482. A Trumpian Year, the Politics of Hope and Highlights of 2025

What surprised Rory and Alastair most about 2025? Why does Trump's presidency feel even more chaotic than expected? And who gets their vote for campaigner of the year? Join Rory and Alastair as they discuss all of this and more. __________ 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 fuseenergy.com/politics ⚡ __________ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] __________ Social Producer: Charlie Johnson Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producer: Daisy Alston-Horne Producer: Evan Green, India Dunkley Senior Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Tom Whiter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 0:00Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:09Rory Stewart?

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• 0:17Alastair Campbell?

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• 0:33Rory Stewart?

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• 0:40Alastair Campbell?

  I'd love to know how many of our listeners have 20 acres of land. We shall maybe find out. You can watch the energy revolution from the sidelines, or you can join it today.

• 0:48Rory Stewart?

  Turn idle land into forward progress with Fuse. Contact Fuse at [email protected] to start a referral and have the chance to win £2,000.

• 1:02Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 1:04Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:17Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:41Alastair Campbell?

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

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

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

• 2:04Speaker 02

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• 2:40Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to a Christmas Day Rest is Politics special with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 2:44Rory Stewart?

  Lovely to see you. And are you eating, Alistair? That's a real sign of Christmas.

• 2:46Alastair Campbell?

  Quality Street.

• 2:47Rory Stewart?

  Usually you're telling me that was Saddam Hussein's favourite suite, wasn't it?

• 2:51Alastair Campbell?

  Quality Street, was it?

• 2:52Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, lovely called Quality Street. Every time George Galloway went to see him, he'd bring him a box of Quality Street.

• 2:56Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, there was also a line in Camus' budget speech.

• 2:58Rory Stewart?

  Quality Street, yeah. Oh, good.

• 3:00Alastair Campbell?

  Anyway, let's get on with it.

• 3:02Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, happy Christmas to you. I love you. Christmas, let's get on with it. What's surprised you, Alistair, the most?

• 3:10Alastair Campbell?

  Even though I knew that it was going to be awful is just how awful the first year of the Trump presidency has been on so many levels. Far better organised in the first time, far more extreme, far more truly terrible things going on that you almost can't keep up with them. Undermining the rule of law, the horror of some of the behaviour of his and the budget for ICE, the tariffs that we talked about on Christmas Eve, the hokey-cokey on Ukraine, the way that Putin plays him, the awfulness of some of his people around him. I could go on and on and on and on.

• 3:47Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, it's surprising. Trump is surprising, I mean, in a horrible way. But, you know, if you were Narendra Modi in India, the one thing you were confident of is that India was going to get a good deal out of a Trump presidency. They'd invited Jared Kushner to a fancy wedding. They'd done all the right things. They were filling stadiums together. India was the counterbalance to China. America was going to be focusing on China, so they were going to be nice to it. No, meh. The one thing you were confident about if you were Israel is that Trump was not going to recognise Syria and lift the sanctions on Syria. Meh. The one thing you were confident on if you were Israel is that Trump was not going to sell F-35s to Saudi Arabians. Meh.

• 4:28Alastair Campbell?

  Is this a gibbon?

• 4:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, no, it's a-

• 4:29Alastair Campbell?

  A mating gibbon?

• 4:30Rory Stewart?

  A mating gibbon, it's good, good.

• 4:31Alastair Campbell?

  Is that a mating gibbon?

• 4:32Rory Stewart?

  No, no, no, that's-

• 4:33Alastair Campbell?

  What is it?

• 4:33Rory Stewart?

  It's the red buzzer that we had in our live shows a year ago. Just to remind people of our live shows. We can keep going on, but I mean, one of the most amazing things is occasionally I'm unfortunate, I'm fortunate enough to sit next to some of these great titans of American finance. These kind of famous people who run the big hedge funds and banks. They are consistently wrong in their predictions about Trump.

• 4:53Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 4:53Rory Stewart?

  You know, they really think they know him well. And every four weeks, he does something which they absolutely assure me that he won't do.

• 5:01Alastair Campbell?

  It's that phrase that we, when we did the mini series with Michael Wolff about Murdoch. This thing about people ache to believe that Murdoch's going to be a good guy. I think with Trump, you ache to believe that it's going to sort of be some sort of normality in this presidency.

• 5:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I think.

• 5:14Alastair Campbell?

  There's none.

• 5:14Rory Stewart?

  I still think you've got on to the great analytical tool here, which is a reality TV show. That's the only way of explaining why, having done an entire campaign saying Mamdani was a communist anti Semite who would destroy the world. When he invites Mamdani into the Oval Office, he does a kind of.

• 5:32Alastair Campbell?

  Love him, yeah.

• 5:33Rory Stewart?

  I love him. It can only be that, that he's running the equivalent of a reality TV show where he just has to go. I hate him, I love him, I hate him, I love him, in order to keep the narrative going.

• 5:42Alastair Campbell?

  So what's your big surprise? Was it, were you on the same thing?

• 5:45Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I'm totally on the same thing. What's your personal highlight of the year?

• 5:48Alastair Campbell?

  Personal highlight of the year, there are two. One was in Sarajevo, being told by the organizer of the youth sport games that next year I will be captain of the team in the pro-am match and Luka Modric, your look alike, will be on my team.

• 6:06Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 6:06Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 6:07Rory Stewart?

  You're going to be captaining Luka Modric?

• 6:08Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:10Rory Stewart?

  Wow.

• 6:10Alastair Campbell?

  So that was good.

• 6:11Rory Stewart?

  Are, and are you, are you playing enough football, Alistair, to be able to play with Luka Modric? I know he's considered to be getting.

• 6:16Alastair Campbell?

  I have played with Maradona.

• 6:17Rory Stewart?

  Modric is getting.

• 6:18Alastair Campbell?

  Twenty years ago.

• 6:19Rory Stewart?

  Modric, Mod, I mean, I know people think Modric is getting a bit old. He's, he's now forty, but you're a little bit older than Luka Modric, aren't you?

• 6:26Alastair Campbell?

  Twenty-eight years older. Forty's great for a footballer in the modern age. That's amazing. I actually watched him play in the Milan Derby the other day. He's still got it. He's still got it. He's, he's not as fast as he was, but you know, nor am I.

• 6:40Rory Stewart?

  Can you tell us what it means for your actual style of play now? Are you, are you moving a little bit less with the ball, a little bit more stationary?

• 6:46Alastair Campbell?

  When I, when K O played, I told, I told Sean Dyche, the ex Burnley and Nottingham Forest manager, I was going to be playing this charity match. He said, he said, do the Dick Turpin style, stand and deliver.

• 6:58Rory Stewart?

  That's very good, very good. Good.

• 7:01Alastair Campbell?

  So, no, but my, my actual, my actual personal highlight was being taken by the woodland trust to play my bagpipes to my favourite tree, which then appeared in the exhibition launched by your friend, the King, ahead of COP.

• 7:18Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 7:19Alastair Campbell?

  It was called Living Legends and the Legends of the Trees.

• 7:22Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, not you, not you and the bagpipes.

• 7:23Alastair Campbell?

  It was me, Theresa May, Niall Rogers, a few other people, Fiona Bruce, and we were pictured with our favourite trees.

• 7:30Rory Stewart?

  Oh, how lovely.

• 7:31Alastair Campbell?

  And it was just the most beautiful day. The tree is called a Skippinish Oak because it was a friend of mine who is in this band called Skippinish who they, they discovered this, this extraordinary tree. It's just one of the most impressive trees on the planet. And, and the day, the day that we went to it was just one of those days in the Scottish Highlands when it was beautiful weather, blue skies, and it's just wonderful. We should treat our listeners and viewers to me playing my pipes to this tree. It was a wonderful moment.

• 8:03Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Rory Stewart?

  So you don't talk to trees, you, you play music to them?

• 8:25Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I don't always talk to them, give them a hug.

• 8:27Rory Stewart?

  A hug, hug is good, hug is good.

• 8:29Alastair Campbell?

  It's, but, but it's massive, it's massive. And I love standing there and looking at this thing, you think, this thing has been here for hundreds and hundreds.

• 8:36Rory Stewart?

  And now you can understand Lushen when it began.

• 8:39Alastair Campbell?

  Lushen.

• 8:39Rory Stewart?

  Lushen.

• 8:40Alastair Campbell?

  Lushen, let's not screw up our French grammar.

• 8:42Rory Stewart?

  So Lushen.

• 8:44Alastair Campbell?

  Lushen.

• 8:44Rory Stewart?

  And, and what you learnt from that is that this thing will have started as a tiny acorn, probably in a mast year, with tens of thousands of other acorns scattered across the ground. And by some miracle, maybe in a thorn bush or whatever, it survived. And then at the right moment, the thorns were cut away and it sprung up into the air.

• 9:02Alastair Campbell?

  God did that, didn't he?

• 9:04Rory Stewart?

  Well, I don't know. I don't know, connecting, that's a nice Christmas message. Oak trees, of course. Well, of course, some people say pagan festivals around mistletoe and oaks, you know, quite connected to this particular day, idea of rebirth. Anyway, my, my highlight, um, so my highlight of the year is I've discovered a little trick in the morning, which is I go into the kids' bedroom and I take them out for a little expedition to get a croissant, a coffee for the family. So I have a lovely sort of, I suppose I have a five minute walk there, three minutes queuing for the croissant, five minute walk back, but a really lovely time, just seven in the morning with the kids. Sometimes just one, sometimes both of them. It's just very precious.

• 9:48Alastair Campbell?

  Good. Excellent. Excellent. Book of the year.

• 9:51Rory Stewart?

  Book of the year, Yohan, what's your book of the year?

• 9:53Alastair Campbell?

  I think if I'm only allowed one.

• 9:54Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 9:55Alastair Campbell?

  I've mentioned this before, it would be If Russia Wins by Carlo Masala, written in German, it's been translated into English, and it's a sort of novel act. It's, it's, it's actually called a scenario. So it's obviously with real people, real events. It's about what's happening in Ukraine now, but it's what happens if Russia wins. And it just sets out this amazing story and it really is, it's, it's, it's like, it's gripping and it feels very, very, very realistic.

• 10:24Rory Stewart?

  And then you had another book by a friend of yours who's writing about AI.

• 10:27Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, that's, that actually would be my, my novel of the year. We both have lots of people who say, I've written a book. Can you read it for me? Maybe da, da, da, da, da. So this friend of mine I was at university with, who went, he was a medic. He went on to become a war doctor called Robin Copeland. He's now retired. He sends me this book and he says, I've written this novel. Love to know what you think. It's absolutely brilliant. Um, and I'm actually now trying to get him, what I might call a proper publisher, because it's self-published. He published it himself. It's about an AI companion that a family gives to an old man who's lost his wife. And this AI companion just becomes ever more important in his life. The guy eventually dies, then the AI companion goes on to this vicar and then bit by bit, you get to the, the AI companion adapts to.

• 11:11Rory Stewart?

  But don't tell us too much, because we go, yeah.

• 11:13Alastair Campbell?

  Just the political bit.

• 11:14Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Alastair Campbell?

  Gets to when the AI companion links up with other AI systems and somehow finds a way into North Korea's nuclear weapons programme.

• 11:22Rory Stewart?

  Well, any.

• 11:23Alastair Campbell?

  Which the CIA have been trying to do for decades.

• 11:25Rory Stewart?

  Any publisher listening to this, please, please pay attention.

• 11:28Alastair Campbell?

  So that's a, and then my third one, Rory, which I mentioned many times on the, on our tour. Bagpipes, A Cultural History by Richard McLaughlin. It's a great book.

• 11:38Rory Stewart?

  That's a lovely, lovely pitch. Now, in tribute to you and my, my long years for apprenticeship at the feet of Alastair Campbell, I, I must plug my book, Middleland, which is out and is a lovely set of a hundred very short little essays. You read it in the loo, read it in the bath, read it on the tube with positive optimistic stories of the British countryside.

• 12:01Alastair Campbell?

  As if we haven't plugged it enough. I gave it the better, I gave it a better plug than that when it came out.

• 12:05Rory Stewart?

  I feel I'm, you did, you did, and I feel I'm learning. Now, here's, here's three books, though, not written by me.

• 12:11Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 12:11Rory Stewart?

  Um, I've become increasingly entranced by a novelist called Nick Harkaway, who's John Le Carre's son.

• 12:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yep.

• 12:18Rory Stewart?

  He's written a great follow-on Le Carre book called Carla's Choice, but he's also written, under his own name, a whole series of extraordinary sci-fi dystopian novels, of which the Titanium Noir series I thought was most interesting, because partly because it's about tech folks, and it's also about his understanding, which we've touched on, but maybe haven't done enough on, the sense in which time sort of freezes. Actually, the sense that the 1940s feel much more different to 1980 than 1980 does to today. That there's a sort of odd sense that you get back into the 40s or in the 70s and you really think you're looking at a very alien culture. Get back into the 90s, which is now quite a long time away. Things haven't changed as much as you'd think.

• 13:03Alastair Campbell?

  It's interesting, yeah.

• 13:04Rory Stewart?

  And, and you get that sort of sense in a lot of things, fashion, music, food, culture and British productivity.

• 13:12Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, so Nick Harkaway. Uh, second one, I talked about AI. If people are interested in the amazing story of the businesses, the egos, the personalities around AI, Karen How's Empire of AI, I think is really lovely. And for people more on the kind of spiritual side, because we're at Christmas, almost any podcast or interview done by either Rowan Williams or Father Zacharias, worth listening to.

• 13:41Alastair Campbell?

  Is that a book? That's not a book.

• 13:42Rory Stewart?

  Father Zacharias is no, Rowan Williams has written books, but I think he's particularly good in his short sermons on audio.

• 13:48Alastair Campbell?

  Maybe we should have a podcast of the year. That's not ours. We'll do that next year.

• 13:50Rory Stewart?

  We should, we should, Father Zacharias is a monk in Essex, talks wonderfully about faith. But my book, Matthew Ricard, Notebook of a Wandering Monk, Matthew Ricard.

• 14:02Rory Stewart?

  Astonishing. I mean, like a sort of central casting, French meritocratic success story. His father, one of the most famous left wing editors in France, went to the fanciest schools in France, graduated and really, you know, in some ways might have been a kind of miniature Macron or Juppé or something, decided to go and become a Tibetan monk. And this is really his diary and it's astonishing. There are seven year retreats, there are his encounters with his father. He actually wrote a book called Monk and the Philosopher about arguing with his left wing atheist dad about being a Tibetan monk. There are incredible portraits of Bhutan in the nineties, when it was completely locked away from

• 14:45Rory Stewart?

  the world, where he goes, essentially every village is an incredible shrine dedicated to Buddhism, travelling with his llamas, these great gurus that he follows. Question for you, film of the year.

• 14:59Alastair Campbell?

  Do you know, I struggled with this almost as much as I struggled with UK politician of the year, but I'm going in the end for The Ballad of Wallace Island.

• 15:08Rory Stewart?

  Oh, my lord. Is that, that sounds quite serious. When things called the ballad of it usually means grim, doesn't it?

• 15:12Alastair Campbell?

  No, well, it's, it's, it's, it's very funny.

• 15:17Rory Stewart?

  Is it darkly humorous with drunken Scots in it?

• 15:20Alastair Campbell?

  There are no drunken Scots. It's got a very small cast.

• 15:24Rory Stewart?

  Right.

• 15:25Alastair Campbell?

  It was written by a guy called Tom Basden and Tim Key. Tom Basden also writes music and there's some fabulous music in it.

• 15:32Rory Stewart?

  And no, no drunken Irish people?

• 15:34Alastair Campbell?

  No, not one, not one.

• 15:36Rory Stewart?

  Okay. Oh, maybe I've got this wrong. Drunken Scandinavians?

• 15:39Alastair Campbell?

  No, no.

• 15:40Rory Stewart?

  Okay, got, got wrong the whole theme of this.

• 15:42Alastair Campbell?

  You totally got the.

• 15:42Rory Stewart?

  I thought, I thought this was like.

• 15:44Alastair Campbell?

  Why do you listen? And I'll tell you.

• 15:45Rory Stewart?

  Go on, tell us.

• 15:45Alastair Campbell?

  God's sake. It's got Carey Mulligan in it, which is always a good thing. She and Tom Basden were an item and they were a band together, were musicians together. And this, this guy who's become very, very, very wealthy, not really through any, having any special talents. He lives on this very, very small island. Hardly any Beals lives there. And he sort of, he lures them into coming on to the island because he wants them to get back together and he wants them to do a sort of comeback concert. But he is the audience. It's very funny. It's rich. It's got beautiful music, beautiful scenery, and I loved it.

• 16:24Rory Stewart?

  My, my film would be Nuremberg with this extraordinary performance by Russell Crowe as Goring in The Nuremberg Trials.

• 16:32Alastair Campbell?

  Oh.

• 16:33Rory Stewart?

  This is now the fortieth anniversary of John and Anne Chute's book on The Nuremberg Trials. John went to see it and he just thought, they have got this absolutely right.

• 16:43Alastair Campbell?

  Brilliant.

• 16:43Rory Stewart?

  They've got the courtroom right. They've got the star right. And if you really want to understand evil and charisma, Russell Crowe as Herman Goring.

• 16:50Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. Excellent. Well, neither of us watch a lot of TV. TV show of the year. I think we're going to go for the same one here.

• 16:56Rory Stewart?

  Well, I hope we're not going to go for Celebrity Traitors.

• 16:59Alastair Campbell?

  We're not going for that because neither of us watched a single second of it. I'm going for Slow Horses, Runner Up, Blue Lights, which is a story about the police service of Northern Ireland. And it's very well made. And it is a kind of just a sort of a police thriller type thing, but it's got so many different levels going on that are really interesting if you're interested in Northern Ireland.

• 17:21Rory Stewart?

  The most recent season, I know I chose The Diplomat last year, but the most recent season of The Diplomat is completely blows you away.

• 17:28Alastair Campbell?

  Is this just an admission that you've only ever watched one TV programme?

• 17:31Rory Stewart?

  Pretty much, yeah. And, and this is again about the relationship between America and Britain and Europe and its vulnerability to America. So very prescient. I don't know when they wrote it, but boy, it's a way of imagining the current moment.

• 17:43Alastair Campbell?

  Okay, really quick break, then we'll come back with best new place visited, Homer Abroad, cultural event and campaigner of the year.

• 17:49Rory Stewart?

  Okay, very good.

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• 19:58Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to the Rest is Politics Christmas special with me Rory Stewart. And me Azd Campbell. Best new place visited, home or abroad? Blimey, where did you go? My best place visited, home or abroad, I'm gonna go for the bathing pools at La Valette on Guernsey. Oh, Guernsey. Most of my best places, I think last year was a swimming place. I judge a lot of things by whether you have a really good cold water swim. And the bathing pools on Guernsey, it's like they have this Australian model of where a pool is built into the sea. And they also have, I'm not a big fan of saunas, but I was a really big fan of this sauna.

• 20:42Alastair Campbell?

  One, because it was bloody cold. And secondly, because we just have these amazing views out from the sauna.

• 20:47Rory Stewart?

  From the sauna?

• 20:48Alastair Campbell?

  From the sauna, yeah.

• 20:48Rory Stewart?

  It's like a glass wall in the sauna?

• 20:50Alastair Campbell?

  It was windows.

• 20:51Rory Stewart?

  Windows, yeah.

• 20:52Alastair Campbell?

  The pool itself was absolutely beautiful. And, and I've been to Jersey a few times, but I'm trying to think, I don't think I'd ever been to Guernsey before. Yeah.

• 20:59Rory Stewart?

  Brilliant. Okay, that's lovely. My push is for Colombia, which we talked about a bit on the podcast. And particularly the Rainbow River, again, our swimming in waterfalls, but above this extraordinary coloured river, which my eight-year-old discovered through a teacher. It's actually a type of fern and the water goes from green to red and the gravel is yellow. And then the light hitting it is blue. So literally the river is this kind of insane rainbow colour. It's right in the centre of Colombia. Very few people go there. It's not like going to Cartagena, which sadly, a bit like Venice, is now being completely overrun by tourists. You can't move. Central Colombia, unexplored, magical Colombia.

• 21:43Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. Cultural event of the year. You're not allowed to say the Rest is Politics tour.

• 21:50Rory Stewart?

  The Rest is Politics tour, yeah, the live tour. Well, I have seen a remarkable number of people. I was just doing a Christmas signing at Hatchards. A very large number of people came to see us, had seen us in the live tour. And some of them were talking about how you had inspired them through, well, often through disagreeing agreeably. They seem to like that as a Christmas message.

• 22:08Alastair Campbell?

  They do like that. I've got two. One of them, I mentioned Notre Dame last year, but I can't have been by then. I think I was just watching it on TV, but we went to Notre Dame. The new Notre Dame, the refurbished Notre Dame, despite your loathing of mon ami Emmanuel Macron, is an amazing transformation. But the other thing that we went to in Paris was the Hockney exhibition, which was extraordinary. One of the best art exhibitions I've ever been to. Finally, the National Theatre do these terrific, where they film plays at the National Theatre and you can then go and see them in the cinema.

• 22:46Alastair Campbell?

  Which is a relatively new thing and Fiona and I with Callum, we went to see The Fifth Step, starring Jack Loudon, a brilliant Scottish actor, and Martin Freeman. And it was just absolutely amazing because, you know, when you go to the theatre, but I do like going to the theatre, but for a start, you're often surrounded by people eating and shuffling and piddling about, what have you. It's beautifully filmed. So it's just two guys, the whole story is two people. There's only two people in this, in this, in this play. It's about, The Fifth Step is one of the steps in Alcoholics Anonymous. It's about, the play is about the relationship between an alcoholic and a sponsor who's trying to help the alcoholic through.

• 23:28Alastair Campbell?

  They're both brilliant actors, but the filming of it is just absolutely beautiful. And because the thing is, when you go to the theatre, you don't, if you're sitting third of the way, half the way towards the back of the theatre, you can't actually see the actors' faces. You can't actually get a lot of what they do. So when you see it in the cinema, big screen, it's absolutely brilliant.

• 23:47Rory Stewart?

  So my culture events of the year, first one, Marie Antoinette at the Victoria and Albert Museum. It begins with an extraordinary story about fashion and clothing and jewellery and celebrity. In some ways, she's one of those great first celebrities, a kind of global figure for her face and her clothes. But it's the other side of celebrity too, and the way in which we turn against famous people or people who are perceived to get power, and in this case chopped her head off. I mean, literally executed her and executed her because of what she represented. And the guillotine's there, her death mask is there, the clothes she wore at the moment for execution. It's, it's a,

• 24:29Rory Stewart?

  it's a heart wrenching experience and it makes you think of actually so many celebrities who are kind of built up and then smashed down by public opinion in the most deadly way. On a happier note, with another unashamed plug. My wife, Shishana Wutukwazman, has begun doing exhibitions in London around the crafts of the West Bank and Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria.

• 24:56Rory Stewart?

  There was one in Sotheby's in Bond Street this year, and there's going to be another one in the Garrison Chapel in central London in February. And these are craftspeople from conflict zones. These are women from Afghanistan weaving incredible carpets. Currently, Turquoise Mountain is supporting, I think, 7,000 women weaving carpets. It's Syrian refugee artisans returning home and producing masterpieces in mother of pearl and wood carving. It's people in the West Bank, Palestinians in unbelievable difficult situations, creating glorious glassware, jewellery, cups. And it's a sign of economic development, working conflict zones, but also just beauty, pride, production.

• 25:40Alastair Campbell?

  Great. Okay, last category, this Christmas Day 2025 campaigner of the year.

• 25:47Rory Stewart?

  Oh.

• 25:47Alastair Campbell?

  I think we're going to agree.

• 25:49Rory Stewart?

  Okay, go, try.

• 25:50Alastair Campbell?

  I'm going Zora Mamdani.

• 25:52Rory Stewart?

  Political campaigner, unbelievable.

• 25:54Alastair Campbell?

  He's not even 35 yet. Really charismatic, really clever, I think quite strategic. He's now going to have to show that he can do it. It's going to be very, very difficult because expectations around him are so high. Political structures in America don't necessarily give them, they've got more power than a lot of British mayors have, but they don't have all the hands on all the levers. But I think as a campaigner, he was absolutely brilliant. And the fact that he's essentially, I know New York's a massive city, but in the end, it's a, it's a local position, political position within a, within a admittedly large country. He's literally gone from zero to being a global figure. That's a pretty amazing thing. He's done it through being a brilliant campaigner.

• 26:34Rory Stewart?

  Here's my little campaign of the year. And actually, curiously, it's a little bit more anonymous, more difficult to associate an individual with it, is the UK campaign around prostate cancer and encouraging people to have PSA tests. It's a needless horrible death affecting tens of thousands of people. We're a politics podcast. David Cameron has just said that he's now been diagnosed as prostate cancer, diagnosed because his wife heard this campaign being aired on the Radio 4 and made him have a test. It's something that I'm afraid for bad reasons, as well as good reasons, the NHS has been resisting because false positives happen with these tests. I think the campaigners are absolutely right. Let's drive through these tests. It will make a huge difference. I think people can cope with the fact that can be false positives and it will save a lot of lives.

• 27:18Alastair Campbell?

  Excellent. Well, on the happy note of saving lots of lives. Happy Christmas. See you in the new year.

• 27:24Rory Stewart?

  See you in the new year.

• 27:25Alastair Campbell?

  Bye bye.

• 27:26Rory Stewart?

  Bye bye.

• 27:31Speaker 08

  For the barbecues,

• 27:34Speaker 08

  games with friends, and game day countdowns.

• 27:41Speaker 08

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• 28:00Speaker 09

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• 28:15Speaker 10

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 28:25Speaker 11

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 28:32Speaker 12

  What would happen if I stopped growing? You starve, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 28:36Speaker 11

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 28:39Speaker 12

  I'm not the first man.

• 28:41Speaker 11

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.