411. Question Time: Gaza’s Aid Blocked, Trump’s Power Tested & Dominic Cummings’ Big Mistake

What was the most significant event of geopolitics in the last 30 years? Are Dominic Cummings' comments about the "broken" Westminster model valid? And, should politicians be clued up on popular culture? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all of these questions and more. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to Question Time episodes to live show tickets, ad-free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to ⁠therestispolitics.com⁠ to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: ⁠apple.co/therestispolitics⁠. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit ⁠GetFuse.com/Politics⁠ ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ ⁠nordvpn.com/restispolitics⁠ It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to ⁠www.goalhanger.com⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@restispolitics⁠⁠ Twitter: ⁠⁠@RestIsPolitics⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Assistant Producers: India Dunkley, Evan Green Video Editor: Josh Smith Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:44Rory Stewart?

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

• 2:47Alastair Campbell?

  And with me, Asda Campbell. Let's start in Gaza Rory and the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Stephen Rakes. How do you two personally know what to believe about Gaza when there's so much misinformation? Journalists can't get in to report from the ground. Take the 31 Palestinians killed in Rafa this weekend. The IDF are straight out saying the reports are fake. Jennifer Brown. What can individuals do for the starving in Gaza? Do donations to Share a Meal, the Red Cross, et cetera, actually get to people? What can governments do? Airlifts, delivery by sea? It is horrible to watch.

• 3:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, a couple of things. Firstly, it's very difficult to get clear news out of Gaza. Because people like Jeremy Byrne and the BBC are not allowed into Gaza. So most of the reporting we see is from Jerusalem, from Israel, not from Gaza at all. And the people who are operating in Gaza, which is Al Jazeera, a lot of their journalists are getting killed. There's no doubt that sometimes the stories that come out of Gaza from Hamas are false. So sometimes Israel is right to say that that was false. And equally, Israel itself has clearly made things up and lied. And that was true in terms of the killing of the aid workers a few weeks ago when they were buried in shallow graves and accused of being terrorists who'd advanced without lights on when all the video evidence showed otherwise.

• 4:06Rory Stewart?

  And this is a problem that we're seeing a lot around the world. And one of the reasons we don't really know much about what's happening in China and why reporting from India is getting less good is because people are just not allowing access to journalists. Quickly on the aid thing. So listeners will probably know, or most listeners will probably know, that Israel has effectively blocked the traditional UN humanitarian delivery mechanisms. So there were these enormous UN mechanisms, which have been running since the Second World War with very, very practice partners. And if you go to a UN camp in South Sudan, for example Somalia, you will see UNHCR or IOM organising the camp.

• 4:51Rory Stewart?

  You will see Save the Children, you'll see the Red Cross. You might see Medsens Frontière, these kind of big international NGOs, IRC, your friend Dave Miliband's thing. And they are very, very, very experienced in doing this. They know how you organise the lines. They know what kind of food you should be delivering when, what kind of emergency nutrition to bring, what kind of psychosocial services, a pretentious way of saying, how do you find a child that's being raped or abused or has some trauma and how you deal with that? Instead of which, what Israel's tried to do is essentially contract a pretty inexperienced private contractor to come in and deliver some assistance in very limited points. And the result has been an absolute disaster.

• 5:35Rory Stewart?

  They are doing it exactly in the way that the UN wouldn't do. They're concentrating people after 60 days so that there are basically riots to get to the food rather than spreading out the distribution. They're giving out things like pasta that need to be boiled in water when there's no clean water. There are no proper psychosocial services surrounding it. And the only way that you're going to sort this out is by giving it back to the people who have the capacity and the knowledge to do it properly.

• 5:58Alastair Campbell?

  I think the other thing that is a part of this. You and I both keep banging on about Doge and Musk and Trump getting rid of or cutting USAID and the knock on effect then of we did the same in the UK, cutting back on overseas aid and development. When you've had propaganda going from the White House, echoed by Israel, that these aid organisations are sort of, you know, radical left wing lunatics, when actually these are incredibly brave people, genuinely committed to public service, trying to help people who are starving or, you know, fleeing war and conflict. And then to sort of put this thing together, I'm almost at the point of wondering whether it's been

• 6:40Alastair Campbell?

  designed to create this chaos. The question about what, you know, what, how do we know? How do we find out what's true? You kind of have to make a judgement based upon all the different things that you hear and see. And certainly on these incidents that Stephen Raich in his question is talking about, you know, I listened to an interview with the doc, one of the doctors who was treating the people who had been brought from the incident at Rafa into his hospital, where he said they were suffering from blast and gunshot wounds. So that there had been shooting of civilians, of people who were queuing or

• 7:22Alastair Campbell?

  trying to queue for food that they were hoping to get. I don't think there's any doubt. And I think I'm afraid, you know, the old cliche about truth is the first casualty of war. It's very hard to believe anything at the moment that comes out there. And I think this goes back to a point I've been making from the start about, about the way that some of the Israelis communicate. They are absolutely brutal in the way that they put over their, their messaging. And I'm sorry, I think they've, I think they've made themselves largely unbelievable. And that's, that's, I think, to their detriment, as well as to the detriment of people trying to understand what's going on. But watching, there were some aerial shots of the, these crowds gathering and the

• 8:04Alastair Campbell?

  chaos that followed. And I've got no doubt there are really bad people in Hamas who've been ripping off food and what have you. But those international organisations that you talked about, Roy, they're used to dealing with that stuff.

• 8:15Rory Stewart?

  To add to it, there are not just Hamas in Gaza. There's also alternative tribal crime-linked families in Gaza, which have traditionally been supported against Hamas, who are actually involved in a great deal of the looting as well. I mean, the lack of any administration, the lack of the ability to stand up any kind of legitimate authority, any Palestinian authority, at the same time as Israel refuses to take responsibility or declare a formal occupation, essentially means that the whole thing is also, in ways that we don't report enough, often very, very lawless. But, and that's something Israel

• 8:57Rory Stewart?

  will point to, but of course, Israel isn't taking responsibility for the fact that, to a large extent, that lawlessness is caused by the fact that it isn't making any steps to help set up any kind of government.

• 9:07Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I think Jennifer Brown, though, on your question, what do individuals do? Do donations actually get to people? They do. And of course, those who oppose do-gooding, like the right-wing newspapers and so forth, they like you to believe that all the money that you give to a charity goes on fat cat salaries and people flying business class and all that old stuff. If you give to charities, some of that money at least is going where it is needed. And even the charities that can't get in there, they're worth supporting anyway. And I think these charities are needed now more than ever.

• 9:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Very, very quickly, a shout out for the fact that if you're interested in supporting humanitarian causes, which is supporting refugees and people who are starving in very concrete ways, look at the Disaster Emergency Committee, which is a fantastic organisation, which coordinates charities and appeals in the UK. Look at well-established blue chip organisations, Save the Children, IRC. Look at people doing innovative things and cash, like GiveDirectly. But generally, there's a lot of good stuff out there and to choose from. And don't get into a cycle of thinking there's nothing you can do.

• 10:16Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. Also, we didn't mention on the main podcast, we normally plug, happily plug our leading interviews, but Jacinda Ardern, former New Zealand Prime Minister, and I thought one of the best bits in her book. Was when she was writing about handling the Christchurch massacre as Prime Minister, and she had a conversation with Donald Trump, who said, is there anything I can do to help? And she said, be kind to your Muslim community. And I just think sometimes that, yes, I think people feel absolutely helpless at the moment. They're watching the news, they're seeing these kids in absolute abject desperation, starvation and so forth. And I think we've just, you know, we can't get in there. Jeremy Bowen can't get in there, as you say, lots of the agencies can't

• 10:59Alastair Campbell?

  get in there, but we, we, we should still support the ones who are trying, put it that way.

• 11:03Rory Stewart?

  Following on from your just in trade, and here's a question for you about women in politics that this follows on from the excellent listener question from Catherine Dunn, who asked why young women are being taken for granted politically. I'm 22 years old, involved in politics since I was 14. She works at the Senate for a Welsh Labour member. She's interested in becoming a Senate member, a member of the the Welsh Parliament, and applied to be a candidate when applications opened earlier this year. School governor, local youth organisation leader, but she thinks she won't be successful because older party members often don't take young women seriously as candidates. Young women are ignored in policymaking. There are threats of violence against female politicians, mainly online, which are not dealt with effectively

• 11:43Rory Stewart?

  within politics. And then Lyn Cockerfi, and then I'll hand over to you. None of the political parties ever tried to appeal to women. If they did, they'd be making offers around childcare, the two child benefit cap, social care, maternity leave, legalising abortion, making our streets safe, sorting out misogyny in politics. But no party is interested in this. And sorry, I broke my promise, Sarah Peters. As a woman under 30 in politics, the Green Party is, in my view, the only truly left wing major UK political party. Labour have lost so many of us as a demographic by mimicking right wing policy and rhetoric. Why should we trust a party that can't keep their promises or do what they're supposed to stand for? Over to you.

• 12:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And then maybe finally, we did get lots of responses to this, asking young women to tell us whether they thought it felt ignored, and if so, why and what we should do about it. And I think it's fair to say from the responses that, yes, they do think that young women are ignored, possibly taken for granted. Interestingly, in the Polish election, there was a gender divide on the voting, that more young women voted for the liberal, more saw mare and more young men voted for the more right wing guy. Final point here, maybe from Angie, Jacinda Ardern proves it can be done. I really do think there is a progressive female Prime Minister of the UK's future out there and it's not too far away.

• 13:02Alastair Campbell?

  And Jacinda Ardern did prove it can be done and really did put kindness and compassion at the heart of her politics. But in a way, her experience then underlines the problem that these young women are highlighting because she did and continues to suffer an awful lot of online abuse, an awful lot of misogyny, a lot of hatred. And she sort of made the point that she had to protect herself from it. She didn't say that she left because of all the kind of negativity. She basically said she left because she felt she was running out of steam and she wasn't operating at the standards she felt she should. But I think that constant negativity erodes your sense of self-confidence and your belief that you can do stuff.

• 13:47Rory Stewart?

  And so let me, let me sort of pin you down. I mean, some of this is very directly against the Labour Party. I mean, this is somebody who actually wants to be a Welsh Labour Member of the Senate, saying she doesn't think the Labour Party is going to take a cireracy as a candidate. And someone else saying, Labour's lost her, she's going green. And Lynne's saying, no party's actually interested in female issues. I mean, what, what do you think about that? I mean, imagine your Keir Starmer, imagine you were trying to put a coherent policy together. Why isn't the government doing more to win over women? What could it be doing to win over women?

• 14:18Alastair Campbell?

  This comes from the, the starting point. The question that started this debate off was whether enough attention is paid to young women or whether it's all about young men. And I think there has been huge focus on young men. I think that TV programme Adolescents sort of brought it to a head in a way. And we've seen, you know, in the whole sort of Andrew Tate stuff and online hate and misogyny and pornography and all this stuff that we, that we know about. And we've got Jonathan Haidt coming up on, on leading soon, the social media guy who really is, author of Anxious Generation, really wants us to sort of crack down on this stuff. This feels to me like an area where a section of the population feels taken for granted. And your answer to what should Labour be doing, do not take any section of the

• 15:03Alastair Campbell?

  population for granted, and understand where these arguments are coming from. So for example, there's another one here, MZ0202, Keir Starmer pledged to tackle violence against women and girls, so far has done nothing. That's 50% of the population is ignoring. Now, as I understand it, Jess Phillips has actually done quite a lot in this field, but here's somebody clearly who doesn't feel that that is something that they're aware of, they've heard of, that they therefore can see as a priority from the government. I need to think about this, I'm not sure what the direct answer is, but I think what you're seeing here is, and you know, you and I get this out when we're out and about, I sense a real sort of gender divide

• 15:46Alastair Campbell?

  amongst young people, and we shouldn't overstate it because, you know, you'll get very right-wing populist women, and you'll get very, you know, woke for want of a better word, young men. But I think there is a sort of hardening of views amongst those young men who feel that politics is just completely failing them for one set of reasons, and a different set of reasons amongst young women who feel that politics is failing them, but they don't even feel they're being heard. So I think this starts with them being heard and listened to, and their concerns addressed. Keep your responses coming though, people, thank you. Right, Joya D., please can we have an explainer, that's your tage, Rory, on Trump's tariff

• 16:28Alastair Campbell?

  court appeal. Where are we now, and are the tariffs here to stay? Ultimately, who will win, Trump or the courts?

• 16:34Rory Stewart?

  The Trump administration, both last time and this time, have implemented tariffs. And the first time, largely the courts allowed them to do it, because they thought that what they did was in one case about national security, in another case about dumping practices, and that these referred to the 1962 and 1978 four trade acts. But this time, he's done something different. So what people will remember is with his famous Liberation Day tariffs, so this was April the 2nd, not April Fool's Day, he announced these tariffs that went to everybody, including the Penguins. Then he brought them down to 10%, and now he's signaled that Europe and China and everyone could be hit with 50%.

• 17:17Rory Stewart?

  A US court has ruled that he does not have the power to do this. What he did is he used emergency powers really designed for wartime. And the Supreme Court in the United States has tended to rule that when presidents start using weird ancient decree powers, they need to get some authorization from Congress to do so. And in this particular case, Congress is supposed to have, not the president, but the legislature, control over trade policy. Another court has now come in and said basically that the tariffs can stay in place to give Trump time to appeal. So the situation is if you are importing to the United States, you're still paying

• 17:58Rory Stewart?

  the 10% tariffs and the US government's still collecting the 10% tariffs while the courts try to get round to hearing this case. Trump is enraged, and it underscores two things. One of them is the continuing uncertainty which stops business investment because you simply don't know. I mean, you know, you might have thought in January, I need to move my production to the US because if I don't, I'm going to be hit by 10% tariffs or 50% tariffs. Now you think, well, who knows what's going to happen because he's playing the hokey-cokey and the tariffs are going up and down, now the court's going up and down. The second thing is this bigger issue around the fact that so far, at least, and thank goodness, Trump has tended to try to work around the courts, not openly defy them.

• 18:43Rory Stewart?

  Vance talks much more macho language about not implementing court decisions, but Trump tends to send new bunches of lawyers and tends to work his way around the back. We haven't yet got into explicit situation of Trump explicitly refusing to implement the decisions of courts.

• 18:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, we are definitely heading in that direction. And you get, you do get the feeling that he's sort of spoiling for that fight at some point, but he's probably keen to pick the right moment. Okay, well, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and talk about what on earth's going on in that stable, modern, progressive country, the Netherlands.

• 19:21Speaker 02

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• 21:15Alastair Campbell?

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

• 21:18Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 21:19Alastair Campbell?

  So Harry Cooper, what's next for Holland following the Dutch government's collapse?

• 21:25Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I guess, will they get through this without another election? I don't know. The government has collapsed because Heert Wilders has pulled the plug because he didn't feel that his ideas on asylum and immigration were being taken seriously, taken forward or properly implemented.

• 21:41Rory Stewart?

  And I think if I'm right, unless I'm being too grand about this, this is the theme that we might see repeated because in Austria, the far right has a lot of power. And of course, in Germany, the far right has a lot of power. They're not in the government, but they are now ahead in the opinion polls. And immigration's right at the heart of that. So there are these unstable coalitions which have got the right on the side, saying what we want to do is actually challenge the European Union's rules. And Germany is pretty close to doing this, actually even under Metz's government, of challenging the European Union rules around asylum and what you can do on borders, which calls into question Schengen, the European Court of Justice, quite big stuff in terms

• 22:25Rory Stewart?

  of the functioning of the European Union. And in the case of the Netherlands, Heert Wilders, because he was in government, has basically been able to collapse the government over it. And in each case, I guess what they will do is they will say, this government are wimps, they weren't tough enough on immigration, we want a new election and hope they'll get more votes in the next election. That's the far right, is that right?

• 22:47Alastair Campbell?

  I mean, you said at the time when Wilders came top in the election, that he would probably be waiting, biding his time, waiting to pull the plug and assume that he'd then be able to do even better next time. Because people would say, oh, to hell with them. They can't even keep a government going. We'll see, because the reaction of the other parties predictably has been very, very angry, basically saying this is all sort of about his opportunism. But, you know, you have this poor guy, Dick Schuf, who's a civil servant, who's been the prime minister trying to hold this thing together.

• 23:30Alastair Campbell?

  And basically, Wilders pulled the plug with a tweet, "No signature for our asylum plans, no changes to the agreement. PVV, that's his party, is leaving the coalition", and that was that. So there'll be a meeting later today. Expectation that the prime minister and the cabinet will offer their resignation. So it looks like we're headed for more elections.

• 23:54Rory Stewart?

  And do you think this strategy will work for the far right in general, that refusing to cooperate and bringing down governments is the best way of getting themselves in a better position?

• 24:04Alastair Campbell?

  I think it can play both ways. I think actually that there's... People generally, I mean, you and I might enjoy elections because we're sort of political geeks, but once you've had an election, most people in most countries just want the government to get on and do stuff. So it could go against him, but then, of course, you're into a campaign. But he will be hoping that by the end of the campaign, people will have forgotten why the whole thing's happened in the first place. At the time of recording, we don't have the result of the South Korean election. Interestingly, the arguments about the declaration by the previous president of martial law remained a very, very, very dominant theme.

• 24:43Alastair Campbell?

  So maybe Wilders won't get the leap on this that he's expecting, but we'll have to wait and see.

• 24:50Rory Stewart?

  Remind me, is this not part of the calculation around Marine Le Pen's far-right party in France? This difficult decision about whether they support government budgets and government votes and by doing so get compromised by seeming to have sold out? Or on the other hand, stand in permanent opposition and try to gamble that in the next election, they can reject it all?

• 25:12Alastair Campbell?

  But it's hard to think that somebody like Wilders, it's a bit like Farage in the UK now. I mean, Farage... There's a sort of, you know, pretty perseverant character, he's been around for a long time. And Vildas has been around for a long time. I think he's the longest serving member of the parliament, isn't he?

• 25:27Rory Stewart?

  Yes, he is, since ninety seven.

• 25:29Alastair Campbell?

  You know, he's playing a long game, wants to end up presumably in government. The coalition was formed largely on the basis that he wouldn't be allowed into government, he individually, even though his party was. Um, so he must be hoping that this is the, he's pulling the plug at the right time. I think one of the things, I spoke to somebody in the Netherlands the other day, who said that what was, what Vildas was struggling with is that although immigration is a big issue, he wants it to be the only issue. And actually, a combination of Ukraine and Trump and China, geopolitics has become much more important. And that has not necessarily been playing to what he sees as his, his strengths. So we'll have to, we'll have to see. Now Rory, you've clearly got something um in common with the subject.

• 26:13Alastair Campbell?

  We got a lot of questions about this chap, a gentleman by the name of Dominic Cummings. And people clearly see him very much as being a bit like you. Finn Hayworth, Dominic Cummings interview with Sky. Is this a valid criticism of the broken Westminster model? So there's you and Cummings both arguing that the Westminster model is broken. Did you, I couldn't bring myself to watch this interview, but did you?

• 26:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I, I saw a bit of it and then I'm following his tweets. So we're, we're back in the normal territory, which is tricky stuff for you and me, which is there's no doubt that part of the problem that we're facing, and this is something we talked to Ezra Klein about, is that government feels all over the world paralyzed and inert. We're tied up in process and regulations and we find it really difficult to get things done. And you keep talking about this in terms of how quickly infrastructure is built in China, how slowly it's built with us. And it's going to be very difficult for the progressive centre to ever win again unless it can really demonstrate it can do stuff. And the risk is that it then gives space to the Elon Musks and Dominic Cummings of this world,

• 27:14Rory Stewart?

  who pretend they can get stuff done um by taking a chainsaw to everything. You know, I think part of the Challenge I'd want to throw back on you is how do we acknowledge that the public thinks things are broken, services aren't working, everything's far too slow and useless? And convey a sense that we get it and that we've got the energy to fix it without falling into the kind of trap of sounding like we're endorsing Cummings and Musk?

• 27:40Alastair Campbell?

  Look, I don't think we should, we should, we can endorse, I mean Cummings, I didn't see the interview I was away, I'd, he's not exactly on the sort of, on the list of people that I feel I have to, you know, look it up and wind back and take another look. I, I, I read about it. I don't think we need to worry too much about him as an individual. But the thinking that he's trying to get out there, one is to evade any proper scrutiny and argument about his role in getting us into the mess that we're in. And in part, I think by, I think it was in this interview that he said that he lost it with Boris Johnson, when he realised that Boris Johnson was a compulsive liar. Well, I could have warned him of that long before he walked through the door of Downing Street to help him.

• 28:21Alastair Campbell?

  And indeed, he knew that long before that. So there's a sort of, he, he has no kind of moral authority as far as I'm concerned. He wasn't very effective in government. And he's doing what Farage does on Brexit. Farage says on Brexit, well, if only I'd been in charge of the Brexit that we went for, it would have been different. And Cummings is sort of saying, well, if only I'd been allowed to get my hands on all the levers and change things, then the, the country wouldn't be in such a mess. I think West Streeting in his own way is showing it. The challenge of the health service is enormous. It is massive. And yet he's focused on certain metrics where things are improving. And then if you ally that to the sort of passion and lack of defensiveness that Ed Miliband showed in relation to talk about net zero.

• 29:04Alastair Campbell?

  And then you ally that to Peter Kyle and some of the energy and enthusiasm that he's showing in relation to his brief on AI. And you ally that to the seriousness with which, say, somebody like John Healy set out the, his response to the strategic defence review. I think there's a network of ministers there that can persuade people that the government, yes, the government needs to change and the ways of working government need to change. But they're already, I think, within a year, shrouded by all the negativity that we've talked about, lots, winter fuel, farmers and all the other stuff that we've talked about plenty. But actually, they're showing, I think, that it's, government doesn't need to be completely and totally blown up. In order for a specific government to make progress.

• 29:49Alastair Campbell?

  And then I think if they change the ways that they operate in relation to working with the private sector, I will, you and I, we, we got a lot of feedback from our podcast last week talking about the housing conference in Leeds, the UK reef. Because that was a great example of where people feel that the government goodwill is there, but that the systems get put in place, make things harder rather than easier to deliver on their own objectives. Well, in a big private sector organisation, I don't think that would be that difficult to fix. So we just need more radical thinking about how to fix those things. What we don't need is people like Musk to come along and say the entire thing needs to get blown up, or somebody like Cummings comes along and just has his sort of, you know, his kind of run of mad ideas that he thinks everybody should be following.

• 30:33Rory Stewart?

  Also, nobody ever holds Cummings accountable or remembers when he bullshits and lies. He managed to get an incredible amount of publicity, I'm not sure whether you remember, before the election 2024, saying he was going to set up his own party called People's Action, which he registered as a shell company, said he was going to wipe out the Tories, that he was going to raise all this money from tech donors. And he managed to get huge stories in The Telegraph and things, Dominic Cummings is setting up a new political party and he's, the Tories are toast, et cetera. Never happened. Why does nobody ask? Why does it never happen? Why does he get to portray himself as this amazing seer who predicts the future, needs to be taken seriously, envisaged a new party reshaping politics? Why does nobody remember that he bullshits?

• 31:18Alastair Campbell?

  And also, why is he allowed to do any interview without actually being pinned on all of the lies that he told during the whole Barnard Castle episode? The answer to the question, Rory, is a media that doesn't really have much of an attention span. I mean, I don't see, you know, I've, I've been looking into the Covid inquiry stuff. I tell you, a proper media would be getting front page after front page out of what's being said at the Covid inquiry right now. But that's yesterday's story. So Cummings is allowed to sort of just flit in and out of the debate.

• 31:52Rory Stewart?

  Posing as a kind of prophet and a seer, and an increasingly eccentric one. I mean, I thought very revealing, if you see his tweet, you can see somebody being drawn into that weird Musk world. It's actually very Trump. It's got a little bit of hanging out with wealthy people in the Gulf. It's got a little bit like Pete Hegseth of showing off about knowledge of classified operations, a little bit of deep state conspiracy theory. Let me read it to you. This is me quoting Cummings. If you talk to senior people in places like UAE, they tell you what big shots in that region now tell each other. Don't send your kids to be educated in Britain. They'll come back

• 32:34Rory Stewart?

  radical Islamist nut jobs. Right now, number one, this is a very weird world. This is Dominic Cummings, apparently having fun hanging out with wealthy people in the Gulf who are grumbling about their kids in British universities. All the statistics suggest there's no evidence at all for what he's talking about or what on earth he means by the Islamic nut job. In fact, if anything, people are increasingly moving their kids from American universities, British universities. Then he goes on. Terrorists being hunted from cave to cave in Afghanistan by JSOC, brackets, US Classified Special Forces, have used satellite phones to procure London barristers to bring legal cases against the MOD. Please, just one MP dare to ask the PM about this in Parliament and see what

• 33:16Rory Stewart?

  happens, right? So actually, he's a child. I mean, that's a bit like Pete Hegseth, you know, on his Signals chat, putting in all this sort of ludicrous acronyms in order to sound like he's on the inside line. It's very, very Cummings. This is how he does it. Sound confident, create a conspiracy theory, drop names, sound like he's all across classified information that nobody else knows about, and basically just hang out with tech bros in Silicon Valley, write tweets for Elon Musk, and cozy up to the Emiratis.

• 33:44Alastair Campbell?

  Be a bit of a twat. Yeah. So do you think I made the right decision, Rory, in pushing back somewhat on the original Goalhanger suggestion that my podcast partner should be Dominic Cummings? Do you think that was probably not a very good idea?

• 33:57Rory Stewart?

  It's extraordinary, the deference that he achieves. I mean, I've just been invited again to hear him pontificate about AI at something. I mean, it's amazing. He sits there stroking his chin like some equivalent of kind of Putin's intellectual Alexander Dugin.

• 34:11Alastair Campbell?

  I must admit, maybe I'm looking at the wrong things. I don't see much reverence. I really don't.

• 34:16Rory Stewart?

  His little tweet got in 143,000 views.

• 34:21Alastair Campbell?

  I've told you not to look at these Twitter metrics. Right, let's get a question from somebody who does know about this stuff. Okay. So this is a question from our Goalhanger colleague Gordon Carrera.

• 34:35Speaker 07

  Hi, Alistair. Hi, Rory. It's Gordon Carrera here from The Rest Is Classified. Myself and my co-host David McClosky have just launched a new series on Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the long struggle with the CIA. And the question I've got for you is, do you still think that 9/11 was the most significant event in geopolitics in the last 30 years? It certainly felt it at the time, but does it still look like that now today?

• 35:02Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think, weirdly, it doesn't. You're completely right. A lot of people wrote books. In fact, I wrote a preface to a book called The World Changed: How the World Changed at 9/11. I think if you compare it to stuff that happened after it, the founding of Twitter and Facebook, the iPhone, the Arab Spring, which is 2011, the 2008 financial crisis, the election of Modi in 2014, Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2014, Trump's election in 2016, the Brexit referendum in 2016, the rise of Xi Jinping to power, these things actually have turned out to be much more definitional of the world. That was a world

• 35:41Rory Stewart?

  where we thought the fundamental question was terrorists in failed states. Actually, we're now in a world which is much more about three main things: the collapse of democracy and its replacement by populism, the collapse of global trade and its replacement by protectionism, and the collapse of international intervention and its replacement by isolationism.

• 36:03Alastair Campbell?

  I guess another way of looking at it, if you take all of those events that you mentioned. Plus, say, what Putin's up to. Which of them will we still be talking about in fifty, seventy-five, a hundred years? I think the rise of China, almost certainly, unless it does a Japan. Um, social media, will we? Yeah, possibly, but it will have morphed into something completely different. Artificial intelligence will have taken over. But I think nine eleven, I think it is one of those dates that is part of language for, certainly for the rest of our lives and beyond. You talked there about the rise of the far right and populism.

• 36:48Alastair Campbell?

  I think some of that can be traced back. Um, I think that's when the, the, the sense of, of Islamophobia really kind of took on a new dimension, which fed into our politics more generally. So, yeah, very good question, and we shall look forward to listening to their, their series.

• 37:06Rory Stewart?

  Here, Alistair, is, is a question, question perfect for you and me, from James Moo, which I guess means muscles, he's a muscly guy. How important is it for politicians to be clued into popular culture?

• 37:20Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, God. Um, so Rory, who won the Champions League?

• 37:25Rory Stewart?

  Don't know.

• 37:26Alastair Campbell?

  You seriously don't know?

• 37:27Rory Stewart?

  No, don't know. No, was it Liverpool, Liverpool?

• 37:32Alastair Campbell?

  No, they won the Premier League. PSG, Paris Saint-Germain, beat Milan five-nil. You didn't know that?

• 37:38Rory Stewart?

  I didn't know that, no.

• 37:39Alastair Campbell?

  There were riots in Paris following it and a thousand arrests. Okay. Um, name one Coronation Street star.

• 37:47Rory Stewart?

  Uh, no, I haven't even watched Coronation Street. Have you watched Coronation Street?

• 37:52Alastair Campbell?

  I used to watch it quite a lot when I was a kid. Uh, in fact, on, on my plane back from Istanbul the other day, I was sitting next to this woman who was, she sat herself down and she got her laptop out and she proceeded, she lived in abroad, she lived in Saudi Arabia for quite a long time, and she proceeded to watch, as she said she's done every year since she left Britain, Coronation Street, Emmerdale. And she, she downloads them and she just binge watches them at the end of the week. I think it's quite important to be clued into popular culture, but you shouldn't force it. I think more important is that politicians understand the importance of culture. And I'm obsessed with this idea that we, even though we are a great cultural force,

• 38:36Alastair Campbell?

  the UK, I still don't think that we make enough of it.

• 38:39Rory Stewart?

  That I couldn't agree with more. I was in Japan, I saw the new chief designer of Uniqlo, this Japanese brand who's British. She was explaining how British fashion designers dominate a lot of the French fashion houses, how huge film made in the UK is and what a massive income earners, video games, digital in the UK, music in the UK, football, of course. So, no, I think it's incredibly important part of our lives. I guess my sense of the House of Commons, if I was looking around, if I was going to be mean, I didn't think the fundamental problem with the House of Commons was that my colleagues didn't know enough about football. I thought my fundamental problem with the House of Commons was they didn't know enough about China.

• 39:20Alastair Campbell?

  Listen, I do, I do agree with that. I'm gonna, while we're on the culture, I'm gonna give a big shout out to a film that Fiona and I went to see the night called The Ballad of Wallace Island. Very small cast. There was a Q and A with the cast afterwards and Tim Key and Tom Basden, who wrote it together. Carey Mulligan, the only, I mean, she's like an A-lister who was, who was in it as well. But it's a wonderful film. It really makes you feel good. And it's partly about music as well, Roy, which is, you know, is a, is a great love of my life. So, and the other thing I discovered at the, at the do afterwards is that they're all big fans of the podcast. So I think they deserve a massive shout out, The Ballad of Wallace Island. And it's a great story. It's about a guy who wins the

• 40:01Alastair Campbell?

  lottery and he goes and with all his millions, he goes and lives in this remote fictional Welsh island where he gets his favorite folk duo who used to sing together and were partners as well in life, as it were. And he entices them to his, to his, to his island because he's basically just a massive fan. And the guy gets 500,000 and the woman gets 300,000. And I won't give away the ending, but it's, shall I say, one of the smallest gigs that any musicians have ever done, but it's really, really, really funny. So anyway, cultural superpower, that's what we need to be.

• 40:42Rory Stewart?

  Very good.

• 40:43Alastair Campbell?

  Thank you for the question and we'll see you soon.

• 40:44Rory Stewart?

  See you soon, Arthur. Bye bye.

• 40:54Speaker 08

  There we are, getting a statement from Number Ten. On that flight, with three hundred and fifty passengers on board.

• 41:03Speaker 09

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 41:10Speaker 10

  We assess, Prime Minister, with high confidence it was Russian.

• 41:16Speaker 07

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 41:18Speaker 11

  They took down a British passenger jet containing three hundred and fifty people.

• 41:21Speaker 09

  Man in the Kremlin is playing, Alex. Got to ask yourself, you want to play, or not? You're the Prime Minister. You've done nothing!

• 41:35Speaker 12

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 41:37Speaker 09

  All the relevant context will be structured as a framework today, disseminated into an operation order, or FRAGO.

• 41:46Speaker 13

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 41:50Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 41:52Speaker 13

  New from Goalhanger. Who is going to be able to pull this off?

• 41:57Speaker 11

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• 42:01Speaker 13

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 42:03Speaker 11

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 42:07Speaker 13

  Devized as a technically rigorous geopolitical action thriller. We have two tight friendly key-... Where Britain plays its strongest hand... He's the best. ...against its strongest foe. Don't do it, Duffy! Bear Hunt. Available now, wherever you get your podcasts.