98. 100 days of Sunak, the art of resigning, and Israel-Palestine

After 100 days as PM, is Rishi Sunak’s power already waning? What happens behind the scenes of a high-profile resignation? Has the US pivoted away from its central involvement in the Israel-Palestine conflict? Alastair and Rory cover all the latest political news from both the UK and abroad in today's episode of The Rest Is Politics. Leading: This week on Leading, Rory and Alastair were joined by the former Labour Health Secretary Alan Milburn to answer a big question... How can we save the NHS? TRIP Plus: Become a member of The Rest Is Politics Plus to support the podcast, receive a weekly newsletter, enjoy ad-free listening to both TRIP and Leading, join our Discord chatroom, and receive early access to live show tickets and Question Time episodes. Just head to therestispolitics.com to sign up. Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @RestIsPolitics Email: [email protected] Producers: Dom Johnson + Nicole Maslen Exec Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:04Rory Stewart?

  This episode is brought to you by NordVPN.

• 0:06Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:19Rory Stewart?

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

• 0:42Alastair Campbell?

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

• 0:49Rory Stewart?

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

• 1:43Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome to another episode of the Rust is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 1:47Rory Stewart?

  And with me Rory Stewart.

• 1:49Alastair Campbell?

  And we're going to talk about matters Nadeem Zahawi, matters Richard Sharp with BBC and the Boris Johnson sleaze. We're going to talk about Sunak more generally. How is he doing after his first 100 days? We're on the third anniversary of the exit from the European Union. I suspect we may touch upon that. And I think we need to touch on the Middle East as well. And also Rory, I'm very keen to talk about Nagorno-Karabakh. So your friend Nadeem Zahawi, I predicted he would go, he has gone, but he's gone in a way that I think has not just damaged him and his career, but I think it's damaged Rishi Sunak as well.

• 2:26Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, I think the, I agree. I think the lesson, there are a couple of lessons for this. One of them is the problem for politicians, and I think that comes into conflict of interest and cover up. So I think when we look at people's finances and their income, the big question is always around conflict of interest. And here, the clear conflict of interest was that he was the chancellor of the Exchequer when he was negotiating his own tax bill with HMRC. So he was negotiating with his own department as their boss. Clear conflict of interest. And second thing is his attempts to deny claims that he wasn't being investigated by HMRC and attempts to shut down this incredibly active ex Clifford

• 3:11Rory Stewart?

  Chance tax lawyer.

• 3:13Alastair Campbell?

  Dan Needle.

• 3:14Rory Stewart?

  Dan Needle, yep. And then the final thing is, if you're gonna go, go quickly. If he'd gone absolutely immediately, as soon as this came out, he would have had a chance, potentially, of coming back as a minister. People like Peter Mandelson, Alba Rudd, many others have resigned and come back. But if you try to cling on so long that you're eventually sacked, you damage your career in a way that it's very difficult to come back from.

• 3:39Alastair Campbell?

  Although yesterday, Number 10 apparently at their briefing said that Rishi Sunak didn't rule him out coming back. I think the problem here is that Rishi Sunak is, I can't work out whether he feels weakened by these various factions around him, or whether actually he doesn't really have a kind of a political impulse that tells him instinctively where things are going to end. I did an interview for the BBC about two weeks before Zaha Zahawi eventually went, and they said, you know, what advice would you give to Sunak? And I said, work out where you think it's going to end and get there first. And it was obvious, I think it was obvious to everybody that you couldn't possibly justify what Zahawi

• 4:23Alastair Campbell?

  had done and the way he was defending himself. And I also think it was interesting how Zahawi's letter of resignation.

• 4:32Alastair Campbell?

  There was no apology, there was no acceptance of the findings of the report that Sunak had based his decision to sack him upon by Laurie Magnus, the ethics adviser. And there was this rather pathetic bleat about some of the coverage. That too, I think, probably damaged him, but he clearly thinks, I mean, you probably know better than I do what the various factions are around this, but I think he felt that Sunak was maybe too weak to sack him and he needed the ammunition of that report.

• 5:06Rory Stewart?

  One thing to give a bit of credit to Sunak as opposed to Boris Johnson is that when we spoke last week, we were talking as though the waiting for the Magnus report would be exactly what Boris Johnson was always doing, which was trying to buy two or three months in order to hope that it went down. And actually, to the credit of the ethics adviser, Rishi Sunak, that report came out very quickly, delivered on a Sunday, totally unambiguous, actually quite clearly written, well-written by Laurie Magnus and Nadeem Zahawi was fired on Sunday. But you're absolutely right that there was no reason to wait for that report or commission that report.

• 5:46Rory Stewart?

  And in a way, it indicates maybe what you're pointing to, which is questions about political antennae. I think you'd probably say, just from a political point of view, either get rid of the person immediately, or, and we disapprove of this deeply, but I guess if you're being Machiavellian and Boris Johnson-like, you're using the report to try to brush the thing under the carpet for four months. But this, in a sense, is the worst of all worlds, which is that you just get another six days of being hammered in the media and then you do what everyone knew you were going to do anyway.

• 6:16Alastair Campbell?

  Rishi Sunak got the political pain or shared the political pain with Nadeem Zahawi, but he got none of the credit. He got no credit back in the reputational bank. Again, we said this, I think, two weeks in a row, for him to stand up at the Prime Minister's Questions, as he did when the story was first really kind of taking, getting hold in the political psyche, as it were, in the political debate, he said that Nadeem Zahawi had dealt with it and all the questions were answered, and that simply was not the case. And, you know, you've got to be very, very careful in those situations. If you're the Prime Minister, these words, they get noticed more because you're the Prime Minister. You know, professionalism, integrity, accountability, he deliberately made that a big thing. And that means that

• 7:00Alastair Campbell?

  he's, you know, I think there are maybe lesser scandals now will become bigger scandals because of that. It's a little bit like John Major with his back to basics. Now, poor old John Major, it got completely sort of, you know, twisted against him and not, not least by us, and certainly by parts of the media. But I think John Major sort of saying back to basics and family values and all that stuff. And then every small scandal became a big scandal, every big scandal became a huge scandal. And I think anything now to do with financial impropriety within the Conservative Party and the Cabinet is going to be a real problem for Ismaila Sunak.

• 7:38Rory Stewart?

  It is a big problem. And yet, the tragedy of the thing is that I think he genuinely is a better person, Boris Johnson. He's trying harder. He wasn't trying to use that report just to buy himself three months and brush it under the carpet.

• 7:51Alastair Campbell?

  No, I agree with that.

• 7:52Rory Stewart?

  But you're right, he's mishandled it. A couple of things, Ansel, which I think would be interesting to hear from you on. One of them is just this question of how you get the judgment call right on when to act and when not. I remember when I was an MP and got myself in trouble in my constituency in my first few months, because I'd said to a journalist from The Sun that there were people in my constituency who held their trousers up with twine. And I went to talk to your successor in in number 10. The story at the time was that they had to calculate whether the story would go away within three days or not. And if the story went away in a couple of days, they would try to bluff it out. And if they thought that it was going to continue for much more than three days, the

• 8:36Rory Stewart?

  tendency was to try to force someone to resign and throw them under the under the bus. Does that does that resonate with you? Is that the way you thought about it? Do you think about it in a different way?

• 8:44Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, my Lord, I'm amazed that that one even got to that level.

• 8:49Alastair Campbell?

  Who was that? Was that Craig Oliver?

• 8:51Rory Stewart?

  No, no, it was the it was the man who went to jail eventually for.

• 8:54Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, Andy Coulson.

• 8:55Rory Stewart?

  Andy Coulson, yeah.

• 8:56Alastair Campbell?

  Andy Coulson. Oh, my Lord. So your your thing about the farmers with twine.

• 9:02Rory Stewart?

  I think I think, to be fair, Andy Coulson was not very interested in the subject. I think it was me as a neurotic anxious.

• 9:07Alastair Campbell?

  Were you getting a bit paranoid?

• 9:09Rory Stewart?

  Getting paranoid and going to him. And no, I think he wasn't very interested. He gave me about five minutes of his time.

• 9:13Alastair Campbell?

  I'd have been very surprised at that. So and did it run for three days or did it just sort of go away?

• 9:18Rory Stewart?

  No.

• 9:18Alastair Campbell?

  I think Andy, to his credit, probably worked out. This is going to blow over. This little guy is really clearly a bit worried. I'm just going to patronize him a bit. Then he'll go away. And then I'll go tell David Cameron, my God, that Rory Stewart, he's a bit sort of woolly, isn't he?

• 9:36Rory Stewart?

  Anyway, tell me about this. How do you work out when you can sort of tough it out and get behind your minister and it's going to be OK? I guess you would have thought about this, won't you? When Peter Mandelson got in trouble, you would have had to calculate, is this going to blow over? Can we stick by him because Tony Blair cared about him, would have wanted to keep him? Or are we going to have to encourage him to go? Was that an example?

• 9:59Alastair Campbell?

  There are quite a few. And the Peter Mandelson one is, you know, is quite painful in lots of different ways. I think on the second resignation in particular, that we were probably driven more than we should have been by this sort of noise and the frenzy.

• 10:18Alastair Campbell?

  Particularly, I thought I felt this a lot during the Johnson era, where there were scandals far worse than anything Peter was alleged to have done, which didn't seem to get any level of frenzy at all.

• 10:33Alastair Campbell?

  So that would have been one definitely where I think we were being pressured by the noise and by the frenzy. I think with other ones, it was much clearer. I remember. I can't remember if we talked before about Ron Davis, the Welsh Secretary, when he was

• 10:49Alastair Campbell?

  arrested on, or the police picked him up after he'd gone for a walk on Clapham Common. And when he came in to try to explain what had happened, I can remember the look in Tony's eyes. Tony kept sort of just looking over to me with this look that said, I've already made my mind up. And you didn't need to sort of linger too long on that. And Ron was gone by the end of the day. So it depends, I think, on, I guess, the personal and the political value of the minister, definitely important. I don't think it is really about the media. I think it's about what you feel, deep down, whether you think this is right or wrong, what's happened is right or wrong. I think that does come into it in a big way.

• 11:34Rory Stewart?

  Question asked, I think, also, which was relevant to you. I mean, as you say, it's very painful. I don't want to drag over Peter Mandelson because he's a friend of yours. But to remind listeners, he resigned twice, and the second time was over his role in brokering a British passport for a donor to the Millennium Dome. And the thing that, at least in the Guardian reporting at the time, they said that in an hour-long meeting, Tony Blair discussed why the media and Alastair Campbell and ministers were misled for 48 hours about Mr. Mandelson's phone call to Mike O'Brien, the immigration minister in June 1998. So I think that's something that you also raised in some of these other resignations, which is, as a communications director, you wanted to know the facts. And you got very, very angry if you felt people

• 12:19Rory Stewart?

  weren't being straight with you on what had happened.

• 12:21Alastair Campbell?

  That's what I think Rishi Sunak didn't do in relation to Zaha We. You've got to demand the facts, and you've got to try to get the facts. And it's in that process that I think sometimes, yes, confusion can happen, muddle can take place.

• 12:35Alastair Campbell?

  But also a sense can develop that you're not getting the full picture here. And is there a reason for that? And that might, might colour your assessment at the time. I think that the other thing that is important here is the sort of leadership and the relationships of trust. So I can remember, for example, with Robin Cook, the very, the first big issue with Robin Cook, when there was the whole, the story about him having an affair with his, with, with a member of his team. And the mythology was that I told him, you have to choose between your wife and your mistress. It wasn't like that at all. However, there was a judgment to be made about whether this mattered sufficiently.

• 13:17Alastair Campbell?

  And that was a point where the value of the minister, if you like, was a factor. Tony did not want to lose Robin Cook.

• 13:25Rory Stewart?

  Was it also that you felt by that stage that British life was also changing? And that somebody having an affair, which was considered a really big problem back in the eighties, by the nineties was something that you were beginning to feel this is more to do with somebody's personal, private life and is less relevant. I mean, if I go back to where I began, the thing that I think ministers should resign over is, is conflict of interest.

• 13:48Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and corruption.

• 13:49Rory Stewart?

  And, and an affair isn't, isn't about corruption or conflict of interest.

• 13:53Alastair Campbell?

  Well, it could be, it could be dependent upon who it was. If you're having an affair with a, with a Russian agent, that would be a bit of a problem.

• 14:00Rory Stewart?

  Like Mr Profumo.

• 14:01Alastair Campbell?

  Indeed, indeed. I mean, I don't think it wasn't that it was a problem because it was going to be a problem because the newspapers were going to go big on it. And indeed, the news of the world did go big on it. And, and, but by that time, Robin was clear that as far as he was concerned, his marriage was over. I had said to him that it's utterly up to you what you decide to do. This is what got mangled afterwards. I said to him, but my advice in this situation is clarity. In other words, you have to be clear what you are going to do and what you're going to say about it. And he slept on it and came back the next day and said, I'm going

• 14:40Alastair Campbell?

  to leave my wife and move in with Gaynor. But I think where you're right, I think it wasn't that maybe the culture had changed, but I think the other thing that we were quite keen to do was not as it were, on the first, as it were, back to basics, family values scandal that hit the new government, to say we're going to throw him overboard for the press.

• 15:02Rory Stewart?

  So that's a difficult judgment call, because sometimes, like the awful Boris Johnson, just by toughing it out, he almost got away with surviving scandals, which-

• 15:11Alastair Campbell?

  He got away with a lot of scandals.

• 15:13Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Alastair Campbell?

  A lot.

• 15:14Rory Stewart?

  And so I wonder whether somewhere in what Rishi Sunak's struggling with in the culture of the Conservative Party is that Narin Zahawi, who'd been part of those Boris Johnson governments and seen Boris just defending ministers through thick and thin, refusing to resign himself, refusing to let anyone resign, was still living in a culture where he was used to that Boris culture, just tough it out, ignore it, pay no attention whatsoever.

• 15:38Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think that's the influence of Johnson, is he corrupted the whole lot of them in terms of what they thought was acceptable and what wasn't. I find it mind-blowing that anybody can think that that was not the immediate clear conflict of interest, and clearly Laurie Magnus did. I mean, when you read his report, as you say, it's brutally clear.

• 15:58Rory Stewart?

  And I'm really pleased, in a way, that that's something Rishi Sunak did and brought somebody back. You remember Boris Johnson having run through two ethics advisers resigned, which you would have thought would lead to the resignation of the Prime Minister, right? And then he decided he didn't need an ethics adviser anymore.

• 16:12Alastair Campbell?

  Liz Truss said that she had such a good understanding of ethics that she didn't need to be advised on it. Shame that the same couldn't be said about her handling of the economy. So I do think it weakens Rishi Sunak, and I guess it is. I mean, it's 100 days, and I know we're less focused on the 100 days thing in the UK than maybe the States, where it's a big thing, you know, the president's first 100 days. But what's your overall assessment of Rishi Sunak's first 100 days?

• 16:38Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think on the plus side, he's a big improvement on Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. I think he's somebody who, a bit like John Major, could well, after his political career, have a sort of position in public life and a respect which I don't think Boris Johnson or Liz Truss will ever attain. I notice with my colleagues and friends that they are much more comfortable working with him and in his cabinet. They like the fact that he delegates, he trusts them, they think he's serious and professional, does his job well. But I think, as you said, he is struggling to project outwards and do the big public

• 17:17Rory Stewart?

  leadership bit. I think he seems to be a hardworking, serious internal manager. But politics ultimately, particularly in a crisis, and my goodness, the UK is in a crisis, as you're going to remind us, the IMF just announced that the UK is going to be the only major economy that's going into recession this year. And what he's so far failing to do is do the really big business of saying, yep, we're in a mess, yes, it's partly our fault, it's not entirely our fault, there are other things going on in the world, and this is the path out of it. Come with me, and that we're not yet feeling.

• 17:52Alastair Campbell?

  And I mean, I also think he's being further deliberately weakened by Boris Johnson constantly just trying to be on manoeuvres, get himself noticed. I thought that story yesterday, I mean, I know he's got a number of client journalist friends still in the media, but that utter bilge about Putin threatening to kill him by sending a missile, I mean, utter, total crap. And some of the journalists yesterday, they produced the briefing note that Number Ten had done on that specific call, which was all about how they agreed to keep in touch and, you know, President Putin was pleased that the Prime Minister, you know, I mean, all this rubbish. And it's just like, but it's done deliberately, I

• 18:37Alastair Campbell?

  think, to show, you know, I can still get noticed, I can still get a message, I still know how to manipulate the media in a way that Rishi doesn't.

• 18:44Rory Stewart?

  He's our one of the sitting MPs, he's the one guy. He's part of that real populist tradition. And one of the things that your friend Moses Naim, the man of populism, post-truth and polarization points out in his book is that one element of these populist leaders, particularly in Latin America, is that they do separate themselves from their parties. They're able to be individuals. He points out Fuhimori in Peru was an example of this, and that's what Boris Johnson's trying to be. He's trying to be still the big figure, the big charismatic figure who can somehow transcend the fact that he's on the back benches. And there's almost nobody else who could do that. Many others threatened to do that. I mean, every time that

• 19:27Rory Stewart?

  Michael Gove was removed from office, he would definitely cause trouble for prime ministers. But Boris Johnson does it on a different scale. You know, he's got Jacob Rees-Mogg out there saying he should be chairman of the Conservative Party. He's doing visits to Ukraine. He says he's standing again. And the story, obviously, in a year's time that he's going to put out is he's going to be the only person who can win the Conservatives the election will be the story.

• 19:49Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. Well, I think he's absolutely wrong about that. I think it would be the absolute death throws for them if they brought him back, but there we are. I do think, by the way, one thing that Sunak could do that would indicate strength and would also be the right thing to do would actually, if he were to announce that this whole business of Johnson and Truss having resignation honours, given that they both basically left office in disgrace, that he just says it's not happening because they have to be agreed by number ten. So if he were just to say that now, it would be, as it were, a declaration of Johnson would see it as a declaration of war. But given that Johnson is effectively spending most of his time waking up and thinking, how can I make Sunak's life more difficult today?

• 20:34Alastair Campbell?

  I think he's going to need to take it on. It's a bit like Keir Starmer's done with Jeremy Corbyn.

• 20:37Rory Stewart?

  It's a, yeah, that's a tough call because the problem is, once you start doing that, you have the possibility, which we've never had in British politics, of when a new government comes in, when Labour takes over from the Conservatives, refusing to accept the resignation of.

• 20:52Alastair Campbell?

  But there shouldn't be. What is the point of these resignation honours?

• 20:55Rory Stewart?

  Well, you hate the whole system, don't you?

• 20:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yes, but I particularly. Hate that because it's I do hate the whole system, but it's like, you know, particularly in the hands of somebody like Johnson. I just, you know, it's going to be his mates, the people he's made promises to, the donors, the people whose houses he lives in. You know, he's just so sordid and the it's not as if the House of Lords currently has a great reputation, Rory. Anyway, I think soon he's probably too weak to do it. And I don't mean that as a as a character assessment. I mean, politically, he's probably too weak to do it. But I really do think that would be a good thing for him to do. Did you do a resignation letter or did you just?

• 21:34Rory Stewart?

  I did do a resignation letter. I did a resignation letter sent to Theresa May saying that I would not be prepared to serve in Boris Johnson's cabinet. And it was coordinated. So I did it with, three of us did it, Philip Hammond, who was the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Gork, who was Lord Chancellor, myself, were the three Cabinet Ministers who decided to resign before before Boris Johnson came in.

• 21:54Alastair Campbell?

  And did you get a nice reply?

• 21:55Rory Stewart?

  Yep, get a very nice reply from Theresa May.

• 21:58Alastair Campbell?

  Have you framed it? Is it on your toilet wall?

• 22:01Rory Stewart?

  Actually, no, I am afraid to put on my toilet wall. I'm worried I've actually lost it, to be honest.

• 22:05Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, you can't do that. When when we were talking about Robin Cook, I can remember when he finally resigned, which was was obviously over Iraq, and he was Commons leader by then, and Robin and I had about half a dozen meetings to go over the exact wording, both of his letter and of Tony's. Now, there were other resignations where, you know, it didn't require that level of of input, but it was going to be such a big a big sort of issue when he resigned. And Robin, Robin was very, very grown up about it. He didn't want to. Yeah, I remember him saying, I'm resigning because I can't support the policy, but I don't want to make life any more difficult for Tony.

• 22:49Alastair Campbell?

  I don't want to just become a sort of, you know, serial rebel.

• 22:54Alastair Campbell?

  So we had this this sort of, you know, and he drafted something and and I drafted something and and we sort of, I remember sitting there and I drafted something for him where I talked about, you know, how proud he was about his role in the The Kosovo conflict and and and the military action we took in Sierra Leone and all this. And he said at one point, he said, do you think you could focus a little less on my war record? And a little more, a little more on my ethical foreign policy.

• 23:24Alastair Campbell?

  And so, but eventually we sort of, you know, we we batted it backwards and forwards. And obviously Tony was seeing these drafts and eventually we got to a place where, you know, obviously the fact of his resignation was was huge news. But then you got a sense from the letters of there was a sort of a mutual respect. And Robin, very, very clear that, you know, he understands the decision. He understands why Tony Blair wants to make that decision, but he can't support it. And he's reached the point where he can't stay in the government.

• 23:54Rory Stewart?

  And I think that's a big test, isn't it? Whether whether they're still on side or not. I mean, obviously, the the resignation letter I was sending in against Boris Johnson was not being negotiated with anybody. It was designed to hit Boris Johnson. And that was true for the people who resigned at the end of his time when they were trying to bring him down. That they definitely wouldn't have been negotiated with number ten.

• 24:14Alastair Campbell?

  Now, you mentioned, you mentioned Jacob Rees-Mogg there. I'm doing, we're recording this on Tuesday morning. I'm doing Tuesday evening, this evening, I'm doing a Radio Four debate, live debate on Brexit three years on. So two questions, Rory. I've done several debates with Jacob Rees-Mogg. He's quite a tricky character to debate against because he is unbelievably slippery and gaslights par excellence. But he does it in that, is it an Etonian thing, Rory? Can I, are there any kind of Etonian tricks you could maybe teach me that I could, that I could use?

• 24:49Rory Stewart?

  Well, I think he's, he's, he, his weapon is is not really old Etonian. It's a kind of mad sort of anachronism. He's, he's mainlining a sort of vision of a kind of Edwardian man. It's a sort of comic opera, excessive courtesy.

• 25:05Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 25:06Rory Stewart?

  Credibly polite language, never getting flustered. No, it's, it is, it's a very particular style. If you were really, really bored, my greatest debate against Jacob Rees-Mogg was in the House of Commons, where I Offended the European Human Rights Act against him in a debate of an hour and fifteen minutes, just the two of us going at each other in the House of Commons on a really boring, boring evening. I once said, I was in Brixton once and I was stopped by a British Nigerian man who owned a hair extension shop who said to me, "That debate between you and Jacob Rees-Mogg on human rights is the best thing I've ever watched."

• 25:44Alastair Campbell?

  Did you win the debate?

• 25:46Rory Stewart?

  Well, actually, there wasn't any vote at the end of it, so there's no way of telling.

• 25:48Alastair Campbell?

  But did you feel you won it?

• 25:49Rory Stewart?

  I felt I won it, but Matthew Paris, who's normally a fan of mine, then came out and I think wrote an article saying he thought Jacob Rees-Mogg had bested me.

• 25:56Alastair Campbell?

  Oh, right. So what's your tip? Give me a tip.

• 25:59Rory Stewart?

  So I think you want to make the audience see what he's doing, expose it. So I think you might want to say, "Jacob, I know what you're going to do here. You're going to be awfully courteous and polite and use some very fancy language. And I know what you're going to say is that, you know, there are still opportunities from Brexit." So sort of spike his guns before he does it.

• 26:20Alastair Campbell?

  I know that he's going to say that because of Brexit, we managed to do the vaccine rollout and the money for the health services have already been given, both of which are total lies.

• 26:29Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 26:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, I think that's not a bad tip, but a preemptive rebuttal.

• 26:32Rory Stewart?

  Good. Well, let's, on that, let's take a break and we'll return to Israel and the Gona Karabakh.

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• 27:31Alastair Campbell?

  Welcome back to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell.

• 27:34Rory Stewart?

  And with me, Rory Stewart. Alistair was about to say with me, Alastair Campbell and me Rory Stewart. Listen, Alistair, I really, really enjoyed talking to your friend and my hero, Alan Milburn, on The Rest is Politics leading. I think the best interview we've done. It's partly my theory that it's great getting someone who's no longer an active politician to be a bit more honest and open. But Alistair, he was really challenging. He's very, very proud of Labour, he's very bright, but he was also pretty brutally clear about the fact that he was still proud of many things that are controversial. PFI's in the National Health Service, bringing private sector in to work in the National Health Service, and his absolute belief that markets were necessary to improve the performance of the NHS.

• 28:19Alastair Campbell?

  Controlled markets.

• 28:19Rory Stewart?

  Controlled markets, yeah.

• 28:20Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah. I thought that you weren't alone, by the way. I mean, I was looking, Rest is Politics Twitter feed put out the links to the podcast, and this morning before I went swimming, I was just having a look at some of the replies. And, you know, we get pretty positive stuff in the main, even on Twitter in response to our podcast. But honestly, it was like a, I actually sent it to Alan this morning and said, listen, this is a love-in. There was a little bit about, you know, people criticizing for marketization, PFI, et cetera. There were a kind of few, sort of, you know, left wing of the Labour Party criticism. But in the main, it was honestly, it was, it was like, it really was like a kind of, you know, wow, this guy was amazing. Which, no, I've known Alan for a long time, and I just thought that was him being him.

• 29:05Rory Stewart?

  Well, there's something really important here, which is that I think it was a glimpse of what made New Labour so strongly appealing. I said in the interview that for someone like me to vote Labour, I want to hear people who sound like Alan Milburn. And that's, of course, what Tony Blair delivered in 97. And I'm sure that many of our listeners are from the political centre. And they are worried that they're not getting enough courage and clarity out of Labour.

• 29:37Rory Stewart?

  And it was wonderful, maybe, for people to hear somebody who's unimpeachably Labour, proud of Labour's record, but is also very happy to acknowledge that there are things that make sense about the market, that PFIs and the private sector being involved in health isn't necessarily a bad thing, that reform is important. And just tonally, I thought he was respectful towards Rishi Sunak, which we don't hear often. And all of that, oddly, would be what would convince, I think, me and many people like me to vote for Labour.

• 30:08Alastair Campbell?

  Although he also did say he felt that West Streeting was very much not part of the Mingvar's strategy, as he described it. I also liked the fact that, I mean, obviously I know Alan's backstory, I know about his childhood and his upbringing. I hadn't realised that he'd sort of felt he couldn't talk about that when he was a politician.

• 30:28Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Alastair Campbell?

  And I'm thinking that's because actually, maybe, I don't know whether there was a slight sort of sense of, well, if you're coming from this poor background, you either look like you're trying to use it, or you're giving the sense that, you know, you're not really made for this. So I think he came across very, very authentic. And for those who haven't heard Rory Stewart's hero, his word, not mine, Alan Milburn, just search leading, that's the word, single word, leading, wherever you get your podcasts. Now, shall we turn abroad?

• 31:03Rory Stewart?

  Let's turn abroad. So Israel-Palestine, shall we start with that?

• 31:07Alastair Campbell?

  Well, there's old Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, going, he saw Netanyahu yesterday, is off to see Mahmoud Abbas today. And I really feel for the guy, because, I mean, how many times can you sort of go there and say, we're absolutely committed to the two-state solution, and we call on both parties to bloody, bloody, bloody, blah. And this is the reality of what's happened, I think, and, you know, it's fair to say that you can point to faults on both sides. But that government that you've now got in, and obviously what happened with the killings at the weekend was horrific. But you now have, and you knew this was going to happen because of just how right-wing the Israeli government now is, there was only ever going to be a security response.

• 31:50Rory Stewart?

  Is it worth my just, as you say, we've got very sophisticated listeners, but shall I just try to give a, because I'm speaking to you from Jordan.

• 31:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 31:59Rory Stewart?

  Very close to the Palestinian border, just to remind people a little bit about the way in which at least Palestinians and Jordanians perceive this.

• 32:08Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm.

• 32:08Rory Stewart?

  So I think just remind people the very, very basic things, which is, the state of Israel emerged in 1948, and for many Palestinians, even the territory that Israel captured in 1948 involved them being displaced from their homes, and they still regard that as an occupation. That's not the way the international community regards it, but the international community is focused on what happened in 1967, which was the Six Day War, where Israel basically in six days defeated Egypt, Syria and Jordan, took the Golan Heights, took the West Bank, which was previously controlled by Jordan. And it's from then onwards that we really have the deep sense of the international community saying, this territory is occupied

• 32:53Rory Stewart?

  Palestinian territory, it should not belong to Israel. And a debate within Israel, which used to be much fiercer than it is today, between liberals saying, we don't need this territory, and conservatives saying this territory is vital for Israeli national security. And that debate actually is, on my last visit to Israel, I got a sense that actually the Israeli liberals are less strong than they were, that a new generation has emerged, that people are less interested in making the case for the two-stage solution. And this brings us to the final thing, which is, what's at the heart of what we're dealing with now, which is that we came out of these agreements, people would have heard of the Oslo Accords, would have heard of Camp David, which was an attempt, again, to do it in 2000. And this

• 33:36Rory Stewart?

  divided the territory, Palestinian territory, into areas A, B and C. Broadly speaking, area A was the areas which were absolutely Palestinian, B were ambiguous, and C were areas where there were Israeli settlements. And Israeli settlements Are four hundred thousand Israelis who have built villages, in some cases towns or even cities. And over a hundred of them are completely informal things where they just push out, take a piece of territory in the middle of what the Palestinians feel is their territory. So while the Palestinians have these scraps of territory, I think they've got one hundred and sixty six separate little entities. And when I was travelling through Palestine, you're going through checkpoints all the time.

• 34:17Rory Stewart?

  You're driving down essentially tunnels with breeze block on either side to try to get to somewhere like Nablus. And I, I think, understanding this or trying to understand it from these two points of view is essential, but I think quite difficult to articulate because even when I'm talking to you now, I'm aware that there will be many listeners on both sides saying what an outrageous way of characterising the conflict.

• 34:40Alastair Campbell?

  I think that's pretty fair and, and also it's, it's gone on now for, for decades with various points at which you mentioned Oslo, you mentioned Camp David. I can remember when Tony Blair went to the Middle East, not long after we'd done the Good Friday Agreement. And I'm not linking the two, I'm simply saying that at that time, there felt like this could happen. It felt like something was really moving, but unless you have, particularly the Americans, but the international community more broadly, really, really focused on this and really, really trying on to pull every single lever that's available to you, then it just sort of, it just feels like it evaporates.

• 35:22Alastair Campbell?

  And I watched Blinken with, with Netanyahu yesterday. I think Blinken's a pretty impressive Secretary of State. And I think Biden, like previous American presidents, really does feel a sense of responsibility because the American power there really matters. But that, and that relationship with the Israelis is incredibly strong.

• 35:43Alastair Campbell?

  But it's sort of, I kind of felt Blinken, it felt to me like he was slightly going through the motions.

• 35:49Rory Stewart?

  One hundred percent. And that's, I think you've put your finger on to Alistair, and I think it's actually unspoken policy now at Washington, that this is not going to be their issue, that Biden has signaled that Israel-Palestine is not what this administration's concentrating on. And so they will continue saying that they call on all sides to show restraint, they will continue to use all the old language, their unconditional support for Israel, they'll keep the $3.8 billion a year, which the US provides in support for Israel. You'll notice Blinken didn't mention the settlements in his, in his speech. But I don't get the impression that this is something they're going to be leaning into or trying to resolve. And in the absence of that, the

• 36:30Rory Stewart?

  truth is that many of the people around the new Israeli Prime Minister, around Bibi, are going to be pushing hard to extend those settlements further, to reinforce them, to connect with roads, to put the whole social security system behind them, to get electricity into them. And of course, Ben Gavir, who's the National Security Advisor now, or the head of National Security Department Minister, has just again made a very provocative visit to the Temple Mount, to the Haram El Sharif.

• 36:58Alastair Campbell?

  I thought also it was the Palestinian who committed that atrocity at the, at the weekend. When I saw the Israeli Defence Forces then being filmed by themselves and releasing the film of them going in to effectively demolish the house where he came from and and kick out his family, his father there saying he had no idea this was happening. And I just think, and, and the response has been one of, as I say, security, security, security, which I get from the kind of mindset. But at the same time, in terms, it feels like you're pushing the idea of any kind of

• 37:42Alastair Campbell?

  solution further and further away. And the other thing which I think Blinken did raise, and I think was right to raise, is the Americans worries that they have about the the new government's determination to do something about the independence of the judiciary.

• 37:57Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely. And then then just to put the point of view from the other point of view, I mean, this is incredibly presumptuous of me because I'm not in the middle of this. But I also have travelled around Israel with Israeli friends who feel so strongly the threat. They they feel threatened. The way that they perceive this is that they are facing an existential challenge, that they need to control this territory in order to guarantee the survival of of Israel as it exists. And also that the tragedy of the last few years is that there's so little interaction now between Israeli and Palestinian communities.

• 38:37Rory Stewart?

  I remember that when I visited 25 years ago, you could drive very comfortably from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, and many Israelis would would visit Bethlehem. And now there are big signs up put up by the Israeli government saying, do not enter this territory, you could be a danger of your life. And so Bethlehem, which is a very peaceful part of Palestine, I mean, there are more tricky bits, visiting Hebron and Nablus may be a bit trickier. But even the most peaceful bits are now perceived, bits just a few miles outside Jerusalem, are perceived as being these very hostile alien territories. And you get the sense that there's so little understanding now about different people's experiences and cultures.

• 39:18Alastair Campbell?

  The trips I did with with Tony, the other thing, when you go from one to the other, you do really, really do have this strong sense of going from To use the old language, you know, the first world to the third world, literally the moment you cross the border. I can remember one visit where I think Sharon was prime minister. And to this day, I don't know where we were driven, but the security around him was just extraordinary. We're driven into this sort of, it felt like a garage in a lift. And we drive in and honestly, it was like saying that with James Bonfield. We drive in and the car stops. And then we sort of, the car goes up in a lift and then we come out at a different place.

• 39:59Alastair Campbell?

  And then suddenly we're in Sharon's house. And then you cross the border. So you've got all that. And then you cross the border and we had, I remember having this meeting with, with Yasser Arafat, just over the border. You felt you'd suddenly gone to a very poor country from a very wealthy country. And that, I think, further exacerbates this sense of divisions that can't be bridged.

• 40:22Rory Stewart?

  Let's, let's move on to the thing that you, I think, were quite right to raise and almost nobody talks about, which is what's happening now in Nagorno-Karabakh, which is this disputed territory between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Tell us a little bit about why you wanted to talk about it.

• 40:36Alastair Campbell?

  Well, I've been, I've been talking to, to people, particularly on the Armenian government side. And I think it is one of those situations where it just gets, it gets no kind of, it doesn't really get any coverage at all in, in, in large parts of the, of the media. But it's an incredibly important story for lots and lots of different reasons. I mean, just, so wind back to when the Soviet Union collapsed in the early nineties. You had ethnic Armenian separatists in this area, Karabakh, who broke away from Azerbaijan. There was a war, estimated 30,000 lives lost. Then there was a peace process that's been going on since 1994.

• 41:23Alastair Campbell?

  But then there was a new war started in twenty twenty.

• 41:26Rory Stewart?

  So twenty twenty five years later, which is interesting, isn't it?

• 41:29Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, exactly. It flares up. I don't know about the Azerbaijan side, but I think there were five thousand Armenians killed in that. Armenia was then forced to return occupied territories around Nagorno-Karabakh. So now Nagorno-Karabakh is landlocked inside Armenia.

• 41:49Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Alastair Campbell?

  But disputed. And it's governed by something called the N K R, which is Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Russia has sent this billionaire to kind of be the sort of the overlord, as it were. And you have, if you look at, if you look at it on a map, Nagorno-Karabakh, which is it's relatively small, it's about seventeen hundred square miles and and very kind of agricultural, very rural, very foresty. Population roughly one hundred and twenty thousand, so quite small numbers of people. But because it's landlocked, to go from Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh, you have to cross about twenty kilometers of Azerbaijan.

• 42:32Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 42:32Alastair Campbell?

  And this protest has now started. And it's a protest that is clearly organized by the Azerbaijan government.

• 42:40Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Alastair Campbell?

  But it's a let it's reportedly protesting at gold mining that's going on inside, inside Nagorno-Karabakh. And what it means is that there's, apart from some traffic from the Red Cross, you can't get in and out. And they say, they are saying that within Nagorno-Karabakh now, there's a humanitarian crisis. But meanwhile, you have all this geopolitical stuff going on around it.

• 43:05Rory Stewart?

  So I think that's a brilliant description of it. And and actually Azerbaijan itself is also split into different bits. There's a bit called Nakhijevan, which is again separate.

• 43:14Alastair Campbell?

  It's the other side of Armenia.

• 43:16Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, travelling through Armenian territory to get to.

• 43:17Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 43:18Rory Stewart?

  So to take listeners back to the real basics, Armenia, oldest Christian state in the world, first first country to convert to Christianity. Azerbaijan, predominantly Muslim and related very closely linguistically, culturally.

• 43:33Rory Stewart?

  To Turkey. And as you say, it's become a real centre for geo-conflict. So the war in the nineties saw the Armenians essentially win in Nagorno-Karabakh and kick out 600,000 to a million Azerbaijanis. And then 25 years later, Azerbaijan came back the other way. And when Azerbaijan came back the other way, which was, as you say, 2020, and they came back this time, supported very strongly by Turkey, that provided them with drones, Turkish F-16s landed on Azerbaijani airfields, and they won this victory that essentially took back a lot of the territory and kicked out a lot of Armenians.

• 44:13Rory Stewart?

  And the Russians got a lot of credit in 2020, this was pre the invasion of Crimea, for soft power and diplomacy and sending in a couple of thousand troops and seeming to police a ceasefire and keep everything going.

• 44:29Alastair Campbell?

  And they're still there.

• 44:30Rory Stewart?

  And they're still there. But as you've pointed out, they've completely failed to respond to this blockade, which is effectively strangling the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh. And the question is, why are they not responding? And it seems as though Russia's power is ebbing, and probably it's that Putin now needs to keep Turkey on side, because he's got so few friends out there in the world that he's not prepared to have this fight anymore.

• 44:53Alastair Campbell?

  Hmm. The other, the other relatively new factor is that the European Union has now got involved and has sent this mission, civilian mission, to monitor the border, which Moscow has now said is a terrible provocation, one of their favourite words. And the Americans, Blinken, talking of Blinken again, Blinken has expressed support for the European Union taking an interest. And if you look at, you look at the map, you've got Turkey, you've got Iran on the other borders. The Armenians say that the Pakistanis are getting involved and getting engaged. And you talked about the, the, this, this, where they got the support from Turkey in the previous war.

• 45:37Alastair Campbell?

  They now have support from Israel.

• 45:42Alastair Campbell?

  In terms of drones, where there's a bit of a sort of deal going on for, you know, drones and oil supplies. And of course, and the British, just to throw in a slight British element in the air, of course, one of the biggest players inside Azerbaijan is BP.

• 45:57Rory Stewart?

  Absolutely, because Azerbaijan, unlike Armenia, is the big oil and gas hub of the region. And that's one of the reasons they've been able to fund this over the 25 years, build up their armed forces to recapture. And maybe in another episode, the story of what's happening to all these states that were part of the former Soviet Union around the fringe of Russia, and they're in particularly in Central Asia and the Caucasus, their failure really to make the transition to liberal democracies, the ways in which Russia has continued to bail out dictators and from Belarus all the way through to Kazakhstan. And these, the strange nature of the rule of ALIEF in Azerbaijan, or indeed his equivalent in Armenia, I think this is, this is good stuff, because this is right at the centre

• 46:42Rory Stewart?

  of what's happening in the, in what we probably see called the global order.

• 46:45Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and it is, it is interesting how in this one, for example, that Ukraine seems to side much more with Azerbaijan.

• 46:57Rory Stewart?

  Oh, wow. I wasn't expecting that.

• 46:59Alastair Campbell?

  There was an interview recently with one of Zelensky's key people, who said that the, essentially was saying that the whole thing is being whipped up by the Armenians, possibly by the Russians as well, but to take attention away from Ukraine.

• 47:15Rory Stewart?

  Oh, goodness.

• 47:16Alastair Campbell?

  And essentially saying that this one doesn't really matter that much.

• 47:19Rory Stewart?

  Gosh, when you would have thought their natural instincts, the other direction.

• 47:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Rory Stewart?

  Okay, well, a lot more to be discussed. Thank you for raising the corner, Carabac. And so without you, we would not have, we definitely not have got there. And I think maybe that brings us the end of this week's pod.

• 47:31Alastair Campbell?

  I shall be off now to see your friend Jacob Rees-Mogg, your fellow Etonian, and I shall do exactly as you said, I have my tactics prepared.

• 47:42Rory Stewart?

  Very good luck. Very good luck, Rees-Mogg. Bye bye.

• 47:45Alastair Campbell?

  Bye bye.

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