413. Question Time: How to solve Britain’s immigration question

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• 2:38Rory Stewart?

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

• 2:41Alastair Campbell?

  And with me Alastair Campbell. And Rory, you've insisted that we start with this question. I assume it's because you're brimming with ideas. Adam Hensall, as professional armchair critics, I might rebut that actually.

• 2:56Rory Stewart?

  Well, we do have arms on our chair.

• 2:58Alastair Campbell?

  We do have arms, but are we armchair critics? Anyway, offer us some potential solutions to the UK migration issue. At least Adam doesn't call it a crisis, he calls it an issue.

• 3:07Rory Stewart?

  Like, that's gonna be unfair, but let's imagine that I was stereotyping you. I would say you're somebody who is very comfortable with multicultural Britain, probably feels the anxieties about immigration are overdone, certainly has said on the podcast in the past that talking about it too much hands stuff to Nigel Farage. And that you don't really want to be associated with Rwanda-style politics, stop the vote, stop immigration. In fact, you used to wear a T-shirt saying something like, "Open minds, open borders", didn't you?

• 3:44Alastair Campbell?

  That was the slogan of the New European, now the New World.

• 3:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Alastair Campbell?

  I also wear a T-shirt sometimes that says, "Refugees welcome". Look, I honestly do think the first thing we have to do is to change the tone and the nature of the debate. Because the reason why we have an issue and why we do get a lot of questions about this and why it is so salient in our politics is that I think a lot of the fears may be genuine, okay, but I think a lot of the facts in quotes around which the debate is based are not. And so, for example, you mentioned the stop the boats. I completely agree with the importance of, quote, stopping the boats.

• 4:26Rory Stewart?

  You do agree with that?

• 4:27Alastair Campbell?

  Totally. And by the way, this is what so riles me up about Farage. The situation has got a lot worse since Brexit. The numbers have got a lot worse since Brexit because the systems that we depended on have eroded. So I'm all in favour of them trying to stop the boats, not least because it stops people dying needlessly.

• 4:46Rory Stewart?

  So you're not on the side of the argument that these are incredibly vulnerable needy people who are just trying to get a better life and fleeing persecution, getting on rubber boats and therefore we should welcome them?

• 4:58Alastair Campbell?

  What I'm against is them being in the position where they either, I'm in favour of, quote, smash the gangs.

• 5:05Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Alastair Campbell?

  Because it's become a big thing for organised crime. But I'll give you one idea, which I think might be worth thinking about. So as I understand it, you can no longer just turn up at a British Embassy anywhere in the world and say, I'm fleeing persecution.

• 5:22Rory Stewart?

  Which was true. When I was in the embassy in Indonesia, we had somebody hopped over the wall. In fact, we built these big walls to try to stop it happening. But when they hopped over the wall, they were taking refuge in our embassy, a bit like Assange.

• 5:31Alastair Campbell?

  So let's just say you went, but now I know the numbers are large, okay? And we don't have big embassies in a lot of the countries from which the people are fleeing. But if you were able to have your case assessed at a local level by a local diplomat.

• 5:45Rory Stewart?

  Let me say I like that idea. Not quite that idea, to lean into my slight disagreement, agreeable disagreement. I think we've taken another level. It's actually the idea that David Cameron started to pioneer, Theresa May did a lot on, which is that you rely on UNHCR, UN agency, to screen genuine cases in country. We did it first in Lebanon and Jordan on the borders of Syria with refugees, did Pakistan with Afghan refugees. The idea is that you. Give a quota to UNHCR. So let's say Britain's going to take 25,000 asylum seekers a year, but they're going to be processed outside the United Kingdom and then they're brought in. But what's the problem? The problem is that actually the tradition of international law.

• 6:25Alastair Campbell?

  Hold on, the question of the matter is solutions, Rory.

• 6:27Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, okay.

• 6:28Alastair Campbell?

  So don't give us the problems.

• 6:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Alastair Campbell?

  You want solutions.

• 6:30Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 6:31Alastair Campbell?

  I've given you a small solution.

• 6:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Alastair Campbell?

  A small part of a solution.

• 6:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, which is the processing in third third countries.

• 6:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. And by the way, you could take that into a third party organisation. And that's why, for example, I know you're in favour of the whole Rwanda thing. Now, I thought the Rwanda thing in the last government was a complete gimmick and a total waste of money. And I recently met somebody who works for the Rwandan government, who literally said the words, we so saw them coming. So we wasted a lot of time, a lot of effort, but I'm not against.

• 7:00Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 7:01Alastair Campbell?

  I'm not against some sort of processing and some sort of assessment taking place in different countries.

• 7:07Rory Stewart?

  Okay, so as usual, disagree or agree, that's not quite my position. I absolutely think that Rwanda was the wrong choice, done in the wrong way, incredibly expensive and was never going to work. But the principle behind it, which is that you look for safe third countries and you say that anyone arriving on your shores, they're coming after all from a safe country, right? They're coming from France, which is safe to Britain. You can say, look, we don't have a responsibility to put you up in Britain. What we have a responsibility to is to make sure that you're safe. And the EU did a deal exactly like this with Turkey and it had an incredible impact. They did it in the midst of the migrant crisis. The EU-Turkey deal involved the European Union providing a lot of support for Turkey

• 7:52Rory Stewart?

  and Turkey in response agreeing that they would keep people in Turkey rather than facilitating them getting on boats to Greece. It cut the numbers down in a couple of months from tens of thousands down to a few hundred. And it only broke apart because the EU-Turkey relationship broke apart. So actually, the answer to this in Britain and across Europe is partly about agreements with Turkey, North Africa and other safe third countries to take asylum seekers.

• 8:19Alastair Campbell?

  But you think the whole problem of this entire debate is that it's happening at a time when nationalism. Is in a lot of our politics more powerful than internationalism. So I would argue this thing, a bit like climate, a bit like some of the environmental challenges, is not going to be solved country by country. This is where I think we're in agreement, but I think it's how you then do it. So you've talked before about maybe every country agreeing to take a number of what you.

• 8:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, let me explain that quickly. So this is my idea that you set up. Actually, it's an idea that I developed with my friend Gerald Knouse, that you develop a global refugee coalition, where every country agrees to take point zero five percent of its population annually, right? So there's maybe five families for a town of 10,000 people on average spread across the country every year.

• 9:11Alastair Campbell?

  But are you talking there about asylum seekers?

• 9:13Rory Stewart?

  Asylum seekers.

• 9:13Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so not the economic immigration. Because we're going to need more of that as well.

• 9:17Rory Stewart?

  Exactly, so asylum seekers only we're talking about here. And let's say the UK would take 40,000 every year. So over 10 years, that's 400,000 people, a lot of people. But at the same time, Canada's taking 20,000, the United States taking 120,000, of course, easier before Trump.

• 9:32Alastair Campbell?

  Is one person a person or is it a family?

• 9:34Rory Stewart?

  One person's a person. And the idea here is that if the whole world shares the burden and sets up good criteria and you're targeting not, and this is another thing that's going to annoy some people listening to this. I'm afraid it is true that a lot of the people crossing those boats are young men who were not necessarily in lethal danger of their lives. The problems they were in might have been bad, but it's nothing like.

• 9:57Alastair Campbell?

  I don't disagree with that.

• 9:58Rory Stewart?

  What a female judge faced under the Taliban in Afghanistan, right? So you want to target the female judges from Afghanistan, not a 16 year old kid who's come over from Kurdistan, who's paid a lot of money to a people smuggler and who's hoping to bring their family over after them, because that's just nonsense, right? I'm not saying that those people are not great in many ways. I'm not buying into this idea, which the far right's trying to sell, which is that. They have made London unrecognisable and unsafe and that they're all creating criminal gangs. That isn't true at all. My experience with enormous number of young Afghans that I meet in London is that they're working incredibly hard, they're doing well in school, they're doing well in businesses, they're making a real contribution.

• 10:40Rory Stewart?

  But we do not have a moral obligation to take people from France. They're not persecuted and arrested.

• 10:47Alastair Campbell?

  So hold on, so just on that, on the France there. So sort the boats problem out.

• 10:50Rory Stewart?

  And the only way of sorting the boats problem out is if the French government want to sort it out. And the only way in which the French government will want to sort it out is if the government's brave and returns to what Yvette Cooper was talking about and then drops, which is we'll say to France, okay, we will take our share of your genuine asylum seekers. And in return, any single person who lands in British Isles, we're pushing back to France.

• 11:11Alastair Campbell?

  The other thing that Yvette Cooper could do, and I don't know whether this is on the agenda at all, but actually is to revisit the idea of identity cards.

• 11:17Rory Stewart?

  Of course, we should have identity cards, yeah. Now, that's going to involve a big, big fight, unfortunately, with actually international law and UNHCR. Because UNHCR inherited a system set up after the Second World War, where people were horrified by the fact that Jews crossing from Germany into Switzerland were pushed back by the Swiss into Germany and then killed. So the system basically is set up to say, if you can land in someone else's country, you claim asylum there, right? And UNHCR has a lot of people in it who talk as though they believe in open borders. And, and you know, when I'm teasing you about your T-shirt, I think that's part of the problem. People shouldn't be wearing T-shirts saying open borders. You obviously don't believe in open borders and it's a real gift to.

• 11:59Alastair Campbell?

  You sure you said open borders?

• 12:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, it said open minds, open borders. Yeah. So the second thing, though, that we need to talk about is legal migration. Because it would be a big mistake for any government today, anywhere in Europe or the West, to go into an election thinking that it's enough just to have an answer to illegal migrants or asylum seekers. If you don't have an answer to the much bigger numbers, which is coming to Britain in a single year, seven hundred and fifty thousand people coming in. Hundreds of thousands of them on student visas, hundreds of thousands on family visas, and a few hundred thousand coming into work.

• 12:39Alastair Campbell?

  But the reason why I talk about the way the debate is conducted, so the, I don't have the data in front of me, but the numbers involved in the small boats.

• 12:48Rory Stewart?

  Tiny.

• 12:49Alastair Campbell?

  Tiny.

• 12:50Rory Stewart?

  Tens of thousands, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:51Alastair Campbell?

  What you're talking about. You mentioned there the universities. One of the outcomes, I fear, of the spending review is that a lot of universities are going to really, really struggle. One of the reasons, now, we could argue, well, you got into the mess because of fees and then you need to get more money from overseas students, et cetera. But the debate about immigration means that I think at a time when our top universities should be doing everything to get the brightest and the best from around the world to come and study here, we're putting up barriers instead.

• 13:21Rory Stewart?

  Okay, but now, let me again disagree.

• 13:25Rory Stewart?

  I think we're confusing two different things. There was, I think, quite a smart policy which was put in place by Rishi Sunak to say the very top students in the world should be fast-tracked, so it's very easy to get a visa to come to the United Kingdom, or was under him, if you'd been Harvard, whatever. That isn't quite the same as what I see, unfortunately, when I go often to graduation ceremonies for some British universities that are not on the top tier. Often, they are actually universities that have been really struggling in terms of student numbers, financial viability, and are bringing in a very, very large number of not particularly top-notch students.

• 14:02Alastair Campbell?

  From China?

• 14:04Rory Stewart?

  No, no, I mean, an enormous number, last graduation I went to had actually come from Nigeria. And as far as I could tell, they actually only did a few weeks of study in the United Kingdom. They were an incredibly important revenue stream. They got to go back and say that they had a degree from this university. I was not certain that they were top flight students. I was not certain they were making a huge contribution to British economy. And I was a bit worried that actually what we've got here is a system where we're not funding our universities properly. So we're forcing

• 14:36Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 14:38Rory Stewart?

  to bring in people who may not actually be making a huge contribution.

• 14:40Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I've said a few weeks ago, and we said yesterday on the on the main episode that, you know, we thought there wasn't this sort of national story. Part of the national story for Britain, I think, is that this is a place to welcome the brightest and the best brains around the world. And at a time, for example, when Donald Trump is whacking the intellectual elite and the arts and humanities and top universities and undermining their reputation, we should be trying to get those people to come here.

• 15:09Rory Stewart?

  But how do we do it? And Labour's not really helping itself. One way in which you'd help it is if you produce tax breaks for them.

• 15:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 15:17Rory Stewart?

  So traditionally, the way in which people did it is they got a lot of foreign capital into the country, a lot of investment into the country by providing tax breaks for non-doms. That's been taken away. I mean, the question, the question, if you are a very talented person who's very business oriented and really wants to make money, does the UK strike you as a place where you're going to want to come in and invest, where you're going to be able to make money, which is going to be low tax, competitive, good capital markets, innovative? Probably not. The reality is at the moment that all the signals come from the Labour government don't really feel as though Britain is welcoming in money.

• 15:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, but I think you're I think you're confusing their wealth with talent. I'm not talking about getting people in because they've got loads of money. I'm talking about people getting in because they've got really good brains.

• 16:03Rory Stewart?

  But the two things are connected. So if you're if you're a really ambitious software engineer, and you could be coming from Kenya, you could be coming from China, you could be coming from India, you're coming in to live the dream of creating your amazing tech startup in AI or quantum, and your models are the great heroes of Silicon Valley. You go to Silicon Valley in the US, there's incredible amount of venture funds that will put money into your startup business. There's a culture that celebrates hard work. There's an incredible ecosystem of other people working in software. Come to the United Kingdom, you could be just a very bright Estonian coder. You set up your fintech business. Pretty soon, you're moving to real estate in the United States. And part of the problem is that there's a connection between

• 16:48Rory Stewart?

  Being the great innovator in the most productive part of the economy, which is tech. And then what happens in terms of your taxes and money at the end of it?

• 16:55Alastair Campbell?

  My final point on this, it actually restates what I said earlier about the the tone and nature of the debate. While the debate is dominated by this sense of nationalism, screaming front pages day after day in the Express and the Mail and the Sun. BBC tending to follow that agenda on the debate, government tending to follow that side of the debate, rather than sort of stand up for why we need in a vibrant, dynamic, modern economy, we need to keep our eye on the people that we need to come in. And we need to go out and get the best. Until we change that frame, I don't think we're going to crack this problem. So although Adam calls it being an armchair critic, what I think I'm trying to do is to say to people that we have got ourselves into a place

• 17:37Alastair Campbell?

  where we seem to define anyone who is not of us, not British, coming into this country somehow burdened. We're not going to be able to run hospitals and care homes and schools and prisons and all the other public services. Unless we have understand we've got to go and get people from outside.

• 17:54Rory Stewart?

  One hundred percent. But if you look at the numbers of the hundreds of thousands who are coming in, only a couple hundred thousand of them are coming in to do those jobs.

• 18:00Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 18:01Rory Stewart?

  So the majority are coming on on very different types of visas. As I say, student visas, which are not often for great universities, family reunification visas. And the talent bit, you know, really getting that talent bit right.

• 18:14Alastair Campbell?

  It's about more than immigration. It's about much more than immigration. That is where the national story comes in. Anyway, I don't know if we disagreed or agreed there in the end, but thank you, Adam, for calling us armchair critics.

• 18:25Rory Stewart?

  Now, here is a question. Hannah Colley's asked whether I'm as outraged as I'm sure Alistair is by the BBC's obsessive coverage of Reform. It completely outweighs coverage of any other party. Please talk to us about the knock on effectors. Well, first, Alistair, over to you. Tell us about BBC's coverage of Reform, what you actually thought about and why you were cross.

• 18:43Alastair Campbell?

  I don't know whether it's cross. I just think that the. I mean, they've got what, five MPs?

• 18:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, this is something you teased me about in the past, which is that, to be honest, I'd struggle often to name the chairman of any of the political parties, including Labour and Conservative, but the one chairman of a political party I really can name is Zia Yousaf.

• 19:02Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm, Labour Ellie Reeves, Conservative Nigel Huddleston.

• 19:06Rory Stewart?

  Good man Nigel Huddleston.

• 19:07Alastair Campbell?

  Greens John Not.

• 19:09Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Alastair Campbell?

  Lib Dems Baroness Caroline Pidgen. Now, why can you name Zia Yousaf? Because I know that the BBC and all the other media outlets, they have to compete. They have to try and get our attention, but honestly, to get a breaking news alert, Zia Yousaf has resigned as chairman of Reform. And then Chris Mason writing this essay like it was the biggest thing in the world, why this matters, why you should think this matters. And then two days later, Zia Yousaf unresigns and it leads the news at a time when Gaza is kicking off, LA is kicking off, it leads the news. And, and the reason why I'm-

• 19:49Rory Stewart?

  It was a great story though, it's a bit like Trump Musk, wasn't it?

• 19:51Alastair Campbell?

  No, fuck.

• 19:52Rory Stewart?

  It was kind of weird, wasn't it?

• 19:53Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, please.

• 19:54Rory Stewart?

  Zia Yousaf comes, attacks-

• 19:55Alastair Campbell?

  Excuse me.

• 19:56Rory Stewart?

  Attacks Raj and then suddenly he's back again. What's he doing going back again? I mean, it's fascinating, isn't it?

• 20:00Alastair Campbell?

  Well, hold on, hold on.

• 20:01Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 20:01Alastair Campbell?

  And I did actually have some spirited, polite but spirited exchanges with Nick Robinson at the BBC today program, because they did Zia Yousaf at the start of the week-

• 20:11Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 20:11Alastair Campbell?

  As the main, and as you know from your politics day, eight, 10-

• 20:15Rory Stewart?

  Is the big interview.

• 20:16Alastair Campbell?

  That's where the BBC says, this is the most important thing happening in the world today.

• 20:21Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I remember. I think I only got about four of those interviews and it was a big deal in my political career.

• 20:25Alastair Campbell?

  Right, okay.

• 20:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Alastair Campbell?

  So eight, 10 has sort of got this mythical status. And there's Nick Robinson. Now, I'm not saying it wouldn't get listened to and because, you know, people are thinking, well, who is this guy? Because he's just been leading the news for the last three days.

• 20:37Rory Stewart?

  Not who is this guy, we all know who he is. He's the chairman of Reform.

• 20:40Alastair Campbell?

  So the, the questions were all about, um, so why did you leave? And he sort of said, well, I felt a bit tired. I found it very exhausting. I hadn't had a holiday and this was not, and then Nick Robinson.

• 20:51Rory Stewart?

  And clearly that wasn't the reason he left, right? He must have left with a massive falling out with Farage.

• 20:56Alastair Campbell?

  Part of the reason he left was because the new MP had this thing, stood up at Prime Minister's Questions and said, would Keir Starmer agree with me that we should ban the burka? And Keir Starmer said no. And then Zia Yousaf put out a statement saying that it was a really dumb question because that's not even our party policy, which suggested things were already frayed.

• 21:15Rory Stewart?

  Zia Yousaf is a Muslim who's trying to.

• 21:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, Rory, wait a minute, wait a minute, he may be Muslim.

• 21:19Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Alastair Campbell?

  They've got five MPs. One of them has already, Rupert Lowe's already legged it, okay? They've got the woman who came in at the by-election.

• 21:28Rory Stewart?

  We've all heard of him too, I mean Rupert Lowe.

• 21:30Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. We've all heard of Sarah Pochon, we've all heard of Lee Anderson.

• 21:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, Lee Anderson.

• 21:34Alastair Campbell?

  The only one we forget from time to time is the guy who beats women up, right? So my point is, the Lib Dems, and Nick Robinson, to be fair, he said in his response to me, where I think you've got a point is we don't maybe give space to the Lib Dems and the Greens, right? But you can do that, right? So I just think that this is, and I heard, right, somebody very, how can I say this without dropping a friend in it? Somebody very, very, very, very, very, very senior in the BBC management structure. Very, very, very, very, very, very, very senior.

• 22:07Rory Stewart?

  Not dropping a minute, yeah?

• 22:08Alastair Campbell?

  You could almost say right at the top.

• 22:10Rory Stewart?

  Almost, yeah.

• 22:11Alastair Campbell?

  Of the organisation, goes around saying to people that the BBC

• 22:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Alastair Campbell?

  has to get in touch with this angry zeitgeist and this populist anger, and we've got to shed our woke image. The woke image of the BBC has been created by the people they're pandering to. The Daily Mail, the Daily Express, the Sun, and now Reform.

• 22:36Rory Stewart?

  Where Nick Robinson's got a point is that it would be completely mad for the BBC to ignore the rise of Reform. I think there is a decent chance now that something that hasn't happened in a hundred years will happen in British politics, which is that Reform will replace the Conservatives as the major party. I think populism is the big story of our decade, from Trump to melee to millennialists.

• 23:03Alastair Campbell?

  I think the media is, the question is whether they're covering it or driving it. And I fear at the moment that be, look, it's my old point that I make all the time. Too many people within the broadcasting organisations, not just the BBC, but the BBC is more important than others, that's the fact. Too many of them, they decide their agenda for the day by taking in the papers to the morning meetings and sitting around and say, oh, the Mail have splashed on it, we've got to cover it. Oh, the Times have read on this today. Oh, the Telegraph's got this piece by Robert Jenrick, talking about his latest sort of stunt. We've got to cover it. Whereas actually, I think their job is to stand back and say what is actually happening. Now, the other point Nick made to me, and he's fair, is a fair point. He said, look,

• 23:47Alastair Campbell?

  if Keir Starmer's making a speech saying reform is now the threat.

• 23:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, that's a very good point, right?

• 23:52Alastair Campbell?

  That is a fair point.

• 23:52Rory Stewart?

  The premise himself is saying reform is the big story.

• 23:55Alastair Campbell?

  That is a fair point. However.

• 23:57Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Alastair Campbell?

  That doesn't mean to me that you then say when some guy that most of your viewers and listeners have literally never heard of.

• 24:05Rory Stewart?

  No, we all have. Zia Yousaf. That's the point you just proved that.

• 24:08Alastair Campbell?

  Most of the viewers and listeners had not heard of him until the BBC actually started to think this guy's a story. Now, we're, again, I'm trying to be fair and reasonable here.

• 24:17Rory Stewart?

  Now, what?

• 24:18Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. So when I, when I had a long chat with Farage in the, the, the green room in wherever it was, where we did question time, he actually, I remember it's the first time I really clocked on to this. He said, oh, we've got this guy, you know, Zia Yousaf, who's our, he's like, he's, he's.

• 24:31Rory Stewart?

  And in the, and the.

• 24:32Alastair Campbell?

  He's shit hot.

• 24:32Rory Stewart?

  In the absolute Palace for Truth, Alsa, was there not a microsecond of a moment after Zia Yousaf's resignation where you thought, let's get him on the rest of this politics leading interview.

• 24:41Alastair Campbell?

  I, I'd still like to do that. I would still like to do that because we're a different sort of medium. I'm talking about the news, the news medium. Okay. So I, I think that it's fair. They're a story, they're doing well in the polls, but let's, let's talk about the Scottish by-election.

• 24:57Rory Stewart?

  Tell us about Scottish by-election, yeah.

• 24:58Alastair Campbell?

  So the Scottish by-election up in Hamilton last week, okay. So the whole build up was part of this, as you say, the rise and rise of reform. Now, it is newsworthy. I accept that Reform did better in that by-election than they normally do in Scotland.

• 25:12Rory Stewart?

  And the Conservatives basically completely disappeared.

• 25:15Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 25:15Rory Stewart?

  It was unbelievable, right?

• 25:16Alastair Campbell?

  Correct, that's part of the story. On the morning, let me tell you this, Roy, this will interest, let me just get you the betting odds on the day.

• 25:22Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 25:23Alastair Campbell?

  So, Roy, the by-election in Hamilton, Lark Hall and Stonehouse.

• 25:27Rory Stewart?

  Yes.

• 25:27Alastair Campbell?

  Now, normally, a Scottish Parliament election.

• 25:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Alastair Campbell?

  Would not be that big a story across the entire news.

• 25:36Rory Stewart?

  No, correct, we barely know what's going on.

• 25:38Alastair Campbell?

  The reason why there was such a build-up to it.

• 25:40Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 25:41Alastair Campbell?

  And why, when the day happened, it was live coverage was because they thought Reform might win.

• 25:47Rory Stewart?

  And is that because Farage was sending that story to them?

• 25:49Alastair Campbell?

  No, Farage actually was saying if we won this, it would be an absolute miracle.

• 25:53Rory Stewart?

  He was trying to downplay, he was doing the famous Ken Baker Westminster strategy.

• 25:57Alastair Campbell?

  He knew that he was doing quite well, so he was trying to downplay. Let me tell you what the odds.

• 26:00Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Alastair Campbell?

  At the bookmakers were the day before the by-election.

• 26:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, these bookies are always right, yeah.

• 26:04Alastair Campbell?

  SNP twenty to one on.

• 26:08Rory Stewart?

  So if you bet twenty pounds, you'd make one pound.

• 26:10Alastair Campbell?

  Correct.

• 26:11Rory Stewart?

  Well, that's rubbish.

• 26:11Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly. So in other words, we, the bookies, think it's all over the SNP have won. Reform, nine to one, second favourite, good bet.

• 26:19Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 26:19Alastair Campbell?

  Labour, twelve to one.

• 26:21Rory Stewart?

  So if you bet pound, you get twelve pounds.

• 26:22Alastair Campbell?

  And why were the bookies saying that? Because the media was building up the story that Reform might win this, and that's a better story.

• 26:31Rory Stewart?

  Well, wait a second, the bookies were saying SNP were going to win.

• 26:33Alastair Campbell?

  The bookies were saying the SNP because they couldn't believe that Reform could do it.

• 26:36Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 26:36Alastair Campbell?

  Nobody saw Labour coming. If they're the odds, and that's the conventional wisdom, why is the story not Labour have done rather well here?

• 26:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 26:46Alastair Campbell?

  Taking a seat for the SNP.

• 26:46Rory Stewart?

  That's the story you'd do, wouldn't it?

• 26:48Alastair Campbell?

  What was the BBC headline? Is Reform the real winner?

• 26:51Rory Stewart?

  When the story should have been miraculous Labour victory.

• 26:54Alastair Campbell?

  I don't care what the headlines are, Roy, it's, you know, I don't care about headlines, I care about deep arguments. But I just think it was a very interesting example of where the whole thing was framed within this context of the rise and rise of Reform. Now, it was a good result for Reform.

• 27:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 27:09Alastair Campbell?

  To get seven thousand in a Scottish by-election was a good result.

• 27:11Rory Stewart?

  And a terrible result for the Tories. What did they get at the end?

• 27:13Alastair Campbell?

  Unbelievable, wiped out.

• 27:15Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Alastair Campbell?

  So that's the story. Yeah. Don't make the story about reform. Could Nigel Farage be the next Prime Minister? The story is, is reform destroying the Conservative Party? Yeah. Who got tanked at the last election? Oh, actually, there's one other point I've got to make. What? Go on then. My highlight of the by-election campaign, I've got to say to you, Rory. Yeah. Now, this is going to be a no answer. Do you know who Graham Soonis is? Yes. Who's Graham Soonis? The footballer. Ex-footballer? Yeah. And Scottish manager and football manager, yeah. So Graham Soonis, who I know a bit, and I've always, I've never really discussed politics with him because I always, he always gave me the vibe of being a bit of a Tory. Oh, wow, okay. So there's no bother with it. And, and I thought, you know, unless you're going to volunteer, your politics don't push too much. Anyway, he came out for the Labour candidate.

• 28:00Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, and I think that might have had a bit of an impact because I don't think people knew her political view. But do you know what his big argument was? The reason why he said he wanted to get involved? No. He said, that Nigel Farage, I've seen people like him through my life, is a total chancer. Good word. Chancer, good word. So I think that, I think that had a bit of an impact. Very good. Well, let's take, take a break and back for questions.

• 28:22Speaker 02

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• 29:19Speaker 04

  Hello, I'm Gordon Carrera, national security journalist.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  And I'm David McCloskey, CIA analyst turned spy novelist.

• 29:25Speaker 04

  Together, we're the co-hosts of another Goalhanger show called The Rest Is Classified, where we bring you the best stories from the world of secrets and spies.

• 29:34Speaker 05

  We have just released a series on the decades-long battle between the CIA and Osama bin Laden. And this week, we are stepping into the devastation of the 9/11 terror attacks to understand how Osama bin Laden was able to carry out such a plot right under the nose of the CIA.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  It was a moment that changed global politics forever, shifting the focus of spy agencies away from nation-states towards hunting for terrorists and understanding the extremist ideology that drove them.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  We will then go into the decade-long manhunt for Osama bin Laden, which culminated in a dramatic raid at his compound in Pakistan in 2011, which killed the world's most-wanted terrorist.

• 30:13Speaker 04

  So if all of this sounds good, we've got a clip waiting for you at the end of the episode.

• 30:24Rory Stewart?

  Welcome back to The Rest of Politics: Question Time, with me, Rory Stewart. And with me, Alastair Campbell. And slight irony alert, which is that, of course, having said that we should have been concentrating on what was happening in Gaza, and the BBC kept talking about reform, we've just spent the last 15 minutes talking about reform. So let's get on to what you said we should have been talking about. Brian Gorch, surely you have to agree, the picture of Greta Thunberg smiling sheepishly as the IDF officer of sandwich exposes the hollowness of lefty activism. What was the real point of this stunt? Who did it help? And similar question from Charlotte Lees and Madeline. What do you think of Greta being captured? So what did you make of that moment? And just to explain, as far as I remember, this story of flotillas goes back a long way.

• 31:08Rory Stewart?

  2010, when I was newly elected as an MP, one of the first big issues that, in fact, it was the first issue, I think, that David Cameron answered in his very first Prime Minister's Questions, was about the fact that the Israelis had boarded a flotilla on its way to Gaza from Turkey. Nine people had been killed because the Israelis had rappelled onto the ship, and then they'd shot people who they said had been threatening them. And it was one of those moments, 2010, where David Cameron said, you know, as a friend of Israel, and I've always called myself a friend of Israel, and then the butt comes through. There was another flotilla that was coming to pick up Greta Thunberg, I think from Cyprus or Malta, which mysteriously exploded or had some malfunction on its way.

• 31:51Rory Stewart?

  This one she boarded. She boarded with a member of the European Parliament. They were carrying nappies, baby milk, food, small amounts, to relieve the Gaza blockade, definitely not carrying weapons, I mean genuinely was carrying humanitarian supplies into Gaza. And Katz, the Israeli security minister, authorized the arrest and the stopping of the boat, calling Greta Thunberg a pro Hamas, anti Semite, and saying Israel would not accept this form of interference. What do you make of it all?

• 32:23Alastair Campbell?

  And they're being deported.

• 32:26Rory Stewart?

  And they're being deported.

• 32:26Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I am an unashamed fan of Greta Thunberg, and I know that's a very unusual position for a middle aged, aging, white man.

• 32:37Rory Stewart?

  Who writes books about how young people can change the world.

• 32:39Alastair Campbell?

  Correct. And actually, who in that book, but what can I do, had a profile of Greta Thunberg is a very good example of somebody who decided as a teenager, I am going to make a difference. And I think she's made a massive difference in the environmental debate, albeit that it's going backwards. But I think she's a big part of that still.

• 32:57Rory Stewart?

  Is she not, and I don't know how old she is now, but.

• 33:00Alastair Campbell?

  Early twenties.

• 33:01Rory Stewart?

  Is it not quite a sort of, in a sense, a slightly tragic story? That she was an icon of a moment where we really thought that people like she were the future? And now she feels oddly kind of outdated, like a kind of boy band that faded?

• 33:15Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'm not sure about that, because it was interesting to me at the swimming this morning, a couple of the kind of my generation, a bit younger, saying that their kids had raised her. One in the context of, why has nobody been talking about this flotilla until the Israelis got arrested her? Um. But also, I think we, I think you underestimate how she still does have a very powerful in with a lot of people around the world. I mean, and certainly for somebody of her age and her background, it's pretty extraordinary. And I think that there is something really weird. When you get Piers Morgan, for example, saying, showing this shows that she's a sort of, you

• 33:54Alastair Campbell?

  know, entitled, self-obsessed narcissist. I mean, look in the mirror, mate. Why does she wind them up so much?

• 34:02Rory Stewart?

  It's interesting, isn't it?

• 34:04Alastair Campbell?

  She's an activist. She's trying to make a, the thing about Gaza, Roy, is why have the Israel, we talked about this last week, why have the Israelis been so adamant that journalists can't go into Gaza? Because they understand that in war, the battle of the narrative is hugely important. I think the reason why they were so angry with her in this boat is that just for a day or two, she sort of punctured the narrative.

• 34:24Rory Stewart?

  And the purpose of it was to say, here we are, obviously not bringing weapons, bringing humanitarian assistance.

• 34:29Alastair Campbell?

  And they don't want it.

• 34:30Rory Stewart?

  Why can't we bring it in?

• 34:31Alastair Campbell?

  And the reason they don't want it is because they actually don't want to give this stuff to the, to the people of Gaza. They've got this humanitarian fund going and they, they're pretending that this is not a kind of, you know, and here's.

• 34:40Rory Stewart?

  Well, the, the whole, the whole story is they, they are blocking UN aid and relief and humanitarian operations because they want to control who gets the aid, where they get the aid. Um, there's been a massive uptick, though, I've noticed on social media, a very, very strong Israeli narrative reemerging again, that this is all about antisemitism. This is all about pro Hamas. There was a, the posts yesterday that I was reading about saying that many Jews in Britain are fleeing Britain to move to Israel because they, they can't bear the environment that's precreated here. I've noticed, actually, there was a quite an interesting article, which people might enjoy reading by Hadley Freeman, talking about how conflicted.

• 35:26Rory Stewart?

  It feels to be Jewish in Britain at the moment. And it's an article which basically says, on the one hand, on the other. So on the one hand, Hamas wants to kill all Jews. On the other hand, tens of thousands of people are being killed in Gaza. On the one hand, these stories are coming from the Hamas Health Authority. On the other hand, etc. But what was interesting about it as a revelation of the fact that there still isn't a completely open debate on this is that the fundamental question that isn't asked in that whole article is why is the killing still going on? You can see a year

• 36:04Rory Stewart?

  ago that there was a story about Hamas, Hamas wanting to kill Jews, Israel's right of self-defense going after Hamas. But now, as we're moving up towards the two-year anniversary, the question of why it's still going on, what the strategic objective is, whether any of this stuff around humanitarian aid could be justified, why is that not being asked?

• 36:27Alastair Campbell?

  We partly discussed this answer last week. And, you know, that it is ultimately, there's a lot of, a lot of this is bound up with Netanyahu's survival, a lot of it's bound up with the hard right and the cabinet who are open about wanting to sort of drive Gazans and drive Palestinians out of the West Bank as well.

• 36:46Rory Stewart?

  But I was with a very senior, very, very, to take your words, very, very, very senior Israeli opposition figure 10 days ago. And they were saying in a speech, you know, this is very polarized. And they said, on the one hand, you have Hamas and people talking about from the river to the sea. And I was expecting them to say, on the other hand, you have Smotrich and Ben Gavir talking about Greater Israel and expelling all Palestinians. That second bit never came. This was an opposition figure who's absolutely not part of that coalition, still not quite prepared to call out Smotrich and Ben Gavir. And I thought that was very striking.

• 37:20Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of people are. There was a big march again yesterday. This thing about, if you are remotely critical of anything that the Israelis do, you are pro Hamas and anti-Semitic. I mean, It's so offensive, but they know that that is, that's the narrative that they're trying to shape because they want to stop people criticizing them, stop people calling this stuff out. That's why they hate the Greta Thunberg stuff, because for a day or two, it did get an awful lot of traction. We talked about it last week and, you know, I got a, literally, within half an hour of the podcast being out, I was getting messages from people in Netanyahu's office. One of them just said, I'm very disappointed in you. Well, I'm very disappointed in you because you're justifying, you're now justifying things that cannot be

• 38:03Alastair Campbell?

  justified. And I keep going back to the point, they keep saying that they're, you know, when you see these kids who are starving, you see, you know, civilians being killed, you see, you know, there's barely a hospital left. And they always say, we were targeting a Hamas cell, a Hamas this, a Hamas that. You know, sorry, but give us the names. Who have you killed? Who have you killed to justify all of the people who are not terrorists, who are not Hamas? Or are you now saying, because I'm sure this is what some of them, some of the people in that Louis Theroux settlers film think, they're all terrorists because they're Gazans. That's the sort of mindset that some of them have now got. Okay. This one for you, because you really want to talk about this. Yeah.

• 38:46Alastair Campbell?

  Jacob Donnelly, how could a global trade war affect our access to hardware and software needed to secure organizations from cyber threats? How is policy evolving within the UK and EU to help us defend ourselves? Well, that's one for you because you, all I've got to go on here is this brilliant article by Mutha Gledi in the Financial Times, which was pretty scary. Got to tell us about that. Well, he starts off with this thing about, you know, that there's lots of focus on the fact that Marks and Spencer got hit and it led to empty shelves and this, and it's going to cost them like hundreds of millions. But he, he starts off the, the piece with one about a company called Synovus, which provides blood testing and transfusions to the NHS. And I wonder whether this is related, even though it wasn't said, but a lot of our

• 39:30Alastair Campbell?

  papers the other day were leaning on the story that there's a shortage of blood. Yep. Um, but basically he said that two patients suffered serious long-term harm, and this was deemed to be a two. On the matrix of six for cyber incidents, and he says, we're not far off from having a one.

• 39:46Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 39:47Alastair Campbell?

  I don't, I think, I think Marks and Spencer may be the two as well. I don't know.

• 39:50Rory Stewart?

  Well, let's, let's get back to the whole story. So the normal story that we celebrate is a story where we all seem to like the nineties and the early two thousands as being an age of.

• 40:02Alastair Campbell?

  New Labour.

• 40:02Rory Stewart?

  New Labour and what I call the rules, rules based international order.

• 40:07Alastair Campbell?

  Effective government.

• 40:08Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. But the weird exception to this story is in the world of the internet and cyber. So whereas in much of the rest of the world, you know, those eras, the nineteen nineties, early two thousands was about creating international agreements, international criminal court, for example, World Trade Organization, single market, NAFTA. There was a deliberate decision, basically, to leave the internet as a kind of Wild West. And I, I don't know whether you were conscious at this time, were you sort of conscious of that, that there wasn't actually much effort made to do international regulation on cybersecurity, cyber threats, cyber attacks?

• 40:42Alastair Campbell?

  I'll be honest, I don't think we, I don't know what we thought. I think we, I think we, we saw it as being bound up in the whole excitement about globalization and, you know, prosperity. I can remember, I think I mentioned it before, that once when I, I was doing a briefing and it was about the genome project, which I knew next to nothing.

• 41:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Alastair Campbell?

  Uh, and I was asked a question, instead of saying,

• 41:07Alastair Campbell?

  I know I should know about this, but I don't, I'm a bit thick when it comes to sort of, you know, science and technology. I said what I thought was a completely bland, neutral parking question. By the time I got back to Downey Street, shares were plunging of all these sort of biotech companies because I'd said something that, and I think Bill Clinton phoned Tony Blair and said, what the fuck's going on? So I don't think we were, and I can remember Liz Lloyd, who's now back in government, working for Keir Starmer, who was then working for us, and she was very much on the kind of environmental side. I remember her sometimes talking about, you know, this tech stuff is going to be so important. We did, you know, I've said before, we did get onto the old

• 41:49Alastair Campbell?

  information superhighway, but I'd be lying if I said that we thought this was going to become quite the phenomenon it has. Tony Blair's catching up now, by the way, he's utterly obsessed with it.

• 41:58Rory Stewart?

  He's talking about one thing else. Anyway, one of the reasons why the US and the UK didn't police it is that it suited us because Five Eyes, and this has become, you know, I'm not revealing secrets here because unfortunately it's become clear through WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden, basically thought it rather suited us not to regulate it because we were from the National Security Agency, GCHQ, hacking into absolutely everything. And we thought, in a slightly smug way in those days, that the US, the UK and others had such a massive superiority over Russia, China or any adversary when it came to penetrating this stuff, getting into this stuff, mounting attacks, that it wasn't in our interests to regulate it or

• 42:39Rory Stewart?

  control it. Things then began to change because from, two big changes, I think. One of them is more and more of the world went online. So from 2005 onwards, you begin to see suddenly, you know, Gmail puts all your emails and data out there. Online shopping becomes absolutely enormous. So huge opportunities for criminals. And the second thing is then states beginning to do it. So Russia mounts a big attack on Estonia in 2008. And then you get the fake news stuff happening. So you get the Syrian cyber army putting out a fake tweet from

• 43:20Rory Stewart?

  the Associated Press, saying the White House is on fire, which tumbles the US stock market back in 2014. And then you get this agreement between the criminal gangs and the governments, which you see particularly in Russia. Essentially Putin lets the hackers get on with it, and a lot of them are mafia groups, provided when he rings them up and says, could you help me out here on a cyber attack? They get in behind him. There was a big attack against Ukraine, which wasn't actually as effective as it might have been if it had been mounted against the UK or the US, because a lot of Ukraine wasn't connected as much as would be the case the UK.

• 43:58Alastair Campbell?

  Where are you getting all this from?

• 43:59Rory Stewart?

  Well, so I've read a couple of books, read a couple of great books. Scott Shapiro, Fancy Bear Goes Fishing with a PH. There's another book, which I like less actually, but Nicole Palath, because it's slightly sensational called This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends. Fancy Goes Fishing is actually written by a colleague of mine at Yale Law School. Really good at explaining clearly the computer science behind the attacks. Anyway, the reason why I want to raise it, though, just to finish, is that your old friend Donald Trump is now featuring in this because the Biden administration tried at the end to pass emergency legislation to make sure that the future generation of the

• 44:42Rory Stewart?

  internet had built into it from the beginning proper protection against cyber attacks and particularly quantum attacks. And Donald Trump announced two days ago, and again, this is probably one of the biggest things he's done that nobody's noticed, that he's dismantling all of Biden's protections in the name of deregulation, free trade, and essentially allowing a free for all. And so things that people were less worried about. I did a big cyber conference, one of these big events, at the Excel Center 10 days ago. And what was clear there is that people were beginning to worry about how AI can mount attacks, but they were less worried about quantum computing. They thought they were ready to deal with the quantum threats. Now I'm getting messages from those same people saying, oh, my goodness, what Trump's

• 45:25Rory Stewart?

  done has suddenly made all of that much, much more dangerous.

• 45:28Alastair Campbell?

  He's also gone on a bit of a similar journey on Bitcoin, hasn't he? He was always, you had a sense he was sort of a bit alarmed and worried about that. But now, now that it's sort of, you know. Flowing into his coffers, he's.

• 45:38Rory Stewart?

  And the two things connect because of course cryptocurrency is the main way that cyber criminals make money. That's the great untraceable way that when they attack your company and say, you know, give us fifty million dollars or we're going to dismantle your entire system. That's how they collect their money.

• 45:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, why are governments not more worked up about that? Why are they sort of?

• 45:56Rory Stewart?

  The story used to be.

• 45:57Alastair Campbell?

  I get the Russian point, but why the Americans?

• 45:59Rory Stewart?

  Story used to be that it rather suited our agencies and the Five Eyes to be able to stick our fingers into this. The second part of the story is a lot of these companies are secretive about it. So well done, Mr. Glenn, if you're getting stories out. But a lot of these companies are being attacked with cyber attacks and are paying the ransom and are not revealing it because they don't want to admit paying ransom. Our banks are losing incredible amounts of money. I don't know whether you've ever been the victim of a bank fraud. But the fact that our banks are able to cover these frauds shows how much they must be ripping us off as customers.

• 46:30Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it shows how good their insurance policies are, I guess.

• 46:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 46:33Alastair Campbell?

  Well, Mr. Glenn's book is called Dark Market: How Hackers Became the New Mafia. Yeah, I I find this stuff a bit scary. I've got to be honest. And let's go on to this related question from Dawn Reef. I've just watched Sam Coates, Sky News, get gaslit by ChatGPT. I'm now more terrified of AI than ever. Please convince me not to be, or at the very least, explain that what happens in the video shouldn't be a surprise. Did you see it? You did.

• 46:59Rory Stewart?

  I did. I did see it. I did see it. I did see it. Yeah. So.

• 47:02Alastair Campbell?

  You thought he was a bit silly?

• 47:03Rory Stewart?

  I thought it was weird, actually.

• 47:05Alastair Campbell?

  Because?

• 47:05Rory Stewart?

  Because I thought Sam should have known this. It was as though he didn't really understand what an AI system is. So the story, how did the story strike you? Because you sent me the tweet. What was it for you as a kind of non-massive AI person watching it? What was the story you took from what Sam said?

• 47:20Alastair Campbell?

  The story I took from it was that he discovered that if somebody asked AI to tell. Him what he had just recorded, even though the podcast he'd recorded had not been uploaded, that it gave him the answer.

• 47:35Rory Stewart?

  And it made it up, didn't it?

• 47:37Alastair Campbell?

  And it made it up. And then when he, when he asked, he said, hold on a minute.

• 47:39Rory Stewart?

  It invented a Sam Coates podcast, complete with jokes and exchanges, which hadn't happened.

• 47:44Alastair Campbell?

  And then when he said, hmm, hold on a minute, I didn't actually say that. And he said, have you just made this up? No.

• 47:49Rory Stewart?

  It said, no, no, no, I didn't make it up. It really happened. That's exactly right. You're, you're complete right. Um. So this is actually, the, the, the reason why I was a bit surprised that Sam Coates made such a big deal with it. And he dragged it out over a lot of minutes.

• 48:01Alastair Campbell?

  This is a twenty four news channel, Rory. They've got a lot. They're not like us with very, very limited time. Um. As we drove on for the second hour.

• 48:09Rory Stewart?

  No, it's that, it's that AI has been doing this since the very beginning. I mean, this is the story of hallucination. Goes back to the very early chat GPT. Um. And actually, it changes over time as they begin to, um, as the models retrain and retrain on their own stuff, the amount they hallucinate go up and down, which is why I would encourage you, if you're doing this, I, I at the moment run, uh, four models at one time on my phone. So I'm running chat GPT and I'm using the O three model. Um. But I'm also running DeepSeek, uh, which is the Chinese model. I'm running Grok, which is Elon Musk's model, and I'm running Claude, which is.

• 48:46Alastair Campbell?

  What do you mean by we're running them?

• 48:47Rory Stewart?

  Oh, well, they, they're, they're apps on my phone. So, so if you see my.

• 48:51Alastair Campbell?

  Well, you still write things and.

• 48:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, but there's Claude, there's Grok, there's DeepSeek, there's ChatGPT.

• 48:56Alastair Campbell?

  Do you use them different things for different things?

• 48:58Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. Yeah. Grok's very good on things like clean economic analysis. Uh, chat GPT, uh, O three was pretty good until something's going a bit weird with it over the last week. I mean, they, they are very odd. Well, over the last week, it's begun to produce less and less detailed answers. And when you challenge it.

• 49:17Alastair Campbell?

  Fewer and fewer.

• 49:18Rory Stewart?

  Fewer and fewer details. And when you challenge it in the way, and this is, I think, what Sam is experiencing. You know, for example, I said to it, uh, what was the date when Henry the Eighth, um, abolished, uh, the laws of the forest in Britain? And it produced.

• 49:33Alastair Campbell?

  Why did you want to know that at that time?

• 49:34Rory Stewart?

  Uh, because I've been writing about Cumbria, the abolition of forest laws in Cumbria.

• 49:38Alastair Campbell?

  It's part of the merril bit, yeah.

• 49:39Rory Stewart?

  It's part of my non-merril bit for Cumbria, yeah. And then, uh, it, it's gave me, uh, three paragraphs on Henry the Eighth abolishing the laws without a date. So I said, now, what's the date? And it did again the three paragraphs. And then I said, date exclamation mark, and it just did the three paragraphs again. So there's something going wrong. That wouldn't have been true 10 days ago. 10 days ago, O three had a good logical method for checking itself and it would have got its way to the date. So it's getting itself into a muddle.

• 50:06Alastair Campbell?

  What's the best? I've, I've used chat G P T very, very, very rarely.

• 50:09Rory Stewart?

  So for simple economic analysis, Grok, for general stuff until this week, O three, for, um, political analysis, except when you're talking about China, Deep Seek and for literary writing, for literary writing, Claude.

• 50:27Alastair Campbell?

  Seriously, for, for Deep Sea, you would go for America, you'd go to Deep Sea?

• 50:31Rory Stewart?

  Really good.

• 50:31Alastair Campbell?

  But surely they're just as biased against America as they are for China.

• 50:34Rory Stewart?

  Um, it, it's, no, no, they, they, it's not, Deep Seek isn't biased. What it does is when, when you ask it a question that triggers some alert put up by the Chinese Communist Party, it just shuts down and won't answer. It says, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that answer. It doesn't produce.

• 50:49Alastair Campbell?

  Like if you said, is Xi Jinping corrupt, what would happen?

• 50:51Rory Stewart?

  It'll be saying, I'm sorry, I can't help you with that. Please ask me another question.

• 50:54Alastair Campbell?

  Right.

• 50:55Rory Stewart?

  Um, but if you said to it.

• 50:57Alastair Campbell?

  If you said, is Donald Trump corrupt?

• 50:58Rory Stewart?

  I don't really ask it that kind of question. I mean, that's the other point.

• 51:00Alastair Campbell?

  If you did.

• 51:01Rory Stewart?

  Uh, okay, I'll tell you what, I'll tell you what, Hessey, let's do it, let's do it, because it'll do it immediately. The other thing about Deep Seaks is very, very quick.

• 51:07Alastair Campbell?

  Okay.

• 51:07Rory Stewart?

  So is Donald Trump corrupt? Now, thinking, hmm, the user is asking whether Donald Trump is corrupt. This is a complex question that requires careful analysis based on the search results. Right, let me review the key evidence. Extensive allegations, footnote two and 10, lavish gifts like a $400 million gift from Cados 3411. Is executive orders boosting their value? Footnote 10, based on comprehensive review of the provided courses, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that Donald Trump has engaged in systematic corruption during his presidency, particularly since resuming office in January 2025. Below is the detailed analysis, the key findings. Now, the reason I'm reading it to you like that is it's quite possible before it gets to the end of its answer. This Chinese model will say something that suddenly triggers an alert and it will wipe everything. So I'm still wondering whether it's gonna end the answer. Often it's halfway through

• 51:51Rory Stewart?

  its answer where it suddenly says, sorry, I can't answer that question. Please go. And I'm screenshotting its partial answers.

• 51:58Alastair Campbell?

  So to put in, is Xi Jinping corrupt?

• 52:00Rory Stewart?

  Okay, very good. Is Xi Jinping corrupt? Server busy. Please try again later.

• 52:07Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. Excellent. So listen, talk about AI. You know Rankin, the photographer?

• 52:12Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Alastair Campbell?

  Very fine man. Big fan of the podcast. Anyway, I saw him yesterday about something completely different, but he gave me this book and I've got one for you as well. So this is a, it's called Fake Play on Words.

• 52:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 52:24Alastair Campbell?

  Fake, F A K E, fa- F A I K.

• 52:27Rory Stewart?

  Oh, AI. Oh, I see the AI.

• 52:28Alastair Campbell?

  Because the whole thing, apart from one interview with him.

• 52:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 52:33Alastair Campbell?

  Has been done by AI.

• 52:34Rory Stewart?

  Oh, I see. And part of his point presumably is that as an incredible photographer, it's really disturbing that AI is generating incredibly high quality photographs, which are not being taken by photographs.

• 52:44Alastair Campbell?

  They really are. They're amazing. And I don't think you can tell.

• 52:47Rory Stewart?

  And part of the problem presumably then is what happens to that industry. There was something sort of, I didn't want to be cheeky, but one question around Sam when he was showing this. So what exactly was he doing asking ChatGPT to write a podcast for him?

• 52:59Alastair Campbell?

  That he'd recorded.

• 53:00Rory Stewart?

  Well, it's sort of slightly, slightly, no, slightly sounded as though every week he was actually using ChatGPT to help compose this podcast, but maybe I'm, this is a bit dangerous because the answer is you can already, Gemini does this. You can already, Gemini is actually getting better and better. I'm sorry, I didn't praise them. That's the fifth model that's getting better and better. But Gemini is the Google product.

• 53:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 53:21Rory Stewart?

  The people who have really been slow were Google and now Apple, which just don't know what they're doing when it comes to AI.

• 53:28Alastair Campbell?

  Well, look at this, right? So this is a whole section here about Glasgow.

• 53:33Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. And it's called rainers Glasgow.

• 53:34Alastair Campbell?

  Poverty in the old days, it were. And I mean, so these are entirely fake.

• 53:39Rory Stewart?

  Figur looks a bit like I do when I wake up in the morning.

• 53:42Alastair Campbell?

  No, I'm pretty sure it looks better than that.

• 53:44Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 53:45Alastair Campbell?

  There's lots of politics in here as well, but it just sort of makes you wonder, well, why are photographers going to exist? Why are designers going to exist? Why are?

• 53:56Rory Stewart?

  Yeah. Well, more than that, I was talking to the head of one of the biggest telecoms company in the world. It's laid off eighty five percent of its people in its call centers and it's closing its stores using AI to do this from, I think, fifteen thousand down to six thousand.

• 54:12Rory Stewart?

  They're the first to move, but if that's the model, you're looking at major companies laying off the majority of their staff. And, and this is the big story because within five years, we could end up with forty percent of the jobs in the United Kingdom disappearing. But the main thing to take away from the SAM thing before we move on, final question, is you've got to use these things all the time and learn their personalities. They're like bright graduate students who make mistakes, make stuff up, bluff, but you have to learn what they're likely to bluff on, what they're not likely to bluff on, how to check them. And what you must never do is what SAM's doing, which is check them against themselves. If you say to them, you lied, didn't you? They either sometimes say, oh, so sorry, and then make up another lie, or they say, no, I didn't lie, right? So you really have to check it against an external source. Right.

• 54:55Rory Stewart?

  Here's a question that's coming, quite, quite good timing, coming from Jason, which is, what on earth has happened to the New European and why has it changed its name and are you suddenly ashamed of Europe?

• 55:05Alastair Campbell?

  No. The New European was started as an emotional spasm. Something must be done. I think what it does, it accepts that Brexit's happened.

• 55:17Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 55:18Alastair Campbell?

  We, we will continue as the new world to be very anti-Brexit, calling out the lies, calling out the economic disasters.

• 55:27Rory Stewart?

  You've accepted it. There's no more rage, rage against the dying of the light.

• 55:30Alastair Campbell?

  No, we are raging against the dying of the light, but it's a fact. Brexit has happened.

• 55:33Rory Stewart?

  Okay.

• 55:33Alastair Campbell?

  And added to which, I think we've discovered that quite a lot of people who like the look of the New European. Don't pick it up on the newsstands because they think it's just about Europe. And in fact, it's about, we've got, you know, we're writing about China, about, well, we cover the world now.

• 55:47Rory Stewart?

  So what's the new name of it?

• 55:48Alastair Campbell?

  The New World.

• 55:49Rory Stewart?

  Oh, the New World.

• 55:50Alastair Campbell?

  And this is amazing. Do you know that's never, ever been copyrighted?

• 55:52Rory Stewart?

  The New World.

• 55:53Alastair Campbell?

  The New World has never been copyrighted.

• 55:55Rory Stewart?

  Novia Zemlia, no?

• 55:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. No, le monde est développé.

• 56:00Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 56:01Alastair Campbell?

  We call this, but so, so, so no, we're still going to be there.

• 56:04Rory Stewart?

  Final question coming off Brave New World is, why do politicians always have people standing behind them in important speeches? Is this a recent thing? Surely it's a pretty risky strategy. Tell us about, what happened to Rachel Reeves' speech you were trying to act it out for me just before we came on?

• 56:17Alastair Campbell?

  Well, she had, she was making a speech in what I think was a factory and there was, the backdrop was, were these workers, they were all male.

• 56:26Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 56:27Alastair Campbell?

  But the guy immediately behind her right shoulder.

• 56:31Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Alastair Campbell?

  Sort of went viral.

• 56:34Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 56:34Alastair Campbell?

  Because he was basically pulling his face a lot, not in a kind of rude way.

• 56:39Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 56:39Alastair Campbell?

  But just a sort of, oh, no, rolling his eyes and all this. And Keir Starmer had done one a week earlier.

• 56:46Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 56:47Alastair Campbell?

  He did the defence film up in Glasgow with the defence workers.

• 56:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 56:50Alastair Campbell?

  And there was one guy there, very tall.

• 56:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 56:53Alastair Campbell?

  Noticeably, when Keir took the stage, did not clap.

• 56:56Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 56:57Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, so I became rather obsessed with watching this non-clapping guy. And then, of course, when you saw the wider shot, the other thing is that if you were behind them, both of these speeches were delivered by autocue, right? So the other thing that happens is the people behind can see the autocue.

• 57:13Rory Stewart?

  Weird.

• 57:14Alastair Campbell?

  So it sort of gets rid of the magic.

• 57:16Rory Stewart?

  Wait, wait, Rachel Reeves' this great oratory is actually written out in an autocue. Wow.

• 57:23Alastair Campbell?

  Roy, when you say great oratory.

• 57:24Rory Stewart?

  I assumed she was just repeating lines she'd memorized six months ago. I don't know, it's actually somebody's written the speech that she's reading. It's incredible.

• 57:32Alastair Campbell?

  That's harsh. Anyway, so in front of.

• 57:36Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 57:36Alastair Campbell?

  The Keir Starmer thing.

• 57:38Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 57:38Alastair Campbell?

  Right, so you've got the people in the background. And then when you had a shot from behind the whole thing, he was basically delivering the speech to like Chris Mason, Beth Rigby.

• 57:48Rory Stewart?

  Right, there were like three people.

• 57:49Alastair Campbell?

  Much of an audience there. And, and I, and I think that, look, the, the idea of having people behind you is to show you've got solidarity. The Northern Irish politicians always have a chunk of people behind them.

• 57:59Rory Stewart?

  But they're usually your party supporters, right?

• 58:01Alastair Campbell?

  You've got to be a bit careful.

• 58:02Rory Stewart?

  Well, I remember Boris Johnson, you remember he launched his 2019 election campaign at a police academy with police officers behind him. And one of them fainted.

• 58:10Alastair Campbell?

  Fainted, I do remember that.

• 58:11Rory Stewart?

  Fainted behind him, so generally it doesn't go well.

• 58:13Alastair Campbell?

  No, I thought that was bad as well, using a police academy as backdrop. Tony once did it, I remember once in Iraq, in fact, it was the day the Andrew Gilligan report on the BBC. And Tony was making a speech in Basra and the troops were all around him. So they were behind him, in front of him, to the side. And he, he did this sort of big speech thanking them and, you know, and it was quite, quite a good speech. And at the end of it, there was silence. And we discovered later that they'd been told.

• 58:41Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 58:42Alastair Campbell?

  Not to applaud.

• 58:43Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 58:44Alastair Campbell?

  Not as an insult.

• 58:45Rory Stewart?

  Right, right.

• 58:45Alastair Campbell?

  But as so is it not to be felt, like when Trump does a speech to the troops and they're all throwing their hats in the air and all that.

• 58:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, you don't want to be political.

• 58:51Alastair Campbell?

  You don't get dragged into politics. So we sort of totally understood that. Yeah, I, I think. Maybe a real backdrop's better sometimes.

• 58:59Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:00Alastair Campbell?

  Than the ship workers.

• 59:02Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 59:02Alastair Campbell?

  You should check out this guy, though. He had such a, the Rachel Reeves guy had a really expressive face. The, the non-clapping guy in, in govern had a very quizzical, not impressed.

• 59:14Rory Stewart?

  I guess the anxiety is that if you don't have the people behind you, you look like a bit like you've got no mates and that you don't have any supporters.

• 59:20Alastair Campbell?

  If I, you know, I think if you'd have had a, if you'd have had a kind of, if it's a shipyard, you know, get the shipyard in the background, get a ship in the background.

• 59:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 59:29Alastair Campbell?

  Backdrops do matter because people look at them. They do look beyond the politicians.

• 59:32Rory Stewart?

  As long as it's not the Titanic, which is what the Tories tend to put behind them.

• 59:36Alastair Campbell?

  Rather than the Titanic, I think we should call it a day.

• 59:39Rory Stewart?

  All right. Bye bye. Thank you.

• 59:44Speaker 04

  I'm Gordon Carrera.

• 59:45Speaker 05

  And I'm David McClosky.

• 59:46Speaker 04

  Together, we're the co-hosts of another Goalhanger show called The Rest Is Classified. Here's that clip we mentioned earlier on.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  When I look back on it now, you still see that, you know, there's plans, there's memoranda, there's notifications, there's all these things, but they're never actually executed. They never actually kind of pull the trigger on anything, do they?

• 1:00:10Speaker 05

  I'm a little bit of two minds on this because I, I agree with you that the theme of this episode really is a series of missed opportunities to get Osama bin Laden prior to nine eleven.

• 1:00:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 05

  But we should also note that once tenet in the CIA understand that Osama bin Laden is coming for us, in particular after the East Africa bombings, there is a push to improve our collection and our understanding of Al Qaeda pretty significantly. I mean, there's a bunch of human sources who get recruited in this period. There's a lot more technical collection. Alex Station is beefed up to more than forty people. There's a bunch of connections with foreign partners on Al Qaeda that hadn't existed before. I mean, interestingly, there's a PDB, President's Daily Brief, in December, December the fourth of nineteen ninety eight, which is titled, quote, "Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks."

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Speaker 05

  So there's a lot of. Strategic warning, I think you could say, about what Al Qaeda is up to. And yet, there's an inability, I think, to translate that into practical efforts and operations to stop these attacks and to stop Al Qaeda from ultimately carrying out 9/11.

• 1:01:28Speaker 04

  If you want to hear the full episode, listen to The Rest Is Classified wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:01:48Speaker 06

  The Great Game: Strategic Struggle Between Britain and Russia.

• 1:01:55Speaker 07

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

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  Holding the Russians accountable is World War III.

• 1:02:04Speaker 08

  They took down a British passenger jet containing 350 people.

• 1:02:07Speaker 06

  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!

• 1:02:20Speaker 04

  We would need to understand the policy context.

• 1:02:22Speaker 06

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

• 1:02:31Speaker 09

  A FRAGO that says to kill the President of Russia?

• 1:02:36Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:02:38Speaker 09

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

• 1:02:42Speaker 08

  You're my soldier, are you? Sergeant Tom McDuff, Duffy!

• 1:02:46Speaker 09

  An audio drama journey like no other.

• 1:02:48Speaker 08

  Men like Duffy, they are our most valuable weapons.

• 1:02:52Speaker 09

  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.