm going to, with the benefit of having now been back a few days, I'm going to write a piece for our newsletter about the German situation, because it is fascinating. And if you want to sign up to that, go to the episode link in the description below.
46:27 Rory Stewart? And the newsletter actually is definitely, if you haven't signed up, definitely worth signing up for. Getting a lot of high quality journalism out of Alster, but we're also actually getting some amazing commissioned pieces by independent journalists. It's becoming quite an interesting magazine.
46:39 Alastair Campbell? And Izzy, our newsletter staffer, I think we call her, is churning it out. Excellent stuff.
46:46 Rory Stewart? That's a great, great, great thing. Final thing, Hungary.
46:48 Alastair Campbell? I do think it's interesting. I mean, I've, I've, I do, I sent you a couple of videos. There's Aurban in power for forever. And one of the issues that led to him being brought down was the, was the issue of corruption and cronyism and oligarchism. And Majiar, who's taken over, he's putting out these fascinating social media posts where he's basically just taking people, including the media with him, on a tour of the government infrastructure that Orban built. So, for example, going around offices with these incredibly valuable paintings, which ought to be in the National Gallery, that is suddenly pitched up in Orban's residence or his office, taking them to, showing them
47:30 Alastair Campbell? Orban's house and saying, how, you know, I know what the salary is because that's the salary I'm on now. So how has he got all this? He's also said that Orban changed the arrangement so as that when he, if and when he lost office, he would get a very big payoff. And Majiar has said, no, you're not getting that. I'm going to give it to Ukraine. So he's sort of, now, you could say, well, that's a pretty populist move as well. But I think what he's doing is signalling as hard as he can, particularly to the European Union. I am very, very different. The European flag was flying from the parliament the other day because they need the money that Orban's moves meant it was locked up.
48:07 Rory Stewart? And I guess that the signal for Wes Streeting or Andy Burnham might be that. Put the European flag on the building and go after reform on corruption. Go after them on funding, corruption, expense. That's the thing you have to keep pounding. Without sounding too much like Gary Stevenson, I, I would say that the key argument to make here is these are people who present themselves as speaking for the real people against the corrupt, out of touch, plutocratic elite. And boy, the whole thing is crazy, rolling in millions and millions of pounds coming in from crypto donors from Thailand, whole series of people who've made their money in business deals around the world in ways
48:49 Rory Stewart? that are pretty difficult to track. I mean, take, take a camera and film some of Nigel Farage's five houses.
48:55 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
48:58 Alastair Campbell? The, um, no, cause this, this, um, this five billion, five million thing, we still haven't got to the bottom of it. He's changing his story every five minutes. By the way, Rory, I think I'm right. We've got through a whole episode without mentioning the word.
49:10 Rory Stewart? Yeah, well, we haven't. Well, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't try, but, but there might be a bit of a clue on how you might go after him too, because I'm not mentioning the ballroom, on which let's finish for the day. Do come back, listen tomorrow to question time where we've got some great questions which will allow us to do a deep dive on US-China, on Russia, on Ebola, international aid and the far right. A lot of things to cover tomorrow.
49:32 Alastair Campbell? See you.
49:38 Speaker 06 Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd.
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51:02 Speaker 07 Espolone Tequila, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Copyright 2026, Campari America, New York, New York. Drink responsibly.
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